VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Preoccupations with Modernity: Geopolitics of Knowledge in Colombian Reproduction Laws, 1936-2006

The dissertation examines how Colombian professionals have developed reproductive laws and policies during the past century in the name of being modern. I focus on four moments of reproductive lawmaking from 1936-2006, analyzing legal and sociolegal texts that record or inform the lawmaking process. These four moments of reproductive lawmaking are the 1936 Colombian Criminal Code, which increased penalties for men’s sexual crimes as well as abortion; two 1960s policies that promoted family planning; the 1991 Constitutional Assembly and the debate whether to include a comprehensive reproductive right, libre opción a la maternidad (free motherhood) in the new constitution; and the 2006 Colombian Constitutional Court decision C-355, which decriminalized abortion in three instances./nStudying each moment reveals Colombian professionals – lawyers, politicians, highly educated feminists, doctors, and others – participating in knowledge discourses which construct a particular approach to reproduction as the necessary course of action if Colombia would be modern. In 1936, Colombian lawyer-politicians employed legal positivist science to scrutinize sexual crimes and develop a rule of law in keeping with other liberal, modern states. During the 1960s, a community of Colombian doctors and politicians developed family planning policies in an attempt to curb rapid population growth. Grounded in the ideas of transnational population studies, the Colombian professionals feared “overpopulation” would undermine Colombia’s ability to prosper socially and economically, leaving Colombia “behind” modern nations. The 1991 Colombian Constitutional Assembly shows a commitment to inclusive democratic politics and women’s equality to counter representations of the country as violent and the state as incapable of governance. Finally, the 2006 Constitutional Court decision decriminalizing abortion portrays Colombia as an equal partner with other states in promoting women’s rights through international human rights./nThe dissertation shows how Colombian professionals’ understandings of current challenges facing the state interact with knowledges based in other countries or developed in transnational circles; and that the discursive construction of these knowledges as the “modern” approach towards law and women’s reproduction generates both pressure and enthusiasm among professionals to enact these knowledges in reproductive lawmaking. Based in transnational feminisms, I use the term “geopolitics of knowledge” to refer to how social, economic, and political forces shape the circulation of knowledge discourses and effects across transnational space; as well as to how relations of power at a transnational scale affect how knowledges circulate and how, when, and who participates in a given knowledge, or “takes it up.” The dissertation shows that conceptions of modernity change over time, with implications for legal approaches towards reproduction and women’s reproductive lives.

Advisor: Constable, Marianne
Responding to Disproportionality of Students of Color Through Addressing Teacher Practice

ABSTRACT/nResponding to Disproportionality of Students of Color Through Addressing Teacher Practice/nby/nJudy Jaramillo Argumedo/nDoctor of Education/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Bernard Gifford, Chair/nThe Acquiring Common and Collaborative Educational Systems and Strategies (ACCESS) is a design dissertation which provides a professional learning experience for teachers that builds awareness of how the deficit mindset of students of color lead to inequitable practices. The learning model is based on using instructional coaches to facilitate discussions about race, model effective strategies and provide experiential learning. The learning sequence will also focus on professional competence that highlights how teachers can intervene and utilize best practices with students in the classroom. Shifting teacher mindset is challenging and difficult to accomplish, but, with a focus on professional competence, teachers may change practice as they realize it is within their domain to act. With the focus on changing specific teacher practices, teachers may see improvement in the classroom environment shifting their thinking.

Advisor: Gifford, Bernard
Nasir, Nai’lah
Neural Dust: Ultrasonic Biological Interface

A seamless, high density, chronic interface to the nervous system is essential to enable clinically relevant applications such as electroceuticals or brain-machine interfaces (BMI). Currently, a major hurdle in neurotechnology is the lack of an implantable neural interface system that remains viable for a patient's lifetime due to the development of biological response near the implant. Recently, mm-scale implantable electromagnetics (EM) based wireless neural interfaces have been demonstrated in an effort to extend system longevity, but the implant size scaling (and therefore density) is ultimately limited by the power available to the implant./nIn this thesis, we propose neural dust, an entirely new method of wireless power and data telemetry using ultrasound, which can address fundamental issues associated with using EM to interrogate miniaturized implants. Key concepts and fundamental system design trade-offs and ultimate size, power, and bandwidth scaling limits of such system are analyzed from first principles. We demonstrate both theoretically and experimentally that neural dust scales extremely well, down to 100's, if not 10's of $\mu$m. We highlight first wireless recordings from nerve and muscle in an animal model using neural dust prototype. The thesis concludes with strategies for multi-neural dust interrogation and future directions of neural dust beyond neuromodulation.

