Digital Commons Network^™

Staging Nature: Performing Environmental Crises In War, Housing, And Labor, 1935–1990, Erik Barrett Wallenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Staging Nature” examines how theater was used as a means for expressing environmental concerns in moments of environmental crisis in the United States. I begin with The Federal Theatre Project’s national tour of a performance addressing the metabolic rift in the divide between the city and country with a focus on the devastation of farmland in the Dust Bowl in the late 1930s. At the heart of the dissertation are three theater groups that start in the 1960s during the rise of the modern environmental movement. Chapters on Bread and Puppet Theater show that they make a name for themselves …

Extraction, Property, And Rights In Southeastern Arabian Seascapes C.1820–Present, Scott Erich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a historical and ethnographic examination of fish, pearl, sponge, and oil extraction in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. These waters, which were fished and labored upon in much of the same way for millennia, have, in the last two centuries, undergone a sea change. Regimes of property and rights have transformed the ocean from a wild and undifferentiated space into a place which is enclosed, privatized, industrially fished, drilled, and otherwise despoiled. This dissertation, building on recent works in environmental history, Indian Ocean studies, and legal and economic anthropology, probes the many cultural, religious, social, …

Gendered Care Work And State Ambivalence: Disaster Recovery And Puerto Rican Displacement In New York City, Lisa Jahn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the politics of disaster recovery and coloniality in New York City, documenting the forms of ambivalent care that characterize institutionalized disaster recovery programs. I examine how Puerto Ricans arriving in New York City post- hurricane María navigate the racialized and inadequately funded recovery aid program supported by the Office of the Mayor of New York City. Following the events of September 11, 2001, New York City faith-based agencies established programs to assist in rescue, relief, and recovery efforts. The New York City Relief Center (NYRC) was first incorporated in 2003 to address all phases of the disaster …

Synthesis Of Biologically Active Tropolones And Stereochemically Rich Compounds Via Cross-Coupling Reactions, Nana B. Agyemang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the past years the Murelli lab has established research based on the synthesis and biological evaluations of alpha-hydroxytropolones (alpha-HTs). These seven-membered aromatic rings have three contiguous oxygen atoms that chelates to metals, thus, biologically having the ability to bind dinuclear metalloenzymes and promoting inhibition. Synthetic routes to alpha-HT’s are scarce and therefore has been the main driving force in developing efficient and general synthetic methods to obtain variations in alpha-HTs, enabling SAR studies. The Murelli lab have therefore developed an oxidopyrylium cycloaddition/ring-opening strategy that is able to generate polysubstituted alpha-HTs starting from kojic acid, a cheap and readily available …

Establishing A Mouse Model Of Glioblastoma (Gbm) And Developing Strategies To Eliminate Cancer Cells., Juliet N.E. Baidoo-Kanneh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As the tenth leading cause of cancer death in the United States with a 6.8% five-year survival rate, glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a very deadly disease with a poor prognosis. Therefore, a curative treatment is in high demand. Among the widely used anti-metabolites (Chemotherapeutic agents, CAs), each compound approved for human use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has side effects. Three main phenomena contribute to the side effects and the reappearance of cancer: (a) the cancer cells become resistant to chemo- and radiation therapy; (b) this chemo-resistance prompts the use of higher doses of the chemotherapeutic agents; and …

Icons In Lyari: Resonance, Visibility, And Global Blackness In An Indian Ocean Port Town, Zehra Husain

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This doctoral dissertation studies the resonances of boxing, football, and rap music in Lyari Town, a working-class neighborhood located in Pakistan’s commercial port city Karachi. Based on 12 months of in-person and remote ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation traces the circulation of iconographies of Blackness and global sports as they sediment in a port town on the Indian Ocean. Lyari has long been in the news for gang violence and urban strife, but is also noted for its talented boxers, footballers and more recently rap musicians, some of whom are of Afro-Baluch descent. These “two faces” of Lyari Town informs its …

