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Not (So) Political: Politics, Everyday Life and Stereotypes in Argentina
Get PDFThis dissertation analyzes the interaction between politics and everyday life in Argentina, a context characterized by weak political parties and a primary cleavage centered on adherence to—or rejection of—Peronism, a charismatic movement. In particular, this work focuses on stereotypes as associations between political positions and traits or choices. The first paperexamines how everyday preferences — such as food, music, or sports — become politicized and associated with Peronism or anti-Peronism. Using expert surveys, public opinion data, and a pre-registered within-subject survey experiment resembling the parallel design logic, I find that these stereotypes shape negative perceptions of political outgroups, even though they are often inaccurate. Perceived political orientation mediates these effects, showing how imprecise cues candrive social rejection. The second paper explores how the aggressive tone of voice used by populist candidates functions as a political heuristic. Through two pre-registered survey experiments with audio treatments, I show that an aggressive tone signals strong, personalistic leadership and anti-institutional attitudes—but harms candidates’ perceived competence and support, especially among independents. Tone, then, can effectively communicate political positioning but also limits electoral appeal (except for those voters that support the current president the most). The third paper analyzes political branding in the marketplace, using a vignette experiment on Peronist-themed restaurants. I find that political theming deters outgroup and neutral consumers and only appeals to extreme Peronists. These results highlight the reach of affective polarization into everyday decisions and the risks of politicizing consumer spaces. Across the three papers, I use evidence from two national surveys and a range of experimental and statistical methods to show how politics interact with everyday domains like lifestyle, communication, and consumption—even in a context with weakly institutionalized parties.Doctor of Philosoph
The Thomas M. Bello Papers 1970–1971 and the Sounds of Student Protest at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Get PDFIn this thesis, I compare archival practices used to historicize 1970 student protests at UNC to practices used to recount contemporary student protests. With this comparative approach, I argue that paper archives have aurality—demonstrated through their inherent silences and the sonic clues they offer—and that reading paper archives with a sonic perspective offers more context for understanding the content within them. My critical study of Thomas Bello’s archive demonstrates how to approach an otherwise “silent” archive with an attunement to its latent music and sound. Secondarily, my research advocates for mobilizing public participation in archival practice, inviting a multiplicity of voices to foster diversity in historical records. I suggest a way the Southern Historical Collection can engage aurality to decenter a history of exclusivity. Considering an archive’s silences and soundings strengthens archival study by broadening narratives of historical events, such as student protests at UNC.Master of Art
Differences in Components of the Ankle-Go Return to Sport Assessment Among College Athletes
Get PDFThis study examined normative values of the Ankle-GO Return to Sport Assessment Battery among Division I collegiate athletes, evaluating differences based on sex, sport, and injury history. Thirty-one athletes from four sports (volleyball, track and field, wrestling, and soccer) completed patient-reported outcome measures and functional performance tests. Key differences were seen across groups, with females showing significantly lower scores in certain functional test variables compared to males. Sport-based differences were noted in functional performance and self-reported function, particularly among soccer and wrestling athletes. Injury history primarily impacted FAAM-S scores. Variability existed in Ankle-GO scores, suggesting current thresholds may not fully reflect the capabilities of division one collegiate athletes. These findings emphasize the importance of establishing normative data for the ankle to enhance clinical decision-making and return-to-sport decisions using the Ankle-GO tool.Master of Art
Windows into Planetary Evolution: the Detection and Characterization of Young Worlds
Get PDFYoung exoplanets -- those less than a billion years old -- offer a unique window into the early stages of planetary formation and evolution. Gaining insight into how these worlds acquire and lose their atmospheres, migrate within their systems, and evolve into the diverse populations we observe today is essential for refining models of planet formation. However, this phase remains poorly understood due to the rarity of known young transiting systems and observational challenges such as stellar activity. In this thesis, I investigate the atmospheres of several young exoplanets using a combination of ground- and space-based observations, including data from the Spitzer, Hubble, and James Webb Space Telescopes. Through transmission spectroscopy across optical and infrared wavelengths, I probe their atmospheric compositions, characterize aerosol properties and stellar spot contributions, and infer planetary masses using atmospheric scale height measurements. The findings of this work include the discovery of two transiting sub-Neptune-sized exoplanets orbiting the young M dwarf, TOI-1224, adding to the small, but growing sample of young multiplanet systems. I also present the first atmospheric analysis of K2-25b, K2-33b, and HIP 67522 b, which reveals significant diversity in their observed properties. These findings provide new constraints on atmospheric evolution in young systems and help connect early formation processes to the characteristics of mature exoplanets.Doctor of Philosoph