Advisor: Maharbiz, Michel M
Alon, Elad
Jenseits von Being and Reason: Imagining Otherwise and the World History Classroom

Despite increased literature on the disciplining of black and brown youth in schools, there has been little attention to implications for content area instruction. This study examines the disciplining of knowledge in world history classrooms, and the impacts of this on students who often get labeled as troublemakers. Although many world history classrooms make claims of a shared humanity, such spaces often reproduce value systems that deem some as historically significant, while negating and excluding others. I employ qualitative methods to examine how such disciplinary practices impact students. I conducted individual student interviews and think-aloud tasks with twelve tenth grade students, to document how students understand themselves in relation to world history. To identify students and gain context of their learning, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in two out of three sections of tenth grade world history classrooms in their small urban Title 1 school, with predominantly African American and Latino students, over the course of six months. I read the world history classroom and how students think in light of queer theory, critical theory and cultural studies, and subaltern studies./nThis study shifts the focus on so-called troublemaker students from a behavioral focus that aims to integrate them into the status quo, to consider their ways of thinking in broader socio-political contexts. This work builds on the ways these students productively trouble the logics of traditional world history pedagogy, and complicates historical thinking by engaging challenges within the discipline of history itself. I turn to history as a disciplinary space to consider how scholars from marginalized populations have challenged the work of history, including the archive, document production and preservation, narrative production, and the relations of knowledge production within the history discipline. This study ultimately aims to alter how teachers think about and teach world history, in light of these marginalized students.

Advisor: Perlstein, Daniel
Decoding the Rhythms of Avian Auditory LFP

We undertook a detailed analysis of population spike rate and LFP power in the Zebra finch auditory system. Utilizing the full range of Zebra finch vocalizations and dual-hemisphere multielectrode recordings from auditory neurons, we used encoder models to show how intuitive acoustic features such as amplitude, spectral shape and pitch drive the spike rate of individual neurons and LFP power on electrodes. Using ensemble decoding approaches, we show that these acoustic features can be successfully decoded from the population spike rate vector and the power spectra of the multielectrode LFP with comparable performance. In addition we found that adding pairwise spike synchrony to the spike rate decoder boosts performance above that of the population spike rate alone, or LFP power spectra. We also found that decoder performance grows quickly with the addition of more neurons, but there is notable redundancy in the population code. Finally, we demonstrate that LFP power on an electrode can be well predicted by population spike rate and spike synchrony. High frequency LFP power (80-190Hz) integrates neural activity spatially over a distance of up to 250 microns, while low frequency LFP power (0-30Hz) can integrate neural activity originating up to 800 microns away from the recording electrode./nTo understand how an auditory system processes complex sounds, it is essential to understand how the temporal envelope of sounds, i.e. the time-varying amplitude, is encoded by neural activity. We studied the temporal envelope of Zebra finch vocalizations, and show that it exhibits modulations in the 0-30Hz range, similar to human speech. We then built linear filter models to predict 0-30Hz LFP activity from the temporal envelopes of vocalizations, achieving surprisingly high performance for electrodes near thalamorecipient areas of Zebra finch auditory cortex. We then show that there are two spatially-distinct subnetworks that resonate at different frequency bands, one subnetwork that resonates around 19Hz, and another subnetwork that resonates at 14Hz. These two subnetworks are present in every anatomical region. Finally we show that we can improve predictive performance with recurrent neural network models.

Advisor: Theunissen, Frederic E
Subjects of Trauma: The Decolonial Tactics of Self-Making and Self-Healing by Queer Xicana Feminist Teatristas

