VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Pedagogies of Liberation: Integrative Epistemologies and Learning and Teaching Practices for Cultivating Social Equity and Well-being in the 21st Century

In 2014, minoritized students became the majority in U.S. public schools. This demographic shift has not by default translated into equity in education. Amid the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and increasingly visible systemic racism, many universities began emphasizing the use of institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements and numerical data of admission rates of minoritized students to signify diversity at their institutions. However, both educators and students have critiqued these measures as being performative and falling short of enacting real social transformation while systems of power, privilege, and oppression remain unchanged. This study argues that merely increasing diversity of some minoritized students and faculty in systems of inequity does not constitute systemic change, especially without creating learning environments that foster equity and inclusion within those institutions. Therefore, my dissertation provides an interdisciplinary analysis of culture changes required to bridge the frequent gap between diversity discourse and equity and inclusion practices in higher education. In this century, we will need to learn new ways of seeing, thinking, and being. Instead of reinforcing limiting paradigms that foster duality, division, and domination, I posit that education must be transformed to cultivate new integrative epistemologies, pedagogies, and practices that prioritize interconnection and cooperation to foster social equity and well-being./nMy research draws from critical mindfulness studies, critical ethnic studies, feminist studies, and equity-based and holistic pedagogies. This dissertation first outlines the root causes of systemic inequity, including the fundamental thought paradigms and three major forms of barriers that have enabled social inequities to persist in education. I then present a framework of integrative epistemologies and pedagogies for transforming education to foster social equity and well-being. Integrative here refers to epistemologies based in interconnection, praxis that connects personal and collective liberation, and holistic and equity-based pedagogies that engage the whole person in mind-body-heart-spirit. Rather than presenting a singular, prescriptive way of teaching, my theory of integrative pedagogy emphasizes a dynamic, learner-centered practice that is continually evolving and is necessarily customized according to the context of each class and group of participants.

Advisor: Nakano Glenn, Evelyn
Critical Evaluation of Tuberculosis Diagnostic Tests in Low- and High-Burden Settings

Tuberculosis (TB) is the second leading cause of death from an infectious disease worldwide and remains a major public health challenge, particularly in resource limited settings. Given the effectiveness of current treatment regimens, enhanced detection of disease in both low- and high-burden settings will be critical in making progress towards TB elimination./nAs TB case rates have declined in high-income settings, TB control has centered on finding and treating individuals with non-infectious latent TB infection (LTBI) in order to prevent reactivation infectious TB disease. Since 2005, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended use of interferon-gamma release assays (IGRAs), in vitro immuno-diagnostic tests that measure effector T-cell mediated interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) response to M. tuberculosis specific antigens, could be used for targeted screening of LTBI in all circumstances in which the tuberculin skin test (TST) is used. We found that higher quantitative IFN-gamma results were associated with active tuberculosis and added clinical value to a prediction model incorporating conventional risk factors; however, in all settings and especially within low- and middle-income countries, IGRAs are inadequate rule-out or rule-in tests for active TB. Although IGRAs are widely used in high-income countries and numerous studies have evaluated their diagnostic performance for detection of LTBI, there is limited data on the precision of IGRA results. In the largest precision study of an IGRA to date, we found considerable variability in TB response measured by QuantiFERON-TB Gold In-Tube (QFT-GIT, Cellestis, Australia); test results should be interpreted cautiously among low-risk individuals with positive TB response less than 0.59 IU/ml./nIn contrast to low TB burden, high income settings, TB control in low income settings focuses on early detection and treatment of individuals with active, infectious TB. In the WHO African Region, the incidence of multidrug resistant TB (MDR-TB) has tripled in the past 20 years and poses a major risk to regional TB control programs. Accurate, timely, and affordable drug susceptibility testing for patient management and in support of surveillance programs is urgently needed. In a politically unstable, high HIV prevalence region of southern Africa, we validated use of a low-cost, accelerated phenotypic method for MDR-TB detection, and provide the first report of the prevalence of MDR-TB from this country in 17 years.

