the radical potential of queer nature’s presence on instagram: queer and “decolonially-informed” stories of more-than-human solidarities

Queer Nature is a nature-connection project in service of the queer community and their allies. Queer Nature was launched in 2016 by Altai, Pinar, and So Sinopoulos-Lloyd on Arapaho, Ute, and Cheyenne territories (Boulder Country, Colorado). They offer sliding scale workshops and ‘wilderness’ immersions that facilitate multispecies relationship-building and access to ancestral skills while bringing awareness to Indigenous and settler colonial histories. In parallel to these activities, the Queer Nature co-founders regularly share photographs and stories on the corporate social media platform Instagram. Now followed by more than 14,000 people online, this artistic, activist, and scholarly project is representative of the ways that systematically marginalized communities can use social media as a means for community building and circulating ideas and practices. The market-driven nature of online networking services and the financial interests that dictate them mean that platforms such as Instagram are constantly changing. The infrastructures that support these services are, further, fragile and vulnerable, particularly with regard to the crisis of climate change. With these considerations in mind, this thesis creates a space in which Queer Nature's online artistic practice is given a careful, critical contextualization as both participating in queer visual culture and contributing to a “futurist” sensibility. Grounded in photographic visual analysis, this thesis investigates the radical potential of Queer Nature’s images, and their circulation, in a time of great uncertainty. The context of this work is both political, in that attacks against queer and racialized communities have not ceased, and environmental, in that the dramatic loss of biodiversity and the rapid rise of sea levels have the most profound impact on the most vulnerable populations

Price as a Stimulus to Think: The Case for Willful Overpricing

Abstract Consumers aware of a new benefit will often experience uncertainty about its personal relevance or usage value. This paper shows that the decision to deliberate further to resolve this uncertainty and reach a polarized judgment of personal relevance critically depends on the posted price. In particular, a price above the consumer's initial willingness to pay might be thought provoking and enhance the perception of relevance with a certain probability. This behavioral mechanism is introduced formally and by way of an experiment with reference to the purchase of organic lettuce and fair-trade coffee. Accounting for the effect of price as a stimulus to think, a monopolistic firm should either over-price ("transgressive pricing") or under-price ("regressive pricing") in comparison to the consumer's willingness to pay. Under certain circumstances, the firm should also empower consumers with means that reduce the effort of deliberation

The Effects of Sensitization and Habituation in Durable Goods Markets

We develop a model to study the impact of changes in price sensitivity on the firm as it introduces multiple generations of a durable product where unit costs are a convex function of quality. We incorporate the psychological processes of sensitization and habituation into a model of discretionary purchasing of replacement products motivated by past experience. When price sensitivity decreases with each purchase (sensitization), the myopic firm offers a higher quality product at a much higher price with each generation. When price sensitivity increases with each purchase (habituation), the myopic firm engages in price skimming. When sensitization is followed by habituation, the myopic firm eventually provides higher quality than the market is willing to pay for, leading to a steep drop-off in sales and profits. The actions of the forward-looking firm depend on the discount rate. A firm with a low discount rate builds its customer base before offering a higher quality and higher priced product. In contrast, a firm with a high discount rate quickly increases price and quality following the same path to falling profits of the myopic firm. These results provide insight into the firm and consumer behaviors underlying the phenomenon of 'performance oversupply' identified in the innovation literature

Elp3-mediated codon-dependent translation promotes mTORC2 activation and regulates macrophage polarization.

peer reviewedMacrophage polarization is a process whereby macrophages acquire distinct effector states (M1 or M2) to carry out multiple and sometimes opposite functions. We show here that translational reprogramming occurs during macrophage polarization and that this relies on the Elongator complex subunit Elp3, an enzyme that modifies the wobble uridine base U34 in cytosolic tRNAs. Elp3 expression is downregulated by classical M1-activating signals in myeloid cells, where it limits the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines via FoxO1 phosphorylation, and attenuates experimental colitis in mice. In contrast, alternative M2-activating signals upregulate Elp3 expression through a PI3K- and STAT6-dependent signaling pathway. The metabolic reprogramming linked to M2 macrophage polarization relies on Elp3 and the translation of multiple candidates, including the mitochondrial ribosome large subunit proteins Mrpl3, Mrpl13, and Mrpl47. By promoting translation of its activator Ric8b in a codon-dependent manner, Elp3 also regulates mTORC2 activation. Elp3 expression in myeloid cells further promotes Wnt-driven tumor initiation in the intestine by maintaining a pool of tumor-associated macrophages exhibiting M2 features. Collectively, our data establish a functional link between tRNA modifications, mTORC2 activation, and macrophage polarization