29 research outputs found
Taking back the streets: women, youth, and direct democracy
No full textToward the end of the twentieth century in places ranging from Latin America and the Caribbean to Europe, the United States, South Africa, Nigeria, Iran, Japan, China, and South Asia, women and young people took to the streets to fight injustices they believed they could not confront in any other way. In the hope of changing the way politics is done, they called officials to account for atrocities they had committed and unjust laws they had upheld. They attempted to drive authoritarian governments from power by publicizing the activities these officials tried to hide. This powerful book takes us into the midst of these movements to give us a close-up look at how a new generation bore witness to human rights violations, resisted the efforts of regimes to shame and silence young idealists, and created a vibrant public life that remains a vital part of ongoing struggles for democracy and justice today. Through personal interviews, newspaper accounts, family letters, and research in the archives of human rights groups, this book portrays women and young people from Argentina, Chile, and Spain as emblematic of others around the world in their public appeals for direct democracy. An activist herself, author Temma Kaplan gives readers a deep and immediate sense of the sacrifices and accomplishments, the suffering and the power of these uncommon common people. By showing that mobilizations, sometimes accompanied by shaming rituals, were more than episodic - more than ways for societies to protect themselves against government abuses and even state terrorism - her book envisions a creative political sphere, a fifth estate in which ordinary citizens can reorient the political practices of democracy in our time
Right for the Right Reason: Evidence Extraction for Trustworthy Tabular Reasoning
No full textThis repository contains resources developed for the paper: Gupta, V., Zhang, S., Vempala, A., He, Y., Choji, T., Srikumar V., Right for the Right Reason: Evidence Extraction for Trustworthy Tabular Reasoning. In: Proceeding of the The Association of Computational Linguistic 2022 (ACL ’22), May 2022".
It includes the relevant rows marking for the train set of the InfoTabS dataset (https://infotabs.github.io/) Gupta et. al. 2020 [1].
We followed the protocol of Gupta et al. (2022) [2] which annotated the development and test sets (alpha1, alpha2, alpha3) sets: one table and three distinct hypotheses formed a HIT. We divide the tasks equally into 110 batches, each batch having 51 HITs each having three examples. In total, we collected 81,282 annotations from 90 distinct annotators.
Overall, twenty five annotators completed over 1000 tasks, corresponding to 87.75 % of the examples, indicating a tail distribution with the annotations. Overall, 16,248 training set table-hypothesis pairs were successfully labeled with the evidence rows. On average, we obtain 89.49% F1-score with equal precision and recall for annotation agreement when compared with majority vote. It also includes an annotation template used on the mTurk platform for crowdsourcing. The cited datasets were used in this work. The cited datasets were used in this work.
Files to access the annotation follow the below structure:
annotation_batches
batches_test: contain final results “.csv” files for all the development and test set batches (taken from Gupta et. al. 2022)
batches_train: contain our annotated results “.csv” files for all the train set batches
README.md: contain the readme for the annotation batches details
main_template_row_relevant.html: content the annotation template used for each HIT i.e. marking the relevant row for each instance
annotation_stats.md: Have details of the annotation statistics
release_mturk: contain the release batches details i.e. csv for corresponding batches released
Files to recreate the annotation statistics and pre-processed data:
results_test: contain the pre-processed batch csv for dev and test set each batch. In the dev and test set. The integrated one computes the agreement stats for all the batches.(taken from Gupta et. al. 2022)
results_train: similar to resutls_train expect contain the pre-processed batch csv for train set.
scripts: contain the scripts needed to create the csv in the results_test and results_train sets. The script title denotes the function (the statistic it computes) for the scripts.
src: the scripts use these python files to create the relevant statistics.
