VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Imprisonment and (Un)Relatedness in Northeast Brazil

This dissertation – based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in and around a men’s and a women’s prison – explores imprisonment and (un)relatedness in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. From the vantage point of a prison compound and the heavily penalized neighbourhoods surrounding it, I describe and analyze inextricable connectivities which bind this compound to its social milieu, prison cells to houses, and prisoners to non-prisoners. I focus in particular on the gendered experiences and life projects of male and female “subjects of incarceration” – social actors whose entanglements with the prison are relatively intense, namely: (ex-)prisoners, visitors, and non-visitors (people with an imprisoned relation who do not visit the prison). In short, what is at stake in this dissertation is the question of how social reproduction occurs in a context in which imprisonment has come to be a regular, predictable part of life for poor and racialized groups. To grasp material and symbolic continuities, ruptures, and interconnections constitutive of prison-society relations I have developed the concept of “carceral forms.” This concept offers an approach to delineating objects of inquiry and a set of questions that will enrich multidisciplinary conversations about imprisonment as well as punishment and society. Anthropological insights regarding (un)relatedness have informed my theoretical-methodological approach to practices of imprisonment. This means that I approach penality and penal effects through the ethnographic investigation of gendered social relations forged, maintained, strained, and severed within and across prison boundaries. I also use the ethnographic fact of relatedness theoretically. I draw on anthropological theorizations of (un)relatedness to trouble taken-for-granted carceral boundaries and devise an innovative object of inquiry which I call carceral forms. In conceptualizing imprisonment in this way, I take inspiration from Strathern (1989) and her emphasis on immanent sociality. That is, I take “the relation” (1995) as a starting point to rethink the prison as a social institution. Rather than presume the boundaries, and the boundedness, of this institution, I attend to the statements and practices of people who negotiate imprisonment in a manner that at once (re)produces differences between carceral and non-carceral domains and establishes connections between these emergently distinct domains.

Keywords: Bahia
Brazil
Carceral
Imprisonment
Relatedness
Advisor: Muehlebach, Andrea
Feature Selection, Cross-view Matching and Spoof Detection for Electrocardiogram-based Human Recognition

Biometric technology for identifying individuals has been extensively used all over the world. As this technology becomes increasingly popular, the potential of fooling or spoofing it is a rising concern. For example, fingerprint may be left behind whenever we touch a glass surface like a smart phone and from that some synthetic samples can be created that can be used to fool the biometric system. Iris images can also be captured from a few meters distance, not to mention face images that can be captured from a longer distance. Nowadays biometric spoofing and countermeasures is an active research area and there has been a lot of efforts towards a promising approach to ensure the presence of a real legitimate user. Medical biometrics such as Electrocardiogram (ECG) have interesting advantages over conventional biometrics. ECG is a vital signal and it naturally provides liveness detection. In addition, compare to conventional biometrics, if not impossible it is far more difficult to steal someone's ECG. Since ECG can be recorded from fingertips it is a natural choice for fusion with fingerprint. In this research work, we first provide a practical framework for fusion of ECG and fingerprint such that the resulting multimodal biometric system is more robust against novel spoof attacks. Despite its advantages, ECG comes with its challenges. ECG is a non-stationary signal and factors like emotion, diet and hear rate affect its waveform especially when recorded in different sessions. It becomes more challenging when subjects are enrolled using only one session and tested on another session that could be a few weeks apart. To reduce the effect of such non-stationarity, we propose a feature selection method to select a subset of features that are more stable across different recording sessions. Furthermore, to cope with the effect of heart rate on performance of ECG recognition, we propose a novel method for cross-view matching where the distance between two samples situated in different “views” can be computed. In this context “view” refers to different heart rates where samples in different views can be represented by feature sets that can be different in type and length.

Keywords: Feature Selection
Medical Biometrics
Advisor: Hatzinakos, Dimitris
Urban Soil Micromorphology at Bronze Age Palaikastro, Crete: A Geoarchaeological Investigation of Site Formation Processes

