34296 research outputs found
Sort by
Filling the Gaps: Maiti Nepal and Anti-trafficking Governance in Nepal
No full textHuman trafficking in Nepal is closely linked to labor migration, gender inequality, and weak state capacity. In this context, non-governmental organizations play a key role in anti-trafficking efforts. This capstone project examines Maiti Nepal’s approach to prevention, rescue, and rehabilitation, with focus on its work at border points and internal facilities provided to human trafficking victims. The study analyzes how Maiti Nepal functions as a quasi-state actor by addressing gaps in Nepal’s anti-trafficking framework, highlights challenges associated with limited inconsistent funding, uneven resource distribution, and support for survivors. The study argues that Maiti Nepal’s significance lies not only in its direct interventions, but in what its work reveals about the shifting responsibilities between the state, NGOs, and transnational migration governance
One Olivine Crystal at a Time: Unraveling the Volatile Budget and Timescales of the Deccan Traps Large Igneous Province
No full textLarge Igneous Provinces (LIPs) are voluminous intraplate magmatic events thought to originate from a variety of tectonic events including mantle plumes (Campbell & Griffiths, 1990; Richards et al., 1989), separation of continents (Courtillot et al., 1999) and delamination of the mantle lithosphere (Tanton & Hager, 2000). LIPs have been associated with major climate and carbon disruptions in Earth’s history (Wignall, 2001; Clapham and Renne, 2019) and also coincide temporally with mass extinction events (Courtillot & Renne, 2003; Wignall, 2001). Geochronology studies constrain the bulk of LIP emplacement to within one million years and magnetostratigraphy independently supports this finding and suggests that LIPs are emplaced in cycles of heightened magmatic activity lasting decades.
In this work we investigate the Deccan Traps Large Igneous Province and its connection to the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event that wiped out many land and ocean species including the dinosaurs, as reviewed in Chapter 1. The emplacement of the Deccan Traps largely occurred between 66.5 and 65.5 Ma, and emplaced up to 2 x 106 km3 of lava (Jay and Widdowson, 2008). However, the true subaerial volume of LIPs difficult to constrain in part because of weathering and erosion (Schoene et al., 2021). The main stage of Deccan Traps magmatism is represented by a sequence of lava flows of up to 2 km in thickness known as the Western Ghats. The composition of this lava sequence is mostly tholeiitic in composition. To the northwest, in the Saurashtra peninsula, highly forsteritic rocks including picrites can be found (Krishnamurthy, 1974; Beane et al., 1986; Beane, 1988; Peng and Mahoney, 1995).
In Chapter 2, we investigate a 2-4 °C warming episode, known as the Latest Maastrichtian warming event (LMWE). The LMWE preceded the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (KPB) mass extinction at 66.05 ± 0.08 Ma and has been linked with the onset of voluminous Deccan Traps volcanism. We tested the hypothesis that Deccan magmatism triggered the LMWE. To do this, we directly measured CO2 concentrations of melt inclusions and made estimates of CO2 based on trace element proxies for CO2. We found that volcanic CO2 outgassing alone cannot account for the magnitude of the observed latest Maastrichtian warming. However, accounting for intrusive outgassing can reconcile early carbon-rich Deccan Traps outgassing with observed changes in climate and atmospheric pCO2 during the LMWE.
In Chapter 3, we attempt to place better constraints on the volatile budget and sources of Deccan magmas. This in turn will allow us to assess the environmental response due to volatile release from Deccan magmatism. The temporal connection between Large Igneous Provinces and mass extinction events has been suggested because LIPs release volatiles (CO2, SO2, F and Cl) that can exert a global impact on Earth’s systems. Therefore, constraining the source and budget of each volatile is needed to understand the potential environmental consequences of volcanic volatile release. LIP melts originate from a heterogeneous mantle with a variety of contributing sources (e.g., mantle plume, asthenosphere, lithosphere, and crust). We report volatile and trace element concentrations of two melt inclusion suites hosted in picritic and highly magnesian lavas from the Saurashtra province in northwestern Deccan and from the Thakurvadi Formation in the main sequence of Deccan volcanism. We combine our data with published constraints on Deccan volatiles to show that F, S, and Cl evolve in distinct fashions. We find that volatiles in LIP magmas are controlled by a complex suite of factors including mantle source, pressures and temperatures of melting, and incorporation of lithospheric mantle and crust. We show that Deccan magmas had similar H2O/Ce, and Cl/K to global melt inclusion suites. However, Deccan magmas seem to have substantially higher F/Nd ratios. We attribute this elevated F/Nd to incorporation of an ancient lithospheric mantle, which may be a major reservoir for F.
