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The Only Place I\u27m Allowed in the City is Court : Racial Capitalism, Gentrification, and the Criminalization of Homelessness in Missoula, Montana
Get PDFThis thesis dissects how gentrification, homelessness, and criminalization intersect and influence one another, using Missoula, Montana\u27s recent urban camping ban as a case study.
It argues that racial capitalism, as a hermeneutic, structures the logics of Missoula\u27s Ordinance 3747 and that gentrification, as a manifestation of racial capitalism, creates a structural imperative for the criminalization of homelessness. In addition, it asserts that local community organizations such as the Missoula Tenants Union and the Missoula Unhoused Neighbors Union offer viable alternatives to the current carceral organization of public policy, orienting space in the city toward what Ruth Wilson Gilmore terms abolition geographies.
Relying on critical theory and personal interviews, this thesis addresses the ways in which developers and local governments enshrine capital accumulation at the expense of marginalized populations, and how the structure of racial capitalism necessitates criminalization and displacement of those it deems surplus. Concurrently, it demonstrates how the ordinance has provided openings for community-based political interventions, illuminating the efforts and experiences of local organizers who have continuously fought against the criminalization of their unhoused neighbors and who strive to enact a collectivist future that centers the needs of residents rather than capital
Right-Wing Populist Mobilizations and Gender: France\u27s Rassemblement National and Italy\u27s Fratelli d\u27Italia
Get PDFEuropean right-wing populist (RWP) parties are increasingly touting their attention to women’s issues and representation, and this has coincided with stronger electoral performances. Thus, the following puzzles emerge: how have RWP parties harnessed gender frames, issue salience, and women’s representation as part of a mainstreaming process, and through what mechanisms are these strategies resonating with voters? I address these questions by comparing France’s Rassemblement National (RN) and Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), tracing their developments from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. I find that immigrants’ perceived relationship with the welfare state, feelings of insecurity due to terrorism, and RWP versus fascist ideological inheritance matter in generating femonationalist discourses. Secondly, while both parties have benefited electorally from strengthening women’s representation, certain dimensions of representation appear to have greater resonance than others
Heterospecific Mating Triggers Disruptive Postmating Gene Expression Response in Mimulus
No full textMating is both a driver of biodiversity and a battleground for competing evolutionary interests, particularly when postmating interactions impact fertilization success. One such suite of interactions is the postmating prezygotic (PMPZ) transcriptional response, a highly coordinated and dynamic interplay of molecular responses that trigger a cascade of signaling events after mating but before the formation of the zygote. PMPZ transcriptional responses can either facilitate or inhibit successful fertilization, thereby playing a pivotal role in reinforcing species boundaries. While this phenomenon is well documented in animal systems, the transcriptional response to heterospecific mating remains largely unexplored in plants. We used RNA-seq to characterize gene expression in styles of sister species pair Mimulus guttatus and Mimulus nasutus following conspecific and heterospecific crosses. Heterospecific matings elicited a significantly greater number and magnitude of differentially expressed genes, with strong enrichment of stress, immunity, and defense pathways. Some gene families showed concordant expression across treatments, while others, such as NAC transcription factors and heat shock proteins, showed divergent or amplified responses in the heterospecific condition. These results suggest that the pollinated style tissue mounts a heightened transcriptional response to heterospecific pollen, consistent with a shift toward biotic stress signaling. Our findings demonstrate that plants, like animals, exhibit PMPZ transcriptional disruption in response to heterospecific mating. This early molecular response may serve as a barrier to gene flow and contribute to the maintenance of species boundaries
Fair Play or Financial Power? Examining the Competitive Impact of Foreign Investment in European Football
