Characterizing Legal Implications for the Use of Transboundary Aquifers

Groundwater resources that traverse political boundaries are becoming increasingly important sources of freshwater in international and intranational arenas worldwide. This is a direct extension of the growing need for new sources of freshwater, as well as the impact that excessive extraction, pollution, climate change, and other anthropogenic activities have had on surface waters. It is also a function of the growing realization that groundwater respects no political boundaries, and that aquifers traverse jurisdictional lines at all levels of political geography. Due to this growing awareness, questions pertaining to responsibility and liability are now being raised in relation to the use, management, exploitation, and governance of cross-border aquifers by stakeholders and policymakers who want to maximize their access to subsurface freshwater, as well as minimize their legal vulnerability and exposure. This is occurring both at the international level where two or more sovereign nations, and at the domestic level where two or more subnational political units, overlay a common aquifer. The law applicable to transboundary groundwater resources at both levels of governance is presently quite primitive and inadequate. Moreover, the relationship of groundwater law to surface water law is often absent from treaties as well as national laws and regulations. While a few promising trends appear to be emerging in the international realm, clear rules and regulations addressing questions of responsibility and liability in relation to the use, management, exploitation, and administration of transboundary groundwater remains elusive at all level of governance. To provide a foundation for the development of such norms, this paper explores circumstances under which the use, management, exploitation, or administration of a transboundary groundwater body might cause harm to a neighboring political unit—either to their territory, or to important economic, societal, or other interests—and, thereby, result in legal responsibility and/or liability. It assesses cause and effect relationships with reference to conceptual models of transboundary aquifers developed by Eckstein & Eckstein (2005) and Eckstein (2017). Notions of gaining and losing stream relationships, recharging and non-recharging aquifers, groundwater flow direction, the impact of groundwater pumping, anthropogenic contamination, and other concepts are utilized to describe scenarios in which harm could traverse a political boundary. The paper then translates that analysis into notions of responsibility and liability that are common to the legal realm. This research area is novel and has only marginally been addressed in the domestic interstate context of the United States (Hall & Regalia 2016)

Service-Driven Networking

This thesis presents our research on service-driven networking, which is a general design framework for service quality assurance and integrated network and service management in large scale multi-domain networks. The philosophy is to facilitate bi-party open participation among the users and the providers of network services in order to bring about better service customization and quality assurance, without sacrificing the autonomy and objectives of the individual entities. Three primary research topics are documented: service composition and adaptation, self-stabilization in uncoordinated environment, and service quality modeling. The work involves theoretical analysis, algorithm design, and simulations as evaluation methodology

Here and Away: Motherhood and Belonging Among Expat Women in Geneva, Switzerland

The transient space of Geneva hosts a cosmopolitan and mobile population that challenges anthropological understandings of culture, community, and kinship in everyday life. Shrouded in privilege, the world of international expats operated almost invisibly in Geneva. When I asked doctors or midwives questions about them, I heard a dismissive message: "expat women do not have any problems." However, the transition to parenthood is a rite of passage that involved navigating physical, medical, emotional, and social challenges. This dissertation follows a cohort of first-time mothers through pregnancy and birth to explore how their position as expats shaped their prenatal education, care-seeking strategies, experiences, and birth narratives. Expat mothers built narratives of self and networks of support to manage their experiences of pregnancy and birth in Geneva that redefined their relationships to the local and the global, home and away, and the meaning of citizenship. These communities and identities viewed citizenship as strategic rather than as a mode of belonging rooted in local communities. They turned to each other and the internet for guidance and information about health care during pregnancy and birth. Because they often had private health insurance and economic capital, they looked for care in private clinics, trusting the market-based model of care presented. They wanted the ability to choose providers who would work with them for both pregnancy and birth and speak their language with them. However, Geneva has a robust public health system, and women faced fewer unnecessary interventions in the public hospital, so choosing private care in this context carried added risk. I argue that expat women were unable to make informed choices about medical care because their privilege created assumptions of competence which led to blind spots in their understanding of Swiss medical culture and systems of care. These elisions left them unable to advocate for themselves during birth.Doctor of Philosoph

Spanish Orientalism: Washington Irving and the Romance of the Moors

Edward Said\u27s description of Orientalism as a constitutive element of the modern West is one of the enduring concepts of cultural history. The Orientalism thesis begins with the observation that in the 19th century Westerners began describing the Orient, particularly the Middle East and India, as a place that was once gloriously civilized but had declined under the influence of incompetent Islamic governments. This construction was then employed to justify Western Imperialism and the expansion of Christianity into Asia. This dissertation examines a case of Orientalism with a twist. Between 1775 and 1830 a group of Anglophone writers and artists depicted Spain as a state with a cultural trajectory similar to that described by the Orientalists. But in the Spanish case, the glorious past was the age of the Islamic Moors who had ruled parts of the Iberian Peninsula from 700 until 1492, while the current Christian rulers were the backwards and religiously intolerant impediments to progress. Thus the case of Spanish Orientalism employs an argument structurally identical to Said\u27s Orientalism, with the role of the Christians and Muslims reversed. In examining this phenomenon, I focus on three particular issues. The first is the representation of the Moors in early modern European popular culture. I argue that these earlier traditions use the Moors as an emblematic manifestation of oppositionality to the centralizing state and elite authority. The romantics found in the Moors a symbol comparable to such other proto-Europeans as the Celts and the Goths, worthy predecessors to the warlike, chivalric, and liberty-loving modern Europeans. The second is the political context of Spanish Orientalism. Like classical Orientalism, Spanish Orientalism had a clear political payoff. Its articulators meant to show that the Spanish government was an unworthy steward of its rapidly disintegrating empire, thus Spanish Orientalism is closely associated with attempts to assert Anglophone authority in the Caribbean. Third, I examine in detail the work of the author most clearly associated with Spanish Orientalism, Washington Irving. In the four books he wrote while in Spain during the 1820s, Irving became the individual most responsible for reframing the long representational tradition of the Moors into a modern idiom and bringing it to a mass audience

My landscape is a hand with no lines: representations of space in the poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton

This thesis is the first study using contemporary spatial theory, including cultural geography and its precursors, to examine and compare representations of space in the poetry of three mid-twentieth century American poets: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Because of the autobiographical content often foregrounded in their work, these poets have been labelled Confessional. Previous criticism has focused primarily on the ways in which they narrate (or draw on) their personal lives, treating accompanying descriptions of their surroundings primarily as backdrops. However, these poets frequently manifest their affective states by using the pathetic fallacy within structures of metaphor that form a textual mapping of the physical space they describe. This mapping can be temporal as well as spatial; the specific spaces mapped in the poem s present are often linked to memories of earlier life or family. These spaces include psychiatric, general, and penal institutions, parks and gardens, nature (especially coastal settings), and the home (almost always a place of tension or conflict). Each poet addresses these broad types of space differently according to their evolving subjective relationship to them. These relationships are in turn strongly influenced by their social class and gender: for the two women, their experience of their own bodies as prescribed space, in relation to the restrictive and objectifying female role that was imposed on them, is critical. Also, critical in shaping the poets experience of space are post-World-War II socio-cultural and demographic changes in the United States, notably suburbanisation, consumerisation and the consolidation of a therapeutic culture . Interwoven with these influences are major political concerns of the period such as the Cold War with its accompanying surveillance and conformism and the threat of nuclear annihilation. In the work of all three poets, awareness of these modern fears fused with traditional Gothic motifs to permeate their descriptions of spaces with anxiety, bitterness, and even dread in a rejection of the synthetic optimism of the American Century and commercial culture. Other criticism has touched on many of these themes in relation to one or another of the poets, but this study, by way of the theme of space, offers comparison and synthesis that aims to shed new light on their work and its relation to the period during which they wrote

The Islamic Bookbinding Tradition. A Book Archaeological Study

The technique of Islamic bookbinding explores the development of the bookbinding tradition in the Islamic world. Based on an assessment of the collections in the University Library Leiden, the various sewing techniques, constructions and the application of covering materials are described in detail. A comparative analysis of the historic treatises on bookbinding provides further insight in the actual making of the Islamic book. Apart from that, it becomes clear that distinctive material characteristics can be indicative for production in a certain period or region. The general perception of Islamic bookbinding as a weak structure best typified as a case-binding is refuted by the findings. Instead, Karin Scheper demonstrates how diverse methods were used to create sound structures, which fundamentally changes our understanding of the Islamic bookbinding practice.Medieval and Early Modern Studie

Making magazines and newspapers in the nineteenth century: Twenty-one reports

The reports listed here and then reproduced in facsimile were published in British and American journals during the nineteenth century. They describe contemporary aspects, both editorial and mechanical, of the production processes that made such publications possible. Leading topics include the relative efficiency of steam-powered printing, the precarious conditions of manual labor, and provisions made for the timely production of illustrations