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Exploring Institutional Commitments and Perspectives on Higher Education Regionalization within East African Community: An Embedded Single Case Study of Rwandan Universities
Get PDFThesis advisor: Rebecca SchendelThesis advisor: Geraldo R. BlancoInternationalization, understood as the strategic integration of intercultural and international aspects into the function and process of higher education, has been of interest to nations and higher learning institutions worldwide for the past two decades. One area of particular focus within such efforts is regionalization, as exemplified by the European Bologna Process. However, regionalization is not simply a part of internationalization. There are significant differences between regionalization and internationalization in terms of objective, approach, and implications. These differences are arguably particularly salient in post-colonial contexts, yet few studies have examined the two phenomena within any African system of higher education. To address this gap, this thesis examined the factors affecting the internationalization and regionalization initiatives adopted by universities in Rwanda, paying particular attention to how the two phenomena intersect and how stakeholders perceive the potential benefits. The findings reveal that institutional representatives strongly recognize the benefits of both approaches but also experience tensions between the two. The study also highlights a number of challenges affecting the ability of Rwanda universities to adequately take advantage of the potential benefits of regionalization.Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education
The Girls of Sick-Lit: Illness and Gender in Young Adult Fiction
Get PDFThesis advisor: Susan RobertsThe young adult fiction classification features a number of novels that center on the experience of chronic illness in children. This thesis examines the subgenre known as “sick-lit” and its use of illness and gender as themes. Through this study, a repetitive narrative of a beautiful teenage girl falling ill becomes clear. When examined in context, this trope can be traced through several of the most popular “sick-lit” publications. This project is comprised of four chapters, each of which focuses on a specific work, series, or author: Little Women, The Baby-Sitters Club, Lurlene McDaniel, and The Fault in Our Stars. Fleet argues that the representation of these characters is a complex narrative that does not align with the lived experience of chronically ill girlhood while still containing a degree of truth.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Departmental Honors.Discipline: English
Surgeons as Sages: Daoist Sagely Model as a Resolution to Surgeon Burnout
Get PDFThesis advisor: David E. StoreyThesis advisor: Ron TacelliOne of the most critical issues facing contemporary healthcare is that which is called “doctor burnout,” a term that is used within the medical field to describe the range of energetic collapses that doctors experience due ultimately to the demanding nature of their work. This thesis seeks to address burnout specifically in the field of surgery on account of this field’s proximity to patient death. Hallmark texts from the Daoist tradition, the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, refer to sages who possess a transcendent, far-reaching wisdom that allow them to emotionally supersede the quarrels and tribulations of life. This is precisely the ethos that this thesis seeks to investigate in order to determine the ways in which this sage wisdom can be utilized to prevent surgeon burnout. As such, the Daoist model as presented in the Zhuangzian tradition offers an effective resolution to the burnout that many surgeons face. Sages from this tradition have a highly cultivated sense of self, heightened perspective on death and meditative lifestyle that allows them to maintain their equanimity and longevity even in the face of life’s greatest antagonist, death, a model which can be utilized by surgeons for the same purpose.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Departmental Honors.Discipline: Philosophy
Essays in Industrial Organization and Health Economics:
No full textThesis advisor: Charles MurryThis dissertation addresses questions in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. In the first chapter, I study the welfare effects of price discrimination in the medical device industry. In the second chapter, I document shifts in the marketing and prescription behavior for a drug after it is acquired. In the third chapter I study the reputation spillover effects of a major medical device recall. Chapter 1: Implantable medical device manufacturers are able to directly price discriminate by setting different prices for the same product in different hospitals. I analyze the welfare effects of this form of price discrimination in the case of Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators (ICDs). I find that if ICD manufacturers were forced to switch to uniform pricing, prices increase on average, which causes a decline in hospital welfare and manufacturer profits. Allowing manufacturers to indirectly price discriminate by strategically delaying the exit of old products to target their elastic consumers can cause an increase in product variety, which can lead to different welfare predictions. If we fail to account for a manufacturer's ability change their product offerings in response to a uniform pricing policy, we can overestimate the effects of uniform pricing on hospital welfare, underestimate the effect of uniform pricing on the take up of older, lower quality products, and we may overestimate or underestimate the effects of uniform pricing on manufacturer profitability. Chapter 2: In this chapter, Motaz Al-Chanati and I document novel evidence of a shift in marketing and prescription behavior for a drug after its acquisition. Network size is highly relevant for this industry, as advertising to physicians (known as detailing) typically involves in-person meetings between sales representatives and physicians. We use 10 drug acquisitions in 