2,261 research outputs found

    Alʔilbīrī’s Book of the rational conclusions. Introduction, Critical Edition of the Arabic Text and Materials for the History of the Ḫawāṣṣic Genre in Early Andalus

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    [eng] The Book of the rational conclusions, written perhaps somewhen in the 10th c. by a physician from Ilbīrah (Andalus), is a multi-section medical pandect. The author brings together, from a diversity of sources, materials dealing with matters related to drug-handling, natural philosophy, therapeutics, medical applications of the specific properties of things, a regimen, and a dispensatory. This dissertation includes three different parts. First the transmission of the text, its contents, and its possible context are discussed. Then a critical edition of the Arabic text is offered. Last, but certainly not least, the subject of the specific properties is approached from several points of view. The analysis of Section III of the original book leads to an exploration of the early Andalusī assimilation of this epistemic tradition and to the establishment of a well-defined textual family in which our text must be inscribed. On the other hand, the concept itself of ‘specific property’ is often misconstrued and it is usually made synonymous to magic and superstition. Upon closer inspection, however, the alleged irrationality of the knowledge of these properties appears to be largely the result of anachronistic interpretation. As a complement of this particular research and as an illustration of the genre, a sample from an ongoing integral commentary on this section of the book is presented.[cat] El Llibre de les conclusions racionals d’un desconegut metge d’Ilbīrah (l’Àndalus) va ser compilat probablement durant la segona meitat del s. X. Es tracta d’un rudimentari però notablement complet kunnaix (un gènere epistèmic que és definit sovint com a ‘enciclopèdia mèdica’) en què l’autor aplega materials manllevats (sovint de manera literal i no-explícita) de diversos gèneres. El llibre obre amb una secció sobre apoteconomia (una mena de manual d’apotecaris) però se centra després en les diferents branques de la medicina. A continuació d’uns prolegòmens filosòfics l’autor copia, amb mínima adaptació lingüística, un tractat sencer de terapèutica, després un altre sobre les aplicacions mèdiques de les propietats específiques de les coses, una sèrie de fragments relacionats amb la dietètica (un règim en termes tradicionals) i, finalment, una col·lecció de receptes mèdiques. Cadascuna d’aquestes seccions mostren evidents lligams d’intertextualitat que apunten cap a una intensa activitat sintetitzadora de diverses tradicions aliades a la medicina a l’Àndalus califal. El text és, de fet, un magnífic objecte sobre el qual aplicar la metodologia de la crítica textual i de fonts. L’edició crítica del text incorpora la dimensió cronològica dins l’aparat, que esdevé així un element contextualitzador. Quant l’estudi de les fonts, si tot al llarg de la primera part d’aquesta tesi és només secundari, aquesta disciplina pren un protagonisme gairebé absolut en la tercera part, especialment en el capítol dedicat a l’anàlisi individual de cada passatge recollit en la secció sobre les propietats específiques de les coses

    Fictocritical Cyberfeminism: A Paralogical Model for Post-Internet Communication

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    This dissertation positions the understudied and experimental writing practice of fictocriticism as an analog for the convergent and indeterminate nature of “post-Internet” communication as well a cyberfeminist technology for interfering and in-tervening in metanarratives of technoscience and technocapitalism that structure contemporary media. Significant theoretical valences are established between twen-tieth century literary works of fictocriticism and the hybrid and ephemeral modes of writing endemic to emergent, twenty-first century forms of networked communica-tion such as social media. Through a critical theoretical understanding of paralogy, or that countercultural logic of deploying language outside legitimate discourses, in-volving various tactics of multivocity, mimesis and metagraphy, fictocriticism is ex-plored as a self-referencing linguistic machine which exists intentionally to occupy those liminal territories “somewhere in among/between criticism, autobiography and fiction” (Hunter qtd. in Kerr 1996). Additionally, as a writing practice that orig-inated in Canada and yet remains marginal to national and international literary scholarship, this dissertation elevates the origins and ongoing relevance of fictocriti-cism by mapping its shared aims and concerns onto proximal discourses of post-structuralism, cyberfeminism, network ecology, media art, the avant-garde, glitch feminism, and radical self-authorship in online environments. Theorized in such a matrix, I argue that fictocriticism represents a capacious framework for writing and reading media that embodies the self-reflexive politics of second-order cybernetic theory while disrupting the rhetoric of technoscientific and neoliberal economic forc-es with speech acts of calculated incoherence. Additionally, through the inclusion of my own fictocritical writing as works of research-creation that interpolate the more traditional chapters and subchapters, I theorize and demonstrate praxis of this dis-tinctively indeterminate form of criticism to empirically and meaningfully juxtapose different modes of knowing and speaking about entangled matters of language, bod-ies, and technologies. In its conclusion, this dissertation contends that the “creative paranoia” engendered by fictocritical cyberfeminism in both print and digital media environments offers a pathway towards a more paralogical media literacy that can transform the terms and expectations of our future media ecology

    Geoarchaeological Investigations of Late Pleistocene Physical Environments and Impacts of Prehistoric Foragers on the Ecosystem in Northern Malawi and Austria

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    A growing body of research shows that not only did environmental changes play an important role in human evolution, but humans in turn have impacted ecosystems and landscape evolution since the Late Pleistocene. This thesis presents collaborative work on Late Pleistocene open-air sites in the Karonga District of northern Malawi, in which new aspects of forager behavior came to light through the reconstruction of physical environments. My work has helped recognize that late Middle Stone Age (MSA) activity and tool production occurred in locally more open riparian environments within evergreen gallery forest, surrounded by a regional vegetation dominated by miombo woodlands and savanna. Additionally, MSA hunter-gatherers exploited the confluence of river and wetland areas along the shores of Lake Malawi, which likely served as important corridors for the dispersal of biota. By comparing data from the archaeological investigations with lake core records, we were able to identify effects of anthropogenic burning on vegetation structures and sedimentation in the region as early as 80 thousand years ago. These findings not only proved it possible to uncover early impacts of human activity on the ecosystem, but also emphasize the importance of fire in the lives of early foragers. Publications contained within this dissertation: A. Wright, D.K., Thompson, J.C., Schilt, F.C., Cohen, A., Choi, J-H., Mercader, J., Nightingale, S., Miller, C.E., Mentzer, S.M., Walde, D., Welling, M., and Gomani-Chindebvu, E. “Approaches to Middle Stone Age landscape archaeology in tropical Africa”. Special issue Geoarchaeology of the Tropics of Journal of Archaeological Science 77:64-77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2016.01.014 B. Schilt, F.C., Verpoorte, A., Antl, W. “Micromorphology of an Upper Paleolithic cultural layer at Grub-Kranawetberg, Austria”. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 14:152-162. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2017.05.041 C. Nightingale, S., Schilt, F.C., Thompson, J.C., Wright, D.K., Forman, S., Mercader, J., Moss, P., Clarke, S. Itambu, M., Gomani-Chindebvu, E., Welling, M. Late Middle Stone Age Behavior and Environments at Chaminade I (Karonga, Malawi). Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology 2-3:258-397. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41982-019-00035-3 D. Thompson, J.C.*, Wright, D.K.*, Ivory, S.J.*, Choi, J-H., Nightingale, S., Mackay, A., Schilt, F.C., Otárola-Castillo, E., Mercader, J., Forman, S.L., Pietsch, T., Cohen, A.S., Arrowsmith, J.R., Welling, M., Davis, J., Schiery, B., Kaliba, P., Malijani, O., Blome, M.W., O’Driscoll, C., Mentzer, S.M., Miller, C., Heo, S., Choi, J., Tembo, J., Mapemba, F., Simengwa, D., and Gomani-Chindebvu, E. “Early human impacts and ecosystem reorganization in southern-central Africa”. Science Advances 7(19): eabf9776. *equal contribution https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abf9776 E. Schilt, F.C., Miller, C.M., Wright, D.K., Mentzer, S.M., Mercader, J., Moss, Choi, J.-H., Siljedal, G., Clarke, S., Mwambwiga, A., Thomas, K., Barbieri, A., Kaliba, P., Gomani-Chindebvu, E., Thompson, J.C. “Hunter-gatherer environments at the Late Pleistocene sites of Bruce and Mwanganda´s Village, northern Malawi”. Quaternary Science Reviews 292: 107638. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379122002694 [untranslated

    Historical Burdens on Physics

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    When learning physics, one follows a track very similar to the historical path of the evolution of this science: one takes detours, overcomes superfluous obstacles and repeats mistakes, one learns inappropriate concepts and uses outdated methods. In the book, more than 200 articles present and analyze such obsolete concepts methods. All articles have the same structure: 1. subject, 2. deficiencies, 3. origin, 4. disposal. The articles had originally appeared as columns in various magazines. Accordingly, we had tried to write them in an easily understandable way

    Mismarked Flesh: The Interpretability of the Male Body in Julio-Claudian Literature

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    This dissertation studies the increasing failure of the elite Roman male body to serve, as it had done for centuries, as an easily interpretable sign of social identity. The socio-political shift from Republic to Empire led to general disorientation and a crisis of male elite identity that found expression through depictions of the male body. Through Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Petronius’ Satyrica, and Senecan drama, I study this preoccupation in light of the Roman socio-historical context and modern theories of bodily identity found in Kristeva, Spillers, and Scarry, among others. I argue that we can trace the frequent scenes of misrecognition and confusion and the preponderance of wounded, marked, and dismembered non-slave bodies to this identity crisis. The mutilated male body in Julio-Claudian literature becomes a nodal point for multiple intersecting anxieties about gender, class, and status in an uncertain world. Chapter One reviews the socio-political context of the early empire and contemporary theories of embodied identity, and surveys the scholarship on embodied masculinity in early imperial literature. Chapter Two shines light on the confusion of bodily signifiers in the disorienting worlds of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and of Augustan Rome, showing through such stories as Actaeon and Pyramus that failure to interpret signs or to act as an interpretable signifier can be disastrous. Chapter Three examines the new vulnerability of elite men in Augustus’ Rome through the mutilated and dehumanized male bodies of the Metamorphoses, including Marsyas and Hippolytus. Chapter Four connects the confusion of bodily signifiers with a larger failure of the body in Petronius’ Satyrica and in Neronian Rome: whether they do not display legible social identities, fail to perform sexually, or are assaulted, bodies in Petronius’ novel are problems. Chapter Five connects the abject bodies of Seneca’s Oedipus, Thyestes, and Phaedra to the violence of Nero’s reign, reading them as broken signifiers whose misinterpretation spells disaster for their onlookers. Chapter Six offers concluding thoughts, as well as case studies of Pompey’s head in Lucan’s Bellum Civile and Hercules’ suffering in the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus.Doctor of Philosoph

    Trash, Fragments, and Breaking Things: Toward a Grotesque Cripistemology for Disabled Life Writing

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    Despite the boom of memoirs of mental health post-1997 and the first advertisements for Prozac, most of them follow the same formula and come from the same places of privilege. This privilege is evident in the author bios on the books themselves and the careers of the writers. The popularity of these books within both abled and disabled realms has therefore created a script that those with mental illnesses are expected to abide by. Following in the example of Margaret Price, Katie Rose Guest Pryal, Merri Lisa Johnson, and others, I resituate mental illness as mental disability and place it within the world of disability studies. In doing so, this dissertation explores practical uses of Johnson and Robert McRuer’s cripistemologies, Johnson’s c/rip, and Flannery O’Connor’s and Yuan Yuan’s grotesque as methods for establishing the beginnings of a grotesque cripistemology with which those with mental disabilities might construct accessible narratives. Through a close look at zines and glitches, I seek to discover ways in which writers with mental disabilities might use fragmented writing, trash, and brokenness in order to utilize this new grotesque cripistemology in order to not construct stories of overcoming aimed at abled audiences, but rather stories of the self and of being within the hurricane which is to have a mental disability unabashedly aimed at a disabled audience

    Dionysus against the Crucified: Nietzsche, Sovereignty, and the Power of Nihilism

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    Is international law nihilistic? Being produced from nihilism and driven by it? And are even we nihilistic – we Critical scholars who stand beyond the end of history? Not a break from the past but a continuation? That is the gambit of this thesis: to explore the nihilistic inner life of international law, through the root and stem of its creation and development, right up until the contemporary movement towards Critical approaches to the discipline. Through the embracing scope of nihilism, I argue that each of these turns and evolutions can be tracked back to a single logic. The first Volume of this thesis is dedicated to the theorisation of nihilism and how it could be existentially connected to international law. Using the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, I link nihilism to what I term the ‘civilising psychosis’: a process (or sickness) by which the production of the human and the state is co-constitutive. Through this bond, it becomes possible to argue that the structures of nihilism, and the civilising psychosis, frame and condition the development of legal concepts. In Volume II, I take the civilising psychosis and apply it to the creation of the European global order of sovereign states. Here I suggest that transformations within sovereignty doctrine have been devices of managing and rearticulating the civilising psychosis. Applying literary techniques, this Volume takes the form of a ‘A play in three acts’. Within it, I follow the civilising psychosis, first, in the domestic generation of sovereignty, through to the use of sovereignty in 19th century imperialism, before bringing the civilising excesses of this latter period into confrontation with Critical scholarship. Through the violence of this encounter, I intend to begat recognition and disorientation. Rather than marking a departure from the civilising psychosis, such scholarships could be its most visceral manifestation

    (b2023 to 2014) The UNBELIEVABLE similarities between the ideas of some people (2006-2016) and my ideas (2002-2008) in physics (quantum mechanics, cosmology), cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and philosophy (this manuscript would require a REVOLUTION in international academy environment!)

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    (b2023 to 2014) The UNBELIEVABLE similarities between the ideas of some people (2006-2016) and my ideas (2002-2008) in physics (quantum mechanics, cosmology), cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and philosophy (this manuscript would require a REVOLUTION in international academy environment!

    Developing computational tools and datasets to investigate the genomic loci associated with disease

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    The majority of genetic variants associated with complex diseases are located in non-coding, regulatory regions of the genome. Understanding the genetic mechanisms of the progression of these diseases has been largely advanced by sequencing-based genomic techniques including RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, Hi-C, genome-wide association studies (GWAS), and Quantitative Trait Locus (QTL) mapping. However, the genetic underpinnings of disease have been difficult to interpret largely because (1) currently available visualization software lacks the ability to efficiently and programmatically integrate large volumes of complex multi-omic data and (2) there are few datasets in disease-relevant cell types in which genomic changes are tracked in response to disease-specific stimuli. In the first part of this work I describe plotgardener, a new R programmatic library for efficiently and reproducibly plotting publication-quality, multi-panel genomic figures. Plotgardener provides customizable genomic plotting and annotation functions that allows users to size and arrange plots in precisely-defined coordinate systems based upon user-defined units of measurement. I include example use cases with plotgardener, both with genomic data and ggplot2 objects, and also have extensively documented and freely available code for the package through Bioconductor and GitHub. I then go on to create and investigate the first response allelic imbalance (AI) and eQTL (reQTL) datasets using an ex vivo model of osteoarthritis (OA) whereby chondrocytes are stimulated with fibronectin fragment (FN-f), a known OA trigger. AI analysis revealed 55 unique genetic variants exhibiting AI at 58 positional genes only after FN-f treatment, with some of these genes exhibiting differential expression. reQTL mapping identified 384 eGenes specific to FN-f treated samples, and colocalization of identified reQTLs with GWAS of various OA phenotypes revealed one robust colocalization of a reQTL with multiple OA phenotypes. I also use plotgardener to visualize these datasets within the context of the genes and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure of the region. Overall, these studies have resulted in the creation of a broadly applicable genomic visualization tool and novel datasets to provide critical insights into the genetic basis of osteoarthritis.Doctor of Philosoph
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