Narrative and Belonging: The Politics of Ambiguity, The Jewish State, and the Thought of Edward Said and Hannah Arendt

At the core of this thesis, I examine the difficulties of giving an account of oneself in modern associational life. By integrating the theory and political activism of both Edward Said and Hannah Arendt, I follow the Zionist response to European antisemitism and the Palestinian responses to Jewish settler colonialism. Both parties struggle against their ambiguous presence within local and regional hegemonic social taxonomy, and within the world order. Contemporarily, this struggle takes place in the protracted conflict between Israeli and local Arab groups, which has been managed through violence and objectification, as opposed to allowing the dynamism and reconfiguration of political subjectivities. In their later writings, Arendt and Said respond to the violence and resentment that arises from the form of the nation-state by prescribing, and arguably practicing, an understanding of politics where the “other” is constitutive of the “self.” By seeing this relation of alternity as the contemporary heir to diasporic Judaism and Jewish cosmopolitanism, I argue that this project holds the historical traction to reinvigorate the future beyond static and growing violence and dispossession

The Meme as Post-Political Communication Form: A Semiotic Analysis

The 2016 American Presidential Election was a point of great upheaval in the consciousness of many. To many it signified the defeat of the previous global liberal paradigm and a weakening of the traditional ways in which we organize ourselves politically and socially. While most of culture undergoes mediation through the internet- political processes are no exception. This paper aims to analyze how modern political discourses and organizing occur online, and how often politics occurs at the level of memetic communications. The analysis hinges upon studying the history of political memes such as Pepe and the relationship between the news and politics. But it ultimately culminates with the relationship between performing authenticity on the political field and subcultural signifiers such as memes

Decision trees, monotone functions, and semimatroids

We define decision trees for monotone functions on a simplicial complex. We define homology decidability of monotone functions, and show that various monotone functions related to semimatroids are homology decidable. Homology decidability is a generalization of semi-nonevasiveness, a notion due to Jonsson. The motivating example is the complex of bipartite graphs, whose Betti numbers are unknown in general. We show that these monotone functions have optimum decision trees, from which we can compute relative Betti numbers of related pairs of simplicial complexes. Moreover, these relative Betti numbers are coefficients of evaluations of the Tutte polynomial, and every semimatroid collapses onto its broken circuit complex.Comment: 16 page

Dynamics of Marriage: Love, Sex, and Growth from a Christian Perspective

Reviewed Book: Dominian, Jack. Dynamics of Marriage: Love, Sex, and Growth from a Christian Perspective. Mystic, Conn: Twenty-Third Publications, 1993

Organizing Schools to Improve Student Achievement: Start Times, Grade Configurations, and Teacher Assignments

Education reform proposals are often based on high-profile or dramatic policy changes, many of which are expensive, politically controversial, or both. In this paper, we argue that the debates over these "flashy" policies have obscured a potentially important direction for raising student performance -- namely, reforms to the management or organization of schools. By making sure the "trains run on time" and focusing on the day-to-day decisions involved in managing the instructional process, school and district administrators may be able to substantially increase student learning at modest cost.In this paper, we describe three organizational reforms that recent evidence suggests have the potential to increase K -- 12 student performance at modest costs: (1) Starting school later in the day for middle and high school students; (2) Shifting from a system with separate elementary and middle schools to one with schools that serve students in kindergarten through grade eight; (3) Managing teacher assignments with an eye toward maximizing student achievement (e.g. allowing teachers to gain experience by teaching the same grade level for multiple years or having teachers specializing in the subject where they appear most effective). We conservatively estimate that the ratio of benefits to costs is 9 to 1 for later school start times and 40 to 1 for middle school reform. A precise benefit-cost calculation is not feasible for the set of teacher assignment reforms we describe, but we argue that the cost of such proposals is likely to be quite small relative to the benefits for students. While we recognize that these specific reforms may not be appropriate or feasible for every district, we encourage school, district, and state education leaders to make the management, organization, and operation of schools a more prominent part of the conversation on how to raise student achievement