References:
[1] InfoTabS: Inference on Tables as Semi-structured Data, Vivek Gupta, Maitrey Mehta, Pegah Nokhiz, Vivek Srikumar, ACL 2020
[2] Is My Model Using The Right Evidence? Systematic Probes for Examining Evidence-Based Tabular Reasoning, Vivek Gupta, Riyaz A. Bhat, Atreya Ghosal, Manish Srivastava, Maneesh Singh, Vivek Srikumar, TACL 2022, presented at ACL 202
ULTRA: Unleash LLMs' Potential for Event Argument Extraction through Hierarchical Modeling and Pair-wise Refinement
No full textStructural extraction of events within discourse is critical since it avails
a deeper understanding of communication patterns and behavior trends. Event
argument extraction (EAE), at the core of event-centric understanding, is the
task of identifying role-specific text spans (i.e., arguments) for a given
event. Document-level EAE (DocEAE) focuses on arguments that are scattered
across an entire document. In this work, we explore the capabilities of open
source Large Language Models (LLMs), i.e., Flan-UL2, for the DocEAE task. To
this end, we propose ULTRA, a hierarchical framework that extracts event
arguments more cost-effectively -- the method needs as few as 50 annotations
and doesn't require hitting costly API endpoints. Further, it alleviates the
positional bias issue intrinsic to LLMs. ULTRA first sequentially reads text
chunks of a document to generate a candidate argument set, upon which ULTRA
learns to drop non-pertinent candidates through self-refinement. We further
introduce LEAFER to address the challenge LLMs face in locating the exact
boundary of an argument span. ULTRA outperforms strong baselines, which include
strong supervised models and ChatGPT, by 9.8% when evaluated by the exact match
(EM) metric
Women, Gender, and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain
No full textThis edited collection, a tribute to the late noted eighteenth-century scholar Betty Rizzo, testifies to her influence as a researcher, writer, teacher, and mentor. The essays, written by a range of established and younger eighteenth-century specialists, expand on the themes important to Rizzo: the importance of the archive, the contributions of women writers to the canon of eighteenth-century literature and to an emerging print culture, the sometimes fraught relations within the eighteenth-century family, the relationship between life and literature, and, finally, the role of female companionship in women’s lives. Divided into three sections, “Living in the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” “Living in the Eighteenth-Century World,” and “Afterlives,” the fourteen essays that form the body of the collection treat such topics as epistolarity, fraternal relations in novels and in families, women and travel in Jane Austen’s novels, the pleasures and challenges of searching through archives to understand the complex entanglements of eighteenth-century families, the changing reception of Alexander Pope’s poetry, and intersections among race, class, gender, and sexuality in a famous early-nineteenth-century Scottish libel case. The final essay of the fourteen connects the archetypal eighteenth-century figure of the seduced and abandoned woman to Sophie Calle’s 2007 Venice Biennale exhibition entitled Take Care of Yourself, which the author reads as a direct descendant of the eighteenth-century letter novel. The book is framed by an introduction that situates the book as part of the ongoing redefinition of the archive of eighteenth-century literature and an afterword that gives a personal account of Rizzo’s career and her indelible legacy as friend, mentor, and professional model. The contributors use a variety of methods in their scholarship, but a common strand is archival research and close reading inflected by feminist analysis. The contributors to the volume practice the kind of scholarship Rizzo was known for—painstaking archival research and attention to the nuances of relationships among eighteenth-century women (and men)—and in so doing shed new light on a number of familiar and not-so-familiar eighteenth-century texts.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1013/thumbnail.jp
In the crevices of global capitalism: rural queer community formation
No full text“In the Crevices of Global Capitalism: Rural Queer Community Formation” is an interdisciplinary study of a cluster of intentional communities in Tennessee, referred to by residents as the “Gayborhood.” It asks what factors influence rural community-building, and how queer rurality is linked to larger historical, economic, and political patterns. As an interdisciplinary project, the dissertation draws on multiple methods, primarily ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, oral history, and media analysis. The project studies the Gayborhood not just from an LGBT history view, but more crucially from the perspective of the history of the land on which it is located. It argues that the creation of a queer community in rural Tennessee is predicated on several waves of displacement of other groups from the land, through an ongoing process of settler colonialism and capitalist exploitation. The dissertation makes four main interventions in the field of Queer Studies: First, it provides a reading of the concept of “labor of belonging.” The Gayborhood is created through constant labor, which is for the most part unremunerated, and not always acknowledged. This labor creates a multifaceted belonging: people belonging to a community, land belonging to people, and people belonging to the land. Second, the dissertation presents a theory of materiality and excess. The Gayborhood is in several ways built on waste: the utilizing of literal trash in building, discarded food in cooking, and also being located in a metaphorical post-industrial wasteland. Third, the project places rural queer intentional communities within the landscape of settler colonialism. The dissertation shows how the claiming of land by queer groups is predicated on the naturalization of white US citizenship, and the erasure of histories and presents of Native presence on the land. Fourth, the dissertation uses the concept of fermentation as metaphor and method. It poses that the process of fermentation, whereby microorganisms interact with feedstock materials in a process that combines decomposition and creation, can be used to explain how locations such as the Gayborhood become possible, and how they change.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Stina Soderlin
Black internationalism and African and Caribbean intellectuals in London, 1919-1950
No full textDuring the three decades between the end of World War I and 1950, African and West Indian scholars, professionals, university students, artists, and political activists in London forged new conceptions of community, reshaped public debates about the nature and goals of British colonialism, and prepared the way for a revolutionary and self-consciously modern African culture. Black intellectuals formed organizations that became homes away from home and centers of cultural mixture and intellectual debate, and launched publications that served as new means of voicing social commentary and political dissent. These black associations developed within an atmosphere characterized by a variety of internationalisms, including pan-ethnic movements, feminism, communism, and the socialist internationalism ascendant within the British Left after World War I. The intellectual and political context of London and the types of sociability that these groups fostered gave rise to a range of black internationalist activity and new regional imaginaries in the form of a West Indian Federation and a United West Africa that shaped the goals of anticolonialism before 1950. This dissertation examines the black organizations and other social spaces that brought people of African descent together in London to illustrate how the city functioned, at once, as imperial metropolis and global city, as the administrative center of the British Empire and the nexus of black resistance to racism and imperialism.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 471-480)
Polish feminism between East and West: the formation of the Polish women’s movement identity
No full textBy focusing on the unique forces that shape women’s movements in the post-communist context, this dissertation asks if the established geopolitical and theoretical frameworks, based on dichotomies between East and West, South and North can be utilized outside these locations. Or is a new framework necessary to fully understand the specific processes that are at work in the ambiguous “Second” World location? Chapter One, traces the individual and collective trajectories of Polish women’s movement to the 19th century anti-partition mobilizations, the Second World War, the 1968 students’ liberation movement, the “Solidarity” labor union, and the 1990s Polish debate on abortion. Chapter Two identifies two elements as crucial for the unique development of transnational activism in the context of CEE: 1) its trajectory (“late” arrival into the international feminist space) and 2) the domination and critique of the EU “gender mainstreaming” paradigm within gender social justice discourses. Chapter Three recognizes the 1990s “abortion debate” became in impulse for the feminisms to move beyond the borders of the conservative nation state and bring the question of women’s sexual rights into the supranational political spaces and became a momentum for the emergence of versatile, vibrant mobilizations for gender and sexual justice in Poland and (e.g. European Court of Justice decision in the case of Alicja Tysiac against the Polish state). Chapter Four argues that secularism that had become, a necessary feminist response to violent and oppressive discourses that act to restrict women’s sexualities and rights, has also hindered feminist connectivity with religious women. In Poland a purification of the sexuality, emergence of the “political Catholicism” and “secular feminism” produced the subaltern, traveling identities of Catholic feminists. Chapter Five examines re-appropriation of the Anti-Semitic language of civic strangeness, historically represented by Polish Jews to the experience of sexual minorities. In conclusion this dissertation delineates two factors as decisive for current positionality of the “Second” world in the transnational feminist theory and practice: the rejection of Marxism as representing the colonial practices from the East (Russia, Soviet Union), the priotization of the supranational engagements with the European Union and Western Europe rather then Third World.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 293-309)by Magdalena Grabowsk
Cold War capital: contested urbanity in West Berlin, 1963-1989
