At present, the need for an understanding of both physical and cultural geography is increasingly urgent in America’s schools. The present study explores using music as focus for the exploration of geography. Not only is music strongly linked to culture and environment but also its study provides an experiential understanding of a given culture in a way that few others can. Instrumental music, unfettered by practical, semantic, or representational constraints of other traditional art forms, can be considered as one of the most direct forms of cultural expression, reflecting primarily the collective imagination of the culture that developed it and the environment in which it developed. Musical instruments are shaped by a culture’s aesthetics and made using locally available materials and technologies.

The present article takes as a case study a class at the Museum School, a San Diego Unified School District charter school that emphasizes experiential learning and the arts in its daily curriculum. In this case study, 23 children in grades 4-6 focused their attention on the culture and geography of the Island of Bali, Indonesia, through studying its instrumental music, known as “gamelan.”

The Museum School has had a Balinese gamelan program as part of its music curriculum since 2000 and thus all of the students approached the subject with substantial experiential knowledge. The course of study, which lasted several weeks, went through four stages of inquiry and discussion. First, the students conducted background research on Balinese music, focusing in particular on organology. Second, the students explored Balinese geography through organology, deducing aspects of the Balinese environment based on the design and construction of the instruments. Third, the students examined Balinese culture through its music, focusing on musical structure. Fourth the students were asked to make connections between Balinese culture and physical geography as seen through music. Finally, the students compared and contrast what they had learned with musics of their own choice, pointing out likely cultural and environmental factors that likely caused the differences and similarities they observed.

This course of study helped the students make connections between cultural and physical geography in a nuanced way. Further, although focus on music and art as a subject, the core elements of the class were writing and research skills. Combining these skills with experiential learning not only deepens and nuances understanding of geography but also expands students’ cognitive repertoire, providing tools for further exploration.

Graphene, a two-dimensional carbon allotrope, has interesting electronic properties resulting from its unique hexagonal mono-atomic lattice. Electronic quasiparticles in graphene, called massless Dirac fermions, are described by the Weyl equation in which the effective speed of light is the Fermi velocity, approximately c/300. Thus graphene provides a solid state system in which to study the physics of high-energy electrons or neutrinos, including interesting relativistic quantum phenomena such as Zitterbewugung, atomic collapse, and Klein tunneling. The comparison of graphene's quasiparticles to neutrinos is limited by the fact that scattering in the solid reduces the mean free path to about a micron. However, by fabricating clean graphene devices with closely spaced electrodes, one can probe the intrinsic properties of massless Dirac fermions in the ballistic regime where these quasiparticles do not undergo scattering.

The theory of the Dirac equation, the band structure of graphene, and the Landauer formalism for electronic transport is explained. Techniques are presented for the extraction of graphene, synthesis of chemical-vapor deposited graphene, and fabrication of graphene devices for both characterization and electronic transport measurements. The various characterization methods include Raman spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy. Experiments approaching the ballistic transport limit in graphene devices such as point contacts, Josephson junctions, and short-and-wide junctions are described.

In this dissertation, I explore several key works in the fields of Black Literature and Black theology that highlight the rich and complex nature of Black religious and spiritual traditions in the U.S. I focus on studies that show how Africans and African Americans postslavery were able to mount serious resistance to white supremacist efforts to dehumanize and assimilate Black lives politically, economically, and socially by way of Western theology's claims and Protestant Christianity's influence. I term the multifarious spiritual traditions and belief systems that offered Black folks healing, and the space in which to redefine and create new meaning heterodox Black religiosities. I then place my inquiry of minor or heterodox Black Christianities within a larger conversation about the politics of recognition, where the desire to be seen and treated as human within a state to which the appeals for recognition are directed and from which they are denied often prove inadequate or limited as modes for liberation.

This dissertation is an effort to think through the complexities of how African American literature interacts with what I am terming the notion of uncalling made visible by the heterodox Christianities that fall out of the scope of the Black. In other words, I analyze Black religiosity as an enactment of radical Black collectivity in counterdistinction to a politics of recognition. I argue it is this figure of the uncalled, operating out of heterodox Black religiosities, that can offer an alternative model for liberation and healing that is not bound up in outward cries for recognition―a redirected and more productive form of protest that already exists but that is underutilized. This alternative strategy aims to shift Black protest efforts away from desiring settler-colonial, patriarchal, non-mutual state-based recognition, and toward the freedom found in wholeness and strength through internal journeys, supported by radical Black sociality after the emotional and spiritual battles are waged, in the quiet victories of peace, and with the guidance, insights, theories and writings of the Black feminist tradition.

Keywords: recognition; recognition-based protest; liberal politics of recognition; patriarchy; capitalism; heterodox Black religiosities; figure of the uncalled; settler-state sovereignty; freedom, protest, Black church, conjurer, Conjure, Christianity; white supremacy; justice, healing, wholeness, frequency

Without changing a material’s chemical composition, lattice geometry, or orbital structure, the physical properties of a material can be drastically modified by changes to its dimensionality. Two-dimensional materials are therefore an ideal platform for exploring the role of reduction in material geometry because they can be stacked to form three-dimensional structures or etched to form one- and zero-dimensional features.

In this dissertation, I explore the methods for isolating two-dimensional hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) and related materials, for controlling their three-dimensional structural properties synthetically, and for using irradiation to locally reduce their dimensionalities through vacancy formation. After discussing these techniques and their underlying physics, I investigate the applications of etched two-dimensional materials for nanopore sequencing and nanomachines.

In Chapter 2, I outline the techniques for isolation of two-dimensional materials by both exfoliation from bulk crystals and by synthetic deposition. I delve into the mechanics of chemical vapor deposition synthesis of h-BN graphene and establish methods for controlling their three-dimensional stacking.

In Chapter 3, I investigate the effects of electron irradiation on h-BN. I show that accelerated electrons induce specific vacancy geometries in h-BN depending on its stacking sequence and develop a method for creating atomically precise nanopores. I explore the application of these nanopores for DNA sequencing.

In Chapter 4, I similarly characterize the effects helium ion irradiation on two-dimensional materials. I explore the damaging effects on the lattice of h-BN and MoS2 while assessing the controlled use of these helium ions to etch one- and zero-dimensional nanostructures.

In Chapter 5, I study the use of patterned graphene for softened mechanical actuators. I show that micron scale graphene can be used as an acoustic transducer and demonstrate a novel electron beam driven rotational actuator.