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The financialization of corporate America: a case study of stem professionals at a consumer products company
No full textThis dissertation contributes to the limited literature on the impact of financialization on knowledge workers. Financialization refers to a series of policy and economic changes starting over the last four decades that prioritize financial management and financial services over other sectors and business strategies. Specifically, the dissertation examines how financialization has impacted the careers of technology-oriented employees at a large consumer products company, referred to as A&E Corporation. The dissertation utilizes a case study design based on data analysis and semi-structured interviews with 43 professionals in engineering, product development, and information technology. The dissertation’s contribution to the literature confirms previous research across diverse and unrelated industries that financialization eroded employees’ passion for their careers and confidence in their voice in espousing their profession; financialization focused work on short-term job intensification activities and bottom-line orientation while eroding employee value and commitment to the company, with less importance placed on employee recognition, training, and experience; financialization created uncertain and unpredictable employee personnel practices, job insecurity due to frequent reorganizations, less focus on career development, and overall employee confusion over shifting organizational priorities. Moreover, the findings contribute to and expand the existing body of knowledge in areas that have either sparse research or no research. Last, the findings contribute to the literature by bringing forth new/nuanced perspectives on the level of lived experience of STEM participants. Namely amongst these new findings is that less importance is placed on employee recognition and/or experience and unpredictable employee personnel practices due to financialization.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
The six senses: a comparative study of 19th – 21st century Afro-Texan femme sensory epistemologies
No full textMy dissertation, “The Six Senses: A Comparative Study of 19th - 21st Century Afro-Texan Femme Sensory Epistemologies,” argues that by viewing violence as repetitive instances against Afro-Texan non-normative feminine bodies, or what I conceptualize as the sixth sense of haunting, what then emerges from these bodies – the senses – are tools for navigating everyday living. While sociological research has examined haunting as a holder for the ghosts of unsaid origins, the discipline continues to neglect the more intimate and visceral consequences of repeated acts of violence on racialized sexualized bodies. Thus, in this gap, my work theorizes haunting as the consequences of embodied terror imposed on, inhabiting, and expelled from Black femme bodies. To do this, I work across sensory, feminist, and queer sociology while in conversation with cultural studies, often through the lenses of psychoanalysis, queer of color critique, and visual, sound, and performance studies.
Haunting, as a sense, reveals that violence corrupts Black bodies. As I argue, this corruption shifts cultural analyses of everyday Black life back to the body and its embodied adjustments. I explore haunting through three forms of sensory knowing: moans, liquidity, and bareness. Specifically, I compare 19th to 21st-century case studies of sensory knowing as expressed through 1) the moans between blues woman Victoria Spivey’s moanin’ blues and hip-hop artist Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘Ah!” as they emerge from Spivey’s teeth given to an archive and the bullet fragments left in Thee Stallion’s feet; 2) liquidity (racialization’s wet expulsions, i.e. spit) as a queer sociological reading method of Afro-Texan folklore texts Emily, the Yellow Rose of Texas and Aunt Dicy Tales. These wet and messy expulsions disrupt Texas folklore’s larger racial project, shaping narratives of racialized sexualities; and 3) bareness as a visual practice maintained between Afro-Texan femme photographers and their subjects as they play with hypervisibility, namely through the excess use of exposure (exposed flesh, fluorescent lighting, etc.). Here, I situate bareness as a shared intergenerational visuality held by Black Houston’s documentary photographers, Elnora Frazier and Louise Martin, and Adrienne Raquel’s work with Onyx dancers. My research positions the senses as an exciting path advancing social and cultural analysis of racialized and sexualized bodies and their cultures.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Conformal metrics of constant scalar curvature with unbounded volumes
No full textFor n ≥ 25, we construct a smooth metric ˜g on the standard n-dimensional sphere Sn
such that there exists a sequence of smooth metrics {˜gk}k∈N conformal to ˜g with the
same constant scalar curvature R˜gk ≡ 1 and unbounded volumes Vol(Sn, ˜gk) → ∞ as
k → ∞.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Essays in empirical microeconomics
No full textIn my dissertation, I use tools in empirical microeconomics to study topics broadly related to public economics. In Chapter 1, I study the impact of recreational marijuana dispensaries on local crime in Chicago. The legalization of recreational marijuana dispensaries in many U.S. states has prompted debates about their potential social consequences. This paper examines the impact of recreational marijuana dispensaries on local crime in Chicago, Illinois. Utilizing the lottery-based issuance of dispensary licenses, I employ Difference-in-Difference estimators that account for heterogeneous treatment effects with differential timing. I show that the opening of a recreational marijuana dispensary in Chicago led to about a 30\% increase in crime within a 500-meter radius of the dispensary. This effect persists over time and is primarily associated with property crime and violent crime. Moreover, evidence suggests that this crime increase is driven by the relocation of crime from more distant areas to those in closer proximity to ds. I also identify heterogeneous effects across different demographic and socio-economic factors. Finally, I present evidence that census tracts may not be suitable units for analyzing the effects of ds, highlighting the importance of geographical granularity in such studies. Overall, this research reconciles conflicting findings in the existing literature by illustrating that the impact of ds on local crime is context-dependent.
