VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Developing discoursal selves:Academic writing in a linguistically diverse Puente English class

In our globalized world the ability to move across multiple linguistic and cultural borders continues to grow in importance; however, instead of cultivating students' multiple ways of being in the world, public schools in the U.S. have often failed to capitalize on the cultural and linguistic resources that students bring from diverse backgrounds. This qualitative study examines how linguistically diverse students, those who were currently or had previously been identified as English Learners (EL), develop their identities within academic writing practices in a mainstream public high school English classroom that is part of the Puente Project. This is a college preparatory program that includes activities both in and out of the classroom designed to incorporate students' various cultural and linguistic "voices" as resources for learning./nThis study is framed through sociocultural theories of activity, identity construction, and literacy. Drawing on ethnographic and discourse analytic methodology, it examines the motives the teacher and counselor had for the activity system of Puente; how these motives shaped practices inside and outside of the classroom; how practices related to students' construction and performance of their "discoursal" selves; students' understanding of their academic identities within Puente; and how these perceptions changed over time./nA focus on student voice was indeed paramount in the Puente learning ecology, with both the counselor and the teacher emphasizing that supporting students to develop their voices was a central goal of the Puente activity system at Emerson High. This focus, however, did create some tensions with the activity system, since the teacher and counselor conceptualized "voice" differently from each other. Nonetheless, the Puente learning ecology at Emerson High provided students many and varied opportunities to develop academic identities and to perform academic discoursal selves. Students used the conventions of academic discourse that the teacher taught them in combination with their other social languages to express opinions, thoughts and feelings that were meaningful and important to them./nThe findings indicate that providing a variety of opportunities to write, both inside and outside of the classroom, and allowing students to choose the topics that they address are essential to support students' development of academic discoursal selves. While it is important for students to master "genres of power" such as argumentative writing, students are best served when they have an authentic purpose for writing and when they explore issues that hold personal significance through multiple writing genres. Moreover, this study suggests that incorporating personal and creative writing in the English curriculum is crucial to engage students whose identities and experiences had been previously marginalized in school settings.

Advisor: Freedman, Sarah W
The Humanity of the Talmud: Reading for Ethics in Bavli 'Avoda Zara

In this dissertation, I argue that there is an ethical dimension to the Babylonian Talmud, and that literary analysis is the approach best suited to uncover it. Paying special attention to the discursive forms of the Talmud, I show how juxtapositions of narrative and legal dialectics cooperate in generating the Talmud's distinctive ethics, which I characterize as an attentiveness to the "exceptional particulars" of life./nTo demonstrate the features and rewards of a literary approach, I offer a sustained reading of a single tractate from the Babylonian Talmud, Avoda Zara (AZ). AZ and other talmudic discussions about non-Jews offer a rich resource for considerations of ethics because they are centrally concerned with constituting social relationships and with examining aspects of human experience that exceed the domain of Jewish law. AZ investigates what distinguishes Jews from non-Jews, what Jews and non-Jews share in common, and what it means to be a human being./nI read AZ as a cohesive literary work unified by the overarching project of examining the place of humanity in the cosmos. The talmudic materials are organized as a journey down the cosmic chain of being, from the supernal realm of souls and spirit, to the material world of embodied, animal existence, to the inanimate domain of physical objects. In tracing this descent, I discover in AZ the outlines of a rabbinic anthropology that affirms the common humanity of Jews and non-Jews, and highlights the role of Jewish law in constituting Jewish difference./nAs I make my way through AZ, I bring the talmudic text into dialogue with critical insights and issues from philosophy and literary theory. Pointing to ways that the editors of AZ engage the philosophic currents of their time, I challenge the prevailing characterization of the Bavli editors as inwardly focused. Even more important, I explore how AZ engages the critical questions of our time--questions of identity and alterity, of universalism and particularism, of justice and community.

Advisor: Boyarin, Daniel
Mobilizing Rights, Contesting Citizenship and Leveraging Intersectional Identities: Immigrant Youth Activism in Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area

