VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Hawayo Takata and the Circulatory Development of Reiki in the Twentieth Century North Pacific
Keywords: circulation
Hawayo Takata
Reiki
spiritual healing
spirituality
spiritual networks

Scholarly literature on religion in contemporary North America and Europe has taken Reiki, a form of spiritual healing, to be indicative of broader trends in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. These works generally assume Reiki is either a form of American unorthodox medicine in Oriental trappings or a form of Japanese religious practice that has found a place in Western biomedical settings. This dissertation avoids such characterizations by foregrounding transnational exchange instead of national culture. It argues Reiki is best understood as a product of the twentieth century North Pacific (specifically Japan, Hawaii, and North America). It proposes an analytical framework of “circulatory development” to understand Reiki’s movement through transnational networks. Circulatory development describes how the movement of practices transforms both the practices (as they are adapted for new audiences) and the people who encounter them (by embedding them in new social and spiritual relationships). This dissertation also proposes a category of “spiritual medicine” for practices that transcend the assumed differentiation of religious and medical spheres. Usui Mikao (1865–1926) fashioned Reiki’s earliest forms from a mix of elements in 1920s Japan, including some with long local histories and some that had been recently imported from North America. Since the mid twentieth century, Reiki’s most prevalent forms have been reconfigurations of Usui’s practice adapted for audiences in Hawaii and North America by a second-generation Japanese American named Hawayo Takata (1900–1980). Using archival materials and oral history interviews, this dissertation analyzes how Takata creatively transformed Reiki practice from the 1930s through the 1970s. It focuses on the relation between her gendered racialization as a Japanese American woman, her development of spiritual capital in social networks, and shifts in the meanings assigned to Japanese religion in Territorial Hawaii and mainland North America. It concludes that Takata’s innovations to Reiki practice both accommodated and resisted elements of North American cultural hegemony by gradually introducing practices intended to: 1) professionalize Reiki as a practice of spiritual medicine; 2) transmit “Japanese” values to her students, and 3) establish a form of “particular universalism” that valorized Japan while promoting Reiki as a “universal” practice.
For All Peoples and All Nations: Anglophone Literature and the Imaginative Work of International Law (1884-2017)
Keywords: human right literature
international law

This thesis explores how Anglophone literature debated the rise of modern international law since the late nineteenth century, including the founding of the United Nations and the 1948 declaration of human rights. While international law has its origins in the early modern period, it was largely at the turn of the century, with the Berlin Conference, that it began taking shape as a colonial and then a postcolonial, global ethics. In this thesis, I lay claim to literature’s capacity to legislate by examining instances where Anglophone novelists—including Joseph Conrad, Bryher, Vladimir Nabokov, Chinua Achebe, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—work through the promises and problems of international jurisprudence. More than a mere reflection of international law’s evolving theory and practice, the literature I treat registers the law’s presumptions and first principles while interrogating its capacity to follow through with its declarations. In spreading the law’s claims while also submitting them to the scrutiny of close reading, these novels are both advocates of and at times stubborn liabilities for international law’s normative worlds. Collectively, these Anglophone novelists scrutinize international law’s ability to shape the ways we come to know ourselves and one another as rights-bearing individuals, international actors, advocates, and activists. Recent work in the humanities has begun to address the ways in which international law is a set of interlocked narratives that claim to enshrine common sense when, in fact, they curate and confine modern ways of knowing, feeling, and belonging. By attending to issues that often go unacknowledged in the ordinary practices of international law—questions about subjectivity and self-fashioning, concerns about security and citizenship—I continue the work of examining international law’s epistemologies. In approaching literature as responsive to legal developments, and law as dependent on the narrative logic conventionally reserved for literature, I narrate the kinds of life and liberty that international law makes both conceivable and inconceivable, while at same time examining the literary contexts that continue to shape its apparent common sense.
Imprisonment and (Un)Relatedness in Northeast Brazil
Keywords: Bahia
Brazil
Carceral
Imprisonment
Relatedness

