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Redefining the Language of Care: A Reflection on Wajdi Mouawad’s Dramaturgy of Care and the Possibilities of Theater
No full textFocusing on Wadji Mouawad’s redefinition of care, my dissertation explores the Francophone artist’s performances and para-theatrical works, using his pandemic corpus as a starting point. Mouawad is a well-established and institutionally recognized figure, a polymorphous artist in the process of being canonized. He engages with care in all the spheres of his career, revolving around the questions of reparation, solidarity and allyship: reading and researching his work teaches us how to feel about care, how to understand our identity, how to live with the Other, both in a local context and a global or pandemic one. Care is a term drawing on attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness, that emerges in the Francophone performance as a restorative mediation of art and ethics in which the invisible, the minor and the marginalized are at the core of a symbolic, linguistic and ethical form of care. Moving away from the theoretical framework of care ethics established by Carol Gilligan and Carol Gilligan and introduced in French by Fabienne Brugère, Mouawad redefines the language of care. In this thesis, my goal is to investigate how Mouawad’s diasporic perspective challenges standard approaches to care studies and, using his work as a case study, show the unique possibilities of theater that complement the existing research in the field – connectedness and community, interactivity and civic action, plurality, physicality and spatiality – and structure a dramaturgy of care. A case study on which my dissertation pivots, the evolution of this artist provides an important insight into the possibilities of theater in our socio-political present, within and outside the Francophone borders
Accessing the Viral Cargo: Capsid Dynamics and Disassembly
No full textMany viruses consist of a genome encapsulated in a protective, self-assembled protein capsid. Infection requires exposure of the genomic cargo to the host cellular machinery. Because the self-assembled capsid is thought to be in a free-energy minimum in the cellular environment, this exposure requires an external energy input or a chemical change in the environment. This thesis focuses on understanding how the cargo of a viral capsid can become exposed. In the first part, I study the uncoating of bacteriophage MS2 bound to its receptor in vivo using fluorescence imaging, and I find evidence of a new extracellular uncoating pathway, suggesting that the virus could have more than one uncoating pathway to balance different risks during the early stages of infection. In the second part, I use coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations to understand the disassembly kinetics and intermediates of a generic virus-like particle. I find that disassembly is nucleated and investigate the factors that affect the nucleation barrier. In the third part, I develop a high-throughput measurement of capsid permeability and use it to investigate how MS2 and its virus-like particles respond to different environments, showing that increased capsid dynamics can help to expose the cargo even when the particle cannot disassemble completely. I also find that the size and structure of the cargo affects the permeability. The work presented here provides new insights into the viral disassembly process and the factors that contribute to the accessibility of a viral cargo
Fencing Off Silicon Valley: Cross-Border Venture Capital and Technology Spillovers
No full textThe treatment of foreign investors is a contentious topic in U.S. entrepreneurship policy. We model a setting where foreign corporate investments in Silicon Valley may allow U.S. entrepreneurs to pursue technologies that they could not otherwise, but may also lead to knowledge spillovers. We show that despite the benefits from such inbound investments for U.S. firms, it may be optimal for the U.S. government to raise their costs to deter these investments. Using as comprehensive as possible a sample of investments by foreign corporate investors in U.S. startups, we find evidence consistent with the presence of knowledge spillovers to foreign investors.Author's Origina
Prior Ties and the Limits of Peer Effects on Startup Team Performance
No full textWe conduct a field experiment at an entrepreneurship bootcamp to investigate whether interaction with proximate peers shapes a nascent startup team's performance. We find that teams whose members lack prior ties to others at the bootcamp experience peer effects that influence the quality of their product prototypes. A one-standard-deviation increase in the performance of proximate teams is related to a two-thirds standard-deviation improvement for a focal team. In contrast, we find that teams whose members have many prior ties interact less frequently with proximate peers, and thus their performance is unaffected by nearby teams. Our findings highlight how prior social connections, which are often a source of knowledge and influence, can limit new interactions and thus the ability of organizations to leverage peer effects to improve the performance of their members.Author's Origina
Essays in Macroeconomics and Public Finance