Advisor: Reingold, Arthur
Materials Deforming Near their Ideal Strength

In recent years it has been shown that it is possible to design materials with strengths approaching their theoretical ideal limit. This is an intriguing development; materials typically fail at stresses that are several orders of magnitude below their theoretical limits of strength. The development of engineering alloys with usable strengths near the ideal limit would have profound technological implications./nThe most common approach used to increase a material's strength, is grain refinement. This method has been used to produce nanograined hollow nanospheres of CdS. Under nanoindentation these spheres show remarkable strength and deformation properties. The stresses and strains in the shells are studied with linear elastic finite element analyses and from this a failure criterion is developed. The stresses predicted by the failure criteria are 2.2 GPa, which is very large for an inherently brittle material. We compare the failure stress to the calculated ideal strength for CdS, calculated using density functional theory. Comparing the stress predicted by the failure criteria to the ideal strength shows that the hallow nanospheres approach 70% of their ideal strength./nIn 2003 a new Ti, Nb based alloy "Gum Metal" was introduced by Toyota Research Corp. This alloy has strength approaching the ideal limit even in bulk form. Moreover, the material deforms in a novel fashion without the obvious participation of dislocations. A Ti-V alloy has been chosen to study the properties of this type of alloy. The BCC ideal yield surface is examined as a function of composition. Dislocation core structures are also examined as a function of composition. The results explain some experimental observations in this novel system.

Advisor: Chrzan, Daryl C
State, Coalition, and Regime in Latin America: Concepts, Causes, and Case Studies

Over the course of the last decades of the twentieth century, Latin America has experienced massive institutional change. Democracy has become the dominant political regime. Change, however, has been restricted at the level of access to power. Patrimonial and hegemonic forms of exercise of power persist. Patrimonialism and hegemonic rule are birthmarks of most Latin American countries, but they have adapted to the new democratic context and gained strength from recent economic processes. This dissertation traces, from different angles, the sources of patrimonial persistence and hegemonic consolidation. State structures and coalitional dynamics, not culture or formal rules, have played a crucial role./nThe distinction between access to power and exercise of power is central to the analysis. It is used to reconceptualize the discussion of regimes and states in Latin America, with the goal of overcoming important analytic problems in the field. To explain the transformations of regimes and states, this study advances a model of "institutional refraction," which in turn is a synthesis of two major strands of macro-comparative analysis, neo-Marxism and neo-Weberianism. These concepts and distinctions are explored in two case studies. An analysis of Colombia in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries examines the interaction between regime and state in a context where a fundamental change in the electoral regime serves to stabilize the state's control of violence within the national territory. The second case study focuses on South American politics since the year 2000. Here the refraction model, along with the distinction between access and exercise, shed new light on how an unprecedented export boom has facilitated a move to the left throughout the region, and has also reinforced hegemonic forms of rule in some--but not all--countries.

Advisor: Collier, David
The Danceable City: Aging Women Improvising Health Practices in Beijing's Interstitial Spaces, 2004-2010

The objective of this dissertation is to examine how older, urban Chinese residents appropriate interstitial spaces in Beijing to improvise ways to pursue healthy aging through dance. Observations, interviews and surveys were conducted with retired residents who danced for exercise inside their communities over the course of three fieldwork visits: 2004-06, summer of 2007, and spring and summer of 2010. Interview data collected from exploratory fieldwork in 2004-06 informed the design of a survey that was later deployed in 2007. A total of 395 dancing residents were surveyed in 2007. Further semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2007, as well as community sketch mapping, to discover whether dancers encountered new constraints or opportunities in the urban landscape since the previous visit. In 2010, follow-up surveys and interviews were again collected to see whether the hosting of the Olympic Games affected dancing in communities. Qualitative analysis for the dissertation focused mainly on the interviews and survey responses collected in 2007, as well as interviews and sketch maps collected in 2010./nIn this study, I examine the experience of older urban residents who live in a rapidly modernizing city. I describe how changes in the social norms of elder care have placed aging residents in a precarious position because expectations that younger family members will care for older family members are changing. I show that dance becomes tactic that many older residents utilize in order to maintain their health, to not "burden" their families, and to avoid institutionalization. Dance has other useful social roles: it provides residents a way to keep social networks intact and creates a platform for dancers to share news with one another, including new-found information on how to stay healthy./nThrough observations, surveys, mapping, site visits, and interviews with dancers, I show that aging Beijing residents who dance outdoors for exercise are experiencing increasingly greater difficulty finding appropriate dance sites in the modernized version of their city. Through mapping dancing groups' migrations in search of new spaces, I examined dancers' tactics of adaptation, improvisation, and appropriation of left-over spaces. However, I discovered that even the most dedicated dance groups are limited by how much they can adapt before they are forced to give up dancing altogether. This leads me to conclude that a reevaluation of Beijing's rapid urbanization program as experienced by urban seniors who are pursuing healthy aging through dance is sorely needed, if in fact, Beijing is to remain a senior-friendly, danceable city.

