This thesis investigates how my representations of experience through arts-informed autoethnographic research are significant in establishing the pedagogical nature of place. I seek to understand how place-conscious education in a community setting can encourage students' relationships with the spaces they inhabit and lend to a more just learning environment. Many educative tools are provided and analyzed which are derived from wayfinding and psychogeographic methods. Data was collected over two months throughout the Summer of 2015 while participating in the Onward Israel service learning program in Israel and Palestine. My digital photographs and excerpts of stream-of-consciousness style poetry serve as the data set to illuminate the rich sensory encounters and art making processes indicative of experiential learning. This context-driven artwork encourages questions and dialogue about sociopolitical conflict and wars, migration and occupation. It is concerned with physical as well as psychological borders, checkpoints and boundaries. I utilized poetic and photographic inquiry as well as cognitive mapping to explore how concepts of travel are intricately linked to practices of self-reflexivity, community building and alternative curricula development outside of the formal classroom setting. This qualitative data is not a strictly defined set of interviews or statistics. Instead, vignettes of a more totalizing experience can be extracted, analyzed, dissected and/or rearranged. It is an exploration of identity, agency and untraditional ways of knowing the self/Other. I underscore how new pathways and possibilities for teaching emerge from a greater acceptance and validation of experiential knowledge and an attuned consciousness to place.

Drawing from trauma-informed interviews with women undergraduate students, this article examines the ripple effects of sexual violence on student (in)security and mobility. Campus sexual violence is an exceedingly common occurrence, with 1 in 5 women having experienced sexual assault during their college tenure. Women undergraduates are also shown to have the highest rates of sexual assault anxiety of all demographic groups, yet despite the ubiquitous nature and high rates of fear, it is still not well understood how such violence collectively impacts women students’ notions of security, geographical mobility, and independence, regardless of whether they as individuals have experienced assault. Focusing on a cross-section of women undergraduate students from the University of Arizona, I analyze how their perceptions of sexual violence impact their behavior and safety strategies. I illustrate how exhaustive women undergraduate’s ‘prevention’ methods are, and how women students shoulder the burden of safety and care in lieu of the university. Lastly, despite data that women are most likely to be assaulted by someone they know in a private space, interviewed students expressed great fear of strangers and public spaces on campus, perhaps signaling that misleading sexual violence narratives have impacted women student’s independence the most.

This thesis set about to achieve three goals. First it discusses street gang research, assessment of the gang problem, and in particular the forces that push and pull American youths into the street gang lifestyle and the gang member experience. Second, it explores how alternative forms of data presentation, such as ethnodrama, blur the boundary lines between art and scientific research and demonstrates that the embodiment of human experience through artistic means enhances our understanding of the gang problem and creates context. Third, it includes an ethnodrama text constructed from qualitative interviews of three former gang members, in support of narrative inquiry research methods, and illustrating how three young men were drawn into the gang lifestyle, what they experienced by being in a gang, and the factors that helped them to leave the gang and lead them to make positive changes in their lives.

Most current commercial automated IC inspection systems use gray-level or binary images for IC defect detection in spite of the fact that color permits defect detection where gray-level information is insufficient. Three color image processing techniques including the spectral-spatial clustering, principal components, and hue-saturation-value (HSV) color features have been investigated to evaluate the usefulness of color for IC defect detection. The AMOEBA spectral-spatial clustering algorithm, an un-supervised color segmentation approach, with a sequence of image processing procedures resulted in segmentation results with high accuracy and discriminated successfully an isolated and homogeneous defect with an unique color signature. The principal components transformation and the HSV color features, two color enhancement/separation algorithms, have proven useful for enhancing and isolating weak spectral signatures in the defect regions. The results of this investigation into the use of color are promising.