VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Patterns of Liberation: Social and Archaeological Analysis at the Blair Mountain Battlefield, 1921

This dissertation examines the Battle of Blair Mountain occurring in Logan County, West Virginia, and which was the largest labor war in United States history. The battle was fought in 1921 by revolting coalminers against a quasi-militarized force backed by coalmine owners. The issues that surrounded this battle, such as social inequality, oppression, and social change, are highly prescient for debates ongoing in society today. This dissertation investigates both the historical context of the battle and the current issues that impact communities around the modern day battlefield. This analysis incorporates multiple datasets from both primary and secondary sources, including archaeological material, historical records, previously compiled oral histories, and modern sociological studies. This allows a multi-dimensional and diachronic view of a system of inequality based around the extraction of coal from central Appalachia. The theoretical framework used to interpret these data is drawn from intersectional theory (Collins 1990) and liberation theory (Albert et al. 1986), which are combined in this study to explain inequality and oppression as resulting from multiple spheres within society that overlap and reinforce each other. The theoretical framework divides both the historic and contemporary social context into five spheres: political, legal, economic, civic, and social. In this, an illustration for how each of these spheres work at the local level is given to explain the historic and current social issues surrounding the battle. Archaeological evidence from the battlefield is then examined using the framework of intersectionality and liberation theory. From ammunition and terrain analysis, this dissertation shows that the social context around the battle generated not only a unique form of oppression, but also of resistance. The miners during the course of the insurrection engaged in a highly efficient and coordinated mass uprising, where the primary dynamic was that of intersectional solidarity. This was where the common struggle incorporated the interests of many different people from different backgrounds and ethnicities. This is in contrast to traditional explanations of labor struggle as resulting from class solidarity superseding racial, ethnic, regional, or other identities and experiences. This research contributes to multiple conversations within the social sciences, including ones around community-based research, social and environmental issues around energy extraction, working class archaeology, and theories of social transformation.

Advisor: Conkey, Margaret
Nonlinear Modeling of the Early and Mid-Level Visual System

The work presented in this thesis is toward the goal of extracting structure and meaning from neuroscientific data. Data in visual neuroscience is becoming increasingly high dimensional and the stimulus-response relationships can be highly nonlinear. Data in visual neuroscience is also somewhat noisy due to the imprecise separation of signals from multiple neurons on an electrode, nonstationary effects in the brain, and inherent noise in the brain; neurons rarely respond identically to identical stimuli. Finding nonlinear relationships between a high dimensional stimulus and neural responses in the presence of substantial noise is a challenging nonlinear regression problem. This thesis presents effective techniques for solving this problem and creating highly predictive models of neural function. I first introduce linearized regression, a technique for modeling nonlinear responses using linear regression on a nonlinear transformation of the stimulus. Next I demonstrate a method for efficiently finding Volterra series representations of nonlinear neural responses. Finally, I demonstrate that deep neural networks can provide accurate and interpretable models of the neural computations in visual cortex.

Advisor: Gallant, Jack
Japan's Response to the Russian Revolution: Anarchism, Socialism, and Pan-Asianism in the early 1920s

In my dissertation I analyze how Japanese radicals, both socialists and nationalists, responded to the Russian Revolution in the crucial period from 1917 to 1925. I argue that Left and Right ideologies in Japan were defined during these years, and that this process must be viewed within the larger framework of the changing nature of the Russian Revolution and the advance of communist ideology and its Soviet agents into the North East Asian region./nDuring 1917-1925 the Japanese socialists split in their understanding of the Russian revolution into anarchists, national socialists, and Bolsheviks. Anarchists, by far the most popular movement among the radical intellectuals and workers until 1923, believed the revolution's goal was individual liberation and destruction of the state. National socialists maintained that the Russian Revolution was about building a strong Russian nation-state based on the principles of national self-determination, national values, and nationalized property. The distinction between national socialists and the radical right wing therefore was never clear, and most often both groups shared the same people and same sponsors. Finally, Japanese Bolsheviks created in 1922 the Japanese communist party, which, I argue, was communist largely in name. The most thorough Japanese Bolsheviks did not accept the principle of a vanguard party of "professional revolutionaries" until the mid-1920s, did not support the abolition of the imperial institution, and did not discuss the abolition of private property./nThe radical right wing, and particularly the pan-Asianists, who form the focus of my project, saw the Russian revolution as an alternative modernity project. They argued that Japan, inspired by the Russian example, must develop an alternative, non-Western (i.e. non-White) vision of modernity, based on Asian history and values. I argue that in the early 1920s Japanese pan-Asianists were inspired by internationalism the Russian Bolsheviks proclaimed, and worked on democratic anti-colonial liberation movements. As Soviet Russia advanced in North Asia and gained power in Chinese politics, Japanese Asianists changed their opinion of Russia, from ally to enemy, increasingly aligning themselves with the Japanese imperial interests and actions in Asia./nThe goal of the dissertation is to move beyond the preconceived definitions of Left and radical Right, and expose the fluid and often interchangeable nature and ideology of the Japanese Left and Right. New ideologies, although sharing many features with contemporary radical movements in Europe, were defined by the perceived stage of Japanese society vis-à-vis the rest of the world (e.g. Asia, Russia, the advanced West), and by the perceived dangers the new geopolitical situation in East Asia presented.

