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The Occupation of Pensacola: Slavery and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World
No full textIn 1818, Cuban slave traders sent over one hundred enslaved Africans to Spanish Pensacola. Unbeknownst to them, Andrew Jackson had just begun the Occupation of Pensacola. American military officials captured the ships and accused the Spanish of violating the American laws that had abolished the slave trade in US territories. Although Spanish West Florida was not a US territory and Jackson had not received congressional approval for his military occupation, American officials nonetheless turned the enslaved Africans over to the Alabama territorial court as property of the US. The Cuban slave traders soon pursued a number of lawsuits in Alabama and Florida and before the US Supreme Court to retrieve the captives and raise questions about the legality of the occupation and the subsequent war itself.
My dissertation follows these lawsuits as they transformed from straightforward capture cases into disputes about the legality of the slave trade and a contest over American expansionism and Spain’s legal authority in Florida. At the center of my project are issues of sovereignty. I demonstrate that Cuban slave traders deployed the language of sovereignty as the most important legal authority in their arguments. Indeed, they argued that Pensacola was still a Spanish territory upon their arrival and therefore well within a jurisdiction that allowed for the international slave trade. They insisted that it was not they who violated American law, but rather the US military: when Jackson invaded Florida, he violated both Spanish sovereignty and US law by capturing the enslaved Africans and continuing to hold them as property. But Cuban traders were not the only ones to deploy this language: through comparative research with other similar slave trade cases, I found that enslaved captives leveraged issues of sovereignty and national belonging when insisting on their freedom at court, as well. Therefore each, in different ways, used the slave trade to influence a dynamic and politically charged Atlantic legal culture: slave traders and the enslaved alike took advantage of competing jurisdictions and pluralistic legal orders to stake their claims
Gender Differences in Job Flexibility
No full textEconomics Department Honors Thesis.In this paper, I explore the factors of workplace flexibility under the compensating differential framework and examine the gender differences in how flexibility is experienced from three different angles: workplace culture, flexible work arrangements, and occupational characteristics. I propose and examine four components, which are reasons for paid leave, intermissions during work hours, work from home, and flexible job characteristics that arise from work style and values. The regression analysis of these measures against weekly wage revealed that the same flexible work arrangements could be cheaper or more expensive based on gender, which may be connected to traditional gender roles. In identifying that the worker’s skill level leads to endogeneity, I employ the spouse’s usual work hours as an instrument. Although the instrument turned out to be poor, the IV regression results support that there is some female penalty—making the price of taking flexible work arrangements more expensive for females—correlated with flexible work. This penalty seems to be also related to the findings by Goldin (2014), which states that nonlinearity of wage with respect to work hours generates a gender pay gap for women who require more workplace flexibility.College of Arts and ScienceEconomic
Conceptualizing Leadership Support
No full textLeadership and Learning in Organizations capstone projectBottom Line-Boston (BL-B), a regional office of the national nonprofit organization Bottom Line, noticed differing perceptions and expectations of leadership support between its leaders and program advisors. Using a qualitative case study method, this project aimed to understand the misalignment between leadership support behaviors and the perceptions of their employees. The study’s design included interviews with leaders, secondary surveys, document review, and observational field notes analyzed through the lenses of organizational support and transformational leadership theories. Its data revealed which leadership support practices aligned and misaligned with the expectations of their employees. The findings identified a range of effective supportive methods employed by BL-B's leadership, including communication, and social support. Conversely, missed opportunities for transparency, limited empowerment, and weak professional development opportunities diminish employees' feeling of support. Based on these findings, several recommendations are proposed to align support expectations and minimize barriers to support
Searching for Meaning(s): The Impact of Young Children’s Question-asking on Novel Word Retention
