Digital Commons Network^™

Valuing Cheap: Constructing, Consuming, And Contesting The Dollar Store Economy, Frances Evelyn Barrett

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

In Valuing Cheap, Barrett traces the histories of Dollar General, Family Dollar, and Dollar Tree from the firms’ twentieth century origins in three distinct southern locales into corporate behemoths with more stores than McDonald’s or Walmart. Valuing Cheap provides an important chapter of the late twentieth century history of racial capitalism, detailing how dollar stores at once “served” local communities while capitalizing on existing spatialized, racialized, classed, and gendered inequalities. This history illuminates the interwovenness of business, consumer, and labor histories, emphasizing the fundamental entanglements of power, material and cultural production, and consumption. The dollar store industry’s cheap goods, low-wage …

Russian Forms: Race, Sex, And The Making Of Russian Literature, Fiona Bell

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the elaboration of Russian racial imaginaries was coterminous with the construction of the Russian literary canon and Russian literary theory. Beginning with the global debates concerning the abolition of slavery and serfdom in the 1850s and concluding with the first wave of emigration from the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the dissertation demonstrates how canonical Russian authors—Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Viktor Shklovsky, and others—wrote fiction that, in mobilizing the racial implications of intimacy, kinship, and heredity, articulated arguments about racial difference and the conceptual “fit” of “race” for the Russian Empire. Literary authors make arguments about …

Outside The Workshop: Alternative Spaces Of U.S. Printmaking, 1935–1977, Michelle Donnelly

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The studio, the land, the camp, and the home are vital locations of print production. Yet scholars have overwhelmingly focused on prints made in the workshop, or an institutional facility stocked with specialized equipment and overseen by “master printers.” This dissertation investigates how women artists and artists of color expanded the parameters of printmaking outside the traditional site of the workshop from 1935 to 1977 in the United States. Each spatially organized chapter centers on one artist: David Hammons, Sari Dienes, Matsusaburo “George” Hibi, and Ruth Asawa. All four artists practiced what I call emplaced printmaking: an engagement with the …

The Organization Of Autophagic Membranes And Proteins At The Phagophore Assembly Site, Devin Michael Fuller

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Autophagosomes are transient organelles which grow from a seed vesicle to encapsulate a target cargo and subsequently fuse with the lysosome to degrade its contents. This process occurs rapidly and requires the concerted effort of a host of unique membranes and proteins in a complicated cascade, which I detail in chapter I. Deletion of the lipid transport proteins ATG2A and ATG2B results in the accumulation of most of the preceding autophagic membranes and proteins in a large compartment. The ATG2 DKO compartment is advantageous as a model for the phagophore assembly site (PAS) for the following reasons: it is not …

Warm Life, Cold Stones: The Effigial Tomb In Late Medieval English Literature, Maia Ruth Béar

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The effigial tomb is one of the defining features of Gothic sacred art. Tombs topped with grand effigies populated the churches, cathedrals, and chapels of late medieval England and many survive to this day. This dissertation explores the encounter with these tombs as represented in the literature of the period, in particular hagiography, romance, and narrative poetry. Although it literally demarcates the boundary between dead and living, the tomb is a powerful site of boundary-breaking in these texts at which the distinctions between life and death, flesh, and natural and artistic bodies are tested and often complicated. I consider various …

Institutions For Online Governance: Field Experimental Studies Of Participation, Incentives, And Deliberation, Eliza Oak

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

One of the oldest questions in human society is: What kind of government works best, and why? To date, studying the effects of governance design decisions has been empirically difficult. This dissertation addresses this challenge by examining decentralized governance in blockchain-based technology platforms, where decision-making power is distributed among users who collectively cast votes. These digital communities provide a unique laboratory for democracy research as they rapidly iterate on their institutional structures, experimenting with both traditional and novel governance strategies while confronting classic representation and accountability challenges. The blockchain context offers two crucial advantages for studying democratic processes, namely the …

Distrust Of Psychotherapy For Biologically Explained Mental Disorders: A Validation Of Beliefs Underlying This Distrust And Interventions To Mitigate This Distrust, Annalise Perricone