Towards Interpretable Machine Reading Comprehension With Mixed Effects Regression And Exploratory Prompt Analysis, Luca Del Signore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We investigate the properties of natural language prompts that determine their difficulty in machine reading comprehension tasks. While much work has been done benchmarking language model performance at the task level, there is considerably less literature focused on how individual task items can contribute to interpretable evaluations of natural language understanding. Such work is essential to deepening our understanding of language models and ensuring their responsible use as a key tool in human machine communication. We perform an in depth mixed effects analysis on the behavior of three major generative language models, comparing their performance on a large reading comprehension …

Somos Boricuas Y Estamos Despertando: Decolonial Education, Collective Identity, And The Struggle For Puerto Rican Studies, Ricardo Gabriel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Student movements have been and continue to be major catalysts for social change. The Puerto Rican student movement at The City University of New York (CUNY) during the late 1960s and early 1970s played a central role in desegregating CUNY—the largest urban university system in the United States—and establishing Black and Puerto Rican studies departments throughout the CUNY system. Student-activists also agitated for participatory democracy and community control of university institutions. Despite the movement’s intellectual contributions and its impact on higher education, it has received little scholarly attention. This study helps fill that gap by exploring the movement’s origins and …

Development Of Chemical Probes For Two Pro-Metastatic Enzymes: Cysteine Cathepsins And Nek2 Kinase, Ashif I. Bhuiyan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Proteases, specifically cysteine proteases, are crucial for the survival and growth of living organisms. They hydrolyze proteins and use different mechanisms to function. Cysteine proteases are classified into three types: papain, caspase, and picornaviridae. The papain class, with 11 cysteine cathepsins, regulates essential physiological functions, and abnormal expression is linked to various diseases. Our research aims to develop small molecules that inhibit cathepsins B and L to develop probes for functional proteomics.

The centrosome is critical for proper cell division and is regulated by multiple kinases, including Nek2. Nek2 is highly concentrated at the centrosome in vertebrates and plays a …

Between Two Messiahs: An Ethnography Of Settler-Colonizers In The West Bank, Amir Reicher

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of settler-colonialism. Based on fieldwork among Jewish settlers in the West Bank, it analyzes from an anthropological perspective how a settler-colonial process takes place. Officially, since the signing of the Oslo Accords, with few exceptions, Israel ceased to build new settlements in the West Bank. But, on the ground, from the 1990s onwards, the West Bank hinterland was scattered with over 150 illegal outposts, strategically constructed to appropriate as much land as possible. Often established on remote hilltops, the illegal outposts are the central tool today in appropriating Palestinian land, and the “outpost people” who …

Sonorous Movement: Cellistic Corporealities In Works By Helmut Lachenmann, Simon Steen-Andersen, And Johan Svensson, John Popham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Sonorous Movement: Cellistic Corporealities in Works by Lachenmann, Steen-Andersen, and Svensson, I analyze three compositions that foreground the cellist-body, its physical gestures, and instrumental interactions: Helmut Lachemann’s Pression für einen Cellisten (1969/2010), Simon Steen-Andersen’s Study for String Instrument #3 (2011), and Johan Svensson’s marionette for string instrument, electro-mechanical devices and lights (2018). These works center sound production and the performing body as sites of ontological and creative exploration. Their physical gestures serve multiple sensorial functions, heightening the visual and kinesthetic dimensions of a traditionally aurally oriented practice. For each work, I develop a corresponding analytical method based on …

Drug Repurposing Using Gene Expression Data Mining, Yue Qiu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The conventional drug discovery process that employs the "one disease, one target, one drug'' paradigm is expensive, time-consuming, and has a high rate of failure for multi-genic complex diseases. An alternative approach to drug discovery is to repurpose an existing drug that has been used to treat some medical conditions. Drug repurposing is considered a promising method due to its accelerated the process of drug discovery and lower overall cost and risk.

