VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Immoral Panics: Black Queer Aesthetics and the Construction of Risk

My dissertation centers an established and emerging cohort of black queer contemporary visual artists and writers who articulate how blackness is historically constructed as a signal for erotic danger through a host of aesthetic strategies in order to argue for risk-taking as a mode of erotic liberation. Drawing on archival research, interviews with contemporary artists, and close readings of visual and literary objects, my project is the first to address the persistence of the HIV/AIDS crisis as it traverses time and space in the work of black queer cultural producers. Building upon recent interventions in the fields of Black Queer Studies, Art History, Literary Studies, and Film and Media Studies, I argue that black queer visual artists disrupt and expand upon a version of sexual risk-taking in (white) queer studies that is claimed as the vanguard of radical queer practice. Over four chapters, Immoral Panics considers how black gay, lesbian, nonbinary, and trans filmmakers, painters, and poets represent blackness as a sign of erotic risk in its shifting historical proximity to debates surrounding consent, ungendering, andthe HIV/AIDS crisis. Beginning in 1976 and concluding in 2018 the project, first, reveals the coconstitution of blackness and queerness as sexually excessive contagions by the state through proceeding generations and, second, marks the HIV/AIDS crisis as always already racialized and ongoing in the lives of black queers who now bear the structural brunt of queer radicalism. In Chapter One, I argue that consent within queer pleasure is haunted by the violence of the law and the afterlife of slavery through a reading of the rarely cited archive of the 1976 police raid at the Mark IV Bathhouse during a white male BDSM slave auction and filmmaker Isaac Julien’s The Attendant (1993), produced in response to the AIDS crisis. In Chapter Two, I articulate how the initial moral panic regarding AIDS built upon the anti-black surveillance of skin color through attentive readings of the journals of late black gay writer Gary Fisher and the abstract paintings of Mark Bradford as they both pay sustained formal attention to society’s demeaning interest in AIDS-related cancer Kaposi’s Sarcoma. In Chapter Three, I argue that the disorientation experienced by black queers as they interface with queer public sex institutions, blamed for the spread of the virus, serves as a productive affective model for both inhabiting and critiquing queer risk and pleasure through close readings of the works of late black gay poet Essex Hemphill from 1992, London-based Indian gay photographer Sunil Gupta from 1999, and black lesbian filmmaker Tiona Nekkia McClodden in 2017. In Chapter Four, I demonstrate how a cohort of black nonbinary, queer, and trans contemporary painters and poets, including Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Danez Smith, and jayy dodd, play with and rearrange risky images and signifiers of black masculinity, as a form of pleasurable world-making under the specter of the virus.

Advisor: Raiford, Leigh
Predicting and preventing Pb leaching into drinking water: novel approaches

Childhood lead poisoning is a multifactorial problem that affects as many as 500,000 US children younger than six years of age in the US. Drinking water is currently a major source of exposure: lead leaching from lead-based water infrastructure affects over 5,000 public drinking water utilities, potentially exposing over 18 million people to elevated lead water levels. Pipe replacement, the most effective solution to this problem, is prohibitively expensive, while chemical conditioning of drinking water using orthophosphates, although cost-effective, does not quickly solve the problem. Moreover, identifying the locations at risk of lead leaching is challenging because lead is not routinely measured, and when it is, the data are seldom made public. Thus, cost-effective technologies meant to detect and to stop lead leaching are currently needed to prevent childhood lead exposure and to enable an equitable and fair access to safe drinking water.The purpose of this dissertation is to develop the foundations of novel technologies meant to both identify the risk and prevent childhood lead exposure from drinking water, particularly in low-income settings where this problem is more prevalent. Chapter 1 presents an overview of the lead leaching problem in the US, its causes, and the health effects of childhood lead exposure. Chapter 2 presents a novel method for estimating the likelihood of lead leaching into the drinking water in schools at the state level using machine learning and applies this approach using data from the states of California and Massachusetts. Chapter 3 utilizes the same tools presented in chapter 2, but for predicting the risk of childhood lead poisoning at the state level. This model is tested and validated using lead blood data from the states of New York and Massachusetts. Chapter 4 introduces the foundations of a novel electrochemical method to prevent lead leaching into the drinking water from lead water pipes that overcomes some of the limitations of existing technologies. In this method, an external power supply is used to promote the formation of an insoluble scale within lead pipes that significantly decrease lead leaching rates. Chapter 5 presents a modified version of the method presented in chapter 4, in which an amorphous aluminum oxide layer is deposited within lead pipes. This method was tested in used lead pipes collected from a water distribution system and using different water matrices. Chapter 6 concludes this dissertation by discussing the implications of the main findings and by presenting recommendations for future work.

