WASH Interventions in Humanitarian Contexts: Investigations at Multiple Stages of an Intervention, With a Focus on FSM Activities and Cholera Contexts

Ricau, Marine C ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Tufts University 2023 해외박사(DDOD)

Access to WASH is a fundamental human right that prevents disease transmission and improves human well-being. Humanitarian contexts are particularly vulnerable to poor WASH access, as political instability, mass displacement, and ongoing humanitarian crises significantly impact access and availability of adequate health and WASH infrastructures. Research on WASH interventions in humanitarian contexts helps improve the overall WASH response by designing and implementing better interventions. This dissertation investigated the three stages of an intervention (selection, design and implementation, and monitoring), and helped cover four identified gaps for WASH interventions in humanitarian contexts. I conducted a study to determine the factors to be considered to select the appropriate WASH interventions in a cholera context, and found that the disease objective, the existing WASH infrastructures and populations’ habits, available funding, the outbreak sources and transmission pathways, stakeholders’ capacity, and access difficulties were the main factors to consider. I conducted a laboratory study to compare the efficacy of three geotextile and nongeotextile fabrics for fecal sludge dewatering and filtration and found that the woven geotextile is the most appropriate fabric for both dewatering and filtration. I conducted a systematic review to identify barriers and facilitators to fecal sludge treatment in humanitarian camps, and we found that the barriers and facilitators were mostly linked to the treatment system itself, and less to local context, and that most barriers could be mitigated by facilitators. I evaluated the monitoring tools of WASH activities in a cholera outbreak, and found that there were scarcity and inconsistency in the reported data, but it still helped organizations identify gaps during the response, and improved coordination. In addition to these results, common themes and considerations emerged across the studies presented in this dissertation: 1) for the selection stage of an intervention, similar factors to select WASH interventions in humanitarian contexts (local skills and capacity, or financial sustainability); 2) for design and implementation, investigations results show the necessity to combine laboratory (technical aspects), effectiveness and implementation (contextual aspects) evaluation of an intervention, and 3) for monitoring, the necessity for clear monitoring protocol and reporting guidelines to improve the quality of data.

Early Modern Inoperativity: Shakespeare & Milton

Whalen, John ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Tufts University 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

When we think about being together we are tempted to conjure a form, an entity to which we, subjects, belong. This form is the antagonist of this dissertation. Using a framework taken from continental philosophy, and most specifically Jean-luc Nancy’s work centering on desoeuvree, or “inoperativity,” I re-read important works by Shakespeare and Milton by beginning with the contention that both plurality and inoperativity are ontological, fundamental to human experience. Chapters 1 and 2 engage with what I’d assert are elements of inoperativity— time and language— as they manifest themselves in Shakespeare’s Henriad. I read the plays of the Henriad as engaging in an elliptical process in which the communities are unable to begin. I then examine language in the Henriad and the problems that are initiated by a static and operative idiom. My reading of language in the Henriad contrasts the political language of the lie with the dynamic language of the Boar’s Head Tavern, an environment dominated by the pun.In Chapters 3 and 4, I turn my attention to John Milton. While the Chapters on Shakespeare attempt to amplify inoperative elements embedded in social constructions of community, in my Chapters on Milton I work to articulate what I perceive to be Milton’s inoperative stance through readings of his major poetry. Ultimately, I will argue that For Milton, creation itself is inoperative, in fact must be inoperative in order to preserve both God’s omnipotence and human freedom, and that there is no room for faith in an ostensibly operative community. My hope is that my reader is spurred to both think differently about the texts under consideration, as well as about fundamental aspects of human commonality.

