Wasting women, corporeal citizens: Race and the making of the "modern woman," 1870--1917

Mower, Christine Leiren University of Washington 2003 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

My project explores the discursive role of women's bodies in imagining nation and female identity in fiction and journalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the reproductive body has historically defined women's national identifications, the late nineteenth century produces a startling diverse range of national imaginings of the “American” woman which both reinforce and critically redefine the meaning and scope of “reproduction” as a national procreative labor. <italic>Wasting Women, Corporeal Citizens </italic> investigates the tensions between these competing configurations of female identity by examining how white women's development of individualism and independence integrally depended on the configuration of a new female body, one which, in its sensuous, healthful, vigorous and genetically “pure” corporeality, suggests a new non-familial imagining of national female identity. Rather than disqualifying women from citizenship status, the eccentric corporeality of this healthful body becomes the basis for the modern woman's transformation from a subject who disproportionally bears the burden of corporeality to a citizen who claims a new hyper-embodied relation to the nation. At the same time, <italic>Wasting Women, Corporeal Citizens</italic> narrates a second story about female identity and the nation, one which traces the emergence of a competing configuration of the modern woman—the wasting body—as a challenge to the white female corporeal citizen's authority in producing national identity. As physical weakness and as racial, ethnic or class “impurity,” the wasting body trades on its presumptive status as outside what Lauren Berlant terms “normal personhood” and in so doing vigorously negotiates an extranational imagining of self, one which redefines and repositions women's identity in excess of national and civic demarcations. By constructing white US “civilization” as illness, as racial contagion which “infects” not-white and working-class cultures, the wasting female body indicts the spread of US imperialism outside national borders. By focusing on the representational tensions between the robust corporeal citizen and the wasting female body, <italic> Wasting Women, Corporeal Citizens</italic> explains the centrality of the female body to a conflicting range of national imaginings which both reinforce US national borders and produce alternative “nations” of dissent within the US at the turn of the century.

Leveling sex differences in mindreading

Mower, Deborah The University of Wisconsin - Madison 2007 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

New research in cognitive science shows that there are sex differences across mathematical, verbal, and spatial abilities. Researchers also propose that there are sex differences in how we predict and explain the behavior of others through mental state attributions, or "mindreading," and that females are superior mindreaders or "empathizers." Some claim that this female superiority in mindreading is due to sexually dimorphic social cognitive structures. Simon Baron-Cohen presents the most comprehensive theory of sex differences, and I analyze his theory as an exemplar of theoretical and empirical work on sex differences in mindreading. Whether there are sex differences in mindreading and sexually dimorphic social cognitive structures are interesting philosophical questions with far-reaching consequences for politics, education, and culture. Deep philosophical issues about the composition and nature of the mind, as well as the nature of our ability to predict and explain others, hinge on whether there are male and female kinds of minds, or even male and female social cognitive structures. In addition, there are interesting philosophical questions about the realism of proposed mental structures, and how differences in the descriptive grain of observations and hypotheses affect the evidence for claims of sex differences. I analyze the nature of the evidence for Baron-Cohen's theory of sex differences, and argue that despite the apparent high confirmation for his theory, there is very little evidence for sex differences in empathizing abilities, an Empathizing mental structure, a sexual dimorphism in that structure, or sex differences in the innate social preferences of infants. I analyze his three main sources of evidence from autism, Empathizing tasks, and social preference studies. In addition to theoretical and empirical difficulties for each evidential source, I argue that the theory as a whole is confirmed spuriously due to the coarse description of the observational evidence. I argue that this theory illustrates a new grain problem in evolutionary psychology, "grain fixing," that can result in spurious confirmation and which is not prohibited by the interdisciplinary methodology presently used in evolutionary psychology.

Discourse and discipline: Third-grade literacy practices in suburban spaces

Mower, DeAnna Johnson The University of Utah 2014 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This study focuses on teacher literacy practices in a suburban school district. Using a Foucauldian perspective of discourse and technologies in analyzing teacher literacy practices provides a conceptualization of why teachers might use the practices they do. Discourses are the socially shaping understandings of best teaching practices imbedded in national discourses of policy, testing, and neo-liberalism. These discourses manage technologies. Technologies are the goods and services provided to teachers that encourage particular practices or behaviors. Technologies also include surveillance practices for sustaining particular behaviors. Technologies function differently at differing suburban schools. Even though similar materials and services are provided to each school in this study, teachers take up literacy practices in dissimilar ways. Three teachers, including myself, from four different schools within the same suburban school district were observed in their literacy instruction over a yearlong period. Each school denoted a low-, mid-, and high-performance on their testing consistently for the 5 years previous to the study. The data and analysis concludes that surveillance practices were much higher in the low-performing school. The tighter surveillance more closely regulated the teacher's behavior to conform to rules, regulations, and consumer products supported by technologies. The teacher at the high-performing school had the least amount of governance on her practices, and she was able to utilize alternative discourses in her practices. Because of the differences in technologies guiding practice, students at each school received differing literacy knowledges. At the low-performing school, students received much more literacy instruction in skill sets through isolated social relationships, while students at the high-performing school received literacy instruction through social interactions of application and analysis. Furthermore, for all of the teachers in this study, national neoliberal discourses influenced teaching literacy practices because they are inherent in discourses framing policy and materials that are apparent in teaching behaviors. Therefore, I conclude that teacher quality is diffused with school performance and its associated technologies rather than directly to the teacher.

Reaction Kinetics and In-Situ Monitoring – Detailed Understanding of Reaction Mechanism through Analysis of the Full Reaction Profile

Mower, Matthew P The Scripps Research Institute ProQuest Dissertati 2018 해외박사(DDOD)

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Reaction monitoring using in-situ tools allows the straightforward acquisition of full reaction kinetic profiles. These profiles contain a wealth of mechanistic information that when interrogated correctly can lead to significantly improved understanding of a chemical process. This thesis demonstrates the use of these tools to improve understanding of several complex chemical systems. We first describe how a [3+2] cycloaddition exhibiting complex kinetics with an irreproducible induction period was interrogated and found to be catalytically controlled by a transient decomposition species. Without the aid of in-situ tools deconvolution of the induction period and intrinsic reaction kinetics would have been a near intractable problem to solve. Next, we show how the use of kinetic modeling applied to full reaction profiles is able to confirm a mechanistic hypothesis about the behavior of a cavitand macromolecule and reveal unexpected information about its effect on reactivity of guest species. Finally, we have made a significant contribution to the development of Vibrational Circular Dichroism spectroscopy as a new in-situ monitoring tool for enantiomeric excess. In addition to showing that unperturbed in-situ monitoring of ee during a complex synthetic reaction is possible, we also demonstrate the mechanistic utility of the information gained from such a method.

Algorithms and Applied Econometrics in the Digital Economy

Mower, Emily Harvard University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 2019 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.