Advisor: Barshay, Andrew
The Geometry of Thermodynamic Control

Living systems are distinguished by their self-organization. Given the entropic driving force embodied in the second law of thermodynamics, creating and maintaining such organization requires staying far from equilibrium. Furthermore, since selective advantage may be incurred by energetically-efficient operation, evolution may have sculpted biological components to interact so as to reduce the energy wasted during transitions. Therefore, a deeper understanding of the principles governing biological molecular machines and their synthetic counterparts may be achieved by cultivating a set of tools to explore the optimization of finite-time nonequilibrium transitions of mesoscopic systems./nRecent work has shown that when a thermodynamic system is driven from equilibrium then, in the linear response regime, the space of controllable parameters has a Riemannian geometry induced by a generalized friction tensor. Optimal protocols are equivalent to geodesics in the geometric sense./nWe exploit this geometric insight to construct closed-form expressions for minimal-dissipation protocols for a colloidal particle diffusing in a one dimensional harmonic potential. These protocols are verified numerically. We also calculate and numerically verify protocols optimizing the Hatano-Sasa Y-value (a quantity relevant for transitions between nonequilibrium steady states and similar to dissipated work) for a colloidal particle dragged through solution by a translating optical trap with two controllable parameters. Finally, in an application that has particular relevance to small-scale information processing systems, we calculate maximally efficient erasure cycles for deletion of a single classical bit of information. The system storing this bit consists of an overdamped Brownian colloidal particle diffusing in a one-dimensional double-well potential separated by a potential barrier stabilizing the memory.

Advisor: DeWeese, Michael R
Global Full-Waveform Tomography Using the Spectral Element Method: New Constraints on the Structure of Earth's Interior

The radially anisotropic shear-velocity structure of the earth's mantle provides a critical window on the interior dynamics of the planet, with isotropic variations interpretable in terms of thermal and compositional heterogeneity and anisotropy in terms of flow. Indeed, more than 30 years after the advent of global seismic tomography, many open questions remain regarding the dual roles of temperature and composition in shaping mantle convection, as well as interactions between different dominant scales of convective phenomena. To this end, we use full-waveform inversion of the long-period teleseismic wavefield to image radially anisotropic shear-wave velocity at the scale of the entire globe. In particular, we use a technique which we have termed the "hybrid" waveform-inversion approach, which combines the accuracy and generality of the spectral finite element method (SEM) for forward modeling of the global wavefield, with non-linear asymptotic coupling theory for efficient inverse modeling. This hybrid technique helps considerably in making SEM-based global waveform inversion tractable, as it allows for the use of a rapidly converging Gauss-Newton scheme for optimization of the underlying seismic model. We take additional steps to reduce the cost of these inversions using novel techniques for treatment of the earth's crust. Namely, naive modeling of thinly layered crustal structure can lead to an overly restrictive time-stability condition in the SEM, which in turn drives up the cost these simulations. Instead, taking advantage of the physics of long-period wave propagation, we introduce alternative parameterizations of crustal structure which appear identical to the wavefield, but relax these constraints on stability./nWe approach this imaging problem in an iterative fashion, hoping to learn something about the earth's interior at each step. First, we present our work focused on the upper mantle and transition zone (≤ 800km depth) in the form of the global model SEMum2, discussing both its development and general properties. Second, we take a detailed look at novel structures in SEMum2 - namely, never-before-seen low-velocity structures in the upper mantle beneath the ocean basins, showing intriguing correlations with other geophysical observables (e.g. absolute plate motions and the geoid). Third, we move on to imaging of the whole mantle, examining the relationships between different scales of convective phenomena in the upper and lower mantle, and particularly those previously seen in SEMum2. Finally, we discuss novel computational aspects of our work, focusing specifically on applications of the partitioned global address-space model of parallel computation to the large-scale data-driven calculations underlying our hybrid inversion approach.

