VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Building the American Archive in the Atlantic World, 1776-1869

This dissertation examines the piece by piece collection of American archives from independence through the Civil War, explores the Atlantic context that these collections emerged in and depended on, and analyzes the historical narratives that they bolstered. Through six chapters, it shows that the development of U.S. historical societies, archival collections, and historical narratives was a far more contentious, uncertain, and global process than has been recognized. After a chapter examining the nature of American archives in an Atlantic context, it charts the attempts by different Americans from the Revolution through the Civil War to collect and narrate an antique, a medieval, a colonial, and a revolutionary history for the nation. Each of these is explored in a separate chapter, followed by a final chapter about women's influence on the development of collecting and archives throughout this period. This process of collecting and narrating American history took place in a dynamic hemispheric and transatlantic context as the U.S. expanded as a global power. Yet, it played out on a local level too, fragmented among the states. Without this framework comprising the global and local, it is impossible to understand how and why Americans in this period built the archives and told the histories that they did. Meanwhile, this dissertation shows how the authority and the responsibility to collect historical materials shifted unevenly over the course of these decades among individuals, historical societies, states, and the federal government. The dissertation asks why certain materials were collected, which narratives were imposed on or excluded from these archives, and who was empowered or denied the right to build these networks and collections, narrate the American past, and claim belonging in it.

Advisor: Peterson, Mark
Self-Assembling Systems from Single Molecules to Macromolecular Assemblies

Nanoparticle formulations of chemotherapeutics have been shown to be highly effective in the treatment of various cancers by increasing the amount of drug that can be delivered, reducing systemic toxicity, and increasing tumor uptake. Many nanoparticle scaffolds have been investigated in a drug delivery context, displaying diverse sizes, morphologies, compositions, and properties. One class of nanoparticles that has shown promise for drug delivery applications are those based on self-assembling proteins. These protein-based nanoparticles share many of the advantages of more traditional nanoparticle scaffolds made from synthetic materials, but also benefit from being biodegradable and genetically tuneable. Herein, the development of a new class of self-assembling proteins based on an intrinsically disordered protein sequence derived from human neurofilaments is discussed. Efforts to systematically alter the sequence space of these proteins to study variables that impact their physicochemical and self-assembling properties were undertaken. This allowed for the identification of protein variants that had favorable characteristics as drug delivery scaffolds and as general bio-surfactants. This work represents the initial steps in developing a quantitative model for the future engineering of self-assembling proteins based on this intrinsically disordered protein sequence.

Advisor: Francis, Matthew B.
Developing Designers of Digitally-Mediated Learning: A Socioculturally-Situated Model of Humanizing Critical Digital Pedagogy

Contemporary conversations about digital tools in education tend to focus on technology integration and notions of “digital transformation” without careful attention to pedagogy or sociocultural ecosystems related to education. Before COVID-19, prevailing conversations of educational technology left largely unaddressed digital divides and associated impacts on nondominant communities. This dissertation study focuses on one year (Year 3, or Y3) of a 3-year course redesign organized around principles of equity, design, and community participation to mediate literacy teacher candidates’ preparation to center sociocultural knowledge in their use of digital tools. Building on earlier foundations of Learn, Tinker, Create/Share of the two previous iterations, Y3 uniquely featured a digitally-networked community of learners that included pre-service and in-service teachers. The study employed qualitative methods of multi-sited ethnography and digital ethnography to investigate teacher candidates’ (n=10) meaning-making in participatory networks, their expansive learning related to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and their development, revealing, and applications of sociocultural knowledge across their designs of digitally mediated learning. Data sources included blog posts, Twitter posts, participant coursework, digitally-mediated learning designs (e.g. lesson plans, tool tutorials, and flipped instruction designs), multimodal compositions, all of which were created with free web-based ICTs. Findings from this study lay the groundwork for humanizing, critical digital pedagogy—a term coined to identify digital pedagogy that honors the lived subjectivities of nondominant communities and centralizes humanizing critical sociocultural knowledge throughout. The findings have research and practice implications related to teacher learning and collegiality (including in digital environments), critical digital literacies in teacher education, and pedagogical design. This vision of humanizing, critical digital pedagogy positions teachers as not only pedagogical designers, but also digital designers who can shape educational technology design cycles toward socially just futures through their uniquely intersecting knowledge domains.