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Lay and scientific communities alike increasingly attribute mental disorders to biological causes (e.g., genetic risk or neurobiological abnormalities). Biological explanations of mental disorders have some beneficial consequences, including reduced personal blame of individuals affected by such disorders. One adverse consequence, however, is that upon learning that a mental disorder has a biological etiology, people tend to show reduced trust in the effectiveness of psychotherapy. Given that the combination of psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy is often optimal for many mental disorders, reduced trust of psychotherapy could result in poorer clinical outcomes, if people elect not to receive such treatment. Although this distrust …

Cure Newsletter Volume 4 Issue 2, Department Of Oncology

Cancer Updates Research & Education (CURE) Archives

• Message from the Chair
• Conferences & Workshops
• Conferences & Workshops
• Invited Talk
• Events and Celebrations
• Umeed Parr
• Awards and Achievements
• Oncology Social Media
• Oncology CPSP
• Residents & Fellows
• Spotlight on Faculty Contributions
• Nursing Oncology
• Nursing Awards Oncology Appreciation Evening 2024
• Upcoming Events Oncology
• Appointments
• Promotions
• Publications

Cure Newsletter Volume 4 Issue 3, Department Of Oncology

Cancer Updates Research & Education (CURE) Archives

• Message from the Chair
• Advancing Oncology Through Education & Exchange
• Clinical Conversations & Collaborations
• Voices from Oncology “Invited Perspectives”
• Spotlight on Achievements
• Workshops Spotlight: Nurturing Clinical Excellence
• Moments That Matter "Celebrating Together”
• Umeed Parr
• Social Media Spotlight
• Oncology at CPSP “The Academic Contributions”
• Resident Reflections "Future Leaders in Oncology"
• Nursing Highlights
• The upcoming Event at Oncology
• Clinical Wisdom Shared via Grand Rounds
• Welcoming New Colleagues, “New Strengths”
• “Climbing Higher”, Promotions at Oncology
• “Where Research Meets Impact” Oncology Publications

The Power Of Church Leadership Training And Development: Equipping, Empowering, And Encouraging Church Leaders To Lead Effectively, Monique Kirk

Doctor of Education Dissertations

This study explored perceptions of a church’s ministry leadership team to determine their preparation in the tools, skillsets, and strategies needed to lead themselves and others well. The study sought to understand the needs of these church ministries to meet the spiritual and daily needs of the members they serve. The study used a mixed methods design, employing a survey and focus group that examined perceptions of ministry experiences, training, development, and other support. Results were examined through the lens of Lewin’s (1947) force field analysis to determine both driving and restraining forces on effective ministry leadership (Hussain et al., …

Solutions To Building Consistent And Sustainable Youth Ministry Programming, William C. Kincy

Doctor of Education Dissertations

This mixed methods convergent study explored strategies for building consistency and sustainability in Baptist youth ministry programming, with a particular focus on the AFC Youth Ministry. Guided by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (Hitt et al., 2018) and Senge’s (2006) Systems Thinking approach, the study addressed three key research questions: What needs are youth seeking to meet that lead them to join a Baptist church youth ministry? What programming can AFC Baptist Church’s youth ministry provide to youth that would promote retention of the youth in the youth ministry? What are the best practices in delivering programming to youth in a …

Teacher Perceptions Of Social-Emotional Learning In A Covid-Impacted Environment, Gina Gold

Doctor of Education Dissertations

Social-emotional learning (SEL) builds students’ resilience skills, which impact the biology of the brain connected to emotional regulation, safe behaviors, and positive learning outcomes. Diminished resilience is typically the result of childhood trauma, which affects physical and emotional health into adulthood. Teachers’ capacity, implementation, and data analysis practices for SEL are important to support building resilience skills in our students to help them grow to be emotionally and physically healthy citizens. The purpose of this research study was to investigate the perspectives of elementary school teachers from four elementary schools in the same school district in rural, southwestern North Carolina …

A Phenomenological Study On How White Public Middle School Teachers Who Self-Identify As Racial Allies Experience And Navigate Their Implicit Biases, Joyce Faye Patton

