34296 research outputs found
Sort by
Figures of the Jeune Fille in Postwar French Cinema: Libertine Ingenues, Lolitas, and Creatures from \u3cem\u3eCaroline Chérie\u3c/em\u3e to \u3cem\u3eMonika\u3c/em\u3e
No full textFigures of the Jeune Fille in Postwar French Cinema: Libertine Ingenues, Lolitas and Creatures from Caroline Chérie to Monika examines how teenage girls became symbols of political, sexual, and cinematic revolution in France from the 1950s through the 1960s. French films such as Richard Pottier’s Dear Caroline (1951), Henri Verneuil’s Forbidden Fruit (1952), and Claude Autant-Lara’s Love is My Profession (1958) demonstrate an obsessive preoccupation with the young girl as figurehead for social change. On-screen, young girls perceived as lolitas and libertine ingenues celebrate sexual autonomy, corporeal agency, and independence, renegotiating their place in the nuclear family and society at large. Focusing on a group of midcentury films, I analyze how actresses such as Harriet Andersson in Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953) and Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1956) became important cultural icons by merging with their characters. I examine the figures they became through the conceptual prism of ‘creatures’ of cinema. Though these creatures celebrate sexual emancipation, social independence, and the right to love, they remain subordinated, shaped by directors to satisfy patriarchal expectations and desires in an exploitative system deployed in service of artistic vision. While exposing how these young girls are instrumentalized through what Laura Mulvey called “the male gaze,” I reclaim the creature as the work of the actress-creator by analyzing actresses’ performances and collaborative processes with film crews. Finally, I demonstrate how these figures inspired the next generation of feminist filmmakers like Catherine Breillat to reclaim cinematic power and develop a new language for representing young girls, thereby restoring artistic agency to the muses
Precarious Status, Essential Work: Migrant Labor, Social Reproduction, And the Politics of Regularization in Covid Quebec
No full textThis dissertation examines how migrant justice struggles in Quebec during and immediately after the COVID‑19 pandemic challenged and reshaped the cultural politics of membership in a neoliberal welfare state under strain. The research is centered on an ethnography of the Status for All campaign, a coalition effort spearheaded in Montreal to secure permanent immigration status for all people with precarious status in Canada. I situate pandemic‑era regularization efforts within overlapping crises of border governance, social reproduction, and federal–provincial relations. I argue that Quebec’s growing reliance on migrants with precarious status to sustain essential public social reproductive functions in care work, education, and construction, while often legally excluding them from the benefits of these same systems, exposes a bordering logic that manages the contradictions of a fraying welfare state through status stratification.
Using a conjunctural analysis and drawing on five years of ethnographic work with the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal—supplemented by media, archival, and policy analysis—this study traces how ‘essential worker’ discourse advanced a novel social reproduction argument for immigrant inclusion and opened space for political mobilization. I show how, in multiscalar governance contexts, organizers leverage jurisdictional tensions to secure footholds for transformative projects. The regularization campaign provoked significant debate over the meaning of national membership in Quebec, pushing beyond a linguistically defined imaginary toward questions of pluralist values and what a society owes the people involved in the material making of its everyday life. Coordinated lobbying across civil society and both Quebec and Canada’s “national” governments ultimately produced the Guardian Angels Program, a regularization initiative for pending and refused asylum seekers working in healthcare. Efforts to extend the program to all migrant ‘essential workers’ were briefly entertained by the Canadian government but were blocked amid a post‑pandemic wave of migrant scapegoating for housing pressures and the erosion of public services. Linking theories of social reproduction, border governance, and differential inclusion, I reconceptualize immigration policy as a central technology in reproducing provincial welfare systems in an era of intensified contestation over the state’s role in public provisioning and the politics of immigration
Where do Latinos Live in the New York City Metropolitan Area? Changing Settlement Patterns 2000 - 2024
No full textThis report shows that between 2000 and 2024, the Latino population of the New York metropolitan area increased by 48% from 3,592,542 to 5,316,472 according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Along with population expansion, there was a decisive change in settlement patterns among all Latinos, which, in fact, began before 2000. This was the decline of New York City as the major area of the Latino population concentration, although there were differentiations by nationality.
