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Teaching Motherhood: Corporate Strategies to Prevent Chronic Malnutrition in Guatemala
No full textThis dissertation explores the role of private corporations in the prevention of chronic malnutrition in twenty-first-century Guatemala. I examine how the regulation of maternal behavior serves as the linchpin of corporate-led programs addressing malnutrition in the country. My research draws on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork—including archival research, interviews, and observations—to analyze why corporate actors are so invested in preventing chronic malnutrition by targeting maternal behavior. Under the banner of corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporations design and manage their own maternal and child health and nutrition interventions, aligned with The First 1,000 Days of Life framework. I argue that these programs promote women’s empowerment, individual behavior change, and income-generating strategies as mechanisms to extend corporate control into domestic spaces, create new markets, and increase economic returns. I suggest that these programs, while focused on improving children’s health and nutrition, function as tools for reshaping Indigenous Maya women into ideal subjects of corporate-oriented development. Yet, women engage with these programs critically and selectively, using them to support their children while resisting excessive corporate oversight. In doing so, they reveal the limits of corporate-led development and the enduring strength of community-based practices and their maternal expertise
Needle in the Z-stack: Mapping the 3D Transition to Malignancy
No full textThe tumor microenvironment (TME) plays a critical role in driving cancer progression. However, the complexity and heterogeneity of the TME—in terms of cell types and spatial context—have posed significant challenges for cancer characterization. In this dissertation, I present several tools and methods for spatial and molecular quantification of the TME across several cancer types. First, I introduce Pollock, a deep learning-based classifier for single-cell data that offers high accuracy, broad cross-platform compatibility, and biologically interpretable outputs. I then apply single-cell and bulk transcriptomic analyses to pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), identifying tumor ecotypes and a continuum of developmental stemness in malignant and stromal cells that predict patient survival. Finally, I spatially extend this approach to breast and prostate cancer, integrating spatial transcriptomics, multiplexed imaging, and 3D volumetric reconstruction to uncover genes that characterize the precancer-to-cancer transition
Behavioral Decision-Making in Platform Operations
Get PDFOver the past decade, online platforms have experienced significant growth, both in terms of user interest and the range of services they offer. These platforms now provide a wide array of services, from groceries (e.g., Instacart) and transportation (e.g., Uber, Lyft) to entertainment (e.g., TikTok, Twitch). Understanding how individuals interact with these platforms is crucial, not only for the platforms’ success but also for assessing their broader societal impact. In my research, I employ a range of empirical methods—including field experiments, natural experiments, and online experiments—to explore how online platforms can intentionally and unintentionally influence behaviors. In Chapter 1, “The Impact of Customer Information on Service Supply and Demand: Evidence From a Large Live-Streaming Experiment , we study how the introduction of customer information at the beginning of a live-streaming encounter impacts both supply and demand. First, we conducted a field experiment on a live-streaming platform. For broadcasters randomly assigned to the treatment condition, when a viewer entered their shows, information including their username and the page they entered from appeared on the screen. Broadcasters in the control condition saw no such message. On the supply side, treatment broadcasters expanded service supply by 12.62% by increasing both show frequency (3.31%) and show length (7.10%) relative to control broadcasters. Our intervention also increased service demand, measured by an increase of 4.51% viewer watch time. Using four online experiments, we provide insights into the mechanisms. On the broadcaster side, seeing the viewer information increases how vividly their perceive viewers, which increases their sense of appreciation from the viewers, which increases their motivation. Participants acting as treatment broadcasters are also more likely to personalize the service for their viewers. On the viewer side, in reaction to the more personalized serviced, participants acting as treatment viewers are more likely to interact with the broadcaster. This increase in social interaction increases the viewers’ enjoyment as well as the motivation of the broadcasters. In Chapter 2, “The Impact of Ridesharing Platforms on Healthcare Access , we use a natural experiment in Austin — the abrupt exit and re-entry of Uber and Lyft in May 2016 and May 2017 — to investigate the impact of ridesharing platforms on healthcare access for Medicare patients. We find that while the initial exit of Uber and Lyft had an insignificant impact, their subsequent re-entry led to an 8.0% decrease in total claims filed by medical providers. We further show that providers with higher percentages of low-income patients, those treating patients with greater health risk, and providers who are less accessible by public transportation are disproportionately affected. We then demonstrate two ways that increased transportation costs, both financial and in terms of convenience, are important drivers behind the observed effect. First, using traffic data, we show that the presence of ridesharing corresponded to an increase in traffic, likely increasing the inconvenience of traveling to healthcare visits. Second, we provide evidence that the re-entry of Uber and Lyft negatively impacted nonprofit transportation organizations that serve older people and individuals with mobility problems. Our investigation of the mechanisms suggests that ridesharing platforms, aided by federal funding, need to devote more resources to bridging the gap between the transportation they offer and the nonprofit transportation they seem to be replacing
The Click-and-Commit World Order
Get PDFThis essay explores the rise of a new model of global governance: the “click-and-commit world order,” characterized by digitally mediated pledging platforms through which a wide array of actors—states, corporations, cities, NGOs, and individuals—publicly commit to addressing global problems through non-binding promises. In contrast to traditional treaty-making, these pledging platforms offer a decentralized, voluntary framework for international cooperation that relies on public declarations rather than negotiated obligations.
