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Invisible Wounds and Sibling Dynamics: A Narrative Study Investigating the Influence of Juvenile Incarceration on Black Family Life
No full textThis dissertation, Invisible Wounds and Sibling Dynamics: A Narrative Study Investigating the Influence of Juvenile Incarceration on Black Family Life, explores how juvenile incarceration reshapes emotional life, sibling relationships, and family dynamics by centering the experiences of non-incarcerated Black siblings. While prior research has extensively examined the effects of incarceration on youth and their parents, this study turns attention to siblings—who often occupy the longest and most developmentally significant familial roles—yet remain largely overlooked in research, practice, and policy. Drawing on narrative life history interviews with 40 Black individuals across the United States whose siblings were incarcerated as youth, this study examines how incarceration reconfigures family roles, alters perceptions of justice and state legitimacy, and influences long-term identity and behavioral outcomes. It traces how siblings’ emotional responses, caregiving responsibilities, and relational bonds are shaped by their proximity to carceral institutions and the systemic pressures that follow. The first paper, Sibling Bonds and Carceral Disruption: A Narrative Study on the Impact of Juvenile Incarceration in Black Families, identifies three types of sibling relationships that emerge in response to incarceration: enduring, forged, and damaged. These bonds reflect how incarceration can both deepen emotional ties through solidarity and loyalty, or fracture them through silence, guilt, and abandonment. This paper highlights siblinghood as a crucial relational space where the effects of state punishment are absorbed, negotiated, and remembered. The second paper, Trapped in a Bubble: The Unintended Consequences of Parental Protection in Families Impacted by Incarceration, examines how parental strategies intended to preserve family stability—such as emotional redirection, overprotection, and role enforcement—often produce unintended harm to non-incarcerated siblings. Five themes emerged across participants’ narratives: diverted attention, psychological splitting, parentification, emotional isolation, and role ambiguity. These findings suggest that caregiving under conditions of carceral stress can complicate developmental processes and suppress emotional expression. The third paper, The Radicalizing Effect of Mistreatment: How Sibling Incarceration Shapes Life Trajectories, analyzes how siblings’ exposure to legal and institutional harm—through arrests, courtroom proceedings, and prison visits—catalyzes long-term shifts in worldview and decision-making. Participants described moments of disillusionment and betrayal that spurred both withdrawal from institutions and commitment to justice-related careers. This paper theorizes these shifts as part of a broader process of meaning-making in response to systemic mistreatment. Together, these three papers demonstrate that juvenile incarceration functions not as a discrete event, but as an enduring, relational disruption that alters the emotional, developmental, and institutional trajectories of siblings left behind. The dissertation contributes to social work by expanding family systems and ecological models to account for sibling experiences; to criminology by reframing legal cynicism, system avoidance, and institutional disengagement as relationally grounded responses; and to sociology by extending theories of secondary prisonization, social bonds, labeling, and strain to include the role of siblings. Ultimately, this work argues for greater recognition of siblings as central actors in the aftermath of incarceration and as key informants in understanding the multigenerational effects of carceral harm
"Un retrato me has pedido": Gender, Beauty, and the Female Gaze in the Spanish Golden Age
Get PDFThis dissertation explores the construction, negotiation, and subversion of the female gaze in early modern Spanish literature. In a period defined by ocularcentrism, where vision was closely tied to knowledge, power, and morality, the gaze operated as a potent mechanism of control—particularly over women, who were more often the object of vision than its agents. Drawing on feminist theory, visual culture studies, and baroque aesthetics, this study traces how women writers—and select female characters—resisted or reconfigured the dominant visual economy of the period. Rather than positioning the female gaze as a simple inversion of the male gaze, I argue that it emerges in early modern Spanish texts as a multifaceted and unstable practice marked by ethical discernment, affective complexity, and rhetorical play. Through close readings of works by Lope de Vega, Ana Caro de Mallén, María de Zayas, and Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán, I examine how women looked: not only at men, but at themselves, each other, and the visual and social systems that sought to define them. From the stagecraft of Lope’s heroines to the epistemological strategies of Caro’s protagonists, from Zayas’s trauma-inflected narratives to Ramírez de Guzmán’s satirical self-portraiture, each chapter reveals how the female gaze disrupts aesthetic norms and moral ideologies. Ultimately, this dissertation proposes a genealogy of early modern feminine visual agency that foregrounds the relationship between beauty, resistance, and self-representation in a culture that sought to render women both silent and seen
