A longstanding grand-challenge problem in AI is to build machines that are able to think and interact like humans do. A specific embodiment of this problem is a generalization of the cocktail party problem encountered in signal processing and blind signal separation: If...

Between 1989 and 2004, Noah Purifoy constructed over one hundred large-scale sculptures that intersect earth art, assemblage, and architecture spread out across a ten-acre parcel of land in Joshua Tree, California. His works are primarily made from locally discarded and...

After the Hunt connects technological developments in visual media to hunting practices and ecological changes in the American West as a result of the westward colonial project between 1860-1910. Looking beyond the genres of sporting or wildlife art, this dissertation a...

This dissertation investigates the thirty-seven entries in the Descripci�n Geogr�fico-Moral de la Di�cesis de Goathemala (DGM) that correspond to present-day El Salvador and the R�o Lempa basin. Each of these entries is a description of a parish in the diocese and inclu...

Chicanx studies has long overlooked a spiritually centered social movement history. Scholarship on the Chicana/o movement has been predominately studied through a secular lens, all but ignoring the communities longstanding religious values. Yet, unbeknownst to most, rel...

Contemporary Black political discourse has recently engaged several differentpropositions and models seeking to actualize reparations for chattel slavery in the United States as a major political project. On September 30, 2021, the state of California established the Ta...

This dissertation investigates modernist artists and designers as they used the functional craft of woodworking to enact value for marginalized working bodies. Art historians have acknowledged self-conscious labor within modernism, mapping the ways in which work can sig...

This dissertation traces Black AIDS Activism in the Bay Area and how the layered crises of the crack cocaine epidemic, chronic joblessness, and poverty shaped HIV/AIDS prevention and education efforts. It also compares Black health activism with ways policymakers, local...

In the United States Southwest in the early 1960s, an academic lineage began utilizing the techniques of paleomagnetism and geomagnetism for applications in archaeology. However, most of the research was conducted with an enterprise mindset, resulting in few published d...

This Master’s thesis is based on a web-based multimedia project titled, “Soundscapes of Pandemia,” created during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and global Black Lives Matter uprisings. A question guiding the design of this multimedia project that this Master’s thesis co...