This dissertation explores public and private hybridity in the production of sovereign power, or hybrid sovereignty, through the cases of the English East India Company, Blackwater, International Chamber of Commerce, and Amnesty International. It asks: What forms and dynamics are featured in hybrid sovereignty? What implications does hybrid sovereignty have...
Paralysis resulting from spinal cord injury (SCI) is devastating, dramatically reducing the independence of affected individuals. Currently, functional electrical stimulation (FES), controlled by a patient’s residual movements, is used clinically to restore a limited range of voluntary movement. However, if FES could be controlled using signals recorded from the brain,...
Mounting public concern about a school-to-prison pipeline has put schools and districts under increasing pressure to reduce their use of suspensions, expulsions and arrests. Many are turning to restorative justice practices (RJP) as a promising alternative for addressing school discipline and improving school climate. However, implementing RJP in a high-quality,...
The electronic materials research driving Moore’s law has provided several decades of increasingly powerful yet simultaneously miniaturized computer technologies. As we approach the physical and practical limits of what can be accomplished with silicon electronics, we look to new materials to drive innovation in future electronic applications. New materials paradigms...
Supported metal catalysts find many important uses in areas including chemical production, petroleum refining and emission control. The catalytic behavior of a supported metal catalyst is influenced by size and type of reaction sites on metal nanoparticles. For many structure insensitive reactions catalyzed by the supported metal catalysts, smaller metal...
There is a need for alternative biomanufacturing solutions to produce novel medicines and help solve long-standing issues regarding difficult-to-treat diseases. Cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) provides scientists with a new paradigm for producing proteins with an unprecedented freedom and control over the biomolecular machinery involved. In this document, I describe my...
This dissertation uses the case of Putin’s Russia to examine how authoritarian regimes build relationships with their societies in a way that strengthens authoritarian rule. In contrast to the existing scholarship, which concentrates on redistributive politics, that is, on the autocrat’s capacities to buy the loyalty of the masses, I...
How do creative producers make their works, and how do their social interactions within creative industries shape the creative process? This study addresses these questions by drawing upon two years of ethnographic fieldwork and over 100 interviews with artists, dealers, curators, collectors, and art advisers in the New York City...
Education policy and funding increasingly foster the creation of school partnerships with external stakeholders, such as parents, neighborhood organizations, school district offices, and universities, as a strategy in improving student outcomes. In three independent but related studies, this dissertation sheds light on the specificities rarely addressed by the rhetoric championing...
The brain has a remarkable ability to rapidly adapt behavior. On the scale of development, the brain learns to control the complex dynamics of our limbs by forming and pruning synaptic connections. However, the motor system also learns on much shorter timescales, such as when learning to hit the bullseye...
Plasmonic chemistry is an emerging field of research that contains great promise for new chemical reactivity, but thus far has been improperly observed. The goals of using plasmonic chemistry typically revolve around the use of nonequilibrium charge carriers that migrate to the surface of a plasmonic substrate to perform redox...
Vegetation in dryland environments is often patchy in response to water limitation. This patchiness can take the form of periodic patterning at length scales much larger than that of an individual plant. Instances of patterns resembling leopard spots and tiger stripes are widespread in dry regions of Africa, Australia, and...
The mouse visual system has recently been shown to possess many of the properties observed in the visual systems of the classically studied carnivores and primates. An ever-expanding genetic toolkit has given researchers who study vision in mice many advantages unavailable in other species.
In this thesis I study the...
Since Spanish colonial rule to the present, mining has been one of the main economic activities in the Andes. Taking this fact into account, my dissertation explores how two major Andean countries’ cultural production reacted to mineral wealth exploitation from 1880 to 1930. By analyzing foundational novels and influential journalistic...
Polarized emission from aligned interstellar dust is both a crucial tool for studies of magnetism in the interstellar medium (ISM) and a troublesome contaminant in studies of the polarized cosmic microwave background. In each case, an understanding of the significance of the dust polarization signal requires well-calibrated models that accurately...
The tools of computational chemistry allow researchers to gain insight into chemical systems that would be difficult or impossible to gain experimentally. This dissertation discusses the application of several of these computational tools to chemical systems of interest. First, we present several studies of plasmon resonance in Ag nanoclusters using...
To check that changes in prevalence rates over time were not the result of changes in measurement, we conducted sensitivity analyses. We created a set of adjusted scoring algorithms to maximize comparability among the DISC- 2.3, DISC-IV, and DIS-IV criteria while minimizing alterations. This file shows the adjustments made to...
Inability to understand speech in the presence of background noise is one of the most common complaints of individuals with hearing impairment. Two hearing aid processing strategies specifically recommended for improved speech perception in noise include: digital noise reduction (DNR) and cognition-based wide dynamic range compression (WDRC) speed. While previous...
Prejudice based on a person’s low socioeconomic status (SES) has been largely understudied in social psychology. In my dissertation research, I argue that understanding a perceiver’s mental model of SES is crucial to explaining anti-poor prejudice. I borrow from work in anthropology to characterize two main mental models of SES—ascribed...
Makerspaces have become explosively popular in recent years. Many believe they hold promise as contexts for integrated STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) learning, meta-disciplinary skill learning, and promoting interest and equity in STEAM. However, we still know relatively about what is actually learned in these spaces, how interest...