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Genealogías futuras: memoria y anticipación en la ficción especulativa Latinoamericana contemporánea
No full textWhat is the role of collective memory when imagining communal futures? To answer this question, my dissertation takes on contemporary cultural expressions from Latin America–performances, films, and novels–that engage in what I term retro-speculation: they revisit the past in search of knowledge needed to formulate alternative visions of the future. My dissertation’s main argument is that cultural future-building practices in Latin America are intrinsically linked to the region's dictatorial history, and they also challenge the notion of time as linear and its association with neoliberal progress. I focus on narratives that envision an emancipatory future for generating public policies regarding environmental sustainability and the protection of marginalized people’s rights.My research pushes against existing boundaries in Latin American Memory Studies and Dictatorship Studies, expanding these fields by forging innovative connections between memory practices and speculative fiction. Interlinking these disciplines holds particular significance in the present historical juncture, characterized by the rise of far-right movements and a pervasive sense of apprehension about Latin America's future, where the role of the arts, humanities and public culture is facing scrutiny.
My corpus is a gathered collection of materials from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, and Guatemala, where brutal dictatorships and their neoliberal agendas between 1970 and 1990 resulted in grave consequences for minoritized populations, afro-descendants, and indigenous peoples. I highlight how these works reveal links between the dictatorial neoliberal past and the visions of the future while amplifying the voices of these marginalized Latin American communities. These radical futures offer a compelling alternative to the dominant narrative that equals economic progress to extractivism and that has been responsible for environmental degradation and human rights crises.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Triphenylphosphine assay for nanomolar detection of lipid hydroperoxides
No full textAs the first stable product of lipid oxidation, hydroperoxides have often been the most common marker of oxidation progress. Their importance in the integrated alternated reaction scheme for lipid oxidation merits the need for a sensitive assay. The gold standard assay of hydroperoxide content -- iodometric titration with thiosulfate – has low sensitivity for the amount of sample required, tedious handling, and no possibility for high throughput. More sensitive methods such as xylenol orange and ferric thiocyanate colorimetric assays have debatable stoichiometry and specificity, limited range of quantification, and low stability.
Triphenylphosphine (TPP), used for decades to detect trace levels of hydroperoxides in solvents, offers excellent promise as an alternative reagent for specific quantitation of lipid hydroperoxides with greater sensitivity than previous methods. TPP reaction with hydroperoxides yields the optically active triphenylphosphine oxide (TPPO) which can be separated from other reactants by HPLC to create an assay with greater sensitivity, specificity, ease of handling, stability, confirmation of reaction completion, and possibility of high-throughput analyses using autosamplers. A previous study using standards verified quantitation of nanomolar hydroperoxides but did not optimize applicability to lipid hydroperoxides.
This thesis extended TPP method development to optimize reaction specifically with lipid hydroperoxides (LOOH). A gradient program that separated TPP, TPPO, LOOH, and product hydroxylipids on a pentafluorophenyl column provided a means of following reaction completion with samples of unknown LOOH content and allowed determination of TPP excess required for complete reaction. Reversed-phase HPLC proved suitable for quantitating hydroperoxides of fatty acid methyl esters, but quantitating hydroperoxides of triacylglycerols required adapting the method to normal-phase HPLC due to their hydrophobicity.
