Sitting to Participate

Over the years of education one of the most beneficial things one could do is participate in class. Many scholars have research the causes for participation in a classroom and what affects it has on student’s grades. For our study we are looking at participation and seat location. As current students we feel that majority of the students who participate inside the classroom sit in the front of the classroom. We defined the front of the classroom as the first three rows, the back of the classroom as the last three rows, and the middle of the classroom anything between the front and back. This brings us to our research question; is the placement of students in a classroom associated with how much they participate in the classroom? To give us a better idea of this subject we research six scholarly sources, handed out forty surveys to a convenience group, did participation observation, and interviewed two people

Tax reform: is the time right for a new approach?

Taxation

Artistic (mis)representation and commodity culture in The Picture of Dorian Gray and The House of Mirth

Artistic (Mis)representation and Commodity Culture in The Picture of Dorian Gray and The House of Mirth attempts to establish a trans-Atlantic connection between authors Oscar Wilde and Edith Wharton by considering the manner in which each author\u27s respective protagonist relates to art, commodities, and the society in which he or she lives. By reading Dorian Gray and Lily Bart through the lens of Jean Baudrillard\u27s Simulacra and Simulation (1981), the companion chapters show the extent to which each character\u27s reality is complicated by his or her illusory relationship with both fine arts and social artistry. The first of these chapters, Portrait-Induced Madness: Artistic Representation and Simulation in The Picture of Dorian Gray considers Dorian\u27s uncanny relationship with the portrait that bears the sins of his soul as a representation of double-simulation wherein Dorian\u27s unchanging appearance and the portrait\u27s grotesque transformations are the consequence of artist Basil Hallward\u27s departure from ethical artistic creation. The second chapter, Object d\u27art for Sale: Lily Bart\u27s Self-Commodification and Simulation in The House of Mirth, traces Lily\u27s social maneuverings through fashionable New York society in order to show how her supposedly artistic attempts to attract a suitor result in her treatment as a social commodity instead. The tragic fates of each author\u27s protagonist ultimately suggests that even though they are active participants in the consumer culture of their time, Wilde and Wharton experience and express severe anxieties concerning how anyone can remain unique or artful in a society that dictates an individual\u27s material desires

Producing the Dead Sea Scrolls: (Trans)national Heritage and the Politics of Popular Representation

This thesis explores the politics of representing the assemblage of ancient manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls to popular audiences in Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the United States. I demonstrate that these objects of national heritage are circulated along transnational routes to maintain the legitimacy of nationalist discourse abroad. Three sites—the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Qumran National Park in the West Bank, and a travelling exhibit presented at the Boston Museum of Science—are examined for textual narrative, spatial arrangement, and visitor behavior. Analysis of these observations illuminates two recurring motifs common to all three sites: the restoration of an ancient ethno-national landscape (“land of Israel”) in the contemporary landscape of Palestine/Israel and the important legacy of ancient Jewish society in contemporary Israel and “the West.” These motifs and the way they are presented through a framing of cultural heritage can be associated with a larger nationalist discourse maintained by Israeli state authorities and mainstream media that perpetuates a linking of western liberal and Zionist ideologies. I contend that the transnational circulation of this nationalist heritage narrative works to legitimize—at a global scale—an ongoing Israeli program of occupation and settlement in Palestinian territory subsumed under the biblical/Zionist frame of the “land of Israel.” While making preliminary suggestions toward critical interventions, I also suggest that the analysis of transnational encounters with nationalist heritage merits deeper ethnographic investigation towards understanding its impact on individuals’ political (in)action towards the Israel/Palestine conflict

Christotechtonics: Dildonic Prostheticity in Theological Formulation

This dissertation asserts the following claim: Christ is a dildo. This project brings Paul B. Preciado into conversations with contemporary philosophies of religion and interrogates a hegemonic Christian theological political matrix. This project articulates a hermeneutic of christotechtonics, which studies appearance, formation, and utilization of Christ. This project is twofold. It begins with a transdisciplinary exploration that entangles queer and trans theories, religious studies, secular studies, and philosophy of religion to position reading queer and trans theories as forms of counter political theologies. The work then transitions into dildonic prostheticity in theological formulation. The 2019 Vatican document “Male and Female He Created Them” forms the textual case study of this project. A hermeneutic of christotechtonics uncovers the white cisgender heteropatriarchal foundations of this document. “Male and Female” hinges upon a lone reference to Christ which reverberates through the document. In this way, Christ is used to modify the sexual subject. This project ends with a performance analysis of “Personal Jesus” performed by drag artist Louisianna Purchase. This transgressive performance highlights a heuristic edge of christotechtonics. This enacts an inelegant, but potent, short-circuiting of theology; this challenges not only our understanding of how Christ has functioned in relation to intentionally exploited peoples, but also indicts theology for its complicity in such violence

Museums Narrating the Nation: Case Studies from Greece and Bosnia-Herzegovina

A museum that represents a community’s history and culture has the ability to influence the way that visitors understand that community in the present. In this paper, museums in Greece and Bosnia-Herzegovina are examined as case studies in order to better understand how museums attempt to narrate national identity to visitors, both domestic and international. Critical analysis of exhibits in these museums reveal that museum narratives often attempt to project the image of singular national identities. Meanwhile, they may deny the history of place of other contemporary or historic communities that are held in disfavor by those who influence the development of exhibits. In Greece, museums project a ‘Greek’ identity based on Classical, Byzantine, and post-Ottoman history. Museums in Bosnia-Herzegovina emphasize a unifying, shared history of the state’s three main ethnic communities without recognizing the profound differences felt between these communities today. Thus, these institutions may be seen as attempts at encouraging visitors to imagine the nation in one way only, without recognizing pluralism. While these case studies do not necessarily represent a universal trend, they demonstrate the need to reflect upon the place of such museums in contemporary society

The critical density for star formation in HII galaxies

The star formation rate (SFR) in galaxies is believed to obey a power law relation with local gas density, first proposed by Schmidt (1959). Kennicutt (1989) has shown that there is a threshold density above which star formation occurs, and for densities at or near the threshold density, the DFR is highly non-linear, leading to bursts of star formation. Skillman (1987) empirically determined this threshold for dwarf galaxies to be approximately 1 x 10(exp 21) cm(exp -2), at a linear resolution of 500pc. During the course of our survey for HI companion clouds to HII galaxies, we obtained high resolution HI observations of five nearby HII galaxies. HII galaxies are low surface brightness, rich in HI, and contain one or a few high surface brightness knots whose optical spectra resemble those of HII regions. These knots are currently experiencing a burst of star formation. After Kennicutt (1989) we determine the critical density for star formation in the galaxies, and compare the predictions with radio and optical data

The satiricon

XL, 228 p

The Abstract Artifactual Theory of Fictional Characters

This paper undertakes an extended criticism of Thomanson's artifactual theory of fictional characters (1999)

Essays on Human and Social Capital

Chapter 1: “The Impact of College Education on Mortality: A Study of Marginal Treatment Effects.” With a newly constructed dataset that links the 2000 U.S. Census long-form to Social Security Administration records, I estimate the effect of college education on mortality. Using the proximity to college from birthplace as an instrument, I estimate the marginal treatment effect (MTE) of college education on 10-year mortality rate for adults aged 60-99 in the United States from 2000-2010. The OLS results show a strong association between college education and lower mortality. The MTE results show that individuals that have unobserved characteristics that make them least likely to attend college have the largest effects of education in reducing mortality. This suggests that the individuals who would benefit most from receiving college education in terms of health are those do not attend college. The positive effects on reducing mortality are solely concentrated among men. For women, I find no evidence of an effect of education on old-age mortality. Combined with evidence from the literature, these results provide suggestive evidence that income is not the mechanism through which education reduces mortality. Chapter 2: “Social Interactions and Location Decisions: Evidence from U.S. Mass Migration.” (with Bryan Stuart) This paper estimates the strength through which social interactions influenced location decisions during two large scale migrations in the United States during early to mid 1900s. We examine the Great Migration of African Americans out of the Southern United States and the Dust Bowl Migration of whites out of the Midwestern U.S. Using long-run data on migration patterns for individuals born 1916-1936, we estimate the effect of social interactions on influencing where individuals decided to migrate. We find that social interactions were very important for African Americans during the Great Migration in affecting location decisions. Our results suggest that 47-69 percent of blacks chose their destination city in the North because of influence from other people that were from their hometown. For whites, we estimate much smaller effects; only 14-24 percent of whites chose their destination city because of social interactions.   Chapter 3: “The Effect of Social Migration on Crime: Evidence from the Great Migration.” (with Bryan Stuart) Using results from the second chapter of the dissertation, which shows that social interactions were influential in guiding migration patterns during the Great Migration, this paper estimates the effect these patterns had on crime in U.S. cities from 1960-2009. We document the large variations in the connectedness of migrants from the South that moved to different Northern cities. For example, some cities received almost one-third of their migrants from only one origin town in the South, where other comparable cities received no more than three percent of migrants from any one place. We find that, controlling for other economic characteristics, cities which received more connected migrants had lower crime rates from 1970-2000, which suggests an important role of social connectedness on crime during these periods. The results are largely driven by cities with a high population share of African Americans, and through crime increases among black juveniles. Cities that had more connected migrants had smaller increases in crime rates during the 1970s and 1980s.PHDEconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138478/1/evanjt_1.pd