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The Shadow of Surveillance: Post-9/11 Approaches and the Potential for Erosion of Liberal Democracy
No full textThis thesis argues that post 9/11 means of surveillance employed by US government intelligence agencies have interfered with foundational norms of liberal democracies. Coercion, identified as the most problematic aspect of surveillance, is found to be applied unwarrantedly in post 9/11 approaches to surveillance due to lack of consent. Citizens cannot consent to coercion from surveillance because they are not informed enough to consent. Based on foundational works of liberal theory, this paper creates frameworks for understanding principles of consent and publicity normatively, and then applies these definitions to instances of post 9/11 surveillance. This application finds that surveillance methods have departed significantly from the norms that sustain liberal democracies. Based on this application, this paper will examine the implications of these instances for the sustainability of democratic regimes. In assessing this potential sustainability, this paper discusses the feasibility and limitations of a “democratic surveillance” in the US. Ultimately, this paper concludes that, because of the increased value placed on information collection for security purposes, intelligence operations are unlikely to scale back surveillance, meaning that incremental efforts to publicize surveillance provide the most promising route towards a more justified surveillance that better sustains democracy.
Keywords: Surveillance, Post-9/11 surveillance, Liberal democracy, Coercion, Consent, Publicity, Intelligence agencies, Democratic theory, National security, Democratic sustainability, Government transparency, Justified surveillance, US intelligence operations, Normative political theory, Democratic surveillanc
A higher Hida cuspidal Siegel Eisenstein family for GSp₄
No full textWe consider cuspidal Siegel Eisenstein series on GSp₄ and define explicit rational Λ-adic families of Eisenstein cohomology classes on Siegel 3-folds. Under standard assumptions, we prove that these rational families are integral in the context of higher Hida theory. This provides the first example of an explicit integral family of Eisenstein cohomology classes in higher degrees
Becoming Useful: How 19th-Century New York and Philadelphia Institution-Builders Formalized Knowledge, Education, and Character Formation
No full textIn the nineteenth century, institution-builders in New York and Philadelphia formalized an idea of what knowledge and education were by defining what exactly useful knowledge and useful education consisted of and were used for — and what they were not. These ideas were not agreed-upon understandings: they were arbitrary and subjective. These definitions included the drawing of lines of inclusion and exclusion; institution-builders delineating them made value judgments about who could learn, teach, and accredit both useful knowledge and useful education. Different kinds of institutions had different goals, processes, and identities in mind.
Through learned societies such as the American Philosophical Society, leaders defined American useful knowledge as a hybrid of the useful and the ornamental on the one hand, and of the arts and the sciences on the other. It was the practice and application of knowledge that made it useful, rather than either of these categorical binaries. In New York, founders of the New York Institution and officers of the New York Society Library considered the centralization of culture and knowledge, viewing their institutions as both cultural and educational; founders of the University of the City of New York sought to create a bridge between the Old and New Worlds through their modern urban university, a model of useful education that encompassed more types of knowledge and students, with usefulness determined by the institution’s connection to the urban public of its leaders’ choosing.
And through institutions such as debating societies and industrial education organizations by and for women, leaders created skills-based institutions that combined useful knowledge and useful education: with knowledge for professional life and education for industry at the institutions’ centers. In these institutions, it was the members themselves who became useful. The founders of these institutions redefined utility so as to allow their members access to these American processes: processes that determined the defining of what useful knowledge and useful education were, and whom they were by and for.
This project, in the traditions of the history of education and American Studies fields, relies on archival collections, which themselves are manifestations of the lines of inclusion and exclusion that are baked into knowledge institutions. These institution-builders formalized knowledge and education production in the United States by defining useful knowledge and useful education, materially and organizationally, making claims to production processes and collective identities in the process. They defined American usefulness through the individuals performing and producing this knowledge and education, as well as its application: if the knowledge, education, or practice in question was applied for utility by those deemed knowledge and education producers, then it was American useful knowledge and education. This was formalized through the building of their institutions; this process was an accreditation of knowledge and education — itself a claimed responsibility — and a legitimation and reinforcement of these individuals’ own authority over such matters: authority that was claimed, arbitrary, and exclusionary
Entangled Assembly: A History of the Global Factory in Taiwan and the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1960-1993
No full textEntangled Assembly: A History of the Global Factory in Taiwan and the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1960-1994 offers the first transpacific and comparative history of the Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone and Mexico’s Border Industrialization Program from 1960 to the early 1990s. Drawing from multi-lingual archival research conducted in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, El Paso, Texas and Kaohsiung, Taiwan from 2021 to 2023, this dissertation traces the history of export-manufacturing in Taiwan and Mexico by examining the simultaneous creation of the first Export Processing Zone in Kaohsiung and the first maquiladoras in Ciudad Juárez. In my study, I prioritize the study of labor regimes—as encompassing labor controls on the factory floor and capitalists’ interventions into workers reproductive lives outside the factory—as a primary site of analysis. This study also attends to the global factory’s transformation of everyday life in its host cities.