Standard curves of TPPO were generated for quantitating lipid hydroperoxides by both reversed-phase and normal phase HPLC. Response curves for TPP reaction with oxidized lipids of various hydroperoxide concentrations (predicted by iodometric titration) were co-linear with the TPPO standard curve, showing that the TPP-lipid hydroperoxide reaction is stoichiometrically 1:1. With reversed-phase HPLC, limits of detection and quantification were 2 pmol and 6.03 pmol TPPO injected (LOOH reacted), respectively. With normal-phase HPLC, limits of detection and quantification were 0.19 pmol and 0.57 pmol TPPO injected (LOOH reacted), respectively.M.S.Includes bibliographical reference
Sound reward learning induces distinct auditory cortical transcriptional changes
No full textGene expression is dynamically regulated in the adult brain during learning and memory formation across multiple brain systems including the sensory cortex. Over the past decade, epigenetic mechanisms that regulate transcription have been implicated in modulating adult learning-induced sensory cortical plasticity. Of the sensory cortices, the auditory cortex has been best described for its capabilities to gate the encoding of sensory features in the production of persistent and vivid long-term memories of sensory experiences. Learning induces neurophysiological plasticity in the adult auditory cortex at multiple timescales to support both short-term (at a scale of seconds to minutes) and long-term (at a scale of hours or potentially one’s lifetime) memory. Long-term memories that persist over days, weeks, or even a lifetime, require learning to induce de novo activity-dependent gene expression in the brain. As learning-induced transcription is the molecular determinant for long-term auditory memory consolidation and emergent sound-related behaviors, epigenetic mechanisms that control transcription offer an opportunity to investigate key genes in auditory memory processes. Here we use a known memory-modulating epigenetic molecule, histone deacetylase 3 (HDAC3), as a tool to investigate learning-induced gene expression within the auditory cortex that supports auditory learning, memory, physiological neuroplasticity, and its consequences on learned sound-specific behavior. Doing so has provided the opportunity to characterize learning-induced transcription within the adult auditory cortex. Chapter 1 reports the first identified genome-wide changes in learning-induced gene expression within the auditory cortex using an auditory memory model in adult, male Sprague-Dawley rats. Auditory cortical samples were collected from animals in the initial learning phase of a two-tone discrimination sound-reward task previously reported to induce exceptionally sound-specific neurophysiological cortical plasticity and behavioral memory under conditions that inhibited HDAC3 activity during training. Genome-wide changes in auditory cortical transcription are now candidate to underlie neurophysiological changes in the auditory cortex for the formation of long-lasting discriminative memory of acoustic frequency cues. Bioinformatic analyses identified molecules and mechanisms including cholinergic synapse (KEGG rno04725), extra-cellular matrix receptor interaction (KEGG rno04512), and neuroactive ligand receptor interaction (KEGG rno04080). These candidate pathways are potential therapeutic targets to enable experiences to induce long-lasting changes to sound-specific auditory function in adulthood and prime for future gene-targeted investigations.
Chapter 2 examines the anatomical relevance of genes of interest (GOIs) identified the transcriptional profiles induced by successful auditory learning mediated by blocking HDAC3 described in Chapter 1. Changes in GOI expression were examined within the auditory cortex in a separate cohort of adult animals that underwent the same two-tone discrimination task described in Chapter 1. RNAscope was used to reveal that learning experiences can shift the amount of GOI transcripts uniquely within cellular subpopulations (e.g. CamkIIa+ or Rorb+ cells). Additionally, GOIs shift their magnitude of expression uniquely between hemispheres of the same subject. These findings indicate that there are gene-specific changes in transcription that depend on cellular context and functional hemispherical asymmetries in the auditory cortex that may support molecular mechanisms that underly neurophysiological plasticity and the expression of learned sound-reward behaviors. Analysis of GOI expression and how it contributes to behavioral performance indicate that relative GOI expression within both hemispheres are strong predictors of how well an individual will learn and acquire a sound discrimination task. Together, these findings indicate a highly specialized set of cellular changes at the transcriptional level that are now relevant for investigation of their physiological consequences at the circuit and systems levels.