How do undocumented youth, whose very presence and identities are constructed as outside the law, mobilize the law in their efforts to enact social change? In what ways do their conceptions of their individual and collective identities construct citizenship from the bottom up, and how does this challenge and/or reinforce formal, legal conceptions of citizenship? Unlike other social movement participants, undocumented youth, by virtue of their undocumented status, are removable from the state at any time; their very participation in a social movement thus places them at risk of deportation. Existing literature suggests that this elevated risk would inhibit social movement activism, yet this has not been the case. Utilizing an interdisciplinary, multi-method approach combining cognitive discourse analysis, in-depth interviews and participant observation in Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area, this dissertation explores the activism of undocumented Asian and Latina/o immigrant youth advocating for the passage of Comprehensive Immigration Reform. In doing so, I advance a proxy dynamic process argument to explain how the process by which non-citizens assert citizenship rights. This process involves first raising the political consciousness of citizens, second engaging the law in a piecemeal fashion to construct the equivalent of formal citizenship rights and third deploying their newly won rights as a means of working to challenge the normative, dominant construct of citizenship altogether. This dissertation is extremely timely given the rapidly changing U.S. treatment of immigrants both at the local and national level. While states such as Arizona and Georgia have sought to enact harsh anti-immigrant laws, others such as California and Illinois have passed progressive bills allowing increased access to education for undocumented young people. On a national level, President Obama recently announced his plan to extend prosecutorial discretion providing undocumented youth with a stay on deportation and granting them renewable work permits in increments of 2-years. The changing legal environment is therefore evidence that the sustained political activism of undocumented youth is indeed having a positive impact on increasing rights for the entire undocumented immigrant community.

Advisor: Glenn, Evelyn N
Simulations of Complex Synergies in bcc-Fe under Multi-Ion Irradiation Using Stochastic Cluster Dynamics

The objective of the reported study is to develop the much-needed computational bridge for connecting the accelerated irradiation tests to the expected material performance in the future fission/fusion reactors. This new computational model serves as an alternative to traditional mean-field ODE-based reaction rate theory (RT) models which come with intrinsic disadvantages that cause simulations of complex microstructure evolution under multi-ion irradiation conditions to become prohibitively expensive to handle. Our stochastic cluster dynamics (SCD) model enables efficient simulation of complex damage accumulation in materials irradiated to practical damage doses with reasonable computing time and resources. SCD obviates the need to solve the exceedingly large sets of ODEs and relies instead on the sparse stochastic sampling from the underlying kinetic Master Equation (ME). We then apply the SCD model to simulate multi-ion irradiation experiments of Fe3+, He+ and H+ on bcc-Fe and provide explanation to the synergistic effects observed in the triple-beam experiments carried out at the Japanese Takasaki Ion Accelerator for Advanced Radiation Application (TIARA) facility. We also propose the employment of pulsed single/dual-beam irradiations as possible alternatives to the steady triple-beam irradiation for investigation of materials used for nuclear applications.

Advisor: Hosemann, Peter
Chrzan, Daryl C
Finding a Founding Father: Memory, Identity, and the Icelandic landnám

This study explores the bearing that theories of cultural and collective memory and national identity have on Icelanders' preoccupation with competing versions of their past, especially their foundational story. To enable a narrower focus, I place an emphasis on representations of the figure of the founding father and first settler of Iceland, the Norwegian chieftain-son and Viking Ingólf(u)r Arnarson, said to have settled on the island in the year 870 or 874. The material covered ranges from the twelfth century to the present, and comprises various forms of media, such as the earliest preserved texts in the Icelandic vernacular, geographical treatises in Latin, baroque and romantic poetry, visual art, political petitions and protest songs, and newspaper editorial letters.

Advisor: Lindow, John
Discriminative Acoustic Features for Deployable Speech Recognition

This work explores discriminative acoustic features: audio signal representations produced by multilayer perceptrons, such as Tandem and bottleneck features used in state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition systems. Experimental results highlight the factors that influence performance in terms of accuracy and speed; novel approaches are introduced to provide improvement in both regards. The overall emphasis is on discovering techniques that are suitable for practical deployment, translating effectiveness beyond a traditional research setting. Applications include real-time low-latency audio stream processing on mobile devices - as well as systems that are built with low-quality training data and must encounter the diverse complications of "real-world" use cases.

Advisor: Morgan, Nelson
"If The House Is Not Yet Finished": Urban Renewal and Postwar African American Poetry

In my dissertation, I investigate the epic writings of Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Robert Hayden to tell the stories of black working class life and culture in postwar New York City, Chicago, and Detroit. I suggest that these writers' modernist epics offer a counter-poetics to the "clean" modernism of urban renewal and, implicitly, lay bare the racial exclusionism foundational to not only urban renewal's specific policies of segregation and displacement but also to its aesthetic claims to architectural avant-gardism and newness. This was a time of urban renewal-slum clearance programs that displaced and disrupted black communities--more specifically, a time when race, modernism, and geography all collided in urban renewal--and I argue that we can see both urban renewal and the poetic responses to it in terms of aesthetic modernism./nIn my first chapter, "Alternative Geographies of Community in Langston Hughes's Montage of a Dream Deferred," I claim that Hughes's poem about the struggle for home and belonging in postwar Harlem invokes the importance of black self-determination and action through the democratic movements of bebop jazz and montage. In my second chapter, "Building `Social Width' in Gwendolyn Brooks's `In the Mecca,'" I read Brooks's epic as a poetic formalization of the negotiation of private and public space and, in particular, of the voices which speak for and shape a community. In my third chapter, "Racial Grief and Racial Mourning in Robert Hayden's `Middle Passage' and `Elegies for Paradise Valley,'" I argue that the epic becomes impossible for Hayden because of the way blacks are displaced from their history, beginning with the rending racial grief of the Middle Passage; "Elegies for Paradise Valley" revisits the experience of racial grief and racial melancholia is one affective avenue his poem offers.