Get PDFFootball is not only the most popular sport in Europe but also fundamental to driving local and international economies due to the heavy influence fans have on driving ticket sales, team merchandise purchases and media rights. In the last twenty years, it has become increasingly popular for wealthy capital groups or businessmen from outside Europe to buy clubs and give teams a large influx of capital. Fans and players alike have grown worried that this type of new ownership will change the football world for the worse because teams with foreign investment can outspend their opponents for the best players. Others argue that buying out smaller clubs creates a fairer playing field and will raise the competitiveness of football, benefiting everyone involved. Using panel data from 20 seasons of European football play from the top five most profitable leagues in Europe, this thesis aims to understand which argument is correct: does foreign investment create an unfair advantage or make competition more equitable? An event difference-in-difference regression model with local team fixed effects is used to see if foreign investors have an impact on a team’s on-field and off-field. Both the summary statistics and the regression results conclude that there is not an unfair advantage created for teams with foreign ownership but rather teams with this type of ownership allows clubs to equal, or even surpass, clubs with domestic ownership. Through elevating the level of poorer clubs, this thesis concludes that foreign investment is advantageous for football as the overall competition is raised rather creating a wealth gap between clubs
Linguistic Performance of Gender and Sexuality in Romantically Oriented Settings: Participant Pitch Variation on The Button
No full textSociolinguistics has long concerned itself with the variation of speech between different demographics (Labov, 1972). Building upon the theories that individuals construct their speech to indicate their identity or association with a group (Eckert, 1989), and that such constructed speech can be altered to fit the specific conversational context a speaker is navigating (Bucholtz, 1999), this paper attempts to examine the effects of a romantically oriented setting on one’s speech. Hypothesizing that this type of setting will result in speakers foregrounding their gender and sexual identities, it aims to determine whether speech differences will arise among these distinctions. It measures the pitch ranges of male-presenting and female-presenting participants in both opposite-gendered and same-gendered environments. Data are derived from videos of an online speed dating show called The Button, published by the YouTube Chanel Cut. Statistically insignificant results were yielded for all groups. Most values were highly insignificant, but two groups approached significance: men speaking to other men when compared to men speaking to women, and men who rejected their male partners when compared against men who did not reject their male partners
Investigating the Role of HAT2 and EAF6 proteins in initiating transcription of insect stage proteins in African Trypanosomes
No full textTrypanosoma brucei, the unicellular, protozoan parasite that causes both Human and Animal African Trypanosomiasis, cycles between a bloodstream form in mammals and a procyclic form in the insect vector. In the mammalian bloodstream, T. brucei evades the host immune system by varying expression of Variant Surface Glycoproteins (VSGs) on the cell surface. In flies, the cell surface is instead coated in one, invariant protein called procyclin. Procyclin is coded for by a set of GPEET and EP genes. The mechanism by which transcription of these EP genes is initiated during differentiation from the bloodstream to procyclic form is not yet well understood. Our research group previously investigated the role of chromatin interacting proteins in regulating the expression of life cycle stage specific genes. Ashby et al. A de novo increase in occupancy of a bromodomain reader protein, Bdf3, near the EP1 gene locus in parasites induced to differentiate to the procyclic form (Ashby et al., 2022). We hypothesized that chromatin remodeling near the EP1 locus by the histone acetyltransferase enzyme, HAT2, and the protein subunit of the Nu4 Histone Acetyltransferase complex, EAF6, facilitates Bdf3 binding and subsequent EP1 transcription during differentiation. To test this, T. brucei strains were modified to include FLAG tagged HAT2 and EAF6 at the endogenous loci. We further modified these strains to allow for a doxycycline inducible knock down of HAT2 or EAF6. We demonstrate that the knockdown of target proteins was induced in drug treated bloodstream parasites. However, we found that target proteins were not knocked down in drug treated parasites induced to differentiate to the procyclic form. Experiments to support or refute our hypothesis about the role of HAT2 and EAF6 in initiating transcription of EP1 could therefore not be completed. Further studies may provide insight into the mechanisms of transcriptional activation as parasites transition between diverse host environments
The Aesthetic Assembly Line: Beauty, Labor, and the Commodification of Women’s Bodies
No full textThe Aesthetic Assembly Line is a capstone installation and a thesis project that critiques the global beauty industry’s commodification of women through the lens of aesthetic labor. The project argues that beauty routines are often marketed as forms of self-care or empowerment but are repetitive, industrialized processes driven by capitalist systems. Drawing theories from aesthetic labor and feminist media studies, the work challenges the idea that beauty is not a purely personal act or an act of self-expression. Instead, the paper frames beauty routines as a form of labor that is required for social acceptance, and digital visibility.
