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The Problem of Organization: A Study of Michel Foucault’s Conception of Systemic Power
Get PDFThis dissertation addresses a challenge facing Michel Foucault’s conception of systemic power, a challenge I call ‘the problem of organization.’ Foucault argues that power is exercised through systems (‘dispositifs’) that are made up of various elements, such as institutions, procedures, techniques, and discourses, that co-operate in the execution of strategies of mastery and control.
However, this view gives rise to a question: What accounts for the organization in purpose and function exhibited by systems of power, such as the criminal justice system or the public health apparatus, if the strategies they put into operation are not consciously arranged or centrally coordinated by any specific person or group?
I argue that Foucault answers this challenge by conceiving such systems as technological, drawing on accounts of technology found in the work of Georges Canguilhem, Martin Heidegger, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Foucault holds that this organization emerges not in accordance with a conscious plan, as in a conspiracy, nor through an evolutionary process, as in an organism, but instead, like in a technology, through the decentralized coordination made possible by the production and circulation of knowledge
Minds and Bodies: Exploring the Interplay of Embodied Learning and Social Engagement in Adolescent Dance Students
Get PDFThis dissertation explores the relationship between embodied learning and social engagement through the perspectives of four high school dance students. Embodied learning has been recognized for enhancing education by promoting active engagement, deepening comprehension, and improving retention. It was the focal point of the investigation, which took place at an independent kindergarten through twelfth-grade school in an urban area.
Data collection involved interviews and reflections from student participants, with careful coding applied to identify emerging themes and patterns. These themes provided insight into how students' embodied experiences related to their social engagement. Although the reflections were collected post-movement exploration, they captured the students' thoughts and learning processes while in motion.
The biggest affordance of this study is its emphasis on youth perspective. The findings shed light on students' capacity to synthesize their embodied learning in dance class, particularly when given reflective time, and the potential implications for their social engagement. By examining the intersection of embodied knowledge and social engagement from the students'
perspectives, the dissertation contributes valuable insights into the role of movement in education and its broader implications for students' engagement in their communities
Refining Real Consumption: Accounting for In-Kind Transfers, Imputed Rents, and Preference Heterogeneities
Get PDFOver the past decade, expanded government in-kind transfers such as healthcare and education have influenced household welfare in many countries. To capture their effects on consumption inequalities, this study introduces an acquisition-based consumption measure that includes in-kind transfers and imputed rents, deflated using a superlative index. Using Japanese data from 2005 to 2021, we find that while conventional measures indicate an 11.2 percent decline in consumption among younger households, our index shows a 6.3 percent increase. Of the resulting 17.5 percentage-point gap, 10.7 points come from the deflator choice, while the rest arises from including in-kind transfers and imputed rents.
JEL Codes: C43, D12, D63, E01, E21
A quest for questions: The JUSTRA as a matrix for navigating just food system transformations in an era of uncertainty
Get PDFA just food system transformation is imperative to meet this century’s goals of environmental sustainability, economic fairness, and equitable social well-being. While considerations of justice are beginning to inform food system transformation debates, there remains a lack of conceptual and practical integration of these two historically separate disciplinary perspectives. This perspective therefore proposes the just transformation matrix (JUSTRA), which integrates justice and transformation concerns using an interrogative approach. Interrogatives probe the historical, present, and future intersections of justice with specific food system elements. If used conscientiously, the JUSTRA can assist a wide spectrum of food system actors in strategizing, implementing, and monitoring just food system transformations. It can also help stakeholders to more thoughtfully engage with power imbalances both among users and in the food system more broadly—if used “in bona fides.” Thus, while further testing is necessary to fully realize the potential of the JUSTRA, the matrix can become a powerful tool in multi-stakeholder dialogues to navigate unpredictable, diverse, and power-laden complexities of just food system transformations.
Keywords: food system transformation; context-specific pathways to sustainability; justice; interrogative approach; just food system
Search for single-production of vector-like quarks decaying into in the fully hadronic final state in collisions at √ = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector
Get PDFA search for and vector-like quarks produced in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV and decaying into in the fully hadronic final state is presented. The search uses 139 fb⁻¹ of data collected by the ATLAS detector at the LHC from 2015 to 2018. The final state is characterised by a hadronically decaying boson with large Lorentz boost and a -tagged jet, which are used to reconstruct the invariant mass of the vector-like quark candidate.