This dissertation – based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in and around a men’s and a women’s prison – explores imprisonment and (un)relatedness in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. From the vantage point of a prison compound and the heavily penalized neighbourhoods surrounding it, I describe and analyze inextricable connectivities which bind this compound to its social milieu, prison cells to houses, and prisoners to non-prisoners. I focus in particular on the gendered experiences and life projects of male and female “subjects of incarceration” – social actors whose entanglements with the prison are relatively intense, namely: (ex-)prisoners, visitors, and non-visitors (people with an imprisoned relation who do not visit the prison). In short, what is at stake in this dissertation is the question of how social reproduction occurs in a context in which imprisonment has come to be a regular, predictable part of life for poor and racialized groups. To grasp material and symbolic continuities, ruptures, and interconnections constitutive of prison-society relations I have developed the concept of “carceral forms.” This concept offers an approach to delineating objects of inquiry and a set of questions that will enrich multidisciplinary conversations about imprisonment as well as punishment and society. Anthropological insights regarding (un)relatedness have informed my theoretical-methodological approach to practices of imprisonment. This means that I approach penality and penal effects through the ethnographic investigation of gendered social relations forged, maintained, strained, and severed within and across prison boundaries. I also use the ethnographic fact of relatedness theoretically. I draw on anthropological theorizations of (un)relatedness to trouble taken-for-granted carceral boundaries and devise an innovative object of inquiry which I call carceral forms. In conceptualizing imprisonment in this way, I take inspiration from Strathern (1989) and her emphasis on immanent sociality. That is, I take “the relation” (1995) as a starting point to rethink the prison as a social institution. Rather than presume the boundaries, and the boundedness, of this institution, I attend to the statements and practices of people who negotiate imprisonment in a manner that at once (re)produces differences between carceral and non-carceral domains and establishes connections between these emergently distinct domains.
Feature Selection, Cross-view Matching and Spoof Detection for Electrocardiogram-based Human Recognition
Keywords: Feature Selection
Medical Biometrics

Biometric technology for identifying individuals has been extensively used all over the world. As this technology becomes increasingly popular, the potential of fooling or spoofing it is a rising concern. For example, fingerprint may be left behind whenever we touch a glass surface like a smart phone and from that some synthetic samples can be created that can be used to fool the biometric system. Iris images can also be captured from a few meters distance, not to mention face images that can be captured from a longer distance. Nowadays biometric spoofing and countermeasures is an active research area and there has been a lot of efforts towards a promising approach to ensure the presence of a real legitimate user. Medical biometrics such as Electrocardiogram (ECG) have interesting advantages over conventional biometrics. ECG is a vital signal and it naturally provides liveness detection. In addition, compare to conventional biometrics, if not impossible it is far more difficult to steal someone's ECG. Since ECG can be recorded from fingertips it is a natural choice for fusion with fingerprint. In this research work, we first provide a practical framework for fusion of ECG and fingerprint such that the resulting multimodal biometric system is more robust against novel spoof attacks. Despite its advantages, ECG comes with its challenges. ECG is a non-stationary signal and factors like emotion, diet and hear rate affect its waveform especially when recorded in different sessions. It becomes more challenging when subjects are enrolled using only one session and tested on another session that could be a few weeks apart. To reduce the effect of such non-stationarity, we propose a feature selection method to select a subset of features that are more stable across different recording sessions. Furthermore, to cope with the effect of heart rate on performance of ECG recognition, we propose a novel method for cross-view matching where the distance between two samples situated in different “views” can be computed. In this context “view” refers to different heart rates where samples in different views can be represented by feature sets that can be different in type and length.
Urban Soil Micromorphology at Bronze Age Palaikastro, Crete: A Geoarchaeological Investigation of Site Formation Processes
Keywords: Bronze Age Aegean
Crete
Geoarchaeology
Micromorphology
Palaikastro
Urban

Across the Mediterranean region, human-environment interactions constitute a major research focus, often concerned with issues of sustainability, both past and present. The Aegean region shares many environmental features and often direct cultural interactions with this larger, encompassing region. While broader Mediterranean research questions are also applicable at the local Aegean level, there are some surprising gaps in inquiry, particularly in studies of the Bronze Age Aegean civilizations. Although narratives of the emergence and collapse of civilizations—such as that of Minoan Crete—do invoke environmental factors, whether catastrophic events (e.g., Theran eruption, tsunami) or anthropogenic processes (e.g., soil erosion, overintensive agriculture), there are few multi-scalar investigations of how urban centres interacted with their environments. This dissertation aims to address the aforementioned shortcoming. This project (part of the Palace and Landscape at Palaikastro Project) evaluates epistemological issues concerning the roles of geoarchaeological research and environmental science in archaeological research and applies an urban archaeological soil micromorphology approach to help understand the issues surrounding the episodes of occupation and disturbance at the Minoan urban centre of Palaikastro, in East Crete. The study demonstrates that varied types of socionatural transformations are visible via different scales of data and analysis. Micromorphological differences are observed between sediments related to urban abandonment and transformation processes. This micro-scale evidence indicates the influence of coastal sediments on the site; however, occupation of the urban structures appears to be related to the sustainability of the surrounding slopes. These findings illustrate that information garnered on ‘micro’ processes occurring in and between buildings in the urban settlement completes the punctuated dataset in which one typically encounters archaeological contexts produced by events (such as destructions and abandonments). The micromorphological data connects discrete, small-scale processes that occurred leading up to, and after, specific events and relates these processes to cycles of growth and decay, construction and abandonment, in the context of larger-scale social and environmental transformations.
Energizing the Right: Economy, Ecology, and Culture in the 1970s US Energy Crisis
Keywords: crisis
ecology
energy crisis
energy humanities
futures
neoliberalism