Drug-perturbed gene expression profiles are powerful phenotype readouts of biological systems, and they have been widely used in drug repurposing studies. However, the existing drug-perturbed gene expression datasets …

Flamboyant Abundance: Performing Queer Maximalism, 1960–1990, Jack Owen Crawford

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation theorizes “queer maximalism” as an aesthetic of unmitigated flamboyance and voracious drag that appears in a constellation of performance-based artistic practices in the postwar United States. Queer maximalism brings together a historically grounded group of performers primarily based in New York City who have been variously described as theatrical, baroque, and Ridiculous and repositions them within an art-historical frame. Identifying drag and pastiche as central to queer maximalism, I show how artists salvage, assemble, and re-signify pop-cultural imagery, inflecting it with camp in order to fashion intimate community and openly flout societal norms of gender, race, and sexuality. …

"How" As A Signal Of An Invariant Meaning, Andrew S. Mccormick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to explain why speakers and writers use how in the communicative contexts in which they do, and its central claim is that how is a signal of one invariant meaning. The form’s diverse communicative contributions can be explained by hypothesizing a single meaning that contributes to different message effects, or contextual interpretations, on different occasions of its use.

The present analysis rests on the crucial distinction in Columbia School (CS) linguistics, the theoretical framework guiding this project, between meaning and message. A meaning is a signal’s invariant semantic contribution, while messages are the context-unique interpretations that …

Remote Sensing Characterization Of Ecosystem Structure And Functional Types To Inform On Biodiversity Conservation In The Lowland Chocó Rainforest, Derek Tesser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on the utilization of remote sensing techniques to characterize ecosystem structure and functional types to inform on biodiversity conservation. This work is motivated by a guiding hypothesis that increased degradation of tropical forest biodiversity due to human activity results in in measurable changes in ecosystem processes that can be detected using remote sensing technologies. Throughout this dissertation, testing of aspects of this hypothesis involve comparing areas with varying degrees of human-induced degradation in a biodiverse tropical ecoregion, the lowland Chocó rainforest of Ecuador. Remote sensing data is used to evaluate changes in vegetation structure, thermal regimes, and …

Recursive Functional Learning In Nonfluent Aphasia, Gerald C. Imaezue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

People with nonfluent aphasia (PWNA) require feedback from an external agent as well self-feedback to facilitate performance of language production tasks. The extent to which PWNA can use self-feedback alone to improve their task performance is unknown. In addition, it is argued that self-feedback may reinforce or minimize performance errors over time. To test whether either is the case, we introduce an original learning mechanism, recursive functional learning, which uses self-feedback loops to optimize recursively multiple subsystems (cognitive and linguistic subsystems) that PWNA engage during task performance. We used this mechanism to underpin a novel automated procedure we developed, recursive …

Raphael Montañez Ortiz And Alternative Art Spaces, 1966–1971: From Repulsion To Exaltation, Ana Cristina Perry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the 1960s, Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz built a successful and provocative career in New York. Throughout the decade, Ortiz created sculptures, performances, and events that were part of a sustained investigation into how embodied destructive and uncomfortable actions could physically confront rationality and objectivity. His works attend to how rationality and objectivity were valued in the United States as a consequence of colonization and imperialism. Beginning in 1969, Ortiz overtly addressed how museums are directly implicated in systems of oppression, protesting with the Art Workers Coalition and founding El Museo to meet the needs of the …

You Hurt My Feelings: Autonomic And Behavioral Responses To Social Exclusion And The Moderating Effect Of Psychopathic Traits, Liat Kofler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Humans have a fundamental need to form and maintain social connections, and thus experiencing social exclusion is extremely distressing as it threatens this basic human need. Individuals who are socially excluded often respond aggressively, not only towards their ostracizers but also towards innocent bystanders, with ostracism being implicated in extreme acts of violence such as school shootings. However, individual differences in behavior exist within the context of social exclusion as not everyone responds aggressively after being ostracized. Identifying risk factors for retaliatory aggressive behavior following experiences of social exclusion may facilitate the development of targeted interventions aimed at mitigating such …

Attenuated Typicality Effect In Category-Based Inferences: Implications For Autism Spectrum Disorder, Janani Rajagopalan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Individuals diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often encounter challenges in assimilating atypical exemplars into their categorical prototypes, a cognitive hurdle that can impact their interpretative and integrative capacities. Addressing this problem, the present research sought to develop a robust methodological approach to reduce the effect of this disparity. We examined the elements embedded within the category's internal structure, with the intention of experimentally attenuating the pronounced typicality effect, which is often exaggerated in ASD.