No full textThis dissertation is comprised of three essays in macroeconomics and public finance. Chapter 1 focuses on measuring strategic complementarity in the wages posted by firms in online job advertisements. I find a modest degree of complementarity in the wages posted by firms in online job advertisements: a 1\% increase in the average posted wages of competing firms induces a 0.1\% increase in the posted wage of a given firm, on average. I interpret my findings through the lens of a monopsonistic New Keynesian model, in which strategic complementarity in wage-setting can arise through (for instance) log-convex firm-specific labor supply. My empirical findings are consistent with a substantially more modest degree of complementarity than has often been assumed in prior work, and suggests that the empirical relevance of these channels is modest. Chapter 2 (joint with Walker Ray and Yuriy Gorodnichenko) empirically and theoretically studies whether preferred habitat and market segmentation are relevant in mediating the financial and real effects of the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing programs. We find strong evidence of localized impacts on Treasury yields. We develop a model that embeds preferred habitat in an otherwise-standard New Keynesian model, and calibrate the model to empirical moments. In our model, quantitative easing is modestly stimulative during ``crisis times'' when financial markets are disrupted. Chapter 3 (joint with Drew Burd, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick) studies the incidence of state business tax reforms by focusing on a particularly large and salient reform (and subsequent repeal) of pass-through business income taxes in the state of Kansas in 2013. We use U.S. treasury data to trace out the impact of the reform on exposed businesses, their owners, and their employees. We find that the Kansas 2013 tax reform and its subsequent repeal led to virtually no behavioral responses by businesses or business owners, either on the intensive margin (e.g. employment, investment) or the extensive margin (entry, exit, migration). Generalizing our design to a larger set of state-level business tax reforms, we find evidence consistent with our analysis of the Kansas tax reform
Mitigating Risk and Maximizing Employee Potential: Managing Employee Performance and Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace
No full textParticipation in the workforce is a critical success factor in the treatment of an individual with a mental health condition.1 2 However, unemployment rates and the likelihood of involuntary termination are much higher among people with a mental health history relative to the overall rates for the US working-age population.
Exploring the roots of managers’ fears in managing employees who have a mental health condition or are suspected of having a mental health condition in the workplace provides a baseline for future research on how to establish the highest likelihood of success in the workplace for an individual with a mental health condition. Understanding the literature on stigma, disability, management in the workplace, and legal-related decisions and articles serves as a foundation for understanding the current state manager experience. An online survey was used to gain insight into the reasons managers express hesitance to address performance issues with employees having a known or perceived mental health history. Responses to the survey revealed that the employment laws intended to protect employees with disabilities may play an inadvertent role in preventing the performance success of employees having a mental health condition. The survey results highlight the critical nature of educational interventions and practical guidance for managers. This thesis explores a manager’s role as a factor unintentionally limiting employment success for employees with a mental health condition.
1 Shazana Shahwan et al., "Employer and Co-worker Perspectives on Hiring and Working with People with Mental Health Conditions," Community Mental Health Journal 58, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-021- 00934-2.
2 Henry G. Harder, Shannon L. Wagner, and Joshua A. Rash, Mental Illness in the Workplace: Psychological Disability Management (Burlington, VT: Gower Publishing Company, 2014), Kindle
Killing with Kindness: Ethics, Technology, and the History of Animal Euthanasia in the United States, 19th Century-Present
No full textThis dissertation historicizes the ethical, technological, and legal development of animal euthanasia in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. Grounded in the archival study of humane society records and drawing from feminist STS, multispecies studies, and disability studies traditions of care theory, it addresses two main questions. First, how did killing become entangled with the very meaning of the humane in the United States? And, second, how did humane advocates attempt to materialize a form of suffering-free death for the animals they killed? It shows that killing became recognizable as an act of care among early twentieth century American humane activists through their construction of a multispecies, eugenicist notion of the 'fit' family. They saw the family as the building block of civilizational progress and disability as the root of social decline. To kill sick animals, aggressive animals, stray animals, and animals living in what were seen as inadequate conditions was, from the point of view of the humane movement, both to save those creatures from suffering and to build a healthier, stronger society: killing removed caretaking responsibilities from households unfit to fulfill them and eliminated animals unsuited to life in human society. In a world in which there were more animals than there were humans able to properly maintain them, euthanasia or a “good death” was positioned as the next best thing to a good life for surplus dogs and cats.