Advisor: Gadgil, Ashok J
New Era, New Media: The Postsocialist Chinese Media Ecology

“New Era, New Media" shows how new and old media in early postsocialist China worked together to visualize new and desirable materialities and technologies, mediating China’s transition to postsocialism. In analyzing odd media hybrids like films “screened” on paper, that is, comic book adaptations of foreign blockbusters, or art films that echo the aesthetics of early digital piracy, I use my case studies to underscore the incongruities of transition and the unevenness of global media cultures. The newly mediated rhythms and sensoria of the 1980s emerged at a moment when changes in the textures of commodities and urban spaces—the introduction of synthetic fabrics, plastics, the vertiginous surfaces of skyscraper glass and reinforced concrete—transformed everyday life to create citizens schooled in navigating the aftermath of socialism. My account is not a teleological history in which old media and ideologies are simply replaced by new ones, but a postsocialist media archaeology that maps the relationship between outmoded and newly emergent media and their attendant ideologies. My conclusion points to how the media entanglements of early postsocialism, such as issues of piracy, audiovisual fidelity, and the mobile screen, reemerge in digital spaces to inform the euphoria and anxiety of China’s fraught digital media cultures today.

Advisor: Bao, Weihong
Jones, Andrew
Queer Burlesque's Histories, Fantasies, and Futures

“Queer Burlesque’s Histories, Fantasies, and Futures,” interprets queer and disabled burlesque through interviews, ethnographies, and performance analysis, reading history, craft, and choreographies that together reimagine the intersectional possibilities of “queer” away from queer mainstreaming and toward queer and trans liberation. I point to the entanglement of crip drag and racial mimicry and the way burlesque can cite, reclaim, satirize, or exploit the construction of the other. Burlesque as a performance genre evolved from minstrelsy, and many mainstream burlesque performers continue to use black dance without attribution or citation, employ culture as a costume, and use disability as a narrative trope. I interview over twenty international burlesque performers in order to interpret performers’ responses to racial appropriation and disability drag and investigate their pedagogical strategies of education, activism, and the cultivation of desire for justice. I use crip glam as an epistemology for citing the lines of gestural exchange and manipulating traditional models of femininity, where performers invent strategies of refusing objectification and reimagining intimacy./nChapter 1, “Un-Choreographing Violence: Transformation in Trauma Time,” delves into how burlesque can create cultural shifts toward undoing rape culture through its nondiscursive form of erotic activism. I argue that trauma time is a mode of crip time that enables survivors to experience the world differently and in doing so implement their unique skill set to create transformative performance toward abolishing sexual violence. Chapter 2, “Crip Glam As Eroto-Technoscience: Transforming Devices in the Dancing Sensorium” examines the making of queer and disabled burlesque props. This chapter examines crip glam as a form of crip eroto crip-technoscience, a disabled strategy of reinvention that emerges from the labor of cultivating desire combined with the scientific knowledge disabled people garner from surviving ableist medical systems. Chapter 3, “Anti-capitalist Re-use and Refuse: Wigs, Rhinestones, and Compost,” looks at the hand-making Do-It-Yourself practices of building costumes in queer and disabled burlesque and the relationship between these practices and racialized queer excess, femme disposability, and reclaiming trash as aesthetic. Finally, chapter 4, “Object Choreographies and Gestural Attitudes: A Biography of The Cane,” travels further into the realm of critical prop studies, using the case study of the cane as both prop and medical device to signal the ways that stage objects can reveal buried histories. Together these chapters provide a guide for interpreting queer burlesque that reimagines the intersectional crip erotic possibilities of “queer.”

Advisor: De Kosnik, Abigail
Quantifying the Construction: A Reflexive Application of Quantitative Methods to Trace the Construction of Racial Statistics.

This dissertation applies quantitative methods to the study of how race and ethnicity are socially constructed in quantitative research. This reflexive application of method reveals the contribution to constructionist theory that is possible from thoughtfully applied quantitative reasoning. In part, this contribution is the elaboration of the specific ways in which racial and ethnic data are constructed, providing details to the broad constructionist rhetoric that has been critiqued for being overly grand and substantively shallow. The dissertation suggests that both theory and method can be improved through the integration of both - by demonstrating how quantitative methods can incorporate constructionist perspectives while also demonstrating specific ways in which race and ethnicity data are constructed./nThe first substantive chapter tackles racial identification in survey interviews, demonstrating that complexities of specific interactions can shape how individuals identify their own race, revealing the many ambiguities present when relying on a single identification in a survey. The second chapter describes how missing responses are filled in, producing an apparent universality of racial self-identification in the decennial census and American Community Survey. By exploring the patterns in these allocations, this chapter demonstrates how statistical descriptions of communities are reliant upon decisions made by bureaucracies rather than simple aggregations of self-identifications. The final chapter explores the mathematical details of statistical models that have been applied to studying intersectional differences. This chapter reveals that the current gold-standard approaches, while well motivated, unintentionally incorporate assumptions which are anathema to their theoretical perspectives. Finally, the chapter suggests that the application of Gaussian Process models may have similarly favorable mathematical properties, while avoiding contradictory assumptions.

