Showing 51 - 60 of 5709 Items
Clones, Corporations, and Community: Cyborg Bodies Onstage
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Grace Kellar-Long
Access: Open access
- For my honors project, I selected, wrote, directed, and produced an adaptation of a science fiction novella for the stage. I chose Nino Cipri's Defekt as the source material for my adaptation because I wanted to adapt a text where the novum, or science fiction novelty, is located in the bodies of the actors. During the written adaptation process, I worked from my memory of the novella, highlighting and expanding on the themes of queer found family, empathy, and anti-capitalism that were already present in the text. I repeatedly attempted to contact the author, their agent, and the publisher to secure the rights to adapt the novella, but I did not receive a reply from any of the copyright holders. After I adapted the novella into a script, I conducted a staged reading. Following that reading and further revisions of the script, I began rehearsals for the full production. During the rehearsal process, I guided the actors to create a shared vocabulary of movement to communicate that they were portraying clones, the embodied novum I focused on in my adaptation. In addition to leading rehearsals, I also coordinated the logistics to produce the play, including working with two designers, creating rehearsal schedules, and working with the tech staff in the Theater Department. The final performance examined the boundaries between human and non-human bodies, inviting audiences to think about how capitalism and empathy determine how we interact with marginalized bodies. This packet contains the program and program notes from the production.
On the Dirichlet L-functions and the L-functions of Cusp Forms
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Nawapan Wattanawanichkul
Access: Open access
- The main objects of our study are L-functions, which are meromorphic functions on the complex plane that analytically continue from the series of the form \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{a_n}{n^s}, where {a_n} is a sequence of complex numbers. In particular, we are interested in two families of L-functions: ''The Dirichlet L-functions" and ''the L-functions of cusp forms." The former refers to the L-functions whose a_n's are determined by Dirichlet characters, whereas cusp forms determine the latter. We begin our study with the celebrated Riemann zeta function, the simplest Dirichlet L-function, and discuss some of its well-known properties: the Euler product, analytic continuation, functional equation, Riemann hypothesis, and Euler's formula for its critical values. Then, we generalize our exploration to the Dirichlet L-functions and point out some analogous properties to those of the Riemann zeta function. Moreover, we present our original work on computing the critical values of the Dirichlet L-function associated with the primitive character mod 4, or what is known as the Dirichlet beta function. Lastly, we establish some knowledge of the theory of modular forms and cusp forms, which are nicely-behaved modular forms, and discuss some properties of the L-functions of cusp forms.
Education Amid Stabilization: The Varied Effects of Military Intervention on Public Schooling in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Arjun S. Mehta
Access: Open access
- At the intersection of international relations, comparative politics, and war consequence studies, this paper seeks to evaluate the effects of supportive foreign military intervention on education provision in three neighboring Central Sahel countries: Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. In the wake of a Tuareg insurgency and a 2012 coup d’état in Mali, the proliferation of jihadist violence in the tri-border Liptako-Gourma region has been met by a proliferation of foreign interveners. Does stabilization— the form of intervention in the Central Sahel— improve education provision, as measured by diminishing jihadist attacks on schools and school closures due to violence? This paper hypothesizes that where there is a larger scale of intervention, there is more security— and thus an environment more conducive to education provision. Although insecurity in the three Central Sahel countries has shared origins, each country has a distinct scale of intervention. In placing Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso on a spectrum of stabilization (from largest- to smallest-scale), this paper conducts a comparative test to determine how intervention affects education provision. Qualitative and quantitative data analyses reveal that, while a larger scale of intervention (in Mali) guarantees neither better security nor more favorable education provision, the absence of intervention (in Burkina Faso) facilitates unfavorable security and education outcomes. This paper concludes that destabilizing security-centric conceptions of stabilization may lead to more lasting peace and more accessible education in the Central Sahel and beyond.
It’s #PrisonAbolition Until the Bad Guys Show Up: Conflicting Discourses on Twitter about Carceral Networks in 2020
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Tam Phan
Access: Open access
- “Twitter Revolutions” in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, and Moldova illustrate social media’s capacity to mobilize citizens in uprooting systems of injustice. As non-democratic regimes, these “Twitter Revolutions” offer insight into how Twitter’s microblogging, hashtags, and global user connections help broker relations between activists hoping to challenge the government. However, this thesis focuses on the democratic regime of the US and how Twitter plays a role in aiding the prison abolition movement in their effort to dismantle carceral networks that inflict racial and political violence on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and People of Color. The thesis outlines how, under the US’ classification as a democracy, the US utilizes infrastructural power to coerce American citizens into accepting carceral networks of violence as essential institutions to maintain civil society. The following sections explain the abolitionist movement’s history of attempting to dismantle the discrete formal and informal institutions of political violence, and includes the complicating development of liberal-progressive reformism that attempts to co-opt the goals of the abolition movement. The thesis focuses on the Twitter hashtag #PrisonAbolition in 2020 to explore how American Twitter users perceive the US carceral state and the prison abolition movement. The research concludes that #PrisonAbolition does not currently possess the capacity to evolve into the social mobilization seen in the “Twitter Revolutions” of non-democratic regimes because the US’ infrastructural power effectively engrained into the minds of Americans that prisons protect civil society. However, the tweets still show a promising development as American Twitter users become more engaged in abolitionist conversations.
A Comparative Perspective on Colonial Influence in the Effectiveness of Foreign Aid in South Korea and Algeria
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Viv Daniel
Access: Open access
- South Korea and Algeria are both formerly colonized nations with a history of dependence on foreign aid. Their former colonizers, Japan and France respectively, collaborated closely throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, despite colonial linkages and similarities in early developmental trajectories, South Korea has grown into a donating member of the OECD and one of the world’s largest economies, while Algeria continues to struggle both economically and politically. This paper engages existing literature on postcolonial development and foreign aid by arguing that the attitudes towards colonization and the motivations for undertaking it on the part of colonial powers can have as large an impact on the success of foreign aid as the endogenous circumstances of the states receiving such aid.