No full textAsking questions is one way that young children elicit word-related input. Children appear to be well-positioned to use questions as a tool for learning words. However, whether and how children’s questions impact their learning and memory has been understudied. Asking a question about a word may increase attention to and encoding of the anticipated answer, leading to improved retention of the novel word. Alternatively, children may experience cognitive costs associated with asking questions, making it more difficult to encode and retain the novel meaning. The current study tests whether asking questions improves children’s novel word retention, compared to their retention when listening to the same information. Four- to six-year-old children (N = 64) were randomly assigned to a Question-Asking or Listening condition. Participants were asked to retrieve a novel object out of an array of novel objects according to a novel label, such that there was ambiguity about the named referent upon hearing only the novel label. In the Question-Asking condition, participants had the opportunity to ask questions to an experimenter to help them select the target referents. The experimenter responded to questions with a standard set of feature descriptions of the novel objects. In the Listening condition, participants heard the same descriptions, but heard each description immediately after the novel label. Participants’ selections after they heard the descriptions as well as their selections on a later retention test were recorded and compared across conditions. Children in both groups showed above-chance retention of the novel words, but children who had an opportunity to ask a question learned the same number of words as children who listened to the label information. The results of this work suggest that asking a question does not provide a boost for novel word learning, prompting consideration of the utility of question-asking beyond the potential benefits for retention
A Geospatial Approach to Assessing the Burden of Amplified Risk Among Sensitive Subpopulations to Unsafe Drinking Water in the United States (2016-2020)
No full textType Ⅱ Interleukin-4 Receptor Activation in Basal Breast Cancer Cells Promotes Tumor Progression
No full textInterleukin 4 (IL4) is a Th2 cytokine initially discovered as a B-lymphocyte proliferative factor. In the context of cancer IL4 is largely studied for its role in promoting an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. The type Ⅱ IL4 receptor is expressed predominantly by non-hematopoietic cells, and has been shown to be expressed in a number of cancers including breast, prostate, colorectal and pancreatic cancers. Relatively little is known about the consequences of IL4 signaling through the type Ⅱ and how it may contribute to tumor progression. In this thesis we explore the role of type Ⅱ IL4 receptor expressed in basal breast cancer, and how signaling through the type Ⅱ supports proliferation and growth of basal breast cancer. In chapter Ⅰ I present an introduction on the contributions of metabolism to cancer progression, the biology of breast cancer clinical subtypes, and a brief introduction to the biology of IL4 and its receptors. In chapter Ⅱ, using various in vitro methods I demonstrate that type Ⅱ signaling increases glucose metabolism, and histone acetylation in basal breast cancer. This increased histone acetylation and glucose uptake induces expression of genes associated with proliferation, and survival of breast cancer cells such as BCL2, and CCND2. In chapter Ⅲ I further explore how IL4 impacts metabolic regulation of basal breast cancer and show that some effects are temporally regulated. In chapter Ⅳ using a humanized mouse model that targeting the type Ⅱ IL4 receptor using a dominant negative mutant of IL13 attenuates metastatic colonization of basal breast cancer in vivo
Prediction Uncertainty Quantification for High-dimensional Problems
No full textThis dissertation investigates the uncertainty quantification of prediction in high-dimensional problems. A systematic approach including adaptive surrogate modeling, discrepancy modeling and uncertainty propagation for high-dimensional input and output is studied in this dissertation. The dissertation has three objectives: surrogate modeling for high-dimensional input and output, adaptive improvement of the surrogate model, and discrepancy modeling in Bayesian calibration and uncertainty quantification (UQ) in predictions of unobserved outputs. Several methods for reducing the output dimension are explored and compared, namely, singular value decomposition (SVD), random projection, randomized SVD and diffusion maps; and two methods for the input dimension are investigated: variance-based sensitivity analysis and active subspace discovery. This is followed by the construction of Gaussian process and simple regression surrogate models in the low-dimensional latent space. Using an active learning function introduced in the latent space that properly considers all subspaces, new physics-based model runs are proposed to adaptively improve the surrogate model. Model discrepancy is then introduced through additive terms to the surrogate models in the latent space. With measurement data, the model discrepancy is calibrated along with observation error. The calibrated quantities are used for uncertainty quantification of predictions of unobserved system outputs
Diagnosing the Crisis of Modernity: Historical Thought in the Midcentury United States