Doctor of Education Dissertations

The teaching force in the United States is overwhelmingly White, while the student population is increasingly diverse, reaching a minority majority in 2014. The racial mismatch between a predominantly White teaching force and students of color in public schools presents barriers for those students as they navigate an educational system built on historical injustices and racism. The study examines the lived experiences of White middle school teachers who identify as racial allies in schools having a student population that is greater than 50% students of color. The interviews revealed that participants understood bias on a basic level yet continued to …

Description’S Displacements: Writing Experience In Musil, Benjamin, And Bachmann, Aida Feng

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation unfolds the ways in which description emerged as an active site for reconfiguring human experience in the writing experiments of the 20th century. Description, as a procedure for presenting and arranging the phenomena of reality, typically constructs an epistemological realm of experience that progresses toward comprehension and internal consistency. Understood in this way, description mediates one kind of experiential reality while foreclosing others. This project enlarges description’s operative capabilities toward a presentational mode that does not merely re-describe the phenomenal objects in this reality. To do so, it foregrounds writers and thinkers who conversed directly with philosophical traditions …

Functional Roles Of Subcellularly Localized Glycolytic Isoforms Of Glucose 6-Phosphate Isomerase, Ian Joseph Gonzalez

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

While metabolic pathways are largely conserved across cells and organisms, tissues exhibit metabolic heterogeneity that tailors metabolism to their physiological demands. How the conserved pathways of metabolism achieve metabolic heterogeneity is incompletely understood, particularly in vivo. In this dissertation, I investigate the genetic requirement of glucose 6-phosphate isomerase (GPI-1), a conserved glycolytic enzyme that also regulates the pentose phosphate pathway (PPP). Using CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, I found that gpi-1 knockout animals display germline defects consistent with impaired PPP, and somatic defects consistent with impaired glycolysis. I discovered that GPI-1 isoforms are differentially expressed and localized: GPI-1A is cytosolic in all …

‘Soñando En Un Futuro Mejor’: U.S. Empire, Racial Capitalism, And Garífuna And Afro-Caribbean Radicalism In Caribbean Honduras, 1920-1963, Cristian Jose Padilla Romero

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation argues that Afro-Caribbean and Garífuna radicals in 20th-century Honduras forged, at different times, radical, race-conscious, and sometimes anti-imperialist and nationalist politics that contested both U.S. corporate domination and the racialized exclusions of the U.S and Honduran nation-state. Focusing on the period between 1920 and 1963, it traces struggles across the Caribbean coastal cities of La Ceiba, Trujillo, Puerto Cortés, and Tela. By foregrounding Black and Indigenous working-class actors, like Centeno García and Alfonso Lacayo, it highlights how racial capitalism, labor radicalism, and anti-Black state and corporate repression intersected in Honduras’ banana economy. The stories of individuals like Centeno …

Manufactured Enchantments: Technologizing The Self In The Twentieth-Century Americas, Isabel Ortiz

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Manufactured Enchantments examines the way in which forms of enchantment worked at various sites—from culture industries, to self-help doxa, to esoteric and occult practices, to intellectual life—to construct an ideal self tailored to geopolitical violence in the U.S. and Latin America during the twentieth century. The dissertation studies five technologies—psychoanalysis, film, the rotoscope, the enneagram, and the tarot—that each suggested a self that could be stretched, modified, or altered to meet conditions of violence, uncertainty and precarity stemming from pre- and peri-Cold War U.S. imperial expansion efforts in the Americas. In each case study, I examine how the featured technology …

Coordinated Wnt And Shh Signaling In Hair Follicle Mesenchyme Development And Regeneration, Yiqun Jiang

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Developmental morphogenesis requires cells to balance proliferation with differentiation, often regulated by multiple signaling pathways. While most studies consider these pathways as additive, less is known about how they interact to regulate fate transitions. In this dissertation, I use the hair follicle dermal condensate (DC), the first differentiated mesenchymal population of the skin with the ability to instruct new hair growth, to study morphogens interact to regulate the dermal mesenchyme.Wnt and SHH are necessary and sufficient for DC formation, during which cell cycle exit with molecular DC gene expression occur simultaneously. Interestingly, high Wnt alone is sufficient to induce cell …