This dissertation has three key arguments. Firstly, I argue that the history of the maquiladora and the EPZ ought to be understood as entangled history of the global reconfiguration of capitalist manufacturing in the twentieth century. In the 1960s, Taiwan and Mexico’s governments pioneered new spatial forms of organizing global manufacturing through the creation of “bonded manufacturing zones” or what I refer to as export-industrial zones. Secondly, I argue that the comparative analysis of labor regimes in both export-industrial zones demonstrates a history of gendered labor abuse, economic dependency, and long-term contamination. In this second argument, I draw heavily from Fronteriza/o (border people) radicals’ engagement with Marxism and Marxist Dependency Theory to analyze how the export-industrial zone created uneven and dependent relationships between foreign firms and local workers. Workers’ labor was pivotal to the valorization of global capital, but that process of labor exploitation contributed to the long-term devaluation of workers’ lives and the ecological devastation of the communities they lived in.
Finally, I disentangle the origins of the global factory in the 1960s from the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s. In this dissertation I resituate the rise of global export-manufacturing within the context of the global Cold War and argue that the export-industrial zone emerged as a key component of a broader counter-revolution of property in the twentieth century. Borrowing from W.E.B. DuBois, I argue that we conceptualize export-industrial zones as one of many manifestations of a global counter-revolution of property in the 1960s and 1970s, which sought to outmaneuver domestic and international challenges from organized labor and revolutionary socialist movements. This dissertation attends to the long-term historical and political implications of the rise of the global factory and its role in that counter-revolutionary reconfiguration of capitalist production
Reinventing Purpose: Meaning-Making in the Face of Pain and Illness
No full text"Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal" was founded in 2017 by Arden Hegele, a literary scholar, and Rishi Goyal, a physician. Its mission is to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing ... as a “Department Without Walls” that connects scholars and thinkers from different spheres
A BIT of Regret: Modeling the Development Consequences of Investor-State Dispute Settlement as a Signal of Investment Readiness
No full textRecent studies have called into question the fairness of the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system given the system’s unique one-sidedness, exceedingly large settlements awarded to investors, and less-than-opaque reporting mechanisms. These critiques raise important questions about the incentives for states to include ISDS provisions in bilateral investment treaties (BITs) as well as the potential consequences of doing so. I hypothesize that states experiencing instability adapt to (and therefore more prone to investment uncertainty) signal to investors that they are open to foreign direct investment (FDI) by including ISDS provisions in BITs. Using a signaling model I study the difference in effects between stable and unstable states in the effects inclusion of ISDS provisions in a BIT. I find empirically the existence of a pooling equilibrium where unstable states ‘mimic’ the stable states’ action of including ISDS provisions in a BIT. Studying the effects of each of the model’s parameters on the equilibrium results indicates that risk–be it the costs associated with implementing ISDS or the risk to investors associated with their foreign investments–is the significant driver of state-level decisions regarding ISDS. Under conditions of high risk, it becomes non-optimal for unstable states to include ISDS in a new BIT, regardless of FDI prospects. I use Monte Carlo simulations to test the long-term effects of risk on the inclusion of ISDS. The simulation results reveal optimal stopping strategies (as a function of state GDP) for unstable states’ inclusion of ISDS. The paper concludes by examining the model’s applicability to outliers in the ISDS system: India and Venezuela.