The main background is QCD multijet production, which is estimated using a data-driven method. Upon finding no significant excess in data, mass limits at 95% confidence level are obtained as a function of the global coupling parameter, . The observed lower limits on the masses of quarks with = 0.5 and = 0.7 are 2.0 TeV and 2.4 TeV, respectively. For quarks, the observed mass limits are 1.4 TeV for = 0.5 and 1.9 TeV for = 0.7
Genes Needed for Benomyl Resistance and Hypersensitivity in Caenorhabditis elegans
No full textBenzimidazole anthelmintics, such as benomyl, paralyze C. elegans and slow their growth by targeting the BEN-1 β-tubulin. Loss of ben-1 results in normal-appearing animals that are completely resistant to benomyl and other benzimidazoles, a result suggesting that BEN-1 acts redundantly in C. elegans. Since 74% of benzimidazole-resistant C. elegans strains isolated from the wild had ben-1 mutations (Hahnel et al. 2018), defects in other genes must also convey resistance.
To identify such genes, we screened 1,751 fully sequenced Million Mutation Project strains for benomyl resistance and additionally for increased benomyl sensitivity. Two completely resistant strains, both with ben-1 mutations, 14 partially resistant strains (animals were mobile but uncoordinated on benomyl), and five strains with increased sensitivity were identified.
We identified the causative mutation in five partially resistant strains: one was a ben-1 mutation. One was a microtubule depolymerase gene klp-7/ kinesin-13. The other three were in genes expressed in ciliated sensory neurons (the intraflagellar transport particle genes osm-1/ IFT-172, che-13/ IFT57 and dyf-3/ IFT38). We tested other mutants with defects in these cells and found that mutations of daf-19 (in the presence of a daf-12 mutation to block dauer formation), which encodes a key transcription factor for ciliogenesis, and 17 other cilia-related genes also produced partial resistance.
A similar result for 12 of the latter genes, but not daf-19 and the remaining cilia-related genes, was reported in a preprint in BioRxiv by Robert A. Brinzer et al. in 2021. This finding suggests that benomyl is transported into C. elegans via ciliated neurons as Brinzer et al. (2024) found for macrocyclic lactones. Three of the five strains with increased sensitivity, which led to paralysis at a low, normally ineffective benomyl concentration, had mutations in tbb-2/ β-tubulin (a result consistent with that of Pallotto et al. 2022).
A fourth, similarly hypersensitive strain had a mutation in tba-1/ α-tubulin. Together with effects of microtubule destabilizer KLP-7 on drug sensitivity, these results suggest that the microtubule stability may affect the strength of the drug’s effect, perhaps by changing the amount of BEN-1-containing microtubules.
We also identified a Snapin gene (snpn-1) mutant with increased sensitivity, while examining the effects of vesicle transport on drug sensitivity. Since the loss of snpn-1 results in defective synaptic vesicle distribution, it may modulate the benomyl sensitivity by disrupting the proper function of motor neurons
Enzymes Helping Enzymes: Oxaloacetate Decarboxylase Increases Malate Dehydrogenase's Turnover Number
No full textData for the manuscript titled: "Enzymes Helping Enzymes: Oxaloacetate Decarboxylase Increases Malate Dehydrogenase's Turnover Number."
The catalytic performance of enzymes is largely perceived to be a property of the enzyme itself, altered by environmental conditions such as temperature and pH. However, the maximal catalytic rates of enzymes differ up to hundred-fold between in vivo and in vitro measurements, suggesting that a complex chemical system has additional effects on catalytic performance. In this work we show that the initial rate of an enzyme can increase three-fold due to the presence of a second enzyme, which uses the product of the first enzyme as its substrate. This enhancement may originate in an allosteric effect or result from binding competition for the product molecule by the second enzyme
Embracing Every Hue: Using our Narratives to Cultivate Healing
No full textThis dissertation will explore the intersection of poetic inquiry, narrative reflection, and culturally responsive pedagogy within the context of pre-service teacher education. Rooted in the belief that educators must critically engage with their own identities and positionalities to foster equity in classrooms, this research investigates how reflective and creative methodologies can empower pre-service teachers to cultivate culturally affirming practices.
Drawing on qualitative methodologies, this study integrates poetic inquiry as a lens for analyzing the lived experiences and evolving pedagogical identities of teacher candidates. Narrative reflection, facilitated through structured journaling and dialogic workshops, provides a platform for participants to grapple with the complexities of their cultural, social, and professional landscapes. By centering culturally responsive pedagogy, the research emphasizes the need for teaching practices that honor and sustain diverse student identities while challenging systems of oppression embedded in traditional educational paradigms. The findings of my dissertation study reveal that engaging pre-service teachers in poetic and narrative reflection fosters deeper self-awareness, empathy, and a commitment to transformative teaching.
