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“There’s Nothing More to Get From It”: Subverting Representation in Olivia Wenzel’s \u3ci\u3e1000 Serpentinen Angst\u3c/i\u3e and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s \u3ci\u3eAdas Raum\u3c/i\u3e
No full textOlivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum resist the demands of representation literature by portraying protagonists who cannot be pinned down to a single position. As Black women writing in German, Wenzel and Otoo are faced with particular pressures to describe the effects of structural racism. They show an awareness of this expectation and develop forms of subversion: namely, ambiguity that defies resolution and coherence. Their novels show how constantly shifting contexts ruin any straightforward project of representation. Portraying the protagonists in a variety of different moments and locations, the texts reveal the insufficiency of characterization(s) such as “Schwarz”, “Weiblich” or “Queer”. We are never sure exactly which positions the protagonists are speaking from, which raises the question—how do you claim that something is a representation novel when you cannot identify what perspective is being represented
The Crossroads We Make: Intergenerational Trauma and Reparative Reading in Recent Asian American Memoirs (2018-2022)
Full text linkThis project extends reparative reading practices to recent Asian American memoirs, specifically trauma memoirs from the past five years (2018-2022) that detail personal trauma and communal, intergenerational trauma. Reparative reading is explored within five memoirs: Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know (2022), Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (2019), Phuc Tran’s Sigh, Gone (2020), Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings (2020), and Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know (2018). In considering the reparative turn in Asian American memoirs, this thesis draws on and extends Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reparative frameworks and bell hooks’ theories on pedagogy and love. A critical analysis of self-writings through pre-existing reparative reading models alongside traditional Asian American scholarship on racial melancholia resists the monopolistic dominance of overwhelming negative affects (such as shame, guilt, and anger) that saturate Asian American lives and life-writing. Instead, this alternative interpretative practice exposes how authors seek love, pleasure, and positivity within their texts and within their own lives, while also exploring the methods through which the memoirists themselves embody the reparative in writing and self-analysis. Thus, shaping the reparative turn for Asian America illuminates the productive ways reshaped methods of writing and criticism, and its resultant ethics of living, can push back against lived racial oppression and pain as well as decades of cultural erasure and intergenerational trauma. This varied engagement with love-based and reparative frameworks allows Asian American authors to begin healing from trauma, and this is evidenced through non-traditional psychiatric healing methods, literary methods, and strategies of communal formation
Growing Pains: Toward a Coalition-Based Theory of State Land Use Policy
Full text linkIn the decades following World War II, mass suburbanization remade the American landscape. While suburbs accounted for 83% of the nation’s growth between 1950 and 1970, cities bled their populations and natural resources dwindled. Treating the postwar era as a critical juncture, this thesis examines the political history of twentieth-century state land use policy to illuminate how competing interests have shaped policy outcomes across the United States. Specifically, the paper seeks to explain the passage of statewide growth management and smart growth programs. After providing a history of American suburbanization, the paper considers an emergent challenge to the postwar growth paradigm as manifested through resistance to urban renewal, open space loss, and diverse anti-freeway coalitions that combined actors from each movement. Thereafter, I detail the development of statewide growth management and smart growth programs before employing a set of case studies to discern causal factors associated with the success or failure of such legislation. Testing the theory that broad-based coalitions were essential to the passage of state growth management legislation, I perform a controlled comparison of two pairs of states, Maryland and Virginia and Oregon and Washington, employing additional within-case analysis for Washington. In so doing, I find evidence that diverse coalitions—from environmentalists and housing advocates to farmers and historic preservationists—were essential to the passage of state growth management programs. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings and the relevance of state land use policy to contemporary issues such as affordable housing and climate change
The Impact of Toll 6-1 Function on the Maintenance and Plasticity of the \u3ci\u3eGryllus bimaculatus\u3c/i\u3e Auditory System
No full text[Abstract embargoed
Written in the Body: Embodiments of Gender, Asexuality, Queerness, and Disability
No full text[Abstract restricted
Functional redundancy of a non-native foundation species (eelgrass, \u3ci\u3eZostera japonica\u3c/i\u3e) across intertidal stress gradients
No full textNon-native species foundation species can alter ecosystems in both positive and negative ways. The creation of habitat can be beneficial to native species when they provide a limiting resource or in a stressful environment. Yet this creation of habitat can also be detrimental by replacing native species and/or facilitating the presence of more non-native species. In Willapa Bay, WA, a non-native foundation species, Zostera japonica, co-exists with the native foundation species Zostera marina. Zostera japonica persists at the higher intertidal in monocultures, the two species overlap in the mid intertidal, and Z. marina persists in monocultures in the low intertidal. Epifaunal invertebrates, the organisms that live on eelgrass blades, connect eelgrass to higher trophic levels. Through a series of transplants and removals, I used this zonation pattern to ask if the two species can fulfill a similar functional role in respect to epifaunal invertebrates (functional redundancy), and if this was due to the identity of the foundation species or a response to the stress gradient of the intertidal. My results suggest that the epifaunal invertebrate community is responding more to the physiological stress gradient, and the functional redundancy of the two species depends on the location they are found. Z. japonica is expanding the range of vegetated habitat into to the physiologically stressful high zone, which supports a different community. This experiment highlights that the impacts of non- native species are highly localized and that abiotic and biotic factors are important to trophic interactions