Advisor: Loveman, Mara
Algorithms for Computing Highly Oscillatory Indefinite Integrals and Applications in Plasma Physics

We develop methods for numerically integrating oscillatory functions and employ one of the methods in a new spectrally accurate collocation method to solve the linearized Vlasov-Poisson equation describing a collisionless plasma./nIn 1923, Filon provided one of the first methods for evaluating definite oscillatory integrals via a quadrature formula. Filon's method involved treating the integral as a non-oscillatory function being multiplied by an oscillatory function. An inherent difficulty to what are now known as Filon methods involves integrating a set of basis functions against the oscillatory part of the function. We present two moment free Filon method capable of calculating indefinite integrals on a finite interval for irregular oscillators. These are the first moment free Filon methods with a polynomial basis that can compute integrals for general irregular oscillators. This work is a generalization of previous work by Hasegawa and Torii for the regular oscillator case that relies on representing the non-oscillatory part of the function via shifted Chebychev polynomials. We also present a novel method for calculating the regular oscillator case./nWe then present a new collocation technique of computing solutions of the single-mode 1-D Vlasov-Poisson problem in which the plasma density is represented on Chebychev panels using high-order polynomials in time. We apply this method to a Volterra equation first discovered by Penrose that describes the time evolution of the plasma density. We also compute the resolvent of the Volterra integral operator using the collocation scheme. By integrating a highly oscillatory function that fits in the framework of the first half of the thesis, we are able to reconstruct the velocity distribution of the plasma at any time. The numerical simulations agree with key theoretical aspects of plasma physics such as Landau Damping. We present examples for a Maxwellian distribution and a double-hump unstable distribution.

Advisor: Wilkening, Jon A
Wearable Sweat Sensors for Personalized Health Monitoring

Wearable sensors that allow continuous, real-time, and point-of-care monitoring of body state have many advantages over invasive, hospital-based tests. Wearable sensors that probe the chemical state of the body by measuring analytes in sweat have generated particular interest in recent years, due to sweat’s rich composition and ease of access. Preliminary studies have revealed that sweat composition and secretion rate may indicate blood concentrations or health conditions including dehydration, metabolic conditions, and stress, enabling physiological health to be tracked dynamically without painful, disruptive, and discrete tests. However, accessing sweat for measurement poses unique challenges. Sensors must limit evaporation and mixing of old and fresh sweat, must be robust under the mechanical rigors of prolonged on-body wear, and must be expanded towards low sweat volumes and secretion rates in order to collect sweat without needing to exercise. Careful interpretation of sensor measurements must also be performed to account for cross-dependencies between measured parameters and to develop personalized and universal correlations between sweat measurements and established health metrics./nIn this dissertation, I discuss the vision of wearable sweat sensors for personalized health monitoring and present technological progress towards realizing this goal. Chapter 1 introduces background and challenges of sweat sensing, as well as key considerations and components of wearable sweat sensors. Chapter 2 addresses high-throughput fabrication of electrochemical sweat sensors via roll-to-roll processing. Chapter 3 discusses the integration of microfluidics to enable dynamic sweat capture and analysis of both composition and sweat secretion rate, with a focus on sweat that is secreted via exercise or local drug-based stimulation. Chapter 4 moves beyond these disruptive modes of sweat generation to present a platform for rapidly accumulating and analyzing sweat at rest, via functionalized gloves that dramatically inhibit evaporation. Chapter 5 presents a complementary system using microfluidics to dynamically monitor sweat at rest, including while sitting and sleeping. Throughout these chapters, small-scale human subject trials and studies highlight the potential of wearable sweat sensors for personalized health and fitness monitoring applications. Chapter 6 concludes by discussing work that must be done to enable sweat sensing to become a viable and ubiquitous tool for health monitoring outside the lab.

