We Are One: Singing, Sisterhood, and Solidarity in Appleton-Area Women\u27s Choirs

Despite its relatively small population, the city of Appleton has a large and thriving women’s choir community. Between the Lawrence Academy of Music Girl Choir, which serves hundreds of girls every year, and Cantala, the women’s choir at Lawrence University, opportunities for involvement in nationally-recognized female-voice ensembles range from second grade all the way through to college graduation. Using the theories of Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler, Green, and Bentham, this project explores the women’s choir culture of Appleton in an attempt to discover the core values of these two influential programs. I accomplished this by conducting ethnographic research in the form of interviews and surveys as well as completing analysis of existing literature. At the end of my research, I determined that there are three key areas that have defined the success of each program: the ways in which community and intimate relationships are fostered, the performance of challenging and meaningful repertoire, and the empowerment of singers. These programs encourage young women to “find their voices” by breaking, discarding, reclaiming, and subverting stereotypes associated with women and women’s choirs

Introduction:Structuralists of the world unite

Supplementary Table S3: Temporally significant metabolites from DMSO treatment as determined by t-test, p<0.05. These tables include all metabolites that were significantly changing from DMSO control treatment between A) 0.5 – 1 h (72 metabolites), B) 0.5 – 4 h (76 metabolites), and C) 1 - 4 h (25 metabolites). Metabolites were included in this table if annotated with either KEGGID or HMDBID. Tables include compound name, KEGGID (if applicable), HMDBID (if applicable), and p-value from t-test (methods described above)

Metabolite-related dietary patterns and the development of islet autoimmunity

The role of diet in type 1 diabetes development is poorly understood. Metabolites, which reflect dietary response, may help elucidate this role. We explored metabolomics and lipidomics differences between 352 cases of islet autoimmunity (IA) and controls in the TEDDY (The Environmental Determinants of Diabetes in theYoung) study. We created dietary patterns reflecting pre-IA metabolite differences between groups and examined their association with IA. Secondary outcomes included IA cases positive for multiple autoantibodies (mAb+). The association of 853 plasma metabolites with outcomes was tested at seroconversion to IA, just prior to seroconversion, and during infancy. Key compounds in enriched metabolite sets were used to create dietary patterns reflecting metabolite composition, which were then tested for association with outcomes in the nested case-control subset and the full TEDDY cohort. Unsaturated phosphatidylcholines, sphingomyelins, phosphatidylethanolamines, glucosylceramides, and phospholipid ethers in infancy were inversely associated with mAb+ risk, while dicarboxylic acids were associated with an increased risk. An infancy dietary pattern representing higher levels of unsaturated phosphatidylcholines and phospholipid ethers, and lower sphingomyelins was protective for mAb+ in the nested case-control study only. Characterization of this high-risk infant metabolomics profile may help shape the future of early diagnosis or prevention efforts

Metabolite-related dietary patterns and the development of islet autoimmunity

The role of diet in type 1 diabetes development is poorly understood. Metabolites, which reflect dietary response, may help elucidate this role. We explored metabolomics and lipidomics differences between 352 cases of islet autoimmunity (IA) and controls in the TEDDY (The Environmental Determinants of Diabetes in theYoung) study. We created dietary patterns reflecting pre-IA metabolite differences between groups and examined their association with IA. Secondary outcomes included IA cases positive for multiple autoantibodies (mAb+). The association of 853 plasma metabolites with outcomes was tested at seroconversion to IA, just prior to seroconversion, and during infancy. Key compounds in enriched metabolite sets were used to create dietary patterns reflecting metabolite composition, which were then tested for association with outcomes in the nested case-control subset and the full TEDDY cohort. Unsaturated phosphatidylcholines, sphingomyelins, phosphatidylethanolamines, glucosylceramides, and phospholipid ethers in infancy were inversely associated with mAb+ risk, while dicarboxylic acids were associated with an increased risk. An infancy dietary pattern representing higher levels of unsaturated phosphatidylcholines and phospholipid ethers, and lower sphingomyelins was protective for mAb+ in the nested case-control study only. Characterization of this high-risk infant metabolomics profile may help shape the future of early diagnosis or prevention efforts

Metabolite-related dietary patterns and the development of islet autoimmunity

The role of diet in type 1 diabetes development is poorly understood. Metabolites, which reflect dietary response, may help elucidate this role. We explored metabolomics and lipidomics differences between 352 cases of islet autoimmunity (IA) and controls in the TEDDY (The Environmental Determinants of Diabetes in theYoung) study. We created dietary patterns reflecting pre-IA metabolite differences between groups and examined their association with IA. Secondary outcomes included IA cases positive for multiple autoantibodies (mAb+). The association of 853 plasma metabolites with outcomes was tested at seroconversion to IA, just prior to seroconversion, and during infancy. Key compounds in enriched metabolite sets were used to create dietary patterns reflecting metabolite composition, which were then tested for association with outcomes in the nested case-control subset and the full TEDDY cohort. Unsaturated phosphatidylcholines, sphingomyelins, phosphatidylethanolamines, glucosylceramides, and phospholipid ethers in infancy were inversely associated with mAb+ risk, while dicarboxylic acids were associated with an increased risk. An infancy dietary pattern representing higher levels of unsaturated phosphatidylcholines and phospholipid ethers, and lower sphingomyelins was protective for mAb+ in the nested case-control study only. Characterization of this high-risk infant metabolomics profile may help shape the future of early diagnosis or prevention efforts

Vanderll/TIPRA_baseline: v1.0

Data and code used for Nature publication titled "Multifaceted Immune Dysregulation in Potentially Modifiable Pathways Characterizes Individuals At-Risk for Rheumatoid Arthritis

Hearing Hoofbeats: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Interspecies Musical Encounters

In this thesis, I explore the sonic interactions between humans and horses that take place in the many sporting and leisure events that rely on the presence of music and media as part of the web of connection between actors. To accomplish this, I bring together literature from a wide variety of fields to argue that analyzing and understanding interspecies musical encounters requires a flexible, interdisciplinary approach to theory and methodology that more deeply accounts for animal agency, sentience, and individuality. Many scholars have suggested that music is not a solely human endeavor, but rather one that has tangible, felt effects on many life forms beyond the human. Despite this acknowledgement, there is a dearth of studies that deal in the specifics of human-animal interactions within musical contexts. This is partially because no single discipline’s methods can successfully encompass what it is like to live as a member of another species, rendering non-human existence fundamentally unknowable and therefore difficult to engage with analytically. However, this thesis attempts to offer a solution to this problem by arguing that using the shared, embodied, thinking activity of music as a starting point for case-specific interdisciplinary combinations of methods and theories can allow scholars to more rigorously, ethically, and comprehensively engage with non-human agents in interspecies encounters. Ethnomusicology in particular offers an excellent starting point for this engagement because of the field’s emphasis on music as a social practice situated in specific contexts and relationships. Analysis of literature stemming from anthropology, sociology, sports studies, media studies, voice studies, biology, and cognitive science reveals three core themes that drive my research questions: first, the idea that interspecies research is fraught with a particular set of ethical dilemmas that emerge when non-human agents are involved. How might we conduct research that promises to do no harm when we cannot truly know what harm means to others? What are our ethical responsibilities to our animal interlocutors and partners, and how do we fulfill them? Second, closely tied to considerations of ethics is the profound impact that interspecies relationships and musical relationships have on the physical bodies of those who participate in them. This refers not only to the physical toll that research and fieldwork takes on the body of the researcher, but the physiological imprints that horseback riding in particular has on riders and horses alike. Music, too, is tied up in this idea of shared bodily impact; in sports like dressage, the rider disciplines the horse’s body into synchronization with the music that undergirds their performance, creating the illusion of a fluid and collaborative dance. But do animals really understand and hear humanly-defined music as something different than speech or communication? If we cannot ever know for sure whether or not they do understand, how can we claim to undertake research that accounts for non-human cognition? Third, the questions raised by considering cognition and the body lead us to trouble any clear division between music, sound, and language. Literature from anthropology, voice studies, and music cognition all complicate the idea that these categories are strictly bounded, and suggest that in the unknowability of non-human sentience our conceptions of music and language might even be moot when it comes to animal communication. Studies of birds, dolphins, bats, and whales have pushed biologists and music scholars to radically re-consider what they believe music to be and do, and turning to less obviously musical animals like horses holds the potential to further complicate and break down these conventions. But what is the value of this kind of inquiry? If we broaden our definitions of music and musicking to account for non-human participation, what will become of music scholars? These questions are addressed in this thesis through the convergence of disparate fields of literature. By bringing into conversation these disciplines that seldom meet, a more clear picture of what ethical, rigorous, musical interspecies research might look like begins to emerge

Sounding the American West: Nostalgia, Patriotism, and National Identity in Rodeo’s Musical Landscape

In this dissertation, I utilize a mixed-methods approach consisting of ethnographic research, archival and historical work, media analysis, and virtual fieldwork to lay out the constellation of music, media, identity, and sport that defines rodeo in the twenty-first century. To accomplish this, I first outline a brief musical history of rodeo, beginning with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows and ending with the present day, the first compilation of rodeo’s musical history in print to date. I discuss the foundational relationship between rodeo and popular music that began with Wild West shows and continued throughout the twentieth century. This history reveals both a reliance on nostalgic whiteness as a foundational identity marker for audiences and the prevalence of military and hyper-patriotic influence in rodeo’s inception as a sport. I further argue that the rodeo cowboy, increasingly the only “real” cowboy left in the United States as the proverbial frontier continued to disappear in the twentieth century, came to represent this nexus of influences and sentiments, both in the rodeo contest and in the music accompanying it. I also argue that country music, the genre most consistently associated with rodeo through its history, plays a particularly important part in how that identity has been constructed and maintained.I also undertake a close analysis of the 2020 National Finals Rodeo as the central case study in this dissertation. Using a selection of the opening ceremonies, I argue that these rodeo rituals work to define a specific iteration of cowboy—and, by extension, American—identity that is rooted in patriotism and a willingness to act to protect (or use) individual or national freedoms. This is accomplished through visually collapsing the distinction between cowboy and soldier in rodeo media during opening ceremonies, and through the deployment of differing styles of music to incorporate audiences into the spectacle of the rodeo. The overlapping values and audiences between rodeo and country make this ritual legible for participants, and both spheres’ histories of patriotism and invisible, nostalgic whiteness link them together in a shared performance of the Old West that stakes a claim to a particular iteration of cowboy identity as the most authentic. I further trace this thread of performativity in my final chapter to examine how the figure of the rodeo cowboy has continued to circulate in popular music more broadly, both affirming and contesting the rodeo cowboy’s cultural relevance. To accomplish this, I discuss the subgenre I call rodeo country alongside recent manifestations of the Black West, known as the “Yeehaw Agenda,” in popular music (Malandro 2018). I analyze multiple case studies to discuss how the symbols and trappings of cowboy identity are utilized by artists in both country and non-country genres to varying effects. Both types of performance serve to give us insight into how the cowboy figure maintains its relevance in the twenty-first century, and what alternative sets of values might be poised to infiltrate the sacred space of rodeo in the years to come

Whole brain and brain regional coexpression network interactions associated with predisposition to alcohol consumption.

To identify brain transcriptional networks that may predispose an animal to consume alcohol, we used weighted gene coexpression network analysis (WGCNA). Candidate coexpression modules are those with an eigengene expression level that correlates significantly with the level of alcohol consumption across a panel of BXD recombinant inbred mouse strains, and that share a genomic region that regulates the module transcript expression levels (mQTL) with a genomic region that regulates alcohol consumption (bQTL). To address a controversy regarding utility of gene expression profiles from whole brain, vs specific brain regions, as indicators of the relationship of gene expression to phenotype, we compared candidate coexpression modules from whole brain gene expression data (gathered with Affymetrix 430 v2 arrays in the Colorado laboratories) and from gene expression data from 6 brain regions (nucleus accumbens (NA); prefrontal cortex (PFC); ventral tegmental area (VTA); striatum (ST); hippocampus (HP); cerebellum (CB)) available from GeneNetwork. The candidate modules were used to construct candidate eigengene networks across brain regions, resulting in three "meta-modules", composed of candidate modules from two or more brain regions (NA, PFC, ST, VTA) and whole brain. To mitigate the potential influence of chromosomal location of transcripts and cis-eQTLs in linkage disequilibrium, we calculated a semi-partial correlation of the transcripts in the meta-modules with alcohol consumption conditional on the transcripts' cis-eQTLs. The function of transcripts that retained the correlation with the phenotype after correction for the strong genetic influence, implicates processes of protein metabolism in the ER and Golgi as influencing susceptibility to variation in alcohol consumption. Integration of these data with human GWAS provides further information on the function of polymorphisms associated with alcohol-related traits