In Chapter 2, I study the effects of dowries on female intra-household bargaining power and female welfare. I also study the effects of dowries on children human capital accumulation. I use a Chinese longitudinal dataset CFPS. To address endogeneity issues, I use an instrument that measures local dowry spending with respect to average household income. I find evidence that higher dowries lead to higher female household bargaining power and therefore better children education outcome. I find no evidence that higher dowries increase female mental and physical welling or children health.
In Chapter 3, I study the impact of the Paycheck Protection Program on employment in publicly traded companies. The COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented disruption of the U.S. labor markets, with rapid, record-setting increases in unemployment. The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was enacted as a response to counter the havoc. To date, over 800 billion dollars have been issued as low interest rate loans to small businesses and the majority of it has been forgiven. This paper tries to understand whether this enormous spending has achieved its goals of maintaining employment and whether it provide a good model for future policy responses to crisis. Linking compustat data on publicly traded firms with PPP loan data from Small Business Administration, I estimate an OLS model and a TWFE model. In both specifications I find no significant effect of PPP loans on employment, consistent with some previous literature.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Experimental methods in number theory and combinatorics
No full textSome results in experimental mathematics are presented. In particular, new primality tests based on the theory of linear recurrences; the confirmation of some conjectures by Manuel Kauers and Christoph Koutschan;some new proofs of famous summation identities; a connection to Gosper summability of factorials and Bell numbers; the creation of new, decidable diophantine equations; experiments related to Beukers’ proof of the irrationality of Apery’s constant; and an enumeration of certain types of restricted Dyck paths.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Devoted, desiring, devouring: cannibalistic queer female intimacies
No full textThere is a wealth of scholarship dedicated to the significance of the female cannibal who eatsmen. Much less scholarly attention has been paid to instances where women eat one another. Looking at a variety of media, including Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca, Bones and All (both the novel by Camille DeAngelis and the film), “Exorcism, or Eating my Twin”, Yellowjackets, and the 2016 film Raw, I argue that the figure of the queer female cannibal assays an assemblage of ways to understand how queer women relate, are vulnerable to, and are intimate with other queer women. The cannibal lingers, queerly, in the in-between, between loathing and desire, the repellant and consumptive, between devotion and abhorrence. The phenomenon of queer women taking up the image of the cannibal and delightfully consuming queer girl media unveils the potential of cannibalistic intimacies to portray the feeling of being loved, vulnerable, queer, eaten, and uncapturable. The cannibal, in defying easy or singular categorization, is just the figure to expand on how queer female intimacies are expressed and negotiated between women.M.A.Includes bibliographical reference
A belligerent peace: military victimhood and counterinsurgency in transitional Colombia
No full textColombian soldiers are subject to polarizing characterizations, portrayed either as patriotic martyrs or irredeemable murderers. While some view the National Army as selfless heroes combating terrorism, others highlight its history of abuses against civilians, denounced by national and international human rights groups. Despite evidence of these abuses, some consider the military as victims of “lawfare,” aiming to tarnish their image. Against this backdrop, Colombia implemented a peace agreement in 2016 with the FARC-EP guerrilla, marking a transitional scenario aimed at managing the legacies of past atrocities.