Kailomas, Fruit Salads, Halves, and Parts: Linguistic Constructions of Mixedness in the Fiji Islands
No full textAmong the discourse on racial identity and the role of language in successful racial performances, mixed-race individuals are often overlooked. In their position as in-betweeners they draw on a variety of resources for the construction of a mixed identity which navigates between the established racial categories. Language has been shown to be a key resource for the establishment, performance, and uptake of mixedness and mixed-race identities (Holliday 2016; Reyes 2017, 2020; Narain 2019; Bucholtz 1995). This dissertation seeks to expand this work by examining how linguistic resources are used to construct mixedness in Fiji. In this work I explore how terms for mixed-race classification, both endonyms and exonyms, are unstable in their meanings as they seek to reflect the fluid and shifting social construct of racial mixedness. I also show how certain linguistic resources beyond terms are used to create, preform, and enregister a particular mixed-race identity as a socially salient persona (Agha 2005, 2011; D’Onofrio 2020). Using the data collected from modified sociolinguistic interviews and ethnographic observations during two months of fieldwork in Fiji, I examine the mixed-race terms, and the linguistic practices associated with mixed participants. In this dissertation I analyze the most frequent and observable mixed-race terms in Fiji: Half-caste, Part-European, Part, Kailoma, Mixed, Fruit Salad, Vasu, and Fijian. The terms are discussed using approach which examines their historical trajectory, linguistic form (structure), denotational content, and social meaning, as they fluidly shift to reflect changing attitudes and historical moments, constructing mixed categories. This work also moves beyond the meanings of the terms and discusses how the kailoma, is not just a categorical label but also an enregistered and legible persona that exists between the dominant social categories in Fiji. The findings and analyses in this dissertation illustrate that mixedness in Fiji is constructed through various forms of meaning making between language and race. This work prompts additional research to examine mixed-race populations for their ability to illustrate how race is semiotically constructed and how those between racial categories fit it. Mixed-race individuals continue to play a significant role in language change and shifting racial attitudes and their study can further our understandings of the interactions between language and race
Combining Models and Data to Explore Infectious Disease Dynamics Across Time and Space
No full textInfectious disease dynamics are shaped by complex interactions across biological scales, from within-host immune processes to host-to-host transmission and broader environmental influences such as climate and landscape. These dynamics vary across host-pathogen systems: some infections drive host population cycles, while others persist asymptomatically. Understanding the mechanisms behind disease persistence, spread, and evolution is increasingly urgent in the face of rapid global change. However, empirical data limitations present challenges, especially in systems with patchy pathogen distributions or difficult-to-measure environmental drivers. To address these gaps, this dissertation leverages mechanistic modeling and phylogenetic tools to explore pathogen dynamics in two distinct wildlife systems: spongy moths in North America and fruit bats in Madagascar. First, I investigate competition between a virus and a fungus co-circulating in the spongy moth (Lymantria dispar). Using field data and fitted mechanistic models, I show how dispersal, weather, and initial conditions jointly influence infection outcomes. I then use these insights to predict how pathogen competition and may shift under climate change, with implications for forest health. Next, I focus on viruses in Malagasy fruit bats. I model the spatiotemporal dynamics of henipavirus infection in Eidolon dupreanum, integrating novel predictions of birth pulse timing, habitat suitability, and bat movement. These infection maps are linked with spatial layers of human and environmental factors to assess zoonotic risk. I then shift to evolutionary questions, using molecular surveillance to document and phylogenetically characterize astroviruses across Madagascar’s three endemic fruit bat species. The results reveal both host-specific and geographic viral patterns and contribute to the growing understanding of bat virus diversity and evolution in the Southwest Indian Ocean region. Together, these studies span biological and ecological scales, from within-host viral diversity to landscape-level infection modeling. By integrating field data with ecological and evolutionary modeling frameworks, this dissertation highlights the diversity of infectious disease dynamics and provides tools to better understand wildlife disease systems of importance to public and environmental health
Securing the Seas: The Political Economy of Naval Force Structure
