Alliance One Tobacco (Malawi)
Academic Research Repository at the Institute of Developing EconomiesNot a member yet
52305 research outputs found
Sort by
Negotiating Regions, Ordering Sustainability: Planning, Infrastructure Transition, and Socio-legal Agency in the Mexican Anthropocene
No full textThis three-study dissertation explores policy and practice logics of trying to exert multilevel governing influence over transboundary infrastructural and territorial systems, and the ecological underpinnings on which they depend, in contexts of emerging market territories of production, agro-industry, and trade. Across the three studies, in different registers and modes, the project centers the active search for alternative institutional and infrastructural configurations that more frontally grapple with the multi-scale and multi-level entanglements of such regional industrial development projects. To this end, it variously engages with ideas of regionalism and negotiation as motors for cross-scale "creative institutional thinking" as part of broader climate and resource transition planning efforts, themselves taking shape amidst debates about changing industry-society-environment relations. Collectively, the studies are concerned with two broad questions: 1) how are diverse ideas about environmental crisis conditioning the ways in which dilemmas of regional climate transitions are understood and structured in territories of production, agro-industry, and trade; and 2) how do/how should fluid and multi-level ideas of scale, boundary, and subjectivity shape what we think is possible regarding physical/infrastructural interventions, professional practice, policy actions, and the inclusion of relevant stakeholders and affected/responsible parties in response to such transitions? The dissertation pursues these questions via engagement with two regional cases in Mexico, the first concerning policy, planning, and design responses to regional water scarcity and ecosystem degradation in an agro-industrial territory on the very far outskirts of the Mexico City urban agglomeration in Hidalgo state, and the second focused on the nationally-led development of a global trade transshipment and industrial manufacturing corridor project on the Tehuantepec Isthmus in southern Mexico, spanning the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz. Critical socio-legal analysis, integrated with territorial systems governance analysis, is an important component of the broader dissertation frame, specifically in its role as a combined hinge lens for variously broaching structure/agency dilemmas across local-to-global institutional and infrastructural reformulation imperatives amidst cascading climate crises.Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Plannin
The Effects of News Media Bias on Election Outcomes: A Comprehensive Study of Interpretive-Framing, Priming and Agenda-Setting
No full textNews media has the ability to create biases and influence audience perceptions by emphasizing certain elements of a narrative and minimizing others. However, different news biases have different degrees of effectiveness in encourage (or discourage) broader political participation and affecting voters’ political preferences in different geographic regions and electoral periods. This research studies the appearance and the timing of various media bias (using interpretative-framing, priming and agenda-setting techniques) before and after presidential elections in local political news reporting in all 50 states from 1980 to 2021. The empirical results show that the use of liberal-leaning priming technique used in the news increases the probability of electing Democratic presidential candidates while reducing the chance of Republican candidates. On the other hand, the use of conservative-leaning priming and agenda-setting techniques reduces the probability of electing Democratic candidates. In terms of voter participation, left-leaning interpretive-framing reduces the voting rate of Republican voters and left-leaning priming increases the rate of Democrat voters. Finally, the appearance of conservative-leaning agenda-setting technique is associated with a lower voter participation in the Democratic Party.Extension Studie
The Hypermobility Turn: Opera of The Future, The Future of Opera
No full textAs a global artform, opera has always been on the move. Yet contemporary opera today has expanded our understanding of global flows in unprecedented ways. The COVID-19 pandemic serves as a powerful testament to how immobility can galvanize unexpected mobilities, as the creative innovations of 2020-2021 continue to generate seismic changes in our operatic ecology today. This unpredictable shift reveals a crucial insight about twenty-first century global flows: mobility is neither preordained nor stable but exists in dynamic tension with immobility, producing evolving and often unforeseen artistic possibilities. This dissertation examines the alternative mobilities shaping contemporary operatic sensibility. I investigate what it means for opera to be performed in a particular city, locale, or even cyberspace. Furthermore, in light of the pervasive racial reckoning unfolding in the performing arts, I interrogate how opera is moving beyond Western epistemes and what this shift signifies for the future of the art form.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, I analyze cross-cultural operas that illustrate how the pandemic and decolonial thought have ushered in a watershed moment for the genre. What we could call a hypermobility turn has emerged—operas predicated on breaking barriers and hierarchies, but far beyond more conventional strategies of unsettling, beyond swapping out musical or vocal styles, adapting contemporary news as plot material, foregrounding social issues, or choosing an unexpected performance venue. The change is more deep seated. Hypermobility, as I define it, resists the frameworks of conventional mobility studies by decentering geographical specificity. Rather than tracing movement from one fixed location to another, hypermobility captures the spontaneous diffusion of innovations in opera today, demanding new modes of engagement. Through transgressive movements, media, and mechanisms, contemporary opera opens up a spectrum of artistic and political possibilities.
Chapter 1 examines Bright Sheng’s Dream of the Red Chamber, which exemplifies Sheng’s musico-diasporic aesthetic through its interweaving of Chinese music, poetry, and stylistic allusions to Béla Bartók, a synthesis that propelled its transnational success across the US, China, and Hong Kong. Chapter 2 focuses on The Industry’s Sweet Land, a site-specific, collaboratively produced opera staged at Los Angeles at the State Historic Park. I argue that the alternative site generates ephemeral and unexpected experiential orders emerging in the here-and-now, which forge a new political sensibility in opera. Chapter 3 analyzes Yuval Sharon’s Twilight: Gods, two site-specific reimaginations of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung staged in urban multi-storied garages in Detroit and Chicago. I argue that this production serves as a critical site for investigating how alternative stagings reveal underlying ideologies of canonic operas while raising complex questions about localization and reinterpretation. Finally, Chapter 4 focuses on White Snake Projects’ The Pandemic Trilogy, a set of three live virtual operas produced during COVID-19. While proponents of cyber-stage view transmedia storytelling as a promising avenue of operatic engagement, I posit that the trilogy raised new questions about the challenges transmedia aesthetics have introduced into opera performance, asking us to put pressure on the idea that live virtual opera heralds a paradigm shift for the future of opera.Musi
Exploring the Ribosomal DNA Epigenetic Clock as a Biological Age Estimator
No full textBiological age (BA) is a measure of overall health status that allows one to assess health risks in individuals of the same chronological age. To estimate BA, we need reliable biomarkers of aging (i.e. clocks). Various clocks have been developed with epigenetic clocks being the most widely used. They rely on the age-associated change in DNA methylation (DNAm) to estimate BA. However, they are not evolutionary or biologically grounded. To address this, Wang and Lemos (2019) proposed the ribosomal DNAm (rDNAm) clock, which estimates BA based exclusively on rDNAm. According to them, a biological clock should (1) be evolutionary conserved, (2) have a mechanistic relationship with age, (3) predict chronological age under control conditions and (4) respond to interventions that decrease or increase longevity. In order to explore the rDNAm clock in the light of these criteria, we designed four investigations with each dedicated to one of them. First, we used cohort studies on three vertebrate species to describe how the methylation of rDNA cytosines change with aging and found that only a limited number of them have a positive correlation. We interpret our results as being coherent with rDNAm of early life stages marked by lower methylation levels. Second, we investigated if rDNA is responsive to inflammation using a chicken inflammation trial. We found rDNAm patterns consistent with accelerated aging and, therefore, propose inflammaging as a biological mechanism underlying the rDNAm clock. Third, we tested if the rDNAm clock predicts chronological age in spermatogenic cells. We show that spermatozoa rDNAm is the result of the cumulative effects of mouse chronological aging and sperm development, both of which are captured by the rDNAm clock. Fourth, we demonstrate that exercise modulates rDNAm and that cardiovascular training reverses rDNAm aging. Altogether, we add evidence to the rDNAm clock being a biologically grounded, evolutionary conserved and cost-effective estimator of BA.Population Health Science
Ambidirectional Liquid Crystal Elastomers: Opposite Deformations Designed Across Length Scales
No full textlEngineering and Applied Sciences - Engineering Science
Designing Intelligent Interactive Systems for Vulnerable Populations
No full textTechnology alone cannot drive social change for vulnerable populations—it amplifies existing human intentions and social forces, sometimes exacerbating inequalities rather than reducing them. This dissertation shows that well-intentioned technological interventions do not inherently benefit marginalized communities and examines how technology can effectively support vulnerable populations when designed to amplify the right forces.
My qualitative analysis of LLM-based mental health chatbots revealed that while these systems offer on-demand, non-judgmental support that boosts user confidence, they face significant limitations in addressing the complex needs of vulnerable users. For LGBTQ+ individuals specifically, these chatbots frequently fail to grasp the nuances of their experiences, providing empathetic but ultimately inadequate support. This demonstrates how technology that merely attempts to ``fix'' missing institutional components without addressing underlying societal factors can widen rather than bridge existing disparities.
To effectively support vulnerable populations, technology must amplify intentional positive forces. Through an experiment on dating interfaces, I demonstrated that supposedly ``neutral'' designs like swipe interfaces perpetuate racial bias, even among users who explicitly claimed not to consider race in their decision-making. By redesigning the interface to display substantive profile information before race information such as photos and names, I significantly reduced biased choices, showing how technology can meaningfully engage willing participants' stated values rather than amplifying implicit biases.
Finally, my work with humanitarian frontline negotiators illustrates how technology can strengthen positive social forces by supporting existing expert practices. Rather than replacing human judgment with AI recommendations, I designed tools that enhance the negotiation process by contextualizing cases and exploring options with associated risks. This approach builds on practitioners' validation practices while augmenting their capabilities to secure essential resources for people in conflict zones.
This dissertation argues that effective technological interventions must identify and strengthen underlying positive social forces while meaningfully engaging willing participants' stated values. By designing systems that amplify these specific elements rather than simply introducing technology as a solution, we can create intelligent systems that genuinely serve vulnerable populations and reduce, rather than reinforce, existing inequalities.Engineering and Applied Sciences - Computer Scienc
Genomic and Proteomic Regulation of Activity-Dependent Neuronal Function
No full textAs postmitotic cells, neurons face the unique challenge of dynamically responding to changing environments while simultaneously stably encoding information over the lifetime of an animal. To accomplish this, neurons utilize an intricate system of molecular mechanisms. Much of this regulatory program is activated in neurons in response to experience—neuronal activity triggers calcium influx, in turn transiently activating signaling cascades that rapidly induce diverse downstream pathways, including post-translational protein modifications, transcriptomic regulation, and synaptic remodeling. Here, we present three studies that investigate distinct molecular mechanisms involved in activity-dependent neuronal regulation.
We begin by examining transcriptomic regulation through the lens of the immediate early gene, NR4A1. Using biochemical techniques, we discover that the COMPASS complex—a histone H3K4 methyltransferase and transcriptional regulator—assembles together with NR4A1 in neurons. In NR4A1 knockout mouse brains, we find that chromatin binding of the COMPASS complex is reduced at NR4A1 binding sites near genes that regulate dendritic spines, suggesting that NR4A1 facilitates COMPASS complex recruitment and subsequent gene activation for neuronal function. Consistent with this finding, we observe that distal regulatory elements have altered accessibility in NR4A1 knockout mice, suggesting dysregulation by the COMPASS complex. Furthermore, RNA-sequencing of the hippocampus reveals that loss of NR4A1 leads to downregulation of numerous synaptic regulatory genes and ion channels. Finally, we demonstrate that NR4A1 deletion reduces Sag current in CA1 pyramidal neurons, consistent with the observed transcriptomic changes and indicative of disrupted neuronal function in the absence of NR4A1.
In our second study, we look at the impact of protein phosphorylation on brain function and gene expression. Here, we show that MeCP2 is phosphorylated at four residues in the mouse brain (S86, S274, T308, and S421) in response to neuronal activity and generate a quadruple knock-in (QKI) mouse line in which all four activity-dependent sites are mutated to alanines to prevent phosphorylation. Electrophysiological recordings from the retinogeniculate synapse of QKI mice reveal that while synapse elimination is initially normal at P14, it is significantly compromised at P20. We thus propose a model in which activity-induced phosphorylation of MeCP2 is critical for the proper timing of retinogeniculate synapse maturation during the early postnatal period.
Lastly, we demonstrate that neuronal activity-dependent phosphorylation events primarily occur in disordered regions of proteins, where they control structural transitions and modulate condensation dynamics in the nucleus. We focused on one of these events, the phosphorylation of histone methyltransferase SETD2, and found that disrupting activity-dependent and condensation-modulating phosphorylation of SETD2 impairs histone methylation, RNA splicing programs, neuronal excitability, and leads to changes in social behavior akin to autism-like behavior in mice.Neuroscienc
A Metanational Modernism: Yannis Ritsos, Tradition, and the Poetics of Return
No full textMy dissertation explores the uses of Greek indigenous culture in the poetry of one of Greece’s most prolific modernists Yannis Ritsos (1909–90). My focus on his rehandling of the return theme offers a much-needed systematic reappraisal of the still widely held view that Greek modernism constituted a Hellenocentric movement distinct from an assumed cosmopolitan modernist standard in the West. Challenging this outdated and problematic distinction, I show that while Ritsos drew on substantially local and living traditions, his modulation of global meaning undermines claims for his “Generation’s” Hellenocentrism. Defining Ritsos’s approach to Greek culture in terms of a metanational modernism, I argue that his reinvention of the return theme not only contributed to a synchronic and synthesizing conceptualization of twentieth century Hellenicity but concurrently reinscribed the formal, ritual, and symbolic structures of his indigenous sources into viable modes for negotiating a dialogic interaction between Greekness and the larger discursive paradigms of literary modernism regarding history, modernity, and the poet’s universal significance within these socio-cultural matrices.
