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X2Sim
No full textTraditional methods for modeling natural hazards such as landslides, floods, and storm surges are computationally intensive and time-consuming, thus limiting their applicability in effective disaster preparedness and response in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we present a novel framework, through TACC’s HPC resources, for rapidly creating digital twins that significantly reduces the time, manual input, and computational resources needed for simulating the interaction between natural hazards and real-world 3D objects. Our X2Sim framework utilizes an agentic text-to-simulation Large Language Model (LLM) to generate digital twins, integrating two distinct 3D object generation methods: (i) A text-to-3D point cloud diffusion model that swiftly creates 3D point clouds from natural language descriptions, enabling rapid digital twin prototyping, and (ii) An efficient method for constructing high-fidelity point clouds from video input, allowing for more detailed digital twin representations of existing structures. These digital twins are integrated into a Graph Network-based Simulator (GNS) that models the dynamics of particle and fluid interactions, enabling the simulation of complex natural hazard scenarios. Our X2Sim system allows for adjusting simulation parameters, offering a robust tool for exploring various disaster scenarios and their impacts on the digital twins. While our digital twin framework may not match the accuracy of high-fidelity numerical methods, it significantly reduces computation time and complexity, making it viable for near-real-time applications. The X2Sim approach offers a valuable balance between speed and precision in digital twin creation and simulation, providing a streamlined, low-intervention workflow for researchers and practitioners in natural hazard modeling and disaster preparedness.Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC
Assembling citizenship in Islamabad : a visual ethnography of socio-spatial narratives by Christian women from informal settlements
No full textHow do Christian women from informal settlements conceive and experience citizenship in Islamabad through the built environment? I answer this question by engaging in feminist-based participatory ethnography with such women in Pakistan’s capital city. States in capital cities use the built environment to homogenize heterogenous identities and value-systems. Such practices, combined with the intersectional religious, gender and class-based disparities faced by religious minorities living in informal settlements, exacerbates their exclusion from representation and accessibility to public spaces in Islamabad and Pakistan. To challenge such hegemonic interventions, I am highlighting the emergent forms of socio-spatial citizenship that Christian women in informal settlements enact on a daily basis. I argue that this process of citizenship actually emerges from an assemblage of bodies, identities and places that can be enacted by all those who reside in a city, whether from a “minority” or “majority” group. Such a framework helps us re-orient the way states idealize and monumentalize an imaginary nationalism and ideal citizen.Community and Regional Plannin
Gnarled ecologies : postindustrial affects of southeast Texas
Get PDFEthnographically engaging with multiple publics in the small cities and rural backwaters of Southeast Texas’ Golden Triangle, this dissertation works through the political and ideological implications and heavy atmosphere of stories told in a context of hard-luck Texan regionalism. The hard-luck stories and oral histories of SE Texan LGBTQ folks, cancer patients, and those practicing religious faith on the outskirts, are rich archives of exuberance, ideology, and pain. Their expressive qualities challenge conventional political discourse around notions of what progress means, how political consciousness is determined, and what defines community in this postindustrial region of the 21st-century American Deep South. Unexpected histories of non-normative sexualities, fraught relationships with the petrochemical industry, experimental modes of faith and materiality, and creative, stubborn practices of regionalism come together in a vibrant social ecology in which people throw themselves into the impasse of modernity with the creativity of characters working out their stories within a poetic genre. Drawing out the complexities and incommensurabilities of ordinary life in this rigidly conservative and economically depressed region of Texas reveals a divided America in the throes of overwhelming upheaval, comically abject excess, and expressive tragedy.Anthropolog
Weaving webs, cutting wires : textual production as action at Greenham Common
Get PDFThe edited collection Greenham Common: Women at the Wire (1984) and the process of its production with The Women's Press provide a node of connection between UK feminist grassroots activism and feminist cultural production in the 1980s. Along with scholars of social movement culture, I consider Women at the Wire, as a text produced from within a social movement, to be a form of action in itself. It self-consciously archives, in a polyvocal manner, the everyday life and processes at Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp and attempts to bring this experiential knowledge to new publics. I engage with Women at the Wire in conversation with texts contemporaneous to it and more recent scholarly work on Greenham Common. These literatures, in addition to archival material from the records of The Women’s Press at the LSE Women’s Library, allow me to think through how its content was negotiated and its intended audience conceptualized. I contend that Women at the Wire’s particular contribution is in its commitment to record and make available activist affects and processes in an unapologetically radical manner.Englis
Master's thesis recital (bassoon)
No full textDance suite : for solo bassoon / Jacqueline Wilson -- [Unidentified work for bassoon and piano] -- Pastorales de Noël : for flute, bassoon and harp / André Jolivet -- Portuguesa : op. 106 : sur des chansons populaires du Portugal : for bassoon & piano / Henri Büsser.MusicName of supervisor not provide
Islam, ethnicity, and citizenship : the politics of Muslim leadership in Accra, Ghana since 1900
Get PDFIslam is the second largest religion in Ghana making up 17.6% of the total population of 24,658,823. Comprising two main groups, migrants and their descendants and indigenes, the Muslim community presents a complicated strand to the religious fiber of Ghana. The sectarian and ethnic composition of the Muslim community poses a significant threat to the community in their search for leadership. Marginalized politically and socio-economically by the majority southern ethnic groups who tend to be Christian and see Muslim migrants as “outsiders,” the force that has prevented any violent clashes in Ghana is the Office of the National Chief Imam, always headed by a descendant of the pioneer immigrants who introduced Islam to Accra. In this dissertation, I examine the Islamic religion, citizenship, and ethnicity as components that have shaped Muslim leadership in Accra, Ghana since 1900. The dissertation explores who has the right and legitimacy to Muslim leadership, political participation, and Ghanaian citizenship. I look at the organizations of the various Islamic sects (Tijaniyya, Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission, Ahlu Sunnah wa Jamma’a, Shia, and the Nation of Islam) and the foreign influences that impact their operations in Accra. I discuss the various forms of leaderships— Imams, traditional leaders, and the major non-governmental social organizations— and assess that religion is not the hindrance to finding progressive and effective leadership. Instead, it is the diversity in ethnicity that prevents the Muslim community from achieving unity in purpose. I argue that the Office of the National Chief Imam and the National Chief Imam have held the Islamic community together thus helping create the relative peaceful religious atmosphere in Accra, and Ghana. However, the ad hoc composition of the working parts of the Office and the absence of an electoral process create an enabling environment for a major intra-religious clash in the future; one that will make it easy for terrorist cells to find a niche in the country. In addition, the old, immigrant interest groups of the Hausa-Fulani-Wangara-Yoruba ethnicities who introduced Islam to Accra do not own a monopoly on Islamic knowledge anymore as many indigenous Ghanaians have gained the Islamic knowledge. Therefore, leadership must be reconfigured to transcend ethnicity and sectarianism.Histor
Ethiopian royal vassals : free black itinerancy in the Iberian Atlantic (1500-1640)
No full textEthiopian Royal Vassals: free black itinerancy in the Iberian Atlantic (1500-1640), traces the lives of hundreds of free black individuals from Castile who became colonial settlers in the early Hispanic Caribbean, and explores how they shaped discourses of blackness, Christianity, and empire in the early Iberian world. I challenge the long-standing historiographical tradition that claims that Iberians considered black Africans as the ultimate outsiders in the Spanish monarchy, perceiving Africans as converts (New Christians) rather than Old Christians due to their irredeemably stained or impure blood. Such views supposedly precluded black men and women from becoming vecinos (subjects, citizens). Positioning black colonial settlers as formative in the circulation of ideas across the Hispanic Atlantic, I respond to Herman L. Bennett’s “intellectual frustration with the ways that scholars of Latin America referenced Africans and their descendants as slaves and servants, castas and hybrids, but rarely acknowledged that as persons they brought perspective, a way of seeing, if you will, to the historical experience.” I position black colonial settlers as integral to diverse intellectual milieus of the early Iberian Atlantic and who shaped early colonial society, especially ideas about African Christianity, just slavery, royal vassalage, empire, and blackness. Their voices, intellectual thought, and roles in shaping empire faded into oblivion over the centuries, however, as a result of generations of historiographical traditions that found the notion of a black colonial settler-intellectual so inconceivable that any such archival sightings were construed as exceptional. Tracing a loose history of ideas – or an intellectual history – across the Hispanic Atlantic, I attempt to restore some of the long-obscured ideas and experiences of black colonial settlers and the diverse intellectual milieus that they shaped.Histor
Narrating peace : the relational construction of state (il)legitimacy in Colombia’s Peace Laboratory
