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Modeling the Diverse Trajectories of Psychedelic-Occasioned Mystical Experiences
No full textOver the course of three studies, this dissertation quantitatively examines the relationship between mystical experience and mental health, first in general, and then in the context of naturalistic psychedelic use.
The first study of the dissertation proposes a model for understanding the within-population variability of this relationship, and identifies a “relational triad” of three factors which help to explain it: belongingness/social connectedness, mindfulness, and spirituality.
The dissertation’s second and third studies draw upon longitudinal data collected from individuals planning to take a psychedelic substance in a naturalistic context, and apply the “relational triad” model to help predict the quality of individuals’ psychedelic experience (Study 2), as well as individuals’ mental health trajectories in the aftermath of a psychedelic experience (Study 3). Baseline mood, as well as the three “relational triad” factors identified in Study 1, were found to be implicated in individuals’ psychedelic experiences and their post-experience mental health trajectories.
Finally, clinically-oriented recommendations are offered based on this set of empirically-derived findings, and a screening/predictive measure is proposed
GRID3 COD - Settlement Names v8.0
No full textThe GRID3 COD - Settlement Names v8.0 dataset consists of settlement points with name and attributes for all the twenty-six provinces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (COD).
Province group 1: Haut-Katanga, Kasaï, Kasaï-Oriental, Kinshasa, and Lomami
Province group 2: Haut-Lomami and Tanganyika
Province group 3: Ituri and Kwilu
Province group 4: Maniema
Province group 5: Kasaï-Central
Province group 6: Tshopo and Mongala
Province group 7: Sankuru
Province group 8: Kongo-Central
Province group 9: Lualaba, Mai-Ndombe, Sud-Ubangi, Tshuapa
Province group 10: Equateur, Nord-Ubangi, Sud-Kivu
Province group 11: Bas-Uele, Haut-Uele, Kwango, and Nord-Kivu
This operational dataset has not been fully validated by government officials or ministries.
This current version supersedes the GRID3 COD - Settlement Names v7.0 (https://doi.org/10.7916/fyk2-sj30). The following changes were made:
Added data for the provinces of Bas-Uele, Haut-Uele, Kwango, and Nord-Kivu.
The data for Tanganyika was updated.
Keywords: Settlement
Mapping Public Open Access K-12 State Education Indicator Data Across 7 States and Washington D.C. Using the FAIR Data Principles
No full textThe purpose of this report is to map the landscape of thousands of publicly accessible PK-12 school datasets from seven U.S. states and Washington, D.C. to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) framework of 16 indicators for schools and districts, including California, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, and Texas. Consistent with NASEM (2019, 2020), we extend the focus on outcome data (such as test scores and graduation rates) to include a wide range of opportunity and resource data. Despite longstanding calls and mandates to leverage public education data for informed decision-making, data reuse remains limited due in part to poor adherence to the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR) data management principles. To address this challenge, we systematically identified and qualitatively coded public education datasets across the eight jurisdictions. Using a standardized data ingestion protocol grounded in the FAIR principles and a coding scheme based on the NASEM framework, we identified 3,822 datasets and created a metadata catalog for each locale. The report includes the full metadata catalogs, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) flow diagrams visualizing data sources, network visualizations of data-indicator relationships, and data ingestion protocols and coding schemes. Additionally, we present an interrater reliability analysis of the NASEM indicator coding within and across the states, and a link rot analysis to assess the stability of public data over time. This report provides both a replicable methodological framework and a practical resource for researchers, policymakers, and educators seeking to navigate public education data for decision-making focused on opportunities and achievement for all students
Escalation of Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) Attacks on Financial Institutions and Optimizing Cybersecurity Investment: A Quantitative Decision and Risk Perspective
No full textThe financial sector is facing an escalation of Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) attacks, resulting in growing operational, regulatory, and reputational risks. As financial institutions expand their digital infrastructures, the key challenge has shifted from whether to invest in cybersecurity to determining how much to invest and how best to allocate limited resources. This paper examines cybersecurity investment decision-making in financial institutions through a quantitative decision and risk framework. Using publicly available data from industry reports, including IBM, PwC, and ENISA, the study develops an exponential cybersecurity investment and risk-cost optimization model to analyse the relationship between spending, expected loss, and total cost. The results reveal a point of diminishing returns, where total cost initially decreases with increased investment but begins to rise beyond an optimal threshold. The findings highlight the importance of aligning cybersecurity budgets with institutional risk appetite and regulatory expectations. By integrating principles of decision science, operational risk management, and cybersecurity economics, this study contributes to the ongoing academic and practical discussions on data-driven cybersecurity investment strategies in the financial sector.
