We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Pan-African Consciousness Raising and Organizing in the United States and Venezuela

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Pan-African Consciousness Raising and Organizing in the United States and Venezuela, draws on fifteen months of field research accompanying organizers, participating in protests, planning/strategy meetings, state-run programs, academic conferences and everyday life in these two countries. Through comparative examination of the processes by which African Diaspora youth become radically politicized, this work deconstructs tendencies to deify political s/heroes of eras past by historicizing their ascent to political acclaim and centering the narratives of present youth leading movements for Black/African liberation across the Diaspora. I employ Manuel Callahan’s description of “encuentros”, “the disruption of despotic democracy and related white middle-class hegemony through the reconstruction of the collective subject”; “dialogue, insurgent learning, and convivial research that allows for a collective analysis and vision to emerge while affirming local struggles” to theorize the moments of encounter, specifically, the moments (in which) Black/African youth find themselves becoming politically radicalized and by what. I examine the ways in which Black/African youth organizing differs when responding to their perpetual victimization by neoliberal, genocidal state-politics in the US, and a Venezuelan state that has charged itself with the responsibility of radically improving the quality of life of all its citizens. Through comparative analysis, I suggest the vertical structures of “representative democracy” dominating the U.S. political climate remain unyielding to critical analyses of social stratification based on race, gender, and class as articulated by Black youth. Conversely, I contend that present Venezuelan attempts to construct and fortify more horizontal structures of “popular democracy” under what Hugo Chavez termed 21st Century Socialism, have resulted in social fissures, allowing for a more dynamic and hopeful negation between Afro-Venezuelan youth and the state.

Investigating the Structure of FtsZ to Understand its Functional Role in Bacterial Cell Division

FtsZ, a bacterial tubulin homologue, is a cytoskeleton protein that plays key roles in cytokinesis of almost all prokaryotes. FtsZ assembles into protofilaments (pfs), one subunit thick, and these pfs assemble further to form a “Z ring” at the center of prokaryotic cells. The Z ring generates a constriction force on the inner membrane, and also serves as a scaffold to recruit cell-wall remodeling proteins for complete cell division in vivo. FtsZ can be subdivided into 3 main functional regions: globular domain, C terminal (Ct) linker, and Ct peptide. The globular domain binds GTP to assembles the pfs. The extreme Ct peptide binds membrane proteins to allow cytoplasmic FtsZ to function at the inner membrane. The Ct linker connects the globular domain and Ct peptide. In the present studies, we used genetic and structural approaches to investigate the function of Escherichia coli (E. coli) FtsZ. We sought to examine three questions: (1) Are lateral bonds between pfs essential for the Z ring? (2) Can we improve direct visualization of FtsZ in vivo by engineering an FtsZ-FP fusion that can function as the sole source of FtsZ for cell division? (3) Is the divergent Ct linker of FtsZ an intrinsically disordered peptide (IDP)?

One model of the Z ring proposes that pfs associate via lateral bonds to form ribbons; however, lateral bonds are still only hypothetical. To explore potential lateral bonding sites, we probed the surface of E. coli FtsZ by inserting either small peptides or whole FPs. Of the four lateral surfaces on FtsZ pfs, we obtained inserts on the front and back surfaces that were functional for cell division. We concluded that these faces are not sites of essential interactions. Inserts at two sites, G124 and R174 located on the left and right surfaces, completely blocked function, and were identified as possible sites for essential lateral interactions. Another goal was to find a location within FtsZ that supported fusion of FP reporter proteins, while allowing the FtsZ-FP to function as the sole source of FtsZ. We discovered one internal site, G55-Q56, where several different FPs could be inserted without impairing function. These FtsZ-FPs may provide advances for imaging Z-ring structure by super-resolution techniques.

The Ct linker is the most divergent region of FtsZ in both sequence and length. In E. coli FtsZ the Ct linker is 50 amino acids (aa), but for other FtsZ it can be as short as 37 aa or as long as 250 aa. The Ct linker has been hypothesized to be an IDP. In the present study, circular dichroism confirmed that isolated Ct linkers of E. coli (50 aa) and C. crescentus (175 aa) are IDPs. Limited trypsin proteolysis followed by mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) confirmed Ct linkers of E. coli (50 aa) and B. subtilis (47 aa) as IDPs even when still attached to the globular domain. In addition, we made chimeras, swapping the E. coli Ct linker for other peptides and proteins. Most chimeras allowed for normal cell division in E. coli, suggesting that IDPs with a length of 43 to 95 aa are tolerated, sequence has little importance, and electrostatic charge is unimportant. Several chimeras were purified to confirm the effect they had on pf assembly. We concluded that the Ct linker functions as a flexible tether allowing for force to be transferred from the FtsZ pf to the membrane to constrict the septum for division.