Get PDFState legitimacy is usually analyzed from the perspective of the claimant (how the state justifies its claims to legitimacy) rather than the source (local communities that decide to grant legitimacy or not). This article analyzes the local construction of state legitimacy in Briceño, a rural Colombian village that is a key site for the implementation of Colombia’s 2016 peace accords with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas. After 35 years of guerrilla presence, the state is newly asserting its presence as part of the ongoing peace process, including a coca substitution program that has transformed the local economy. Based on interviews and ethnographic research, I analyze how people encounter and talk about the state in their daily lives. I argue that state legitimacy is formed discursively through the consolidation of public narratives, commonly shared ways locals talk about and understand the state, based on their everyday relations with it. These narratives take on two forms: narratives of consequences that talk about the results of state action, and narratives of essence that talk about intrinsic characteristics of the state. The four narratives that have emerged from Briceño’s post-peace transition are: (1) replanting, in which locals explain that state delays in aid for a coca substitution program may leave them no choice but to plant coca again; (2) rearmament, in which locals blame these same delays and military abuses for the fact that a number of local young men are joining an armed FARC dissident group; (3) corruption, which locals use to understand the failures of state development programs; and (4) resource exploitation, which describes the state’s support for a multinational gold mining company seeking to enter the area. I conclude by extending my analysis of the narrative construction of state legitimacy and discussing its implications for our understandings of peace processes, narratives, political legitimacy, and Colombia’s transition.Sociolog
Circadian regulation of behavior and the neuroimmune environment
Get PDFThe circadian system is an evolutionarily adaptive, internal timing system. It produces anticipatory signals to control reoccurring physiological activities such as feeding and sleep and promotes survival on a planet with 24 h periodicity. Circadian rhythms in physiological activities are entrained by environmental signals – light is the most potent environmental cue that entrains the circadian system. Exposure to light during the wrong time of day disrupts the circadian system and homeostatic functions that it regulates. In modern society, with the use of artificial lights at various times during the day and night, disruptions to the circadian system are common and accompany the increased prevalence of mood disorders. In this dissertation, I propose that: (1) circadian disruption disturbs mood, and (2) changes in mood-related behaviors due to circadian disruptions are associated with alterations in the brain’s immune environment. Nearly half of all protein-coding genes in mature organisms show circadian rhythmicity in at least one body tissue, and rhythms in those body tissues are synchronized by the central circadian oscillator in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the brain. In Chapter 2, I characterized the developmental emergence of circadian rhythmicity across brain regions in mice and determined a critical window for neuroimmune development. Furthermore, circadian disruption during this critical window produced long-lasting effects into adulthood: developmental exposure to dim light at night disturbed mood and exacerbated neuroinflammatory responses in adult mice (Chapter 3). Altered working and sleeping schedules after long-distance traveling (termed jet lag disorder) or shift work are circadian disruptions commonly experienced in modern society. Alterations in light exposure, feeding, and exercise can re-entrain body clocks at different paces and thus desynchronize rhythms from one another. In Chapter 4, I used alternating light exposure to mimic shift work and chronic jet lag in a lab environment. Mice experiencing “chronic jet lag” performed worse in mood-related behavioral tasks, especially during their rest phase. Experiencing “chronic jet lag” also increased corticosterone and suppressed neuroimmune function in the hippocampal region of the brain. The experiments thus far explored the consequences of circadian disruption induced by aberrant light exposures. In Chapter 5, I investigated interactions among the circadian system, mood, and neuroinflammation in a genetic model. At the molecular level, core circadian clock genes act as transcription factors that regulate the rhythmic expression of other genes involved in sleep, cognition, mood, and immune function. Rev-erbα is a circadian clock gene that was differentially expressed during environmental circadian disruption (Chapter 4). In Chapter 5, I showed that deleting Rev-erbα increased neuroinflammation. Furthermore, mice with Rev-erbα knockout had impaired mood and cognitive function. Depleting microglia, the resident immune cell of the brain, resolved neuroinflammation induced by Rev-erbα knockout in a sex-specific manner. Moreover, microglia depletion ameliorated some of the behavioral impairments in these Rev-erbα knockout mice. Taken together, these studies indicate that circadian disruption impairs mood-related behaviors, in part by altering neuroimmune responses.Pharmaceutical Science