In 2000, 60% of all Latinos in the region lived in the City. By 2024, this had declined to 46%. And while the City’s Latino population increased by about 12% over this time frame, the suburban counties increased at significantly faster rates
Autoconvocadxs: interpretaciones biopolíticas y psicopolíticas del poder popular, el archivo y la memoria en la cultura popular de Puerto Rico
No full textAutoconvocadxs analizan el nacimiento, el desarrollo y la consolidación de la asamblea popular como un mecanismo para fiscalizar la labor del Estado. Este, insuficiente y al servicio de las instituciones imperiales, se ha desentendido de las necesidades del pueblo en momentos de crisis. Al servicio de la agenda imperial estadounidense, el gobierno puertorriqueño echó mano de diversas estrategias de coerción y vigilancia que perjudicaron el desarrollo social, económico y político de Puerto Rico. Sin embargo, dichas estrategias e instrumentos de vigilancia han evolucionado a través del tiempo: desde una perspectiva biopolítica en los años 1970, hasta el triunfo de la psicopolítica en el presente.
Asimismo se enfoca en tres asambleas que determinaron el futuro sociopolítico del archipiélago: los levantamientos estudiantiles e independentistas de los 1970, las manifestaciones en contra de la presencia de la Marina estadounidense en Vieques a principios de los 2000 y el Verano del 2019. Además de explorar la evolución de las estrategias estatales de coerción, se analizan los medios para convocar, documentar y preservar la memoria de la asamblea. Por ello, los conceptos de archivo (Derrida) y repertorio (Taylor) se emplearán para determinar los mecanismos empleados por cada grupo involucrado al (re)construir la memoria en torno a estos sucesos históricos
Molding the Mosaic: Progressive Coalition Formation in the 2021 New York City Council Elections
No full textThe 2021 New York City Council primaries marked a decisive breakthrough for the city’s progressive left. A cohort of democratic-socialist and socialist-adjacent candidates won office across multiple boroughs, dramatically expanding the size and influence of the left flank of the council. This dissertation analyzes those victories and argues that they constituted a hinge moment in the construction of a progressive governing regime in New York City, with implications that extend beyond New York City politics to the study of social- democratic party families more broadly. Drawing on electoral returns, demographic data, campaign materials, and elite interviews, the project demonstrates that progressives succeeded by strategically expanding a coalition previously anchored in white, well-educated professionals into racially diverse segments of the working class, particularly among Hispanic and South Asian voters. These gains translated not only into electoral durability but into governing capacity: progressive council members passed a substantial body of social-democratic legislation and exercised increased oversight of an adversarial mayoral administration. The demographic expansion of the progressive coalition also set the stage for the 2025 mayoral victory of Zohran Mamdani, further cementing the New York City left’s electoral and institutional power
Development of the Active Participle Denoting Ongoing Aspect in Heritage Speakers of Levantine Arabic in the US
No full textThis study investigated the acquisition, development, and productivity of اسم الفاعل “ism il-fA؟el”, Active Participle (AP) when denoting ongoing aspect in the comprehension and production of heritage speakers (HSs) of Levantine Arabic (LA[1]). Ongoing aspect is mainly realized in Arabic by an inflected imperfective verb preceded by a progressive particle (PROG.V) and in certain cases b AP. Our study is comprised of four sub-studies: a Syrian Levantine Arabic (SLA) adult corpus analysis (production of PROG.V and AP/ CACeC template); a cross-sectional LA child heritage comprehension and production experiment (PROG.V and AP/ CACeC template) ; a longitudinal study of two heritage speakers of SLA through 13 months (production of PROG.V and AP in different templates); and a LA adolescent and adult heritage speaker cross-sectional elicitation task (production of PROG.V and AP in different templates). The adult SLA corpus analysis revealed that PROG.V is more frequent than AP (only the first template of the AP. i.e., CACeC فاعل was investigated). Findings from the LA child heritage speaker cross-sectional experiment confirmed accessibility to CACeC AP, providing evidence of availability of its mental representation. Results also showed better performance in comprehension compared to production, and more accuracy in PROG.V responses than AP. The longitudinal study also supports the Strong Continuity Hypothesis (SCH). The two children observed in the longitudinal study exhibited