Globalizing the Sculptural Landscapes of the Sarapis and Isis Cults in Hellenistic and Roman Greece

“Globalizing the Sculptural Landscape of Isis and Sarapis Cults in Roman Greece,” asks questions of cross-cultural exchange and viewership of sculptural assemblages set up in sanctuaries to the Egyptian gods. Focusing on cognitive dissonance, cultural imagining, and manipulations of time and space, I theorize ancient globalization as a set of loosely related processes that shifted a community's connections with place. My case studies range from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, including sanctuaries at Rhodes, Thessaloniki, Dion, Marathon, Gortyna, and Delos. At these sites, devotees combined mainstream Greco-Roman sculptures, Egyptian imports, and locally produced imitations of Egyptian artifacts. In the last case, local sculptors represented Egyptian subjects with Greco-Roman naturalistic styles, creating an exoticized visual ideal that had both local and global resonance. My dissertation argues that the sculptural assemblages set up in Egyptian sanctuaries allowed each community to construct complex narratives about the nature of the Egyptian gods. Further, these images participated in a form of globalization that motivated local communities to adopt foreign gods and reinterpret them to suit local needs.

I begin my dissertation by examining how Isis and Sarapis were represented in Greece. My first chapter focuses on single statues of Egyptian gods, describing their iconographies and stylistic tendencies through examples from Corinth and Gortyna. By comparing Greek examples with images of Sarapis, Isis, and Harpokrates from around the Mediterranean, I demonstrate that Greek communities relied on globally available visual tropes rather than creating site or region-specific interpretations. In the next section, I examine what other sources viewers drew upon to inform their experiences of Egyptian sculpture. In Chapter 3, I survey the textual evidence for Isiac cult practice in Greece as a way to reconstruct devotees’ expectations of sculptures in sanctuary contexts. At the core of this analysis are Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, which offer a Greek perspective on the cult’s theology. These literary works rely on a tradition of aretalogical inscriptions—long hymns produced from roughly the late 4th century B.C.E. into the 4th century C.E. that describe the expansive syncretistic powers of Isis, Sarapis, and Harpokrates. This chapter argues that the textual evidence suggests that devotees may have expected their images to be especially miraculous and likely to intervene on their behalf, particularly when involved in ritual activity inside the sanctuary.

In the final two chapters, I consider sculptural programs and ritual activity in concert with sanctuary architecture. My fourth chapter focuses on sanctuaries where large amounts of sculpture were found in underground water crypts: Thessaloniki and Rhodes. These groups of statues can be connected to a particular sanctuary space, but their precise display contexts are not known. By reading these images together, I argue that local communities used these globally available images to construct new interpretations of these gods, ones that explored the complex intersections of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman identities in a globalized Mediterranean. My final chapter explores the Egyptian sanctuary at Marathon, a site where exceptional preservation allows us to study how viewers would have experienced images in architectural space. Using the Isiac visuality established in Chapter 3, I reconstruct the viewer's experience, arguing that the patron, Herodes Atticus, intended his viewer to inform his experience with the complex theology of Middle Platonism and prevailing elite attitudes about Roman imperialism.

Throughout my dissertation, I diverge from traditional approaches to culture change that center on the concepts of Romanization and identity. In order to access local experiences of globalization, I examine viewership on a micro-scale. I argue that viewers brought their concerns about culture change into dialogue with elements of cult, social status, art, and text to create new interpretations of Roman sculpture sensitive to the challenges of a highly connected Mediterranean world. In turn, these transcultural perspectives motivated Isiac devotees to create assemblages that combined elements from multiple cultures. These expansive attitudes also inspired Isiac devotees to commission exoticized images that brought together disparate cultures and styles in an eclectic manner that mirrored the haphazard way that travel brought change to the Mediterranean world. My dissertation thus offers a more theoretically rigorous way of modeling culture change in antiquity that recognizes local communities’ agency in producing their cultural landscapes, reconciling some of the problems of scale that have plagued earlier approaches to provincial Roman art.

These case studies demonstrate that cultural anxieties played a key role in how viewers experienced artistic imagery in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. This dissertation thus offers a new component in our understanding of ancient visuality, and, in turn, a better way to analyze how local communities dealt with the rise of connectivity and globalization.