Advisor: Mahiri, Jabari
The Making of “Foreign-Exchange Heroes”: Gender, Occupation, and the Social Organization of Labor Migration in Indonesia

This dissertation examines the interlocking web of social and political institutions that underpins the organization of international migration from the standpoint of a migrant-sending country. Based on 19 months of participant observation and interviews with more than 120 bureaucrats, staffing agents, NGOs, migrants and their families in Indonesia, Taiwan, and Singapore, the dissertation explores why and how labor management has propelled Indonesia’s rise as the world’s largest exporter of live-in women care workers./nThis dissertation uses training centers as an entry point to examine the political economy of labor management. Training centers are the nervous system of Indonesia’s labor export system, wherein raw labor-power is transformed into an ideal mobile workforce. Against the premise of a race to the bottom in a migratory order putatively controlled by host states, sending states may vie for market access by strategically elevating emigrant skillsets through the medium of training centers. Training centers are also pivotal sites wherein diverse schemes of privately organized labor management are congealed. In these “hidden abodes” of labor production, recruiters devise an ensemble of disciplinary techniques to compete for job orders and generate profit. The dissertation takes us to two such training centers, Indodespotic and Indofam, to uncover how brokers negotiate the competing demands of states, employers, and aspiring migrants. Indodespotic and Indofam serve as prototypes of what I call the prison and the school labor regimes, which are associated, respectively, with labor camps in the urban metropolis and educational facilities in the rural periphery. Whereas Indodespotic enacts strict regulations on trainees through spatial confinement, overt coercion, and family separation, Indofam grants recruits a high level of discretion with respect to many aspects of the labor process. These labor regimes generate contrasting female subjectivities. While Indodespotic produces atomized, pliable workers for the benefit of employers, Indofam manufactures animated, if somewhat disobedient, laboring subjects to juggle the needs of workers for autonomy and employers for professionalism. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the coexistence of these variegated labor regimes is emblematic of Indonesia’s increasingly rationalized system of migration governance.

Advisor: Burawoy, Michael
Structured Learning for Autonomous Driving

There are two main approaches for today's existing autonomous driving systems. The most popular one is the modularized approach, which divides the driving problem into multiple subproblems such as detection, localization, prediction and decision making and then solve them separately. Such approach is interpretable and easy to locate a malfunction during development. However, the predefined interfaces and heuristically designed solutions of individual modules inevitably introduce some form of information bottleneck to the driving process, limiting the performance of the final driving policy. Furthermore, developing and maintaining such a pipeline is costly. Extensive use of hand-engineered heuristics and pre-built maps also makes it hard and expensive to scale to new environments. Benefited from recent advances in artificial intelligence, the second approach is end-to-end autonomous driving, which learns a deep driving policy directly mapping the raw sensor inputs to control commands by interacting with the environment or imitating the collected driving data. Such a system is able to scale to new environments without much hand-engineering or pre-built maps, and is promising to obtain high-quality driving strategies for complex environments. Furthermore, the significantly simplified pipeline makes it cheap to develop and maintain. However, existing end-to-end autonomous driving systems are usually inefficient to train and dealing with simple driving tasks, without interpretability and safety guarantee of the learned driving policies./nThis dissertation introduces a structured learning approach for autonomous driving, which combines the advantages of both the modularized approach and the end-to-end approach, while alleviating their shortcomings. Instead of dividing the system into a lot of heuristic-based modules or learning an end-to-end driving policy directly from raw sensor inputs to control, we propose to learn a compactly structured autonomous driving system. The system is composed of policies and deep environment models, which can be learned/obtained separately or jointly depending on the situations. The resulted driving policy is able to handle raw sensor inputs and produce appropriate control commands. With this structured learning approach, we can improve not only the training efficiency and performance, but also the interpretability and safety of the system. The dissertation contains four parts. The first two parts introduce the policies we use in our system, which can be either planning-based policies (the first part) or learning-based policies (the second part). The third part introduces how to learn deep environment models capable of handling raw sensor inputs with latent representation learning. The fourth part talks about how to combine the deep environment models with the policies to construct and learn structured deep autonomous driving systems.