competence of different templates of AP and applied them correctly to express ongoing aspect. Finally, the adolescent and adult LA heritage speaker cross-sectional elicitation task, also provided evidence for SCH where most participants used different templates of AP, though their performance was better with PROG.V. Results of this latter study moreover exhibited that females performed better than males. In general, results and findings shed light on the heritage speakers’ morphosemantic competence of AP as an ongoing aspect marker, and the factors influencing their performance. Adopting The Network Analysis Approach, proposed by Dattner et al. (2022), we explored the relationships between roots/ lemmas in the lexicon and morphological templates (all represented as nodes with interconnecting lines in the original model), and between AP templates and their aspectual semantic application in LA (a linguistic variety characterized by a non-concatenative morphology). Building on The Strong Continuity Hypothesis (SCH) in language acquisition (Chomsky,1960s; Wexler, 1993 &1996; Hyams 1986 &1993; Flynn 1987, 1998 & 2004 ; Pinker, 1984; Lust, 1992, 1999 & 2006; Boser,1992; and Pierce,1992), we provided evidence that heritage speakers of LA have access to LA grammar from childhood (2-years old). Heritage grammar is not a simplified primitive version of the native monolingual speaker’s grammar, and it does not lack fundamental structural mental representations. It is rather a fully structured system that gradually matures with continuous input, by adding lexical and functional details. Heritage speakers of LA retain substantial grammatical knowledge, especially for high-frequency and semantically transparent forms. They, nonetheless, display areas of variability in the morphological realization of the ongoing aspect. Variations in production among heritage speakers are interpreted in relation to gender effects, and usage-based learning theories such as frequency of form (roots, lexemes/ lemmas, and templates); complexity of form-form interrelationships networking (a root/ lemma-morphological templates) and/ or form-function mapping (AP - ongoing aspect); and to crosslinguistic influence from the dominant language, English. The findings in general contribute to ongoing debates in heritage language morphosemantic acquisition and development, with implications for both theoretical linguistics and educational and pedagogical practices.
[1] Levantine Arabic is an Arabic Dialect spoken in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan
Nanoparticles for Advancements in Radiopharmaceutical Technologies
No full textCancer is a significant burden on patients and healthcare worldwide and remains the second leading cause of death in the United States[1, 2]. Nuclear medicine has evolved over the decades to improve diagnosis, treatment, and better guide the resection of tumors through radiopharmaceuticals[3, 4]. Nanoparticles play an interesting role in the evolving field of radiopharmaceuticals due to their modularity and subsequent flexibility, providing new technologies for nuclear diagnosis and treatment of cancer[5-7]. Nanoparticles have high surface area to volume ratios, making them more amendable for surface modification[8]. Multiple radionuclides can bind to one nanoparticle, with or without a chelator, increasing specific activity without increasing particle number[9]. By fine-tuning size, morphology, composition, and functionalization, the blood circulation time can potentially be tuned for nanoparticles, ranging from 30 min to 24 h, which can be matched to a radionuclides’ half-life[8, 9]. Nanoparticles are also an effective carrier for the delivery of drugs or imaging agents [9, 10]. Radiolabeled nanoparticles have made their way into the clinic, e.g. for sentinel lymph node imaging[9]. This dissertation aims to highlight how nanoparticles can be utilized as ideal carriers of radiopharmaceuticals for improved cancer imaging and treatment.
Among the most common forms of biomedical imaging are Positron Emission Tomography (PET)[2], Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)[4], and fluorescence imaging [2, 4]. Our research in biomedical imaging in this dissertation centers around techniques related to Cerenkov Luminescence Imaging (CLI), which relies on Cerenkov Luminescence emitted from radioactive decay, and for which the research of Grimm and co-workers have made significant advances in clinical imaging [11]. CLI has the advantage of combining the availability, sensitivity, and specificity of nuclear tracers for molecular imaging with the higher resolution, lower cost, and faster acquisition times of optical imaging[12]. This work investigates a unique contrast enhancement approach for CL that would enhance the signal without increasing the radioactive dose for patients.
