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The self-conscious kings: agency and the representation of power on the figural relief sarcophagi from the Aya'a Necropolis, Sidon
(2024) Acquisto, Kiernan; Martin, S. Rebecca
In this dissertation, I focus on four architectonic sarcophagi with Greek-style figural reliefs found in the Aya’a or Royal Necropolis of the Phoenician city of Sidon. These objects are collectively referred to in scholarly literature as “the Sidonian relief sarcophagi” and include the Satrap Sarcophagus (ca. 390 BCE), the Lycian Sarcophagus (ca. 380-370 BCE), the Mourning Women Sarcophagus (ca. 360-350 BCE), and the Alexander Sarcophagus (ca. 310 BCE). The sarcophagi are counted among the most celebrated examples of classical sculpture due to their preservation and technical virtuosity. Scholars have, however, infrequently discussed them in the context of Near Eastern art and Phoenician mortuary practice in the Persian period (539-332 BCE). In neglecting to do this, scholars have failed to adequately consider why the sarcophagi were made in the first place, stripping the objects of their fundamental Phoenicianness. The central premise of this project is that the Sidonian relief sarcophagi are the product of a series of strategic artistic choices made by their patrons, generally assumed to be Sidonian kings, and that these choices are mediated by the social worlds in which these kings operated. While all of the four sarcophagi differ in their particulars, they are deliberately linked by their shared stylistic and iconographic features, indicating conscious affinity across the reigns of several kings in a period that spans nearly a century. The first chapter is an account of the excavation of the relief sarcophagi and discussion of the ways in which their display and early interpretation have had a lasting impact on our understanding of these objects. The second chapter is a detailed analysis of the archaeological context of the sarcophagi, highlighting their use in Phoenician mortuary ritual. In the third chapter, I situate the relief sarcophagi within the broader history of sarcophagus use in Sidon and explore the narrative and rhetorical potential of figural relief. The fourth chapter is a discussion of the ways in which the visual rhetoric of the relief sarcophagi signals participation in communities of rulers in the western Achaemenid Empire, while the fifth chapter situates the relief sarcophagi in the Sidonian religio-political context. The text closes on a discussion of the Alexander Sarcophagus as evidence for continuity rather than rupture in early Hellenistic Sidon. By establishing the sarcophagi within their broader context in the ways mentioned above, I will provide a deeper, more accurate understanding of the visual rhetoric of these important objects. I argue that the imagery on the relief sarcophagi is intended to reinforce a shared identity: that of a male ruler participating in the interconnected world of the Persian period. However, the form and context of the sarcophagi also honors local tradition and conceptions of kingship. In this project I therefore consider the Sidonian relief sarcophagi as multivalent political objects, focusing on the ways in which the Sidonian kings used the form, style, and iconography of their sarcophagi to articulate their power in both the imperial and Phoenician milieux.
Identity & belonging: voices in Texas Latine political salience
(2024) Arellano, Michael; Greenfeld, Liah
This thesis explores the relationship between cultural and political identities among Latine voters in Texas, examining the degrees to which these dual identities may influence issue salience. Rooted in existentialist thought and drawing from both historical and contemporary life perspectives, this research offers a comprehensive analysis of what it means to be Latine in Texas, examining cultural identity as both a form of expression and a mode of political engagement. I conducted a two-part survey among Texas' Latine voters offered in English and Spanish. The first part collected demographic data and inquired respondents' affinity to their Latine identity and its influence on their politics. The second part, guided by UnidosUS findings, asked respondents to prioritize top issues personally and for their community. Respondents were also given free response opportunities to elaborate on their responses.Results reveal varying degrees of affinity to Latine identity among respondents and its significant influence on their political beliefs and priorities. The findings highlight that while some issues like immigration and healthcare are consistently seen as priorities, the degree of their importance varies greatly among individuals, often influenced by personal experiences and communal ties. My findings confront homogenous perceptions of Latine voters, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging and understanding the diversity within this demographic.
Moreover, my thesis contributes to political science by providing an in-depth analysis of factors influencing the political salience of Latine voters in Texas, emphasizing the importance of both personal and communal narratives.
As a first-generation Latine, this research fostered personal and professional growth, deepening my understanding of my own relationship to my identity and cultural community.
