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Penn Library\u27s LJS 409 - Kitāb al-Kashf wa-al-bayān.. (Video Orientation)
No full texthttps://repository.upenn.edu/sims_video/1162/thumbnail.jp
Thriving Together: A Phenomenological Study of the Contributions of a Professional Counterspace to Black Women Higher Education Leaders’ Cultivation of Resilience
No full textBlack women who serve in administrative leadership roles in higher education do so amidst conflicting experiences wherein they are positioned to exercise authority while being subjugated to conditions, socially and institutionally, that uphold racism and sexism. The manifestations and effects of gender and race-based oppression on Black women professionals in higher education have been well documented, but limited research makes visible the strategies that enable Black women leaders to persevere amidst the oppressive conditions they encounter in the higher education context. Professional counterspaces may add to the strategies employed by Black women leaders by offering inclusive spaces to cultivate resilience to persist in their professional practice. This phenomenology explores the impact of institutional racism and sexism on the leadership experiences of eleven mid-level and senior-level Black women administrators historically White Institutions (HWIs), the ways these leaders cultivate resilience, and these leaders’ experiences in a professional counterspace. Black feminist thought, critical race feminism, and resilient leadership frame this study to center the leaders’ voices. Consistent with prior literature, the participants in this study reported persistent encounters with microaggressive work environments. Participants also described their experience of the professional counterspace as a unique and additive opportunity to garner support and generate resources to resist the oppressive conditions that encumber their work as leaders. Whereas the experiences of Black women leaders are understudied, this dissertation uplifts the lived experiences of Black women higher education administrators and the ways the leaders in this study generate and exercise resilience in their practice, to expand leadership and higher education scholarship. In response to the gap in the leadership and higher education literature on the experiences of Black women administrative leaders, this study joins emerging scholarship about professional counterspaces to illustrate features of a support space crafted by and for Black women as a unique mechanism for the professional care and development of Black women leaders. The findings of this dissertation also offer research and practice implications for scholars and practitioners of leadership and resilience to further explore the contributions of sociocultural constructs that shape the experiences of leaders from minoritized communities, such as Black women
Essays in Climate Finance
No full textIn the first chapter, Climate Finance in Financial Markets , I propose a model that determines the discount rate on large-scale climate change mitigation projects. In the model, climate change is present through disasters that destroy capital. Disaster probability is endogenous and grows with emissions that evolve with new investments in carbon-intensive capital. I show that large-scale projects or policies aimed at abating climate change should be discounted with a rate significantly lower than the market rate. I also show the additional losses the economy will incur if the policy awaits several years to start. Finally, I show that only the transition risks rather than the physical risks can explain the green premium and reconcile the theoretical predictions with historical observations. The second chapter, Climate Change Adaptation in Financial Markets , proposes a model that determines the appropriate discount rate on projects that adapt to climate change. In addition, it helps determine the best time to start implementing climate policy. The model is production-based and features endogenous climate-related disasters. It suggests that the discount rate on climate change adaptation projects is lower than that on the risk-free rate and that it is optimal to start investing in them as soon as possible. The third chapter, Adapting to Climate Change: A Disaster-Based Asset Pricing Model , co-authored with Jessica A. Wachter, answers a similar question but with a different approach. In the model, disaster probability increases in the temperature anomaly as soon as the latter surpasses a tipping point. The model suggests that the discount rate on climate change adaptation projects reaches zero as soon as the tipping point is reached while the climate beta becomes negative at that time
The Ebb and Flow of Revolution: A History of Emotions in Early Nineteenth-Century Colombia
No full textThis dissertation explores the ways in which emotions shaped people’s understandings of the troubled times they were living in. It focuses on northern South America – present-day Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela – between 1808 and 1830. These years saw both the collapse of the Spanish Monarchy’s rule over the region and the rise of new republican nations. Such an outcome was far from being inevitable or from being one desired by all. The dissertation is both a history of emotions that focuses on early nineteenth-century northern South America and a history of the region’s independence process studied from the perspective of emotions. Throughout the dissertation, I reflect on how emotions shaped people’s notions of reality and their conceptions of the past and the future. The dissertation poses two main arguments. First, I argue that emotions are a constitutive part of cognition. Emotions shaped the meanings people gave to the world around them at the same time that emotions helped express and impute meaning to people’s actions. Second, the dissertation demonstrates that the emotions that circulated during these years, particularly intense fear and confusion, gave form to the republican and national projects that emerged at the time. It claims that independence and the onset of republicanism did not bring about a critical break from the monarchical and colonial past. Widespread feelings of dread and uncertainty led many of the region’s residents to seek stability and safety at the expense of their aspirations for social and political reform. The dissertation carries out a microscopic analysis of a series of events, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, panic attacks, and funeral rites, in order to grasp the prevailing emotions of the time as well as to get a sense of the different ways in which people understood, experienced, and expressed emotions
Independent School Responses to the #BlackAt Instagram Movement: A Study of Two Cases
No full textResponding to the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, the hashtags #ICantBreathe and #Ferguson hashtags, respectively, brought much needed attention to the police brutality and racial injustice suffered by Black people for generations. While George Floyd’s death caused a racial reckoning in this country, it was the efforts of Black Lives Matters protesters and activists, both online and off, that brought about such a moment. Due to Floyd’s death and the hashtags above, many Black students and alumni of independent schools created #BlackAt Instagram pages to call out the racist and discriminatory behaviors of peers, teachers, and administrators at their schools. The following study investigated how two K-12 co-ed independent schools in the Washington, DC area responded to their #BlackAt Instagram pages. Social media posts and archival documents were examined and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders at each school were conducted to more fully understand the phenomenon. Results indicate that both schools are plagued by the racism of the past and continue to deal with overt racism, microaggressions, and the perpetuation of white supremacy culture, but have also changed significantly as a result of their #BlackAt pages. A focus on the interpersonal dynamics of racism at each school seem to be taking precedence over addressing some of the deeper elements of systemic racism. Implications for leaders at predominantly white independent schools are also discussed
Glottal Stop Variation in Standard Arabic: OT-based Optionality Analysis
Get PDFThis paper analyzes optional glottal stop deletion in Standard Arabic. This deletion is typically accompanied by lengthening or gliding of an adjacent vowel, and deletion can be blocked when this lengthening/gliding is not possible, and also when deletion would create homophony. This paper assesses the ability of various OT-based theories of optionality to account for glottal stop deletion, arguing that the rank-ordered model of EVAL (ROE; Coetzee 2006) provides a better account than alternatives such as partially ordered grammars (PO; Anttila 1997, 2007) and serial variation (SV; Kimper 2011)
Can the Head Quantifier Phrase Reconstruct in Doubly Embedded Chinese Relative Clauses?
