MARS
MARS is a repository service of Mason Publishing and the Data and Digital Scholarship Services (DDSS) at the George Mason University Libraries. MARS provides enduring, stable, well-indexed access to a wide range of scholarship from the Mason community, such as Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), articles, presentations, reports, and creative work. Learn more about publishing, sharing, and preserving research data with the George Mason University Institutional Dataverse, and our other repository services.
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Genre Performance and the Discursive Regulation of Value Alignment
(2023) Tuckley, Lauren E; Lawrence, Heidi Y
This dissertation examines how the personal statement, an occluded genre, mediates organizational access and shapes writers’ identities in alignment with institutional ethos. To demonstrate how the personal statement constructs its writers, I employ Vijay Bhatia’s Critical Genre Awareness (CGA), an evaluative framework designed to identify trends in the circulation of discourse within professional settings, to analyze the personal statement of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program and the discursive resources that give rise to its production. This investigation includes an analysis of the genre’s text-internal properties, including a Swalesian move step analysis of a corpus of 19 personal statements for the English Teaching Assistantship fellowship and an analysis of the intertextual genres that constitute the application. The text-internal analysis is considered alongside a text-external analysis of the discursive resources that account for the genre’s expression and social action, which includes a close examination of the Fulbright program’s professional practices and culture. Finally, after demonstrating how an organization's discourses regulate social participation through value alignment, I offer a case study illustrating how one college applicant creates a new ‘possible self’ through the act of writing her personal statement for college admissions. Ultimately, this project reveals how personal statement writers’ identities are reconstituted through genre performance, establishing both that and how applicants appeal for organizational inclusion through performing identities and expressing commitments that most align with the social organization's institutional ethos.
HARDENING CYBERSECURITY FOR 5G AND BEYOND WIRELESS NETWORKS AT PHYSICAL LAYER
(2023) Jiao, Long; Zeng, Kai KZ
One of the main challenges in 5G networks is to ensure secure and reliable communication service. An efficient and lightweight security mechanism is desired in the design. In this dissertation, we focus on the physical layer secret key generation and primary user (PU) location privacy protection in 5G wireless networks. Physical layer key generation is a promising secure mechanism, which does not rely on the hardness of computational solutions but on the information-theoretical security to generate symmetric secret keys. It thus induces low computational complexity and fit for the resource-constrained IoT devices. For instance, two entities (Alice and Bob) can perform physical layer (PHY) key generation based on the reciprocal channels to extract identical secret bits. To improve the secrecy of pair-wise physical layer key generation, we propose the power delay profile (PDP) as the common randomness for secret key generation in this dissertation proposal. Unlike the channel statistic information (RSS) and received signal strength (RSS) adopted in existing works, PDP can resolve the path gain for each multipath and flatten the channel noise. Secret beampattern configuration at the legitimate devices can directly decorrelate attackers' channel observations. This strategy is game-changing for the security of PHY key generation because it establishes an extra shell to prevent the passive attacker. We propose to utilize low-correlated beampatterns to collect non-correlated channel measurements in channel coherence time in order to increase the channel probing rate. For instance, K channel probings with low-correlated beampatterns in coherence time can produce the channel measurements K times more than the existing works and thus enhance the key generation rate. To reduce temporal correlation among channel measurements, we propose a cosine similarity-based metric to evaluate the inter-correlation of beampatterns. Based on this metric, the channel measurements with the least inter-correlation can be selected using the proposed algorithm. In this dissertation, we also investigate the scheme to improve the group secret key generation efficiency in 5G mmWave Massive MIMO networks by enhancing the efficiency of channel probing for group key generation. A new channel probing strategy for star-topology networks group key generation is proposed, which focuses on multiplexing of downlink probing signals to perform the downlink channel probing concurrently. The hybrid precoder has been considered in this scenario to mitigate inter-group interference, which includes an analog precoder and baseband precoder. To further balance the group key rates, a genetic algorithm (GA) based power allocation algorithm is developed to allocate more power to the nodes with unfavorable channel conditions. What’s more, we propose a scheme to estimate group key rates based on the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) so that we can estimate the group key rates based on the probing samples. Various numerical results are provided including the group key rates and bits disagreement ratio (BDR). The numerical results show that the GA-based downlink channel probing scheme can increase the efficiency of channel probing and have higher group key rates compared with the existing channel probing schemes. When the SNR is 25dB, the key rates of GA-based power allocation scheme are 20% higher than the scheme with the conventional channel probing strategy. To protect the PU location privacy, we investigate the benefits of secondary user (SU) network beamforming on improving primary user (PU) location privacy in spectrum sharing systems in this dissertation proposal, where the beamformer in the SU network is designed to suppress the aggregate interference to improve the location privacy of PUs. We consider two problems: improving SU network communication throughput subject to the specified PU location privacy requirements and enhancing PU location privacy given the quality of service (QoS) requirements of SU networks. In the first problem, we provide an algorithm to achieve high data rates with the constrained PU location privacy level. Numerical results show that for a given PU location privacy requirement, the proposed scheme is able to interfere/exclude only a few SU nodes from the PU band and the network throughput can be improved by over 50\%. In the second problem, to fully explore the potential of SU network beamforming for enhancing PU location privacy, we propose a two-step scheme to decouple the beamforming and privacy zone design so that the PU location privacy can be improved while satisfying the SU network throughput requirement. According to numerical evaluations, the proposed scheme can maintain/achieve higher PU location privacy than the benchmark beamforming schemes while satisfying a QoS requirement for the SU network.