Get PDFAs China continues to rise as a commerce state in an international system dominated by an incumbent maritime power, future points of tensions are most likely to occur at sea, rather than by territorial conquest. Yet, security studies have long favored the dominance of land power and often fail to account for naval power functions beyond land support, viewing the few maritime powers as exceptions. Naval strategy and force structure varies considerably across states, even when controlling for relative size. Due to the nature of building and maintaining naval fleets, overall naval force structure is a path dependent endeavor, not easily varied over time. States must then construct naval strategy based on long time horizons, despite fluctuations in the threats they face. This project will look beyond security concerns and consider the economic motivations that influence whether a state deploys a naval strategy of competition or denial. First, a large-N analysis of country-year data introduces a new measure of naval force structures beyond the dimension of size, and findings indicate that while naval size is largely influenced by how wealthy a state is, naval strategy is instead influenced by the type of wealth a state has. Second, a series of case studies explore the within-state decision-making process for naval strategy, at the point in which the state begins to invest in a fleet of a specific force structure. Even while controlling for changes, or the expectation of change, to a state’s security environment, the project finds that states with externally oriented economies, reliant on production and overseas commerce are more likely to invest in a competitive naval strategy while states that are economically dependent on land rents, internally oriented, are more likely to follow a naval strategy of denial
Multibody and Non-Reciprocal Interactions in Acoustically Levitated Granular Systems
Get PDFParticles interacting via a non-equilibrium fluid often violate the principle of reciprocity after the fluid is coarse-grained away. The lack of reciprocity means that neither energy nor momentum are conserved and can be continuously extracted from the surrounding fluid medium. These systems are inherently `active', capable of generating behaviors seen in active matter, such as self-propulsion, flocking, and pattern formation. Non-reciprocal interactions are often engineered through asymmetric pairwise forces or designed particle interactions. This thesis presents an alternative approach where non-reciprocity emerges naturally from multibody effects in systems of identical particles with reciprocal pairwise interactions. Through experiments and simulations, we explore the consequences of the non-reciprocal multibody interactions on the dynamics, structural assembly, and mechanical properties of acoustically levitated particle rafts. Specifically, we demonstrate how multibody interactions drive spontaneous self-propulsion and limit-cycle dynamics in a minimal three-particle system and avalanche-like excitations in crystalline rafts. Furthermore, the multibody effects enable unique structural configurations, such as self-assembled particle rings, inaccessible with purely pairwise interactions. Finally, we show how multibody interactions alter the mechanical properties of large crystalline rafts, introducing anomalous transverse force components when interactions are modeled as effectively pairwise. Our findings highlight the fundamental role of multibody non-reciprocal interactions in driving emergent collective dynamics and structural transformations in multi-particle systems with fluid-mediated interactions
Molecularly Defining Vesicular Trafficking Pathways at the Golgi Apparatus
No full textThe Golgi apparatus functions as the heart of the eukaryotic cellular endomembrane system, sorting newly made, ER-exported proteins and lipids while circulating and recycling older ones from other organelles. Many membrane traffic machinery proteins reside at the Golgi, with their localizations polarized across the set of cisternae comprising this organelle. A suite of resident Golgi enzymes is likewise polarized. These enzymes sequentially modify proteins and lipids passing through the Golgi, fine-tuning them for their appropriate functions at other organelles or the cell exterior. To perform these functions, the Golgi organizes itself through cisternal maturation, a process by which individual Golgi cisternae are assembled, biochemically altered over time, and then disassembled. Retrograde intra-Golgi vesicular transport pathways are essential for the fidelity of this maturation process, because they both polarize and recycle resident Golgi proteins by allowing younger cisternae to receive these proteins from older cisternae. In spite of this understanding, the number of intra-Golgi vesicular transport pathways and their molecular characteristics have not yet been identified.In this thesis, I identify and characterize three molecularly distinct intra-Golgi vesicular trafficking pathways at the Saccharomyces cerevisiae Golgi. To accomplish this, I designed vesicle capture and tethering assays that concentrate distinct vesicle populations at the yeast bud neck based on cargo content or affinity with a vesicle tether. Both assay types reveal three populations of vesicles containing largely unique sets of transmembrane resident Golgi proteins. Each of these vesicle populations presumably belongs to a distinct intra-Golgi trafficking pathway. The first two pathways employ coat protein complex I (COPI) for vesicle formation and operate at early and intermediate stages of cisternal maturation. The early COPI pathway apparently uses the golgin Rud3 to tether its vesicles prior to their fusion with cisternae, and the intermediate COPI pathway likewise uses the Sgm1 golgin tether. At the late Golgi, an intra-Golgi trafficking pathway is operated by the clathrin coat and its AP-1 and Ent5 adapter proteins. This AP-1/Ent5 pathway utilizes the Imh1 golgin