Advisor: Tomizuka, Masayoshi
Strangers and Intimates: How Law Inflects Subjectivity, Morality, and Experience in China

This dissertation is about how modern forms of law interact with culture, subjectivities, and social morality. The argument builds upon an ethnographic investigation of law in everyday life among Reform-generation residents of Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, in the People’s Republic of China. Departing from approaches that foreground law’s coercive functions (especially in authoritarian China), my approach emphasizes law as a cultural ideology that contributes to forming identities and subjectivities. By shifting focus from the state to subjectivities that emerge through legal imaginings and interactions, this dissertation reveals how recent legal reforms in China have impacted ordinary people’s understandings of meaning, morality, relationships, and self in the midst of the massive structural upheavals characterizing 21st century China./nThe analysis incorporates a grassroots-level vantage of law in three exemplary scenarios of everyday Chinese life—traffic accidents, divorce, and filial responsibility. Based on 17 months of field research conducted in Chengdu, it employs multi-sited ethnography, court judgments, and media reporting to show how the Chinese state’s embrace of law and legal ideologies manifests in, resonates with, and departs from people’s basic assumptions, desires, and fantasies about, for example, how to treat strangers, the purpose of marriage, and the obligations that children owe their parents. These ethnographic observations support the dissertation’s two most distinctive findings: (1) That the legal subject emerging in China, unlike the atomized individual posited in liberal theories of rational law, is embedded in networks of reciprocal relationships; and (2) that an analysis focused on what I term “legally enable subjectivity” facilitates understanding how and why my interlocutors have formed particular affective, ethical, and (in some respects) unconscious orientations towards the law, the various subject positions law prescribes, and the recognition law confers. This perspective illuminates the imaginative ways that individuals exercise agency in the production of law’s life in the world. The dissertation’s conclusion that law interacts intimately with people’s sense of self and sociality invites viewing law’s role in other societies in similar terms.

Advisor: Liu, Xin
Juvenile Oncorhynchus mykiss in Dire Straits? Sultans of a thermal swing.

Heat stress threatens the survival of Pacific salmonids at the southern extent of their range in Northern California and Southern Oregon. The high ecological, cultural, and economic value of Pacific Salmonids in this area has motivated a broad range of policy and management efforts aimed at supporting the persistence of these fish. These efforts will require user-friendly and scientifically informed decision-support tools. These tools must include mechanisms to identify and protect the sites that are most likely to support Pacific Salmonid persistence in warming surface water environments: sites known as thermal refugia./nThis dissertation focuses on a subset of cold water thermal refugia, those formed by cold water confluences with warm main river stems. It uses two such confluences in the South Fork Eel River in Northern California as case study locations, and the juvenile steelhead trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss, as a case study species. O. mykiss juveniles rear over the warm summer within the South Fork Eel River, and are exposed to heat stress in the warm main stem, which they are observed to escape from by holding in cold water confluence refugia. The dissertation synthesises approaches from fluid mechanics, hydrology, and ecology to refine the identification and definition of thermal refugia for O. mykiss, partly by exploring contradictions between the existing definitions and partly by linking fluid mechanics with fish bioenergetics to understand how fishes might use these refugia O.mykiss. Finally, the dissertation presents a mechanistic modeling framework for predicting the volume of available thermal refuge habitat at confluences. The framework is robust to non-stationary conditions and flexible enough to address the diverse physiological needs within a population of juvenile O.mykiss. By using parsimonious predictive approaches, the research generates tools to predict the extent of cold zones, and define their importance as thermal refugia for salmonids, over the large scales and multiple environments contained within river basin salmonid habitat.

Advisor: Thompson, Sally
Humanity in Ruins? Liberal Disillusion and the Left Critique of Human Rights at the End of the Twentieth Century

Abstract/nHumanity in Ruins? Liberal Disillusion and the Left Critique of Human Rights at the End of the Twentieth Century/nby/nZachary-John Manfredi/nDoctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessors Wendy Brown and Pheng Cheah, Co-Chairs/nThis dissertation analyzes the discourses and practices of left political thinkers and activists in the Euro-Atlantic world who adopted the language of human rights in the fifty years after 1968. The dissertation investigates recent histories in order to distinguish socialist theories of human rights from the projects of post-war liberalism and neoliberalism. It examines invocations human rights across a variety of late twentieth and early twenty-first century scholarly literatures and political sites: 1970s and 80s anglophone Marxist debates about the reception of Eastern Bloc dissidents, the post-68 French Left’s reckoning with the failures of revolutionary politics, post-colonial struggles to restructure the global economy through the New International Economic Order and the right to development, and post-financial crisis social movements challenging corporate power, austerity, and structural racism in the United States. Through its historical excavations the dissertation challenges the characterization of socialism as inherently antagonistic to human rights. It argues that left thinkers turned to human rights in order to reassess the tradition of Marxist political and legal thought in light of twentieth century authoritarian state violence and to articulate their support for anticolonial struggles for self-determination. In this era, left political thinkers developed novel theories of human rights as part of a socialist political imaginary and simultaneously produced compelling critiques of liberal and neoliberal accounts of human rights. The dissertation also assesses whether alternative formulations of human rights remain latent in legal instruments, social movement discourses, and institutional practices today.