In our research towards cancer therapeutics, we explored further the potential of certain heavy radionuclides for curative therapy, which, besides gamma radiation, also emit subatomic particles such as alpha (a) -particles, beta (b) -particles, and Auger electrons[8]. Therapeutic efficacy is maximized when the effective range, particle decay pathway and linear energy transfer (LET) of the radionuclide matches the tumor size, density, radiosensitivity, and heterogeneity[13]. Targeted Alpha Therapy (TAT) provides high cell-killing efficiency and short effective range, sparing healthy untargeted tissue as compared to beta-radiation therapy[13]. In an attempt to reduce ancillary effects to healthy organs from TAT, this work investigates the use of core-shell nanoparticles as a technology for sequestering decay daughters without inhibiting therapeutic a-emission[14-17]
Typeface: Machine-Viewing Gentrification on Storefront Imagery in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn
No full textGentrification—broadly, the replacement of a less powerful group by a more powerful one in an urban context—is oft-discussed in the popular press, but its definition is much-debated in the urban planning literature. Furthermore, academic treatments of displacement understandably focus on measurable yet fairly abstract indicators like changes in rent or income, whereas neighborhood change is often registered by residents on the ground using visual, but difficult-to-quantify markers like retail turnover. This project uses image recognition technology on a set of storefront photos to index the visual streetscape of a neighborhood, as well as to track changes to that portrait over time, and presents the findings in an accessible format on the web. The model relies on a binary classification developed by New York City cultural anthropologist Edward Snajdr and sociolinguist Shonna Trinch (2020), wherein colorful, text-heavy “old-school” storefront signage evokes openness, diversity and accessibility, while the spartan, symbolic and glass-laden “new-school” design signals clubbiness, cultural capital and upscale. The neighborhood focus is Bedford-Stuyvesant, a historically Black section of Brooklyn that has lately been in the top three community districts for proportional increases in rent, income, and white share of the population. The model finds a small but significant likelihood that old-school stores have closed, while more newly opened stores reflect the new-school style
A Critical Lens on Emotions and Learning: Shame, Loneliness, and Alienation in Community College
No full textThis dissertation explores how community college students make sense of and navigate their emotions related to learning. Community colleges are two-year public higher education institutions that primarily serve working-class and students of color, enrolling almost half of all current undergraduates in the United States, yet their experiences are rarely addressed by researchers. Drawing on critical theories (e.g., feminist politics of emotions, Black feminist/queer women of color theorizing), emotions in this study are conceptualized as socio-politically situated, shaped by institutions and ideologies distributed through power across intersecting social identities. Although emotion research in higher education has grown substantially in the past two decades, community colleges remain marginal in this literature. This scholarly gap, addressed in this study, is not neutral; if left intact it may reproduce dehumanizing narratives about students from historically marginalized communities. The current study was conducted as a qualitative inquiry (in two phases) employing interviews with community college students about their learning experiences and emotions. The research questions for Phase I focus on how community college students make sense of learning-related emotions—what emotion discourses they use, how institutional contexts shape those feelings, and what supports they draw on when experiencing negative emotions. Phase II research questions examine how students across intersecting identities experience and interpret shame, loneliness, and alienation in learning; how structures of oppression shape these emotions; and how students imagine or create alternatives grounded for resistance and solidarity.
