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On the multimodal communication and social cognition of the plains zebra (Equus quagga)
No full textMultimodality is a virtually ubiquitous feature of communication. To understand the full subtlety and complexity with which animals use communication to solve the challenges of their social environment, it must be studied as the interconnected, multimodal system that it is. Using the plains zebra, which possesses a rich, multimodal communication system and the greatest social complexity among the equids, this dissertation seeks to understand how animals living in complex societies use their multimodal communication to navigate their social and physical environments in accordance with their social niche. I investigated a previously undescribed visual signal in the plains zebra, the “headbob,” and found the first evidence that it may demonstrate the three key criteria used to infer joint attention in nonhuman animals: first-order intentional communication, sensitivity to receiver attentional state, and common ground. Additionally, I developed a novel framework for using network analysis techniques as a tool to describe and visualize the relationships between simultaneously produced signals within and between modalities, as well as to infer signal meaning and function. Leveraging this technique, I examined the ontogeny of multimodal communication in plains zebras and the social forces that act to shape its development, demonstrating that juvenile individuals use simpler and less combinatorically complex communication to potentially mitigate social risk during the relatively vulnerable period of immaturity. I also used this technique to investigate how individuals balance self-maintenance with social maintenance behaviors during a period of acute environmental stress, revealing how individuals modulate the ways in which they communicate to minimize ambiguity and risk when interactions are costly but bonds cannot be sacrificed. Finally, I expanded beyond plains zebras to examine the study of multimodality in animal communication and human language with an emphasis on identifying parallel threads of inquiry, as well as areas that would benefit from increased interdisciplinary collaboration. Overall, my dissertation contributes to our understanding of how animals can use multimodal communication to flexibly solve the challenges in their social and physical environment in accordance with their social niche
New Objectives: Possibilities for Painting in 1920s Germany
No full textNew Objectives frames the figurative painting produced in 1920s Germany as a form of work and as a dialectical social intervention that was both protective and experimental. The artists under discussion, affiliated with the tendency known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), produced paintings in view of the demands that greeted labor in various contemporary industries and, at the same time, demonstrated how art evaded the other fields’ expectations. Beholden to exclusive Western artistic traditions through its maintenance of figuration, oil paint, and genre, the painting invoked, too, its period’s disaggregated makeup: through content that displayed diverse strata of workers and products, through formal strategies that suggested new ways of seeing, and through the extra-artistic activities of the artists themselves, propelled by material and creative concerns. In sum, the artists (and their critics) wondered if the specification of art’s unique possibilities and of artists’ consciousness could facilitate a social, artistic, and historical reorganization based on the transferability of skills across vocations and vocations across classes.
Each chapter centers an emblematic painter whose practice as a whole forced them to reckon with non- or para-artistic social milieux and technical imperatives, and who also mobilized artistic strategies dating from the Middle Ages to modernism. Chapter 1 focuses on Wilhelm Schnarrenberger, whose narrative opens on to four dynamics central to the next two chapters, focused respectively on Anton Räderscheidt and Carl Grossberg: art’s relationship to professionalization, the role of the artist in a diversified material environment, the fraught affiliation of painting with mental and manual (and public and domestic) labor, and of these forms of labor with imputed class consciousness or ideology. A conclusion prods the Neue Sachlichkeit’s apparent aesthetic and political contradictions; in doing so, it historicizes the tendency’s reception and the modernist critique of so-called “returns” in art history. Here the painting appears less reactionary than reactive: part of a wider inquiry into the complex rhythms of (art) history itself. Throughout, New Objectives situates the question of Neue Sachlichkeit’s adequacy to, or stability within, a historical position defined as much by modernism, modernity, capitalism, and liberalism as by contemporaneous revisions thereof
INTEGRATIVE MULTI-OMIC DATA ANALYSIS AND SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
No full textSingle-cell technologies have enabled us to profile the internal state of individual cells with increasingly high granularity, but computational methods to extract deep biological insight from these complex, multi-omic datasets remain underdeveloped. Unstandardized workflows with arbitrary quality-control (QC) thresholds lead to low reproducibility, and it remains challenging for scientists without coding skills to gain biological insight using these valuable data. Here, we develop an end-to-end computational pipeline for rigorous, reproducible analysis of single-cell data, and then we apply this pipeline, along with other analytical techniques, to epigenomic and transcriptomic data gathered from an influenza challenge study to better understand how influenza infection shapes innate immune memory. We first describe our work on SPEEDI (Single-cell Pipeline for End to End Data Integration), a computational end-to-end pipeline that processes single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq), single-cell ATAC-seq (scATAC-seq), or multiome data in a reproducible, robust manner. After reading input data, the pipeline automatically filters the data using algorithmically determined thresholds for common QC metrics, integrates data using a novel data-derived batch inference method, annotates cell types using an internal or user-provided reference object, and then performs preliminary downstream analyses within each cell type. Importantly, SPEEDI is available both as an R package for advanced users and as an interactive web server for biologists with no prior coding experience. We next apply SPEEDI and other analytical techniques to investigate how innate immune memory develops following influenza infection. We leverage blood samples from a human influenza virus challenge study to conduct integrative multi-omic data analyses, focusing specifically on the epigenetic and transcriptomic profiles of subjects at 1 day pre-challenge and 28 days post-challenge. We find that the innate immune system enters a state of suppressed inflammation after resolution of infection, with decreased cytokine and AP-1 gene expression and decreased chromatin accessibility at AP-1 targeted loci and promoter regions of interleukin-related genes. However, increased chromatin accessibility at promoter regions of interferon-related genes and increased MAP kinase gene expression may suggest that the innate immune system is primed to respond to subsequent infection
Sovereignty's Glitch: Structures of Feeling in Native American Literature
No full textSovereignty’s Glitch: Structures of Feeling in Native American Literature reads contemporary Native American cultural production as aesthetic works that contest the logics of solution and integration, remedy and repair, which necessarily accompany the paradigm of sovereignty as it has been taken up in the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies. This project takes into consideration the fundamental aporia that is tribal sovereignty in that it is a political quality that arrives at the same time as it is denied. For tribes and Native people in America alike, this denial signals the inherent contradiction of Native life in the contemporary: that paradox of being both material presence and figural absence, being subjects of a state that eschews their subjectivity, being racial objects rather than political peers. Rather than rooting my analysis of these literatures in the paradigms of presence and survivance which have now become dominant frameworks in the field of Native American Studies for analyzing Native American life, I take up an alternative analytical framework by attending to the coercive positions of absence and social death. I argue that the field’s emphasis on sovereignty has subordinated the wound of Native life and the experience of social death in favor of a progressive discourse of solution, integration, and possibility under neoliberal multiculturalism. While such discourses name modes of continuing to live in an unethical world, the authors I read in this project all stage scenes wherein Native people are made to leave or reject the world. Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017), Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem (2017), Tommy Orange’s There There (2018), and Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit (1990) are all literatures which detail unique circumstances through which the integrity of the tribal nation as a form, the protections that sovereignty might offer, and corresponding Native life and subjectivity have been made precarious, and even untenable, by the American state. Through readings of these texts, I dilate moments of interpersonal settler-Native encounters to magnify the affective residue engendered by the personal, social, and material violences provoked by the ongoing structure of settler colonialism (I refer to the phenomenon of these affective residues as “sovereignty’s glitch”). These literatures, I argue, avoid offering recuperative possibility—they refute logics of remedy, repair, and inclusion. In so doing, they refuse continued practices of making coherent the unethical settler colonial project of America