Within the U.N. system, this mode of governance developed within the United Nations Global Compact and the Paris Climate Agreement, where bottom-up pledges were institutionalized within formal and informal international structures. The internet now amplifies and democratizes this model, enabling coordination and norm diffusion without requiring state action or legal enforcement. Examples such as the Net Zero Space Initiative and a range of climate-related platforms illustrate how the pledging order bypasses formal treaty regimes in favor of reputational incentives, public transparency, and symbolic participation.
The essay evaluates the values, risks, and institutional dynamics of this emergent order, including its emphasis on pluralism, voluntarism, and functional over status-based participation. Ultimately, the pledging order reflects a shift from constitutional, rule-restraining global law toward a voluntarist, productivity-oriented attempt to address 21st-century transnational challenges—particularly where formal multilateralism has stalled
Public Benefits Cliffs and Asset Limits Harm the Economic Mobility of Young Adult Workers
Get PDFAt its best, the public benefits system in the United States helps families avoid poverty’s most severe effects while also giving them a hand up. But the system also can keep working families in poverty. Workers may want to earn more money, take better jobs, or save for the future, but doing so can raise their income above program limits, causing workers to lose the benefits they and their families need to survive. This is known as the benefits cliff. This brief draws upon data from the Workforce Economic Inclusion and Mobility survey to explore how benefits cliffs and related asset limits influence the lives of low-wage workers. The findings identify differences between younger (aged 18-25) and older workers (aged 26 or above), as well as the strategies workers deploy to avoid losing benefits
Ageism in Employment
Get PDFThe World Health Organization defines ageism as stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination directed at individuals based on their age. As people remain in the labor force longer, they are increasingly exposed to ageist attitudes and discrimination. Ageism often manifests through negative assumptions about older workers’ abilities, adaptability, and value in the workplace. Older workers are frequently perceived as less competent, resistant to new technology, inflexible, or physically and mentally less capable
A Strategy for Implementing Automatic Enrollment in Trump Accounts
Get PDFIn the summer of 2025, the United States created the framework for a national asset-building initiative, but the success of the Trump Accounts policy depends in part on effective implementation. This brief presents a two-step strategy for ensuring that all eligible U.S. children will be able to participate in the program. Leveraging existing federal infrastructure to create capacity for automatic enrollment, this strategy would enable the policy to avoid the high costs and low participation rates of programs with opt-in enrollment structures. The operational model would be built on two foundational components: a centralized Trump Accounts Fund and an automated enrollment system
Making the Ghost King through Liturgical Paintings in Late Imperial China
No full textIntroduced to China during the Tang dynasty, the Ghost King became a central figure in the salvation rituals of both Buddhism and Daoism, liberating suffering souls of the deceased and guiding them to land of bliss. This dissertation investigates the historical development and religious significance of Ghost King paintings utilized in Buddhist and Daoist ghost-feeding rituals, centering on mural paintings and hanging scrolls dating from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries. Special attention is given to a Qing dynasty hanging scroll preserved at Beijing’s White Cloud Monastery (hereafter as the WCM scroll), the preeminent Daoist institution affiliated with the Quanzhen School. This dissertation provides a comprehensive art-historical examination, revealing how these paintings actively shaped both the deity’s identity and the ritual’s practical dimensions. This study employs multidisciplinary approaches, integrating visual and textual analysis with material culture methodologies to examine Ghost King paintings. Originally derived from Hindu esoteric Buddhist scriptures, these paintings underwent visual transformation through functional refinement to accommodate different ritual programs, and Sinicization that incorporated diverse art sources into a Chinese framework. Additionally, this research offers new insights into the decline of mural production in late imperial China, arguing that hanging scrolls became the preferred format due to their portability, storability, and adaptability to various ritual settings. By applying the concept of “visionary paintings” and incorporating Daoist visualization practices, I demonstrate how Ghost King paintings function as more than decorative objects. Rather, they serve as active ritual agents that embody religious ideas, facilitate meditative and physical practices, and fundamentally involve in the completion of ritual performance. My dissertation investigates the paintings beyond traditional approaches such as text-image relationships and iconography, to examine liturgical paintings within their religious contexts of setting, meditation, and performance. Chapter One explores the iconographic development of the Ghost King’s image within Chinese liturgical art and traces the iconographic progression that depict distinct functions for the Ghost King within specific rites. Chapter Two examines the diverse visual sources for the works, and