Advisor: Hejinian, Lyn
Place and Social Networks: Informing Strengths-based Intervention to Promote Latino Adolescent Health

Latino youth represent a growing population in urban centers across the United States, yet face substantial socioeconomic barriers to future opportunity tied to poverty, immigrant status, and social exclusion. These negative aspects of the social environment contribute to a disproportionate distribution of adolescent childbearing, substance use, and gang involvement among Latino youth. To reverse these trends of health and socioeconomic inequity, public health practitioners must consider innovative research approaches and intervention designs that address upstream and contextual exposures. Such approaches carry the potential to impact a range of individual and community health outcomes. This dissertation will explore avenues to promote Latino adolescent health and a shift from a conventional public health focus on an individual-level and risk-reduction approach to a focus on a contextual-level and asset-promoting approach./nThis dissertation is composed of three papers that explore protective social ties, neighborhood norms and structural barriers associated with Latino adolescent health. The data for each paper come from two studies conducted as part of a community-based research program in the Mission District in San Francisco. The first paper is a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews and explores how youth articulate ideal childbearing expectations and the alignment of individual expectations with those that dominate their social environment. Findings from this analysis suggest that while youth aspire to fulfill post-secondary goals prior to starting a family and that these goals are aligned with family and partner childbearing expectations, they face barriers tied to poverty, immigration status, and community violence. Implications for strengths-based sexual health and adolescent pregnancy prevention are discussed. The second paper is a quantitative assessment of baseline data from a feasibility study of a sexual health intervention and examines the presence of positive peer network ties among gang-affiliated youth and how such ties are associated with frequent alcohol and marijuana use. Findings from this analysis suggest that having close friends with college plans has a protective association against frequent substance use. Intervention implications are discussed, including opportunities for leveraging positive peer ties among gang-affiliated youth. The third paper is a community report and is a translational research effort to provide community partners with key findings from the first two papers and an analysis of the intervention outcomes. This paper details next steps to inform programming and local policy that promotes adolescent health. In combination, these three papers underscore that protective factors in the social environment can inform strengths- and community-based interventions to support and enable adolescents to proactively engage in healthy behaviors, pursue future opportunities, and contribute to community well-being.

Advisor: Deardorff, Julianna
Minnis, Alexandra
Paleoenvironmental Change in Central California in the Late Pleistocene and Holocene: Impacts of Climate Change and Human Land Use on Vegetation and Fire Regimes

Dramatic environmental changes have occurred in the last 50,000 years in California due both to changes in climate and anthropogenic impacts. Analyses of pollen and microscopic charcoal from sediment cores from three wetland sites in central California record changes in vegetation and fire frequencies during the late Pleistocene and Holocene at different temporal resolutions. A long-term record with a basal date of ca. 50,000 cal yrs BP from a coastal wetland north of Santa Cruz shows important vegetation shifts between the Last Glacial Maximum, the glacial-interglacial transition, and the mid- to late-Holocene, as well as the introduction of a frequent fire regime in the Holocene. A 3,000-year record from a wetland near Año Nuevo State Park provides evidence of an increase in fire frequency in coastal California from the fifteenth century to the present, and vegetation changes associated with logging after Euro-American settlement. A core that spans the last ca. 700 years from an oxbow lake in the Sacramento Valley records the introduction of non-native plants into the area after European arrival. Together, these records help place the magnitude of anthropogenic impacts in the context of long-term environmental change due to regional or global climatic forcing.