Advisor: Romanowicz, Barbara A
Small Pond Migration: Chinese migrant shopkeepers in South Africa

The steady growth of Chinese migrants to South Africa in the past decade provides an opportunity to use Amartya Sen's (2001) capabilities approach in the field of immigration. This theoretical framing along with qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews and participant observation in three South African cities, Johannesburg, Durban, and Bloemfontein, reveals that the Chinese employ, what I call, a small pond migration strategy--utilizing mobility to maximize their social, economic, and human capital. I argue that mainland Chinese migrants move to South Africa because of a desire to adventure out of China and pursue freedoms associated with being one's own boss. Once in South Africa, they choose to stay because of comfortable weather and a slower pace of life, despite losing freedoms associated with high crime in Johannesburg. As a contrast to these mainland Chinese migrants, Chinese migrants from the province of Fujian embrace a hyper-small pond migration strategy where they move year to year searching out the best places to make money. This is because rather than valuing long-term development and quality of life concerns, Fujianese migrants value short-term money-making above all. These findings suggest alternative ways of understanding factors of migration, a way to utilize Sen's capabilities framework in immigration studies, a model that explains migration from more developed countries to less developed ones, and a potentially predictive model of what may happen throughout the African continent as China invests more in Africa.

Advisor: Bloemraad, Irene
Translating the Arab World: Contingent Commensuration, Publishing, and the Shaping of a Global Commodity

In the dissertation, I explore the translation, publishing, and marketing process of Arabic novels in English. My research examines how translations of Arabic novels are produced as a commodity within a globalized publishing industry and circulate in a highly-charged political context. In the process, these novels--and the individuals involved in making them--produce, resist, respond to, and incorporate ideas and representations of the Arab world in the West or English-speaking world. The dissertation asks what kind of translation is possible in a cultural and political landscape shaped by wars, sanctions, media stereotypes, and histories of colonization. In each of my chapters, I address the specific practices of translation, editing, and branding that produce the novel as a global commodity that serves as an interface between the West and the Arab world. My ethnographic research was primarily conducted in Cairo, Egypt in 2010, where I worked at the American University in Cairo Press, the largest publisher of translations from Arabic to English. While there, I conducted extensive interviews and fieldwork with translators and Egyptian authors./nMy research examines the broader context of Arabic novels in English translation as they circulate in the politicized public sphere of the West. How are political and social elements incorporated into the text through lexical items that index cultural ephemera? How do novels as contingently-constructed objects move and circulate? Translation, as I discuss it here, is a process that extends beyond the text to include the creation of equivalence across cultural differences, differing business models and histories, varying concepts of art and literature, as well as material differences that shape the production, circulation, and reception of these novels./nIn doing this, my work intervenes in the scholarly literature around globalization, transnationalism, and circulation in two central ways. First, I argue that translation is a kind of scale-making project that works to move between and reconstruct local and global spheres. Second, I argue that translation renders certain elements mobile and other immobile, enabling some aspects (of language, culture, experience, and so on) to circulate while creating others as fixed. In this way, translation emerges as a key site for thinking about the construction of the global and local in the contemporary moment.

Advisor: Briggs, Charles
Pandolfo, Stefania
Non-Permanent Contraceptive Methods in India: Exploring the Inter-play of Ethics, Policy, and Cultural Influences

Universal access to reproductive health and the promotion of reproductive rights were key goals articulated at the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994. The role of contraception in meeting these goals is critical. Access to contraception helps women avoid unintended pregnancies, improves maternal and infant health by spacing births, and reduces the need for abortions. The benefits of modern contraception also extend beyond the realm of health to economic and social gains for women. Women who delay pregnancy are more likely to remain in school and participate in the labor force. While the past decades have witnessed significant increases in the provision of modern contraceptive methods, there are still more than 200 million women around the globe who want to delay or stop pregnancy, but do not have access to contraception. Women in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa suffer disproportionately from poor health related to pregnancy and childbirth, and thus, stand to gain the greatest benefit from investments in contraception policies and programs./nIn India, state-sponsored family planning programs have been promoted since 1951. The predominant focus has been on permanent methods, and female sterilization currently accounts for nearly 60% of modern contraceptive use. The use of non-permanent contraceptive methods, including oral contraceptive pills, injectable contraceptives, and intra-uterine devices, remains low. This dissertation sought to explore women's experiences with making decisions about, and using, non-permanent contraceptive methods, taking into account individual, family, and community influences. Building upon those women's experiences and their reasons for using non-permanent methods, this research then explores key opinion leaders' attitudes towards, and the policy landscape of, injectable contraceptives within India, a method that has been controversial within that country. Finally, a new theoretical framework of autonomy is proposed for analyzing women's reproductive and contraceptive decision-making, and rights to self-determination.