Smart Synthesis: Harnessing Electrochemistry To Enhance Catalytic Water Treatment, Aidan Francis Meese

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Catalytic water treatment technologies hold great promise for degrading even the most recalcitrant contaminants of emerging concern (CECs). Heterogeneous catalytic processes are especially appealing, providing the benefits of easy catalyst recovery and reduced risk of secondary pollution. However, heterogeneous reactions often suffer from mass transfer limitations, and the development of catalyst materials that are sufficiently active, selective, and stable under the conditions necessary for pollutant degradation remains challenging. Furthermore, synthesis of catalyst materials, particularly those with desirable catalytic properties and novel architectures, are often time- and energy-intensive and involve expensive materials and/or equipment. In this work, we address these challenges …

Streamlining Drug Discovery With The Aid Of Artificial Intelligence And Physics-Based Modeling, Anastasia Saar

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The drug discovery pipeline is both expensive and prone to high attrition rates with many compounds failing in late-stage clinical trials. Computer-aided drug design (CADD) has emerged as a pivotal part of the pipeline to mitigate these challenges by enabling earlier and more cost-effective assessment of compound viability. This work focuses on two major aspects of CADD: absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET) predictions and free energy calculations. First, neural network models are developed for the prediction of aqueous solubility and cytotoxicity, two key contributors to late-stage drug attrition. Ensemble models of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) and graph attention …

Two Systems For User Control On The Modern Web, Caleb Malchik

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Providers of web services and content are compelled to offer value in order to attract users, but they are also increasingly incentivized to abuse their users in order to maximize revenue. Interfaces that monitor, distract, manipulate, and addict users are commonplace, and means of resistance are largely individualized and dependent on technical proficiency. This dissertation advocates a collective approach to empowering users in their relationship to the web services that they use, centered on an organizational form known as the data co-op. We describe two software systems that pair naturally with data co-ops and are designed to improve users’ control …

Unraveling The Phenotypic Plasticity In Glioblastoma, Chunxiao Ren

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Cell plasticity enables cancer cells to transition between distinct phenotypic states, driving heterogeneity and therapeutic resistance. Here, I present the RACE (Rapid Analysis of Cell phenotypic Extremes) assay, a longitudinal in vitro experimental model designed to functionally isolate and enrich fast- and slow-migrating glioblastoma (GBM) cell subpopulations in response to mechanical input imposed by an extracellular matrix (ECM)-mimicking nanofabricated platform with pro-migratory property. I tracked these phenotypically distinct subpopulations and characterized their dynamic evolution through bulk and single-cell transcriptomic profiling. I found that fast- and slow-migrating cells corresponded to mesenchymal- and proneural-like transcriptional programs, respectively, and were regulated by a …

Molecular Mechanisms Of Kras Regulation And Resistance In Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma, Xiangyu Ge

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) remains one of the most aggressive human malignancies, with a five-year survival rate of less than 13%. Oncogenic KRAS mutations occur in over 90% of cases and drive tumor initiation and progression, making KRAS a desirable therapeutic target. Despite the development of direct KRAS inhibitors, clinical efficacy has been modest due to rapid adaptive resistance. This thesis primarily investigates the molecular mechanisms by which PDAC cells adapt to KRAS inhibition, while also uncovering co-vulnerabilities that can be therapeutically exploited. Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive literature review of KRAS biology in PDAC, summarizing historical and contemporary findings …

Chemosensory Variation Within And Across Bacterial Species, Jeremy Philippe Moore

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Bacteria use a highly conserved sensory pathway to navigate chemical gradients. In particular, the chemotactic signaling pathway of Escherichia coli is one of the best-characterized systems in biology. However, despite decades of study, there are still open questions about bacterial chemotaxis, including how clusters of receptors cooperatively amplify signals, how variability in the composition of these arrays affects behavioral diversity, and how findings in E. coli generalize to diverse motile behaviors across bacteria. In this thesis, we explore diversity in chemosensory capabilities within and across bacteria species. First, we characterize the distribution of sensitivities to various chemical attractants in populations …