This study’s diachronic as well as synchronic discussion of Ritsos’s poetics of return represents one of the relatively few book-length explorations of his poetry, as well as the only one of its kind in the English language to undertake a close examination of his poetic engagement with tradition. Such a study is especially warranted in the wake of more recent shifts in the scholarly dialogue in which modernism is being explored as a transnational phenomenon with greater attention being devoted to the negotiation of cultural indigeneity and globality in American, European and many other underrepresented modernisms beyond this orbit. Ritsos’s metanational poetics of return is not only important for how it extends to a more wholistic assessment of Greek modernism but also for how such an approach to the Greek case may contribute to this ongoing reassessment of global modernism.
Grounded in the methodological frameworks of ritual poetics and mythogenesis, I approach Ritsos’s rehandling of the return theme primarily by his manipulation of the cultural and ritual deep structures of his indigenous sources, while also devoting comparative attention to a number of his modernist peers in Greece and abroad. I focus my discussion on three main categories that arguably represent Ritsos’s most recurrent frameworks of a poetics of return, and which represent major areas of interest to numerous other contemporaries: Christian journeys, the mourning process, and the dramatic and ritual underpinnings of Ritsos’s approach to classical mythology.Classic
Using Capillary Forces to Manipulate Microscopic Objects
No full textCapillary interactions act between objects that deform a fluid-fluid interface. In recent decades, such interactions have been used to self-assemble objects at interfaces into complex structures. These assembly processes typically do not allow for direct control over individual particle trajectories. In this work, I describe machines and tweezers that use capillary interactions to manipulate small objects in programmable trajectories along fluid-fluid interfaces. Capillary machines are 3D-printed devices that can be used to manipulate millimeter-scale floating objects. I demonstrate that these machines can be used to braid, twist, and weave fibers that are too small to be manipulated with conventional machines. Capillary tweezers are a new kind of tweezer that can be used to manipulate single colloidal microspheres. I demonstrate that these tweezers can trap and translate a single particle and can be used to measure forces applied to the trapped particle.Engineering and Applied Sciences - Applied Physic
From transport to transcription- the nuclear pore complex as a conduit for metabolic longevity signaling
No full textThe Nuclear Pore Complex (NPC) is the sole gatekeeper between the nucleus and cytoplasm; therefore, its function is critical throughout life. One conserved biomarker of aging is the loss of nuclear membrane integrity, which can be seen in the increased leakiness and instability of the NPC. An unbiased genetic screen performed by our lab in Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) found that NPC proteins (nucleoporins/Nups) are required for the pro-longevity biguanide drug, metformin, to inhibit the mTOR growth pathway. Connecting NPC function to this genetic pathway, treatment with biguanides also leads to restricted passive transport through the NPC in human cells– reverting it to a more youthful state. How the physiological modification of Nups affects longevity, and the upstream or downstream effect of the NPC on pro-longevity mechanisms, is a new and exciting area of research.
In our first study, we leverage a passive transport model in living cells to further clarify the mechanism of biguanide passive transport restriction of the NPC. We find not only biguanides, but multiple mitochondrial electron transport chain (ETC) inhibitors restrict passive nucleocytoplasmic transport. Expression of O-GlcNac transferase (OGT) is significantly decreased in biguanide treated cells, leading to a decrease in global O-GlcNAcylation levels, and importantly locally reducing O-GlcNAcylation of Nup98. Further, inhibition OGT is sufficient to restrict NPC passive transport and upregulation of O-GlcNAcylation alone reverses biguanide mediated effects on nuclear permeability. These findings reveal that O-GlcNAc serves as a mitochondrial–nuclear signal, and that altered mitochondrial energetics, driven by ETC inhibition, lead to rapid changes in nucleocytoplasmic transport in human cancer cells through post-translational modification of the NPC.
In our second study, we discover that CeNup153 is one of the select nucleoporins (Nups) required for biguanide mediated lifespan extension in C. elegans. CeNup153 has several roles within the nucleus, including passive transport, active transport, and chromatin organization. CeNup153 is also necessary for starvation and daf-2 mutant pro-longevity pathways, but how CeNup153 activity is altered, as well as the specific mechanisms by which CeNup153 is required to promote longevity, were not previously investigated. Here, we demonstrate that biguanide treatment increases CeNup153 expression during aging, and that CeNup153 overexpression alone is sufficient to extend lifespan. We identify CeNup153 dependent biguanide-activated or repressed genes- and find many are within pro-longevity pathways. Interestingly, one of the top differentially expressed genes (DEGs) elo-2 was previously found in our lab to be part of a biguanide longevity pathway involving ether lipogenesis. Linking these pathways, we find that CeNup153 mediated lifespan extension requires expression of these lipid biosynthesis genes. Furthermore, we show that CeNup153 binds directly to the promoter of lipid metabolism genes fard-1, elo-2, and lbp-8, supporting a model in which CeNup153 promotes longevity through epigenetic regulation of lipid metabolism.Biological and Biomedical Science