Chapter 1 and 2 use pharmacological HDAC3-inhiition as a tool to examine gene expression within the auditory cortex related to successful sound reward learning, plasticity, and auditory memory. In contrast, Chapter 3 determines how local to the auditory cortex the memory enhancing effects of HDAC3 are on epigenetic regulation of auditory cortical transcription, neurophysiological plasticity, and sound-cued behavior. By specifically delivering an adeno-associated virus (AAV) containing a single point mutation of HDAC3 (mtHDAC3) to the auditory cortex, we aimed to limit the effects of HDAC3 inhibition to just the auditory cortex and to target only the deacetylase function of HDAC3. In contrast to prior reports using pharmacological inhibition of HDAC3, animals expressing mtHDAC3 in the auditory cortex showed no behavioral differences compared to eGFP controls learning a single tone detection sound-reward task or in a later auditory memory test. However, electrophysiological recordings of the auditory cortex revealed potential differences in sound representation between groups. Learning appeared to induce tonotopic expansions in both groups but was more sound-specific to the learned tone in animals expressing mtHDAC3 compared to those expressing eGFP. The data did not fully replicate prior HDAC3 manipulations using a pharmacological inhibitor, leaving room for several interpretations. For example, the data could support a role for the non-deacetylase function of HDAC3 in auditory cortical and behavioral effects. In addition, the data could suggest a larger network within and beyond the auditory cortex that can be regulated by epigenetic players like HDAC3 to influence learning-induced gene expression in the auditory cortex that subserve different forms of cortical plasticity with dedicated outcomes on sound-cued memory and behavior depending on task demands.
As a whole, the results reported in this thesis highlight the unique and dynamic profiles of gene expression within the auditory cortex, and how their differential activation by learning experiences can modulate the success of auditory memory formation.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Investigations of trait relationships in fruit rot resistant and low acid american cranberry (vaccinium macrocarpon ait.) populations
No full textAmerican cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon Ait.) is an economically important crop severely affected by fruit rot, a disease complex including up to 15 fungal pathogen species. In Chapter 2 of this thesis, a mapping population (n = 219) bred with high yielding parentage and three diverse sources of fruit rot resistance (FRR) was evaluated under fruit rot pressure for fruit quality traits: percent rotted fruit, yield, berry size, titratable acidity (TA), soluble solids (brix), total anthocyanin content (TAcy), citric, malic, quinic, and benzoic acids. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationships with FRR and horticultural traits. Significant genetic variation in the mapping populations was observed for all traits, with percent rotted fruit ranging from 7.5 - 76.6%, yield ranging 11.9 - 201.8 g/0.09 m2 and TA ranging 1.70 - 2.42% across three beds (locations) and years (2019 - 2021). High yielding, low fruit rot selections were identified. A promising selection had an adjusted mean yield of 201.8 g/0.09 m2 and 23.0% rotted fruit, showing an improvement over both parents and the population mean. Percent rotted fruit did not significantly correlate with yield or fruit weight, suggesting low to no linkage between these fruit quality traits and FRR. However, there was a moderate positive correlation between FRR and TA, and FRR and quinic acid, suggesting potential acid-tolerance of some pathogenic fungi involved in the disease complex. A moderate negative correlation was found between percent rotted fruit and benzoic acid concentration, providing further evidence for the phytochemical’s role in FRR. Additionally, quantitative trait loci were detected for percent rotted fruit, fruit weight, brix, TA, malic, citric, and benzoic acids. Cranberries contain high concentrations of organic acids (such as malic and citric acids) when compared to other fruit (e.g. blueberry, apple, and grape), requiring addition of sugars to make the marketed products palatable, which can deter health-conscious consumers. Breeding cranberry fruit for lower acidity may help consumer acceptance in perceiving a “sweeter” product. Leaf morphology affects photosynthetic capacity, which can alter metabolomic profiles and fruit acidity. Chapter 3 of this thesis characterizes leaf and fruit morphology, fruit weight, TA, brix, and concentrations of malic, citric, quinic, and benzoic acids, and explores relationships of these traits in a full-sibling low acid population segregating for a unique leaf and fruit shape (n = 64). Phenotypes were measured over two years (2021-2022) from plants growing in the greenhouse. Fruit shape was visually assessed and grouped into two categories: (1) ellipsoidal and (2) oblate. For leaves, leaf aspect ratios (LARs; length/width ratio) and Feret’s diameter were quantified using a flatbed scanner and the ImageJ macro “MuLES”. LAR was significantly correlated with fruit weight (R2 = 0.65) and TA (R2 = 0.29). In the oblate-shaped fruit group, leaves had lower LARs (p = 4.7e-15) and their fruit had lower TA (p = 4.0e-3). Additionally, the oblate fruit shape group had lower leaf Feret’s diameter than the ellipsoidal group’s leaves (p = 9.1e-05). The fruit shape groups also differed in fruit weight, with the oblate group having a lower fruit weight than the ellipsoidal group (p = 4.2e-6). These results suggest links between leaf shape parameters, fruit weight, fruit chemistry, and flowering time in this low acid cranberry population. Understanding the relationships between these traits has the potential to inform scientists with any correlated traits across plant organs. Examination into organic acid profiles in leaves of this population and similar populations will improve our understanding of the connections between organ morphology and cranberry chemistry.M.S.Includes bibliographical reference
Social media and social movements: connections between Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in New York City
No full textWorsening inequality, lack of representation, and the increasing role of communications all shaped the context of the 2010s. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Black Lives Matter (BLM) shared this historical moment. The primary objective of my dissertation here is to examine the how OWS and BLM in NYC were organized. To this end, I describe social media use byparticipants. I show how OWS embraced prefigurative politics and a tactical media approach. I challenge the dominant scholarship on social movements and propose instead adopting societies in movement as a framework for social action. OWS moved through social media, creating what I term a participatory movement. I show how similar cultural practices continued in BLM in NYC.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Shaping indigenous youth as national subjects: role of education in Central India
No full textThis dissertation examines how the discourses, practices, and experiences of development and violence shape Indigenous children in the interlocking framings of future and threat, where on the one hand, they are envisioned to become responsible citizens through education, and on the other hand, they appear to be marked as ‘threat’ to the nation. I examine the way education and other developmental interventions shape Adivasi young peoples’ subjectivities. I define education broadly to encompass modern formal schooling, and cultural and political learnings of Adivasi children. Following discourses surrounding and implementation of developmental and neoliberal interventions in post-colonial India and focusing on indigenous childhoods, this dissertation analyzes how Adivasi young people engage in the social, cultural, historical, and political constructions of childhood and their Indigenous identities.The narratives in this dissertation complicate normative and conceptual discussions on age, indigeneity, agency, and temporalities in a context where forms of hyper-visible and invisible violence are deeply entangled. The dissertation offers an overview of palpable religious and ideological tensions that have existed for over a century and their fraught association with relentless capitalist extraction, the limits of postcolonial development, and the political, cultural, and ecological struggles of Adivasi peoples to which childhood becomes central.
The dissertation addresses two interdependent, although undertheorized, ideas – first, developmental interventions in education and communities’ engagement, appropriation, and contestation with the schooling system and its role in shaping gendered national subjects. The second, the temporalities of Indigenous childhood in a charged environment of violence and developmentalism. An immersive engagement, through thirteen-month-long ethnographic fieldwork with Adivasi youth and community members across age, gender, caste, and tribe in Bastar informs the analysis and findings of this dissertation. I argue that the figure of the Adivasi child is a crucial site to witness and discern the processes and functioning of multiple institutions and practices. Employing what I call graded temporality, I argue for children’s collective agency, embedded in intergenerational relations, that comes to the fore in the context of politically charged situations of deprivation. I demonstrate that a continuous process of subjectification and re-subjectification places Adivasi children on a spectrum of subjectivity.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Isao alone and other stories
No full textChosen, cherished, sent -- Disciple of the Stone Eater -- On swimming -- Isao, alone -- Inayah, again -- Those people, that place.M.A
Gold loaded polymersome studies in mammalian cells
No full textPolymersomes have potential for drug delivery applications due to their ability to efficiently encapsulate both hydrophobic and hydrophilic molecules. The ability to control cargo release from these vesicles with high spatiotemporal control would be transformative in biological systems. One such way to accomplish this is with a light-responsive nano-polymersome system, where pulsed laser irradiation can be utilized to bring about membrane disruption and subsequent cargo release. The work herein investigates the use of gold-loaded nano-polymersomes in mammalian cells. Nano-polymersome stability was investigated in various biologically relevant media, such as phosphate buffered saline, and hanks balanced salt solutions are shown. Cell viability was then studied via addition to NIH 3T3 cells in concentrations ranging from 1:5 up to 1:100 dilutions with subsequent studies performed to confirm time associated toxicity. Cell viability studies were performed for two different polymersome preparations, both with, and without post self-assembly dialysis. Additionally, association and uptake were also determined via fluorescence and confocal laser scanning microscopy. Polymersomes were incubated with cells that were subsequently stained with CellMask deep red membrane stain and imaged with a z-stack confirmed the endocytosis of polymersomes.