Taking up Janet Roitman’s charge to think critically about the epistemology of crises, this dissertation is an interdisciplinary cultural history of the 1970s “energy crisis” in the United States. It asks how a crisis of energy came to be, how different experts and interests interpreted its meaning, and how it has shaped US political culture. My central claim is that the energy crisis fostered neoliberalism in the United States by cultivating speculative discourses about energy futures that ultimately supported free market trade and energy policies by the early 1980s. Indeed, the energy crisis itself was always largely speculative, concerned with the possibility of greater scarcity in the future, and it generated competing visions of the future that ultimately moved the country further to the economic right. But this story is not just about the market. It is also about the ecological critiques of carbon capitalism that the energy crisis inspired and the ways in which they both challenged and overlapped with neoliberal formations. I first explore the evolution of the energy crisis as a historically specific assemblage that was only possible in the 1970s. I then consider the political flexibility of the crisis by tracing competing interpretations of its meaning. This theme continues in a chapter on the conservation ethic – a widely proposed solution to the energy crisis that excoriated the waste inherent in the American “way of life,” but for competing ends. Neoliberalism enters the story in my final chapters, which consider how “car films” valorized the white neoliberal subject through unfettered auto-mobility, and the establishment of oil futures contracts as a free market solution to the energy crisis. My interdisciplinary approach broadens the historiography of the energy crisis to consider the concepts, meanings, affects, and practices that comprised it, providing deeper context for the policy and geopolitical concerns that other scholars explore. I conclude that the articulation of a “crisis” was an insufficient foundation upon which to build a large scale energy transition.
Visions of Labour: Socialist Realism, American Reality TV and the Politics of Documentary
Keywords: documentary
reality TV
socialist realism
Soviet film
work
working class

This dissertation considers a number of ideological visions of labour constructed through film and television. The socialist realist vision of work is considered through Soviet films of the 1930s within the context of the building of a workersâ state. This was a modernist dream of non-alienated human labour where the workers create and master the world, their labour revealing and capturing the utopian content in the now. In contrast to this utopian vision are several documentaries that depict technocratic dreams or nightmares of post-apocalyptic societies only to reveal that that future is already here for some. In the documentary central to this project, Michael Glawoggerâ s Workingmanâ s Death, workers inhabit the nowhere places of the global economy, their work unrecognizable as modern day labour. In construction of labour within global capitalism, the workers are rendered as alien and indeterminate, making identification and solidarity difficult if not impossible. The last section of the dissertation considers the vision of labour and the worker as constructed by neoliberalism not in faraway places but in our living rooms: workers competing on reality television for our entertainment. These pictures of labour reveal that work and the worker are socio-historical constructs, and that one of the central goals of emancipatory politics should be the self-representation of workers. The worker must be brought back to the forefront of politics and to the analysis of how the worker is represented in film, television, and in our society as a whole.
Manganese-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Breast Cancer Cells
Keywords: breast cancer detection
cancer imaging
cellular imaging
manganese-enhanced MRI
quantitative MRI
T1 contrast agents

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is utilized in the detection of abnormalities and diseases such as cancer. MRI contrast agents (CAs) are routinely used in cancer imaging to provide enhanced diagnosis. There has been continued interest in engineering CAs and evaluating their diagnostic efficacy to overcome issues associated with clinically-approved CAs such as gadolinium窶電iethylenetriamine pentaacetic acid (Gd-DTPA). Of particular interest are intracellular CAs that can provide sensitive identification of labelled cells, opening the possibility of directly detecting early changes driving cancers at the cellular level before vasculature has been fully formed. To further explore the capabilities of intracellular CAs in T1-weighted MRI of breast cancer, this thesis aimed at (1) demonstrating the potential of MnCl2-enhanced MRI to detect and characterize early small (竕､5 mm3) breast tumors in vivo (2) investigating the potential of manganese-porphyrin-enhanced MRI for sensitive detection of multiple clinical subtypes of breast cancer cells in vitro at subtoxic doses using quantitative MRI (3) utilizing quantitative MRI to demonstrate the role the balance between hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity plays in developing CAs for effective T1-weighted MRI of cancer. This thesis has shown that MnCl2, unlike Gd-DTPA, provided enhancement of the entire tumor mass, depicting both tumor borders and interior morphology. At the early stage of tumor growth, MnCl2 also enabled cancer subtype-dependent differential enhancement and characterization. Moreover, this work demonstrated the superior Tﾂｬ1 enhancement capabilities of manganese porphyrins over Gd-DTPA of multiple clinical subtypes of breast cancer cells possibly due to their greater cellular uptake and relaxivities at 3.0 T. Also, using quantitative MRI, the more hydrophobic manganese porphyrin, MnTPPS3NH2, is shown to be a more sensitive T1 CA than MnTPPS4 for cellular imaging of breast cancers. Such sensitive cellular detection can potentially lead to lowering the dose needed to achieve positive enhancement and merits further future in vivo investigation.
The Effect of Heat Stress on Reproduction in Arabidopsis thaliana, Camelina sativa, and Oryza sativa: A Carbonyl-targeted Proteomics Approach
Keywords: heat stress
plant reproduction
pollen
protein carbonylation
QTL analysis