Climate skepticism: from anti-environmentalism to #climatecult
(2024) Balch, John Connor; Wildman, Wesley
This dissertation presents an analysis of the roles of scientific and religious discourse in the polarization of the American public sphere around environmentalism and anthropogenic climate change. Commentators frequently attribute division over climate issues to elite corporate and political actors who influence the public perception of science, either through actively promoting skepticism towards climate science, or through linking climate science with a pro-ecological spirituality. I supplement this broader framing with analysis of the affective dynamics that motivate the acceptance of climate skepticism. In this dissertation, I argue that climate skepticism can be understood in terms of its underlying cosmological frameworks, which have powerful affective dimensions. Drawing together religious studies perspectives with computational social science methods, I map the discursive networks of climate skepticism in both popular and elite contexts. First, I draw on historical scholarship and reading of popular texts to construct a genealogy of conservative anti-environmentalism, which coalesced around a defense of anthropocentric and pro-carbon free-market neoliberalism. I contend that anti-environmentalism frequently deployed religious tropes by framing environmental science as a covert propagation of an illegitimate nature religion. This set the stage for a polarization of climate change in the subsequent decades. By adopting a conspiratorial framework, however, anti-environmentalists launched an escalating process of suspicion towards scientific authority. This culminated in the furor over the so-called “Climategate” scandal in 2009, which I contextualize with scholarship on the affective and cognitive dynamics in the adoption of conspiratorial beliefs.
I then utilize word-embedding models to analyze a textual corpus compiled from key agents in the climate skeptical public: conservative think tanks online publications, cable news media transcripts, and climate skeptical blog posts and comment sections. I find that climate skeptical blogs represent a discursive shift in climate skepticism away from conventional anti-environmentalist ideology into a more general conspiratorial worldview. I then utilize network analysis to demonstrate the propagation of climate skepticism by users on the social media platform Twitter from 2008-2020. This dataset indicates that expressing climate skepticism on social media can be understood as a ritualized form of performative belief that mobilizes a conspiratorial counter-public in response to climate events.
Girl gang: Black girlhood in France represented through contemporary film and literature
(2024) Bailey, Tiffany; Cazenave, Odile
This dissertation locates Black girlhood experiences in contemporary French film and literature to pursue the question of whether there is a universal experience of Black girlhood in France. The purpose of this work is to highlight Black girls and women, to consider Black girlhood in France with special regard for Black girls’ intersectional identities, and to recognize the complexities of Black girlhood. The field of Black girlhood studies is strong in the United States and focuses on Black American girls. I intend to use a Black feminist approach to help strengthen this field with the study of Black French girls and their experiences in France. The first chapter is an introductory chapter that explores Blackness and girlhood and how their intersection creates a unique identity and experience for Black girls. This chapter also investigates what it is like to be Black in France through non-fiction work such as Isabelle Boni-Claverie’s documentary, Trop noire pour être française?, and Rokhaya Diallo’s book, À nous la France!, as well as fictional works of film and literature representing Black French girls’ experience as they navigate their Black identity and the education system. Chapter two focuses on friendship in the films Bande de filles (2014), directed by Céline Sciamma, and Mignonnes (2020), directed by Maïmouna Doucouré, and how the main characters use the confidence they find through female relationships to discover their independence and individual identities. Chapter three analyzes how Black girls use dance to perform their different identities and desires. In addition to the two former films, this chapter includes the 1823 novella, Ourika, by Claire de Duras, and the 2022 film, Neneh Superstar, directed by Ramzi Ben Sliman as evidence. The fourth chapter addresses Black girls’ exploration of sex and sexuality and their experiences with abuse, purity culture, and sexualization of the body. Focusing on Bande de filles, Mignonnes, and the 2009 novel, Le Roman de Pauline, by Calixthe Beyala, this chapter considers psychological trauma as a result of sexual and emotional abuse.While there is not a definitive universal experience of Black girlhood in France, my conclusions show that there are many recurring aspects that Black girls face, particularly the hostility of the education system towards Black girls as they are measured on a standard of whiteness but are not allowed the same expectation of childhood innocence that white children are afforded. When these institutions fail them, Black girls find support and community through female friendships. Dance is a common way that girls connect with each other and express their youthful energy. More than just fun and games, Black girls dance to perform who they want to be and to express how they want to be perceived. Black girls’ experiences with sex and sexuality vary and range from exploratory to traumatic. In addition to a societal and familial expectation of purity, Black girls also deal with the added weight of Black women being stereotyped as hypersexual and so being seen as irrevocably sexual despite their young age.
This dissertation brings together multiple representations of Black girlhood in France to identify and evaluate the Black French girl identity, highlight their coming of age, center their experiences, and aim for positive representation for Black girls.