Building Intelligent Robots For Social Regulation Therapy, Rebecca Ramnauth

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Throughout life, we learn the rules of social behavior by observing others, by exposure to diverse social contexts, and, in some cases, through targeted intervention. More than learning the rules and expectations on how to behave, social regulation involves the dynamic, real-time coordination of one's internal states and outward behaviors to meet those expectations. Regulation becomes challenging when internal states conflict with external demands, such as in moments of heightened emotion, sensory overload, or social ambiguity. In certain contexts (such as isolation during a global pandemic) or for some individuals (such as those with autism), social regulation can be difficult …

Documentary Opera: Twenty-First Century American Performances Of Race And The Archive, Allison Chen-Xing Chu

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

“Documentary Opera: Twenty-First Century American Performances of Race and the Archive” explores how embracing the documentary impulse has transformed American opera in the twenty-first century. Amidst the current renaissance of American opera, I identify a trend that I call “documentary opera,” namely operas that engage documentary source materials, techniques, and aesthetics to reimagine narratives of historical figures or current events. Like documentary works in other genres such as film and theater, these operas rely on an interrogation of, and relationship to, the archive; however, they also harness the affordances of opera’s heavily stylized aesthetics to unsettle the notion of the …

Programming Cell States With Emage And Engineered Allosteric Crispr Effectors In Saccharomyces Cerevisiae, Peter Ciaccia

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Cells are self-replicating information processing systems that maintain control of internal state by gathering and expending chemical energy. Programming these cellular states requires complementary technological paradigms: genome editing methods define the phase space of possible cellular behaviors by modifying an underlying genetic blueprint, and transcriptional and allosteric control systems enable precise navigation within that defined space through spatiotemporal and environmentally responsive regulation. In this sense, genome editing and gene regulation tools work synergistically to expand ability to perturb, control, and monitor cellular function. No single genome editing or control paradigm optimally addresses all applications: eukaryotic MAGE (eMAGE) excels at generating …

Mediating Power: How Hybrid Media Disrupts Elite Messaging In Japan, Colin Moreshead

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

How does political communication function when the channels between elites, media, and the public become fragmented and unpredictable? This dissertation investigates how influence is exercised in a shifting media environment, where traditional broadcast-era assumptions about information flow and audience exposure no longer hold. Rather than assuming stable pathways from elite messaging to public response, the projects examine how political actors, media institutions, and citizens operate under new constraints and opportunities for choice. It asks whether elites can still shape media tone in ways that affect public support, whether media outlets retain agenda-setting power in a competitive landscape, and how citizens …

In Terms Of Theory, Samuel Steinmetz

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

In Terms of Theory attends to theory in relation to the eighteenth-century novel and to early twentieth-century film, primarily as the taking account of the possibility of form—of the novel, of film, and of theory. The overarching argument of the dissertation, developed in chapter 1, is that the novel and film, as modern forms unknown to classical aesthetics, present particularly rich cases for exploring what theory does, what it looks like, how it relates to its subject, and what kind of knowledge it offers. The rest of the dissertation presents independent case studies: chapter 2 analyzes and contextualizes the style …

The Recruitment, Retention, And Motivation Of Black Male Teachers In K-12 Schools: A Perception Study, Ann M. Brame

Doctor of Education Dissertations

Black male teachers have been underrepresented in K–12 classrooms since integration in the United States. This mixed methods exploratory sequential study investigated the recruitment, retention, and motivation of Black male teachers. The foundation of Maslow’s (1943) Hierarchy of Needs, Herzberg’s (1959) Two-Factor Theory, and Bell’s (1980) Critical Race Theory guided the investigation of the psychological, structural, and social-cultural variables that affect the experiences and retention of Black males in education. The quantitative phase examined survey data to determine patterns aligned with job satisfaction, motivation, and retention. Subsequently, the qualitative phase explored the individuals lived experiences through interviews that offered insights …