This study contributes to the growing body of literature advocating for arts-based research methodologies and underscores the significance of culturally responsive approaches in preparing teachers to navigate diverse classroom environments. Ultimately, it positions poetic inquiry and narrative reflection as vital tools for shaping educators capable of creating inclusive and equitable learning spaces
Managers, Markets, and Money: Essays on the Economics of Higher Education
No full textThis dissertation explores the organizational and market mechanisms that influence student success in higher education, beyond student access to financial and support resources. This work finds that factors such as leadership compensation, quality and characteristics, the structure of outside labor markets, competitive pressures, and the structure of financial aid mediate student outcomes. These results suggest that a successful higher education policy needs to take into account how institutional governance, market forces interact with existing student support policies to ensure that public and institutional incentives are aligned in ensuring an efficient use of resources.
The first chapter focuses on how college presidents' compensation responds to taxation, and how their behavior changes in turn. I use a provision of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which introduced a 21% excise tax on nonprofit compensation above a $1 million threshold, which applied to private nonprofit college presidents and increased the cost to institutions of their total compensation. I use an event study design to estimate the effect of this tax on presidential compensation, finding that presidential compensation fell by 26% and their probability of exit increased by 19%. Presidents adapted their behavior in response to this drop in compensation by prioritizing easily observable financial outcomes instead of student expenditure and success, increasing net income by 30% and investment returns by 23%, while the most taxed presidents decreased student net financial aid by 0.56% per additional 1% of their tax burden. The impact of the TCJA also varies by president demographics: female presidents' compensation decreases were twice as large as those found for their male counterparts. I also find that the returns to experience are substantial, as presidents coming from the private sector or government underperform their counterparts with higher education experience.
The second chapter, joint with Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Kathryn Blanchard, explores institutional responses to changes in the labor market faced by their graduates in a particular context. In the United States, licenses are required for entry into many different occupations. Requirements vary by state and occupation, but many licenses require a minimum number of training or instructional hours. We consider the impact of these hours requirements on students and postsecondary institutions, with a particular focus on cosmetology (also known as hairstyling or beauty), the field that requires the highest number of training hours in the largest number of states. We implement a difference-in-difference design based on state-level changes in licensing hours for cosmetologists between 2011 and 2019. We ask how and whether changes to hours requirements influence student outcomes and institutional behavior. We find that lowering required hours is likely beneficial for students as it increases completion, lowers tuition, and expands enrollment among some groups of students. Larger institutions appear to reduce their tuition by less than smaller institutions. We find no detectable effects on student debt or cosmetologist earnings.
The third chapter explores the effects and limits of emergency financial aid based on direct transfers to students. In this paper, I evaluate the impacts of an emergency financial aid program on short-term academic outcomes in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Using administrative data from a large public college system, I estimate a regression discontinuity model leveraging the assignment rule for additional funding based on expected economic need to evaluate the effects of marginal increases in aid. The regression discontinuity model finds no significant academic impacts of marginal increases in grant aid, consistent with similar results in the literature
Modern Latent Variable Analysis: High-dimensional Grade of Membership Models and Process Data
No full textUncovering interpretable latent patterns in data has been a key focus in statistical learning, an interest that has steadily grown with the advent of modern data. This dissertation presents the theory and applications on latent variable analysis in two modern data regimes: high-dimensional multivariate categorical data from various applications and process data from computer-based assessments.
The first part of this dissertation focuses on the grade of membership (GoM) model, a type of mixed membership model for multivariate categorical data. The GoM model offers rich modeling power but presents significant challenges in model identifiability and estimation, especially with high-dimensional data. In Chapter 2, we present a new notion of expectation identifiability. Based on this identifiability notion, we propose a spectral method that exploits the singular subspace geometry and consistently estimates model parameters for binary responses. In Chapter 3, we extend the GoM models to encompass a broad range of data distributions and arbitrarily locally dependent noise, which we formalize the generalized-GoM models. Specifically, we extend the proposed spectral method to polytomous data and count data. We establish finite-sample entrywise error bounds for the estimated model parameters. This is supported by a new sharp two-to-infinity singular subspace perturbation theory for locally dependent and flexibly distributed noise, a contribution of independent interest.
The second part of the dissertation focuses on process data, a modern data type from computer-based assessments. Process data consist of time-stamped action sequences recorded in computer log files, capturing respondents’ interacts with computer-based items. Unlike traditional outcome data, process data provide rich information on response processes, and offer deeper insights into test-taking behaviors. However, the complex data structure poses significant challenges for integrating process data with established assessment models. In Chapter 4, we introduce a supervised variant of multidimensional scaling (MDS) to extract matrix-formatted features from process data, facilitating its application in subsequent statistical analyses. In Chapter 5, we demonstrate an application of the extracted latent features from process data on differential item functioning (DIF) analysis for assessing testing fairness. By utilizing process data features as proxies for nuisance latent attributes, we introduce a new scoring rule that incorporates respondents’ behaviors. This novel framework effectively reduces DIF and provides deeper insights in interpreting DIF