Situating selves: ‘self-illness’ (nafsānī bali) and living ethical ‘modern’ lives in Contemporary Male’, Maldives
(2024) Ahmed, Fathimath Anan; Shohet, Merav
In the Indian Oceanic South Asian nation of Maldives, nafsānī bali (lit. ‘self illness’) has long been a cultural category of (ill) personhood among Sunni-Maldivians. Various modernization projects that have been underway since the nation’s democratization in 2008 offer new frameworks through which Sunni-Maldivian persons today interpret this category of experience. Drawing on 22 cumulative months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Greater Male’ Region of the Maldives, this study asks: How do Sunni-Maldivians experiencing self-illness and their kin construct themselves as ethical ‘modern’ persons in this contemporary moment? Each of the chapters explore a significant intersection of the various public discourses of ‘modernity’—such as reformist Sunni-Islam, biopsychiatry, humanitarian mental health, and liberal feminism—and how these discourses offer new ways to conceptualize inner processes, such as emotion and sense of moral self. Significantly, the experience-near narrative approach employed throughout the ethnography highlights how people transform discourses just as they are being transformed by them. Through detailed narrative analysis of data gathered from discursive-centered and person-centered ethnographic methods, this ethnography illuminates (1) how long-existing idioms of distress can transform during periods of rapid social change; (2) how individual subjectivities are intimately entangled with these broader processes of social change; and (3) how situating selves in their local sociomoral worlds can refine our existing understandings of concepts such as “madness” and “recovery.” The expansive understanding of Sunni-Maldivian personhood illustrated in this ethnography contributes to the literature on Global Mental Health, studies of South Asian and Muslim subjectivities, and the anthropological project of documenting an ethics of everyday life.
Music, real abstraction, and growth in the Black Atlantic
(2024) Barone, Brian; Birenbaum Quintero, Michael
This dissertation argues that reconsidering the history of music and modernity from the point of view of Africa and its diaspora calls for a new approach to the music concept. Breaking with the ethno/musicological orthodoxy that “there is no such thing as music,” it instead draws on recent critical theory to argue that, under global modernity, “Music” exists as a “real abstraction”—one that has exhibited a startling tendency toward ceaseless growth. The argument unfolds through four case studies that show how this Music’s growth has been sustained by repeated accumulation of African and Black musics, which have been framed paradoxically as both its quintessence and antithesis. Chapter One considers the emergence of Music through early modern globalization; looking in particular at the circulation of African musics to the Iberian Peninsula, it draws on the work of Sylvia Wynter to demonstrate how the encounter of European and African musics gave rise to an abstract Music that was implicated in questions of the similarly new abstraction of the Human. Chapter Two offers an examination of Music’s growth by tracing how mixed-race musicians in the nineteenth-century Spanish Caribbean developed new forms of racially hybrid, “creolized” dance music through abstraction and how the pressures of racialization incorporated these new forms into Music. Chapter Three studies the work of Nigerian musical intellectuals in the decades around Nigeria’s political independence in 1960 as they reckoned with Music as a colonial legacy; these thinkers became champions of Music’s growth as they argued that postcolonial Nigeria could assume a leading position in the musical world by offering its traditional musics as a means for Music’s progress and expansion. Finally, Chapter Four listens to the hyper-referential sound of contemporary Afrobeats and observes the integration of its producers into the global music industry to ask if Music’s growth may be approaching—even exceeding—its limits.
Islamophobia and the construction of a modern Catholic identity
(2024) Bayer, Alexandra; Guillory, Margarita
While Muslims have been in the United States for centuries, in the aftermath of September 11th, Muslims and Islam in the United States faced a renewed and intense form of public visibility. This visibility did not dissipate in the months that followed 9/11, but rather continued to permeate American news media outlets in the decades that followed. The coverage of Muslims and Islam in the United States was frequently polarizing and racially charged. Coverage occurred across media sites, and, interestingly, American Catholic sites also engaged in discourses surrounding Muslims and Islam in the United States from distinctly Catholic perspectives. Yet, these perspectives also covered a polarizing spectrum: the theologically conservative-liberal spectrum of American Catholicism. The stark split between liberal and conservative American Catholic responses to and towards Muslims and Islam in the United States may be surprising considering that until the mid-twentieth century American Catholics were the subject of public and ubiquitous anti-Catholic hostilities. However, this split among liberal and conservative Catholics has a long-standing history, beginning in earnest in the mid-twentieth century after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council. In the twenty-first century and in the era of public Catholicism, American Catholics actively engage in discourses surrounding the presence of Muslims in the United States. By analyzing debates surrounding Muslims in the contemporary United States, this dissertation interrogates how white American Roman Catholic construct Muslims in the United States as Other and how conservative and liberal Catholics employ discourses about the Other to construct their identities as contemporary American Catholics. Particularly focused on white Catholic American narratives about Muslim and Islam in the United States, this project asks what insights can debates among conservative and liberal Catholics about Muslims and Islam in the United States between the years 2001-2022 provide into contemporary American Catholic identity formation, as well as conceptions of citizenship, gender, and race? Not only do these debates speak to differing ideas of citizenship, gender, and race among Catholics, but also to broader American cultural ideas about what it means to be American and who is eligible to be an American.