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary decolonial, queer women of color cultural analysis of Xicana representations of trauma. My examination of theatrical texts relies on a decolonial U.S. Third World queer and feminist methodology. Through this methodological lens, I situate Chicanas as (neo)colonial subjects by focusing on the colonial, imperial, and psychosocial context for Chicana trauma. I detail physical and ontological violence perpetrated upon people in the Indigenous Americas, especially in what has become Mexico and the southwestern United States. I also synthesize mental health statistics that quantify the psychic effects of colonial and imperial changes upon displaced peoples. Xicana plays and performances, I argue, aptly illuminate the embodiment of this locura, a psychosomatic and spiritual dis-ease rooted in colonial and imperial collective and intergenerational trauma. The primary texts for my analysis are Cherríe Moraga’s drama The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, Adelina Anthony’s performance Las Hociconas: Three Locas with Big Mouths and Even Bigger Brains, and Virginia Grise’s play blu. These texts, I posit, illustrate how colonialism, internal colonialism, and imperialism have created subjects. I conceptualize what I term “subjects of trauma” through these three cultural productions that each make visible the social, political, and economic injustices experienced by Chicanas—many of whom live within internal colonies—in the United States. I interrogate the decolonial tactics that queer Xicana feminist playwrights employ to re-create themselves as subjects and subsequently alleviate psychic pain. I maintain that Xicana feminist theater promotes self-healing vis-à-vis self-making, as it theorizes our subject positions and intersubjective self-hood and, through consistent revisions of what have become traditional narratives, reminds us of the possibility of “decolonizing our selves” by remaking our selves.

Advisor: Alarcón, Norma
Pérez, Laura E
School Discipline and Civil Rights: Education Reform in the Neoliberal Era

In the midst of intensifying income inequality, police violence, and school segregation, Obama’s Administration launched the Supportive School Discipline Initiative in 2010 to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement and eliminate the school-to-prison pipeline. Since then, the Supportive School Discipline Initiative has been touted as a success story of grassroots advocacy, philanthropic involvement in education reform, bi-partisan collaboration, and cross sector coordination between education, school psychology, law enforcement, and criminal justice. Education reformers invoke common narratives of liberal reform in this process, including bottom-up change, collaboration between strange bedfellows, and innovative policymaking through networks. Yet, this study finds that even under ideal implementation conditions, characterized by successful destabilization and educators committed to change – the social control, punishment, and policing practices in the school district didn’t change much. Instead, the district mandated the adoption of more behavioral management programs and the creation of a district-wide discipline data system, both experienced as bureaucratic and insufficient to address the school climate and culture needs in schools./nWhile, dominant explanations for liberal reform failure place the blame on resistant or incompetent educators, this study asks what larger political and economic interests were at stake in the creation, implementation, and outcomes of the Supportive School Discipline Initiative. Through social network visualization and qualitative coding of policy and advocacy reports published on school discipline between 2000 and 2014, I found that the US Department of Education and the US Department of Justice worked together to support and shape a national policy network through which education reform non-profits and for-profits co-opted the school-to-prison pipeline frame to drum up demand for behavioral management programs and other education reform products and services. Through an in-depth qualitative case study of the first two-and-a-half years of the implementation of the Supportive School Discipline Initiative in an urban school district, I find that the policy mandates, the civil rights ideals it invoked, and the current grant-dependency of urban school districts incentivized district central office administrators to compete with one another to secure funding for education reform industry products and services and to coordinate a shared managerial interest in data auditing and accountability. Thus, I conclude that the Supportive School Discipline Initiative worked largely as it was intended to, serving the interests of the education reform industry and not the interests of those concerned with the school-to-prison pipeline or creating more just schools.

Advisor: Perlstein, Daniel
Objects of Pity: Art and Emotion in Archaic and Classical Greece

This dissertation investigates the relationship between art and emotion in Archaic and Classical Greece, particularly the relationship between changes in the cultural values attached to oiktos or “pity” and simultaneous changes in the formal appearance of Greek art. Whereas traditional histories assume that emotional engagement was only made possible with stylistic developments in the fifth century, I argue that a cultural mode of viewing works of art through an emotional lens was cultivated already in the sixth century. By promoting encounters with art objects as emotionally similar to real life experiences, this mode of viewing made art look more real by compelling viewers to treat works of art as having intellectual and psychological agency./nWhile the focus of this dissertation is an historical account of how emotions affected the production and viewing of funerary monuments in Archaic and Classical Greece, the structural model it develops for studying the relationship between art and emotion has broader applications. At the heart of this project lies the question of how an individual’s sense of emotional subjectivity is inscribed within artistic and cultural practice, and how works of art themselves constitute a form of emotional practice that can shape that sense of subjectivity. Confronting Greek art through questions of emotional engagement allows me to reframe standard narratives and open up new ways of thinking about the cultural work of sculpture, and art more generally, in Archaic and Classical Greece.