Keywords: Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS), Cybersecurity Investment, Quantitative Decision Framework, Risk-Cost Optimization, Financial Institutions, Cybersecurity Economic
Anonymous Subjects: Performing Anonymity Across Media 1890-1948
No full textThis dissertation introduces “anonymity” as a critical concept that reshapes how we understand modernist performance, subject formation, and political agency. Challenging the enduring association between naming and power, this dissertation shows how anonymity operates as a performative structure across dance, theatre, and cinema to unfix identity and enable alternative forms of individual and collective action. Each chapter analyzes a central aesthetic object through archival research, inductive formal analysis, and critical theory.
Chapter 1 reads Les Noces (1923) by Bronislava Nijinska and Igor Stravinsky as a critique of J.L. Austin's theory of the performative, staging non-sovereign collective agency through the ballet's anonymous peasant chorus. Chapter 2 examines interpellation in Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blind (1890) and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), arguing that anonymity structures the formation of subject positions. Chapter 3 turns from the anonymity of the interpellated individual to that of the collective, focusing on the figure of the proletariat in Bicycle Thieves (1948), and showing how the film mobilizes choral anonymity to untether class from fixed identity and open the possibility of an anonymous revolutionary subject.
Across these case studies, the dissertation reframes anonymity as a performative mode of appearance that unsettles dominant theories of action, collectivity, and representation. In this account, anonymity displaces the centrality of named identity in theories of agency and appearance, revealing how political subjectivation emerges through structurally anonymous, non-sovereign acts. By reading modernist performance as a site in which anonymity materializes subjectivity and agency, the dissertation reframes anonymity as a critical resource for aesthetic form and political theory alike
Balancing Growth and Community Well-being: The Socio-economic and Environmental Impacts of Airports on New York City's Surrounding Communities
No full textThis paper is devoted to the socio-economic and environmental effects that airport development has on the adjacent fit neighborhood of New York. A mixed-methods approach including encompassing geospatial analysis, descriptive statistics, and temporal comparison, examines three key dimensions: housing rentability, employment structure, and environmental evolutions within Jamaica, East Elmhurst, and Corona.
Findings reveal that airport-adjacent communities experienced significantly higher housing price increases, coupled with deteriorating affordability as price-to-income ratios exceeded the "severely unaffordable" threshold of 5.0 in most communities. Environmental analysis demonstrates concerning patterns, with airport-adjacent areas suffering more than double the surface temperature increases and substantially greater vegetation loss compared to city averages. Employment patterns reveal a spatial segmentation of labor markets, offering divergent economic opportunities with varying degrees of stability and upward mobility.
These findings highlight the multifaceted pressures facing airport-adjacent communities, where housing unaffordability and environmental stress coexist alongside limited but valuable job pathways. Despite the fact that airports' development are a source of many skilled jobs that are accessible locally, ensuring these positions offer living wages and career advancement is essential. The findings highlight the need for integrated planning frameworks that include affordable housing protections, environmental mitigation strategies, and inclusive economic policies to ensure airport development benefits local residents across socioeconomic backgrounds
“Policy without teeth is just window dressing”: Using Trans-inclusive Education Policy as a Tool for Change in K-12 Schools
No full textAcross the United States, the right for transgender youth to simply exist has become a widely discussed topic. In 2024 alone, nearly 700 bills concerning transgender people were introduced. In response, schools, districts, and state education agencies have introduced education policies committed to supporting and including trans students. State-level legislation and district-level policy are becoming increasingly critical for the protection of trans and gender expansive youth. With so many decisions now left to local decision-making bodies, it is more important than ever to consider the implications of trans-inclusive policy in schools.
Advocates and policy analysts often decide that a state, district, or school is inclusive or progressive based on whether they have policy in place. However, written policy alone does not ensure organizational and behavioral change in a given context. To that end, this dissertation used a qualitative, critical case study informed by comparative case study methodology to study the implementation of trans-inclusive education policies to understand what these policies actually do in schools.
To do this, I recruited two schools within Evergreen Public Schools, a large school district in the western United States that has adopted trans-inclusive policies. Using document analysis and semi-structured interviewing methods, I used neoinstitutional theory and queer theories of performativity to understand how organizational, behavioral, and ideological change take place at each site. Drawing from the sociological tradition of neoinstitutional theory, I considered how policies gain legitimacy as well as how the phenomenon of loose and tight coupling shape new policy and/or prevent it from catching on. In addition to documenting how district policy and administrative guidance was implemented at the school level, this project also used critical discourse analysis (CDA) to document the ideas, beliefs, and ways of being made possible by policy itself. As an analytic tool for critical policy analysis, CDA considers not only policy problems but also the values and attitudes that make the problems themselves seeable, knowable, and fixable.