The Effect of Prenatal Auditory Enrichment on Perceptual Narrowing in Bobwhite Quail Neonates

The development of species-typical perceptual preferences has been shown to depend on a variety of socially and ecologically derived sensory stimulation during both the pre- and postnatal periods. The prominent mechanism behind the development of these seemingly innate tendencies in young organisms has been hypothesized to be a domain-general pan-sensory selectivity process referred to as perceptual narrowing, whereby regularly experienced sensory stimuli are honed in upon, while simultaneously losing the ability to effectively discriminate between atypical or unfamiliar sensory stimulation. Previous work with precocial birds has been successful in preventing the development of species-typical perceptual preferences by denying the organism typical levels of social and/or self-produced stimulation. The current series of experiments explored the mechanism of perceptual narrowing to assess the malleability of a species-typical auditory preference in avian embryos. By providing a variety of different unimodal and bimodal presentations of a mixed-species vocalizations at the onset of prenatal auditory function, the following project aimed to 1) keep the perceptual window from narrowing, thereby interfering with the development of a species-typical auditory preference, 2) investigate how long differential prenatal stimulation can keep the perceptual window open postnatally, 3) explore how prenatal auditory enrichment effected preferences for novelty, and 4) assess whether prenatal auditory perceptual narrowing is affected by modality specific or amodal stimulus properties during early development. Results indicated that prenatal auditory enrichment significantly interferes with the emergence of a species-typical auditory preference and increases openness to novelty, at least temporarily. After accruing postnatal experience in an environment rich with species-typical auditory and multisensory cues, the effect of prenatal auditory enrichment rapidly was found to rapidly fade. Prenatal auditory enrichment with extraneous non-synchronous light exposure was shown to both keep the perceptual narrowing window open and impede learning in the postnatal environment, following hatching. Results are discussed in light of the role experience plays in perceptual narrowing during the perinatal period.

Mechanisms Governing the Eyewall Replacement Cycle in Numerical Simulations of Tropical Cyclones

Eyewall replacement cycle (ERC) is frequently observed during the evolution of intensifying Tropical Cyclones (TCs). Although intensely studied in recent years, the underlying mechanisms of ERC are still poorly understood, and the forecast of ERC remains a great challenge. To advance our understanding of ERC and provide insights in improvement of numerical forecast of ERC, a series of numerical simulations is performed to investigate ERCs in TC-like vortices on a f-plane. The simulated ERCs possess key features similar to those observed in real TCs including the formation of a secondary tangential wind maximum associated with the outer eyewall. The Sawyer-Eliassen equation and tangential momentum budget analyses are performed to diagnose the mechanisms underlying the secondary eyewall formation (SEF) and ERC. Our diagnoses reveal crucial roles of outer rainband heating in governing the formation and development of the secondary tangential wind maximum and demonstrate that the outer rainband convection must reach a critical strength relative to the eyewall before SEF and the subsequent ERC can occur. A positive feedback among low-level convection, acceleration of tangential winds in the boundary layer, and surface evaporation that leads to the development of ERC and a mechanism for the demise of inner eyewall that involves interaction between the transverse circulations induced by eyewall and outer rainband convection are proposed. The tangential momentum budget indicates that the net tendency of tangential wind is a small residual resultant from a large cancellation between tendencies induced by the resolved and sub-grid scale (SGS) processes. The large SGS contribution to the tangential wind budget explains different characteristics of ERC shown in previous numerical studies and poses a great challenge for a timely correct forecast of ERC. The sensitivity experiments show that ERCs are strongly subjected to model physics, vortex radial structure and background wind. The impact of model physics on ERC can be well understood with the interaction among eyewall/outer rainband heating, radilal inflow in the boundary layer, surface layer turbulent processes, and shallow convection in the moat. However, further investigations are needed to fully understand the exhibited sensitivities of ERC to vortex radial structure and background wind.

The Ontario-Manitoba Boundary Dispute

The powers of the General Government are so much greater than those of the United States in its relations with the Local Governments, that the central power must win. The next quarter century was marked by struggle, or rather a series of struggles, between the Dominion Government and those of the various provinces with as a general rule contrary to Macdonal's expectations, the latter proving successful. Ontario was the most consistent opponent of centralizing tendencies; her most notably victory was scored in what is known as the Ontario-Manitoba Boundary Dispute. It is out intention to deal with this question primarily as a phase of post-Confederation politics.

Individual differences and personality correlates of navigational performance in the virtual route learning task

Research on the mechanisms and processes underlying navigation has traditionally been limited by the practical problems of setting up and controlling navigation in a real-world setting. Thanks to advances in technology, a growing number of researchers are making use of computer-based virtual environments to draw inferences about real-world navigation. However, little research has been done on factors affecting human–computer interactions in navigation tasks. In this study female students completed a virtual route learning task and filled out a battery of questionnaires, which determined levels of computer experience, wayfinding anxiety, neuroticism, extraversion, psychoticism and immersive tendencies as well as their preference for a route or survey strategy. Scores on personality traits and individual differences were then correlated with the time taken to complete the navigation task, the length of path travelled,the velocity of the virtual walk and the number of errors. Navigation performance was significantly influenced by wayfinding anxiety, psychoticism, involvement and overall immersive tendencies and was improved in those participants who adopted a survey strategy. In other words, navigation in virtual environments is effected not only by navigational strategy, but also an individual’s personality, and other factors such as their level of experience with computers. An understanding of these differences is crucial before performance in virtual environments can be generalised to real-world navigational performance.

Renouncing the Single Image: Photography and the Realism of Abstraction

This essay addresses the issue of the relationship between abstraction and realism that it argues is at stake in the rejection of any primacy accorded to the single image, in favour of a sequencing of photographs according to certain, often novelistic and epic ideas of narrative form. Setting out from the opening text of Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, the article explores the competing tendencies towards what Georg Lukács termed ‘narration’ and ‘description’ as these are traced throughout Sekula's project (in part through a comparison with the contrasting works of Andreas Gursky). The essay concludes by suggesting the ways in which it is the irreducible actuality of abstraction within the concrete everydayness of capitalism's social world that means that all photographic ‘realism’ is intrinsically ‘haunted’ by a certain spectre of that ‘self-moving substance in the ‘shape of money’, as Marx calls it, or of the abstract form of capital itself.

Autonomy-Oriented Social Movements and the Politics of Affect

Abstract This dissertation explores damaging tendencies that exist within autonomy-oriented activism in the West. I examine how affect shapes the way that internal conflict is approached and internal strife is dealt with in radical communities. I adopt Sara Ahmed’s proposition “that our emotions are bound up with the securing of the social hierarchy” (Ahmed, 2004b: 4) and given that autonomy-oriented practices are committed to dismantling existing hierarchies, it follows that the less oppressive social configurations sought by autonomous social movements must have different emotional underpinnings. My thesis involves applying critical theory on affect and emotion in social movements to interview data gathered from activists both currently and historically involved in autonomy-oriented social movement communities in Kingston, Ontario. I ask whether anglophone, western-based, autonomy-oriented social movements reproduced understandings of affect/emotions/feelings that underwrite the social order they are working against? I also ask, “how are our emotions conditioned by capitalism?”. The research that I engage with provides responses to these questions by pointing out how the dominant discourse on emotions in the West encourages and informs certain modes of identity production that affect the diminishing and sad practices of autonomy-oriented communities and the (re)production of oppressive practices found in the dominant order. My work critically places this psychologizing view of emotions, and its damaging effects on resistance, within the context of neoliberal capitalism. I argue that the way we understand the politics of affect is an important dimension of radical struggle, and will inform and impact upon our individual and collective capacities to respond to, and refuse to reproduce relations of control and domination. I look for an understanding of “why” and to “what extent” these determinations exists, and look for hope in a politics of affect which supports an autonomy-oriented ethic.

The Narrative Value of Dance Communication: "habitus", musicality and emotion

The richness of dance comes from the need to work with an individual body. Still, the body of the dancer belongs to plural context, crossed by artistic and social traditions, which locate the artists in a given field. We claim that role conflict is an essential component of the structure of collective artistic creativity. We address the production of discourse in a British dance company, with data that spawns from the ethnography ‘Dance and Cognition’, directed by David Kirsh at the University of California, together with WayneMcGregor-Random Dance. Our Critical Discourse Analysis is based on multiple interviews to the dancers and choreographer. Our findings show how creativity in dance seems to be empirically observable, and thus embodied and distributed shaped by the dance habitus of the particular social context.

Warmer, deeper and greener mixed layers in the north Atlantic subpolar gyre over the last 50 years.