2015-2016 to document patterns in the data consistent with firms leveraging their existing physician-sales representative networks to market a drug after they acquire it. We also show that this shift in marketing strategy translates into prescription behavior, i.e. after a drug is acquired, physicians that have prior relationships with the acquiring firm increase their prescriptions of it. Chapter 3: I analyze the effects a major product recall in the implantable medical device industry on the sales of other products manufactured by the recalling firxm. I find that after the recall, consumers substituted away from the recalling firm's other products that were not recalled, and toward the products of the recalling firm's rivals. I also quantify the heterogeneity in the response to this recall based on two consumer characteristics: firm loyalty and exposure. I construct proxies for these characteristics, and I find that while consumers that were more exposed to the recall did not have a significantly different response to it, consumers that were more loyal to the recalling firm had smaller responses to it.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Economics
Facts, Falsehoods and Competing Agendas: Framing Climate Change in the Science Curriculum in Three Countries
No full textThesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-SmithChanges in climate are being experienced by people globally, and increasingly pushing into school science. Educators struggle to make sense of the critical thinking and agency youth will need to face such changes. To this end climate change curriculum, teaching and learning in schools has garnered significant attention in educational research in the last decade. This is particularly important given that formal education is viewed as an important canvas for building the capacity of young people. However, curriculum materials are mostly understudied and taken for granted. In addition, there is also a paucity of scholarship from the global South with respect to climate change education. To address the need for climate change education as well as inclusion of international perspectives, this dissertation presents an analysis of climate change content in select textbooks and supplementary educational materials from Bangladesh, California & Ghana, and three widely different jurisdictions. Using a cultural politics framework, I explored the following questions related to climate change content in textbooks and supplementary materials: (1) How is climate change portrayed in select official/state approved textbooks (2) How is climate change portrayed in supplementary materials? (3) What are the similarities and differences the textbooks and supplementary materials? Using a classical content analysis approach, I show that the content in all three textbooks acknowledged the contributions of human activity to climate change, for example discussing the primary role of human activity to the warming of the planet. However, there were some distinct differences when it came to discussions around the scientific consensus on climate change. While Bangladesh fully noted the scientific consensus, California presented mixed messaging and Ghana did not reference the scientific consensus at all. The textbooks from the three jurisdictions included local and global climate change impacts and policy solutions. My analysis also showed that the two supplementary materials from the United States used different frames to challenge each other’s messaging. And while Heartland Institute cast doubt on the scientific consensus, the Paleontological Research Institution embraced it. Lastly, the United Nations, as an exemplar of content intended for an international audience, was constructed similar to the textbooks in attempting to balance local and global perspectives on climate policy solutions. Importantly, I argue that textbooks and supplementary materials need to provide robust content that attends to the context-specific complexity of climate change. I discuss cultural influences on climate change education. Finally, I conclude with recommendations for the inclusion of more localized ideas on climate change impact and policies
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction
Medial prefrontal cortex neuronal ensembles plasticity during context-mediated renewal of responding to food cues:
No full textThesis advisor: Gorica D. PetrovichThesis advisor: Michael McDannaldCues existing in the surrounding environment repeatedly paired with biologically relevant events can exert a powerful drive over behavior. When learned cues recurrently signal consumption, this can lead to eating in the absence of hunger or physiological need. The difficulties associated with resisting palatable foods and maintaining healthy habits may be related to the neurobiological underpinnings of pervasive responding to food cues. Behavioral flexibility through updating information about formed reward associations is vital to appropriately adapt to the surrounding environment and physiological need. Studying the renewal of responding of extinguished food-seeking behaviors can help us better understand the mechanisms mediating behavioral control over responding to learned reward cues. This dissertation aimed to explore behavioral sex differences and the neural substrates of renewal of responding to food cues after extinction by utilizing a context-mediated renewal of responding paradigm. The first chapter in this dissertation explored the effects of context habituation on context-induced renewal of responding to food cues in males and females. We investigated if increased familiarity with the behavioral contexts, and if presentation of food reward or not during these habituation sessions, would impact the strength of cue-food learning and renewal of responding after extinction differently in males and females. We discovered that when males received context habituation paired with food prior to training they exhibited elevated food-seeking behaviors throughout conditioning, as well as strengthened renewal. This suggests that for males the context habituation with food had a lasting, amplifying effect on