argues for a modular structure that culminates over time in the complex iconography of the WCM scroll depicting the Ghost King. Chapter Three examines the interplay among painting formats, ritual settings, and ritual practitioners’ engagement within a spatial-ritual framework, situating Ghost King murals and hanging scrolls within the evolving perspectives on ritual practice in late imperial China. Chapter Four presents the WCM scroll as visionary icons rooted in Daoist methods of internal visualization, elucidating the sequential stages of the priest’s engagement with the image and its profound impact on both the viewers and the conceptualization of the ritual itself. This dissertation concludes by reaffirming the significance of images in ritual practice, evidenced by the long-lasting institutional regulation on Water-Land scrolls in the past and their dynamic afterlife in contemporary settings
Amies des Livres: Modernist Networks, Gender, and Translation in Literary Paris
No full textIn Amies des Livres, I argue that women translators and cultural mediators were the dominant force in creating a transnational modernist literary culture in interwar Paris. This literary field has long been of interest to modernist studies due to the many expatriate Anglophone modernists living and writing in Paris, but scholarship has primarily focused on authorship to the exclusion of translation. With translation at the center of analysis instead of at the margins, previously invisible women translators become visible as co-creators of meaning and essential collaborators in a network of cultural exchange. I include women editors and publishers of literature in translation alongside translators in the category of “amies des livres” or [female] friends of books, a term I adopt from Adrienne Monnier. This dissertation includes chapters on Adrienne Monnier’s bookstore and publishing house as translation infrastructure, the translating and writing careers of Dorothy Bussy and Hope Mirrlees, and the French circulation and reception of Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia Woolf in translation. I employ methodology from the sociology of literature, book history, and reception studies to analyze translated texts in their material, social, and intellectual contexts. To that end, my corpus includes first edition novels and little magazines, published reviews, and largely unpublished diaries, letters, and business records. Many of the texts in my corpus are born-translated, meaning they were published and received near simultaneously in French and English, contributing to a contemporaneous shared modernist culture on both sides of the Channel. In contrast to the simultaneity of these born-translated texts, I theorize discordant temporalities of translation in texts that were translated belatedly because they were deemed untranslatable by translators, editors, or publishers or even appeared in translation before the original. Rather than thinking of translatability as an intrinsic quality of a text, my project reimagines translatability as contingent on the context of gender and power in publishing
Sea of Luxuries: Oceanic Knowledge, Environment, and the Making of Commodity Frontiers in Southern Maritime China, 1500–1900
Get PDFThis dissertation examines the cultural, environmental, and commercial history of “sea luxuries”—notably pearls, sea cucumbers, and edible birds’ nests—in southern maritime China between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores how people in early modern China perceived, utilized, and reshaped the extensive oceanic zone stretching from southern China to the shores of Southeast Asia. Understanding this process sheds new light on the Chinese interaction with the marine ecology and its unique role in the early modern maritime world. The dissertation traces the rising demand for sea luxuries to the “utilitarian turn” in early modern knowledge making of the marine world. The epistemic shift to utilitarian, use-oriented concerns linked marine species to medicinal and nutritional functions, thereby turning the once considered dangerous and mysterious ocean into a space of products that could be explored, investigated, and exploited. Confucian literati began to reconcile empirical observation of marine life with practical learnings related to governing and provisioning the empire. The high demand for sea luxuries, combined with the depletion of high-end marine resources in nearshore waters, drove an expansive approach to the South China Sea and beyond. By the eighteenth century, the expanding commercial network, advancements in fishing and navigation technologies, as well as the popularization of luxury consumption, collectively transformed this maritime world into an integrated ecological reservoir, from which sea luxuries were increasingly sourced to sustain consumption and profit. This continuous supply of marine goods from Southeast Asian peripheries to the Chinese center not only shaped transregional trade and environmental change but also redefined the spatial and material contours of China’s maritime frontier. Drawing on Chinese local gazetteers, maritime writings, maps, and multilingual archives of the Qing court and European East India companies, the dissertation argues that the expansion of Chinese-driven demand for “sea luxuries”—notably pearls, sea cucumbers, and edible birds’ nests—generated a distinct kind of commodity frontier. Unlike colonial commodity frontiers driven by European territorial expansion, this commodity frontier was forged through diasporic networks of Chinese merchants and fishermen, who utilized their vernacular maritime knowledge, navigational techniques, and commercial acumen to dominate the trade of sea luxuries in maritime Southeast Asia