Recognizing Race: The Impact of Twentieth-Century Feminist Movements on Race Relations in West Germany

After World War II, many West German women had a difficult time coming to terms with the atrocities that the National Socialist leadership committed during that war, as well as their own participation in the Party. Discussions of the roles of women within twentieth-century society began to grow in West Germany as the new women’s movement (die Neue Fraenbewegung) emerged from 1960s student protests. This movement included primarily middle-class white German women. They often dismissed their participation in Party racism by framing themselves as victims of a patriarchal regime. As German women discussed these matters, they ignored the race issues that existed within their own society. As an increase in racial tension spread throughout West Germany in the 1980s, Black German women faced both gendered and racial discrimination. It was during this time that these women unified and asserted their presence in Germany through the creation of the Afro-German feminist movement. Much of the historiography surrounding the Afro-German feminist movement focuses on the significant impact it had on the ability of Afro-German women to establish a collective identity. This thesis, however, will add to this historiography by looking at the ways in which the Afro-German feminist movement interacted with the new women’s movement in West Germany and how it influenced greater discussions of race and issues of racism among white feminists

Witnessing and the Gaze in Barbusse’s Hell

Stripped down to its most basic plot summary, the premise of Henri Barbusse’s 1908 novel Hell, or L’enfer, sounds like the plot of a cheap porno: a man discovers a peep hole in his hotel room and proceeds to spy on the private lives of the people next door. Indeed, the novel obsesses over the erotic; yet, this obsession is often just as unsensual as it is pleasurable, as descriptions of sex become increasingly disillusioning, and the characters, unsatisfied. Moreover, the narrator does not spy on others for a strictly sexual thrill, but because he believes seeing people as they truly are in their private lives is the only way to come to an understanding of human nature. As the novel progresses, his fixation on discovering the truth increases, and he becomes so consumed with watching others that he eventually loses his job because he cannot tear himself away from his hole in the wall. The narrator frequently describes himself as a truth seeker or a witness, a description that most scholarship takes at face-value. Although this scholarship does explore the concept of witnessing in the novel, it always does so with the assumption that narrator is, in fact, a witness. In this paper, I want to challenge this assumption. I argue that even though the narrator claims to bear witness to the human condition, he never achieves this goal of becoming a true witness

Security Blankets: The Art of Maladaptation

In times of stress or trauma, each person has their own means of coping. There are countless ways to deal with stressors in a positive way, such as journaling, problem solving, or meditation. However, many distressed individuals turn to negative, or maladaptive, coping mechanisms. These are behaviors which seem to help ease distress in the moment, but prove to have negative consequences. While they vary greatly, some common maladaptive coping mechanisms include substance and tobacco use, self-harm, disordered eating, violence, and isolation. This project aims to shed light on the subject of maladaptive coping mechanisms, as it is an increasingly wide-spread issue all over the world. Each image is accompanied by quotations from the subjects, which offer some insight into the mind of a person dealing with these behaviors. The goal is to express the individuality and unique value of each of subject. People who struggle with behavioral psychoses are often reduced to their vices while their character is disregarded. By creating a series of portraits from case studies of real people shouldering the stigma of these behaviors, I hope to facilitate a dialogue about the prevalence of these issues and the judgements we tend to make towards them

Marjorie Stobaugh in a Junior Soprano Recital

This is the program for the junior soprano recital of Marjorie Stobaugh, accompanied by pianist, Ronald Lewis. The recital was held on February 23, 1967, in Mitchell Hall

Predicting Gender and Political Affiliation Using Mobile Payment Data

We explore the understudied area of social payments to evaluate whether or not we can predict the gender and political affiliation of Venmo users based on the content of their Venmo transactions. Latent attribute detection has been successfully applied in the domain of studying social media. However, there remains a dearth of previous work using data other than Twitter. There is also a continued need for studies which explore mobile payments spaces like Venmo, which remain understudied due to the lack of data access. We hypothesize that using methods similar to latent attribute analysis with Twitter data, machine learning algorithms will be able to predict gender and political affiliation of Venmo users with a moderate degree of accuracy. We collected crowdsourced training data that correlates participants' political views with their public Venmo transaction history through the paid Prolific service. Additionally, we collected 21 million public Venmo transactions from recently active users to use for gender classification. We then ran the collected data through a TF-IDF vectorizer and used that to train a support vector machine (SVM). After hyperparameter training and additional feature engineering, we were able to predict user's gender with a high level of accuracy (.91) and had modest success predicting user's political orientation (.63).Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Marjorie Stobaugh in a Senior Soprano Recital

This is the program for the senior soprano recital of Marjorie Stobaugh, accompanied by pianist, David Glaze, and violinist, Helen Lyon. The recital was held on February 27, 1968, in Mitchell Hall

Strategies for Differential Proteomic Analysis by Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry

As the field of proteomics has evolved, the analytical techniques used in this field of research has also evolved, transitioning from primarily gel-based techniques to separations based on liquid chromatography. Enzymatic digestion is often a first step for comprehensive analysis, known as bottom-up proteomics, but this comes at a cost of greatly increasing the sample complexity. Analysis of intact proteins, or top-down proteomics, is not without difficulties either as both the chromatography and mass spectrometry are more challenging. Various single and multidimensional techniques have been used to increase the peak capacity for bottom-up approaches, as, for the time being, they appear better suited for comprehensive proteomic analyses. The focus of Chapter 2 is determining what is possible given commercial instrumentation and common analytical methods for a bottom-up analysis. A single- and multidimensional separation were compared in the analysis of differentially grown yeast samples. These same samples were used in Chapter 3 in a pre-fractionation approach in which the intact protein samples were fractionated, then digested. The digested fractions were then analyzed by LC/MS to determine protein identity and relative abundance. The work presented in Chapter 5 relies on the methods developed in Chapter 3 in the differential proteomic analysis of a beta-arrestin 1,2 double-knockout. Lastly, in an effort to increase the number of protein identifications without substantially increasing analysis time, new instrumentation was designed to facilitate chromatography at pressures not attainable with commercial instrumentation. This was the focus of Chapter 4 where a nanoAcquity UPLC was modified for XUPLC operation, allowing for an increase in backpressure from 10,000 psi to 40,000 psi. With the increase in back pressure, columns with more efficiency either through smaller particle diameters or increased length could be used in the analysis of peptide samples.Doctor of Philosoph

Household-level factors associated with relapse following discharge from treatment for moderate acute malnutrition

AbstractFactors associated with relapse among children who are discharged after reaching a threshold denoted ‘recovered’ from moderate acute malnutrition (MAM) are not well understood. The aim of this study was to identify factors associated with sustained recovery, defined as maintaining a mid-upper-arm circumference≥12·5 cm for 1 year after release from treatment. On the basis of an observational study design, we analysed data from an in-depth household (HH) survey on a sub-sample of participants within a larger cluster randomised controlled trial (cRCT) that followed up children for 1 year after recovery from MAM. Out of 1497 children participating in the cRCT, a subset of 315 children participated in this sub-study. Accounting for other factors, HH with fitted lids on water storage containers (P=0·004) was a significant predictor of sustained recovery. In addition, sustained recovery was better among children whose caregivers were observed to have clean hands (P=0·053) and in HH using an improved sanitation facility (P=0·083). By contrast, socio-economic status and infant and young child feeding practices at the time of discharge and HH food security throughout the follow-up period were not significant. Given these results, we hypothesise that improved water, sanitation and hygiene conditions in tandem with management of MAM through supplemental feeding programmes have the possibility to decrease relapse following recovery from MAM. Furthermore, the absence of associations between relapse and nearly all HH-level factors indicates that the causal factors of relapse may be related mostly to the child’s individual, underlying health and nutrition status.</jats:p

Transport and Metabolism of Opioid Peptides across BeWo Cells, An In Vitro Model of the Placental Barrier

Please note that this is an author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication following peer review. The publisher version is available on its site.In keeping with the advance of biotechnology, cell culture becomes an important tool for investigating the transport and the metabolism phenomena. A cell line of human origin, the BeWo choriocarcinoma cell line, was used for the study of the transport and metabolism of opioid peptides across the in vitro model of the placental barrier. Opioid peptides, both naturally occurring and their synthetic analogs, are of interest to be developed as potent analgesics and were included in this study. The apparent permeability coefficients of the peptides containing 4 to 11 amino acid or analog residues were in the range of 0.23-14.60 x 10-5 cm/sec. The apparent permeability coefficients of these peptides were comparable to those of sucrose or dextrans, hydrophilic markers. Molecular weight and size of the peptides were inversely correlated to the permeability across the BeWo monolayers. Lipophilicity and charges of the peptides were also investigated and found to be the minor factors regulating the extent of peptide permeation. Contrasting to the transport of DPDPE peptide analog across the blood-brain barrier, the transport of DPDPE across the BeWo monolayers were not found to be via carrier-mediated transport. The major transport pathway of the opioid peptides across the BeWo monolayers was found to be via paracellular route. In metabolism studies, aminopeptidase was found to be a major enzyme type responsible for the degradation of naturally occurring peptides but not for the synthetic analogues. The finding obtained from the present study reveal the applicability of the BeWo cell line to be used as the in vitro cell culture model for the transport and metabolism screening of the opioid peptides