The humane movement's development of this concept of the good death, its links with eugenics and with racist, classicist, and ableist notions of the ideal American family, and the logical throughlines between the humane movement's work in animal protection and child welfare is the subject of the second chapter. Subsequent chapters examine how the primacy of euthanasia for the humane movement catalyzed technological innovation, as humane activists attempted to invent their way to a solution of the problem of killing efficiently and painlessly. They demonstrate that euthanasia technologies circulated between different projects for the management of human and animal life and death. The history of the electric cage was enmeshed with the development of the electric chair for capital punishment (the subject of the third chapter); the decompression chamber with military training in World War II (the subject of the fourth chapter); and the search for animal birth control as an alternative to euthanasia with neocolonial networks of reproductive science (the subject of the fifth chapter). In excavating these histories, the dissertation pushes the fields of the history of technology and animal studies to consider animal advocates as scientists and inventors, rather than simple opponents of scientific progress, expanding in the process our understanding of who produces scientific knowledge and technological innovation, and the stakes of that production. The conclusion takes up the contemporary legacy of animal euthanasia technologies for capital punishment, reflecting that techno-optimism, the dream that technology can solve social problems, is neither new nor without danger. Whether it is reformers seeking to make capital punishment less brutal by inventing a pain-free method of execution or activists attempting to solve inequities in living standards by controlling population growth, the dissertation shows that the technologies deployed rarely led to the hoped-for result: instead, human and animal suffering often only took on new forms
Polymer Micropatches as Cell Engagers for Cancer Immunotherapy
No full textAdoptive transfer of immune cells has emerged as a potential therapeutic approach against various cancers. The effectiveness of cell-based therapies is limited by an inability to control the cell phenotype post in vivo transfer. This results in a loss of activation over time, accelerated by the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment in many solid tumors. To overcome this challenge, I set to create a platform that can be attached to adoptively transferred cells and leverage cell biology to provide continuous activation to the carrier cell.
I designed a modular platform, Micropatches as Cell Engagers (MACE), which is comprised of Poly(lactide-co-glycolic) acid (PLGA) disc-shaped microparticles, surface modified with antibodies designed to target specific receptors on the carrier cell. These antibodies can mediate attachment to the carrier cell, provide activation signals, or both. I first developed MACE for activation of Natural Killer (NK cells), modifying the MACE surface with a combination of anti-CD45, anti-NKp30/anti-NKp46 antibodies. MACE exhibited strong adhesion to NK cells and induced their activation without the need of co-administered cytokines. The activation induced by MACE was greater than that induced by nanoparticles, attesting to the unique role of MACE geometry in the activation of NK cells. MACE-bound NK cells remained viable, exhibited trans-endothelial migration and anti-tumor activity in vitro. MACE-bound NK cells activated T cells, macrophages and dendritic cells in vitro. Adoptive transfer of NK-MACE also demonstrated superior anti-tumor efficacy in a murine melanoma lung metastasis model compared to unmodified NK cells.
To further demonstrate the versatility of MACE, I then modified this platform to modulate another cell type – B cells. B cells are a largely overlooked cell type in the field of adoptive cell therapies, however, they are key players in mediating adaptive immune responses through antibody production and antigen presentation. I utilized MACE to improve the antigen presenting function of adoptively transferred B cells for use as a cell-based cancer vaccine. I modified MACE with a combination of anti-IgM and anti-CD40 antibodies. MACE could be robustly attached to B cells and provide simultaneous survival and activation signals to the carrier cell, resulting in increased survival and activation of B cells, and enhanced antigen presentation by B cells to CD8+ and CD4+ T cells. MACE-bound B cells retained the ability to home to secondary lymphoid organs in vivo. Adoptive transfer of antigen peptide pulsed MACE-B cells delayed the progression of subcutaneous ovalbumin expressing tumors in a murine model significantly, compared to the adoptive transfer of B cells alone.
Overall, MACE is a versatile and effective way of activating different immune cells to improve the efficacy of cell based anti-cancer therapies
Worlds Apart in the Ottoman World: Islamic Education in Bilād al-Shām and Bilād al-Rūm 1530-1650
No full textThis study explores significant aspects of the history of Islamic higher education in the central Ottoman lands (Bilād al-Rūm) and Greater Syria (Bilād al-Shām) during the approximate period 1530-1650. Two general themes constitute the greatest part of our focus. The first is an examination of the divergent approaches to pedagogy in each geography, an aspect we have seen fit to refer to as pedagogical philosophy(s). The second is an attempt to establish the curricular canons of each region during the period in question, with the purpose of revealing discrepancies – and similarities – in the material studied by aspiring scholars in the lands of the Ottoman center and that empire’s Syrian periphery. The comparative nature of our study enables us to examine the extent of integration between Bilād al-Rūm and Bilād al-Shām in terms of their cultures of higher education during the early period of Ottoman rule in the Arabic-speaking lands. Our findings contribute to our knowledge of the intellectual history of the Ottoman world by offering deeper insight into the complex web of connections that both bound together and made distinct the intellectual elites of both geographies, with conclusions that more broadly argue for divergence rather than similarity.