This dissertation examines the implications of reframing military identity as “victims” within Colombia’s transitional justice process. By analyzing the emergence and circulation of the concept of “military victim,” this study contributes to debates on reforming state institutions implicated in human rights abuses. Furthermore, it sheds light on obstacles faced by transitional justice infrastructures in reshaping national security bureaucracies like the Colombian military. I argue, in this sense, that understanding the everyday practices and narratives of national security bureaucracies involved in abuses is crucial for transforming their institutional cultures, deeply influenced by counterinsurgency frameworks.
Lastly, this dissertation critically reflects on ethical considerations in conducting ethnographic research within national security bureaucracies. My purpose is, then, to translate the cultural frameworks grounding this particular institutional culture into a more nuanced understanding of the vernacular particularities that characterize military identity and transitional justice in Colombia.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Characterizing the response of diverse hazelnut germplasm to eastern filbert blight in New Jersey
No full textThe fungal disease eastern filbert blight (EFB), caused by Anisogramma anomala, is the primary limiting factor to European hazelnut (Corylus avellana) production in the United States. Developing resistant cultivars is considered the most effective management strategy. Breeding efforts at Oregon State University (OSU) have successfully introgressed the dominant EFB resistance gene (R-gene) from ‘Gasaway’ into commercial quality cultivars that have been widely adopted in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, where >99% of US hazelnut production occurs. Concerns over the durability of a single gene for resistance drove germplasm screening efforts at OSU and instigated germplasm collection trips throughout the native range of C. avellana by OSU and Rutgers University, which resulted in the identification of over 100 sources of resistance to EFB. Sources exhibit tolerance (quantitative resistance [QR]) or qualitative resistance associated with R-genes, 34 of which have been mapped to three of C. avellana’s eleven genetic linkage groups (LGs). However, A. anomala exhibits pathogenic variation between populations and some selections made at OSU, where the pathogen is believed to be genetically uniform, have shown variable resistance expression when exposed to A. anomala populations in New Jersey, including trees protected by the ‘Gasaway’ R-gene. Further variability has been observed in long term disease trials at Rutgers, where mature, previously resistant trees started expressing EFB, in some cases more than 15 years after initial exposure to A. anomala. The goals of these studies were to identify changes in resistance expression in Rutgers’ foreign germplasm introductions (n=154) and to characterize differences in EFB resistance expression in cultivars and breeding selections deemed resistant or highly tolerant to EFB at OSU (n=106) when planted in replicated trials at Rutgers. In the germplasm collection, we found 91 introductions that remain resistant, representing only 1.7% of the original 5,226 seedlings planted at Rutgers. New infections (n=63) were severe and primarily linked to trees in specific seedlots, indicative of a breakdown in resistance. The 91 remaining foreign introductions represent 54 distinct seedlots from 7 countries and span 14 of 18 resolved C. avellana genetic clades. Similarly, the 106 cultivars and breeding selections from OSU exhibited variable response to A. anomala at Rutgers. With only two exceptions, cultivars/selections carrying resistance mapped to LG6 (n=30), including the ‘Gasaway’ R-gene, exhibited severe EFB with canopy death observed in 232 of 266 (87%) individual trees. In addition, EFB was identified on carriers of R-genes mapped to LG7, with ‘Ratoli’ related selections (n=4) developing EFB for the first time in their over 20 years of observation at Rutgers, although all other LG7 protected selections (n=7) showed no signs of EFB. With one exception, selections mapped to LG2 (n=9) showed no EFB and cultivars/selections expressing QR (n=50) exhibited disease phenotypes more similar to what they expressed at OSU. These collective findings support that A. anomala displays pathogenic variation between populations and that long term observation of resistance sources across multiple locations and pathogen populations is needed to select durable forms of resistance. Fortunately, dozens of genotypes still exhibit useful levels of resistance/tolerance at Rutgers and constitute a diverse base from which to develop cultivars with sustainable resistance to EFB.M.S.Includes bibliographical reference
The stories mothers tell: twenty and twenty-first maternal life writing as feminist resistance
No full textThis project seeks to empower maternal life writing as a creative outlet, a cultural artifact, and ultimately, a feminist tool towards better understanding the conditions of twenty and twenty-first century mothers in the context of the United States. The three different forms of maternal life writing I explore are twentieth century baby books, turn of the twenty-first century mommyblogs and twenty-first century maternal memoirs. I believe maternal life writing is an opportunity for mothers to transcribe, in their own words, their experiences, triumphs, failures, wants, needs, desires, memories, and visions of the future. It is a powerful tool towards dismantling patriarchal motherhood, specifically the myth of the “good” mother, by acknowledging the identity of mother as not biologically determined and empowering the experience of mothering as feminist knowledge and action.