In Chapter 4, we investigate the magmatic history of individual Deccan Traps lava eruptions using Fe-Mg diffusion chronometry in olivines. Fe-Mg zonation of olivine crystals is suited to understand the timescales and eruption dynamics of individual eruptions because diffusion timescales for Fe-Mg exchange in olivine are similar to timescales of magma ascent and eruption. Olivine zonation has revealed recharge events prior to eruptions at a range of tectonic settings, but this technique has not been extensively applied to LIPs. Here, we use picrites from northwestern Deccan lavas representing early stages of magmatism and Thakurvadi Formation olivines representing the main stage of Deccan magmatism. We find that Saurashtra crystals tend to show substantially steeper zoning profiles compared with Thakurvadi crystals, consistent with more rapid mixing-to-emplacement timescales. However, interpretation is complicated by the lack of information about lava emplacement timescales. We compare Deccan Traps olivine diffusion profiles with those of more recent basaltic eruptions, and find overall similarities, suggesting that Deccan Traps magmatic processes broadly resemble those occurring in smaller-scale basaltic systems
Molecular Biophysics of Mammalian and Fungal Macromolecular Assemblies
No full textNuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMR) is a powerful and highly versatile analytical tool that allows for the collection of data reflecting the macromolecular organization of an ordered structure, and even intramolecular interactions of nuclei. This thesis details two projects that utilized NMR to gain a higher understanding of two macromolecular assemblies; each project has been divided into two separate chapters. Chapter One describes the study of the surface interactions and subsequent conformational changes of fatty acid-binding proteins (FABPs) when bound to a specific substrate, the objective of which was to gain valuable insight on how FABP-ligand interactions impact human obesity. Chapter Two details the study of the macromolecular architecture of the fungal cell wall belonging to the virulent fungal species Cryptococcus neoformans, of which the goal was to obtain biochemical and biophysical insight into the macromolecular complexes involved in human infections, while also potentially contributing towards an eventual method of curing said infections. Pursuing these two avenues of investigation was a necessity, in the interest of both effectively coordinating on projects with valued collaborators, in addition to facing the challenges of protein expression
Socialism on Display: State-Sponsored Exhibitions of Art and Visual Culture in Stalinist Poland, 1945–1956
No full textThis dissertation examines the evolution of state-sponsored exhibitions of art and visual culture in Stalinist Poland (1945–1956) as instruments of political pedagogy and statecraft. It analyzes how exhibitions functioned not only as displays of artistic achievement but also as mechanisms for translating state policy into visual form, directing how audiences viewed and interpreted works, and modeling the values and behaviors expected in a socialist society. Focusing on Warsaw—the capital and administrative center of postwar cultural policy—the study situates the National Museum and, from 1951, the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions (CBWA) at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art as central institutions in building a coordinated national exhibition system. Concentrating on painting, sculpture, and graphic arts, it examines a deliberately broad range of formats—from major juried art shows to touring and mobile displays, foreign propaganda exhibitions, and public artworks. These projects are considered in relation to recurring themes of early communist propaganda, often tied to Soviet-inspired political and economic programs: postwar physical reconstruction, Marxist-Leninist education and literacy campaigns, and industrial development initiatives such as the Three-Year Plan (1947–1950) and the Six-Year Plan (1950–1955).
I argue that state-sponsored exhibitions in Stalinist Poland mediated two visions: an idealized, largely unrealized projection of socialist transformation, and the economic and political constraints of a war-torn country under consolidating totalitarian rule. A central concern of this study is the codification and display of Socialist Realism—a Soviet cultural doctrine requiring naturalistic form and socialist content imposed in Poland in 1949. Rather than a coherent aesthetic program, Socialist Realism is treated here as the most concentrated expression of a broader visual-pedagogical project aimed at affirming state authority, giving political doctrine tangible form, and shaping viewing habits. The dissertation traces three phases: (1) 1945–1948, when early and thematically diverse exhibitions of art and visual culture commemorated wartime destruction and promoted socialist reconstruction as a national duty; (2) 1949–1952, when contemporary Socialist Realist art was provisionally codified and enforced in Poland through centralized exhibition planning; and (3) 1953–1954, when public disengagement, stylistic repetition, and shifting official rhetoric exposed the limits of exhibitions in sustaining the cultural consensus the Polish totalitarian state sought to project. The concluding discussion of 1955–1956 examines how this state-directed exhibition model persisted in modified form, influencing the transition from Socialist Realism to the more pluralist tendencies of the post- Stalin era
To “Guess-timate” or G-Estimate: Understanding and Applying G-Estimation of Structural Nested Mean Models to Estimate Complex Treatment Effects in Public Health and Health Policy
No full textEstimating causal effects in the presence of time-varying treatments, confounders, and effect heterogeneity remains a central challenge across epidemiology, health policy, and economics. Structural nested mean models (SNMMs) provide a flexible and principled framework for addressing these challenges, yet they remain underutilized due to perceived complexity and limited intuitive guidance. This dissertation advances both the accessibility and the applied utility of SNMMs through an innovative tutorial and two substantive policy applications within difference-in-differences (DiD) frameworks.