Across the Mediterranean region, human-environment interactions constitute a major research focus, often concerned with issues of sustainability, both past and present. The Aegean region shares many environmental features and often direct cultural interactions with this larger, encompassing region. While broader Mediterranean research questions are also applicable at the local Aegean level, there are some surprising gaps in inquiry, particularly in studies of the Bronze Age Aegean civilizations. Although narratives of the emergence and collapse of civilizations—such as that of Minoan Crete—do invoke environmental factors, whether catastrophic events (e.g., Theran eruption, tsunami) or anthropogenic processes (e.g., soil erosion, overintensive agriculture), there are few multi-scalar investigations of how urban centres interacted with their environments. This dissertation aims to address the aforementioned shortcoming. This project (part of the Palace and Landscape at Palaikastro Project) evaluates epistemological issues concerning the roles of geoarchaeological research and environmental science in archaeological research and applies an urban archaeological soil micromorphology approach to help understand the issues surrounding the episodes of occupation and disturbance at the Minoan urban centre of Palaikastro, in East Crete. The study demonstrates that varied types of socionatural transformations are visible via different scales of data and analysis. Micromorphological differences are observed between sediments related to urban abandonment and transformation processes. This micro-scale evidence indicates the influence of coastal sediments on the site; however, occupation of the urban structures appears to be related to the sustainability of the surrounding slopes. These findings illustrate that information garnered on ‘micro’ processes occurring in and between buildings in the urban settlement completes the punctuated dataset in which one typically encounters archaeological contexts produced by events (such as destructions and abandonments). The micromorphological data connects discrete, small-scale processes that occurred leading up to, and after, specific events and relates these processes to cycles of growth and decay, construction and abandonment, in the context of larger-scale social and environmental transformations.

Keywords: Bronze Age Aegean
Crete
Geoarchaeology
Micromorphology
Palaikastro
Urban
Advisor: Knappett, Carl
Energizing the Right: Economy, Ecology, and Culture in the 1970s US Energy Crisis

Taking up Janet Roitman’s charge to think critically about the epistemology of crises, this dissertation is an interdisciplinary cultural history of the 1970s “energy crisis” in the United States. It asks how a crisis of energy came to be, how different experts and interests interpreted its meaning, and how it has shaped US political culture. My central claim is that the energy crisis fostered neoliberalism in the United States by cultivating speculative discourses about energy futures that ultimately supported free market trade and energy policies by the early 1980s. Indeed, the energy crisis itself was always largely speculative, concerned with the possibility of greater scarcity in the future, and it generated competing visions of the future that ultimately moved the country further to the economic right. But this story is not just about the market. It is also about the ecological critiques of carbon capitalism that the energy crisis inspired and the ways in which they both challenged and overlapped with neoliberal formations. I first explore the evolution of the energy crisis as a historically specific assemblage that was only possible in the 1970s. I then consider the political flexibility of the crisis by tracing competing interpretations of its meaning. This theme continues in a chapter on the conservation ethic – a widely proposed solution to the energy crisis that excoriated the waste inherent in the American “way of life,” but for competing ends. Neoliberalism enters the story in my final chapters, which consider how “car films” valorized the white neoliberal subject through unfettered auto-mobility, and the establishment of oil futures contracts as a free market solution to the energy crisis. My interdisciplinary approach broadens the historiography of the energy crisis to consider the concepts, meanings, affects, and practices that comprised it, providing deeper context for the policy and geopolitical concerns that other scholars explore. I conclude that the articulation of a “crisis” was an insufficient foundation upon which to build a large scale energy transition.

Keywords: crisis
ecology
energy crisis
energy humanities
futures
neoliberalism
Advisor: Brown, Elspeth
Visions of Labour: Socialist Realism, American Reality TV and the Politics of Documentary

This dissertation considers a number of ideological visions of labour constructed through film and television. The socialist realist vision of work is considered through Soviet films of the 1930s within the context of the building of a workersâ state. This was a modernist dream of non-alienated human labour where the workers create and master the world, their labour revealing and capturing the utopian content in the now. In contrast to this utopian vision are several documentaries that depict technocratic dreams or nightmares of post-apocalyptic societies only to reveal that that future is already here for some. In the documentary central to this project, Michael Glawoggerâ s Workingmanâ s Death, workers inhabit the nowhere places of the global economy, their work unrecognizable as modern day labour. In construction of labour within global capitalism, the workers are rendered as alien and indeterminate, making identification and solidarity difficult if not impossible. The last section of the dissertation considers the vision of labour and the worker as constructed by neoliberalism not in faraway places but in our living rooms: workers competing on reality television for our entertainment. These pictures of labour reveal that work and the worker are socio-historical constructs, and that one of the central goals of emancipatory politics should be the self-representation of workers. The worker must be brought back to the forefront of politics and to the analysis of how the worker is represented in film, television, and in our society as a whole.

