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Review of Gregory Jones-Katz’s Deconstruction: An American Institution
Get PDFJones-Katz helps us recontextualize what we thought we knew about the intellectual history of deconstruction in the United States. His desire to “illustrate how local traditions, distinctive networks, and curious personalities offered a dynamic place for culture to flourish and in turn be venerated and challenged” (297) is largely successful and engaging
Embodiment, Plasticity, and the Re/Production of Gender, Sex, and Race in Human Biology
Get PDFThis paper historically situates human biology research by engaging with feminist science and technology scholars to show how a key mechanism of embodiment, plasticity, is used to re/produce sex and gender binaries in anthropological research and beyond. I begin by defining embodiment and demonstrating its reliance on plasticity. Next, I discuss plasticity and review how and why it has been taken up in human biology research. After, I engage with the works of feminist, trans, and queer scholars who have examined the connection between embodiment, plasticity, and the creation of Western binarized sex and gender. Further, I present how the re/production of a sex and gender binary is entwined with the justification of racial hierarchies through plasticity. While deterministic frameworks are often the most criticized in biology for harmful racist and sexist understandings of race and gender, plasticity and gene-times-environment interaction frameworks are not without fault. Even with large shifts in scientific understanding, in this case from determinism to plasticity, science, in particular human biology, can still be a tool to create and maintain racist, patriarchal, cis- and hetero-normative systems. I conclude with recommendations and possible pathways forward for embodiment and plasticity research in human biology, suggesting that human biology research should engage with feminist science and technology critiques to be mindful of the way in which our concepts might be re/producing harm
Sid Caesar’s Comedy of Excess and the Jewish American 1950s
No full textIn this article, I want to situate Caesar’s famously unhinged comedic art within and against the Jewish American 1950s – a response to the culture of abundance we associate with the era’s embrace of commodification. I’m interested in Caesar’s hilarious, biting social satires that focus on the obsessions and absurdities of the new middle class on display in his domestic sketches, first with Imogene Coca on Your Show of Shows (called “The Hickenloopers”) and later, with Nanette Fabray, on Caesar’s Hour (called “The Commuters”). In his most original comedy Caesar saw through the pretensions, yet also recognized the underlying anxieties afflicting the new suburbanizing culture, a material world to which he was also attached. There is something profoundly unrestrained about Sid Caesar’s audacious comedy. At some level, Caesar’s comedic art was, I argue, a response to Jewish American audiences feeling ambivalent, anxious, perhaps even ashamed of their new suburban worlds. Ultimately, the figure of Caesar in these domestic sketches conjures a version of the self whose “Jewish” audacity can only be enacted through masking. In Sid Caesar we encounter what Philip Roth—who wrote about Caesar at the beginning of his own career—would later term “the unimpeded and excessive Jew.
What Have We Learned? Teaching Gender and Fairy-Tale Films Online Redux
No full textIn 2016 we published “Teaching ‘Gender in Fairy-Tale Film and Cinematic Folklore’ Online: Negotiating between Needs and Wants” in Christa C. Jones and Claudia Schwabe’s New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales. When we revisited, reviewed, and revised the course itself in 2022, we foregrounded issues of accessibility, intersectionality, and critical race theory but also dealt with changes in online teaching. We outline our work and strategies in preparing the course with a focus on current issues via practical considerations from our experience. We address sociopolitical shifts as well as the challenges teachers and students are facing
Analysis of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Gene Expression Profiles in a Prospective, Community-Based Cohort
Get PDFPosttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common and debilitating psychiatric disorder that may occur in individuals exposed to traumatic events such as accidents, interpersonal violence, war, combat, or natural disasters. Additionally, PTSD has been implicated in the development of a variety of chronic conditions, including cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, suggesting the biological alterations associated with the disorder can manifest as chronic diseases in those suffering from PTSD. The biological underpinnings of the disorder are not well understood. Gene expression studies can illuminate the complex physiology of PTSD reflecting the embodiment of trauma, that is, the process in which traumatic experiences in our social environments could potentially manifest in our body by genomic mechanisms. To date, gene expression studies that examine the whole transcriptome are scarce and limited to single-time-point assessments. Here we applied a transcriptome-wide gene expression screen with RNA-seq to whole blood samples from predominantly African American community-dwelling participants to elucidate the gene expression signatures associated with the development of PTSD. The study participants (N = 72) comprised a trauma-exposed subsample of participants enrolled in a longitudinal, prospective cohort study of adults living in Detroit, Michigan. PTSD was assessed in a structured telephone interview, and whole blood samples were taken both before and after trauma exposure. Among the 72 study participants, 10 had PTSD at baseline and 21 developed it during the study. We found 45 differentially expressed genes associated with PTSD development with an estimated log2-fold change \u3e 1.5 at a nominal p-value of \u3c0.05. Six genes (PAX6, TSPAN7, PXDN, VWC2, SULF1, and NFATC4) were also ubiquitously expressed in all brain regions. Longitudinal sampling provides a promising mean to elucidate the pathophysiology underlying the embodiment of trauma