Based in a qualitative thematic analysis, the main finding from Phase I (7 participants) was that students experienced learning-related emotions as shaped by power and institutional context, but often spoke about them in individualist ways that stigmatized sharing, leading most to cope privately except in rare moments of connection, belonging, and critique. Specifically, individualist and isolating spaces of learning in community college seemed to have encouraged students to engage in individualist ways of learning where their feelings of shame were often suppressed and hidden. Phase II (5 participants) extended these findings to include a focus on the dynamics of shame, loneliness, and alienation grounded in social and power-laden contexts of community college. The main finding was that shame, loneliness, and alienation operate in sociopolitical spaces of learning and can enact either oppression or resistance. Specifically, it was revealed how learning was oppressive when shame, loneliness, and alienation served to exclude, marginalize, and isolate students. However, it was also demonstrated how students might draw on these very emotions for resistance against oppressive, dehumanizing conditions for learning. Overall, this study suggests that when shame, loneliness, and alienation are treated as reflections of oppressive educational practices, rather than individual deficits or taboo topics, the stigmatizing, isolating, and overall negative dimensions of these feelings can be negated and subverted by students, thus fostering resistance and solidarity. Thus, shame, loneliness, and alienation contain deep revolutionary potential for educational transformation
Calcium Zincate Cycling and Failure Mechanisms: Pathways to Commercialization for Grid Scale Energy Storage
No full textRising global demand for energy consumption is expected to ramp up due to the increasing need for data centers for AI and the electrification of commercial and residential processes. This increase in demand comes at a time when we have aging electrical grid infrastructure that is also costly to maintain and expand so grid scale energy storage can help supplement the capacity of the grid. Currently lithium-ion batteries play a pivotal role in many of the rechargeable batteries that are used for personal devices, electric vehicles, and grid scale energy storage due to their explosion in popularity and dropping costs. As the demand for the materials needed for Li-ion batteries grows, there is also an increasing supply chain risk that we face since these materials only come from a few countries in the world and there may not be enough to meet all the demand required in the future. We begin to look towards other battery chemistries beyond lithium such as zinc based batteries which have been widely used as single use disposable AA/AAA batteries for the longest time. Rechargeable alkaline zinc (Zn) batteries are attractive due to their global abundance and inherent safety when using alkaline electrolyte; however limited reversibility currently hinders their widespread commercial viability. Calcium zincate (CaZn2(OH)6∙2H2O, CaZn) is a promising material that has shown improvement vs Zn/ZnO electrodes by allowing higher Zn utilizations at comparable cycle life, making it a promising alterative that can help drive down costs by increasing Zn utilization. In Chapter 3, additions of CaZn to Zn anodes for rechargeable alkaline batteries were investigated and found to increase cycle life at high 50% Zn utilization of the anode’s theoretical capacity, thereby significantly reducing anode costs. A spectrum of anode formulations with increasing CaZn (0%, 30%, 70%, 100%) in mixtures with metallic Zn is investigated along with minor additions of Bi2O3, acetylene carbon, and CTAB. The total molar zinc content is normalized; thus, electrode capacity is kept comparable, resulting in electrodes relevant to real world use cases. At a high 50% utilization rate, pure CaZn anodes achieved approximately 280 cycles, a five-fold improvement over the 50 cycles of the Zn anodes. This increased efficiency translates to a 25% reduction in cost per cycle. Microscopic analysis reveals that CaZn delays failure by slowing the formation of a passivating zinc oxide layer and reducing shape change by keeping zinc and calcium intimately mixed during cycling. In Chapter 4, we show that despite these gains that can be achieved using pure CaZn anodes, performance eventually fades due to the segregation of Zn from Ca. As these materials separate, zinc migrates toward areas of higher conductivity, leading to increased internal resistance and heterogeneity within the electrode. Results indicate that CaZn performance is highly sensitive to the charge/discharge c-rates; for instance, fast cycling (1C/1C) maintains a 97.5% Coulombic efficiency with 2.5% overcharge, whereas slower, long-duration cycling (C/10:C/100) drops to roughly 65%. The optimal conditions that allow for the highest cycle life have been CaZn at C/3 with 50% Zn utilization, providing ~400+ cycles before capacity fade of 70% of the cycled 50% Zn utilization. These failure mechanisms highlight the critical role of maintaining material homogeneity and optimized charge/discharge rates. In Chapter 5, to further improve cycling stability and extend cycle life, experiments into additives for conductivity, moisture-retention agents, and excess calcium hydroxide were investigated. What we show is that there is a minimum amount of conductive additive that needs to be dispersed throughout the CaZn electrode to have that a precise level of conductivity is required to sustain performance and other additives would have to be in addition to the conductive additives. This thesis provides a clear roadmap for understanding how CaZn cycles in Zn electrodes and as a pure electrode while optimizing cell fabrication and design, additives, and cycling conditions. These results provide insight into how CaZn based batteries could be designed for commercial applications as a promising alternative to Zn and ZnO based electrodes