Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Unawareness, and its Effect on Beliefs, Learning, and Group Decision Making
    (2024) Tashiro, Masayuki; Pacuit, Eric; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation consists of three standalone papers centered around the concept of unawareness. The first paper, titled `Weak Explicit Beliefs', concerns the effect of unawareness to one's beliefs and extends the standard logic framework of awareness with a novel notion of beliefs under unawareness. The second paper, titled `Learning under Unawareness' concerns the effect of unawareness in one's learning process and extends the standard logic framework of awareness with two dynamic modal operators: learning and change of awareness. Lastly, the third paper, titled `Models of Group Deliberation with Asymmetric Awareness' concerns the effect of unawareness in group decision making situations, in which each agent in the group may be un/aware of different things, and explores a normative question whether it is always better to become more aware (of what the other agents in the group are aware of) via two formal models of group deliberation.
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    More Than A Movement: Unpacking Contemporary Anti-Human Trafficking Efforts in Washington, D.C.
    (2016) Callahan, Gina; Struna, Nancy L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Trafficking in persons has attracted seemingly boundless attention over the last two decades and the work aimed at fighting it is best understood when this cause is contextualized against the backdrop of other social forces—economic, social, and cultural—shaping contemporary nonprofit activities. This project argues that the paid and volunteer labor that takes place in metro Washington, D.C., to combat trafficking in persons can be understood as both a movement and an industry. In addition to arguing that anti-trafficking work is part of a nonprofit industrial complex that situates activist and advocacy work firmly inside state and economic institutions, this project is concerned with the ways in which trafficking work and workers conduct their business collectively. As an organizational study, it identifies the key players in the D.C. region focused on this issue and traces their interactions, collaborations, and cooperation. Significantly, this project suggests that despite variations in objectives, methods, priorities, and characterizations of trafficking, thirty organizations in metro D.C. working on this issue “get along” because they are bound by the benign common goal of raising awareness. Awareness, in this context, is best understood as both a cultural anchor facilitating cohesion and as a social currency allowing groups to opt into joint efforts. The dissertation concludes that organizations centralize awareness in their collective activities over more drastic priorities around which consensus would need to be gained. This is a lost opportunity for making sense of the ways that individual bodies—men, women, and children—experience not just trafficking, but the world around them.