Profit Considerations For Nonlinear Control-Integrated Cyberattack Detection On Process Actuators
Get PDFPrior research from our group developed a control-integrated active actuator cyberattack detection strategy. This strategy continuously probed for cyberattacks by updating target steady-states at every sampling time and then moving the process state toward these over the subsequent sampling period. Attacks were fagged if a Lyapunov function around the target steady-state did not decrease over a sampling period. This strategy had the benefit of ensuring safety of the process until an attack was detected. However, the continuous probing for attacks could decrease profit from the process compared to not probing for the attacks, which could limit the attractiveness of the method in practice. This work marks our first step toward attempting to develop a framework for modifying this detection strategy to make guarantees that the profit over a sampling period would be no worse than that of a stabilizing controller. This is achieved through utilizing two auxiliary controllers, in addition to the one which facilitates the attack-probing, with constraints on profits in the various controllers to enable the profit proofs over a sampling period (in the absence of disturbances) to be developed. A process reactor example is used to demonstrate the implementation of the detection strategy
Poetry And Atmosphere: The Piano Works Of Alexina Louie
No full textThis document examines Alexina Louie’s distinctive approaches to piano composition with an emphasis on her most recent pedagogical album, Small Beautiful Things (2016). It asks the question: What are the distinctive features of Alexina Louie’s piano music and how have they changed throughout her career? The findings herein augment extant scholarship through the following research efforts: Small Beautiful Things is considered within a historical context of Louie’s pedagogical writing for piano; moreover, the substantial use of visual aids and post-tonal analyses helps to address the underlying theoretical basis of her stylistic choices and their pedagogical implications.
Rhythmic features are discussed in terms of their role in determining phraseology and, consequently, form. Louie often approaches phrasing from a minimalist standpoint, opting to lengthen or shorten the musical phrase according to her visceral sense of its trajectory. Harmony, melody, and motivic cells are analyzed through the lens of post-tonal theory. This approach illuminates Louie’s preferred pitch class sets and the extent to which their properties inform musical development.
The findings of this research suggest that those stylistic features which characterized Louie’s most advanced and virtuosic works permeate her pedagogical compositions from 1982 to 2016. Louie prefers to develop her pieces through minimalist approaches to rhythm, harmony, and melody, including a tendency to select symmetrical pitch class sets. These strategies work symbiotically, alongside evocative titles and poetic references, to convey a musical sound world that is, at once, reflective, appealing, and accessible to young pianists
Making The Right Turns: Deepening Our Understanding Of Women’s Leadership Labyrinth By Investigating Decision-Making Amidst Developmental Opportunities
No full textThe purpose of the present research is twofold: 1) to address the gap in our understanding of the individual and organizational variables that may be influencing women’s decision-making when faced with developmental opportunities, and 2) to explore the efficacy of different interventions and their impact on resilience in the workplace. To accomplish the first objective, Study 1 dove into this by considering how the three components of social cognitive career theory (i.e., self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and goals) inform one’s likelihood of accepting developmental opportunities. Support was found for the positive relationship between each of these variables and likelihood of accepting a developmental opportunity. Support was not found for the moderating roles of agency-communion orientation, risk-taking propensity, glass ceiling beliefs, experiences with role models, or career encouragement. To take the investigation into this process a step further, a qualitative component was incorporated to inform the development of vignettes used in Study 2. Results indicate support for the relationship between likelihood of accepting opportunities and confidence, with participants being most likely to accept opportunities when framed with an emphasis on skill development, supervisor encouragement, and readiness for advancement. The findings from this study can be used to inspire organizational interventions to address women’s leadership labyrinth