Across four experiments, the thesis investigated the cognitive and neural underpinnings that shape the access to the typicality gradient intrinsic to a category's structure. The …

Broadcasting La Presencia Latina: Tracing Identities Across Fields Of Interaction In Rural Minnesota, Anthony J. Harb

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation project traces the concerted efforts of an emergent Latinx immigrant community in Westplain, Minnesota to construct and assert their individual and collective identities within the public sphere through a range of multimodal and face-to-face communicative resources. I address enduring questions within the fields of linguistic anthropology, language education, and Latinx (media) studies through a multi-sited ethnography centered around three focal field sites: (1) a Spanish-language community radio program I call La Gran Comunidad Latina (LGCL); (2) a college-level civic engagement Spanish conversation course titled Noticias Comunitarias (NC) designed and taught in partnership with LGCL; and (3) an antiracist …

You Don’T Even Need The Ghosts: A Writer’S Look At The Turn Of The Screw, Andrea M. Schenkel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The novella Turn of the Screw by Henry James was first published in 1898 as a serialized novel in Collier's Magazine. The short novel is characterized by its concise language. James chooses words carefully and consciously. The linguistic compression forces the reader to deal intensively with the main protagonists of the novel: the Governess, the children, Miles and Flora, and Mrs. Grose. Nothing is as it seems. James aims to challenge the reader by forcing them to constantly question what they read.

Countless essays have been written about the text since the novel was published. The figures, especially those …

A Difference Of One's Own: Race, Sex, Modernism, Ryan L. Tracy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“A Difference of One’s Own” demonstrates that deconstructive conceptions of race lie at the heart of the modernist canon’s experimental representations of selfhood. Drawing on recent and canonical scholarship in Modernist Studies, Black Studies, Deconstruction, Queer Theory, Critical Theory, and Feminist Studies, I look at moments in modernist-era literature where the need to represent racial blackness, whether as a descriptor that defines one’s self-identity or the identity of another person, fails to draw a coherent line of difference between people, communities, selves, and importantly, the literatures that are thought to adhere to hard and fast racial distinctions. “Part I: …

Confronting The Doppelganger: Mapping The Ontological Terrain Of An Afro-Caribbean Woman As She Rebrands Diasporic, Feminine Identity Politics: An Autoethnography, Aysha E. Todd-Stone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis seeks to interrogate the intricacies governing the intra-racial\ intra-gendered relationship of an Afro-Trinidadian woman as she commandeers professional spaces in North America. The intent is to challenge the instrument of Black sisterhood deeming it as an incomplete, social instrument, and to prove using an auto-ethnographic approach how Diasporic, feminine trauma leads to psychically induced, episodic violence that is highly suggestive but subtle to the naked eye which in turn irretrievably damages intra-interpersonal relations. Quantitative studies have produced a composite from the white\black perspective (Goosby et al., 2015, Sims et al., 2012) and others dealing with gender (Braithwaite., 1981, …

Diagnosis And Management Of Adults With Hidden Hearing Loss: A Scoping Review, Chana Flohr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Adults reporting speech in noise difficulties yet have audiometrically normal hearing is a common finding in the audiology clinic and are a subject of a recently popular and expanding area of research. Yet, there is still no clear and decisive test battery to diagnose, validate, and manage this disorder in the adult population. The lack of a clear protocol can cause dissatisfaction for both the patient and the clinician.