Advisor: Southworth, Michael
Illuminating the Construct of Managerial Ambidexterity in the Context of Public School Improvement

Principals must cope with the pressures arising from accountability while enabling flexibility in teachers' work. How do principals manage these tensions when attempting to improve their schools? And where are these tensions most commonly centered? Both questions relate to managerial ambidexterity, or how principals simultaneously advance coordination and flexibility to motivate teachers. The process of managerial ambidexterity is not well understood either conceptually or empirically in the school and management literature. To investigate the topic, I take an exploratory and qualitative approach. Through an investigation of 15 school principals, I find that their managerial ambidexterity strongly resides in resolving tensions located between performance-based accountability and the professional autonomy of the teacher. To resolve these tensions, principals use three methods, including affective appeals, cognitive interpretation, and the use of data. I link these methods to specific profiles of schools where principals engage in their managerial ambidexterity differently. Principals' perceptions of their context act to condition which methods are employed. I describe these school-levels contexts as layering in political schools, drops of control in low systems schools, matching in high systems schools, and masking in humanist schools. My findings show how some principals develop their organizations differently through various forms of ambidexterity enactment.

Advisor: Jackson, Nicole C.
Probing Nanostructures for Photovoltaics: Using atomic force microscopy and other tools to characterize nanoscale materials for harvesting solar energy

The ability to make materials with nanoscale dimensions opens vast opportunities for creating custom materials with unique properties. The properties of materials on the nanoscale are distinct from their larger counterparts, and can be tuned in ways that are not otherwise possible. In this work, various nanoscale materials are synthesized and characterized, with an emphasis on materials with photovoltaics applications. Graphene, an atomically thin sheet of carbon, is combined with metal nanoparticles, and the electronic and optical properties of this material are studied. Heterostructured nanocrystals of \ce{CdS}-\ce{Cu2S} are characterized as a potential solar cell active layer. Improvement of the performance of organic solar cells is achieved with the application of large electric fields. In all of these studies, the atomic force microscope is used to characterize the surface topography and electronic properties of these systems.

Advisor: Zettl, Alex
PINs lost and PINs gained: Auxin-transport mediated patterning in the grasses

In plants, transport mediated by the PINFORMED (PIN) family of auxin efflux carriers helps create gradients on which many developmental processes depend. Current models suggest that Arabidopsis PIN1 has two concurrent functions during leaf initiation: 1) concentrating auxin to create local maxima in the meristem epidermis, and 2) transporting auxin away from the epidermal maxima and into the internal tissues. The resulting auxin gradient is required for leaf initiation and vein patterning. I identified an angiosperm PIN clade placed sister to PIN1, here termed Sister-of-PIN1 (SoPIN1), that has likely been lost within the Brassicaceae, including in Arabidopsis, but remains in all other angiosperms sampled. I also identify a conserved duplication of PIN1 to create PIN1a and PIN1b within the grasses. I used live-cell imaging and immuno-localization to characterize the expression and localization of SoPIN1, PIN1a and PIN1b members in both maize and Brachypodium. SoPIN1 expression is highest in the epidermis and is consistently oriented toward areas where the DR5 auxin reporter is highly expressed, suggesting that SoPIN1 functions in the creation of auxin maxima. PIN1a and PIN1b localization, largely absent from the epidermis and oriented rootward in the internal tissues, suggests that these PIN proteins transport auxin after maxima formation during the canalization of leaf and stem veins. These data support the functional division of PIN proteins into maxima creation and canalization modes. In addition, the loss of SoPIN1 within the Brassicaceae suggests that PIN1 in this group may be unique amongst the angiosperms in its ability to dynamically switch between these two functional modes. I then provide a model for how the PIN1a/PIN1b duplication in the lineage leading to the grasses may relate to the novel morphological and anatomical characteristics found in monocot plants. Finally, I summarize some preliminary PIN knockdown experiments that suggest a role for PIN mediated patterning in apical dominance, meristem maintenance and leaf proximal/distal patterning.

Advisor: Hake, Sarah C
The Self-Reliant Literary Group (Tu Luc Van Doan): Colonial Modernism in Vietnam, 1932-1941

This dissertation provides the most thorough history currently available of the Self-Reliant Literary Group. It sheds light on the cultural and political history of the 1930s, arguably the country's most dynamic intellectual and literary period. I examine the nature of colonial intellectual life by addressing the following questions: how did Vietnamese intellectuals make sense of the sweeping forces of modern life brought by French colonialism? How did they understand, internalize, and appropriate the foreign ideas and worldviews transmitted by their colonizers? And ultimately, how did they use this imported knowledge to help themselves and their compatriots? I argue that the cultural, social and political program of the Self-Reliant Literary Group was less concerned with the immediate seizure of political power than the progress towards a just, civil and modern Vietnamese society. Its reforms were wide in scope, concerned with cosmopolitan questions of fairness, freedom and social justice. The Group preferred the unknown and unpredictable future brought by modern life to the known stagnation of tradition. The Group believed that the past and its paradigms held back Vietnamese progress and iconoclastically broke away from their strictures. It looked to westernized societies for models to emulate, borrowing selectively and deliberately from western culture to envision a Vietnamese society that would someday be seen by other modern civilizations as an equal./nAs arguably the most important group of intellectuals in 1930s Tonkin, the Self-Reliant Literary Group is an ideal lens through which to view this complex landscape. The publishers of the first satirical newspaper in Vietnam, the Group served as the vanguard of a new, youthful generation of Vietnamese intellectuals--educated only in modern French and vernacular Vietnamese, unfamiliar with the classical Chinese worldview of their Confucian literati predecessors. Deeply committed to the ideals of human progress, the Group reexamined every aspect of Vietnamese society, and sought to replace outdated traditions with new ways to build a civil society. I maintain that the Self-Reliant Literary Group constituted the first Vietnamese modernists--never before had intellectuals advocated such boldly iconoclastic, sweeping changes across the whole of Vietnamese society. Their reform program covered disparate issues such as rural/urban relations, national costume, domestic and international politics, women's issues, publishing, fashion and architecture. I examine their writings and social/political project to describe how these intellectuals constructed their own vision of a modern, civil Vietnamese society in a colonial context.

Advisor: Zinoman, Peter B
Synthesis and Functionalization of Carbon and Boron Nitride Nanomaterials and Their Applications

Carbon and boron-nitride based nanomaterials possess many exciting properties making them suitable for numerous applications spanning from electronics to advanced composites. However, these materials when synthesized often differ significantly from the idealized crystals usually considered theoretically. A thorough understanding of the structure of the materials as synthesized and how the resultant materials can be utilized for specific application purposes is required such that these applications can be effectively realized. To this end, the synthesis and characterization of carbon and boron-nitride based nanomaterials is undertaken with specific application purposes in mind./nAs a potential scalable synthetic route for graphene, graphene oxide (GO) and reduced graphene oxide are synthesized and characterized using atomic resolution electron microscopy. This elucidates their underlying structures revealing that the reduced form of GO does not resemble pristine graphene. The long-standing debate over the structure of GO is successfully ended with this study given the direct observation of the atomic structure of this material./nTo develop advanced composite materials, the functionalization of carbon and boron nitride nanotubes is undertaken. The characterization of their functionalization and incorporation within composite materials, specifically within a Kevlar polymer matrix, is presented to allow for the development of composites with significantly enhanced mechanical properties./nGiven a significant body of theoretical work paired with a single previous synthetic success, the synthesis of boron nitride nanoribbons is outlined. The first scalable synthesis of boron nitride nanoribbons is demonstrated resulting in long, consistent width, narrow, few-layer boron nitride nanoribbons which could be ideal for addressing these theoretical considerations./nTo establish a method for the synthesis of thin hexagonal-boron nitride (h-BN), the design of a specialized CVD system is described. The material resulting from this system is analyzed with methods including atomic resolution electron microscopy with the results informing future approaches for the synthesis of h-BN./nFinally, high surface area boron nitride materials should be promising for hydrogen storage applications, especially if templated with a microporous scaffold. To this end, the first synthesis of a high surface area, microporous boron-nitride material is accomplished and the resultant surface areas of these materials are reported.

Advisor: Zettl, Alex
Alivisatos, Paul