The art installation visualizes this labor through post-industrial aesthetics, using a non-operational cardboard conveyor belt and silicone molds of the artist’s face to represent the repetitive production of a “perfect” beauty ideal. These sculptural elements are accompanied by a vanity table and posters to further symbolize self-maintenance and external influences. Together, these components expose how the beauty industry dehumanizes women, reducing them to a standardized, commodified subjects who are under pressure to confirm to a certain beauty standard.
Building on works such as Aesthetic Labor and the Effortless Beauty Paradox, The Aesthetic Assembly Line contributes to media studies by reframing beauty not only as a cultural narrative but as an economic mechanism that relies on the continuous investment of time, money, and labor. Ultimately, this project seeks to reveal the unseen labor behind beauty and to challenge the feminine imperative to achieve an appearance shaped to meet society’s ideal of beauty
A Deconstruction of the Basilica of Arantzazu: Culture, Architecture, and Spirituality in a Sacred Place of Worship
No full textThe Sanctuary of Our Lady of Arantzazu located in Oñati, Basque Country, Spain, is a representation of the resistance of marginalized Indigenous peoples against the nation states that wish them erased and forgotten. The sanctuary was built in honor of a legend in which shepherd Rodrigo de Balzategui found a virgin apparition in a hawthorn shrub, to which he exclaimed, “Arantzan su! (Thou, among the thorns!)” The shepherd believed a shrine needed to be built to honor the figure of the virgin, but differing religious communities could not come to an agreement regarding who would take charge of such a project until 1514, when the Franciscans decided to do so (Mallo 609). Unfortunately, the sanctuary suffered various fires throughout its history, mainly due to different wars in 1553, 1622, and 1834. The final fire was preceded by attacks against the monastery during the War of Independence in Spain, which caused the Franciscan community to abandon the convent in 1822, taking the virgin figure with them (Mallo 609). The Franciscans eventually returned to the sanctuary in 1878, and in 1950, the Provincial Minister of the Franciscans decided that a new, larger basilica honoring the Virgin of Arantzazu should be constructed
Costuming the Collective: Constructing Gender and National Identity in Stalinist Musical Comedies
No full textThe Stalinist Musical Comedies of the 1930s answered the call for a “cinema for the
millions”, seeking to offer an accessible and entertaining vision of a utopian Socialist society. They are also markedly different from other official culture of the time as they feature exclusively women heroines. This paper embarks on a closer examination of two films Volga-Volga (1938) and Circus (1936), directed by Grigori Aleksandrov, who pioneered the genre. I will discuss how, within the larger ideological tensions between the Bolsheviks’ idea of women’s emancipation against the push towards nuclear domesticity in the 1930s, the heroines’ changing gender presentation throughout the film purports to reconcile the heroines’ own professional life with the personal and romantic. This supposedly liberatory gender transmigration is repeatedly undermined by Aleksandrov in the service of comedy and spectacle. In addition, these films all adapt the Socialist Realist proto-plot to their feminine protagonists, giving them a larger symbolic role of mother and educator in the “Great Soviet Family”
How Did the Implementation of ASC 842 Affect Credit Markets and Stock Performance Among Publicly Traded Firms with Extensive Lease Obligations?
Get PDFI investigate whether the mandatory lease capitalization under ASC 842 led to measurable shifts in market-based assessments of firm risk, from both a creditor and investor perspective. Sampled firms and financial quarters are segmented based on lease intensity (a proxy for a firm’s reliance on leases) and firm size (based on market capitalization). Contrary to initial expectations, the results suggest that firms with higher lease intensity experienced a significant increase in stock returns and a decline in bond yields following the implementation of ASC 842, which indicates that the added transparency may have reassured equity and credit investors. This study also examines whether firm size moderates these outcomes and finds that size did not significantly affect stock returns, but small-cap firms faced higher borrowing costs in both loan and bond markets. These findings contribute to the ongoing debate over regulatory transparency and seek to respond to the FASB’s request for further insight into how financial markets interpret changes in lease recognition