Interrogating the Complex Roles and Regulation of Vibrio cholerae Seventh Pandemic Islands

O'Hara, Brendan J ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Tufts University-G 2022 해외박사(DDOD)

The current circulating pandemic El Tor biotype of Vibrio cholerae has persisted for over sixty years and is characterized by its acquisition of two unique genomic islands called the Vibrio Seventh Pandemic Islands 1 and 2 (VSP-I and VSP-II). However, the functions of most of the genes on VSP-I and VSP-II are unknown and the advantages realized by El Tor through these two islands are not clear. Recent studies have broadly implicated these two mobile genetic elements with bacteriophage (phage) defense. Still, protection against phage infection through these islands has not been observed directly in any V. cholerae El Tor biotype.In chapter 2 of this thesis I report the isolation of a circulating phage from a cholera patient stool sample and demonstrate that propagation of this phage in its native host is inhibited by elements in both VSP-I and VSP-II, providing direct evidence for the role of these genomic islands in phage defense. Moreover, I show that these defense systems are regulated by quorum sensing and active only at certain cell densities. Finally, I have isolated a naturally occurring phage variant that is resistant to the defense conferred by the VSP islands, illustrating the countermeasures used by phages to evade these defense mechanisms. Together, this work demonstrates a functional role for the VSPs in V. cholerae and highlights the key regulatory and mechanistic insights that can be gained by studying anti-phage systems in their native contexts.In chapter 3 of this thesis I investigate the functions of the hybrid second messenger molecule cyclic-GMP-AMP (cGAMP). Although cGAMP was first shown to be synthesized by the DncV enzyme encoded within VSP-I, the physiological role of cGAMP in V. cholerae is unclear. In this study I test the phenotypes and regulation proposed in disparate literature to gain a more complete perspective on the exact role of cGAMP in V. cholerae biology. My studies show that previous suppositions about the function of cGAMP may have been skewed by the inherent toxicity when cGAMP is over-produced. Moreover, I find no evidence of the prominent role of phage defense by cGAMP in V. cholerae. Instead, I have uncovered that V. cholerae uses both transcriptional and post-translational regulation to control cellular cGAMP levels. Although the exact physiological role cGAMP plays in V. cholerae is yet unknown, by highlighting the multiple layers of regulation of the cGAMP second messenger system, we gain a stronger understanding of its specific role in phage defense and how this important and universal signal is regulated inside the cell.Taken together, the work in this thesis underscores the importance of investigating anti-phage genes in their native genetic context. This has allowed me to not only discover new defense systems on the VSPs but also demonstrate the importance of their regulation.

American Fantasy: Imaginative Landscapes and Environmental Justice in Five American Writers' Work

Dell, Aaron Christopher ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Tufts University 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation focuses on five North American novelists who, in the latter half of the 20th century, strategically broke from realism to advocate for environmental justice. It argues that Ursula K. Le Guin, Gerald Vizenor, Octavia E. Butler, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Karen Tei Yamashita use what I term fantastic realism to dramatize continuities between colonialism and capitalism and to envision alternatives to a dominant culture of whiteness, consumerism, and environmental harm. Situating the works that I discuss with respect to North American histories of genocide and oppression, and developing my readings in conversation with a range of critics of contemporary society, I make the case that politically-engaged imaginative literature can upset established ideologies and inspire new forms of relation.I argue that as a discourse and practice that combines respect for nature with the demand for social justice, environmental justice needs fantastic narratives. My dissertation echoes the concerns of critics and activists such as Wendell Berry, Vine Deloria, Jr., Rob Nixon, and Elizabeth Ammons by foregrounding texts that use science fiction, fantasy, and other reality-reshaping genres to name the lethal delusions of Western civilization. The texts I examine show that our destruction of the biosphere is not accidental or inevitable, but is related to patterns of oppression that have been imposed upon women, poor people, and people of color in North America for centuries; and they maintain that abolishing these patterns requires creating communities in which both ecological integrity and human difference are respected.My first chapter discusses Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea writings (1964-2018) to trace the movement from environmentalism to environmental justice. While Le Guin's novels and short stories begin by reproducing a version of environmentalism that is redolent of the British pastoral romance, I explain that they develop into a radical critique of patriarchy, anthropocentrism, and Western metaphysical dualism. Chapter Two then takes up Gerald Vizenor’s Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978) and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) to ask what life in America has been like for those excluded from dominant modes of fantasizing. The chapter argues that Vizenor and Butler use dystopian fiction to portray the continuity between colonial and capitalist phases of US history from Native American and Black points of view respectively.The importance of multiculturalism is reiterated in Chapter Three, which argues that Paolo Bacigalupi’s portrayal of a drought-ravaged future-Southwest in The Water Knife (2015) under-represents Native American and Mexican American perspectives while reinforcing the myth that technology will solve environmental problems. More broadly, in emphasizing Bacigalupi’s inattention to cultural and racial diversity, this chapter criticizes texts that trade on scientific predictions about the future without a commensurate regard for history. In my final chapter, I turn to a text that foregrounds multicultural realities, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997), which I argue uses magical realism to highlight the injustices of neoliberal economic globalization.I conclude with a reflection on how the critique of the colonial-capitalist mindset in the texts I discuss has changed my thinking about the environmental and environmental justice issues in my home state of North Carolina.