No full textThis dissertation explores the relationship between urban space, protest, and identity in West Berlin by investigating the politics of urban renewal in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. In 1963, the West Berlin government announced a comprehensive program of urban renewal, which entailed the clearance of the nineteenth-century housing stock, its replacement with modern apartments, and a clear separation of urban functions. As was the case across West Germany and in West Berlin, modernist urban planning emerged in the late 1950s as a potent spatial expression and political tool of postwar capitalism and democracy. Given its status as a divided city, Berlin more than any other German city became a key site in postwar developments and discourses of modernization, urbanism, capitalism, and democracy. By the early 1970s, plans to transform and rehabilitate Berlin’s urban environment became inextricably linked to broader West German fears and anxieties about “foreignness,” the urban poor, and political radicalism. In this context, the cultural and political importance of Kreuzberg as a locus of West German anxieties cannot be underestimated. In the same period, vocal opposition and protest against the city’s renewal plans took shape revealing the interplay between the urban environment and the possibilities of political action in postwar German history. This study sets out to investigate the historical counter-narratives beneath the iconic image of West Berlin as the symbolic capital of the “free world.” I argue against customary representations of left-alternative protest in 1970s and 80s West Berlin as the work of a radical group of self-indulgent squatters, punks, eco-freaks, and dropouts, and offer a different reading of these ‘anti-establishment’ actors. My research demonstrates that this brand of urban radicalism of 1980s West Berlin had its roots in long-standing, broad-based political and cultural struggle with parallels in other Western European cities, all of which were attempts to redefine urban spaces from below.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Carla Elizabeth MacDougal
Sharing a laugh: sitcoms and the production of post-imperial Britain, 1945-1980
No full textSharing a Laugh examines the social and cultural roles of television situation comedy in Britain between 1945 and 1980. It argues that an exploration of sitcoms reveals the mindset of postwar Britons and highlights how television developed both as an industry and as a public institution. This research demonstrates how Britain metamorphosed in this period from a welfare state with an implicit promise to establish a meritocratic and expert-based society, into a multiracial, consumer society ruled by the market. It illustrates how this turnabout of British society was formulated, debated, and shaped in British sitcoms. This dissertation argues that both democratization (resulting from the expansion of the franchise after World War I) and decolonization in the post-World War II era, established culture as a prominent political space in which interaction and interconnection between state and society took place. Therefore, this work focuses on culture and on previously less noticed parties to the negotiation over power in society such as, media institutions, media practitioners, and their audiences. It demonstrates how British sitcom writers turned a form which was seen as frivolous entertainment into an inquiry that questioned the most fundamental structures of their society. Sitcoms thus addressed and engaged with the critical issues of British life: postwar consumer aspirations and shortage of housing, fears of Americanization, racism and the end of empire. Sitcoms’ incredible outreach extended these debates across the nation, and enabled a conversation that took place in the privacy of the home to resonant in the public sphere. The dissertation looks both at institutions and at trailblazing individuals who shaped the genre. It considers the role of audiences and of technological innovation in turning a staple of broadcasting into a site of public debate, education, and memory. It maintains that vintage sitcoms still shape contemporary audiences, and their understanding of the past through sitcoms’ repeated transmission on television, their availability on DVD, and via services such as YouTube.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Tal Zalmanovic
Among abnormals: the queer sexual politics of Germany's Weimar Republic, 1918-1933
No full textThis is a study of the politics of non-normative sexualities under the Weimar Republic, Germany's first parliamentary democracy, which was founded in the aftermath of World War I and toppled by the Nazis. In chapters analyzing political struggles over media with sexual content, eugenic sterilization, women's sex work, venereal disease, men's sex work, and male homosexuality, I argue that progressive reforms of laws on non-normative sexualities during the Weimar period went hand in hand with increasing state interference in the lives of a small group of sexual outsiders. Reforms such as the 1927 deregulation of women's sex work and the 1929 vote in a Reichstag committee to repeal Paragraph 175, Germany's law against male homosexual sex, are not simply evidence of an increasingly tolerant attitude toward non-normative sexualities, they are evidence of a shift in how Germans, particularly progressives, expected the state to manage sexualities. I analyze the role played in this shift in forms of state management of sexualities by ideas of the biological origins of sexualities (from eugenics to sexology), by related concepts of ability and disability, by discourses of race, class and gender, and by activists for homosexual emancipation.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 270-286)