I found that, while schools in the district of Evergreen benefited socially from establishing trans inclusion as a priority, most policies were too loosely coupled to be enforced, thus creating a paper trail of (non)performative policy that communicated the district’s values without effectively changing practice. Looking at implementation across sites, it became clear that individual actors, especially LGBTQ staff, played critical roles in establishing trans-inclusive practices at each site. Informal networks of queer and trans teachers and their allies shaped districtwide discourse and understanding of trans-inclusive policy and practice.
Building on theories of inhabited institutionalism, I showed that as policy becomes embodied, it can be shared and communicated through a queerly inhabited institutionalism, even in the absence of knowledge of written policy documents. A queerly inhabited institutionalism is one that shapes and is shaped by the queer performance of trans and gender expansive (TGE) students and staff in schools, shaping what is knowable and possible about gender in a given secondary school.
Policy guidance and school-based staff’s beliefs about TGE students acted as a normative force, creating expectations for how TGE students think, act, and behave. Additionally, policy guidance and staff members’ beliefs about the experiences and identities of TGE students drew on discourses of trans vulnerability. This reinforced TGE subjectivities defined by harm and negative affect. Taken together, these inclusion efforts reinforced hegemonic beliefs about gender and transness while also working to make schools more welcoming spaces.
While inclusive policy is necessary, it alone is insufficient for creating more positive outcomes for TGE youth. Policy is inherently normative; it defines groups and how members of those groups should be treated. However, the normative forces of policy can uphold and reify hegemonic beliefs about the group policy seeks to support and include. This challenge can be mitigated through gender facilitative teaching practices and the performative presence of queer and trans teachers themselves
GRID3 COD - Health Areas v6.0
No full textThe GRID3 COD - Health Areas v6.0 dataset consists of health area boundaries with name, location, health zone, and other attributes for fifteen provinces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (COD).
Province group 1: Haut-Katanga, Kasaï, Kasaï-Oriental, Kinshasa, and Lomami
Province group 2: Haut-Lomami and Tanganyika
Province group 3: Ituri and Kwilu
Province group 4: Maniema
Province group 5: Kasaï-Central
Province group 6: Tshopo and Mongala
Province group 7: Sankuru
Province group 8: Kongo-Central
Province group 9: Lualaba, Mai-Ndombe, Sud-Ubangi, Tshuapa
This operational dataset has not been fully validated by government officials or ministries.
This current version supersedes the GRID3 COD - Health Areas v5.0 (https://doi.org/10.7916/8e06-tn49). The following changes were made:
Added data for the provinces of Lualaba, Mai-Ndombe, Sud-Ubangi and Tshuapa.
Keywords: Health Area
Between Nation and Tradition: FGM/C Elimination, Legal Governance, and Colonial Legacies in Uganda and Somalia
No full textSince its emergence as a global human rights concern, female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) has sparked debate between universalist and cultural relativist perspectives. This study examines two divergent approaches to eliminating FGM/C in Uganda and Somalia, two countries with drastically different prevalence rates (Uganda at 0.3% and Somalia at 99.2%).
Through a comparative analysis of these states’ approaches, this study investigates how different dimensions of states’ regulatory strategies affect current-day prevalence. Findings reveal that the effectiveness of FGM/C regulation is heavily influenced by the complex interplay of historical and sociopolitical contexts, including colonial legacies, governance structures, legal frameworks, grassroots engagement, and reliance on foreign aid. Uganda’s distinct colonial history, relatively centralized governance structure, and grassroots engagement have enabled community cooperation with top-down FGM/C-focused policy and initiatives in a multi-pronged approach to elimination.
Conversely, Somalia’s fragmented legal and political systems, shaped by its colonial and postcolonial history, coupled with a heavy reliance on foreign aid and limited sustained local engagement, highlight the shortcomings of linear models of change—whether top-down or bottom-up. This study argues that effectively eliminating harmful cultural practices like FGM/C requires an adaptive, multi-pronged approach that accounts for a country’s specific historical and sociopolitical context, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all strategy within the universalist-relativist binary
The Language of Displacement: Rethinking Legal Approaches to Hate Speech Through the 2023 Armenian Exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh
No full textThis thesis examines the role of Azerbaijani state-sponsored hate speech in the 2023 forced displacement of over 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. It argues that government rhetoric functioned as a form of discursive coercion, shaping a hostile environment that contributed to the exodus without meeting international legal thresholds for incitement. Using a mixed-methods approach—HateBERT analysis, z-score tracking, and qualitative content analysis—the thesis identifies patterns of rhetorical escalation preceding military action.
Six recurring themes emerged: historical revisionism, glorification of violence, dehumanisation, appeals to territorial integrity, delegitimization of Armenian presence, and victimhood narratives. These findings highlight a gap in international human rights law which fails to address covert, or elite hate speech. The thesis calls for a reconceptualization of hate speech in legal terms, adding that sustained state discourse may function as a tool of coercion, exclusion, and ultimately, displacement