Chapter 1 provides an accessible, intuition-driven introduction to g-estimation of SNMMs for applied researchers. Using a sequential multiple assignment randomized trial (SMART) for depression treatment as a motivating example, the chapter demystifies g-estimation by translating standard mathematical notation into plain language, introducing extensive visualizations beyond traditional directed acyclic graphs, and developing analogies to improve conceptual understanding. A fully worked example with code is presented to bridge theory and implementation.
Chapter 2 applies marginal SNMMs (mSNMMs) to estimate heterogeneous effects of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act on county-level uninsurance rates from 2008–2019. Effects are allowed to vary by expansion cohort, time since expansion, and time-varying county poverty. Identification relies on conditional parallel trends assumptions that may be more plausible compared to time-varying DiD assumptions. Medicaid expansion reduced uninsurance by 3–8 percentage points immediately following adoption, with effects growing to 7–10 percentage points five years post-expansion. Among early (2014) expansion states, effects were substantially larger in higher-poverty counties, a pattern that weakened in later cohorts. While marginal effects were broadly consistent with existing DiD estimators, only mSNMMs enabled joint estimation of cohort-, duration-, and poverty-specific heterogeneity.
Chapter 3 extends SNMMs to settings with continuous, repeated treatments, using state minimum wage increases from 2010–2018 as an illustrative example. SNMMs were estimated under time-varying conditional parallel trends assumptions using doubly robust estimating equations. Sustained effects of a 7.25–$12.50) and up to three years post-increase. Estimated effects on unemployment and food insecurity were consistently small and statistically insignificant. For poverty, small statistically significant increases were observed in states with the lowest minimum wages in the prior year, but these findings were not robust to modest parallel trends assumption violations in sensitivity analyses.
This dissertation makes dual contributions by advancing methodological accessibility through pedagogical innovation and demonstrating policy-relevant applications of G-estimation of SNMMs. Furthermore, G-estimation of SNMMs identified under parallel trends expands the toolkit for evaluating staggered policy adoption and repeated and continuous exposures with greater flexibility than existing methods. Future work should prioritize software development, interactive educational resources, and applications to emerging policy questions
A mixed methods approach to understanding factors contributing to the reduction of childhood sexual violence: A case study of Eswatini
No full textBased on the Violence Against Children and Youth Surveys (VACS), the prevalence of childhood sexual violence in Eswatini decreased from 33.4% in 2007 to 5.4% in 2022 among girls aged 13-24. However, there is limited understanding of the policies, programs, and changes in social values that may have contributed to this reduction and if the decrease in CSV was also associated with improvement in the mental health and sexual risk outcomes associated with CSV. This mixed-methods case study triangulated the analysis of the 2007 and 2022 VACS, a content analysis of national policy and programmatic documents, and key informant interviews with national stakeholders within a multiple streams framework. The aims of this research were 1) to describe the changes in CSV prevalence and associated outcomes of sexual health and suicidality and 2) to investigate factors that contributed to the reduction of CSV in Eswatini. Within the problem stream, the convergence of HIV, gender-based violence, and CSV agendas opened policy windows, with civil society actors as problem brokers and expanding national awareness of CSV. The work of civil society coupled with the 2017 qualitative study by the DPMO may have contributed to increased identification of familial perpetrators (33.4% vs. 14.4% in 2007; p\u3c .0001). Within the policy stream, the Sexual Offenses and Domestic Violence Act (2018) served as a legislative milestone strengthening justice responses and deterrence of sexual offenses. Complementary national reforms, including free primary education, life skills education, and One Stop Centers, provided the foundation of Eswatini’s child protection infrastructure. Following these policy and programming changes, shifts in higher educational attainment (≤primary education: 3.9% vs. 30.8% in 2007; p\u3c .0001), reduced orphanhood (29.5% vs. 40.9% in 2007; p=0.0041), reduction of early sexual debut (19.0% vs. 26.6% in 2007; p=0.0323) and reduced poly-victimization (28.8% vs. 66.0% in 2007; p\u3c .0001) were observed among CSV survivors. Within the politics stream, the country transitioned from fragmented service provision to a coordinated multi-sectoral national response led by the DPMO. Despite progress, female CSV survivors remained significantly more likely to report risky sexual behaviors (aOR: 2.9; p\u3c .0001) with suicidality increasing over time (aOR 1.7 in 2007 vs. 6.0 in 2022; p\u3c .0001; interaction p\u3c .0001) compared to girls that do not report CSV. This case demonstrates how aligning problem recognition, policy reform, and political leadership produced measurable national reductions in CSV, while highlighting the need for investment in survivor-centered mental health systems
The Rhetorical Agency of Student-Parents: Assembling, Archiving, and Naming Practices and Interpretations that Transform Worlds