and Golgi-associated retrograde protein (GARP) complex to coordinately tether its vesicles. Cargo-based vesicle capture analysis further differentiates the intra-Golgi AP-1/Ent5 pathway from other transport pathways that traffic proteins between the late Golgi and prevacuolar endosome (PVE). The PVE-to-Golgi pathway notably utilizes Imh1 but apparently not GARP to tether its vesicles at cisternae. Altogether, the findings presented in this thesis grant us important insights into the molecular mechanisms of Golgi self-organization, particularly with regard to resident protein retention and polarization. Collectively, this work comprises the first systematic molecular characterization of intra-Golgi trafficking pathways.A substantial amount of data presented in this thesis is from fluorescence time lapse microscopy of live yeast cells. Such experiments showcase the dynamic nature of cisternal maturation, and their data are naturally depicted as videos. Cryo-electron tomography data obtained for this thesis can also be represented as videos revealing a continuum of sections through the 3D volume. Representative videos for both experiment types have been archived online as supplementary files. As a reference, the first frame of each video and an accompanying legend are included at the end of each pertinent chapter.</p
Structural basis of drug recognition by human MATE1 transporter
No full textHuman MATE1 (multidrug and toxin extrusion protein 1) is highly expressed in the kidney and liver, where it mediates the final step in the excretion of a broad range of cationic drugs, including the antidiabetic drug metformin, into the urine and bile. This transport process is essential for drug clearance and also affects therapeutic efficacy. To understand the molecular basis of drug recognition by hMATE1, we determined cryo-electron microscopy structures of the transporter in complex with the substrates 1-methyl-4-phenylpyridinium (MPP) and metformin and with the inhibitor cimetidine. The structures reveal a shared binding site located in a negatively charged pocket in the C-lobe of the protein. We functionally validated key interactions using radioactivity-based cellular uptake assays using hMATE1 mutants. Molecular dynamics simulations provide insights into the different binding modes and dynamic behaviour of the ligands within the pocket. Collectively, these findings define the structural basis of hMATE1 substrate specificity and shed light on its role in drug transport and drug-drug interactions
Understanding User Privacy Concerns of Shared Smart TVs
No full textAs smart TVs gain popularity, they introduce significant privacy and security concerns due to their extensive data collection and multi-user contexts. This paper investigates user perceptions of privacy concerns regarding both service providers and the multi-user use case in the context of smart TVs. Through in-depth interviews with 22 smart TV users, we found that participants expressed uncertainty about the data collection practices of smart TVs and a desire for clearer communication of such practices. Participants reported discomfort with how their personal information is handled through their smart TVs but felt forced to accept it due to the lack of ability to opt out. Our study also highlights varied privacy concerns when smart TVs are shared in public versus private settings. While participants expressed significantly less concern when sharing smart TVs with acquaintances in private settings, concerns were more prevalent in public settings like hotels and Airbnbs. Based on the findings, we provide recommendations for designers, policymakers, and researchers to improve privacy protection and user experience around smart TVs.</p
Association between game addiction and lifetime psychotic-like experiences among high school students: A cross-sectional study
No full textBackground: Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) and game addiction are common among young individuals. The present study aimed to explore the association between game addiction and lifetime PLEs among high school students in Guangzhou, China. Methods: Data for this study was derived from the Mental Health and Behavior Disorders among Children and Young People in Guangzhou Survey, which utilized a multistage stratified cluster sampling design. The 15-item positive subscale of the Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences (CAPE-15) was used to assess lifetime PLEs. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis were applied to explore the lifetime PLEs-related factors. Results: A total of 5581 high school students aged 13 to 20 years were included in the analysis. The prevalence of lifetime PLEs and game addiction among high school students was 44.9% (n = 2507) and 15.0% (n = 835), respectively. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that age (OR = 0.86, 95%CI: 0.80–0.93),single child (OR = 1.17, 95%CI: 1.03–1.34), perceived academic stress (OR = 1.10, 95%CI: 1.07–1.14), loneliness (OR = 1.10, 95%CI: 1.08–1.12), social support (OR = 0.93, 95%CI: 1.18–1.23), PHQ-9 score (OR = 1.20, 95%CI: 1.18–1.23), game use time for more than 4 h per week (vs. 0 h) (OR = 1.53, 95%CI: 1.21–1.93), and game addiction (OR = 1.56, 95%CI: 1.29–1.88) were influencing factors of lifetime PLEs (P Conclusion: The prevalence of lifetime PLEs is high among high school students, and PLEs are related to a variety of psychosocial and behavioral factors. Lifetime PLEs are strongly related to game addiction and long game use time among high school students.</p