Host and symbiont-specific patterns of gene expression in response to cold stress in the temperate coral \u3ci\u3eAstrangia poculata\u3c/i\u3e
Full text linkThe coral Astrangia poculata inhabits hard-bottom environments from the Gulf of Mexico to Massachusetts and withstands large seasonal variation in temperature (–2 to 26 °C). This thermal range and its ability to live in a facultative symbiosis makes this species an ideal model system for investigating stress responses to ocean temperature variation. Although it has been shown that aposymbiotic A. poculata upregulates more genes in response to cold stress than heat stress, the transcriptomic response of the holobiont (coral host and symbiotic algae) to stress is unknown. In this study, we characterize changes in gene expression in both the host and symbionts under cold stress (6ºC) and ambient (12ºC) seawater temperatures. We use RNAseq to visualize how patterns of global gene expression change in response to these temperatures within the transcriptomes of replicate corals (n=10, each temperature) and their symbiont partners. By filtering the holobiont assembly for known coral host and symbiont genes, we contrasted patterns of differential expression (DE) for each partner and the functional processes for each set of DE genes. Differential gene expression analyses revealed that the cnidarian coral host responds strongly to cold stress, while algal symbionts did not have a significant stress response. In the coral host, we found up-regulation of biological processes associated with DNA repair, immunity, and maintaining cellular homeostasis as well as downregulation of mechanisms associated with DNA repair and RNA splicing, indicating inhibition of necessary cellular processes due to environmental stress
Peripheral modulation of cardiac contractions in the American lobster, \u3ci\u3eHomarus americanus\u3c/i\u3e, by the peptide myosuppressin is mediated by effects on the cardiac muscle itself
Full text linkA substantial factor for behavioral flexibility is modulation — largely via neuropeptides — which occurs at multiple sites including neurons, muscles, and the neuromuscular junction (NMJ). Complex modulation distributed across multiple sites provides an interesting question: does modulation at multiple locations lead to greater dynamics than one receptor site alone? The cardiac neuromuscular system of the American lobster (Homarus americanus), driven by a central pattern generator called the cardiac ganglion (CG), is a model system for peptide modulation. The peptide myosuppressin (pQDLDHVFLRFamide) has been shown in the whole heart to decrease contraction frequency, largely due to its effects on the CG, as well as increase contraction amplitude by acting on periphery of the neuromuscular system, either at the cardiac muscle, the NMJ, or both. This set of experiments addresses the location(s) at which myosuppressin exerts its effects at the periphery. To elucidate myosuppressin’s effects on the cardiac muscle, the CG was removed, and muscle contractions were stimulated with L-glutamate while superfusing myosuppressin. Myosuppressin increased glutamate-evoked contraction amplitude in the isolated muscle, suggesting that myosuppressin exerts its peripheral effects directly on the cardiac muscle. To examine effects on the NMJ, excitatory junction potentials were evoked by stimulating of the motor nerve and intracellularly recording a single muscle fiber both in control saline and in the presence of myosuppressin. Myosuppressin did not modulate the amplitude of EJPs suggesting myosuppressin acts at the muscle and not at the NMJ, to cause an increase in contraction amplitude
On \u3ci\u3e L\u3c/i\u3e-functions and the 1-Level Density
Full text linkWe begin with the classical study of the Riemann zeta function and Dirichlet L-functions. This includes a full exposition on one of the most useful ways of exploiting their connection with primes, namely, explicit formulae. We then proceed to introduce statistics of low-lying zeros of Dirichlet L-functions, discussing prior results of Fiorilli and Miller (2015) on the 1-level density of Dirichlet L-functions and their achievement in surpassing the prediction of the powerful Ratios Conjecture. Finally, we present our original work partially generalizing these results to the case of Hecke L-functions over imaginary quadratic fields
Guarding Whiteness: Disability, Eugenics, and Rhetorical Agency in Southern Renaissance Fiction
Full text linkThis project explores fiction from white authors in the Southern Renaissance, specifically William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers. By examining their work alongside some of the performers that appeared historically in freak shows of the South, chapter one investigates how physically enfreaked individuals (usually phenotypically white) have access to power and the powers of whiteness. Chapter 2 interrogates how the South pathologizes promiscuity as mental illness with words such as moronic or feeble-mindedness, and the ramifications it has for the stratification on class divides among Southern elites and “White Trash.” The chapter seeks to answer the question of why, for a short period in the 1940s, white women were more likely to be punished with forced sterilization than Black women. Chapter 3 uncovers the rhetorical agency used by Benjy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, looking at how he resists the powers of whiteness through crip time and his trauma responses to his family that seeks to reinsert the Antebellum South.
Using an intersectional approach of critical whiteness studies, disability studies, crip theory, and queer theory, relies on a variety of scholars including, but not limited to; David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, Richard Dyer, Matt Wray, Jasbir Puar, Ellen Samuels, and Allison Kafer. The primary works examined include promotional materials of historical freaks, McCullers’ The Ballad of a Sad Café, William Faulkner’s The Hamlet and The Sound and the Fury, and Flannery O’Connor short stories “Good Country People” and “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.