Advisor: Javey, Ali
Exposing Abjection: Racial Violence in 19th and 20th Century Photography

Exposing Abjection: Racial Violence in 19th and 20th Century Photography examines photographs of racial violence and interrogates Western subjecthood’s reliance on representations of the racial other as abject. Photographs from the Holocaust, American lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan, and anthropological portraits comprise the chapters of this dissertation and their analyses. These images are traditionally seen as displays of otherness and I propose a revised spectatorship that instead asks what kind of self is being developed through the act of looking at these photographic documents. In doing so, this dissertation moves away from the hypervisuality of racialized bodies and works toward decentering spectacle for the purposes of exposing the visual and cultural rhetoric that has been utilized in developing the narrative of a racialized humanity./nThis dissertation is an interdisciplinary engagement with the fields of visual studies, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural studies that specifically addresses the role of photography in the development of a racialized humanity. In particular, the psychoanalytical concepts of abjection, whole body-image, and coherent bodily ego facilitate my examination of the photographs’ function as both historical documents and personal mementos. By considering both the historical significances and personal meanings that the images document, I ultimately argue that the symbolic language of the visual rhetoric has the capacity to enact and lead to actual acts of racial violence. As such, examining the visual rhetoric in 19th and 20th century photographs of racial violence makes possible alternative interpretations that do not rely on the overdetermination of harmed, racialized bodies. Through a study of the photographs, I examine how our viewing of them can disrupt rather than maintain notions of humanity that require the abjection of the racial other.

Advisor: Mascuch, Michael
The ecology and evolution of polyploid niches: investigating the interaction of ploidy, microbiomes, and pathogens

Polyploidy or whole-genome duplication (WGD) is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the evolutionary history of land-plants. As WGD often induces many new novel, adaptive, or transgressive phenotypes, it can have cascading ecological effects on biotic interactions and potentially the microbiome. There is a growing body of research on the impact that the microbiome plays in plant ecology, but few studies have looked at the potential interactions between ploidy, microbiomes, and pathogens in shaping the ecology of newly established polyploids. This study uses synthetic auto-tetraploid Arabidopsis accessions and a synthetic microbiome representative of natural commensal bacteria in order to assay how these interactions impact host phenotype with respect to pathogen response./nIn Chapter 1, I describe how the induction of polyploidy does not change the beta diversity of the phyllosphere but does alter the selection of various taxa of the synthetic community. In Chapter 2, I describe a phenomenon whereby polyploids fare better than diploids when treated with a pathogen regardless of inoculation with a protective microbiome, but where diploids treated with a microbiome better arrest the growth of pathogens than the non-treated diploids. In Chapter 3, I perform an RNA-Seq experiment and find a pattern where defense-associated genes are expressed less in diploid accessions than in polyploids when treated with a microbiome. Together, these chapters for the first time demonstrate that a potential consequence of whole genome duplication may be a loss of control over the composition of the microbiome. Finally in chapter 4, I review and synthesize the literature on somatic polyploidy to assess whether endopolyploidy and whole-genome duplication have shared underlying evolutionary rules.

Advisor: Rothfels, Carl J
Silviculture in the Sierra Nevada Mixed-Conifer Forest for the 21st Century

Climate change poses a profound risk to the functioning of forested ecosystems and past forest management approaches may no longer be appropriate for future forests. As trees vary in their vulnerability to climate change, it is essential to identify the most at risk species for conservation and refine management decisions for resistant tree species. In addition to managing for individual tree species, incorporating adaptive forest management approaches is essential for maintaining future forests. Over three chapters of my dissertation, I use long-term forest inventory data from different silvicultural experiments in the Sierra Nevada mixed conifer forest to evaluate potential management strategies for a changing future. My dissertation investigates three main questions: 1) how does planting density shape the trade-off between individual growth (maximize timber production) and stand-level productivity (maximize carbon sequestration) of giant sequoia, a climate vulnerable species? 2) how does herbivore protection and planting density impact the early survival and growth of incense-cedar, a climate resilient species? And 3) how does an operational femelschlag harvest affect the growth dynamics of Sierra Nevada mixed conifer tree species growing along gap edges? In chapter 1, I demonstrate the potential for incorporating giant sequoia into working forests to achieve different objectives, as they are able to produce merchantable timber at a young age and sequester large amounts of carbon in a relatively short period. In Chapter 2, I show that herbivore protection greatly increases the survival of young incense-cedar. Incense-cedar demonstrates the expected tradeoff between individual tree size and stand production, where narrow spacings yield smaller trees and higher stand-level production and wide spacings yield larger trees and lower stand-level production. Results from chapter 3 show that all mixed-conifer species may be successfully grown along the edges of group selections and most species will exhibit increased height and diameter growth after group expansion. Collectively, these three chapters present information necessary for evaluating forest management decisions to create a resilient future forest.

Advisor: Battles, John J