Keywords: documentary
reality TV
socialist realism
Soviet film
work
working class
Advisor: Lahusen, Thomas
Manganese-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Breast Cancer Cells

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is utilized in the detection of abnormalities and diseases such as cancer. MRI contrast agents (CAs) are routinely used in cancer imaging to provide enhanced diagnosis. There has been continued interest in engineering CAs and evaluating their diagnostic efficacy to overcome issues associated with clinically-approved CAs such as gadolinium窶電iethylenetriamine pentaacetic acid (Gd-DTPA). Of particular interest are intracellular CAs that can provide sensitive identification of labelled cells, opening the possibility of directly detecting early changes driving cancers at the cellular level before vasculature has been fully formed. To further explore the capabilities of intracellular CAs in T1-weighted MRI of breast cancer, this thesis aimed at (1) demonstrating the potential of MnCl2-enhanced MRI to detect and characterize early small (竕､5 mm3) breast tumors in vivo (2) investigating the potential of manganese-porphyrin-enhanced MRI for sensitive detection of multiple clinical subtypes of breast cancer cells in vitro at subtoxic doses using quantitative MRI (3) utilizing quantitative MRI to demonstrate the role the balance between hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity plays in developing CAs for effective T1-weighted MRI of cancer. This thesis has shown that MnCl2, unlike Gd-DTPA, provided enhancement of the entire tumor mass, depicting both tumor borders and interior morphology. At the early stage of tumor growth, MnCl2 also enabled cancer subtype-dependent differential enhancement and characterization. Moreover, this work demonstrated the superior Tﾂｬ1 enhancement capabilities of manganese porphyrins over Gd-DTPA of multiple clinical subtypes of breast cancer cells possibly due to their greater cellular uptake and relaxivities at 3.0 T. Also, using quantitative MRI, the more hydrophobic manganese porphyrin, MnTPPS3NH2, is shown to be a more sensitive T1 CA than MnTPPS4 for cellular imaging of breast cancers. Such sensitive cellular detection can potentially lead to lowering the dose needed to achieve positive enhancement and merits further future in vivo investigation.

Keywords: breast cancer detection
cancer imaging
cellular imaging
manganese-enhanced MRI
quantitative MRI
T1 contrast agents
Advisor: Macgregor, Rob
The Effect of Heat Stress on Reproduction in Arabidopsis thaliana, Camelina sativa, and Oryza sativa: A Carbonyl-targeted Proteomics Approach

The intensity and frequency of global heat stress events are predicted to increase in the coming decades as a result of global warming. The negative effect of high temperature (HT) on reproductive development in plants is a major cause of reduced yields in natural and arable ecosystems. During HT (≥ 32 °C) the accumulation of reactive carbonyl species (RCS), resulting from lipid peroxidation, damage plant cells by irreversibly carbonylating proteins and rendering them non-functional. Heat-induced RCS may induce failure of male and female reproductive development thereby reducing yields. If so, mitigating the effects of HT stress and HT-induced RCS should be a primary target of crop improvement. This dissertation examined the impact that chronic HT stress has on protein carbonylation, reproductive development, and genetic components in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, the emerging biofuel crop Camelina sativa, and the staple food crop, rice. The effect of HT (33 °C) on pollen development and the role of two genes encoding pollen-localized RCS-detoxifying enzymes are examined in Arabidopsis. One of these enzymes, HTT1, is shown to confer pollen thermotolerance in temperature-tolerant Arabidopsis ecotype by detoxifying RCS in pollen, thereby maintaining pollen function and seed set. HT also impacts pollen development and seed production in agronomic Brassicaceious species, such as C. sativa, where reductions in pollen tube growth, ovule number, and embryo sac development were associated with increased protein carbonylation at 35 °C. Reduced pollen tube growth, in conjunction with reduced ovule number and impaired embryo sac development, resulted in reduced seed number in Camelina at HT. The genetic resources available for C. sativa have recently expanded, and a QTL analysis identified candidate genes for improving ovule number at HT. HT (36°C) also induced protein carbonylation and was associated with a failure in pollen development in rice at the uninucleate stage. Across all species examined in this thesis, heat stress resulted in the production of RCS in reproductive tissues and reduced yields, suggesting that the production of RCS may be a universal response to heat stress. Identification of protein targets for heat-induced oxidative stress will highlight organelles and processes sensitive to heat and thus aid in the production of thermotolerant crop species.

Keywords: heat stress
plant reproduction
pollen
protein carbonylation
QTL analysis
Advisor: Sage, Tammy L
The Roles of Free Fatty Acids and Inflammation in Î˛-Cell Dysfunction