Keywords: investor-state dispute settlement, development, signaling games, foreign direct investmen
Changing my mind: The socio-affective mechanisms underlying impression updating
No full textHow do we change our beliefs about other people? When we learn new information about someone that contradicts what we previously believed about them, we are likely to change – or update – our beliefs about their relevant traits. But when it comes to someone we know well, or have strong feelings towards, or who is simultaneously evaluating us, the situation is more complicated. In this dissertation, I investigate the socio-affective and neural mechanisms that underly impression updating.
In Chapter 1, I analyze social media posts to ask how the general public updated their perceptions of the moral character of public figures accused of sexual assault during #MeToo, and how pre-existing motivations impacted the degree of updating. I find that liking mitigates negative updating for less severe accusations, indicating forgiveness of well-liked others
. In Chapter 2, I again examine the impact of motivations on impression updating, but for the competence and sociability of close others after completing a virtual escape room game together. I find that the self-enhancement bias leads perceived similarity to impact perceptions of competence, while liking impacts perceptions of sociability. Both of these chapters also investigate the durability of an update, and both demonstrate that impression updates persist beyond immediate effects.
Finally, in Chapter 3, I use functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the neural mechanisms implicated after an update occurs in the context of romantic interest. I find that the mentalizing network responds to social feedback, suggesting that romantic interest updates are interdependent with a target’s own evaluations
The Downfall of the Global Engagement Center and Disappearing Guardrails Against Disinformation
No full textThe closure of R/FIMI has taken place at the same time that other US security guardrails are being dismantled. The Trump administration fired the director and deputy director of the National Security Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) staff responsible for countering foreign influence operations were placed on administrative leave in February. On April 18, the National Science Foundation terminated support for “research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’” on the grounds of potential infringement of constitutionally protected speech rights. Among the groups losing funding from USAID’s closure were pro-democracy internet freedom and digital rights groups around the world, with as much as $250 million in annual allocations for "Independent Media and Free Flow of Information" foreign assistance at risk. Additional US State Department plans include “sweeping changes” to eliminate 132 offices and 700 positions, announced on April 22,2025
Open the Old Urban Fortress: Assessing Community Perception of Value in New York City’s Historic Armories
No full textNew York City’s historic armories, notable for their medieval fortress-like architectural design, grand street entrances into ornamented vestibules, and massive interior drill sheds with exposed truss roofs, rarely continue to serve military purposes and have since been adaptively reused or left vacant, risking potential demolition. While detailed architectural histories of these buildings have been published, their contemporary value as historic and cultural resources to their local communities has yet to be explored.
This thesis analyzes New York City’s historic armories to better understand the methodologies through which preservationists can use quantitative and qualitative data to assess how communities value their historic and cultural resources. Data was collected from the public on two specific case studies (the Fort Washington Avenue Armory and the Bedford Union Armory) via interviews and an online survey to assess these views directly. Additionally, a spatial analysis was undertaken to identify potential patterns of reuse, vacancy, and demolition across all of New York City’s armories.
The findings indicate that community-driven/informed adaptive reuse projects have increased the local perception of the value of historic resources in New York City’s historic armories, which in turn aids in the continued preservation of these buildings. By evaluating outcomes of completed adaptive reuse projects of armories in New York City, this information can be used to forecast the impact of future projects that are centered around public use. Preservationists can use the data collection methodologies proposed through this thesis to understand how communities perceive historic buildings as an important part of their heritage
smile! you’re on camera: stories of placemaking, surveillance, and carcerality from the Bronx bodega
No full textThis project explores processes of placemaking, surveillance, and political participation through stories from Bronx bodegas and through the frameworks of carceral geography, extrastatecraft, and actor-network theory. It attempts to understand the expansion of surveillance regimes into bodega spaces, not by observing moving objects, but by looking at the relationships of information flows, decision-making processes, and actor participation.
By embedding the analysis in the narratives of local bodegueros, community members, and public representatives, this project contributes to critical technology and surveillance studies by complicating the literature with the lived experiences, epistemologies, and infrastructures of feeling in and around bodegas in the Bronx.
In finding that surveillance as extrastatecraft is expanding into the immigrant spaces of bodegas without meaningful community engagement, this project concludes with a call to plan for abolition with intentional realignment of community organizations, bodega associations, and city institutions that center forms of collective care and protection as articulated by the communities they intend to serve