Shifts in global climate resonate in plankton dynamics, biogeochemical cycles, and marine food webs. We studied these linkages in the North Atlantic subpolar gyre (NASG), which hosts extensive phytoplankton blooms. We show that phytoplankton abundance increased since the 1960s in parallel to a deepening of the mixed layer and a strengthening of winds and heat losses from the ocean, as driven by the low frequency of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). In parallel to these bottom-up processes, the top-down control of phytoplankton by copepods decreased over the same time period in the western NASG, following sea surface temperature changes typical of the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO). While previous studies have hypothesized that climate-driven warming would facilitate seasonal stratification of surface waters and long-term phytoplankton increase in subpolar regions, here we show that deeper mixed layers in the NASG can be warmer and host a higher phytoplankton biomass. These results emphasize that different modes of climate variability regulate bottom-up (NAO control) and top-down (AMO control) forcing on phytoplankton at decadal timescales. As a consequence, different relationships between phytoplankton, zooplankton, and their physical environment appear subject to the disparate temporal scale of the observations (seasonal, interannual, or decadal). The prediction of phytoplankton response to climate change should be built upon what is learnt from observations at the longest timescales.

Warmer, deeper and greener mixed layers in the north Atlantic subpolar gyre over the last 50 years.

Shifts in global climate resonate in plankton dynamics, biogeochemical cycles, and marine food webs. We studied these linkages in the North Atlantic subpolar gyre (NASG), which hosts extensive phytoplankton blooms. We show that phytoplankton abundance increased since the 1960s in parallel to a deepening of the mixed layer and a strengthening of winds and heat losses from the ocean, as driven by the low frequency of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). In parallel to these bottom-up processes, the top-down control of phytoplankton by copepods decreased over the same time period in the western NASG, following sea surface temperature changes typical of the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO). While previous studies have hypothesized that climate-driven warming would facilitate seasonal stratification of surface waters and long-term phytoplankton increase in subpolar regions, here we show that deeper mixed layers in the NASG can be warmer and host a higher phytoplankton biomass. These results emphasize that different modes of climate variability regulate bottom-up (NAO control) and top-down (AMO control) forcing on phytoplankton at decadal timescales. As a consequence, different relationships between phytoplankton, zooplankton, and their physical environment appear subject to the disparate temporal scale of the observations (seasonal, interannual, or decadal). The prediction of phytoplankton response to climate change should be built upon what is learnt from observations at the longest timescales.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Global Security Strategy of the EU

The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) is one of the main security challenges facing the international community today. However the new Global Security Strategy of 2016 raises the question of non-proliferation of WMD only as an incidental matter, not addressing directly the threat, a fundamental threat in the regional and global security. This is a clear step backwards for the European common security.

A Novel Methodology to Characterize the Constitutive Behaviour of Polyethylene terephthalate for the Stretch Blow Moulding process

The stretch blow moulding (SBM) process is the main method for the mass production of PET containers. And understanding the constitutive behaviour of PET during this process is critical for designing the optimum product and process. However due to its nonlinear viscoelastic behaviour, the behaviour of PET is highly sensitive to its thermomechanical history making the task of modelling its constitutive behaviour complex. This means that the constitutive model will be useful only if it is known to be valid under the actual conditions of interest to the SBM process. The aim of this work was to develop a new material characterization method providing new data for the deformation behaviour of PET relevant to the SBM process. In order to achieve this goal, a reliable and robust characterization method was developed based on an instrumented stretch rod and a digital image correlation system to determine the stress-strain relationship of material in deforming preforms during free stretch-blow tests. The effect of preform temperature and air mass flow rate on the deformation behaviour of PET was also investigated.

The Big Crunch : A Mapping of the Swedish Party System from 1991 to 2010

Previous research claims that there has been a narrowing of distance between the Swedish political parties. Typically, such research into political distance has primarily focused on studying voters rather than the political parties themselves. In this article, the author conducts a longitudinal analysis of Comparative Manifesto Project data to determine if, and to what extent, the political parties have converged ideologically on a Left-Right continuum in the period 1991-2010. After first unraveling the concept of political distance, the author moves on to explain why the ideological dispersion of political parties is an important and consequential characteristic within party systems. Furthermore, the author argues that the Left-Right ideological scale continues to be a highly useful model with which to conceptualize and study this characteristic. The author then discusses the methodological approach and explains why quantitative manifesto data, often overlooked in favor of voter interview data, is deemed a valid and reliable material for measuring the ideological positions of political parties. The findings are that there indeed have been over all tendencies of ideological convergence between the blocs and that, in terms of how political parties are dispersed on a Left- Right ideological continuum, by 2010, the Swedish party system (the Sweden Democrats excluded) had become much less polarized than it had been in 1991.