The Crossroads We Make: Intergenerational Trauma and Reparative Reading in Recent Asian American Memoirs (2018-2022)

This project extends reparative reading practices to recent Asian American memoirs, specifically trauma memoirs from the past five years (2018-2022) that detail personal trauma and communal, intergenerational trauma. Reparative reading is explored within five memoirs: Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know (2022), Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (2019), Phuc Tran’s Sigh, Gone (2020), Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings (2020), and Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know (2018). In considering the reparative turn in Asian American memoirs, this thesis draws on and extends Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reparative frameworks and bell hooks’ theories on pedagogy and love. A critical analysis of self-writings through pre-existing reparative reading models alongside traditional Asian American scholarship on racial melancholia resists the monopolistic dominance of overwhelming negative affects (such as shame, guilt, and anger) that saturate Asian American lives and life-writing. Instead, this alternative interpretative practice exposes how authors seek love, pleasure, and positivity within their texts and within their own lives, while also exploring the methods through which the memoirists themselves embody the reparative in writing and self-analysis. Thus, shaping the reparative turn for Asian America illuminates the productive ways reshaped methods of writing and criticism, and its resultant ethics of living, can push back against lived racial oppression and pain as well as decades of cultural erasure and intergenerational trauma. This varied engagement with love-based and reparative frameworks allows Asian American authors to begin healing from trauma, and this is evidenced through non-traditional psychiatric healing methods, literary methods, and strategies of communal formation

Numerical Simulation of AFP Nip Point Temperature Prediction for Complex Geometries

Material placement at the ideal nip point temperature over complex surfaces with uniformity across the width of the compaction rollers results in optimized part properties for Automated Fiber Placement (AFP) processes. However, current AFP systems utilize heat control models and methodologies, based on multiple process parameters such as feed-rate and orientation, that are mostly open-loop. Here, infrared (IR) heater input is calibrated as a function of process parameters during machine qualification. This work presents a numerical simulation to predict arrayed-infrared (AIR) emitter radiation onto a substrate that includes view factor implementation, IR radiative heat flow calculation, energy rate balance, and a transient heat transfer model. The purpose of this numerical model is to predict nip point temperature on complex surfaces, serving as a baseline for a new arrayed-infrared (AIR) thermoset heater to improve AFP process control. It is anticipated that this simulation will accurately control the temperature for high-speed AFP layup of complex geometries. An anticipated result of an AIR heater system is that material calibration and testing will be reduced as temperature is instantaneously monitored and controlled. Therefore, temperature across the roller width will be uniform during placement of complex parts, independent of their geometry

Imagining the role of the student in society : ideas of British higher education policy and pedagogy 1957-1972

Today, the 1960s are fondly remembered as a time when higher education in Britain was understood as a public good. University was free for students, paid for by the state. This expenditure was to provide equality of opportunity, especially for those of lower classes and women. Since the 1990s by contrast, higher education has been based on a marketised funding regime. Self-interested students choose to purchase useful ‘skills’ from higher education providers in order to earn higher wages in the future. Much of the existing historical literature sharply distinguishes this ‘neoliberal’ era from the ‘social democratic’ era of the 1960s. The historiography of post-war Britain increasingly challenges such ‘rise-and-fall’ narratives of social democracy and instead emphasises its dynamism and flexibility. This thesis shows there is much greater diversity than hitherto appreciated in ideas of social democratic policy and pedagogy. Universities in particular were less conservative or complacent in their ambitions than they have been perceived. This includes a complicated relationship with the place of personal flourishing in liberal thought. Education for citizenship and education for consumerism are not so easily disentangled. This thesis explores the university ‘student’ as imagined by a vanguard of reformist university leaders. It begins with neoliberal economist Lionel Robbins, chairman of the famous Committee on Higher Education (1961-63). It examines how the choice of the individual citizen consumer student was made central to determining the pattern and size of higher education. This followed Robbins’ conviction that the freedom of choice was central to the ‘good society’ and human flourishing, but that it must be secured by state intervention. To educate this student, university pedagogies were redeployed to meet the new challenges of the Cold War and modern technological society. Through liaison with industry, reformists imagined a university education would provide students with a holistic understanding of society. They would learn how to best apply their specialist knowledge in the service of liberal capitalism. This philosophy found its way into the pedagogy and built environment of the new universities, including York, Warwick, and Stirling. Throughout the expanding British higher education system were a series of complicated alliances between the priorities of the consumer and the market and the values of the fair, free, ‘good society’

Effects of antiplatelet therapy on stroke risk by brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases: subgroup analyses of the RESTART randomised, open-label trial

Background Findings from the RESTART trial suggest that starting antiplatelet therapy might reduce the risk of recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage compared with avoiding antiplatelet therapy. Brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases (such as cerebral microbleeds) are associated with greater risks of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage. We did subgroup analyses of the RESTART trial to explore whether these brain imaging features modify the effects of antiplatelet therapy

Metformin selectively targets redox control of complex I energy transduction

Many guanide-containing drugs are antihyperglycaemic but most exhibit toxicity, to the extent that only the biguanide metformin has enjoyed sustained clinical use. Here, we have isolated unique mitochondrial redox control properties of metformin that are likely to account for this difference. In primary hepatocytes and H4IIE hepatoma cells we found that antihyperglycaemic diguanides DG5-DG10 and the biguanide phenformin were up to 1000-fold more potent than metformin on cell signalling responses, gluconeogenic promoter expression and hepatocyte glucose production. Each drug inhibited cellular oxygen consumption similarly but there were marked differences in other respects. All diguanides and phenformin but not metformin inhibited NADH oxidation in submitochondrial particles, indicative of complex I inhibition, which also corresponded closely with dehydrogenase activity in living cells measured by WST-1. Consistent with these findings, in isolated mitochondria, DG8 but not metformin caused the NADH/NAD+ couple to become more reduced over time and mitochondrial deterioration ensued, suggesting direct inhibition of complex I and mitochondrial toxicity of DG8. In contrast, metformin exerted a selective oxidation of the mitochondrial NADH/NAD+ couple, without triggering mitochondrial deterioration. Together, our results suggest that metformin suppresses energy transduction by selectively inducing a state in complex I where redox and proton transfer domains are no longer efficiently coupled

Metallized Plastic Current Collectors

Metallized plastic current collectors are an innovation patented by the Soteria Battery Innovation Group with the promise of isolating active material involved in an internal short by vaporizing and isolating the short from the rest of the cell electrode jellyroll or stack. Partnering with NREL, UCL, Coulometrics, and Soteria, NASA is leading a research effort into demonstrating the merits and understanding the phenomena of this safety innovation using prototype 18650 cylindrical cells vs control cells with standard metal foil current collectors. Cells with and without the plastic collector, with and without the on-demand internal short circuit device, and with polymer or cellulose separators were made. Safety evaluations were done with driving cells into thermal runaway (TR) with thermal and nail penetration triggers while inside our TR calorimeter and with ultra high speed X-ray videography provided at Synchrotrons. Preliminary results suggests that the thermally unstable plastic current collector innovation has great promise for preventing TR or reducing the severity of the TR output