Tasoulla Hadjiyanni

Transbodied Spaces: The Home Experiences of Undocumented Mexicans in Minnesota

Much of the scholarship around the notion of home draws on ethnographic and phenomenological studies. As a result, the emphasis is on presence, the physical and material existence of people, spaces, and objects. Through the experiences of six undocumented Mexicans living in Minnesota, this article expands inquiry into how private spatial realities intersect with homemaking processes and citizenship production. The argument is that absence is as critical in unraveling what home means as presence. Situating homemaking at the junctures of the presence and absence of bodies, spaces, and objects, the article positions homes as transbodied spaces. Conceiving of homes as transbodied spaces allows for an exploration of how “illegality” diversifies the domestic experience. The resulting production of a private landscape that accounts for presence and absence, endows some undocumented with an immigrant identity that is validated and spatially promoted. In parallel, the spatial constraints they endure can suppress their efforts to carve out meaning and identity, contributing to their “‘illegalization.” Cognizant of “illegality’s” challenges and that social inequalities are partly spatially constructed at both the private and the public levels, and are therefore malleable, scholars and practitioners can rethink their approach to those “living in the shadows.”

(Im)materiality and Practice: Craft Making as a Medium for Reconstructing Ojibwe Identity in Domestic Spaces

ABSTRACT Through interviews with thirteen Ojibwe, members of a Native American tribe in Minnesota, this article explores how home-based practices relate to the material and immaterial worlds and how they are impacted by a homes spatiality. Conceiving activities as processes that foster social, spatial, cultural, spiritual, and temporal connections, the analysis elaborates on how activities embedded in the craft making tradition are supported or suppressed by the domestic environment; how they relate, as well as how notions of home, culture, and identity are constructed. We conclude by highlighting culturally sensitive solutions and approaches that ease the tension between (im)materiality and the practical limitations of housing conditions.

Kitchens as Cultural Mediums: The Food Experiences of Mexican Immigrants in Minnesota

Abstract Under conditions of displacement, food has been linked to physical and emotional well-being and has been positioned as a stabilizing cultural element, one imbued with symbolic meaning when deployed in the construction of identity. However, limited research has delved into the role of kitchens in the adjustment process of immigrant groups. Understanding how food practices relate to the built environment, and particularly kitchens, enriches the potential solutions by which designers, housing professionals, educators, and policymakers can work toward culturally sensitive housing; that is, housing that supports various ways of living. Drawing from 25 in-home interviews with Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans living in Minnesota, this article investigated their kitchen needs as a way to more fully understand the role of domestic interiors in immigrants’ attempts to navigate life in displacement. A background on Mexican immigration, the culture’s foundations, and the study’s methodology preceded the discussion of the findings which pointed to the value of Mexican foods in constructing and nourishing the Mexican sense of difference. As kitchens were found to act as cultural mediums, capable of supporting and/or suppressing the practice of Mexican food traditions and thereby delineating the direction of cultural change, the article concluded with culturally sensitive design solutions and a call for future research.

Automated coding of activity videos from an OCD study

Analysis of behavior using video is a promising approach for identifying risk markers for psychopathology that can be applied in a wide range of populations. Computer vision techniques are needed to automatically code behavior in order to reduce time and effort in these analyses. This paper discusses algorithms developed for the automatic analysis of video data from a study regarding the impact of environmental factors on youths with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Overhead videos of subjects washing hands were automatically annotated for activities such as rinsing, applying soap, and turning on/off the water faucet. These automated annotations were created by using a color-based background subtraction method to create a foreground probability score which is then used to determine if various labeled regions of interest (ROIs) are activated. These activation signals are then characterized and used to determine when different substeps of the handwashing procedure are performed. Automated annotations were validated by comparisons with hand-labeled ground truth.

Exploring housing quality measures in a rural area of the Philippines

AbstractHousing quality in a rural region of Leyte Province, the Philippines, was examined to develop a model to identify predictors of housing quality, one of the six housing norms within the theory of housing adjustment. Data were drawn from interviews with 150 female heads of households from ten rural villages in the upland and lowland areas near the town of Baybay, the Philippines. Logistic regression was used in the analysis. As expected, socio-economic status was significantly related to housing quality, as were the village’s location, the age of the male-head of the household, and tenure. The number of stories of the house and the crowding measure were not significantly related to housing quality. This research provides documentation for evaluating both equitable distribution of housing and economic development programs and policies in developing areas.

Socializing Surveillance: An interdisciplinary educational model

Surveillance systems are becoming ubiquitous nowadays. Their use is sometimes followed by misuse which often raises ethical questions that have implications for all involved in the design, control, and implementation of surveillance schemes. Spanning across the disciplines of interior design/architecture and camera networks present conceptions of surveillance systems often disregard the social dimension, or those ‘being watched.’ Debates raise concerns as people associate cameras with feelings of fear and control, loss of privacy, discrimination, inequality, and cultural/gender insensitivity. Began as an interdisciplinary collaboration between the University of Minnesotas Interior Design program and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the ‘Socializing Surveillance’ project matured into a joint endeavor undertaken by four faculty advisors and five electrical and computer engineering students through the “ECE 4951: Senior Design” Project in Fall 2009 and Spring 2010. This paper outlines the pertinent issues starting from an optimization approach to place cameras and in-depth interviews with design practitioners that led to a re-thinking of what surveillance and camera networks can entail; the challenges and opportunities afforded through interdisciplinary educational efforts; and the attempts of the team to develop a prototype for an interactive surveillance system that foregrounds the social dimensions of a security scheme. The goal is to ignite interest in surveillance and to set in place considerations for interdisciplinary educational models.

Use of Computer Vision Tools to Identify Behavioral Markers of Pediatric Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Pilot Study.

OBJECTIVES The clinical presentation of pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is heterogeneous, which is a stumbling block to understanding pathophysiology and to developing new treatments. A major shift in psychiatry, embodied in the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative of National Institute of Mental Health, recognizes the pitfalls of categorizing mental illnesses using diagnostic criteria. Instead, RDoC encourages researchers to use a dimensional approach, focusing on narrower domains of psychopathology to characterize brain-behavior relationships. Our aim in this multidisciplinary pilot study was to use computer vision tools to record OCD behaviors and to cross-validate these behavioral markers with standard clinical measures. METHODS Eighteen youths with OCD and 21 healthy controls completed tasks in an innovation laboratory (free arrangement of objects, hand washing, arrangement of objects on contrasting carpets). Tasks were video-recorded. Videos were coded by blind raters for OCD-related behaviors. Childrens Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (CY-BOCS) and other scales were administered. We compared video-recorded measures of behavior in OCD versus healthy controls and correlated video measures and clinical measures of OCD. RESULTS Behavioral measures on the videos were significantly correlated with specific CY-BOCS dimension scores. During the free arrangement task, more time spent ordering objects and more moves of objects were both significantly associated with higher CY-BOCS ordering/repeating dimension scores. Longer duration of hand washing was significantly correlated with higher scores on CY-BOCS ordering/repeating and forbidden thoughts dimensions. During arrangement of objects on contrasting carpets, more moves and more adjustment of objects were significantly associated with higher CY-BOCS ordering/repeating dimension scores. CONCLUSION Preliminary data suggest that measurement of behavior using video recording is a valid approach for quantifying OCD psychopathology. This methodology could serve as a new tool for investigating OCD using an RDoC approach. This objective, novel behavioral measurement technique may benefit both researchers and clinicians in assessing pediatric OCD and in identifying new behavioral markers of OCD. Clinical Trial Registry: Development of an Instrument That Monitors Behaviors Associated With OCD. NCT02866422. http://clinicaltrials.gov.

Exploring video descriptions for handwashing activities as part of an obsessive-compulsive disorder study

Analysis of behavior using video is a promising approach for identifying risk markers for psychopathology that can be applied in a wide range of populations. As part of a study on the environmental factors that relate to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) behaviors, videos were recorded of everyday tasks being performed by two groups of children: a control group and a group diagnosed with OCD. One of the activities involved handwashing, since handwashing compulsions are frequent amongst those who suffer from OCD. Being able to classify these handwashing videos as showing behaviors associated with OCD or not is a step towards helping to automate important aspects of this psychiatric study. This paper explores using various feature descriptors sampled from dense motion trajectories to determine which combination of features and encodings would be best for video classification. Dense motion trajectories are computed for the videos from the OCD study and the points in these trajectories are described using several methods, including histograms of oriented gradient, histograms of optical flow, and motion boundary histograms. Various encoding techniques for these descriptors are also explored, including bag of words, pyramid bag of words, and sparse coding. To determine which feature/encoding techniques would perform the best, several dimensionality reduction techniques are used and the methods are ranked based on separability in the low dimensional space. This separability is measured by classifying using a linear discriminant and also by using kNN.

Toward culturally sensitive housing – Eliminating health disparities by accounting for health

Abstract Refugees, immigrants and people of color experience disproportionate poor health outcomes. Cultural differences in how families cook, eat, and, in general, live in their homes can be partly responsible for some of these health disparities. Understanding and responding to cultural differences through housing that supports various ways of living i.e., culturally sensitive housing can facilitate healthy lifestyles and help improve the health and well-being of diverse communities. Interviews with 21 Minnesota practitioners (designers, affordable housing providers, developers,junders, and policy makers) point to the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to housing studies, one that includes the public health perspective. Although health, and in turn health disparities, were part of the discussion in all four steps of the process for working toward culturally sensitive housing there is room to further infuse health into these conversations. The current definition of healthy housing should be broadened to account for diverse ways of living and for solutions that range from the micro to the macro scale and from interior finishes to neighborhood amenities. Such a reconceptualization of healthy housing can chart new directions for education, policy, and practice.

Children and their Housing - Insights from the Island of Cyprus

Abstract Limited research has been devoted to examining housing from the viewpoint of children. Using quantitative and qualitative data from interviews of 80 children from the island of Cyprus, this paper examined the children’s housing norms and aspirations. In the process, the study searched for dzrerences and similarities between the children’s housing aspirations and the prevailing housing practices on the island. The analysis showed that children’s aspirations matched or exceededprevailing standards. Children aspired for a single-family detached house with one bedroom for each child and a yard, as well as conveniences and comforts such as a swimming pool and more than one bathroom. Furthermore, the analysis illustrated the subtle effects of age, gendel; social class, and type of housing on the children’s housing aspirations. The findings allude to the fact that children are very perceptive of their own housing needs; thus, planners and policy makers should take these needs into consideration when designing housing for families with children.