Contextuality of Mathematical Beliefs and Reasoning

Merighi, Caroline Julia ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Tufts University 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

The question that guides this dissertation is "How do mathematical beliefs and reasoning vary and shift across different contexts?'' I use "context'' to refer to the details of a particular situation. In particular, I look at how small variations in a mathematical question may have meaningful impacts on the beliefs and reasoning that a person draws upon to answer the question. I provide evidence that mathematical reasoning and beliefs are dynamic and sensitive to context, which is consistent with some other results in the existing literature. However, examining the role of such small-level changes is a new contribution to the mathematics education literature, especially beyond K-12 mathematics. I examine versions of my guiding question in the specific cases of: (a) calculus students' epistemologies of mathematics, (b) calculus students' interpretations of graphs of functions, and (c) middle school mathematics teachers' ideas about mathematical proof. The results show that mathematical beliefs and reasoning often are not stable and unitary. Rather, they are often highly sensitive to context and can shift from moment to moment. For calculus students, different beliefs about the nature of mathematical knowledge emerged in response to different questions about mathematical phenomena. Additionally, calculus students' reasoning about graphical representations of functions shifted depending on minor changes in the question they were asked. For middle school teachers, beliefs about mathematical proof varied across different questions within a research interview. Each of the three empirical papers in this dissertation also characterizes patterns of mathematical beliefs and reasoning that appeared frequently across multiple participants, suggesting some common trends. When their intuition and formal mathematical knowledge led them to conflicting answers to the same questions, no calculus students attempted to reconcile this conflict. Coordinating properties of a function's values with that function's rates of change from graphical representations presents a particular challenge for many calculus students. Middle school mathematics teachers tend to pay more attention to aesthetic features of proof than to features more strongly tied to mathematical meaning and sense-making.

Calibrating Optimal Forecasting for Emotional Events

Floerke, Victoria A ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Tufts University 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

Despite the theory that affective forecasting, or the ability to predict how one is going to feel in a future situation, is a resource for situation selection, an emotion regulation strategy in which one chooses situations based on their emotional potential, evidence for this association is limited. Perhaps affective forecasting is indeed related to situation selection, but only under certain contextual constraints. To that end, it is important to seek to understand factors that affect affective forecasting in its own right. The three studies presented herein concern manipulating each of three theorized factors—valence, self-relevance, and timing, respectively—and observing whether these manipulations affect affective forecasting errors when each of the other factors is held constant. In the first study, online participants were randomly assigned to watch positive, negative, or neutral video clips, with the hypothesis being that there would be an interaction between the valence of the videos participants were watching and the valence of the emotions being forecasted. In the second study, online participants were randomly assigned to make forecasts for a game they either did or did not have manufactured past experience playing, with the hypothesis being that participants with manufactured past experience playing the game would have lower affective forecasting error than participants without past experience with the game. The third study, university students were randomly assigned to make forecasts of how they expected they would feel after an in-class exam 1, 3, or 5 days before their exam, with the hypothesis being that affective forecasting error would be worse the farther out participants were from their exam when they were asked to make their affective forecasts. None of these studies supported the confirmatory hypotheses. Moreover, though the individual reliabilities of forecasted and actual affect were high across all three studies, the reliability of their difference score was relatively low, thus rendering the ability to look at how individual differences might also impact affective forecasting error within each of the three studies inadvisable. Taken together, the findings of these studies should motivate the creation of methods for studying and improving affective forecasting within specific domains.

When to Look at Maps in Navigation: Metacognitive Control in Environment Learning

Dai, Ruizhi ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Tufts University 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

Environment learning is usually achieved through direct experience with an environment and/or through map study. Further, research suggests that different perspectives taken while learning an environment influence the type of knowledge acquired. After all, route (e.g. by navigation) and survey (e.g. by map study) perspectives emphasize different environment information. The choice between direct experience and map use, or between route and survey perspectives, suggests a role of metacognitive control. That is, when in a new environment, learners may exercise metacognitive control by selectively choosing and implementing specific strategies, such as primarily focusing on one perspective over the other or switching between perspectives. While metacognitive control may be crucial for real-world environment learning and navigation, research on metacognitive control in environment learning is largely absent. To fill in the gap in the literature, this dissertation explores, in a series of 3 experiments, how people implement metacognitive control in environment learning, and how metacognitive control affects the learning of environments. Results of this dissertation suggest that participants exercise control during environment learning by switching between different spatial perspectives and gather different spatial information. Findings from Experiment 1 and 2 indicated that people may use different strategies when metacognitive control was implicit (in the form of eye movements) versus explicit (deliberately pressing a key). Experiment 3 examined the effectiveness of control as well as the strategies chosen, and found that the strategy used under explicit control was more effective among the two. Such explorations provide important and useful insights into how people study environments. Further, the type of strategies used when learning the environment have implications for navigational aids design and facilitation of real-world environment learning.

Unbound: Analyzing White Supremacy in American Literature, 1892–1903

Scully, Jessica Mitzner ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Tufts University 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation examines seven works of American literature from the turn into the twentieth century—Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood (1903) and Contending Forces (1900), Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby” (1893), and Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892). Each of these texts centers on African American or mixed-race characters as they navigate the dangerous terrain of racism and Jim Crow segregation in the United States. As literary critics have long recognized, these works expose the contradictions inherent in American racial ideology, ultimately revealing the socially constructed nature of “race” itself. But too often examination of these texts ends with this conclusion, which seems to suggest that race isn’t really real after all. In this dissertation, I begin with the recognition that these authors used their art to demonstrate the constructedness of racial inequality and then focus my analysis on their depictions of the way that inequality gets constructed. I argue that these literary texts serve as critical and theoretical tools in understanding the way that structures of white supremacy forcefully reasserted racial hierarchy.My approach is informed by critical race theory and whiteness studies, as well as the concept of postcritique. As Rita Felski argues, the field of literary studies has long been dominated by “critique,” which she defines as an analytical method grounded in suspicion, and the omnipotence of this form of “militant reading” has often left little space for other interpretive modes (1). I want to eschew the suspicious gaze of critique both because it has already been rigorously applied to the texts I am studying and because such a gaze carries an inherent power relation that, as a white critic reading literature largely written by writers of color, I do not want to perpetuate. Instead, I consider what these texts and these writers have to offer us as twenty-first century readers and show that they have much to teach about the way whiteness and white supremacy continue to function.In Chapter One, I examine Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood, texts that demonstrate the ways in which white supremacy has been upheld through a social and legal hierarchy that designated Blackness as servitude and whiteness as valuable property and through devaluing, erasing, and silencing Black culture. Chapter Two explores two Charles Chesnutt novels, The House Behind the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition, alongside Kate Chopin’s short story, “Desiree’s Baby,” to argue that white racial anxiety stems from the precariousness of racial divisions. That instability poses a threat to whites’ social position, as they recognize the vulnerability of their own positions of power, and it is this fear that activates the backlash that Carol Anderson has dubbed “white rage.” In Chapter Three, I pair The Marrow of Tradition with Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces, considering the ways that both novels depict lynching within broader patterns of violence. I demonstrate that for Chesnutt, lynching is coterminous with the less visible, more quotidian forms of structural violence within the Jim Crow system, whereas Hopkins emphasizes the continuities between lynching and sexual violence enacted on Black women, as both forms of assault are about intimate bodily violation. My final chapter reads Contending Forces alongside Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy. I suggest that although both novels are critical of white hypocrisy, Hopkins uses her writing as a call-to-action for white allyship while Harper leaves little space for interracial solidarity, instead drawing attention to the ways that seemingly progressive whites fail as allies—failures that I argue can be read as manifestations of what Robin DiAngelo has called “white fragility.”Although my focus is on history and literature at the turn into the twentieth century, I engage this project with an eye toward our contemporary moment, which is similarly marked by the rise of populism, white nationalism, and hate crimes. The past I am investigating in this study is not really past; it’s a fundamental part of race relations in the United States today. I argue that unless we learn from it, we are bound to repeat it.

Expanding the Stress Phenotype: A Multimodal Assessment of Acute and Chronic Stress

Gormally, Brenna M. G ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Tufts University 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

Decades of research have shown that assessing chronic stress is fraught with complexities. Much of this difficulty stems from an inadequate understanding of how the acute stress response transitions to chronic stress and whether a chronic stress phenotype does in fact exist. Traditional studies of stress physiology—particularly of wild animals—have focused on the stress-related hormone corticosterone. Despite the importance of this hormone, it remains an inconsistent indicator of chronic stress. In this dissertation, I sought to expand the stress phenotype by measuring multiple parameters during acute (minutes to hours) and chronic (days to weeks) stimuli. I conducted several experiments using wild-caught house sparrows (Passer domesticus) that were exposed to acute restraint stress, introduction to captivity, or random, repeated stressors. I found that 8 days of multiple repeated stressors reduced immune function, uric acid levels, and neophobic responses, but did not change corticosterone parameters. Additionally, when the same stressor was used for 8 consecutive days, house sparrows were able to habituate by recovering original, pre-stress negative feedback strength and perch hopping activity. I also tested whether the impacts of recovery were reversible, or if instead they permanently altered physiology and behavior. I found that recovery periods during chronic led to system-dependent changes, improving some, but not all, measured parameters. Finally, I conducted two experiments to validate the use of DNA damage as an indicator of stress. Firstly, I found that transferring house sparrows to captivity elevated DNA damage in red blood cells within 3 days, which slowly plateaued. Secondly, I found that DNA damage increases following a 30-minute restraint stress.A key finding in nearly all of these studies was that chronic stress was not reflected consistently in all parameters. I emphasize that parameters of stress appear to be sensitive to characteristics such as the context and length of stressors; it is crucial that studies assessing stress measure a panel of metrics, rather than focusing on single point indices. I conclude the dissertation with a review that synthesizes common techniques of stress, with a particular focus on how each changes over specific time scales and is sensitive to differently timed stressors.

Characterizing Pathway-Specific Anomalies in Temporal Patterns of Gene Expression

Pietras, Christopher Michael ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Tufts University 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

Recent rapid technological advances have increased the prospects for precision medicine, allowing us to tailor medical care to individual patients or patient groups based on underlying molecular patterns. However, many existing techniques do not consider these molecular patterns in a temporal context, which may be especially important for inherently temporal functions such as those involved in development, aging, or progressive disorders. In this dissertation, we introduce three computational approaches for characterizing time-related patterns of dysregulation in such time-related processes.In previous work, our group developed the FRaC anomaly detection algorithm and used it to identify anomalous mRNA expression patterns and to characterize individual anomalies by identifying dysregulated molecular functions. However, FRaC operates by training supervised models for each feature in a data set. Scaling to substantially larger data sets, such as the massive multi-omics data sets now being produced, would require prohibitive amounts of computation time and memory. We show that by using information provided by preexisting knowledge of biologically relevant pathways, it is possible to substantially reduce usage of computational resources while preserving the same anomaly detection accuracy.However, static analysis of many expression data sets, including that provided by FRaC, is not enough to fully capture time-related patterns of dysregulation that might be present in highly time-related diseases or disorders such as autism, Huntington's disease, or Alzheimer's disease. To characterize temporal dysregulation in these and other disorders, we introduce TEMPO, a pathway-based outlier detection approach for finding pathways showing significant temporal changes in gene expression patterns in data sets with additional temporal annotation. Our experiments demonstrate that a temporal pathway approach can identify new functional, temporal, or developmental processes associated with specific phenotypes.Finally, we develop aTEMPO, combining the two approaches developed with TEMPO and Scalable FRaC by using an anomaly detection model and virtual time series to identify anomalous temporal processes in specific disease states. We demonstrate that this approach provides superior anomaly detection results when compared to anomaly detection approaches that do not explicitly consider a temporal component, and that aTEMPO can informatively characterize individual patients and suggest personalized therapeutic approaches.