The Politics of Pilgrimage: The Legacy of John Paul II’s Pilgrimages to Communist and Post-Communist Poland
Get PDFThis thesis examines the political and emotional influence of Pope John Paul II’s pilgrimages to Poland during the communist era, analyzing their role in shaping both resistance and long-term Church-State dynamics. While the Catholic Church is often remembered as a close ally of the Solidarity Movement, this disquisition argues that its legacy is more complex. Through a close analysis of John Paul II’s first (1979), second (1983), and fourth (1991) visits, this study explores how the Church cultivated a form of Catholic nationalism grounded in socially conservative values. Drawing on affective geopolitics, the thesis highlights how the emotional and symbolic power of the pilgrimages legitimized the Church’s influence in politics. This influence enabled the Church to operate with limited state interference, creating a space of ideological pluralism. Yet paradoxically, that pluralism was expressed through a vision of an ethnically and morally unified Poland, shaped by conservative and nationalist ideals.Master of Art
FROM FEAR TO PHYSICAL FUNCTION: INVESTIGATING COGNITIVE-AFFECTIVE-MOTOR RESPONSES AFTER ACL RECONSTRUCTION
Get PDFFollowing anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR), individuals often experience persistent neuromuscular and sensorimotor deficits that extend beyond biomechanical impairments. Kinesiophobia, the fear of movement or reinjury, has been identified as a significant psychological barrier to recovery and a risk factor for secondary injury after ACLR. However, the mechanisms through which kinesiophobia influences functional performance remain poorly understood. This cross-sectional study included 38 individuals (28 females; mean age: 23.1 ± 6.3 years) who had undergone primary, unilateral ACLR (33.1 ± 30.3 months post-surgery). Participants completed the Tampa Scale of Kinesiophobia (TSK-11) and performed a functional movement progression including bilateral squats, drop vertical jumps, single-leg hops (SLH), and reaction time SLH (RT-SLH). Peak normal force and limb symmetry indices were calculated. Gaze behavior was measured during the RT-SLH task, with the last fixation duration before SLH flight as the primary outcome. Electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded while participants viewed neutral, threatening, and intense images in sport and non-sport contexts, with late positive potential (LPP) and P300 amplitudes extracted as indices of emotional and attentional processing, respectively.No significant associations were found between TSK-11 scores and limb loading symmetry, hop distance, or reaction time. Longer fixation durations during the preparatory phase of the SLH were associated with slower reaction times and shorter hop distances, while higher fixation counts were associated with greater hop distances. The EEG analysis showed that kinesiophobia was not significantly associated with LPP amplitudes, suggesting no enhanced emotional processing of threat-related stimuli. However, higher TSK-11 scores were associated with significantly reduced P300 amplitudes, particularly in sport contexts and intense conditions, indicating diminished attentional engagement.Attentional changes, reflected in both reduced P300 amplitudes and gaze behaviors, emerged as a more reliable index of motor performance than fear itself. Additionally, the altered relationship between visual attention and motor execution suggests fundamental changes in perception-action coupling following injury. These findings suggest that the traditional focus on reducing fear or achieving limb symmetry may overlook critical perceptual-cognitive components of post-ACLR recovery. Visual attention strategies, particularly gaze duration and visual sampling frequency, were better predictors of motor performance than psychological self-report measures or limb symmetry alone.Doctor of Philosoph
Disco-Tech: Jukeboxes and DJs in Manhattan's Gay and Lesbian Discotheques, 1968–1975
Get PDFMy dissertation examines the transition from jukeboxes to DJs in Manhattan’s gay bars and discotheques from 1968 to 1974. I argue that, in combination with the demand for better social dance spaces amplified by activists of the late 1960s Gay Liberation Movement, the decline of the jukebox industry created some of the cultural conditions that led to the rise of the dance club DJ, a figure that would come to dominate dance floors across the United States by the end of the 1970s. When I say that it created some of the cultural conditions, I mean that dancers’ growing distaste for jukeboxes shaped their appreciation of DJs. Over this period, jukeboxes grew undesirable both to patrons and venue owners: they cost patrons to use and often had outdated music selections, could only play shorter-length songs from 45 rpm singles, and in many cases were forced upon clubs by New York’s organized crime families. DJs, however, offered something that no jukebox could provide: the continuous playback of thematically curated music that facilitated cruising, a secretive facet of gay sociality that