β-cell lipotoxicity refers to the adverse effects of chronically elevated plasma free fatty acids on β-cell function and mass and plays an important role in type 2 diabetes. The objective of my thesis was to investigate the role of inflammation in fat-induced β-cell dysfunction in vivo. I used in vivo models of 48h intravenous fat infusion in mice followed by hyperglycemic clamps or islet secretion studies ex vivo, and in vitro models of 48h exposure to oleate and palmitate in islets. The first study showed the proinflammatory kinase IKKβ is causally involved in fat-induced β-cell dysfunction during hyperglycemic clamps in vivo, ex vivo in isolated islets of fat-infused rodents and in vitro in oleate-exposed islets. This is the first study to show directly that β-cell IKKβ plays a causal role in fat-induced β-cell dysfunction in vivo. Inflammation induces insulin resistance in the classical insulin target tissues muscle, fat and liver and the purpose of the second study was to determine whether β-cell insulin resistance plays a causal role in fat-induced β cell dysfunction. We used models of pharmacologic and genetic upregulation of insulin signaling, which were protected from fat-induced β-cell dysfunction in vivo and ex vivo. These data are the first to show that β-cell insulin resistance plays a causal role in β-cell dysfunction induced selectively by fat. The intracellular NOD1 receptor of innate immunity also affects metabolism, however its role in β-cell function is unknown and was the focus of the third study. Mouse and human islets expressed NOD1 mRNA, the NOD1 activator FK565 decreased β-cell function and NOD1-KO islets were protected from palmitate-induced β-cell dysfunction in vitro. In vivo, FK565 decreased β-cell function and NOD1-KO mice were protected from palmitate-induced β-cell dysfunction. These data demonstrate that NOD1 plays a causal role in saturated-fat induced β-cell dysfunction in vivo.

Advisor: Giacca, Adria
Women Between West and East: the Inter-Rite Marriages of the Kyivan Rusâ Dynasty, ca. 1000-1204

This dissertation examines the marriage alliances of the Riurikids, the Orthodox rulers of Kyivan Rus’, with western-rite (Latin Christian / Catholic) rulers. Using both narrative and legal sources, it considers the process by which the brides in these marriages acculturated to the environment of their husbands’ courts, and the degree to which they were able to maintain ties with the culture of their birth. Through the prism of these women’s lives, the dissertation adds to our understanding of the social history of Orthodox-Catholic interaction among lay elites from the early eleventh century to 1204. While individual clerics such as Metropolitan Ioann of Kyiv disapproved of Orthodox-Catholic marriages in the 1080s, such condemnation was an extreme position for its time, and was rooted in concerns with preserving the ritual purity of Orthodox believers. Beginning in the late twelfth century, some western lay persons and clerics also may have disapproved of ties with Rus’, but their views remained in the minority. The dissertation confirms previous findings that the so-called Church Schism of 1054 was not an essential factor in the formation of these marriages until the thirteenth century. It demonstrates that brides in these inter-rite marriages did not experience a complete conversion to the religious tradition of their husbands nor rigidly maintain their allegiance to the culture of their birth; rather, they were able to keep some aspects of their former confessional and cultural identity, depending also on the specific court culture in which they found themselves. Cultural continuity with Rus’ was especially strong when brides were sent to areas of so-called “New Europe” (neighbouring Scandinavia, Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary). The dissertation concludes that marriages between the Riurikids and western-rite dynasties contributed to a cosmopolitan court culture among medieval elites at a time when barriers between Orthodoxy and Catholicism still remained porous.

Keywords: Cultural Exchange
History of Marriage
History of Rus'
History of the Church Schism
Queenship
Royal Women
Advisor: Cochelin, Isabelle
Smith, Allan
TO MAKE A GREAT NATION: The Hebrew Bible and the Idea of the People in Early-Modern Europe

Across today’s world, nearly every functioning state—whether democratic or not—makes some claim to represent a people. But where did this idea of “the people” come from in the first place? By this idea, I mean the people as both a popular entity—comprising a collective body of equal individuals—and a national one—representing a particular social and cultural group distinctive from all others around the world. My answer is that it arose out of the encounter between early-modern European thinkers and the Hebrew Bible. Beginning in the late 15th century, across a remarkable variety of texts—religious sermons, political tracts, dramatic dialogues, philosophical treatises, historiographic inquiries, and so on—we find writers drawing upon the Hebrew Bible as a resource for generating the images of peoplehood that would increasingly define political life into the modern era. At the same time, I think it useful to examine more deeply how certain writers have interpreted the Hebrew Bible. To that end, the back half of this work is devoted to attending to the ways that three particularly important thinkers—Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Benedict Spinoza—read the Hebrew Bible with respect to this idea of the people. A fuller understanding of the origins and development of the idea of the people—and the related concept of popular sovereignty—may provide a firmer basis for thinking about nationalism today. If we see this principle as constitutive, we may be less inclined to evince surprise at the next resurgence of nationalist energies. This may also help clarify how many contemporary conflicts have less to do with territory and security, and more to do with questions about peoplehood: who is in, who is out, and why. Conversely, the comparative stability of the contemporary world order owes much to our willingness to treat established settlements of that question as definitive. At the same time, as long as the concept of “the people” is up for grabs—especially in democracies—even the most settled questions may be open to revision in ways that impact both domestic and international politics.

Keywords: Hebrew Bible
nationalism
popular sovereignty
Advisor: Orwin, Clifford