The intensity and frequency of global heat stress events are predicted to increase in the coming decades as a result of global warming. The negative effect of high temperature (HT) on reproductive development in plants is a major cause of reduced yields in natural and arable ecosystems. During HT (≥ 32 °C) the accumulation of reactive carbonyl species (RCS), resulting from lipid peroxidation, damage plant cells by irreversibly carbonylating proteins and rendering them non-functional. Heat-induced RCS may induce failure of male and female reproductive development thereby reducing yields. If so, mitigating the effects of HT stress and HT-induced RCS should be a primary target of crop improvement. This dissertation examined the impact that chronic HT stress has on protein carbonylation, reproductive development, and genetic components in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, the emerging biofuel crop Camelina sativa, and the staple food crop, rice. The effect of HT (33 °C) on pollen development and the role of two genes encoding pollen-localized RCS-detoxifying enzymes are examined in Arabidopsis. One of these enzymes, HTT1, is shown to confer pollen thermotolerance in temperature-tolerant Arabidopsis ecotype by detoxifying RCS in pollen, thereby maintaining pollen function and seed set. HT also impacts pollen development and seed production in agronomic Brassicaceious species, such as C. sativa, where reductions in pollen tube growth, ovule number, and embryo sac development were associated with increased protein carbonylation at 35 °C. Reduced pollen tube growth, in conjunction with reduced ovule number and impaired embryo sac development, resulted in reduced seed number in Camelina at HT. The genetic resources available for C. sativa have recently expanded, and a QTL analysis identified candidate genes for improving ovule number at HT. HT (36°C) also induced protein carbonylation and was associated with a failure in pollen development in rice at the uninucleate stage. Across all species examined in this thesis, heat stress resulted in the production of RCS in reproductive tissues and reduced yields, suggesting that the production of RCS may be a universal response to heat stress. Identification of protein targets for heat-induced oxidative stress will highlight organelles and processes sensitive to heat and thus aid in the production of thermotolerant crop species.
Women Between West and East: the Inter-Rite Marriages of the Kyivan Rusâ Dynasty, ca. 1000-1204
Keywords: Cultural Exchange
History of Marriage
History of Rus'
History of the Church Schism
Queenship
Royal Women

This dissertation examines the marriage alliances of the Riurikids, the Orthodox rulers of Kyivan Rus’, with western-rite (Latin Christian / Catholic) rulers. Using both narrative and legal sources, it considers the process by which the brides in these marriages acculturated to the environment of their husbands’ courts, and the degree to which they were able to maintain ties with the culture of their birth. Through the prism of these women’s lives, the dissertation adds to our understanding of the social history of Orthodox-Catholic interaction among lay elites from the early eleventh century to 1204. While individual clerics such as Metropolitan Ioann of Kyiv disapproved of Orthodox-Catholic marriages in the 1080s, such condemnation was an extreme position for its time, and was rooted in concerns with preserving the ritual purity of Orthodox believers. Beginning in the late twelfth century, some western lay persons and clerics also may have disapproved of ties with Rus’, but their views remained in the minority. The dissertation confirms previous findings that the so-called Church Schism of 1054 was not an essential factor in the formation of these marriages until the thirteenth century. It demonstrates that brides in these inter-rite marriages did not experience a complete conversion to the religious tradition of their husbands nor rigidly maintain their allegiance to the culture of their birth; rather, they were able to keep some aspects of their former confessional and cultural identity, depending also on the specific court culture in which they found themselves. Cultural continuity with Rus’ was especially strong when brides were sent to areas of so-called “New Europe” (neighbouring Scandinavia, Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary). The dissertation concludes that marriages between the Riurikids and western-rite dynasties contributed to a cosmopolitan court culture among medieval elites at a time when barriers between Orthodoxy and Catholicism still remained porous.