First-Generation Women of the African Diaspora Collective: Finding Fullness Through (Re)membering, an Endarkened Feminist Participatory Action Research Project
(2023) Hassell-Goodman, Sharrell; Arminio, Jan
In the midst of a global pandemic and during a time of emboldened white supremacy, a group of women of the African diaspora created a collective to examine our experiences as first-generation college students navigating college. What started off as a conversation about the ways in which Black women’s voices are often silenced in the academy through misogynoir, developed into our search for fullness through the act of (re)membering. Together as a collective, 22 undergraduate and graduate first-generation women of the African diaspora (FGWAD) represented a wide range of the transnational African diaspora (Black, African American, African, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Cuban, and Afro-Latina), having allegiances to multiple nation states ranging in age from early 20s to mid-50s. Engaging in the three-manuscript format method, this project examined the impact of systemic racism in higher education and explored our intersectional identities as first-generation college students. The author realized early on that the power of this research collective was not only to discover the impact of social injustice in the academy but also revealed a Black woman’s way of knowing. Along our journey for clarity, we created an endarkened feminist participatory research methodological approach (Collins, 1990; Cooper, 1892; Dillard, 2000; Drame & Irby, 2016). Black participatory research informed our work and members of the collective took part in each aspect of the research process, including research design, collection of data, analysis of data, establishment of findings, and their meaning. Each of these manuscripts were concerned with the larger implications of deficit-based ideologies, systemic oppressive structures that maintain power, and the collective grappling with complex and messy binary constructs such as race/gender, superhuman/ subhuman, and trauma/resilience. While co-researchers conversed about the ways in which the academy was suspicious of their stories, members of the collective came to trust and honor their complex and multiple truths through our collective storytelling. For example, the research demonstrated that FGWAD were expected to exhibit strength and exceptionality. On one hand, strong Black woman or Black girl magic ideas created a specific type of capital to navigate the university space or exceed their ancestors’ wildest dreams (Nell & Dunn, 2020), but on the other hand, it was also the site of great pain as members of the collective were expected to maintain excellence at all costs. This research project sought to transcend Black women’s experiences in which their knowledge was questioned, misunderstood, and oftentimes disrupted. Not only is this work significant to sabotage normative claims around research and knowledge, but it is also important in creating a new trajectory for future research.
On 'Peri-peace' Photography: The Nexus Between Images and Empathy
(2023) Souryal, Shirley R.; Hirsch, Susan
Photographic images have power. They can enflame, elicit, evoke and enthuse. While photographs of war and violence inundate society, images of peace are not as easily recognizable. This research project engages the medium of photography to navigate the field of peace and conflict resolution and illuminate creative aspects not widely utilized, so that concepts like empathy and compassion are not just prosocial behaviors but are seen as tangible stepping stones on the path to peace. Additionally, this study amplifies the language surrounding peace to include the concept of ‘peri-peace’ (2019), which I coined to elucidate the mercurial space between negative and positive peace. It also expands analysis to include the innovative practice of ‘peri-peace’ photography, which I developed to allow scholars and practitioners to recognize images of peace and enhance fragmented relationships. The aim is to synthesize various photographic approaches, via a qualitative and interpretative case study, and demonstrate that visual analyses can provide a more nuanced lens through which to ‘see’ peace and conflict, encourage empathy amongst adversaries and propel parties towards resolution and reconciliation.
MOLECULAR CHARACTERIZATION OF PSGL-1 DECAMERIC REPEATS FOR INACTIVATING HIV-1 INFECTIVITY
(2023) Sealey, Leanna; Wu, Yuntao
P-selectin glycoprotein ligand-1 (PSGL-1/CD162) is a dimeric glycoprotein that has been identified as a restriction enzyme factor of HIV-1. PSGL-1 is expressed on the surface of CD4+ T cells, primarily on lymphoid and myeloid cells. This mucin-like surface protein binds to P, E, and L selectin, is upregulated during inflammation, and mediates leukocyte tethering and rolling. Previous studies showed PSGL-1 blocks the infectivity of virions released through steric hindrance, preventing particles from attaching to target cells. Mapping studies showed PSGL-1’s extracellular N-terminus is needed for the antiviral activity. Polymorphisms of PSGL-1 contain an extracellular domain containing 14-16 tandem repeats of 10 amino acids, with the consensus sequence, (-A-T/M-E-A-Q-T-T-X-P/L-A/T-). The extracellular region contains highly O-glycosylated Threonines (30%) and Prolines (10%), which in addition to the tandem repeats form a sturdy elongated backbone for the protein. To determine if the presence of the decameric repeats (DRs) in PSGL-1 is required for its anti-HIV activity, we performed DR deletion mutagenesis studies of PSGL-1, deleting single DR to all DRs. We found that deleting all DRs eliminated PSGL-1’s antiviral activity, but the presence of a single DR, dependent on location, was sufficient to maintain its antiviral activity. The PSGL-1 mutant containing 1 DR has lower antiviral activity than full-length PSGL-1. Mutagenesis of N-linked and O-linked glycosylation sites inside and outside the DRs demonstrated that these sites contribute to PSGL-1’s restriction of HIV-1 activity. However, residues involved in selectin-binding did not appear to be critical for PSGL-1’s antiviral activity. Furthermore, we show that the availability of glucose also affected the antiviral activity of PSGL-1. The results demonstrate that PSGL-1 maintains significant antiviral activity in the absence of certain decameric repeats and the presence of glycosylation sites also influences its anti-HIV activity.