Get PDFAoun and Li (2003) claimed that when a universal quantifier phrase (QP) occurs in the doubly embedded subject position of Chinese relative clauses (RCs), it cannot be raised out of the RC and thus cannot have scope over the head of the RC. This study investigated whether it is really true that when a universal QP occurs in the doubly embedded subject position of Chinese RCs, it cannot take scope over the head of the RC. With a controlled truth value judgment experiment, our findings suggest that in Chinese RCs, it is possible for the universal QP in the doubly embedded subject position to have scope over the head QP, which contradicts Aoun and Li\u27s (2003) claim. Furthermore, our findings cast doubt upon the raising analysis (Aoun and Li 2003, Lee 1986) for the universal QP in the RC subject position of Chinese RCs. We argue that the head of Chinese RCs, regardless of whether it is a QP or an NP, can reconstruct into its base position inside the RC. There is no need to stipulate that in Chinese RCs, a head NP can reconstruct while a head QP cannot
The Strongly Coupled E8 x E8 Heterotic String: Geometry & Phenomenology
No full textWorking within the context of the strongly coupled E8 x E8 heterotic string theory, we analyze the B - L MSSM, a realistic supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model, from both a low-energy phenomenology and high-energy string perspective. From a formal point of view, we examine different constructions of string vacua, which satisfy a series of theoretical and phenomenological constraints. Such vacua configurations are anomaly-free, preserve N = 1 SUSY at the compactification scale and yield the correct value for the SO(10) unification scale and gauge coupling in the visible particle sector. Furthermore, we analyze a possible SUSY-breaking mechanism for the type of vacua we construct, via gaugino condensation in the hidden sector. In an attempt to connect these findings to experiment, we study the prospects of detecting the B - L MSSM at the LHC in the near future. Within this specific context, we show that R-parity violating decays of supersymmetric particles could be amenable to direct detection at the ATLAS and CMS detectors. Detection of these processes would not only be an explicit indication of Beyond the Standard Model physics, but would also hint strongly at the existence of N=1 SUSY with spontaneously broken R-parity
The Design of a Community-Informed Socially Interactive Humanoid Robot and End-Effectors for Novel Edge-Rolling
No full textThis dissertation discusses my work in building an HRI platform called Quori and my once separate now integrated work on a manipulation method that can enable robots like Quori, or any more capable robot, to move large circular cylindrical objects. Quori is a novel, affordable, socially interactive humanoid robot platform for facilitating non-contact human-robot interaction (HRI) research. The design of the system is motivated by feedback sampled from the HRI research community. The overall design maintains a balance of affordability and functionality. Ten Quori platforms have been awarded to a diverse group of researchers from across the United States to facilitate HRI research to build a community database from a common platform. This dissertation concludes with a demonstration of Quori transporting a large cylinder for which Quori does not have the power to lift nor the range of motion to dexterously manipulate. Quori is able to achieve this otherwise insurmountable task through a novel robotic manipulation technique called robotic edge-rolling. Edge-rolling refers to transporting a cylindrical object by rolling on its circular edge, as human workers maneuver a gas cylinder on the ground for example. This robotic edge-rolling is achieved by controlling the object to roll on the bottom edge in contact with the ground, and to slide on the surface of the robot\u27s end-effector. It can thus be regarded as a form of robotic dexterous, in-hand manipulation with nonprehensile grasps. This work mainly addresses the problem of grasp planning for edge-rolling by studying how to design appropriately shaped end-effectors with zero internal mobility and how to find feasible grasps for stably rolling the object with the simple end-effectors
Penn Library\u27s LJS 438 - [Neoplatonic and neopythagorean translations]. (Video Orientation)
No full texthttps://repository.upenn.edu/sims_video/1183/thumbnail.jp