Patronage and politics at Barking Abbey, c.950 - c.1200

This thesis is a study of the Benedictine abbey of Barking in Essex from the tenth to the twelfth centuries. It is based on a wide range of published and unpublished documentary sources, and on hagiographie texts written at the abbey. It juxtaposes the literary and documentary sources in a new way to show that both are essential for a full understanding of events, and neither can be fully appreciated in isolation. It also deliberately crosses the political boundary of 1066, with the intention of demonstrating that political events were not the most significant determinant of the recipients of benefactors’ religious patronage. It also uses the longer chronological scale to show that patterns of patronage from the Anglo-Saxon era were frequently inherited by the incoming Normans along with their landholdings. Through a detailed discussion of two sets of unpublished charters (Essex Record Office MSS D/DP/Tl and Hatfield, Hatfield House MS Ilford Hospital 1/6) I offer new dates and interpretations of several events in the abbey’s history, and identify the abbey’s benefactors from the late tenth century to 1200. As Part III shows, it has been possible to trace patterns of patronage which were passed down through several generations, crossing the political divide of 1066. Royal patronage is shown to have been of great significance to the abbey, and successive kings exploited their power of advowson in different ways according to the political atmosphere of England. The literary sources are discussed in a separate section, but with full reference to the historical narrative. I offer new interpretations of the hagiographic works of Goscelin of St-Bertin written for Barking in the late eleventh century, suggesting they were intended to promote the abbey’s interests and attract new donors, and that the choice of Latin for these works was intended to be politically neutral. I propose new dates for both the Anglo-Norman $\textit{Life of St Catherine of Alexandria}$ and the $\textit{Vie d’Edouard le Confesseur}$ written at late twelfth-century Barking, suggesting that they may have been far more politically motivated than previously thought, commissioned by Abbess Matilda to defend and promote her own family lineage. The thesis concludes that royal interest and interference in Barking’s affairs was a continuous factor throughout the period of the study; that aristocratic patronage often followed royal fashions, but in Barking’s case also frequently had more personal motivations; and that Barking’s literary activity can only be fully understood within the context of its political atmosphere, and should not be studied in isolation.Digitisation of this thesis was sponsored by Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin

Distribution, Ecology, Disease Risk, and Genetic Diversity of Swift Fox (\u3cem\u3eVulpes Velox\u3c/em\u3e) in the Dakotas

The swift fox (Vulpes velox), a native species once abundant throughout the Northern Great Plains (NGP), has declined due to changes in land use, historic predator eradication programs, and predation by larger canid species. Currently, the species is estimated to occupy 44% of its historic range. In the NGP, the status of the swift fox varies by state, ranging from furbearer to endangered species. However, knowledge of the current status of swift foxes in the NGP is lacking due to an absence of systematic population monitoring. Improving the current state of knowledge concerning swift fox populations in the NGP is necessary to assess the population status of the species and will be instrumental in assisting managers in conservation and, if needed, restoration of this rare species. The swift fox is considered rare in North Dakota and state threatened in South Dakota. We evaluated the distribution of swift fox, red fox (Vulpes vulpes), and coyote (Canis latrans) populations, investigated ecology and life history of swift fox, and assessed disease risk and genetic diversity of resident swift foxes in northwest South Dakota and southwest North Dakota. To accomplish these objectives, we first conducted a systematic camera-trap survey to assess occupancy and distribution of swift fox, coyotes, and red fox. Using camera trap detections and anecdotal sightings, we livetrapped, radio-collared, and tracked swift foxes to locate den sites to assess den site habitat selection. Using samples collected during camera-trap surveys and radio-collaring, we conducted disease and genetic diversity analyses. We conducted occupancy and distribution models at two different scales (sympatric canids: double-home range, 6.68 km, and home range, 3.34 km; swift fox: sub-home range, 30 m, and home range, 3.34 km); both scales created overfit models, producing inaccurate distribution maps for swift fox. Therefore, we do not suggest using either of these models for management purposes. However, we found that coyotes occupied 63-69% of the study area while red fox occupied 46-53% of the study area. We documented average litter sizes (3.25 pups), large home ranges (55.38 km2), late dispersal (February), large dispersal distances (17.20 km), high survival (0.857), and found dens farther from roads than other studies, with no correlation between den-site location and vegetation height. We also found high prevalence of canine parvovirus (71.43%) and Francisella tularensis (67.74%), but low prevalence of canine distemper virus (10.34%) and Yersinis pestis (3.32%). The high prevalence of canine parvovirus and exposure to canine distemper are cause for concern, due to their typically highly fatal outcomes. This swift fox population occupying northwestern South Dakota and southwestern North Dakota is genetically viable, with high intrapopulation connectivity and no sign of a genetic bottleneck. Our study is the first of its kind in northwest South Dakota and southwest North Dakota and most of our findings can and should be used in future monitoring, conservation, and restoration plans for this native species in the Dakotas

WATERMAN FUND ESSAY WINNER: On Ceding Control: Motherhood in a Pathless Landscape

At her new home base of eastern Vermont, a young mother gives over her mountain energy to her children’s needs. “I wander these pathless woods, my baby strapped to my chest, as an attempt to reassert control over my body after the violence of pregnancy, of motherhood. This wandering is body work.

New Destinations of Empire: Imperial Migration from the Marshall Islands to Northwest Arkansas

This dissertation examines Marshall Islander migration to Arkansas as an outcome of an international agreement, the Compact of Free Association, between the U.S. and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a former U.S. territory. While the Compact marked the formal end of U.S. colonial administration over the islands, it also re-entrenched imperial power relations between the two countries, at once consolidating U.S. military access to the islands and creating a Marshallese diaspora whose largest resettlement site is now Springdale, Arkansas. As a result, Springdale, an “all-white town” for much of the 20th century, has recently been remade by Marshallese and also Latino immigration, nearly tripling in size in the past three decades. I examine U.S. empire through three interrelated lenses: through an imperial policy, the Compact of Free Association (COFA); through an imperial diaspora, the Marshallese diaspora; and through the town of Springdale, Arkansas, a new immigrant destination for Marshall Islanders, which I argue has become a new destination of empire. These three lenses reveal how empire’s interrelated workings—migration, militarization, racialization, labor, detention, capitalism, and the law, among others—inform one another to uphold U.S. imperial power and how U.S. empire both engenders and constrains mobility for its subjects. I argue that COFA status, the visa-free immigration status granted to Marshallese immigrants, is a type of imperial citizenship and that its partial, contingent, and revocable character produces precarity for those who hold it, placing them alongside other groups of imperial citizens from U.S. non-sovereign territories. Due to a lack of awareness of U.S. empire, however, long-term residents in new destinations of empire like Springdale are unable to comprehend Marshall Islanders as imperial citizens. Instead, their interpretations of Marshall Islanders’ presence are woven back into dominant narratives of U.S. exceptionalism. Such interpretations of why COFA status exists exemplify and perpetuate an occlusion of U.S. empire. In Springdale, in other words, the refrain—‘We are here because you were there’, commonly used to explain the presence of imperial migrants elsewhere—was never heard and, thus, never placed in the context of empire

Steal This Tutorial!

Is your information literacy tutorial outdated? Do you wish it were easier to track learning results from your tutorial? Does the idea of fighting with HTML and computer code make you queasy? Come try out PILOT, an information literacy tutorial running on freely available software. It makes creating/editing content, including interactive assessments, easy for even non-techie librarians. Be ready to roll your sleeves up and try it out

Mortality, Population and Community Dynamics of the Glass Sponge Dominated Community “The Forest of the Weird” From the Ridge Seamount, Johnston Atoll, Pacific Ocean

The ecosystem dynamics of benthic communities depend on the relative importance of organism reproductive traits, environmental factors, inter-specific interactions, and mortality processes. The fine-scale community ecology of sessile organisms can be investigated using spatial analyses because the position of the specimens on the substrate (their spatial positions) reflects the biological and ecological processes that they were subject to in-life. Consequently, spatial point process analyses (SPPA) and Bayesian network inference (BNI) can be used to reveal key insights into the ecological dynamics of these deep-sea communities. Here we use these analyses to investigate the ecology of deep-sea glass sponge dominated community “The Forest of the Weird” (2,442 m depth, Ridge Seamount, Johnston Atoll, Pacific Ocean). A 3D reconstruction was made of this community using photogrammetry of video stills taken from high-resolution ROV video. The community was dominated by two genera of Hexactinellids: Farreidae Aspidoscopulia sp. and Euplectellidae Advhena magnifica with octocorals Narella bowersi, Narella macrocalyx, and Rhodaniridogorgia also present in large proportions. SPPA of the dead vs. alive organisms revealed a random distribution of dead amongst the living, showing a non-density dependent cause of death for the majority of taxa. However, in the high-density ridge crest region there was non-random aggregation of dead specimens, revealing density-dependent mortality for Aspidoscopulia. SPPA showed that the glass sponges and octocorals were each most strongly influenced by different underlying processes, and reacted to the environmental conditions differently. The octocorals responded to higher density areas with increased intra-specific competition, whilst the glass-sponges seemed impervious to a doubling of specimen density. BNI found that mutual habitat associations between different taxa resulted in inter-specific competition at larger (2–4 m) spatial scales, with instances of competition at small-spatial scales (<0.75 m) in the higher-density ridge crest section. To our knowledge, this study is the first to analyze the mortality, population and community dynamics of a deep-sea sponge community using SPPA. Our results provide the first insight into the variety of ecological behaviors of these different glass sponges and octocorals, and show how these different organisms have developed diverse responses to the biological and environmental gradients within their habitat

Modeling Circular Urban Metabolism in Santiago de Chile: Waste Tire Management

Cities account for over 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and consume over two-thirds of the world’s energy. With the continued rise of urbanization, 68% by 2050 as projected by the UN, cities must be redesigned to ensure emissions, and the associated negative impacts of climate change, do not also increase proportionately. One framework through which a city’s sustainability can be analyzed is through the lens of urban metabolism; the inflows, use, and outflows of a city’s resources are viewed as analogous to the functions and processes of an organism. To truly become sustainable, city metabolisms must become “circular,” with high quality resources being recirculated and reused throughout the system, thus diminishing the rate of resource exploitation. Through better understanding of a city’s urban metabolism, governments can implement policies targeting the points of the system with the biggest impact and increase their city’s environmental resilience. Our research focus is on Santiago de Chile, Region Metropolitana, and future management of waste tires. Santiago, as a densely populated city experiencing economic growth paired with rising inequality and environmental sustainability challenges, is an ideal testing ground for innovative environmental policies that could be applied elsewhere in urban Latin America. This material flow is particularly topical as it is one of six products covered by the new Ley de Responsibilidad Extendida del Productor (REP), an extended producer liability law that shifts responsibility of a products’ end-of-life phase from the consumer to the producer. REP is a critical area of interest for the Chilean Ministry of the Environment as well as our client, the EARTH Institute at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez. We conduct a Material Flow and Impact Analysis of future tire streams in Santiago. Using this analysis, we compare scenarios for managing end-of-life tires (ELTs) to understand which tire circularity strategies will have the greatest positive environmental, social, and economic impact. We find that promoting ELT management strategies that focus on energyrecovery will best promote environmental sustainability and human health while minimizing consumption of water and fossil fuels. There is a tradeoff as energy recovery is more expensive and has a minimal impact on material circularity compared to a baseline scenario and we discuss a potential impact score through the lens of Chilean environmental policy. We further recommend that both an Advanced Disposal Fee (ADF) and a Deposit Refund System (DRS) are considered as potential economic policy instruments to facilitate ELT collection.Master of ScienceSchool for Environment and SustainabilityUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163335/1/Modeling Circular Urban Metabolism in Santiago de Chile_356.pd

Rapid signaling reactivation after targeted BRAF inhibition predicts the proliferation of individual melanoma cells from an isogenic population

Cancer cells within tumors display a high degree of phenotypic variability. This variability is thought to allow some of the cells to survive and persist after seemingly effective drug treatments. Studies on vemurafenib, a signaling inhibitor that targets an oncogenic BRAF mutation common in melanoma, suggested that cell-to-cell variation in drug resistance, measured by long-term proliferation, originates from epigenetic differences in gene expression that pre-exist treatment. However, it is still unknown whether reactivation of signaling downstream to the inhibited BRAF, thought to be a key step for resistance, is heterogeneous across cells. While previous studies established that signaling reactivation takes place many hours to days after treatment, they monitored reactivation with bulk-population assays unsuitable for detecting cell-to-cell heterogeneity. We hypothesized that signaling reactivation is heterogeneous and is almost instantaneous for a small subpopulation of resistant cells. We tested this hypothesis by monitoring signaling dynamics at a single-cell resolution and observed that despite highly uniform initial inhibition, roughly 15% of cells reactivated signaling within an hour of treatment. Moreover, by tracking cell lineages over multiple days, we established that these cells indeed proliferated more than neighboring cells, thus establishing that rapid signaling reactivation predicts long-term vemurafenib resistance

Utilizing the Cognitive Orientation to Occupational Performance Approach For Improved Performance and Executive Functioning

The Outreach Program (TOP) in the Kent School District assists young adults in their transition from high school to adulthood. The research team and Dr. Abbott, an occupational therapist at TOP, sought to address whether better outcomes when teaching instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) to adolescents with intellectual disabilities occur when addressing underlying performance skills and client factors through the Cognitive Orientation to Occupational Performance (CO-OP) approach or when addressing them through traditional occupational therapy practices. There is strong evidence to support CO-OP as an effective strategy to improve performance and moderate evidence indicating that it improves executive functioning and cognitive flexibility for a variety of diagnoses. We recommend CO-OP be integrated into traditional therapy practices and that additional research is conducted to explore group implementation and include more diagnoses. Student researchers developed and presented an inservice presentation on the use and implementation of CO-OP in the school setting. An opportunity to receive Competency Assessment Units for NBCOT certification renewal through participation in a study group was provided during the inservice presentation to occupational therapists in Kent School District. Outcomes of this presentation were monitored through a survey to gain an understanding of whether the occupational therapists present would consider implementing CO-OP in their everyday practice. The findings suggest that the majority of people who attended the inservice presentation were interested in seeking more information regarding CO-OP without participating in the NBCOT study group. Additional research in the form of a scoping review is recommended in order to investigate what approaches best support developing autonomy and independent problem-solving in adolescents with intellectual disabilities