Learning and evaluating multimodal representations for digital domains
(2024) Burns, Andrea; Plummer, Bryan A.; Saenko, Kate
Digital domains such as mobile apps and webpages have become fundamental to everyday life. Humans perform many tasks on their phones and online, like reading recipes, booking calendar events, viewing images, and shopping for food or clothes. A prerequisite to building Artificially Intelligent models to aid in these tasks is the process of learning embeddings, i.e., representations, of mobile app and webpage data. In this thesis, we (1) Curate multimodal app and webpage datasets. Digital domains capture four modalities: image, text, structure, and action. We contribute the first multimodal app dataset with all app modalities and language annotations and the first multimodal webpage dataset to retain structure with all image and text content in a unified webpage sample. (2) Define new tasks to evaluate app and webpage understanding. Using our new app dataset, we define an instruction following benchmark that requires mapping a natural language high-level user goal to a sequence of low-level actions. We also define a novel feasibility classification task, in which we predict which user requests can be satisfied in the app environment. Using our new webpage dataset, we define three generation-style tasks: webpage description generation, section summarization, and contextual image captioning. This aims to evaluate webpage understanding at a global, regional, and local level, respectively. (3) Evaluate the importance of each data modality. With our new benchmarks, we determine the impact of each modality on downstream task performance. We find images to be useful for classifying whether a user command is actually satisfiable in an app environment and key to correcting over-reliance on text information. For our webpage benchmarks, contextual text and images aid all tasks, helping image captions retain knowledge-based detail and page descriptions or section summaries retain topical relevance or specificity. (4) Propose new methods for learning multimodal representations of digital domains. Utilizing all available modalities, we contribute a novel attention scheme to make use of webpage structure, separating the most salient content for each task. Results demonstrate that our multimodal encoder is more performant and more computationally efficient. For mobile app representations, we propose using text descriptions and action sequences to learn embeddings that can encode both global and local features while being significantly more data efficient. We outperform prior work on a suite of app understanding tasks while only utilizing publicly available data.
Molecular mechanisms underlying sex and treatment-dependent differences in an animal model of cue-exposure therapy for cocaine relapse prevention
(Frontiers Media SA, 2024) Peterson, Lucy; Nguyen, Jonathan; Ghani, Naveed; Rodriguez-Echemendia, Pedro; Qiao, Hui; Guwn, Sun Young; Man, Heng-Ye; Kantak, Kathleen M.
Environmental enrichment combined with the glycine transporter-1 inhibitor Org24598 (EE+ORG) during cocaine-cue extinction (EXT) inhibited reacquisition of 1.0 mg/kg cocaine self-administration in male but not female rats in a previous investigation. In this investigation, we determined if this treatment benefit in males required EXT training and ascertained the molecular basis for the observed sex difference in treatment efficacy. Nine groups of male rats trained to self-administer 1.0 mg/kg cocaine or receiving yoked-saline underwent EXT or NoEXT with or without EE and/or ORG. Next, they underwent reacquisition of cocaine self-administration or were sacrificed for molecular analysis of 9 protein targets indicative of neuroplasticity in four brain regions. Two groups of female rats trained to self-administer 1.0 mg/kg cocaine also underwent EXT with or without EE + ORG and were sacrificed for molecular analysis, as above. EE + ORG facilitated the rate of EXT learning in both sexes, and importantly, the therapeutic benefit of EE + ORG for inhibiting cocaine relapse required EXT training. Males were more sensitive than females to neuroplasticity-inducing effects of EE + ORG, which prevented reductions in total GluA1 and PSD95 proteins selectively in basolateral amygdala of male rats trained to self-administer cocaine and receiving EXT. Females were deficient in expression of multiple protein targets, especially after EE + ORG. These included total GluA1 and PSD95 proteins in basolateral amygdala, and total TrkB protein in basolateral amygdala, dorsal hippocampus, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Together, these results support the clinical view that sex-specific pharmacological and behavioral treatment approaches may be needed during cue exposure therapy to inhibit cocaine relapse.
Choice architecture, privacy valuations, and selection bias in consumer data
(INFORMS, 2023-08-25) Lin, Tesary; Strulov-Shlain, Avner
How does choice architecture used during data collection influence the quality of collected data in terms of volume (how many people share) and representativeness (who shares data)? To answer this question, we run a large-scale choice experiment to elicit consumers’ valuation for their Facebook data while randomizing two common choice frames: default and price anchor. An opt-out default decreases valuations by 22% compared to opt-in, while a $0–50 price anchor decreases valuations by 37% compared to a $50–100 anchor. Moreover, some consumer segments are influenced by frames more while having lower average privacy valuations. As a result, conventional frame optimization practices that aim to maximize data volume can exacerbate bias and lower data quality. We demonstrate the magnitude of this volume-bias
trade-off in our data and provide a framework to inform optimal choice architecture design.