cue-food learning. For females, however, increased context familiarity did not improve renewal of responding and, moreover, these experiments revealed evidence for resistance to extinguishing food-seeking behaviors in females. Then, in Chapter 2, we found neural evidence for potential plasticity mechanisms in the prelimbic (PL) and infralimbic (ILA) subregions, which were both recruited during context-mediated renewal of responding to food cues. Our findings are in line with evidence demonstrating that the PL and ILA are both recruited during appetitive learning and possibly provide overlapping contributions to encoding and responding in context-based reward learning. Taken together, the experiments outlined in this dissertation add to existing evidence of sex differences in appetitive motivated behaviors and the intricacies of the roles of the PL and ILA in cue-food learning and contextual processing. The findings from these studies advance our understanding of persistent food-seeking behaviors and highlight the importance of elucidating the neural substrates mediating behavioral responding to learned reward cues.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Psychology
Essays in Market Design:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Utku M. UnverThe Market Design approach, which involves the creation of markets with desirable properties, has been successfully applied to study a wide range of real-world economic problems. The market design approach is helpful in scenarios where money can’t be used as a medium of exchange to facilitate transactions. The allocation of school/college seats to students, assigning residency positions to physicians, cadet-branch matching, and exchange of organs like kidneys and liver are some problems that have been successfully studied using the market design approach. Typically, the market design approach concerns with the setting up of two-sided markets with agents on each side of the market having preferences over each other or agents on one side and objects (school seats, military branches, public health goods like beds, ventilators, etc.) on the other side with agents having preferences over the objects and objects having priority over the agents. Priority ranking of agents can be considered an entitlement ranking where agents with higher priority have the right for the object compared to the agent with lower priority. The insights from the matching theory are then used to create a mechanism that matches agents with agents or objects for the given set of preferences/priority ranking satisfying desirable properties. Primary among these properties is stability, an equilibrium concept for matching. Stable matching ensures that matched agents/objects on the two sides of the market do not have an incentive to break up their respective matching and form a better matching for themselves. In the market design problem of matching agents to objects, stability ensures that the agent’s priority for objects is not violated. Other properties include strategy-proofness, where agents do not have an incentive to misreport their preferences. Strategy-proof mechanisms are simple and ensure that high-information agents cannot game the system at the expense of low-information agents.
The priority ranking thus used in matching agents to objects has been subject to much criticism. The underlying process that generates the priority rankings can be inherently discriminatory. Exam scores are used to generate the priority ranking in allocating school seats to students. In the New York City school system, there has been a growing call for abolishing exams since it is considered to favor students with more resources. Similarly, the priority system used in the exchange of organs like kidneys and liver and triage allocation of scarce resources and services like hospital beds, vaccines, and ventilators has received much criticism. Triage protocols are developed with a utilitarian notion of maximum benefit given the constraints. This can result in people with better access to health care resources being better positioned under a triage protocol than those with lesser access. The dissertation comprises two essays, joint work with Kenzo Imamura where I study the pairwise kidney-exchange problem and a ventilator sharing problem where I study the triage allocation of ventilator slots under sharing. In the first essay, I consider the problem of allocating ventilator slots for sharing
under a triage protocol that generates the priority order. The triage protocol is considered discriminatory since patients with better access to health care through their life cycle have a better chance to be placed ahead in the order when compared with patients with lesser access to healthcare services. I consider the allocation of ventilator slots under a system of reserves, where slots are set-aside for types of patients to address the shortcoming of the triage protocol. Sharing is possible between patients who are compatible. In addition to addressing the shortcomings of the generated priority order, I focus on the question of what respecting the generating priority order in a sharing environment means. In the second essay, we consider the pairwise-kidney exchange problem, where incompatible patient donor pairs are matched with each other subject to patient donor pairs being compatible with each other and acceptable to each other under a priority order. The priority order is generated using a composite score which includes variables like the area of patient donor location and post-transplant medical survivability, among other factors. In response to the concerns, two mechanisms have been developed in the literature for pairwise-kidney exchange, a mechanism that facilitates pairwise-kidney exchange under a strict priority order and an egalitarian mechanism that doesn’t have a priority ordering among compatible patients. Owing to the utilitarian nature of priority order ranking, the egalitarian mechanism has not been considered for adoption. We develop a compromise mechanism between the egalitarian mechanism and the mechanism which respects strict priority order. We show that the compromise mechanism carries forward nice properties like strategy-proofness, which incentivizes each patient-donor pair to reveal their complete set of compatible patient-donor pairs and bridges the concern of a need for priority order with egalitarianism. The predominant literature in Matching theory considers matching agents with agents/objects under a priority order considering all agents to be equal and the priority ordering to be the only difference in consideration among agents. My dissertation contributes to the matching literature where different agents can vary in ways other than the priority ordering, and we try to find solutions that strive to address the inequity. I thank my advisors for their generous advice and feedback in shaping my dissertation.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Economics