No full textAfter the First World War there was a period of intense intellectual interest in theorizing the experience of historical time on both sides of the Atlantic, caused by social disruption, new technologies and political instability and the unfulfilled expectations of 18th and 19th century progress. This study focuses on thinkers in this period, focusing primarily on Americans and to a lesser degree Europeans and European exiles. Thinkers in this period found themselves in the need of a new historical idiom for discussing social and political developments, and were self-conscious about the role of historical concepts and historical myths in the modern world around them. Within this environment, 19th century optimism about progress and pessimism about mass society fed into a discourse about propaganda, expertise, social decay, political domination and ultimately totalitarianism. This dissertation looks at how a series of intellectuals, including Lewis Mumford, Ortega y Gasset, Walter Lippmann, Hannah Arendt and Christopher Lasch, participated in a discourse about the experience of modern historical time and its relationship with new forms of social decay and political domination. This dissertation maintains that many of the common historiographical categories, either the history of conservatism or the history neo-liberalism, are ill-fitting categories popular in the literature, and that midcentury social and political discourse can’t be understood so cleanly on ideological lines demarcated by later historians interested in developing critical genealogies of their political rivals. It also maintains that the social and political thought of the Cold War and onward can’t be understood without assessing the effects of, and intellectual interest in, the disorienting experience of modern history, a topic well-understood in some academic literatures today but often overlooked in domestic American historiography. It also finally argues that the history of mass society criticism has been broadly overlooked in the historiography of the 20th century, but was a critically important component of social and political thought across ideological lines up until roughly the nineteen-sixties at the very latest
Development and Assessment of Powered and Passive Prostheses to Improve Functionality and Mobility for Individuals with Transtibial Limb Loss
No full textOne of the major goals for individuals with lower-limb loss is retaining their mobility and independence to stay engaged in community and employment activities. However, mobility-related challenges make physical activity more difficult and fatiguing for this population. The first major contribution of this work is the design and study of an artificial gastrocnemius and its effects on transtibial prosthesis user gait. This thrust saw the development and validation of a prosthesis emulator that couples a powered prosthetic ankle with an artificial gastrocnemius exosuit to restore the mono- and multi-articular functionality of the impaired soleus and gastrocnemius muscles. Transtibial prosthesis users then walked with the prosthesis emulator under a variety of powered ankle and gastrocnemius behaviors. The users’ prosthesis-side hip and knee joint kinetics were analyzed to assess the artificial gastrocnemius’s effects when coupled with different powered ankle behaviors. The second major contribution of this work is the design and study of a bimodal lower limb prosthesis that can switch between walking and running modes. This thrust saw the design of a device that users can quickly reconfigure to suit the locomotive task without the burden of swapping prostheses. Transtibial prosthesis users walked and ran with the bimodal prosthesis prototype and their own walking and running prostheses. Device dynamics and user surveys were analyzed to assess the prototype’s functionality in each task
Settler Violence and Erasing Indigeneity: A Contemporary and Archival Media Analysis of Settler Colonialism, Ecological Violence, and Environmental Apartheid in Palestine
No full textThis article examines how Israeli-based media uses discursive framings of ecological
violence to normalize settler colonial processes and maintain social control over Indigenous Palestinians. In this study, I focus on the particular case of Palestinian olive trees in the West Bank. Olive trees carry significant symbolic meanings and value, as Palestinian people, like the trees they have so long cultivated, are deeply rooted and connected to their land. Drawing data from three mainstream Israeli news and media outlets, I conduct a qualitative content analysis of 75 randomly selected news and media articles between the years 2014 and 2023. My results demonstrate that Israeli media narratives normalize ecological violence against Indigenous Palestinians by legitimizing settler violence and erasing Palestinian indigeneity. Specifically, Israeli media framings legitimize settler violence by failing to characterize the destruction of olive trees as ecological harm, minimizing the suffering of Palestinians, and absolving perpetrators (i.e., settlers) of settler violence. Simultaneously, Israeli media narratives erase Palestinian indigeneity by undermining the ancestral connections between Indigenous Palestinians and their lands. Together, the strategies of legitimizing settler violence and erasing Palestinian indigeneity disrupt and displace embodied connections between Indigenous Palestinians and their land, thereby enacting and normalizing ecological violence in Palestine. Indigenous communities across the globe are exposed to ecological violence as a method of social control. Taking a critical environmental justice approach to examine the role of media in imposing and sustaining settler colonial logic furthers our understanding of the weaponization of the environment to carry out ecological violence towards Indigenous populations, like the Palestinians. Such a lens contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics at play in the olive tree discourse in Palestine and its broader implications for Palestinian environmental justice and Palestinian indigeneity