Advisor: Byrne, Roger
Linearly reductive quantum groups: descent, simplicity and finiteness properties

The thesis comprises three largely independent projects undertaken during my stay at UC Berkeley, all revolving around the same mathematical objects: Cosemisimple Hopf algebras, regarded here as function algebras on linearly reductive quantum groups. We often specialize further to Hopf *-algebras coacting universally on finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces perhaps endowed with additional structure. Such a Hopf algebra is to be thought of as the algebra of representative functions on the compact quantum automorphism group of the respective structure./nChapter 2 is based on [23]. The question of whether or not a Hopf algebra H is faithfully flat over a Hopf subalgebra A has received positive answers in several particular cases: when H is commutative, or cocommutative, or pointed, or when A contains the coradical of H. We prove the result for cosemisimple H, adding this latter class of Hopf algebras to those known to be faithfully flat over all Hopf subalgebras. We also show that the third term of the resulting ``exact sequence'' A -> H -> C is always a cosemisimple coalgebra, and that the expectation H -> A is positive when H is a CQG algebra./nChapter 3 consists of material from [22], with earlier related results appearing in [24]. We define the notion of a (linearly reductive) center for a linearly reductive quantum group, and show that the quotient of a such a quantum group by its center is simple whenever its fusion semiring is free in the sense of Banica and Vergnioux. We also prove that the same is true of free products of quantum groups under very mild non-degeneracy conditions. Several natural families of compact quantum groups, some with non-commutative fusion semirings and hence very ``far from classical'', are thus seen to be simple. Examples include quotients of free unitary groups by their centers as well as quotients of quantum reflection groups by their centers./nIn Chapter 4 we show that provided n is different from 3, the involutive Hopf *-algebra Au(n) coacting universally on an n-dimensional Hilbert space has enough finite-dimensional representations, in the sense that every non-zero element acts non-trivially in some finite-dimensional *-representation. This implies that the discrete quantum group with group algebra Au(n) is maximal almost periodic, i.e. it embeds in its quantum Bohr compactification; this answers a question posed by P. Soltan. We also prove analogous results for the involutive Hopf *-algebra Bu(n) coacting universally on an n-dimensional Hilbert space equipped with a non-degenerate bilinear form.

Advisor: Serganova, Vera
White identity and intergroup attitudes: A meta-analysis and review

Despite growing social scientific interest in White racial identification, how White identity predicts intergroup attitudes remains unclear. Across the literature, results are ambiguous and often contradictory. Some researchers have found that White identity predicts more positive intergroup attitudes while others have found that it predicts more negative intergroup attitudes. Others still have found no relationship or a relationship only when the White in-group is threatened. We hypothesize that these conflicting results may be due to differences in how White identity is conceptualized and to differences among Whites' interracial contact. In the metaanalysis, we examined the relationship between multiple measures of White identity and a variety of intergroup attitudes. In general, White identity weakly but significantly predicted more negative intergroup attitudes. We further explored this finding by testing for moderation by multiple forms of methodological bias as well as multiple proxies for positive and negative interracial contact. We found some evidence of publication bias as well as a moderating effect of experience with interracial contact such that White identity predicted relatively more positive intergroup attitudes for Whites who tended to have positive interracial contact. In our discussion, we integrate the results with racial identity theories to help disambiguate the relationship between White identity and intergroup attitudes.

Advisor: Plaut, Victoria C.
Staging History in Modern and Contemporary Spanish Drama

This dissertation explores the manifestations, uses and appropriations of history in key Spanish plays from the 1950s to the present. The relationship between the stage and history casts new light on Spain's most critical phases in recent history. The authors studied were and are conscious of making history under the dictatorship, during the Transition and at the dawn of the 21st century. As instruments of civic action, their plays perform that awareness and invite spectators to recognize themselves as players in the process./nThe dissertation opens with a comparative analysis of plays written by Antonio Buero Vallejo and Alfonso Sastre between the 1950s and the Transition (1977). While scholars have tended to contrast these two playwrights focusing on their responses to censorship, I propose that Buero and Sastre gravitated towards a poetics of forgiveness through the model of the failed tragic hero. The following chapter explores plays written by José Sanchis Sinisterra during the Transition and the outset of the new democracy (1977-1994), that problematize the tension between the new political order and the old, imperial rhetoric of the Franco regime. Turning to Juan Mayorga in Chapter 3, I consider how his dramas transmit a bitter image of humanity's decadence and loss of moral sensitivity. Largely influenced by a European perspective, Mayorga deploys cartoonish characters in real historical circumstances in order to cast a detached comic eye on the role of the bourgeoisie in the mapping of history during the past two centuries. My final chapter analyzes the topic of religion within the new Spanish democracy in three comic plays by Fermín Cabal, Concha Romero and Carmen Resino. This chapter proposes that the powerful role of religion has not waned since Franco's death and continues to shape Spanish culture, despite the nation's reconfiguration of its Catholic views. These authors dramatize the tensions between modern secularization and traditional Catholic faith, turning to comedy and satire to explore the complex presence of religion in the lives of Spaniards.

Advisor: Dougherty, Dru