Advisor: Brown, Wendy
Cheah, Pheng
High Hopes on a Tightrope: The Nexus of Education, Discourse and Latino Boys

In recent years, the marginal status of Latino boys has garnered political attention. From the Obama Foundation to California’s Select Committee on Boys and Men of Color, these policy makers center around an alleged commitment to academic success. Few studies, however, focus on the experiences of high-performing Latino boys and employ a critique of “merit” itself. My dissertation research probes further with a three-fold purpose: (1) examine the way political discourses via government documents and mainstream media construct notions of merit and deservingness, (2) examine the way high-performing Latino boys resist or reproduce political discourses, and (3) examine the experiences of high-performing Latino boys via a social justice curriculum. My dissertation takes place at a high school in the Bay Area of Northern California and highlights the experiences of 14 Latino boys as they apply to top-tier universities. I employ the lenses of Critical Social Theory and Critical Discourse Studies to conduct a content analysis of political discourse and media coverage, as well as ethnographic methods to examine the experiences of high-performing Latino boys. This work aims to challenge our understanding of academic success—going beyond cognitive skill sets into a more social, political, and performative realm. Central to this work is a critical examination of the role of race, gender, and neoliberalism in shaping political discourses and student trajectories. Special attention to resistance, social reproduction, and Latino male identity will provide fruitful avenues to reimagine education and build transformative academic spaces.

Advisor: Baquedano-López, Patricia
Finding the Man in the Glyphosate

Glyphosate, the main ingredient in “Roundup” pesticide and a probable human carcinogen, is reportedly the most ubiquitous agricultural chemical on Earth. Finding the Man in the Glyphosate attempts to understand how this inescapable risk became a global reality, applying critical feminist theory and qualitative methodology. I focus on the academic discipline of toxicology science in particular, as practiced in the United States, critically analyzing textbooks, classroom pedagogy, and professional conferences. Because toxicology science is, by design, not only an applied but also a policy-producing science, I also assess the regulatory regimes of chemical risk assessment in the U.S., inclusive of national manuals and federal and state rule-making. Together, my critical discourse analysis of academic and regulatory toxicology texts, participant-observation of university-level toxicology courses and professional toxicology conferences, and semi-structured interviews with researchers, regulators, journalists, and advocates, demonstrates that toxicology is akin to a gas occupying the shape of its container. The current container happens to be hegemonic Euro-American scientific onto-epistemology, an Enlightenment-era rational empiricism based upon imperial pursuits of economic gain, nature as an object to be dominated, and the prerogatives of white male supremacy and heteropatriarchy. This sort of “logic,” I contend, helps explain how a carcinogenic and possibly endocrine-disrupting chemical like glyphosate remains legal, profitable, and proliferate—yet inequitably deployed. Moreover, I posit that the inherent biases of toxicology science and U.S. chemical risk assessment impede today’s environmental justice-seeking toxicologists from realizing their laudable goals of chemical bans and reparative clean-ups, for as long as science-the-authority is premised upon reactionary social and ecological hierarchies, any potential challengers are disadvantaged by the rules of a rigged game—“the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 1984). I close with an invitation to environmental health advocates to embrace and enact a more explicitly politically engaged scientific practice, qualifying the power asymmetries that differently distribute toxic exposures alongside their edifying quantifications of the uneven burdens borne.

Advisor: Kosek, Jon "Jake" G
Mascarenhas, Michael
Algorithmic Gentrification: Locating Value in Urban Information Systems

Contemporary digital location-based services (LBS) like Yelp, Foursquare, and Google Maps are part of a longer genealogy of "crowd-sourced" information systems quantifying urban amenities, starting with the 1980s debut of New York's Zagat Restaurant Survey. These distributed sociotechnical systems operate across a variety of scales, organizing information, human labor, and urban space. In this dissertation, I use archival research, key informant interviews, and spatial analysis of review data from 1980 to the present to argue that information systems have a material effect on development trajectories and everyday life in cities. These systems are shaped by and shape the urban settings in which they have been deployed, especially sites of early experimentation and development like New York City and San Francisco. Designed to index urban space for consumption, LBS and digital maps increasingly help to constitute it, as local reviews and social networks have become flashpoints in debates about gentrification, displacement, and structural racism.

Advisor: Watts, Michael
O'Sullivan, David