Dreaming that Sweet Dream: A Study of Kant’s Anthropology of Hope
No full textThesis advisor: Susan M. ShellThis study looks to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant to investigate the relationship between anthropology (i.e., an account of the human) and politics, and, in particular, to think through what sort of human being liberalism at its best (or most civic-minded) requires or seeks to form. Chapter II turns to Kant’s idea of historical progress to draw out the link between his account of the human and his liberal republican politics. The role of hope, as a necessary product of our reason, proves to be central both to Kant’s politics and to the question of human nature. For Kant, we are above all defined by our striving to remake the world.Focusing primarily on the A Preface of the 1781 edition, Chapter III argues that the Critique of Pure Reason can be understood to be advancing a “transcendental anthropology” (which is distinct from Kant’s later anthropology from a “pragmatic point of view”) in that it seeks to provide “the conditions of the possibility” of human experience. The tension between freedom (or morality) and nature (or self-interest) emerges as the defining characteristic of human life. Chapter IV takes up Kant’s attempt to bridge this “gulf” between freedom and nature in the third Critique, specifically by examining Kant’s aesthetic theory to understand how the human being might be represented indeterminately through a regulative principle of reflective judgment. It argues that employing his aesthetic theory, Kant offers throughout his late writings symbolic or even poetic images that depict the human being’s unity and the moral striving toward such unity.
Chapters V and VI consider two such images. The former returns to the question of progressive history. Now integrated into Kant’s critical system through an “as if” postulation of reflective judgment, the idea of history encourages an “admiration” and gratitude for the natural order that counteracts the harmful moral and civic effects of reductive materialism. In Chapter V, however, we face Kant’s less sanguine notion of “radical evil,” an apparent obstacle to progress that emerges from within his own philosophy. And yet, I argue that one can understand radical evil as a symbol of Kant’s striving human being by reading it in light of the aesthetic framework provided in the CPJ. In this way, the symbol of radical evil helps us make sense of the strife inherent in our moral experience and provides a noble, or even heroic, image of the human.
The conclusion raises the question of whether the idea of progress, and the anthropology underlying it, can still grip us today and, if not, whether liberalism can do without something like the sober hope Kant seeks to inspire. As Kant himself saw in 1789, hope, when unrestrained, becomes destructive of the world it aims to overcome. Even so, Kant reminds us of the inevitability of hope’s role in human life and politics. Nonetheless, in light of the ambivalence of hope, and in the spirit of Kant’s rational questioning, one might still wonder whether the end of reason is to remake the world.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Political Science
Testimonial Epistemic Injustice in the Courtroom
Get PDFThesis advisor: Richard AtkinsThe topic of this thesis is testimonial epistemic injustice in the courtroom context. Testimonial epistemic injustice occurs when someone’s testimony is unduly downgraded (credibility deficit) or unduly upgraded (credibility excess) due to a structural social prejudice held by the listener. Examples of structural social prejudices are prejudices concerning race, gender, class, and degree of education obtained by the testifier. Credibility assessments are influenced by listeners’ biases, the social context of the interaction, and the perceived disposition of the testifier. In this paper, I intend to examine (1) what testimonial epistemic injustice is and (2) what can be done to address testimonial epistemic injustice in courtrooms.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Scholar of the College.Discipline: Philosophy
The Synthesis of Magnesium Metal-Organic Framework Film for Ion Transport in Magnesium Battery
Get PDFThesis advisor: Dunwei WangMetal organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of compounds that show promising potential for a variety of applications due to their uniformity, highly porous structure, lack of dead volume, and fine-tunability. One of these significant applications is in selective ion transport, which makes MOF films a uniquely good separatory material for dual-electrolyte setups, such as those being investigated with Mg-Br batteries. This research has important environmental and industrial ramifications, considering the various drawbacks associated with commercially available batteries such as the lithium-ion battery. The MOF investigated was Mg-MOF-74, which showed promising selective Mg2+ transport abilities. Both Mg-MOF-74 powder and films were synthesized via a vapor-assisted conversion process to maximize efficiency. To characterize the MOF, XRD and SEM imaging was used. This allowed us to gain a nuanced understanding of the material and its properties for further applications.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Departmental Honors.Discipline: Chemistry