flourished in reciprocity with disco culture. This dissertation focuses on the relationship between music, dancing, and technologies, engaging with existing discourse on the history of DJing and disco culture, the interpretive flexibility and closure of technologies, and world-making and utopian imaginings on the queer dance floor. I analyze Andrew Holleran’s 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance, advertisements, bar guides, and reviews from lesbian and gay entertainment and activist periodicals from New York City, articles and advertisements from music and coin machine industry magazines such as Billboard and Cash Box, and legal documents from the FBI’s investigation of the Genovese crime family, bringing these disparate sources together to examine cultural and technological change in Manhattan’s early 1970s discotheque scene. My investigation of the overlap and transition from jukeboxes to DJs on some of Manhattan’s queer discotheque dance floors reveals that the shortcomings of the jukebox fueled dancers’ rapidly growing desire for the club DJ’s profession and practice.Doctor of Philosoph
Investigating Referential Adaptation:The Statistics and Learning Mechanism
Get PDFPronoun resolution is guided by various discourse cues. For instance, ambiguous pronouns are often assigned to the subject of the preceding sentence (e.g., Ana went shopping with Liz. She bought a hat). However, how these biases develop has not been widely discussed. Studies have found that people learn discourse biases through exposure, tracking frequent pronoun-reference patterns (e.g., pronouns often refer to subjects), a process known as referential adaptation (e.g., Kaiser, 2009; Johnson & Arnold, 2023; Ye & Arnold, 2023b, etc.). Yet, the specific patterns people learn and the mechanisms underlying this learning remain unclear. Two experiments investigated the specificity of referential adaptation by testing whether third-person pronouns (e.g., he vs. she) are categorized as a general class or individual lexical items and whether referents are categorized by their grammatical positions (e.g., subject vs. non-subject) across different event roles (goal/source vs. agent/comitative). Results indicate that referential adaptation occurs at the level of pronoun categories rather than specific lexical items, and that referents are grouped by their grammatical positions regardless of semantic variations. Another two experiments examined whether referential adaptation is driven by prediction error, which primarily accounts for learning of unexpected patterns, and minimal or no learning when there is no unexpected input. However, comparable referential adaptation occurred both in strongly-biased contexts with unexpected references and equi-biased contexts lacking expectation violations, challenging the necessity of prediction error for referential adaptation. Alternative frameworks are evaluated and discussed in relation to existing findings on referential adaptation, emphasizing the need for a comprehensive model that integrates different results currently explained separately by error-based and frequency-based learning accounts.Doctor of Philosoph
Regularized Regression When Boundary Values Are Possible
Get PDFRegularized estimators have demonstrated outstanding performance across a wide range of applications. In this dissertation, I study regularized estimators when the true value of parameters possibly lies on the boundary of some parameter space. Due to the boundary, the asymptotic distribution of an estimator may no longer be normal. Moreover, regularization can introduce bias to the estimator, which can also interact with the boundary and make the distribution unclear. To understand these issues, in the first part of this dissertation, I derive the asymptotic distributions of the ridge regressor, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, and general regularized M-estimators under constraints and fixed-dimensional settings. Since regularization is often applied in high-dimensional contexts, in the second part, I propose a constraint debiased machine learning estimator and a quasi-likelihood ratio test for high-dimensional linear models. In the third part, I focus on the high-dimensional random-coefficient multinomial logit model, commonly used to study discrete choices in economics. I develop a regularized maximum likelihood estimator for simultaneous variable selection, and construct a constrained debiased machine learning estimator to account for both regularization bias and boundary. Finally, I illustrate the impacts of high-dimensional parameters and boundary in an empirical application to soft-drink markets in North Carolina.Doctor of Philosoph
Tibullus in Love, Horace on Love: Negotiating Genre in C. 1.33
Get PDFIn this paper, I read Horace C. 1.33, nominally a consolation for his friend Tibullus who is disappointed in love, as a negotiation between lyric and elegiac modes. I argue that the poem serves both a humorous, multi-pronged critique of Roman love elegy and an oppositional statement of generic self-definition. I begin by assessing Horace’s criticism of elegy. I contend that Horace faults elegy for being overly emotional, generically over-determined, and excessively reliant on Hellenistic models. This criticism takes on a new valence in the final stanza. Through the comparative adjective melior, Horace, in line with the ancient trend of oppositional generic definition, describes the genre of his own love poetry by explicitly contrasting his work with Tibullan elegy. He thus defines amatory lyric as “not-elegy.”Master of Art