VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Coal Visualities: Labor, Gender, and Regional Consciousness in Chikuhō

This dissertation examines the role of the arts in Chikuhō, a former coal mining region in the northern central part of Kyūshū, which is Japan’s most southerly island. From the Late Nineteenth Century, coal mines proliferated in Chikuhō and greater Kyūshū, fueling Japan’s industrial modernization and imperial expansion. A petro-capitalist thirst for oil, the “energy revolution” as it is often called in textbooks, brought about the closure of coal mines in Chikuhō and elsewhere in Japan, starting in the late 1950s as part of a nationwide “coal rationalization plan.” While the evacuation of coal from Kyūshū provided its landscape with an opportunity to regenerate organic growth and decreased the amount of toxic industrial runoff that seeped into crops, for example, it also initiated trends of marked depopulation. The paucity of surviving industries and companies in Chikuhō contributed significantly to a languishing of the regional economy. I analyze the role of the arts in shaping historical consciousness in Chikuhō with regard to coal’s legacy and imagining a path forward for the community after coal. This study foregrounds the tensions inherent to articulations of ethnicity, gender, and class within the concentric frames of regional and national belonging during and after coal’s regional reign. I analyze Chikuhō’s role in formulating alternative mobile networks of artists, theater troupes, activists, and intellectuals invested in labor, gender, and minority experience from the 1930s as the Japanese imperialist agenda intensified and the arts-political Left questioned the nation’s trajectory. My study tracks regional arts activism in connection with national postwar grassroots democracy movements and into the Twenty-first Century as well, as art becomes a way of challenging historical consciousness and generating opportunities for representation and mutual aid after the evacuation of coal. I argue that region (as shared identity and pendant visuality) takes form through mobility: that of laborers and their families (domestically and from Japan’s wartime colonies); visual artists and theater troupes; and artistic styles and fashions. Coal miners and their families move in and out of Chikuhō in time with imperial military and industrial campaigns. Artists likewise move into or out of the region, carrying artistic styles and cultural practices with them. Activists interested in the emancipation of the proletarian laborer, the rights and experiences of women and minority communities, and the environmental and economic implications of coal’s rise and fall in Chikuhō visit or take up residence for a spell. Precisely because regional visuality exists in relationship to this mobility, Chikuhō—as a shifting field of images, actors, and articulated identity—intervenes in stubbornly static narratives of Japan’s industrial modernization and colonial expansion. The arts equip regional activists to question collective memory and negotiate a place for the region in and against (inter)national narratives of industrial modernization.

Advisor: Levine, Gregory P.A.
The hippocampal code - Towards understanding neural representations underlying spatial navigation

Navigation is central to the survival of species. From a systems neuroscience perspective, the Hippocampus is one of the principal regions that enables mammalian navigation. Academic and medical literature have also implicated this part of the archicortex in the long-term storage of memories. The ability to record from hundreds of neurons at sub-millisecond time-scale from the hippocampus now provides a unique window into its inner workings, allowing us to test broader computational theories about the brain. In this dissertation, we explore the representation of space in the brain from multiple perspectives. First, we study oscillatory interactions in the brain - we combine a novel opto-genetic experimental paradigm with in-vivo electrophysiology to study inter-connected regions in the rodent brain. We then use cross-frequency analyses to study how two of the most prominent oscillations in the hippocampus, theta and gamma, interact. We show that the latter, gamma oscillations, are synchronized across a large extent of anatomical tissue and that this synchrony is driven by the CA3 sub-region of the Hippocampus. We then discuss functional representations of space in the brain that constitute a cognitive map. We demonstrate tools and algorithms that were developed as a part of our projects to perform Bayesian inference of neural activity in real time, as well as to detect known oscillatory phenomenon called Sharp-Wave Ripples (SWR) that have been associated with consolidation of memories in literature. We lay out experimental work to test the role of SWR in online spatial learning. Our work has been released as a publicly available open-sourced tool called ActiveLink. We discuss technological challenges in real-time inference of neural activity and offer a machine-learning solution based on neural networks to outperform existing methods for spatial inference.

Advisor: Foster, David
Carmena, Jose
Holy Mother, Dead Child: Christian Asceticism, Renunciation, and the Making of Holy Women in the sixth-century Life of Matrona of Perge

“Holy Mother, Dead Child: Early Christian Asceticism, Renunciation, and the Making of Holy Mothers in the Life of Matrona of Perge” explores the impact of maternal asceticism on marriage, child mortality and the family economy in the sixth century Greek life of Matrona of Perge, an aristocratic matron and mother who abandoned her family and life of luxury to live as a eunuch monk (and later abbess) in Constantinople. Matrona’s renunciation of her family culminates in the death of her young daughter Theodote, who is presented in the text as a sacrificial offering to her mother’s religious vocation and sanctity. Theodote’s abandonment and death serve as catalysts for Matrona’s transformation from matron to eunuch monk to spiritual mother and abbess.This dissertation combines a literary analysis and adapted translation of the Life of Matrona with careful study of legal, religious, and cultural shifts in the fifth and sixth centuries to reveal a significant interaction between ascetic literature and changes to the family in late Roman culture. As women gained increasingly more rights over their children, dowries, and property in the fifth and sixth centuries, one sees this financial independence play out in the hagiographies of ascetic mothers. The crux of the conflict between the family and asceticism in the Life of Matrona and other contemporary hagiographies of holy mothers was not merely the renunciation of kin, but the rejection of traditional female roles, the destruction of the household, and the redistribution of wealth and property away from the family and toward the Church and monastic foundations. Wealthy matrons who left their families for a monastic life broke apart not only their biological families, but also their households and property, redistributing coin, estates, and slaves outside of the family inheritance economy. For Matrona of Perge and other wealthy Late Antique ascetic matrons like Melania the Younger, the renunciation and dismantling of family and home resulted in their canonization and veneration as saints in the Church from Late Antiquity onwards. The Life of Matrona and other contemporary hagiographies present child mortality as a vital step on the path to holiness for ascetic mothers.

Advisor: Elm, Susanna
Itinerant Belonging: Korean Transnational Migration to and from Mexico

Itinerant Belonging analyzes migration, race, and globalization in relation to the small but diverse community of Koreans in Mexico City: temporary workers brought to manufacturing enclaves fueled by growing South Korean investment; re-migrants from South America drawn northward; and the descendants of Korean contract laborers who came to work on Yucatán peninsula henequen haciendas in the early 20th century. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, 60 semi-structured interviews, and archival research conducted in Mexico, South Korea, and the United States, I argue that migrant identity formation is mediated by transnational global fields that exceed the homeland-settlement country binary. While nearly invisible on the global stage, Koreans in Mexico must constantly respond to shifts in U.S. trade policy, changing economic relations between Mexico and China, and fluctuations in anti-Asian sentiment. To manage these risks and uncertainties, they build transnational social infrastructures that produce lived experiences of the global in their local contexts, transforming Mexico into a nodal point for transpacific and hemispheric Korean migratory networks and a switchboard location between the Global North and the Global South.

Advisor: Siu, Lok
Belonging in an Age of Islamophobia: An Ethnographic Case Study of an Islamic Persian Saturday School

This dissertation examines processes of belonging of a group of young Iranian American Muslim students at an Islamic Persian Saturday school in an age of Islamophobia. As an ethnographic case study of a weekend supplementary education school, it draws on language socialization and discourse analytic paradigms to illuminate how Islamophobic discourses have impacted American Muslims’ sense of selfhood, and, as a result, their senses of belongingness to the American society. Data from participant observation, interviews, and archival research demonstrate that weekend Islamic schools play a crucial role in the development of second-generation American Muslim youths’ identities. This dissertation demonstrates that heritage language and Islamic ethics classes at the Islamic Persian Saturday school surpassed mere preservation and transfer of cultural and religious traditions. One of the major educational goals of the school was for students to become comfortable and confident in expressing their multiple identities as Iranians, Americans, and Muslims. As such the school curriculum served to: 1) make sense of the social injustices experienced by Muslims in America, and 2) resist and respond to anti-Muslim bigotry through mobilization of moral and ethical epistemologies informed by Islamic and Persian traditions, particularly of adab as a form of social conduct. The study finishes by inviting scholars and practitioners to: 1) fully understand the impacts of Islamophobia on young American Muslim students’ sense of self and well-being, 2) address Islamophobia within classrooms and public school settings, and 3) to do so by incorporating students’ traditional and cultural knowledges into their curriculum and research.

Advisor: Baquedano-Lopez, Patricia
Selective Transport in Microporous Polymer Membranes for Emerging Battery Chemistries

Fast, selective transport is essential to the performance of a variety of developing battery chemistries directed at clean energy storage. Redox flow batteries, which store charge in active material solutions, rely on the sequestration of anolyte and catholyte materials in their respective electrode compartments while allowing ion transport between compartments to maintain charge balance. To this end, redox centers designed to realize redox potential, stability, and solubility targets are conjoined to produce charge storing redoxmers – encompassing redox-active monomers, oligomers, and polymers – with unique rheological and kinetic properties in solution. Redoxmers are paired with porous polymer membranes whose pore chemistry and architecture are intentionally designed to promote selectivity, offering advantages in both active material blocking and charge transport. Integration of these materials and design principles into new flow cell chemistries that account for their unique fluid dynamic properties is directed at accessing long-duration energy storage targets that remain inaccessible with existing battery technology. In this dissertation, I will discuss the role of active material and microporous polymer design in achieving selective transport in battery applications. I will first describe the application of an oligoethylene oxide scaffold to produce liquid redoxmers that are infinitely miscible with organic electrolytes and size-sieved by well-established microporous polymer membranes. Subsequently, I will describe my work applying diversity-oriented synthesis to develop a library of polymers of intrinsic microporosity (PIMs) offering polymers with desirable transport properties for various applications. This PIM library encompasses a wide assortment of pore chemistries and architectures and was screened to identify chemistries offering attractive Li+ transport properties. The final two sections apply the synthetic strategies used in developing the PIM library to produce polymers capable of stable, selective transport in alkaline aqueous systems, and to enhance our understanding of permeability–selectivity trade-offs for PIMs in non-aqueous flow batteries.

Advisor: Helms, Brett A
Toste, F. Dean
The #OptOut Movement and Decoloniality in Education: Youth Sense-making, Social Media Representations, and Moving Beyond Colonial Knowledge Towards Unbridled Utopia

In this three-article dissertation, I expand how scholars understand the opt-out movement against statewide testing in the United States and offer a framework for reorganizing learning ecologies outside a testing paradigm. Framed by the ways that knowledge is defined, divided, categorized, and standardized within a system that seeks to hierarchically sort people, I understand statewide testing to be an everyday instantiation of coloniality within education. I thus explore the ways in which the opt-out movement might be viewed as a decolonial attempt, with knowledge claims being tied to claims of humanity, and importantly, rights (including land rights). In the first article, I examine how youth grapple with their own relationships to statewide testing, using an online discussion board, Reddit. I frame their sense-making using the framework of historical action to better understand their nuanced discursive moves. In the second article, I highlight how a subgroup of opt-out participants used public social media posts to vocalize their motives in the movement, centering on themes of race, inequity, civil disobedience, and knowledge subordination, and contextualizing statewide testing within its sordid history. I relate these motives to the agenda of coloniality and how these motives within the movement might indicate a move toward decolonizing knowledge within the K–12 education system. In my final article, I offer the learning as movement framework as a utopian design approach for the literacy learning sciences and an alternate to knowledge standardization. I explore how designing learning ecologies that view learning as movement aligns with the work of decolonial scholars who call for us to re-signify meaning and identity to work towards alternate epistemic futures.

Advisor: Gutiérrez, Kris D
Low-Temperature Growth of Tellurium for Electronic

Large-scale growth of high-quality semiconductors forms the basis of the modern electronics. Growth of high-quality semiconductors such as Si typically requires a high processing temperature, which cannot meet the fabrication thermal budget for the emerging circuit architectures and applications such as three-dimensional (3D) monolithic integration and flexible electronics. Great effort has been devoted to exploration of low temperature material systems with sufficient mobility in last decades. Although low-temperature grown n-type films such as indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) with respectable electron mobility have been shown, the development of their p-type thin-film counterpart with sufficiently high hole mobility is still limited. In this report, we identify the elemental p-type semiconductor-Tellurium (Te) as a promising candidate due to its high hole mobility, low processing temperature and possibility for wafer-scale production.Specifically, the wafer-scale growth of Te thin films was realized through thermally evaporated at cryogenic temperatures, field effect transistors (FETs) based on which exhibited respectable electrical properties. 3D monolithic circuits and devices on flexible substrates were fabricated using the evaporated Te thin films, demonstrating that Te is a promising p-type semiconductor processed at low temperatures. After that, we systemically studied the growth mechanism of the thermally evaporated Te thin films, which has an intriguing amorphous to crystalline phase transition at near-ambient temperature. We visualized and modeled the kinetics and dynamics of the crystallization of thermally evaporated Te films and achieved the growth of Te thin films with large grains and patterned Te single crystal arrays by optimizing the crystallization temperature, which possess an enhanced crystallinity and electrical properties. Additionally, orientated growth of ultrathin tellurium was investigated, as Te has attractive orientated and thickness-dependent properties. Two-dimensional (2D) formed Te and SeTe alloys were realized on the three-fold symmetric transition metal dichalcogenides substrates (WSe2, WS2, MoSe2 and MoS2) by van der Waals epitaxy, forming an one-dimensional/2D moiré superlattice, where the chains were aligned to the armchair directions. Further, growth of single-crystal-textured Te film was demonstrated on the low-symmetric surface of WTe2. Finally, we investigated the thermal stability of Te based devices, which is a major drawback for their practical applications. Two failure mechanisms related to the sublimation of Te channel and the degradation of the contacts were raised. To address these issues, we applied graphene contact and SiOx encapsulation, which is able to keep the contacted stable and channel intact at high temperatures. Such devices have the similar effective mobility comparing to the traditional metal contacted ones’, but with an improved thermal stability.