Advisor: Potts, Malcolm
Russian Opera in the Age of Psychological Prose

Russian Opera in the Age of Psychological Prose examines the relationship between opera and literature in Russia between 1866 and 1881, considering the ways in which both art forms reflected and contributed to contemporaneous understandings of human subjectivity. The status and psychology of the individual was a vital issue for Russian writers of the time, owing to both the new social circumstances that arose from Alexander II's Great Reforms and the still-reverberating salvos from the radical critics of the 1860s, who believed that the political destiny of Russia depended on the psychological constitution of Russians. I argue that opera, a genre that has always traded in the externalization of inner emotional states, played an important and little-understood role in these conversations. Interdisciplinary in orientation, my project draws liberally from the fields of musicology, Slavic studies, psychology, comparative literature, and the history of ideas./nAfter an extended historical and theoretical introduction in "Opera, Literature, and Psychological Realism in 1870s Russia," three chapters focus on the works of Modest Musorgsky and Pyotr Chaikovsky, Russian opera's most celebrated psychologists. "Boris Godunov and the Terrorist" discusses Musorgsky's treatment of Tsar Boris' upstart antagonist, the historical figure of Dmitri the Pretender, in light of the contemporary controversy surrounding Dmitri Karakozov's 1866 assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander II. Considering texts by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Chernyshevsky, this chapter contextualizes the Pretender's ambiguous operatic fate within a broad debate about the morality and psychology of political violence. In "Nowhere Man: Evgeny Onegin and the Politics of Reflection in Nineteenth-Century Russia," I put Chaikovsky's opera in dialogue with the reception history of Pushkin's novel, investigating the ways in which the opera responds to, and transforms, key questions about the status and politics of introspection in contemporary Russian culture. Taking its title and central questions from Tolstoy's 1869 War and Peace, "Khovanshchina, The Maid of Orleans, and the Force that Moves the Nations" interrogates Russian ideas about the role of the individual in history. I juxtapose Chaikovsky's The Maid of Orleans with Musorgsky's Khovanshchina, examining the divergent takes these operas present on history and human agency./nTogether, these studies propose that opera, far from a mere nationalist vehicle or cultural divertissement, served as public staging ground for the exploration, reflection, and enaction of many of the most important social and intellectual issues of late imperial Russia.

Advisor: Taruskin, Richard
Fragmented Loyalties: The Great Migration's Impact on South Vietnam, 1954-1963

This dissertation examines the impact of Vietnam's Great Migration. During a 300-day period between 1954 and 1955, over 860,000 people, many of them Catholic, fled from northern Vietnam to the South. The transmigration profoundly reshaped Vietnamese society and politics. Representing nearly 4% of the entire population of Vietnam in 1954, the refugees arrived in the South homeless, jobless and often separated from family. The overwhelmed regime struggled to resettle migrants in hundreds of haphazard villages in South Vietnam. These villages consisted entirely of northern migrants, often from a single parish or village in the North, and directed by northern Catholic priests. The new villages quickly adopted regional and religious customs peculiar to the homes their inhabitants left behind. At the same time, southerners resented the recent arrivals as carpetbaggers favored by the government. This prompted the government to withdraw assistance to these new villages. As a result, ironically, northern migrants became even more reliant on traditional regional customs and religious institutions in order to overcome the many pressures and struggles they faced in this new land. Finally, the migration and resettlement left indelible marks on the culture, arts, politics and society of Vietnam that are still felt today./nThis dissertation differs from existing scholarship on the subject in its emphasis both on Vietnamese actors as agents of history and the migration as a crisis that affected every aspect of southern society. Instead of portraying the northern migrant community as the privileged loyalist bloc of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime, this project reveals how the refugees faced countless struggles and disappointments in places that proved inhospitable. Moreover, this project challenges the long held assumption of a close alliance between Diem and the Catholic Church in Vietnam. The migration and resettlement process caused deep division in all aspects of society and contributed to the regime's ultimate collapse.

Advisor: Zinoman, Peter B