http://repository.arizona.edu:80 The DSpace digital repository system captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and distributes digital research material. Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:22:36 GMT 2026-06-11T14:22:36Z http://hdl.handle.net/10150/680885 Strengthening Autocracy: How External Actors Enhance Regime Resilience in China Ding, Xiao This dissertation argues that China's information strategies for managing domestic protest arepowerful but conditional. They depend on the media environment, the framing approach employed, and the foreign actors invoked. The regime's approach to protest is not monolithic — it involves a repertoire of distinct strategies, each with its own logic, and each constrained by scope conditions that the state does not fully control. Chapter 1 documents the strategies themselves, tracing how People's Daily has covered — or refused to cover — domestic protests from 2013 to 2025. Using a matching design that links coverage decisions to independently documented protest events, I identify three strategies: accusatory framing, accommodative framing, and strategic silence. The central finding is that silence now dominates overwhelmingly: of 71,823 protest events documented between 2013 and 2017, People's Daily covered fewer than 0.01 percent. From 2022 onward, coverage dropped to zero despite 1,651 documented events. Chapter 2, co-authored with Daniel Arnon, investigates what happens when citizens encounter state media's protest framing alongside foreign media coverage. A pre-registered survey experiment (N = 1,293) reveals a backfire effect: Xinhua's accusatory framing increases sympathy for protesters rather than delegitimizing them. The content of foreign media is irrelevant — the backfire is identical whether BBC reports neutrally or sympathetically. Despite attitudinal shifts, behavioral intentions remain unchanged. Chapter 3 examines foreign intervention narratives using a survey experiment (N = 2,196). All foreign actors delegitimize protests and increase support for repression, but regime rally effects are strikingly selective: only the United States robustly boosts regime legitimacy. Historical traumatization emerges as the dominant mechanism, mediating 71 percent of the regime legitimacy effect. Together, these findings illuminate why silence may be the least risky option available to the regime: accusatory framing backfires when alternative information is available, foreign intervention narratives work only under narrow conditions, and silence — while it forfeits the opportunity to shape meaning — avoids the risks that engagement carries. Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10150/680885 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10150/680878 Post-World War II American Environmental Nonfiction Literature: The Ecocatastrophe Storytelling of Industrial Pollution, Public Health, and Environmental Justice Wang, Meng This multidisciplinary dissertation project, titled Post-World War II American Environmental Nonfiction Literature: The Ecocatastrophe Storytelling of Industrial Pollution, Public Health, and Environmental Justice, focuses on the study of eco-disaster narratives of human ecological diseases caused by industrial pollution and associated with environmental injustice during the post-World War II period in American (& Asian) environmental nonfiction literature (& documentary film). I choose American environmental writers’ creative nonfiction works, such as Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968), Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac : And Sketches Here and There (1949), Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1992), Marilynne Robinson’s Mother Country (1989), Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1984), Sandra Steingraber’s Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (2010), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Marla Cone’s Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic (2015), and Beth Gardiner’s Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution (2019), along with Asian authors Ishimure Michiko’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease (1969) and Chai Jing’s Under the Dome (2015), to create an intertextual, interdisciplinary, intercultural analytical context for the main themes of my dissertation. First of all, the most crucial question I answer in the following four chapters is: how do these environmental authors create eco-disaster narratives in their creative nonfiction works, grounded in scientific research and political debates on the interrelations between industrial pollution, public health, and environmental justice? In these environmental-scientific-and-political stories (I focus on studying and analyzing) regarding how the global ecological degradation caused by has significantly impacted the health and well-being of humans and nonhumans, the American & Asian authors devote themselves to creating the embodied representations of environmental and systemic violence, such as toxic chemical contamination, ecological diseases, the voiceless and powerless struggling of the socioeconomically disadvantaged people (including the Indigenous peoples and women from the Global North), through their poetic/lyrical languages and aesthetic imaginations. The ecological dystopia that those authors reveal to the public in terms of scientific discoveries of the health impacts of environmental pollution on all living and nonliving things is further connected to their idealized image (filled with a hopeful vision) of the re-establishment of the harmonious and sustainable relationship between human society and nonhuman nature, which is based on both their eco-centric and eco-holistic ethics and their political appeals for environmental justice. Then, I am also interested in exploring another question: what social and cultural identities did those American environmental authors hold as creating their creative nonfiction works? I incorporate those environmental authors, who are scientists, educators, humanities scholars and cultural critics, investigative journalists, or activists, into my multidisciplinary studies on the historical development of environmental and medical sciences, environmental ethics, and environmental politics (e.g., grassroots environmentalism) from the transnational and comparative-cultural perspectives in this research project. Second, as a scholar in literary studies, I also spend much time exploring the generic features of environmental creative nonfiction and ecodocumentary to conceptualize the specific rhetorical strategies and narrative techniques these environmental authors adopt to tell the real stories of ecological catastrophes and public health emergencies within the economic and political context of the post-war world. In this respect, I pay close attention to the fundamental functions of econarratology, ecopathology, and ecopoetics as they apply to the making of environmental creative nonfiction in the four chapters of my dissertation, because I am interested in analyzing how environmental authors weave scientific information/knowledge, personal testimonies, eco-ethical ideas, and political orientations into characterization and plot & structure construction. Besides, this dissertation discusses environmental injustice within the political and economic context of neoliberal globalization, state capitalism, and neocolonialism through the theoretical lenses of ecocentrism/deep ecology, ecofeminism, grassroots environmentalism, ecosocialism, and ecocolonialism to further the globalized conversations among humanities scholars, scientists, educators, artists, and activists on environmental victims/refugees’ survival dilemmas caused by pollution and racial/gender/socioeconomic inequalities all over the world. Also, this dissertation adopts regional and global political and cultural lenses to closely examine environmental and human health issues and the phenomenon of environmental injustice, as represented by real eco-apocalypse stories in post-war creative nonfiction. Additionally, this dissertation aims to continue exploring what the humanities scholars can contribute to interdisciplinary environmental studies and modern environmental education (teaching & learning) by interpreting and analyzing environmental literary texts and how the humanities scholars can build intellectual and practical bridges across creative nonfiction writing, environmental-medical sciences, environmental ethics, and global grassroots environmentalism. Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10150/680878 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10150/680882 Mapping Women's Work and Family Trajectories Across Race and Ethnicity Lee, Jennifer Hyunkyung This dissertation examines how women’s work and family lives unfold over adulthood and how these patterns differ by race and ethnicity. Over recent decades, women’s experiences in employment, marriage, and motherhood have transformed, yet they remain deeply shaped by the intersections of gender, race, and ethnicity. Despite increases in women’s labor force participation and major changes in family formation, enduring inequalities continue to shape the life courses of White, Latina, and Black women. Prior research—especially quantitative studies—often treats work and family as separate or static domains, obscuring the dynamic ways employment, partnership, and motherhood evolve together over time. Adopting a life-course perspective, this dissertation conceptualizes work and family as interconnected and cumulative trajectories that vary systematically across racial and ethnic groups.The first article identifies common patterns of joint work-family trajectories from ages 25 to 50 for White, Latina, and Black women. It reveals substantial variation in these trajectories across race and ethnicity. White women’s trajectories center on partnered motherhood with varied employment pathways. Latina women’s trajectories are largely characterized by high-fertility motherhood and a notable group of single mothers. Black women’s trajectories predominantly involve steady employment and motherhood, with single mothers making up the largest clusters. These patterns illustrate how race and ethnicity shape opportunities and constraints throughout women’s work and family lives. The second article examines how educational attainment shapes women’s long-term work-family trajectories. I find that, across racial and ethnic groups, college education generally fosters stable employment and reduces exposure to union disruption, though these patterns slightly differ by group. Among White women, college education reinforces continuous employment among childless single women and buffers against union disruption with unstable work. For Latinas, higher education promotes steady full-time employment—especially among women without children—and reduces entry into union-disrupted trajectories. Among Black women, college education supports steady employment but does not fully protect against single motherhood. These findings demonstrate that education promotes stable employment, but its protective effects are unequally distributed across racial and ethnic groups. The third article investigates how gender beliefs formed in young adulthood predict women’s subsequent work-family trajectories. Traditional gender beliefs correspond to nonemployment within partnered motherhood, while egalitarian beliefs promote long-term full-time employment. This overall pattern holds across racial and ethnic groups, though it manifests differently. For White women, traditional beliefs reinforce non-steady employment with partnered motherhood. For Latina and Black women, they strengthen nonemployment within partnered motherhood and weaken steady employment among single mothers. These findings reveal that early gender ideology sorts women into distinct work-family pathways, with similar beliefs yielding slightly different outcomes depending on racialized opportunity structures. The final article examines how long-term work-family trajectories shape women’s physical health in midlife and how these associations vary across racial and ethnic groups. I find that single motherhood combined with interrupted work is detrimental to health, while steady employment and partnered motherhood are generally protective. However, these patterns are not uniform across race and ethnicity. For White women, early partnered motherhood with steady work is especially beneficial. For Latina mothers, steady employment appears to be protective rather than partnership context. Among Black women, continuous employment leads to the greatest health advantages, regardless of partnership or motherhood. These findings demonstrate that similar trajectories yield unequal health outcomes across racial and ethnic groups. The introductory chapter summarizes the four articles, and the concluding chapter explains how this research contributes to existing scholarship on women’s life courses. Collectively, this dissertation advances understanding of how women’s work and family trajectories diverge across adulthood, highlighting differences by race and ethnicity. It frames work and family inequality as a cumulative process shaped, in part, by the interplay of education, gender ideology, and structural opportunity, showing how these factors contribute to divergent pathways and health outcomes across women’s lives. Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10150/680882 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10150/680879 Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Digital Resilience Framework: A Computational Design Science Approach Yang, Chi-Heng The rapid development of information technology (IT) has led to massive digital transformation in modern businesses. Yet, this progress introduces significant complexity across three key business operational domains: customers, suppliers, and internal manufacturing. Such complexities can lead to instabilities that can spread over complex systems and create disruptions, necessitating strong digital resilience. Existing procedures to build such resilience are often highly manual or rule-based, which struggle to process massive amounts of data and capture complex interdependencies. While Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers scalable capability to support such processes, how to adopt it to build digital resilience remains under-investigated. This dissertation introduces three essays that employ advanced deep learning architectures to establish a comprehensive framework for digital resilience. Essay 1 uses graph autoencoders with a specialized masking mechanism to detect how security vulnerabilities in payment gateways propagate to merchant applications. Essay 2 utilizes a dual-view graph autoencoder with graph transformers and cross-type attention to prioritize key geopolitical risks by modeling risk propagation in a globalized supply chain. Finally, Essay 3 uses a multi-agent reinforcement learning approach with a workflow-aware subgraph partitioning mechanism to coordinate diverse workflows in modern complex machinery. All three essays provide significant practical value for business stakeholders. By delivering these AI-enabled artifacts, this research empowers organizations with a proactive digital resilience and contributes new design principles to the information systems (IS) knowledge base. Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10150/680879 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z