Following an exposition of some of the secondary literature most pertinent to our aims and concerns in the first chapter, chapters two and three investigate the hitherto largely neglected world of Islamic pedagogical philosophy, especially insofar as substantial discrepancies of method and practice exist within that world. Chapter two provides significant evidence for the dominance of a single figure, the medieval Transoxanian scholar Burhān al-Dīn al-Zarnūjī, for the nature of pedagogical philosophy in the Ottoman center, including its development by Turkish-speaking scholars who elaborated many of the same principles in later centuries. The pedagogical philosophy of the Ottoman center is, thus, referred to as Zarnūjism. Chapter two also establishes the preeminence of a Damascene scholar of early Ottoman Syria, Badr al-Dīn al-Ghazzī, in his approach to pedagogical principles in his region, especially in his own hometown.
Chapter three enters into an elaborate discussion of some of the fundamental differences in the two geographies’ approaches to educating scholars in the Islamic religious sciences and related fields. These differences include, among other elements, clearly divergent hierarchies of the scholarly disciplines: Prophetic Tradition is given pride of place in the Arabic-speaking milieu(s) of Greater Syria, whereas jurisprudence figures most prominently in the Turkish-speaking lands of the Ottoman center. More generally, the strong central Ottoman inclination toward the rational(ist) disciplines is contrasted to an attitude of relative suspicion toward these same fields among Arabic-speaking scholars in Greater Syria. There is also a starkly different attitude toward the role of disputation in scholarly formation between scholars of the two geographies, with central Ottoman scholars viewing the practice as a useful – even necessary – component of an aspiring scholar’s intellectual development, and scholars of Greater Syria refusing to hide their suspicion toward such methods.
The fourth chapter studies book collections in Ottoman endowment documents (waqfiyyas) insofar as these are connected to the pedagogical process at educational institutions in Bilād al-Rūm and Bilād al-Shām. The limitations of these waqfiyyas in enabling us to reconstruct actual curricula for individual institutions of education are discussed, but their importance as documents which shed further light on the broad contours of an Ottoman scholarly canon is equally emphasized.
The risks associated with using waqfiyyas in an uncritical manner inspire an examination of a much different source in the next chapter, namely biographical dictionaries. Quasi-statistical data obtained from biographical dictionaries composed in Aleppo, Damascus, and Istanbul during our period then allow us to construct curricular canons belonging to Aleppo, Damascus, and the central Ottoman lands in a methodologically novel approach. The comparison of curricular canons across different geographies – and within different schools of jurisprudence – of the Ottoman realms is another original contribution of the chapter. Perhaps most significantly, the fifth chapter affirms many of the conclusions at which we had previously arrived in chapters two and three, concerning significant divergences in the pedagogical cultures of Greater Syria and the central Ottoman lands.
The concluding chapter of this work offers a nuanced look into the Ottomans’ dual policies of (usually) mild imposition and equally prevalent accommodationism in the periphery of Bilād al-Shām. Among other pieces of evidence, we present compelling cases from prominent individual scholars’ careers in higher education – and other cases pertaining to broader aspects of scholarly life – to substantiate our claims. Some remarks which seek to restate and reemphasize our conclusions on the matter of intellectual integration in the Ottoman realms are offered in closing
Sizing A Market Entry Reward for the Development of New Antibiotics
No full textAntimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a growing threat to global health and wealth. Although new antibiotics are needed to address AMR, industry investment in new antibiotics is limited, due to the expected low economic returns on these projects. The UK implemented a 13M dollar pull incentive in 2022, to provide additional funds to motivate private sector actors to invest in new antibiotics and stakeholders have suggested other OECD governments join these efforts. We examine how large an incentive for industry is needed to invest in new antibiotics to address AMR, using a model of economic return based on Internal Rate of Return (IRR) measures and incorporating the latest data on development phase progression and costs. To achieve a minimum IRR of 11%, our results suggest a government funded market entry reward on the order of 2.6 billion dollars, paid over ten years, would be required to incentivize the development of one new antimicrobial agent. If six new antibiotics were required over a period of ten years, the total indicated fund would be 15.6 billion dollars. Compared to the direct and indirect costs of doing nothing, our estimated cost of a pull incentive seems manageable, and is consistent with estimates of an AMR pull incentive recently proposed in the US Pasteur Act (up to 3 billion dollars). Our estimates provide a foundation for governments and potentially other stakeholders to pursue the development of new antibiotics to avoid or mitigate the AMR crisis.Version of Recor