Objective: The objective of this study is to comprehensively review the existing literature on Hidden Hearing Loss (HHL) in audiology. The study aims to address the lack of consensus and …

Africa’S Coastal Archaeological Record And Climate Change, Michael Murphy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the 1980s, archaeologists have warned about threats from anthropogenic climate change (ACC) to the world’s archaeological record in coastal areas. Until recently, such warnings did not include Africa’s archaeological record. There is a persistent gap in research on climate change and Africa’s archaeological and cultural heritage stretching back before the U.N. established the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. The purpose of this thesis is to assess the gap and help to narrow it. The approach is to take advantage of the availability of the dataset from the first geographically comprehensive study of climate change and coastal …

Visualizing Dopamine Activity In Deletion Of D2 Receptors In Medium Spiny Neurons, Kunhee Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dopamine has been implicated in motivated behaviors and reinforcement learning. In this study, we are looking at the role of dopamine in allocating efforts when obtaining reward. Using Cre recombinase genetic tool, D2 receptors in striatal indirect pathway neurons were selectively deleted, and dopamine signal was recorded in ventral striatum using fiber photometry. Behaviorally, D2 receptor deletion resulted in less effort in a Progressive Ratio (PR) paradigm shown by decreased breakpoint, number of presses, and reward pellets earned. Due to the previous evidence that dopamine positively modulates effort, we hypothesized that there would be less dopamine release in D2 deleted …

Automatic Analysis Of The Frequency, Vigor, And Complexity Of Spontaneous Locomotion Bouts Of Mice With Loss And Gain Of Function Of The G Protein-Coupled Receptor Smoothened In Cholinergic Neurons, Aleksandra Feshchenko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Locomotion, a fundamental behavior, is classically assessed using simple metrics of velocity and total distance moved in an open field. This behavior however offers rich data about the organization and breadth of actions an animal can take while only facing limitations due to the bio-mechanical constraints of the organism. Importantly, these actions are not biased towards a particular task-solution space imposed by many behavioral paradigms. Here, to analyze motor complexity in freely ambulating mice, we developed a method for the automatic and unbiased identification of locomotor bouts which we call Bout Finder (BF). This analysis utilizes Open Feld data to …

Untenable Spaces And Inconceivable Futures In The 21st Century Anglophone Indian Novel, Shoumik Bhattacharya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As the world sours on the history-ending narratives of forever “growth” and unending “development” and recognizes the climate catastrophe, what stories of the future are left? The question of postcolonial space and its representation is a central concern of this dissertation. Thinking beyond the reasons for, and the histories of, the trashing of postcolonial space, examined by thinkers such as Rob Nixon and Jennifer Wenzel, allows for a consideration of the possibilities of life and thriving in unexpected and supposedly untenable contexts. I will therefore focus on what might be considered deterritorialised spaces: that is, spaces outside the structural ambits …

Electrophysiological Signatures Of Stress Adaptability In The Bnst-Vta Pathway, Yuka Miura

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chronic stress has detrimental effects on psychological and physiological health. Incapability to adapt to chronic stress can lead to depression, anxiety disorders, and addiction. The brain regions critical for reward processing share diverse physiological and molecular changes linked to depressive-like behaviors as a result of chronic stress. Cumulative evidence shows that counteraction or prevention of these alterations in neurons, occasionally in a projection-specific manner, can enhance stress adaptation or resilience.

Chronic stress induces various changes in the brain, including in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA). The neural projections from the BNST …

Sex In The Noisy City: Changes In Vocal Behavior Patterns And Dopamine Neurochemistry In The Auditory System Of Oyster Toadfish (Opsanus Tau), Kelsey N. Hom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intense anthropogenic noise can induce stress, behavioral changes, and even hearing loss in aquatic animals. However, there are few studies that have demonstrated how ecologically relevant noise affects aquatic life, and even fewer studies on the effect of noise on animals that require sound for reproduction. The oyster toadfish (Opsanus tau) is an excellent animal model to examine the effects of anthropogenic noise on behavior and neurochemistry since they use a reproductive call to find mates and live near urban areas like New York City. Despite living alongside the most populous city in the United States, these vocal …