Fiscal Autonomy: Urban Democracy and the Politics of Public Finance in Dakar, Senegal

This dissertation is an ethnographic investigation into how democratic municipalities in Dakar, Senegal are formed and reformed. The municipal scale of government has long been both a modern norm and a central object of governmental reform throughout the Francophone world. Established in the late 19th century as a colony of France, Dakar is one of the oldest local democracies in Africa and remains today a model of democratic reform for municipal governments across the continent. In 2013, the Senegalese legislature passed what is known colloquially as Act III of decentralization. This national reform legally delegated political and fiscal authority to Senegal’s lowest level of territorial administration—the commune—inaugurating what the law itself referred to as the “complete communalization of the national territory”. Yet far from resolving the problem of communal form, the Act III incited a novel set of experiments in communal authority. This dissertation reveals a broader terrain of democratic politics and reform that is beyond the more familiar domains of law and public debate. I examine the novel set of experimental techniques that have emerged out of critical reflections on the problem of communal form in Dakar. Posing the communal form as contested problem-space, I follow a range of experiments through which diverse actors make sense of how public authority should be distributed across Dakar’s urban terrain. To analyze the politics of this distribution, I develop the concept of municipal state formation: the set of techniques through which sub-national governments take on functions of the sovereign nation and exercise legitimate authority over citizens, populations, publics, and territory. Yet this dissertation does not demonstrate how communes have arrived, once and for all, fully formed—or, as the Senegalese laws describe it, “fully empowered”. Municipal state formation is never complete; it is an ongoing process of experimentation, disagreement, and piecemeal reform. In the wake of Act III, most communal officials articulated a commonly held critique: the laws had devolved new responsibilities, but without the necessary revenues to match. There was, in other words, a persistent mismatch between political and fiscal decentralization. For this reason, I examine fiscal administration as a particularly consequential political terrain in which the problem of communal form took shape in Dakar.This dissertation is organized into five substantive chapters and a conclusion. After introducing the concept of municipal state formation, the second chapter reveals how a French colonial policy of assimilation provided the political conditions for the legal constitution communes in Senegal. But these laws were also formed in relation to a longstanding dispute over the fiscal administration of the communes. The third chapter turns to one such dispute over Dakar’s municipal bond program. Although the program was ultimately sabotaged by the central state, it introduced a novel political terrain into this long-standing dispute over fiscal administration: public financial evaluation. I argue that such evaluations made an appeal to an audience beyond the courts—what I term, a financial public—to assert the City’s claim to municipal authority. The fourth chapter examines a similarly unsuccessful experiment to re-distribute public authority in Dakar. In partnership with a private firm, municipal authorities constructed a commercial center in which to relocate thousands of Dakar’s walking street vendors. The program introduced a familiar form of a neoliberal fiscal contract: the user-fee. However, vendors disagreed with the poor location and high cost of the building, and unequivocally refused to relocate. In this chapter, I argue that this failed neoliberal program provided the conditions under which vendors’ refusal became a possible and effective political act, successfully delimiting when and where municipal authority was legitimately exercised in Dakar.The final chapter returns to a more traditional aspect of public authority: the right to tax. Although Act III supposedly delegated several new local taxes, bureaucrats and officials nevertheless had to experiment with novel techniques of rule to exercise communal authority on the ground. One local commune pushed the limits of communal rights to enforce tax collection by drawing on the mayor’s public reputation for violence. The Mayor’s reputation as an armed murderer with a “flare for the aggressive” shaped how and where street-level bureaucrats collected taxes. Tax collection thus became more than an accounting of the physical landscape: it was a technique of territorial control grounded in a reputation for unlawful violence.This dissertation concludes with a reflection on how the concept of municipal state formation may be extended to cities far from Dakar. To make this comparative case, I briefly analyze the problem of metropolitan fragmentation in St. Louis, Missouri

Sweet syndrome with pulmonary involvement in a patient with myelodysplastic syndrome

We report a patient with Sweet syndrome involving the pulmonary system in the context of myelodysplastic syndrome. Although Sweet syndrome may involve a variety of organ systems, the pulmonary system is rarely affected and can result in poor clinical outcomes, including acute respiratory distress syndrome. Both cutaneous and pulmonary symptoms respond well to systemic corticosteroid therapy and early diagnosis and treatment can improve the prognosis. Our case highlights the importance of collaboration between hematologists, dermatologists, and pulmonologists to facilitate effective diagnosis, triage, and treatment of these patients

The effect of interstitial clusters and vacancies on the STM image of graphite

Making use of the tight-binding Green's function technique, we have calculated the STM images of graphite with surface and sub-surface defects, while taking into account the relaxation of the lattice due to defects. We have demonstrated that two different physical mechanisms may result in the formation of hillocks in the STM images: buckling of the graphite surface due to interstitials between the uppermost graphite layers and the enhancement of the electron density of states close to the Fermi energy on the carbon atoms in the vicinity of vacancies. Our results indicate that small hillocks may originate both from the interstitial clusters and from the vacancies. By contrast, however, large hillocks in excess of 10 \AA~ in diameter can be caused only by interstitial clusters.Comment: Submitted to Surface Scienc

The conformation of conducting polymer chains: Hubbard polymers

The conformational and electronic properties of conducting flexible random and self-avoiding walk polymer chains are under investigation. A Hamiltonian for conjugated flexible polymers is introduced and its physical consequences are presented. One important result is that the electronic degrees of freedom greatly affect the conformational statistics of the walks and vice versa. The electronic degrees of freedom extend the size of the chain. The end-to-end distance behaves as $R\propto L^{\nu}$ with $\nu=(d+1)/(d+2)$, where $d$ is the spatial dimension.Comment: 11 pages of Latex + uuencoded postscript figur

Theory of photoinduced charge transfer in weakly coupled donor-acceptor conjugated polymers: application to an MEH-PPV:CN-PPV pair

In a pair of coupled donor-acceptor conjugated polymer chains, it is possible for an exciton photoexcited on either polymer to decay into a hole in the donor polymer's valence band and an electron in the conduction band of the acceptor polymer. We calculate the corresponding exciton decay rate and its dependence on inter-polymer distance. For a pair of derivatives of poly(phenylene vinylene), PPV, specifically poly[2-methoxy, 5-(2$^\prime$-ethyl-hexyloxy)-1, 4 PPV], MEH-PPV, and poly(2,5-hexyloxy $p$-phenylene cyanovinylene), CN-PPV, at a separation of 6 \AA the characteristic decay time is 2.2 ps, whereas at 4 \AA it is $\sim 50$ fs.Comment: 9 pages, RevTeX, 4 PS files, to be published in a special issue of Chem. Phy

Enfoque histórico de las técnicas gráficas

A través de una rápida mirada retrospectiva se puede ver que las técnicas gráficas fueron evaluadas desde un enfoque proyectivo gracias a los aportes de Sophie Morgenstern, Anna Freud y Melanie Klein quienes en su labor terapéutica con niños descubrieron que estos a través de sus dibujos, no solo expresaban sus conflictos, sino también las modificaciones que en ellos se operaban en virtud de la acción terapéutica. De lo dicho anteriormente se desprende que no siempre los dibujos fueron evaluados como expresión de la personalidad total, por eso consideramos necesaria una breve reseña histórica, ya que esta nos mostrará como en sus comienzos las técnicas gráficas eran interpretadas como pruebas de madurez mental. (Párrafo extraído del texto a modo de resumen)Departamento de Psicologí

Escenas desplegadas en la discursiva frente a la lamina CG del TRO

Consideramos que desde una perspectiva psicosocial, determinadas Láminas del Test de Relaciones Objetales pueden brindarnos información acerca de la vigencia del contenido de las historias otorgado mayoritariamente a las mismas por Siquier de Ocampo y colab. y R. Frank de Verthelyi, entre otros. Las difíciles situaciones por las que atravesamos como consecuencia de los cambios socioculturales que hicieron eclosión a partir del año 2001, nos llevaron a reflexionar si el TRO podría ser un instrumento apto, dada su alta saturación proyectiva, para explorar el malestar social actual con el que aún convivimos a diario los argentinos. Esta reflexión cobró cuerpo a través del Departamento de Investigaciones de la Universidad de Ciencias Empresariales y Sociales (UCES), el cual propició que el estudio exploratorio del cual hoy presentamos un recorte, fuera posible, dando lugar a una investigación, aún en curso denominada: Indicadores del Malestar Colectivo en el momento actual a través del Test de Relaciones Objetales de H. Phillipson. El punto de partida y motor de esta exposición, surgió del siguiente interrogante: ¿Por qué frecuentemente los relatos no coincidían con el clishé esperado para la Lámina CG? Por lo tanto, será el objetivo de este trabajo mostrar la diferencia del contenido otorgado frente a la Lámina CG, a través del análisis del Eje Discursivo.Eje temático: Técnicas y Procesos de Evaluación PsicológicaFacultad de Psicologí

Escenas desplegadas en la discursiva frente a la lamina CG del TRO

Consideramos que desde una perspectiva psicosocial, determinadas Láminas del Test de Relaciones Objetales pueden brindarnos información acerca de la vigencia del contenido de las historias otorgado mayoritariamente a las mismas por Siquier de Ocampo y colab. y R. Frank de Verthelyi, entre otros. Las difíciles situaciones por las que atravesamos como consecuencia de los cambios socioculturales que hicieron eclosión a partir del año 2001, nos llevaron a reflexionar si el TRO podría ser un instrumento apto, dada su alta saturación proyectiva, para explorar el malestar social actual con el que aún convivimos a diario los argentinos. Esta reflexión cobró cuerpo a través del Departamento de Investigaciones de la Universidad de Ciencias Empresariales y Sociales (UCES), el cual propició que el estudio exploratorio del cual hoy presentamos un recorte, fuera posible, dando lugar a una investigación, aún en curso denominada: Indicadores del Malestar Colectivo en el momento actual a través del Test de Relaciones Objetales de H. Phillipson. El punto de partida y motor de esta exposición, surgió del siguiente interrogante: ¿Por qué frecuentemente los relatos no coincidían con el clishé esperado para la Lámina CG? Por lo tanto, será el objetivo de este trabajo mostrar la diferencia del contenido otorgado frente a la Lámina CG, a través del análisis del Eje Discursivo.Eje temático: Técnicas y Procesos de Evaluación PsicológicaFacultad de Psicologí

Grupo de orientación de padres

La importancia de los padres tanto en el mundo interno como en el mundo externo de los hijos es indiscutible. Se podrá cuestionar en que momento evolutivo aparece la figura del padre; esto variara de acuerdo al marco referencial teórico en el que nos movamos, pero desde Freud hasta nuestro días la existencia de las figuras parentales han cobrado una importancia fundamental para la vida emocional del niño. (Párrafo extraído del texto a modo de resumen)Departamento de Psicologí