Advisor: Stewart, Andrew
Stem Cells in Tissue Regeneration and Diseases

The thesis includes two parts: (1) the role of stem cells in nerve regeneration, and (2) the role of stem cells in the development of vascular diseases. The use of stem cells has promising potential for the fields of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, which relies on precise control of cell proliferation and differentiation by cellular, biochemical and biophysical cues. For cell therapy in tissue regenerative applications, the specific differentiation state of implanted cells must be optimized to control cell fate, viability, potency and safety in vivo. In this dissertation, we investigate the therapeutic effect of induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neural crest stem cells (iPSC-NCSCs) at various differentiation stages and mesenchymal progenitor cells (MPCs) on peripheral nerve regeneration. Transplantation of NCSCs has better outcomes of motor nerve recovery and muscle reinnervation by Schwann cell differentiation in vivo and paracrine signaling, whereas transplantation of MPCs fails to promote functional nerve regeneration. This study provides an insight into the selection of stem cells during tissue regeneration, and has broad impact on the strategic design of cell therapy for tissue engineering. It is generally accepted that the phenotypical de-differentiation of smooth muscle cells (SMCs) has an important role in the development of vascular diseases. Here we identify a population of SOX10+ vascular stem cells (VSCs) that can be isolated from human blood vessel wall and are able to differentiate into cell types of neural lineages and mesenchymal lineages in vitro. SOX10+ cells can be identified in both normal and diseased blood vessels, and some of these cells are positive for osteogenic and adipogenic markers, suggesting that the differentiation of VSCs in blood vessel in vivo can contribute to vascular diseases. In addition, in situ polymerase chain reaction proximity ligation assay (ISPCR-PLA) shows that some of the SOX10+ cells are derived from SMCs. Further investigation of these cells will help us understand the mechanism of vascular pathogenesis and potential therapeutic target of vascular diseases. The work in this dissertation demonstrates the important role of stem cells in tissue regeneration and diseases, which may lead to wide applications in stem cell biology, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

Advisor: Li, Song
Causes and Impacts of Rainfall Variability In Central Mexico on Multiple Timescales

The eastern sector of Mexico’s Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt is a semi-arid region, where interannual rainfall variability is significantly stresses regional water resources and the livelihood of millions. The region is linked to a broader summertime rainfall regime known as the North American Monsoon (NAM). My dissertation uses multiple lines of evidence, from geochemistry to climate model output, to understand the causes of long-term droughts in this region./nMy first dissertation chapter uses instrumental data to diagnose the causes of El Niño-induced droughts in Mexico. This work explores the mechanisms responsible for rainfall changes over Central Mexico during the developing versus decaying phase of an El Niño event. This study was the first to demonstrate the importance of moisture transport anomalies in reducing rainfall in highland Mexico during the decay phase of an El Niño./nMy second dissertation chapter uses the oxygen stable isotope ratios (δ18O) of lacustrine carbonates as well as elemental geochemistry to reconstruct late Holocene drought in Central Mexico. This sub-centennially resolved record is the first to identify a significant dry interval in central Mexico from 1300-1100 cal yr. B.P., which may be temporally coherent with increased drought frequencies recorded on the Yucatan Peninsula. These results also hint at a role for climate change in regional prehistoric cultural changes at the nearby site of Cantona./nMy third dissertation chapter explores impacts of late Holocene droughts on the terrestrial ecosystems in Central Mexico. I reconstructed past vegetation and fire dynamics from pollen and microscopic charcoal, and compared these data to our stable-isotope based climate reconstruction and regional archaeological records./nMy fourth chapter is an exploration of the causes of centennial-scale across Mexico and Central America in the late Holocene. This work identifies the spatiotemporal patterns of late Holocene drought by synthesizing Mesoamerican proxy records. It presents a new hypothesis pointing to the role of changes in Atlantic circulation in causing droughts in Mesoamerica./nFinally, I synthesize the knowledge in each of the dissertation chapters and point to avenues of future research.

Advisor: Byrne, Anthony R.
Probable Histories: Novel Recoveries of the Past

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the simultaneous rise of two discourses that promised to explain the past and predict the future: probability and the novel. The two were not merely historically coincident. In dialogue from the start, “Probable Histories” argues that probability and the novel were also mutually constitutive. Drawing on standard histories of each, I summarize their respective “rises” in the eighteenth century and analyze their interdependence. I then turn to a series of case studies, investigating the novels of Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Walter Scott, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy as points of intersection between the concerns of probability and those of the novel. The project reveals how these two modes of temporal projection extend and inform one another as modes of prediction. In so doing, “Probable Histories” offers a new account of the novel’s shared role in conceptualizing causation.

Advisor: Duncan, Ian