I offer the feminist motherline as the guiding force across each of my three chapters, as I explore examples of maternal life writing in the historic context of a mother writer’s intention, audience, and impact. The motherline is the intergenerational connection between mothers, the passage of knowledge and ultimately power, transfused through blood or belonging, family, kin networks or community. The primary reason for selecting these three unique forms of maternal life writing is their complex relationship with patriarchal surveillance and maternal resistance. Each medium represents the tension between these two forces. As mothers write with the intention of affirming self and subjectivity through personal experience, the social, economic, and geopolitical circumstances in which they live continue to impact their writing. Despite these fraught conditions, I believe maternal narratives complicate patriarchal projections of motherhood and disrupt normative modes of knowledge production and transmission. I write with three goals in mind: positing motherhood studies within the larger feminist discipline in a meaningful and impactful way; analyzing the identity category of mother as multiple and expansive rather than essentialized; and centering maternal life writing as a powerful theoretical and practical framework for survival and resistance.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Random walks, the H-space of a random graph, and four miniatures
No full textThis thesis is composed of two chapters proving results in discrete probability and probabilistic combinatorics and a final chapter giving short proofs of four unrelated results. The introduction gives a brief overview of the two longer results.
Chapter 2 proves the following natural statement that was conjectured by Itai Benjamini in 2009. Here G is a (simple) graph and τG is the cover time (the time it takes for a simple random walk on G to visit every vertex).
Theorem 1. For every C, there is an ε > 0 such that for every n-vertex graph G, P(τG < Cn) < exp[−εn]. A first ingredient in our proof is a similar statement for a general Markov chain with sufficiently small transition probabilities.
In Chapter 3, we study a version of higher order connectivity in the random graph. The edge space E(G) of a graph G is the vector space FE(G) 2 with elements naturally identified with subgraphs of G. For a fixed graph H, the H-space CH (G) is the subspace of E(G) spanned by copies of H in G. Straightforwardly, CH (G) ⊆ CH (K) ∩ E(G), where K is the complete graph on the vertex set of G. We are interested in understanding when (i.e. for which p) equality holds if G = Gn,p. We prove that a simple necessary condition is w.h.p. sufficient for equality whenever H is strictly 2-balanced. Such a characterization was only known previously for odd cycles, where in particular the result for triangles established the first open case of a conjecture of M. Kahle on the homology of the clique complex of Gn,p.
The final chapter proves four mutually unrelated results. First, we give a proof that maxi |ai| ≥ n ⌊n/2⌋ if a1, . . . , an are integers with distinct subset sums, which is the best known lower bound. Second, we prove an identity relating a certain quadratic form associated to a convex polytope to that of its dual polytope. This identity may be viewed as a generalization of Minkowski’s identity relating the normal vectors and facet areas of a polytope. Third, we give a new proof of the van den Berg-Kesten (BK) inequality on disjoint occurrence which is one line given the Sauer-Shelah lemma and Harris’s inequality. Finally, we finish with a counterexample to a directed version of the KKL inequality conjectured by Subhash Khot.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference