Understanding 'It': Affective Authenticity, Space, and the Phish Scene

"Understanding It: Affective Authenticity, Space, and the Phish Scene" is an ethnographic study of "scene identity" around the contemporary rock band Phish. Utilizing data generated from six years of ethnographic fieldwork, including over one hundred and fifty interviews with Phish scene participants, this project explores how the production of space at Phish shows works to form a Phish scene identity. I contend that the identity of the Phish scene, what the band members and fans refer to as "it" and I call a spatial articulation of affective authenticity, is produced and formed by scene members themselves, drawing from the interrelations between the production of space (practices that create a specific environment) at shows and a white, middle and upper-middle class cultural memory of the Grateful Dead scene. I situate this process amidst a cultural backdrop of 1980s and 1990s identity politics and in particular, multiculturalism and suggest that Phish scene identity be analyzed as a middle class performance of resistance that achieves community and meaning without resisting class privilege. Following many American, cultural, and performance studies scholars as well as numerous anthropologists, sociologists, and both musicologists and ethnomusicologists, I treat performance as a ritual and posit Phish scene participants can be seen to achieve a social efficacy in their performance of resistance that although heightened from everyday life ultimately serves to replicate the structures of such life. Research regarding the affective nature of "it" and its relationship to the process of cultural memory, collective remembering and forgetting, can be seen as an insightful and powerful theoretical and methodological tool in cultural studies, for it exposes information pertaining not only to subject identity, but also to the discourses and contexts which help articulate such identities. This dissertation begins to examine what interdisciplinary scholars are to make of textual and spatial connections. How does one work to understand these affiliated, and oftentimes, affective relationships? And, in the case of Phish scene identity, how can one understand "it"

Alice Miel and Democratic Schooling: An Early Curriculum Leader\u27s Ideas on Social Learning and Social Studies

Alice Miel, a nationally prominent curriculum development scholar-practitioner at Teachers College of Columbia University for some three decades (1942-1971), frequently has been overlooked in research on the nature and evolution of the curriculum field and the progressive education movement. Furthermore, her contributions have been overlooked even as attention to women in the curriculum field and in educational history has risen. This study addresses this oversight. Miel became a leading figure in the curriculum field largely on the basis of her progressive-era advocacy and practice of democratic social learning as a primary goal of schooling in the United States. This study explores major influences on her ideas, her understandings of democratic concepts and principles, and her application of these concepts and principles both in her own college classroom and in her research on childhood education. It also explores Miel\u27s notions of the elementary school social studies :urriculum and situates those notions within the context of the conventional wisdom of her day regarding a discipline-centered curriculum. In a broader context, this study contributes to the body of curriculum history scholarship. According to Kliebard (1992), for example, curriculum history often deals with the relationship between social change and changing ideas and contains significant social and cultural artifacts of knowledge that have become embodied in the curriculum of schools. Davis (1976, 1977) characterizes curriculum history as a reflective enterprise for curriculum workers that contributes to their understanding of present courses of study and of the professional field by lending a framework for thoughtful deliberation of what the schools should teach. With these observations in mind, Miel\u27s work may be understood as both artifact of curriculum history and as mindful reflection, situated within a particular social and historical context, on democratic meanings and processes. Biographies of Caswell, Taba, Tyler, Schwab, Kilpatrick, Rugg, Bobbitt, Zirbes, Stratemeyer, and others have yielded significant insights. In addition, Seguel\u27s study of early curriculum leaders (1966) constitutes an important theoretical contribution to the field. The study of Miel\u27s life and work adds to this body of knowledge

A genome-wide association study of marginal zone lymphoma shows association to the HLA region

Marginal zone lymphoma (MZL) is the third most common subtype of B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Here we perform a two-stage GWAS of 1,281 MZL cases and 7,127 controls of European ancestry and identify two independent loci near BTNL2 (rs9461741, P - 3.95 x 10(-15)) and HLA-B (rs2922994, P - 2.43 x 10(-9)) in the HLA region significantly associated with MZL risk. This is the first evidence that genetic variation in the major histocompatibility complex influences MZL susceptibility

Genetically predicted longer telomere length is associated with increased risk of B-cell lymphoma subtypes

Evidence from a small number of studies suggests that longer telomere length measured in peripheral leukocytes is associated with an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). However, these studies may be biased by reverse causation, confounded by unmeasured environmental exposures and might miss time points for which prospective telomere measurement would best reveal a relationship between telomere length and NHL risk. We performed an analysis of genetically inferred telomere length and NHL risk in a study of 10 102 NHL cases of the four most common B-cell histologic types and 9562 controls using a genetic risk score (GRS) comprising nine telomere length-associated single-nucleotide polymorphisms. This approach uses existing genotype data and estimates telomere length by weighing the number of telomere length-associated variant alleles an individual carries with the published change in kb of telomere length. The analysis of the telomere length GRS resulted in an association between longer telomere length and increased NHL risk [four B-cell histologic types combined; odds ratio (OR) = 1.49, 95% CI 1.22–1.82, P-value = 8.5 × 10−5]. Subtype-specific analyses indicated that chronic lymphocytic leukemia or small lymphocytic lymphoma (CLL/SLL) was the principal NHL subtype contributing to this association (OR = 2.60, 95% CI 1.93–3.51, P-value = 4.0 × 10−10). Significant interactions were observed across strata of sex for CLL/SLL and marginal zone lymphoma subtypes as well as age for the follicular lymphoma subtype. Our results indicate that a genetic background that favors longer telomere length may increase NHL risk, particularly risk of CLL/SLL, and are consistent with earlier studies relating longer telomere length with increased NHL risk

Two high-risk susceptibility loci at 6p25.3 and 14q32.13 for Waldenström macroglobulinemia

Waldenström macroglobulinemia (WM)/lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma (LPL) is a rare, chronic B-cell lymphoma with high heritability. We conduct a two-stage genome-wide association study of WM/LPL in 530 unrelated cases and 4362 controls of European ancestry and identify two high-risk loci associated with WM/LPL at 6p25.3 (rs116446171, near EXOC2 and IRF4; OR = 21.14, 95% CI: 14.40–31.03, P = 1.36 × 10 −54 ) and 14q32.13 (rs117410836, near TCL1; OR = 4.90, 95% CI: 3.45–6.96, P = 8.75 × 10 −19 ). Both risk alleles are observed at a low frequency among controls (~2–3%) and occur in excess in affected cases within families. In silico data suggest that rs116446171 may have functional importance, and in functional studies, we demonstrate increased reporter transcription and proliferation in cells transduced with the 6p25.3 risk allele. Although further studies are needed to fully elucidate underlying biological mechanisms, together these loci explain 4% of the familial risk and provide insights into genetic susceptibility to this malignancy. © 2018, The Author(s).Peer reviewe

Genome-wide Association Study Identifies Five Susceptibility Loci for Follicular Lymphoma outside the HLA Region

Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of follicular lymphoma (FL) have previously identified human leukocyte antigen (HLA) gene variants. To identify additional FL susceptibility loci, we conducted a large-scale two-stage GWAS in 4,523 case subjects and 13,344 control subjects of European ancestry. Five non-HLA loci were associated with FL risk: 11q23.3 (rs4938573, p = 5.79 × 10−20) near CXCR5; 11q24.3 (rs4937362, p = 6.76 × 10−11) near ETS1; 3q28 (rs6444305, p = 1.10 × 10−10) in LPP; 18q21.33 (rs17749561, p = 8.28 × 10−10) near BCL2; and 8q24.21 (rs13254990, p = 1.06 × 10−8) near PVT1. In an analysis of the HLA region, we identified four linked HLA-DRβ1 multiallelic amino acids at positions 11, 13, 28, and 30 that were associated with FL risk (pomnibus = 4.20 × 10−67 to 2.67 × 10−70). Additional independent signals included rs17203612 in HLA class II (odds ratio [ORper-allele] = 1.44; p = 4.59 × 10−16) and rs3130437 in HLA class I (ORper-allele = 1.23; p = 8.23 × 10−9). Our findings further expand the number of loci associated with FL and provide evidence that multiple common variants outside the HLA region make a significant contribution to FL risk

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead