GOSPEL SINGING IN THE VALLEY: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE HYMNODY AND CHORAL SINGING OF THE LISU ON THE CHINA-BURMA/MYANMAR BORDER

This dissertation is an ethnomusicological study of contemporary musical practices of the Christian Lisu in Nujiang Prefecture in northwest Yunnan on the China-Myanmar border. Among all the changes that the Nujiang Lisu have experienced since the twentieth century, the spread of Protestant Christianity throughout Nujiang’s mountainous villages has existed for the longest time and had one of the greatest effects. Combining historical investigation and ethnographic description, this study uses the lens of music to examine the impact of this social change on the Lisu living in this impoverished frontier region. The Lisu characteristics have never been vital in the music written by the Christian Lisu in Nujiang. Compared with the practices described in other ethnomusicological writings on Christian music around the world that I have read, this absence of incorporation of indigenous musical elements is unusual. There are probably many other cases similar to that of the Lisu, but few ethnomusicologists have paid attention to them. I aim to elucidate this particular scenario of Lisu Christian music in relation to three social and cultural forces: the missionary legacy of conventions; the government’s identification of the Lisu as a minority nationality and its national policies toward them since the 1950s; and the transnational religious exchange between the Christian Lisu in China and Myanmar since the late 1980s. My examination focuses on two genres which the Lisu use to express their Christian beliefs today: ddoqmuq mutgguat, derived from American northern urban gospel songs, the basis of the Lisu choral singing; and mutgguat ssat, influenced by the Christian pop of the Burmese Lisu, with instrumental accompaniment and daibbit dance and preferred by the young people. Besides studying these two genres in the religious context, I also juxtapose them with other musical traditions in the overall Nujiang music soundscape and look at their role in local social interactions such as those between sacred and secular, and majority and minority. This dissertation demonstrates that the collective performances of shared repertoires have not only created a sense of affinity for the Nujiang Christian Lisu but also have reinforced the formation of Lisu transnational religious networks.

CREATING ORGANIZATIONAL CITIZENS: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL AND QUALITATIVE EXAMINATION OF SUPERVSIOR- AND PEER-BASED INTERVENTIONS

Research suggests that supervisors and peers can help employees make sense of what is important or expected from them at work and, thereby, shape their behaviors. In this dissertation, I examine how employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB), such as helping and voice, are differentially affected by these two sources of influence over time. In particular, I compare the relative and joint effectiveness of two field interventions to enhance OCB: (a) a role clarification intervention in which supervisors are trained to set expectations for OCB for their employees and encourage them to engage in OCB and (b) a norm establishment intervention in which peers are trained to set expectations for each other and encourage each other to perform OCB. I utilize a mixed methods approach involving a quasi-field experiment to test for changes in OCB and qualitative data to explore the theoretical mechanisms over the course of three months in a large food processing plant. I find that role clarification interventions alone have immediate positive effects on OCB, whereas norm establishment interventions alone take a longer period of time to increase OCB. In addition, in the condition where both interventions were combined, norm establishment interventions weaken the effects of role clarification earlier on; however, at later stages in time, this pattern reverses as norm establishment enhances the effects of role clarification on OCB. Through these findings, I highlight how (a) organizations seeking quick increases in citizenship might be better off focusing on supervisors as sources of influence; (b) organizations need to persist with peer-focused interventions to see positive gains; and (c) despite initial hurdles with peer-focused interventions, over time, they can lead to the highest increases in OCB when combined with supervisor-focused interventions.

Quantitative Derivation of Effective Evolution Equations for the Dynamics of Bose-Einstein Condensates

This thesis proves certain results concerning an important question in non-equilibrium quantum statistical mechanics which is the derivation of effective evolution equations approximating the dynamics of a system of large number of bosons initially at equilibrium (ground state at very low temperatures). The dynamics of such systems are governed by the time-dependent linear many-body Schroedinger equation from which it is typically difficult to extract useful information due to the number of particles being large. We will study quantitatively (i.e. with explicit bounds on the error) how a suitable one particle non-linear Schroedinger equation arises in the mean field limit as number of particles N → ∞ and how the appropriate corrections to the mean field will provide better approximations of the exact dynamics. In the first part of this thesis we consider the evolution of N bosons, where N is large, with two-body interactions of the form N³ᵝv(Nᵝ⋅), 0≤β≤1. The parameter β measures the strength and the range of interactions. We compare the exact evolution with an approximation which considers the evolution of a mean field coupled with an appropriate description of pair excitations, see [18,19] by Grillakis-Machedon-Margetis. We extend the results for 0 ≤ β < 1/3 in [19, 20] to the case of β < 1/2 and obtain an error bound of the form p(t)/Nᵅ, where α>0 and p(t) is a polynomial, which implies a specific rate of convergence as N → ∞. In the second part, utilizing estimates of the type discussed in the first part, we compare the exact evolution with the mean field approximation in the sense of marginals. We prove that the exact evolution is close to the approximate in trace norm for times of the order o(1)√N compared to log(o(1)N) as obtained in Chen-Lee-Schlein [6] for the Hartree evolution. Estimates of similar type are obtained for stronger interactions as well.

Intersections of Gay and Bisexual Identity with Fatness

This thesis examines the intersections of gay and bisexual identity with body size, or fatness. Gay and bisexual identity and fatness are marginalized social identities that seem to be incompatible (Bond, 2013). While a sense of collective identity with the gay and bisexual community has been shown to be a protective factor against internalized homonegativity in gay and bisexual men (Halpin & Allen, 2004), the degree to which this protective factor persists for fat people in an anti-fat environment like the gay and bisexual community (Wrench & Knapp, 2008) has not been explored. This intersection of identities and anti-fat culture seemed to suggest there might be a relationship between fatness and internalized homophobia. Fatness did not moderate the relationship between sense of belonging to the gay and bisexual community and internalized homonegativity, but a significant positive relationship was found between belongingness to the gay and bisexual community and body shame.