Advisor: Javey, Ali A
Yao, Jie J
Melodrama Undercover: Resistance as a Collective Project in Contemporary Argentinean Cinema

Melodrama Undercover rethinks the affective work genre cinema performed in post-dictatorship Argentina. Dominant scholarship has tended to dismiss the political and cultural significance of popular films produced after the 1976–1983 military rule. It claims this cinema largely stops reckoning with the dictatorship in the 1990s, given the proliferation of genre films that do not represent state violence and genocide directly. I reconsider mainstream cinema’s role in mediating the past to show how it confronts and represents historical trauma allegorically to negotiate questions concerning justice, memory, and national identity. These films engage processes of displacement and resignification to imagine a different relationship to the country’s past as they restage social and subject-state relations under authoritarianism. In their use of allegorical images, plots, and resolutions, diverse popular genres allow audiences to work through the past in a collective experience of spectatorship that addresses the wounds of historical trauma and, in the process, imagine a (bearable) future that holds the possibility for change. Organized through the conventions of the melodramatic mode, prominent Argentinean genres (such as the tango musical, the policial/crime thriller, and the science fiction film) have historically acted as beacons of memory and justice during moments when both were imperiled. Using a contextual approach, Melodrama Undercover engages archival research, close reading, and film theory to reconceptualize melodrama as a site of collective resistance. In the Argentinean films under consideration, melodrama has offered audiences fantasies that dramatize the restoration of the social and familial relations severed by authoritarianism. I use the concept of the “melodrama of community” to show how Argentinean genres eschew reactionary escapism by looking forward as they look back: they investigate and narrativize the past in order to envision—or warn about—the future. In this way, genre cinema functions as a palliative for the violent losses the military inflicted on marginalized Argentineans while modeling new social formations and resilient communities able to rebuild a shattered nation.

Advisor: Whissel, Kristen
Williams, Linda
Go Forth and Wander: Mapping a Buddhist Hindi Public in the Writings of Anand Kausalyayan, Rahul Sankrityayan, and Nagarjun

Through a focus on the lives and works of three Hindi authors and intrepid travelers—Anand Kausalyayan, Rahul Sankrityayan, and Nagarjun—this dissertation investigates the emergence of “the wanderer” as a cultural hero in India during the twentieth century as part of efforts to define modern Buddhism for Hindi audiences. Beginning with a study of each author’s involvement in Buddhist revival efforts in India, it follows their careers and peregrinations across South Asia and around the world, exploring how each one contributed to the construction of a unique image of the wanderer through their writings and own lived example. Considering the image of the wanderer in the lives and works of these three authors, from its appearance in Buddhist tracts during the 1930s and ‘40s though later figurations of travelers in Hindi travel literature of the 1960s and ‘70s, this dissertation goes on to explore how the act of wandering came to be understood as a model for social, political, and religious reform and development.

Advisor: von Rospatt, Alexander
Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives

“Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives” examines silent film through the prisms of criminality and capitalism, analyzing the ways in which the emerging institutions of modern policing and motion pictures corroborated and subverted each other’s projects from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. I focus on silent films that register the imbrication of modern policing and moving pictures as they were consolidated into dominant social institutions with increasingly standardized practices. Over the course of the dissertation, I show that policing is not simply thematized in silent film, but structures its form and mode of perception. Modern policing does not simply employ the technology of modern image-making; rather, photography and silent film shape the protocols of modern policing and disseminate its worldview. My dissertation argues that policing racially marked bodies, surveying urban vice, and containing women’s mobility offered strategies and material for both institutions to obtain legitimacy, expand power, and train audiences/subjects in the emerging relationship between optics and power in the public sphere. At times, these practices created conditions for institutional critique of the police and the cinema, as well as the broader capitalist system in which both were embedded.By connecting criminality, the capitalist mode of production, and the consolidation of the institutions of modern policing and cinema, I develop a methodology that prioritizes the consequences of capitalist modernity from the point of view of its victims; the capacity of film, as a technological commodity itself, to reflect on its emplacement in expanding industrial capitalism; and the distinct potential of silent film, as a global mass medium, to engage the critical possibilities of the universal. I put silent films in constellation with archival intertexts that illuminate the discursive regimes in which the films intervened and contemporary moving image media. In this way, “Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives” brings together methods from media archaeology, critical theory, and black studies to contribute to a “genealogy of our present”—a present marked by the circulation of digital media that document police abuse of power, as well as collective resistance to state-sanctioned violence.

Advisor: Doane, Mary Ann
Whissel, Kristen