No full textThis dissertation is an interdisciplinary project that uses interview data collected from six student-parents attending Bronx Community College during 2024 to 2025. Using rhetorical and critical discourse analysis, this dissertation argues student-parents enact their rhetorical agency to transform their college experience. Specifically, student-parents use their rhetorical agency to interpret time and place in a way that centers their own wellbeing as well as the wellbeing of their children. This dissertation focuses on interpretations and ordinary practices that reimagine what time and place can look and feel like on a college campus. Additionally, student-parents enact their rhetorical agency through ordinary practices to align their college experience with their own articulations of what it means to be a student and parent. Through their interpretations and ordinary practices, The Rhetorical Agency of Student-Parents: Assembling, Archiving and Naming Practices and Interpretations that Transforms Worlds argues student-parents expand our history of rhetorical traditions. This dissertation ultimately illustrates student-parents are an integral rhetorical population to study for a richer, more nuanced perspective of higher education
Distribution of Power in South Asia: Assessing Sino-Indian Conflict Propensity
No full textIn international relations, the distribution of power is a key theme impacting the propensity for nations to break into wars; however, the vast academic literature is Eurocentric with a concentration on the United States and the Soviet Union. This paper shifts to the unexplored distribution of power in South Asian with a particular focus of Sino-Indian border conflicts namely the Sino-Indian War (1962), the Nathu La and Cho La clashes (1967), the Arunachal Ambush (1975), Sumdorong Chu standoff (1987), the Armed Confrontation (2013), and the Doklam Standoff (2017), and the Galwan Valley (2020) to determine if the region was more peaceful in a unipolar, bipolar or a multipolar system. The data shows that unipolarity is intrinsically conflict-promoting since majority of the conflicts –1962, 1967, 1975, 2013, 2017, and 2020 transpired within a unipolar system than when they were in a bipolar system in 1987. Additional determinants of conflict causation such as the role of lesser power(s) compared to China and India (i.e. Pakistan), the effect of geographical territorial proximity between neighbors and types of rivalries were also explored. The paper concludes that a future Sino-Indian conflict is likely since the two states are strategic rivals connected to inextricable questions of national identity - China’s desire to control Tibet and India’s push for Hindu nationalism
Systems Epistemology
No full textThis dissertation develops a new kind of theory of knowledge, which I call Systems Epistemology (SE). Currently available theories tend to follow the TB+ format according to which knowledge is a true belief plus certain additional properties. Insofar as these theories offer a conceptual gap between the additional properties and truth, however, they are vulnerable to intuitive counterexamples. Building on work by Richard Foley and Stephen Hetherington, SE focuses not on a target belief and the properties it must have to count as knowledge, but rather on the beliefs that surround it and hold it in place. This shift in focus, further, makes SE immune to the usual counterexamples.
SE’s core claim is that S knows that p just in case S’s true belief that p is embedded in a system of true beliefs (STB). Though the claim appears facially similar to old TB+ theories, its structure is different in at least two key respects. First, the property of being embedded in an STB does not depend on characteristics of the target belief. It depends, instead, on features of its doxastic neighborhood, which must amount to an STB. Second, while this property is distinct from the target belief’s truth, it emerges from a truth requirement because, as long as beliefs are interconnected, their being true entails their systematic organization. SE thus offers no conceptual gap separating the additional property and truth. While more than true belief is needed for knowledge, the additional requirement depends squarely on truth—the truth of other beliefs.
The dissertation develops SE’s key terms and applies it to the regress problem. In the first chapter, I explain what an STB looks like and argue that the structure of an STB must match the structure of the system of facts it corresponds with. This goes against the widespread notion that the structure of knowledge is inferential. So I explain why, while inference links some beliefs to each other, it cannot underlie the structure that characterizes bodies of knowledge. In the second chapter, I show that embedment amounts to the kind of justification that exists in our heads regardless of whether the believer has been called on to justify a belief. I argue that taking justification as embedment is more explanatorily powerful than either foundationalism or coherentism. Its key advantages are that it rests on fit with truths, not merely with other beliefs, and that it attaches directly to individual beliefs within a system of beliefs. That is, it need not be transmitted from a foundation or from the system. Finally, chapter 3 applies SE to the regress problem. We endeavor to stop regress because we think that this stopping point is the source of justification for all of our beliefs. Embedment, however, does not have a source. It emerges, rather, when a set of beliefs amounts to an STB, and it attaches directly to the target belief without having to be transmitted from somewhere else. If justification does not have a source, as I argue, then it makes little sense to go looking for one. In other words, there is no need or incentive to stop regress
Advanced Experimental Learning and Behavior Analysis Lab Manual
No full textClassroom and online lab exercises for a learning and applied behavior analysis course