Finally, methods were developed for single-cell and bulk irradiations utilizing a 532 nm femtosecond laser and cytotoxicity as a function of pulse energy was studied. The studies herein suggest that gold loaded polymersomes have strong potential to deliver cargo in biological systems with cargo release mediated by pulsed laser irradiation.M.S.Includes bibliographical reference
Momentary meaning processes shape behaviors with individual and societal relevance
No full textMeaning in life is a fundamental human motivation central to well-being and optimal functioning. Definitional aspects of the subjective feeling of meaning include coherence, significance, and purpose. However, the present literature lacks a well-integrated understanding of how meaning processes, namely the search for and presence of meaning, are tied to various behaviors in everyday life. Across three papers, I examine meaning processes as they relate to different behaviors. In the first line of work (Paper 1), I test how everyday behaviors like routines relate to feelings of meaning in life. In the second line of work (Papers 2 and 3), I examine how feelings of meaning shape a specific kind of behavior with societal relevance – collective actions in response to social injustice. In Paper 1, I clarify how the process and content of everyday behaviors predict concurrent momentary meaning presence. Across 2 experience sampling studies, I find routinization of everyday behaviors is positively related to momentary meaning presence above and beyond the meaningful content of those behaviors, and particularly during difficult contexts (i.e. during the transition to COVID-19 lockdowns). Paper 2 examined the role of search for meaning in motivating collective action against perceived social injustice. Across 4 studies using cross sectional, repeated measures, and daily diary methods, I find that trait, daily, and momentary feelings of meaning search predict greater intentions to engage in collective action against social injustice. In Paper 3, I investigate how engaging in collective action against social injustice is linked with daily and momentary feelings of meaning presence across three studies. This work provides evidence that engaging in collective action predicts greater momentary feelings of meaning presence, which in turn predict greater intentions to engage in collective action in the future. Together, this dissertation contributes towards our understanding of how momentary feelings of meaning shape, and are shaped by, two kinds of behaviors - everyday routines and collective action against social injustice.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Reputation and Sex in the City: governance, women, and paid sex in Newark, New Jersey
No full textThis work investigates the relationship between governance and sex workers in Newark, New Jersey, and what that interaction can teach us about community conflict and sex worker organizing around the issue. The theme of sexuality, particularly sex work, has been mostly disregarded in the city, seen more as a haven for violent crime and racial conflict. This investigation is then designed to affirm Newark as a space worthy of diverse knowledge production by shedding light on the intricate ways women’s – cis and trans – sexualities exist and are managed in the urban space by community, social, and legal forces. Such historical recollection goes from Newark’s foundation until current times, capturing the most important developments in the field, as well as recent organizational practices of organized sex workers opposing whorephobia and respectability politics while trying to survive in a changing urban environment. Therefore, methodologically, this work relies on critical sexuality studies while delving into archival research, participant observation with the sex worker-led organizations New Jersey Red Umbrella Alliance (NJRUA) and Best Practices Policy Project (BPPP), and semi-structured interviews with current and retired Newark sex workers. The present exploration contributes to new forms of looking into municipal politics, the creation and materialization of ideal citizens, as well as organizational/activist initiatives to counteract idealized visions of the city and its citizens. By analyzing these dynamics, we observe how we – as urban constituencies aiming to belong in communities – build and aim to maintain or disrupt reputations encompassing specific ways we live – and mostly, seem to live – our sexualities.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference