Leisy Abrego, University of California, Los Angeles

Transnational Families as Social Networks: Who Migrates and Who Does Not?

Social network theory of international migration indicates that social networks play a central role in promoting international migration and establishing “chain migration” (MacDonald and MacDonald 1974). Non-migrants draw on social ties to migrant relatives and friends to gain access to knowledge, assistance, and other resources in and about the destination area (Massey 1999). Direct ties to migrants through kinship, friendship, or shared place of origin, therefore, raise the odds of migration for any given individual (Massey 1999: 44). Because social networks are often created around the family, family members of migrants should be especially likely to aspire to migrate. In my research, however, I find that the theory incorrectly predicts outcomes for a particular subset of individuals with access to migration-related social networks. Based on in-depth interviews with 83 adolescents and young adults in El Salvador whose parents reside in the United States, I find that remittances are also necessary in explaining migration-related aspirations. Focusing on transnational families, this paper examines how the quantities, frequencies, and uses of remittances help determine who wishes to migrate and who wishes to remain in the homeland.

Transnational families are a subset of those who have access to migration-related social networks. Specifically, they include family members who migrated, often in search of employment to support the non-migrating family members. Taking remittances seriously, I explore how these monies influence recipients’ aspirations to follow suit and migrate, or to remain in the homeland. Unfortunately, for most families, remittances rarely come in large enough quantities or with enough frequency to really increase the socioeconomic status of recipients. However, I argue that when remittances come in larger sums and greater frequency, they help raise the family’s socioeconomic status by granting greater access to education. For the few who are able to raise their socioeconomic and professional status through these monies, migrating to the US becomes undesirable because it will lead to a lower socioeconomic status.

Holly R. Barnard, Oregon State University 
A Peek inside the Black Box: Hillslope Ecohydrological Responses to Simulated Summer Rainfall in Western Oregon

Water use by vegetation has been closely linked to streamflow patterns on a variety of time scales. However, many of the details of these linkages are poorly understood. The objective of this study was to examine the vegetative mechanisms that impart control of the hillslope response to storm events in a small headwater basin in western Oregon. We were especially interested in 1) the response of forest transpiration to rapid increases in soil moisture 2) the time lag between maximum transpiration and minimum hillslope discharge and 3) the comparison of the timing of the breakthrough response curve of the deuterium tracer in transpired water versus the hillslope discharge.

We conducted a sprinkling experiment in Watershed-10 at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest for 24 days beginning on July 27, 2005 on an approximately 8m by 20m section of the study hillslope. Micro-sprinklers delivered water to the site at an average daily rate of 659 L/hr to simulate natural precipitation. The experiment was conducted long enough to bring the hillslope into hydrologic steady-state where discharge stopped increasing and began oscillating only on a diurnal basis. A pulse of deuterated water was applied for approximately 24 hours beginning on Day 1 of the experiment. Transpiration was measured for the dominant trees located within the sprinkled area. Water extracted from xylem and soil samples, as well as, samples from subsurface discharge and lysimeters were analyzed for isotopic composition.

The study area reached hydrologic steady-state six days after the onset of sprinkling. Average daily trench discharge increased from 29 L/hr prior to the experiment to 209 L/hr during the steady-state period. Transpiration rates of the trees within the sprinkled area varied little throughout the experiment. The daily average transpiration rate for the three days prior to the onset of sprinkling and for five consecutive days during the steady-state period was 7 L/hr. During steady-state, transpiration rate maximized during the day at approximately 1300. Hillslope discharge was reduced to its minimum rates at approximately 1400. The peak in the hillslope deuterium breakthrough occurred within 24 hours of the deuterium application. Deuterium enrichment was first observed in xylem samples 3 days following deuterium application. Water extracted from soils and lysimeter sampled water demonstrated similar patterns in deuterium enrichment throughout the experiment.

Grace M. Benigno, University of Maryland

A Critical Social Perspective on Young Children’s Everyday Mathematical Events

Topic Overview. The presenter will discuss preliminary findings from a qualitative study that aims to examine and understand the mathematical events and practices of three 4-year-old African American children, from lower-economic backgrounds, as situated within their immediate (e.g., home) and broader societal contexts. Informed by critical perspectives on equity in school mathematics and socio-cultural theories of learning, this study employs Baker, Street, and Tomlin's (2003) concept of mathematics as a social practice to frame the following research questions:

The presenter will share an initial analysis of the data that include fieldnotes of home and day care visits, transcripts of guided conversations with parents and day care provider, and still photographs/images of children engaging in mathematical activity as defined by Bishop (1988).

Educational Significance. Ginsburg (1977) contends that all children’s home environments, regardless of race or class, are rich in quantity, shape, and pattern. Yet, few studies conducted in the U.S. have directly investigated young children’s informal mathematical activities as they naturally occur in their everyday home settings before they enter school (Guberman, 1999, 2004; Tudge & Doucet, 2004). The research presented attempts to fill this void. Analysis of the data can inform early school mathematics classroom practice and support future research efforts that focus on equity in school mathematics. Study results can demonstrate a need to critically re-examine perceptions of children’s early home experiences against data that report disparities in student mathematics achievement across race and class occurring as early as before students enter kindergarten (Lee & Burkam, 2002). As such, insights gained from this study may give cause to re-evaluate existing assumptions and practices underlying current early school mathematics programs with respect to patterns in differential academic and social outcomes among children.

Summary of Initial Findings. A preliminary examination of the data reveals that the children in this study have engaged in important, meaningful mathematical events (e.g., involving concepts of similarity/differences, measurement, and counting) within their everyday lives. The contextualization of these events supports the participants’ mathematical thinking and is important to draw upon when examining their understanding of early mathematics concepts.

Jeane Breinig, University of Alaska, Anchorage

Haida Language Revitalization: From Decline to Growth in Three Short Years

In 1980 Michael E. Krauss, noted Alaskan linguist and former Director of the Alaska Native Language Center, predicted the imminent demise of the Haida language stating that it along with numerous other Native languages, would probably be “extinct by 2015” and several more “will be dead by 2030” He identified approximately 100 Haida speakers “the youngest of these in their forties” and ties the remaining years for the language to the estimated life expectancy of these people. Krauss also poses and attempts to answer questions about whether or not schools might save the languages, and the role of bilingual education in language maintenance, carefully distinguishing between “transitional” programs where the goal is to ultimately to replace the Native language with English and “maintenance” programs whereby “English would never entirely replace the Native language”, criticizing the fact that Alaska has followed the “transitional” model which has done little to promote and hence regenerate Native languages. But, Krauss also admonishes the “generation that is now able to speak Native and English, but is speaking English only to its children is directly responsible for abandoning this heritage, irrecoverably”.

More recently, John Enrico in the introduction to his Haida Syntax published in 2003 accuses the previous generation of Haida speakers of committing “linguistic suicide” because they adopted the practice of speaking only English to their children. Given this situation, Enrico predicts that is “extremely unlikely that even the most sophisticated and well-funded retention program could put off the imminent loss of the language”. Both linguists might be surprised to learn of the gains we are beginning to make here in Alaska. This paper describes the successful Haida language revitalization project recently undertaken in Southeast Alaska and details some of the reasons for its success.

Mark Broomfield, University of California Riverside

Dance of the Male Goddess

In the performance titled “Dance of the Male Goddess: Dancing the Divine,” I explore practical and theoretical concerns regarding gendered notions of masculinity and femininity. What constitutes a feminine or a masculine gesture in a dance? And why is it considered or perceived so? What happens to the reading when a male dancer chooses to embody characteristics largely associated with femininity in Western cultures? In asking these questions I seek to unveil the troubled nature of masculinity in American culture, probing issues related to male identity construction, while also positing a vision for gender equality and mutuality for the future.² As such, “Dance of the Male Goddess,” will serve as the primary means through which I will investigate these ideas. Using David Gere’s “29 Effeminate Gestures: Choreographer Joe Goode and the Heroism of Effeminacy,” I seek to shift the analysis from the reading of effeminate gestures and the possible threat it causes to masculine identity, to a recognition and embodiment of femininity. In this shift the theatricalization or possible uses of camp are rendered unimportant to the staging of the dance. In doing so, I seek to move the discourse beyond what he says as the “practice of effeminacy,”³ and its potential for subversion, to an expression of masculinity that does not see femininity as a threat, but rather one that encompasses an awareness of it as a potential to be fully human. Additionally, I will utilize bell hooks critique of patriarchal masculinity in The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, where she cites the need for men to redefine outmoded representations of masculinity, instead incorporating a visionary model which would allow boys and men increased space to be who they are, rather than perform specific gendered notions of manhood.

Gloria Chacón, University of California, Davis

Against the Grain: Contemporary Mayas and the Production of Literature

The last twenty-five years in Latin America have witnessed a resurgence of indigenous intellectuals and projects that demystify the monolingual and mestizo paradigm entrenched in official, national discourse. This presentation aims to situate Maya writers within the field of Latin American letters. In so doing, I examine the emergence of Maya literature as part of a larger indigenous movement in the hemisphere and the challenges it poses to established literary and cultural paradigms. The paper will also address the tension between the literary and “folklore” realms used to include/exclude indigenous writers from a larger community of cultural producers.

My focus will be on contemporary indigenous writers who refute the distinction between an oral and a written text, and for that matter, the misconception that orality is more “authentically” indigenous than writing. By doing so, Maya writers dislocate the “natural” connection between an established national identity and the production of literature. Through an analysis of key poems, I illustrate the different literary strategies used by these poets to carve a literary space outside official discourse.

Alex E. Chavez, University of Texas, Austin

Huapango Arribeño: Transnational Performance and the Mexican Immigrant Experience

My research focuses on the recent emergence of the practice and performance of huapango arribeño among transnational Mexican immigrant communities located in Texas and Mississippi in an effort to explore how its integral performative aspects shape and are shaped by the active back-and-forth process of transnational migration between the U.S. and Mexico, embedded in the greater phenomenon of globalization. Huapango arribeño is a variant of son, one of the most well known forms of traditional Mexican folk music. However, unlike its other son counterparts, it is an oral tradition in its most literal sense. That is, its poetic content primarily serves to form and inform the social and historical consciousness of its practitioners and listeners.

John Blacking (1974) notes that the interpretation of music is useful in linking expressive culture to its social base, key in understanding a group’s social and cultural organization and experiences. My study is principally concerned with gaining an understanding of how the performative aspects of huapango arribeño serve as a window into the conditions and experiences of particular transnational Mexican immigrant communities. This overarching concern necessarily requires that we map the processes of the displacement of communities and their relocation in new social contexts. Globalization theory suggests that through global structural and institutional changes, identities have become detached from specific times, places, histories, and traditions. Yet, globalization not only displaces cultural identities, but also produces new politicized positions of identification. If globalization has effectively undermined “the frameworks which give individuals stable anchorage in the social world,” (Hall 1996: 597) then may it be assumed that huapango arribeño serves to restabilize or recreate senses of community? My paper explicitly seeks to accomplish the following:

Accordingly, my questions aim to unravel the relationship between performance and historical and contemporary global social processes and how the conditions of that relationship then serve to mediate their impacts on transnational communities. The proposed paper serves as a contribution to research in anthropology, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology with respect to situated performance particular to Mexican immigrant communities residing in the United States.

Victoria Coleman, American University

Obstetrician-Gynecologists’ Screening Patterns for Anxiety during Pregnancy

Abstract

As obstetrician-gynecologists (ob-gyns) take on a greater role in women’s healthcare, it is important that they are aware of the high prevalence rate of anxiety disorders in their patient population. Anxiety disorders present during pregnancy can have detrimental effects on both mother and child, such as low infant birth weight, spontaneous preterm labor, and negative behavioral reactivity in infancy. In the present study, we surveyed 1,193 obstetrician-gynecologists on their screening rates, practice patterns, training, and knowledge as they relate to anxiety disorders during pregnancy. We achieved a 44% response rate after three mailings. Physicians reported a moderate interest in screening and diagnosing anxiety, but less interest in treatment. Only 20% of respondents screen for anxiety during pregnancy, although having a friend who has been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder significantly increased ob-gyns’ anxiety screening rates as well as the reported level of interest in screening, diagnosis, and treatment of anxiety during pregnancy.

Ob-gyns typically refer anxiety-disordered patients to mental health professionals. This may be related to the finding that the majority of ob-gyns feels that their training in this area was barely adequate to inadequate. Generally, ob-gyns are more knowledgeable about depression and depressive symptoms than anxiety disorders. Specifically, generalized anxiety disorder may be the least understood. Increased training in this area would allow ob-gyns to overcome what they list as a primary barrier to anxiety screening during pregnancy—that is, inadequate training disorders about anxiety. Only 30% of respondents have completed continuing medical education courses on anxiety disorders screening. Education efforts should be targeted to conferences, professional publications, and peer-reviewed journals, as these were reported as preferred methods of training for anxiety-related topics.

Ramon Colorado, Jr., Elizabeth A. Whitsitt, Marlo E. Diosomito, Sarah Y. Billington, and Andrew R. Barron., Rice University

Silica-coated Single Walled Carbon Nanotubes (SWNTs) for Incorporation into Functional Composites

Our research has attempted to overcome the difficulties regarding incorporation of SWNTs in structural and functional composites that can be used in micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS). The initial step toward this goal involves coating SWNTs with materials that will eliminate the undesirable attractive interactions between the nanotubes and facilitate their incorporation into composites. To ensure compatibility with existing silicon-based technology, we have focused our initial studies on silica and silicate coatings. Our initial results suggest that the presence of SWNTs affects the formation of functional composites to provide structural changes as compared to the native matrix material. In particular, we have developed a method of coating SWNTs with silica and silicate coatings in aqueous solutions. The resulting silica-SWNTs and silicate-SWNTs readily assemble into mats which are easily analyzed. Etching of the silica coating with hydrofluoric acid (HF) and exposure of the SWNTs allows for selective re-bundling of the SWNTs. Efforts to use this effect for interconnects will be discussed. Furthermore, etching of the silicate-SWNT mats in the presence of excess silicate leads to the formation of hexagonal fluorosilicate composites that possess a significant amount of incorporated SWNTs within their matrix. We propose plans to explore these methods to create new classes of SWNT-containing composites that may prove useful for the creation of the next generation of MEMS devices.

Michelle Dawson¹, Dan Duda², Rakesh K. Jain³, Edwin L. Steele Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA^1,2,3

The Role of Mesenchymal Bone Marrow-derived Cells in Tumor Formation

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), derived from bone marrow (BM) stroma, are multipotent progenitors cells ¹ that can self-renew and differentiate even upon ex vivo culture and expansion ². In conditions of increased cell turnover, such as wound healing, tissue remodeling, or bone growth, MSCs are recruited from the bone marrow and contribute to the formation of new tissues ³. Similarly, cellular regeneration is increased in the formation of the tumor stromal compartment, which includes inflammatory cells, blood vessels, and fibroblasts that may be generated by bone marrow-derived MSCs ⁴. Recent studies have demonstrated that perivascular progenitor cells found in tumors were recruited from the bone marrow and expressed phenotypic markers, including Sca-1, CD11b, PDGFR-b, and c-kit, which have also been observed in culture-expanded MSCs and MSC progeny ⁵. Other studies have described the formation of a bone marrow-enriched ‘niche’, which stimulates the migration and engraftment of leukemic cells in the mouse skull ⁶ and of Lewis lung carcinoma cells in the lungs⁷. We hypothesize that this metastatic ‘niche’ is formed by cells of MSC-origin. A thorough characterization of the phenotype of mesenchymal bone marrow-derived cells that engraft in the tumor stroma is warranted and will permit the development of new strategies to (i) specifically target these cells to prevent/delay tumor progression; or (ii) use MSCs as carriers to deliver therapeutic payloads to tumors.

To facilitate the identification of bone marrow-derived MSCs after incorporation in tumors, we first investigated the phenotype of MSCs isolated from bone marrow and expanded ex vivo. Briefly, MSCs were isolated from the bone marrow of C57BL/6 and FVB mice by their adherence to plastic and characterized by immunostaining and flow cytometry using antibodies for Sca-1, CD45, CD31, CD11b, and CD117 (c-kit). Interestingly, the bone marrow cells isolated from C57BL/6 mice possessed a more myeloid/monocytic phenotype (CD45⁺CD11b⁺c-kit⁺), whereas the bone marrow cells harvested from FVB mice displayed a more typical mesenchymal phenotype (Sca-1^brightCD45^–CD31^–). Similar studies were performed with transgenic C57BL/6 and FVB mice expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP) under the beta actin (Bactin) promoter (C57BL/6) or elongation factor 1-alpha (EF1a) promoter (FVB). Although both promoters are ubiquitously expressed, we found that bone marrow cells from the FVB transgenic mice expressed extremely low levels of GFP; whereas, bone marrow cells from the C57BL/6 transgenic mice expressed high levels of GFP. Nevertheless, MSCs isolated and expanded from EF1a-GFP and Bactin-GFP mouse bone marrow homogenously expressed high levels of GFP. This surprising finding prompted us to use the EF1a-GFP/FVB mice in subsequent studies.

To determine whether mesenchymal bone marrow-derived cells spontaneously engraft into tumors in vivo, P0008 mammary carcinoma tumors were implanted in the mammary fat pad of FVB mice. These mice were previously given lethal irradiation (10 Gy) and rescued by a restorative bone marrow transplant from EF1a-GFP mice. When the tumors measured 1 cm in diameter, the blood (collected from the vena cava), bone marrow (from the tibia and femur), and tumor cell suspensions (obtained after digestion of tumor tissue with 2 mg/ml collagenase II) were collected and the expression of GFP, CD45, and Sca-1 were analyzed by flow cytometry (Fig. 1A). As expected, GFP-expression in blood and bone marrow was very low; however, tumors expressed detectable levels of GFP, indicating that a substantial fraction of tumor-infiltrating mesenchymal cells were derived from the bone marrow. Confocal microscopy was used to confirm this finding (Fig. 1B).

Fig. 1. GFP expression in the blood, bone marrow, and P0008 mammary tumor in lethally irradiated FVB mice rescued by bone marrow transplant (BMT) from EF1a-GFP transgenic FVB mice. (A) Flow cytometry was used to measure GFP, Sca-1 (mesenchymal marker), and CD45 (hematopoietic marker) expression in the blood, bone marrow, and primary tumor. (B) Confocal microscopy was used to image frozen sections of P0008 tumor collected from EF1a-GFP BMT mice. Scale bar represents a distance of 100 mm. Confocal micrograph shows cells stained with DAPI (blue) and cells expressing GFP (green).

In conclusion, we investigated the phenotype of bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells cultured ex vivo using quantitative multi-color flow cytometry and compared their phenotype to that of bone marrow-derived cells spontaneously infiltrating into tumors. Our results suggest that mesenchymal stem cells contribute in significant numbers in tumors and modulate their growth. We believe that a better understanding of the role of mesenchymal bone marrow-derived cell homing, engraftment, and proliferation in tumor formation will assist in the development of MSC-based therapeutics.

Chris Estrada, University of Michigan , Ann Arbor

Cultivating Continuity: The Ligas Camponesas, the MST, and the Interrupted History of Agrarian Reform in Brazil

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, or MST, began in the final years of Brasil’s military dictatorship in an effort to take direct action on Brasil’s well-documented and long enduring ‘agrarian question’. Briefly stated, the central strategy of the movement is the occupation and disappropriation of latifundia lands. These lands are then surveyed by state agencies to determine whether they are currently productive or instead eligible for redistribution. The MST has developed a massive infrastructure of its own, with a presence in nearly every Brazilian state and sectors specializing in health, education, political formation, gender, and international relations. For many years, the movement has articulated the sentiment that it is continuing the work of the Ligas Camponesas, an organization identified most strongly with the sugar-producing states of Pernambuco and Paraíba in the northeast. The mobilizations of the Ligas Camponesas were interrupted by the military coup of 1964, when the Ligas were criminalized and many of their leaders were subsequently jailed, exiled, or forced into hiding.

While the MST makes frequent ideological use of similar claims of continuity with other, more remote struggles (such as Canudos, the Contestado, and the quilombo Palmeiras), I argue that this self-identification with the Ligas deserves closer analysis and serious consideration. My prelimerary research explores the varied and differing viewpoints surrounding the MST’s claims to this legacy and its importance for the present state of agrarian reform in Brasil. As one of no less than fourteen different social movements organized for agrarian reform in the state of Pernambuco alone, the claim of the MST to be the natural heirs of the Ligas can be expected to contain much contested terrain about the nature of that reform, as well as the imbrication of the ‘agrarian question’ with religion, rural syndicalism, Cold War politics, U.S. interventions in Brazil, sustainable development, and human rights.

The preliminary research for this project was comprised of archival research and interviews conducted during July and August of 2006 in the states of Pernambuco, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. The persons interviewed were affiliated with the following organizations: the CPT (Commisão Pastoral da Terra), FETAPE (Federação dos Trabalhadores Agricultura do Estado de Pernambuco), SEADE (Fundaçao Sistema Estadual de Analíse do Dados), ITESP (Fundaçao Instituto de Terras do Estado de São Paulo), the Diário do Pernambuco, INCRA (Instituçao Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária) and the MST. I also interviewed various persons affiliated with Francisco Julião, the Engenho Galileiá, and the PCB (Partido Communista Brasileira) in Pernambuco. This information will be read against and synthesized with existing research on the Ligas, the MST, and the military coup of 1964. The long-term project aims to employ a comparative historical approach alongside ethnography and oral history to examine the differences and commonalities in two sociopolitical movements book-ending a military dictatorship.

Armando García, Cornell University

Theatres of Conquest: Mestizaje and the Haunting of the PostColonial Imaginary

What I hope to accomplish with this essay is to historicize the central position of mestizaje and the simultaneous erasure of Woman and India/o within the postcolonial imagination in the Américas, as it is always these two subjects undervalued and denied full access to agency and revolution precisely within those narratives claiming to rewrite colonial legacies of sexual and racial oppression.

The colonial encounter between the Old World and New World has continued to haunt cultural memory in and of the Américas since that particular moment of conquest centuries ago. Mestizaje, the process of mixture (particularly racial/biological) between Europe and its “Indian” other, became the critical tool of domination during la conquista de las américas, and also became the dominant trope for nationalist unification during the wars of independence and revolutions in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The rhetoric of mestizaje as cultural memory and national legacy has thus been continuously resurrected during particular historical moments of social and political unrest, each time emphasizing a supposed racial and cultural richness uniting every “mestizo” under a single vision of culture and nationalism, and each time without questioning the technologies of colonialism and erasure of the Indio associated with mestizaje.

This legacy of conquest inherited us from the original moment of mestizaje has been made most evident in the imagination of those postcolonial writers and philosophers claiming to critique the colonizing effects of mestizaje. In the works of each of the three authors I discuss, Cherrie Moraga, Carlos Fuentes, and Octavio Paz, the narratives are founded on the colonial encounter between la india Malintzin and Hernán Cortés, the translator and the Spanish conquistador who toppled the Aztec empire in 1521. Both Paz’ “Los hijos de la Malinche” (1950) and Fuentes’ Todos los gatos son pardos (1970) claim the mestizo son biologically produced by Marina/Malintzin and Cortés as the embodiment of the racial and cultural hybridity of a universal Mexican citizen, the mestizo who will forever hate his India mother for having allowed the white man to rape/penetrate her and bastardizing his existence. Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2003) then takes up the Mexican men’s emphasis on the relationship between the mestizo and “La Chingada” to bring forth the apocalyptic world of a post-Chicano Revolution where queers and feminist women have been sent into exile because of their “deviant” behavior. Moraga’s The Hungry Woman recreates mestizaje through its emphasis on the relationship between Medea, “a full blooded Yaqui Indian”, Jasón, a mestizo who is only of ¼ Indian blood quantum, and their son Chac-Mool, whose indigeneity would validate Jasón’s place within Aztlán and reassign his mother the place of national traitor. The relationship between these three characters can thus be read as a restaging the relationship between Malintzin/Marina, Cortés, and their mestizo child originally staged by Fuentes’ 1970 play, which is also a dramatic performance of the historical encounter between Marina and Cortés, and of the symbolic value of their mestizo son hailed by Fuentes and Octavio Paz as the original Mexican subject. In the end, these three authors and narratives fail to rewrite the paradigm privileging mestizaje-cum-colonialism as the modus operandi haunting our literary, cultural and national imagination.

Desiree J. Garcia, Boston University

Sound Possibilities: Race Cinema and the All-Black Cast Hollywood Musical

Historians of race cinema, a term applied to African American produced films beginning in the 1920s, have emphasized the ³separateness² of race film production and how its marginal status in mainstream American movie culture eventually caused its demise. Thomas Cripps and Paula Massood point to the lack of capital and competition with the Hollywood studios as factors in the dissolution of race film companies. Still to be explored, however, are the ways in which the Hollywood studios and its films were affected by the presence of this ³separate² cinema. During Hollywood¹s ³golden age² in the 1930s and 1940s, some of the most salient aspects of race cinemas persisted.

The exploration of migration narratives, the celebration of the ³folk,² and the use of song and dance to heighten emotion, permeate the most quintessential and popular of Hollywood genres in the mid-20th century, the musical film. In an examination of the series of Black-cast musicals, their production, distribution, and exhibition, made by the Hollywood studios during the early years of sound, it is evident that Hollywood grappled with the presence of an intelligent and assertive Black audience, made stronger by their increased numbers in major cities, and the challenge of making films with universal appeal. The musicals discussed here, Hearts in Dixie (Fox 1929) and Hallelujah! (MGM 1929), capitalized on the success of the ³talkies² with American audiences. Yet, their form and content departed drastically from the dozens of other Hollywood musicals of the same period. The most glaring difference was their all-Black casts and subject matter. The Hollywood studios were forced to negotiate the place of Black actors and audiences in the motion picture industry as a result of the efforts of Black film performers, producers, audiences, and critics. Such films prove that a discourse of migration and film¹s responsibility to interpreting its effects was a major part of the Black experience from the beginning of the sound era in Hollywood.

Alfonso Gonzales, University of California, Los Angeles
Towards a Theory of Anti-Immigrant Politics in North America

From the presence of National Guard troops at the U.S.-Mexico border, to Mexican Federal Army troops in Southern Mexico on immigration sweeps, and the presence of El Salvador’s Armed Forces waiting for the arrival of deportees at the country’s national airport, governments are militarizing their immigration apparatuses to gain greater control of cross-border human flows.  Militarization is the processes whereby states use military strategies, personnel, and/or technologies in what is normally considered civilian social control policies against a targeted population. This paper seeks to understand the dominant discursive formations used by states to rationalize militarizing their immigration security apparatuses in the U.S., Mexico and El Salvador. It argues that while there are multiple state discourses and counter discourses, the dominant discursive formation used to justify militarization is best described by the concept of criminalization.

Rhonda M. Gonzales, University of Texas at San Antonio

You Can't Heal What You Don't Understand: Unearthing Early Religious Epistemologies in Pre-Colonial Tanzania

When early European missionaries disembarked on African shores, they brought with them waves of epistemological baggage that broke on the African continent. While European presence in Africa unquestionably transcended their endeavors, it was the unleashing of these particular folk, whose charge it was to probe and to shape the religious thinking of African people, which set the stage for an intellectual exchange that implicated and challenged both Africans and Europeans. Those connections, part and parcel of a larger colonial project, had the collateral effect of skewing our ability to discern the history of indigenous African belief systems, those that long that pre-dated European occupation. Using data derived from comparative historical linguistics and comparative ethnography, I bring forth aspects of the epistemological and conceptual frameworks that characterized Bantu derived religious knowledge in Tanzania. In so doing, I demonstrate that those who comprised the descendants of ancient Bantu peoples held steadfast to deep-seated traditions anchored in well reasoned worldviews. Those traditions, however, were simultaneously supple and thus enduring. Using illness as a prism for understanding the epistemology of healing, I suggest that we can illuminate and understand that both the metaphysical and temporal worlds were essential for efficacious therapies. In their sinuous frameworks there was a dialectic process that involved both temporal and metaphysical forces, each of which was necessary to reach the desired outcome, wellness.

Robert Alexander González, Tulane University

Pan-Americanism as a Model for Americanization, or vice versa: Comparing the Pan-American and Daughters of American Revolution Buildings in Washington, D.C.

Americanization, in the form of cultural exportation and political influence, was initiated in the late nineteenth century as the United States brought Latin America into its sphere of political and commercial influence, and as the United States tried to nationalize its citizens. Pan-Americanism, a term that gained popular use at this time, was introduced to induce inter-hemispheric loyalties, and its proponents were careful not to couch the term in political terms, even though there was a direct tie between it and the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. This paper will trace the methods of propaganda and inter-hemispheric cooperation that came out of the early phases of the Pan-American movement, orchestrated by the Washington D.C.-based Pan-American Union. Pan-Americanist propaganda, as it is created and maintained through architectural practices, will be compared to Americanist propaganda created by and disseminated from the D.A.R. headquarters, Continental Hall, a building that sits directly adjacent to the Pan-American Union building near Capitol Hill. To what degree did this era of influence lead to tactics used by the United States throughout the world? Described as a “representational machine” by historian Ricardo Salvatore, the Pan-American Union’s controlled flow of information—traveling North to South—proved to be a successful method of influence that left many models worthy of duplication. But to what extent was Pan-Americanism modeled after the D.A.R.’s mission to Americanize its “newest” citizens? This paper will complement potential visits to the building; conference attendees will have an opportunity to visit both buildings and examine the manner in which the actual structures served as propaganda backdrops for the respective missions of each organization.

Alvaro Huerta, University of California, Los Angeles

“The Answer is Blowin’ in the Wind”: A Case Study of Latino Gardeners Organizing in Los Angeles

The City of Los Angeles’ attempt to ban leaf blowers in 1996 sparked one of the most dynamic, grassroots organizing campaigns by Latino immigrants in recent history. Led by the Association of Latin American Gardeners of Los Angeles (ALAGLA), the Latino gardeners’ historic struggle against this ban is reminiscent of the United Farm Workers’ (UFW) struggles of the mid-1960s and the Service Employees International Union’s “Justice for Janitors” campaign of the early 1990s.

This thesis provides a case study of the Latino gardeners’ struggle against the city’s leaf blower ban (1996 – 1998), using social capital theory and focusing on the effectiveness of ALAGLA’s community organizing and media-savvy tactics. I also shed light on workforce characteristics of contract gardeners in Los Angeles.

The main research question I address in this thesis is, “How did a small group of Latino immigrant gardeners successfully challenge the City of Los Angeles’s leaf blower ban?”

I primarily rely on qualitative sources. I focus on ethnographic methods and use personal interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, and also analyze current and archival documentation. Since I also played an active role in the Latino gardeners’ campaign, I researched and analyzed numerous sources to provide a more objective perspective to this case study and allow readers to compare my observations with other sources.

More specifically, I conducted numerous personal interviews with Latino gardeners, community organizers and an elected official to document the gardeners’ organizing efforts against the leaf blower ban and the employment characteristics of this informal sector workforce. I also researched and analyzed numerous Los Angeles City Council minutes, agendas, ordinances and other city documents, including numerous periodicals and books.

The case study provides four key findings based on: (1) the relevance of social capital theory to the emergence of the Latino gardeners’ successful organizing campaign; (2) the ability of the Latino gardeners to effectively frame their message in the media and public events; (3) the Latino gardeners’ effectiveness despite the undocumented status of many of their members; and (4) the role that gardeners play in the informal economy as sophisticated entrepreneurs, rather than unskilled laborers.

Lastly, by shedding light on the Latino gardeners and their effective organizing efforts in Los Angeles, I hope other community activists and progressive, grassroots organizations benefit from ALAGLA’s fine example.

Reginald Jackson , Princeton University

Scripting the Moribund: The Genji Scrolls’ Aesthetics of Decomposition

My aim in this presentation will be to investigate the mechanics of the representational decay that attends illness. The specific question I’ll be addressing is: What and how does illness signify in the context of the Illustrated Handscrolls of the Tale of Genji? I hope to demonstrate the extent to which illness as a motif informs, directs, and even infects the composition and choreography of certain calligraphic and pictorial portrayals.

Specifically, in the midare-gaki passages of the “Kashiwagi” and “Minori” sections of the Genji Scrolls, writing subject and written object wither as one: the script and paper designs used to represent the scenes of fatal illness simulate characters’ paced dying. The notion of “decomposition” becomes an important concept to consider at these junctures because the textual corpus becomes markedly engrossed with moribund bodies—aestheticized figures that infirmly resist conventional modes of reading with their rhythmic decay.

Taking these decrepit displays seriously requires a rigorous questioning of the manner in which they interact with their margin and threaten continually to overrun the utmost limit of their framing context. In this vein, my discussion of painting, text, paper design, and calligraphy will blend to form a whole that is coherent, but that—like the death-bound script itself—nonetheless pressures against the exclusive (and exclusionary) classification as solely “art historical” or “literary.” In considering how illness choreographs these sections into a spectacular tangle of image and text, the Genji Scrolls become a venue in which to critique and permeate such disciplinary boundaries.

Lisa M. Lindeman, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Do Emotional Burdens Feel Like Physical Burdens? The Roots of Some Emotions in Embodied Cognition

While some emotions are innate responses to particular sensory perceptions, such as fear upon hearing a loud noise, many emotions result from the conceptual evaluation of life events, such as a bad grade or lost opportunity, according to cognitive theories of emotion. The question remaining is how these conceptual evaluations evoke the sensations and motor impulses that comprise emotional experience. Recent research in the field of embodied cognition offers a clue. According to embodiment, concepts involve the mental simulation of the sensory-motor experiences upon which they are based. For abstract concepts, these sensory-motor simulations are often metaphorical. For example, the concept of communication is rooted in the experience of giving and receiving physical objects. Hence, when people read sentences involving the abstract transfer of information (e.g., "You told Liz a story"), they simulate movements of their hands consistent with the direction of transfer (Glenberg et al., in press). Simulating bodily experiences also produces peripheral physiological effects, as if one is reliving the experience. Consistent with this, reading sentences about communicating ideas also produces motor impulses in the hands. The application of embodiment to cognitive theories of emotion suggests that some emotions are simulations of bodily experiences, such as smothering, falling, physical injury, or cold, that result when a situation is conceptualized metaphorically in terms of that experience. For example, responsibilities and obligations are often conceptualized as physical burdens (e.g., "heavy work load," "the world on your shoulders"). Thus, according to this metaphor simulation model, emotional burdens should feel like physical burdens. To test this hypothesis, the finding that physical burdens make hills look steeper offers a useful tool. We are currently measuring the effects of emotional burdens on slope perception, and we predict that emotional burdens will also make hills look steeper, as if people taking on a responsibility are truly carrying something heavy.

Marion R. Martin, Davida J. Ankeny Brown, Albert S. Chiou, Richard N. Zare, Stanford University

Effects of reagent vibrational excitation on the Cl + CD₄ reaction

The effects of vibrational excitation on the Cl + CD₄ reaction are investigated by preparing three nearly isoenergetic vibrational states: [3000>, [2100>, and [1110>, where [D₁D₂D₃D₄> identifies the number of vibrational quanta in each C-D oscillator. This is a continuation of previous work on the reactions Cl + CD₄/CH₄ [H. A. Bechtel et al., Mol. Phys. 103, 1837 (2005)]. We observe a preference to remove all energy available in the most excited C-D oscillator with a few minor deviations (see figure). Exciting the [3000>, [2100>, or [1110> mode leads to CD₃ products populated primarily in the ground state, in a state with one quantum of stretch excitation, or in a state with two quanta of stretch excitation, respectively.

Steven McKay, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Born to Sail, Born to Serve? Racial Formation and the Filipino Niche in Global Shipping

This paper examines the interplay between racial formation, transnationalism, and labor market closure through a study of the Filipino niche in merchant shipping. Today, one out of every three seafarers in the world is Filipino, yet the vast majority remains stuck at bottom of the occupational ladder. The paper draws on interviews with employers and government officials, as well as two and a half months of participant observation onboard ships with mixed-nationality crews. I argue that colonial legacies and racialized reputations have helped secure a niche for Filipinos as lower-level crew, but have also limited Filipino upward mobility into positions of leadership. The paper first outlines the re-structuring of the shipping industry and the globalization of the labor market. It then details the Philippine state’s promotion of labor export and discursive construction of Filipinos as ‘naturally’ having the attribute most sought by employers at the bottom of the labor market: subordination. Finally, the paper details the strategies of Filipino seafarers themselves as they negotiate and challenge racial, ethnic and national boundaries both onboard multi-ethnic ships and back home in the Philippines to assert their own agency and positive self-image. The paper extends theories of racial formation and transnationalism by better incorporating socio-historial context and identifying specific mechanisms and institutions of social closure contributing to racialized labor market segmentation.

Christina Marie Medina, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

A Role for ARC, an Apoptosis Inhibitor, in Breast Cancer

The epithelium of the mammary gland is composed of polarized acini units with a hollow lumen. These structures are formed and maintained by specific apoptosis of the luminal cells in a process known as cavitation. Disruption of the glandular architecture and filling of the luminal space is a hallmark of early cancers of the breast epithelium. Mammary epithelial cells grown on three dimensional basement membrane cultures replicate in vivo breast epithelium by forming growth arrested polarized acini with a hollow lumen. Our lab has previously shown that ARC (Apoptosis Repressor with a CARD ([caspase recruitment domain]), an endogenous inhibitor of apoptosis is induced in a wide variety of cancer cells, including human breast tumors. My project explores the role of ARC in normal mammary gland development and the pathogenesis of breast cancer. Both in vitro and in vivo approaches are being pursued. First, the benign MCF-10A human mammary epithelial cell line is being applied in a three dimensional basement membrane (Matrigel) cell culture model to explore the role of ARC in both formation of acini units and carcinogenesis. When assaying for endogenous ARC protein in MCF-10A acini grown in Matrigel, ARC levels increase incrementally after day 5 in culture. Future studies will examine if this induction serves as a mechanism to protect the exterior cells of the acinus from death during the cavitation process. Using this model, it has previously been shown that inhibitors of apoptosis (i.e. BCL-X_L) can delay clearing of luminal epithelial cells and can block clearing when co-expressed with a proliferative oncogene (i.e. CyclinD1). I am currently testing the hypothesis that overexpression of ARC in these cells can distort normal acinus morphogenesis. I am also using the Matigel culture to understand how pathways dysregulated by the Polyoma Middle T Virus (PyMT, which induces tumors when expressed in the mammary glands of mice) contribute to malignancy when expressed in human mammary epithelial cells. Interestingly, the diameter of acini expressing PyMT are double that of the vector infected control. Although the outer cells maintained an organized polarized state, the luminal cells of the PyMT acini did not undergo normal clearance. Also in progress are in vivo studies utilizing ARC knockout mice expressing the PyMT transgene exclusively in the mammary epithelium. This compound mouse will test the hypothesis that the loss of ARC will alleviate mammary tumorgenisis.

Catherine R Medrano, University of California, Santa Barbara

The Smart vs. The Hardworking: The Academic Self-Concepts of Mexican-Descent GATE Students

Using a Power Point presentation, I will first give a short overview of the inequalities Latinos face in the U.S. educational system, and then move onto a few general theories that account for the high rate of Latino underachievement. I argue that it is not only important to identify barriers to academic success, but also to examine the experiences of Latino students who do achieve academically. My interdisciplinary project joins sociology with education in trying to identify the specific challenges to inclusion that high-achieving Mexican-descent high school students face in Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) classes, and how these students respond to these challenges. Specifically, my major research questions are: What does a “high-achieving identity” look like for Mexican-descent students and how do they form them? How do their high-achieving identities affect their interactions with GATE peers and non-GATE Mexican-descent peers? How do students internalize or reject consistent messages of superiority in GATE classes? How do these identities and messages of superiority affect their academic outcomes and peer relations/access to peer social capital? What participation styles do Mexican-descent students utilize in GATE and why? In order to answer these questions, I will present on ethnographic field research and interviews conducted with eight Mexican American and Mexican immigrant students in 9^th grade English GATE classes during the 2005-2006 school year at a high school in southern California.

Kileen L. Mershon¹; Alex Vasuthasawat¹; Chun-Wei Lai¹; Sherie L. Morrison¹; David O. Beenhouwer¹²³

¹Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics and the Molecular Biology Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA

²Department of Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA

³Division of Infectious Diseases, Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, Los

Angeles, California 90073

Generation of Recombinant Human IgGs Against GXM with Alterations in Effector Functions

Understanding the role antibody effector functions play in passive protection is essential for developing effective antibody therapeutics to combat infectious diseases. Passively administered variable region identical monoclonal antibodies of the four human IgG subclasses differ in their ability to modulate murine infection with Cryptococcus neoformans in BALB/c mice: IgG2 and IgG4 prolong survival, while IgG3 does not and IgG1 decreases survival. The non-protective IgG1 and IgG3 effectively mediate complement fixation and phagocytosis of C. neoformans, while the protective IgG2 and IgG4 do not. To further define the role of antibody effector functions in passive protection against cryptococcosis, we have introduced point mutations into wild type (WT) human anti-GXM protective and non-protective isotypes that alter their ability to either fix complement, bind the three classes of Fc receptors for IgG (FcgR) or both. After verifying the proper sequences, mutated heavy and wild type light chain vectors were transfected into the non-productive murine myeloma NS0/1. Transfectants were screened for production of IgG and subcloned at least twice to ensure uniform cultures. Mutant IgGs were affinity purified from culture supernatants. Eleven effector function mutant IgGs against GXM were created (predicted phenotype indicated in parentheses): IgG1-N297Q and IgG2-N297Q, which lack the N-linked carbohydrate in C_H2 (no FcgR or complement binding), IgG1-P331S (no complement activation), IgG4-S331P (complement activation), IgG1-E333S and IgG2-E333S (enhanced complement activation), IgG2-D270E (decreased FcgRII binding), IgG1-D270A (binding only to FcgRI), IgG1-D265A and IgG2-D265A (no FcgR binding), and IgG2-V234L/A235L/-236G (also called IgG2-C_H2; FcgR binding like IgG1). The antibodies were of the expected size and assembled appropriately. Six mutant antibodies were tested and shown to bind antigen with affinity equivalent to wild type. Three of those antibodies showed no significant changes in their ability to mediate phagocytosis of C. neoformans. Eight antibodies remain to be tested for ability to mediate phagocytosis and five antibodies remain to be tested for antigen affinity. Complement activation of six mutant antibodies was measured as binding to C4 in an ELISA assay, expressed as a percentage of the corresponding wild type. The E333S mutation increased IgG1 binding to 120% and IgG2 binding to 455%. The IgG2-C_H2 mutation increased C4 binding to 721%. The IgG4-S331P increased binding to 112%, while IgG1-P331S decreased binding to 8%. Binding to murine FcgRI was also measured in an ELISA assay and is expressed as a percentage of corresponding wild type binding. IgG1- and IgG2-E333S did not alter binding (98% and 100%, respectively). Both IgG1-P331S and IgG4-S331P decreased binding (58% and 85%, respectively). IgG2-C_H2 increased binding to 1376%. IgG2-D270E did not alter C4 binding (99%) nor murine FcgRI (101%). Four antibodies (IgG1-P331S, IgG2-D270E, IgG1-E333S, and IgG2-E333S) had no effect on the survival of BALB/c mice infected with C. neoformans (compared to PBS control).

Jamila Celestine Michener, University of Chicago

Perceiving is Believing:African-American Youth, Perception of Neighborhood Context and Political Trust

The relevance and impact of physical and social environments on political behavior and attitudes has been a theme in American politics since at least the 1930s. Yet, despite the assortment of work done with respect to contextual effects, political scientists have consistently ignored the role of context in the political lives of African-American youth. This is a significant oversight both because young people are especially susceptible to the influence context, and because African-American youth are a segment of the population that often live in neighborhoods characterized by systematically distinctive contextual features. In addition to the omission of black youth, most research to date has ignored the perceptions that individuals have of a given context as a factor in mediating the relationship between context and politics. In this paper, I use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to analyze the relationship between political variables such as trust in government and perceptions of neighborhood context, while controlling for both individual and neighborhood level characteristics. The results show that for black youth, negative perceptions of neighborhood cause a significant decrease in political trust. Ultimately, my findings along with existing research on political trust indicate that perceiving is believing: African-American youth rely on cues from their physical and social environments to evaluate the trustworthiness of national, state and local government. The final part of the paper is devoted to discussing the implications of these findings.

James W. Mickens, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

Diagnosing Message Drops In Cooperative Forwarding Systems

Distributed systems have become indispensable to scientific inquiry. By stitching together computational resources from a variety of locations, they provide a scalable way to study large-scale, complex problems such as weather formation, protein folding, and high energy plasma behavior.

Distributed systems also provide popular means for non-scientists to disseminate media content.

These distributed systems are built atop the Internet, a widely shared communication network consisting of end-hosts such as individual PCs and core routers which connect end-hosts to each other. Internet messages are transmitted using cooperative forwarding: when machine X wishes to send a message to machine Y, it hands the message to a core router, who then forwards the message along a chain of core routers. If everything works correctly, this chain will eventually terminate with machine Y. But what happens when Y claims that it did not receive X's message? Was the message dropped by a core router due to, e.g., a faulty piece of fiber-optic cable belonging to an ISP? Alternatively, did Y actually receive the message and lie about never seeing it, either because Y is misconfigured or because it is actively trying to subvert the system? Robust distributed systems must be able to identify the causes of message drops so that they can route around bad core routers and fix (or evict) end hosts which misbehave. If such corrections are not undertaken, valuable data or computation can lost.

In this work, we address the issue of ascribing blame for dropped messages in a cooperative forwarding environment. In particular, we wish to determine whether the network or a faulty end-host was to blame for a particular unreceived message. Using this knowledge, the system can determine whether it needs to route around a faulty core router or whether it needs to notify an end-host that it is malfunctioning. Since such nodes may not be aware that they are faulty, they can then take actions to fix themselves.

We generate probabilistic notions of blame by combining techniques from several disciplines. In particular, we use distributed tomographic methods from the computer network community, fuzzy logic techniques from control theory, and statistical inference algorithms from the field of applied probability. Unlike previous tomographic research like RON, we consider the fact that faulty nodes may submit inaccurate tomographic data to the collective. Thus, our system can detect the internal misbehavior of individual measurement nodes as well as the external failure of IP network links.

Cary Miller, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Ojibwe Leadership in the Early Nineteenth Century

Anishinaabeg authority in the early nineteenth century arose from charismatic and hereditary sources. Those who exerted the strongest influence in Anishinaabeg society were those who combined the two. Only ogimag (chiefs) from hereditary patrilineal lineages held authority to designate land usage rights and mediate disputes concerning resources. Age, spiritual authority, and chiefly medals played an important role, but were not determining factors. Yet, reputation and ability formed the basis for the degree of chiefly influence, particularly outside their home communities, and successful leadership could only be achieved through access to manidog (spirit) assistance publicly demonstrated through successful war leadership or Midewiwin society membership.

The scholarly characterization of charismatic leadership as aberrant, irrational, and unstable ignores the many societies that maintained orderly charismatic leadership structures over long periods of time. However, Charismatic avenues to leadership democratized access to prestige and authority otherwise attainable only through heredity. Anishinaabeg society evaluated the quality of candidates for hereditary chiefly offices according to their ability to obtain and hold charismatic offices. As a result, charismatic leadership provided stability and authority rather than chaos to Anishinaabeg governance.

As Christianity expanded into Ojibwe communities, some Ojibwe leaders sought to join the church and use its authority in a similar manner. This meant that the choice between Midewiwin and Christianity opened up a new field for the contestation of chiefly authority. Because Anishinabeg communities made no distinction between religious and political power, missionaries not only challenged the religious authorities of Anishinabeg communities, but their political authorities as well. Missionaries lived in these villages oblivious to the temporal responsibilities their claims to religious authority entailed. While charismatic leadership positions provided some individuals in the community a chance for advancement, authority, and prestige, charismatic credentials alone could not trump those of local hereditary ogimag. At least among the Ojibwe, all leaders employed ceremony, ritual and religious symbols to promote unity and enhance their authority.

Elizabeth Perez, University of Chicago Divinity School

Serving Afro-Cuban Gods on Chicago's South Side: Healing and Conversion to Santería in One African-American Community

In the proposed presentation, I will endeavor to give an overview of my dissertation while showing images culled from almost two years of ethnographic research. I will set the scene for my project in my urban field site—a private home where initiated elders live with their family members and ritual objects—and offer a very brief introduction to the religion termed Lucumí by practitioners and popularly called Santería, crystallized around the worship of West African spirits and entailing such phenomena as possession and animal sacrifice. My thesis statement is that, although African-Americans may convert to this largely Yorùbá-derived religion because it appears to satisfy a desire for aesthetic and cultural “authenticity,” the main impetus for initiation is the threat or reality of illness, interpreted in divination as an urgent call from the spirits. Since my argument rests on a distinction between the concepts of conversion and initiation, I will question whether the former remains a useful one for understanding religious transformation, and clarify that the latter is regarded as the healing ritual par excellence—the process through which a person becomes a completely new religious subject, with a radically different relationship to his or her body than previously imagined, and situated within a cosmology with profound social and political implications.

In addition, I also hope to touch on some of the other themes to be addressed in the dissertation, among them the discursive and ceremonial production of gendered bodies in Santería. In closing, I will suggest the potential that history of religions—along with religious studies more broadly—may hold for reconfiguring regnant notions of race and ethnicity, specifically by attending to the issues of affliction, authority, and embodiment that this study has been designed to explore.

Azucena Rangel, University of Texas at Austin

Teacher Expectations, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and Stigmatized Students

Evidence suggests that self-fulfilling prophecies in the classroom occur, but effects are typically weak. However, “stigmatized” students, including those historically stereotyped (based on ethnicity, sex, or SES) to have poor academic performance, appear to be more vulnerable to teacher expectation effects. One study (Jussim, Eccles, & Madon, 1996) focused on stigmatized students and found that teacher expectations for African American students and students from lower-social class backgrounds produced self-fulfilling prophecy effects much larger than the typical studies (effect sizes of .4 to .6 as opposed to typical small effect sizes of 0 to .2). In addition, despite the claim that teachers predict student performance primarily because they are accurate there hasn’t been research to measure whether teacher expectations change to align with student performance over time. The proposed research on teacher expectations will include a more diverse sample of 7th grade students, their teachers and their parents as participants and includes three studies. Study 1 investigates whether stigmatized students elicit lower expectations from teachers than do non-stigmatized students. Study 2 investigates whether stigmatized students are more susceptible to teacher expectation effects than are non-stigmatized students, as has been previously shown. Study 3 measures teacher expectations over time to investigate how expectations change and whether student stigmatization influences this process.

Julia Rasooly, Stanford University

The Piezoelectric Microjet

INTRODUCTION

Reliable delivery of drugs into the body is a necessary part of modern medical therapy. Increasingly in recent years, newly developed drugs take the form of macromolecules, which cannot survive oral digestion, and thus require trans-dermal delivery into the bloodstream [1]. Hypodermic needles remain the only widely accepted method of trans-dermal drug delivery today. Needles, while effective in many settings, cause pain, require trained personnel for administration of a dose, and can be responsible for the spread of disease if reused or improperly disposed of. Commercially available jet injector systems have been developed that use compressed gasses or springs to generate high speed liquid jets (200-500 μm in diameter) that penetrate the skin and deliver drugs [2-4]. While these devices have several potential advantages, (sufficient penetration depth, automation, needle-free) they have not gained wide acceptance due to reportedly painful injections, lack of reliability in the amount of drug delivered and uncertainty in the depth of skin penetration.

To mitigate the problems of traditional jet-injectors, we are developing a piezo-electric driven microjet injector for trans-dermal drug delivery. In our current prototype, a piezo-electric actuator is suddenly expanded, providing an impulse of momentum to the plunger of a conventional syringe, while piezo expansion, plunger motion, jet velocity, and internal syringe pressure are measured in real time (Figure 1). We have demonstrated jet speeds up to 160m/s from a 40-60 μm orifice, likely sufficient for skin penetration [5]. Here we discuss the development of our prototype system and a simple physical model to describe its behavior, with particular emphasis on understanding the effect of fluid viscosity on device performance. Characterizing the effect of viscosity is an important step toward practical implementation of the microjet injector, as it will determine the range of drug formulations that can be delivered and the degree to which drugs may be concentrated. Drug concentration may prove an effective means of reducing the needed drug volume, a benefit when piezoelectric actuators, typically of short stroke, are used.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Jet speeds are measured using a 2-pulse strobe imaging technique [6], in which the pulses are of 5 ns duration and separated by 5 μs (Figure 2). Glass nozzles are attached to shortened syringe needles using epoxy. Nozzles of shallow and abrupt taper are fabricated by mechanical pulling of a glass pipettes (Figure 4 inset). A simple physical model of the microjet system is based on differential equation statements of mass and momentum conservation [7], in a spring (liquid compressibility), mass (syringe plunger), damper (loss of mass through orifice) configuration.

Fluid viscosities are varied by mixing solutions of glycerol and water, for which viscosity is reported in the literature [8].

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

To study the impact of solution viscosity on device performance, we used the strobe imaging technique to measure the initial (first 120us) velocity profile while varying viscosity from 1cp (viscosity of water) to 55cp, adequate to reduce the maximum measured velocity below skin penetration velocities [5]. The effect on the maximum velocity measured (Figure 3) was significant and did not correspond well to a model in which the viscous pressure drop was assumed to be linearly dependent on velocity and viscosity (fully-developed laminar flow assumption). This result suggesting that viscous losses may be best understood through an analysis of boundary layer effects [9].

Nozzles with similar orifice diameters but very different geometries (Figure 3) were tested and found to result in very similar velocity versus time profiles (Figure 4) indicating that the major source of viscous loss is, surprisingly, not in the nozzle. A boundary layer analysis and further experimentation are currently underway to reveal the origin of viscous loss, which we suspect occurs at the abrupt contraction between the barrel and nozzle diameters. The microjet injector presents an interesting microscale fluid dynamics problem in which cavitation, liquid compressibility, viscous effects, and possibly viscoelastic effects may be important for some fluids. The simple fluid dynamic model under development here will aid in design of injectors for effective transdermal drug delivery.

FUTURE WORK

We are currently implementing an internal pressure measurement system to aid our understanding of the injector fluid dynamics. Additionally, we will extend our experimental effort to actual drug solutions such as insulin and measurement of penetration depth in skin surrogates.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors wish to acknowledge the support of Philips Semiconductor, the NSF and the ARCS Foundation.

REFERENCES

2. Voelker, R., 1999, Jama, 281, pp. 1879-81.

9. Streeter, V. L., 1961, Handbook of Fluid Dynamics, McGraw-Hill, New York.

Courtney Robinson, University of Wisconsin , Madison

Flexibility and Invasion of the Cabbage White Butterfly Midgut Microbial Community

Microbial communities are important in all aspects of life, from the gut microbiota that produce nutrients in mammals to the environmental bacteria that maintain the biosphere's biogeochemical cycles. These communities are often dynamic and experience various compositions and structures. Little is known, however, about the factors that govern either intrinsic variation or variation that occurs following perturbation. In this study we describe the variation in microbial communities in the midguts of cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae) larvae experiencing the same treatment at different times or fed diets constituted of different components. Community composition was determined based on 16S rRNA gene sequences. The most common phylum was Proteobacteria, which was present in all communities. The observed species richness ranged from 6 to15, and the species composition of the communities changed with changes in egg source, batch from which larvae were sampled, diet type and diet amendments. Despite these changes at the species level, the phylum level composition was consistent. The most abundant members affiliated with the Methylobacteria, Asaia, Acinetobacter, Enterobacter, and Pantoea genera.

We also investigated whether diet influences the ability of the community to resist invasion by various bacteria. We found that the communities of larvae reared on Brussels sprouts were as susceptible to invasion by certain bacteria as those of larvae reared on sterile artificial diet. Sinigrin, a compound found in Brussels sprouts that selected for a more complex community, increased susceptibility of the community to invasion by certain bacterial species. Our results indicate that the ability of the community to resist invasion may be linked to community composition. More specifically, we propose that susceptibility to invasion may be linked to the biochemical features of the members or the functional composition of the community.

Rocio Rosales, University of California, Los Angeles

Loose Women in a Confining State:  Liberating Ideology and Economic Constraints in Cuba

This paper examines the unintended consequences of socialist state policies on female bodies and sexual intimacy.   Preceding the 1959 revolution, Cuba was often viewed as a tourist destination for drugs and prostitution. The revolution aimed to install national pride and a continuing resistance to imperialist intrusion, including the liberation of the Cuban woman.   However, Cuba's economic decline following the fall of the Soviet Union and a U.S. embargo thwarted the coming of a new feminist age.  In order to sustain a faltering economy, the country embraced the tourism industry and in 1993 legalized the dollar.   Women left riled up by revolutionary ideals sought other avenues for economic advancement.  Ironically, some women turned to their bodies—not their newly acquired education—in their pursuits.   Those sex workers seeking the patronage from tourists have come to be known as jineteras. While sex tourism is still largely viewed as an ill to society, in Cuba a paradox has developed around jineteras.   First, jineteras infuse socialist ideologies of empowerment and autonomy into their work.  The economic independence jineterismo provides creates a certain level of respect for these women among the general Cuban population.  Secondly, jineteras legitimize their occupation, and thus further improve their public perception, by incorporating feelings of love and romance into their encounters.   Fleeting love, the possibility of marriage and migration become recurring themes in their relationships. I analyze the paradox surrounding jineteras based on data gathered from ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with Cubans in and outside of the sex industry.

Lilia Raquel Rosas, University of Texas at Austin

San Antonio of the Imagination: The Shaping of Sin City

Several feature articles in the 1897 San Antonio Daily Express, emphasizing the social and cultural life of the city, reveal a moment of reflection, nostalgia, and transition for both the place and its inhabitants. Four years in the shadow of the new century, outsiders and more recent residents viewed San Antonio as a colorful place, filled with mayhem and festivities around every corner of a different era. At times, the city included memorable figures such as chili queens, pelados, and vendedores, and questionable recreational activities such as cockfighting, playing the numbers, or just too much revelry. Certainly, the Daily Express columnists captured and historicized San Antonio to celebrate its quaintness but emerging sophistication. The attention paid to daily events and routines of everyday Mexicans and African Americans depicted these communities as uninterested in work, but dedicated to pleasure and idleness. How, then, was San Antonio being remembered and for whom? How do these columns and other writings relate to the century turning and white newcomers trying to put a “primitive past” to rest to claim an “unfettered modernism”?

In this paper, I examine these changing cultural and social landscapes of San Antonio in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to illuminate the rise of a Jim Crow Borderlands, specific to the South/west and the progressive period. Put another way, I seek to understand the transformation of San Antonio from a “quaint Mexican town” to a “productive Euro-American city” by using mainstream and alternative discourses found in the local and ethnic presses, travel guides, and surveillance reports of the U.S. Department of State, to further complicate this disorderly transformation. All too often discussions about the place and history of San Antonio or “Sin City” emphasized tourism, profit, and modernity to mask a location with a thriving red light district, revolutionary and radical enclaves, and great racial strife. The prostitutes of color, Mexican revoltosos, and black organizers were not simply throwbacks of the city’s mythical past but central to contesting its future.

Lucía M. Suárez, Amherst College

Dance and the City: Citizenship through Transatlantic Mutations in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

I propose that the Brazilian dance company Grupo Corpo has created a pragmatic response to the contradictions of third world struggles with aesthetic and economic modernization. This response continues the Brazilian tradition introduced by Oswald de Andrade (1809-1954) in his texts Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil (1924) and Manifesto Antropófago (1928). Grupo Corpo’s creative and historical trajectory renders it as the quintessential antropófago (cannibal). The company has ingested as much as it could of all classical and popular dance and performance experiences and then added a unique and dynamic twist of its own from the interactive work between the choreographer, the composers, the music, and the dancers. Any copying from European models shapes an active exploration of national identity through the quagmire of inherited colonialism, global dance ethics and a hybrid language authentic to Grupo Corpo. Their work has functioned as a catalyst, that has moved from self-exoticization with Maria Maria (1976), to reintegration into the city through its social project, Corpo Cidadão (1999).

Arguably, Grupo Corpo continues this historical trajectory of Brazilian modernity (anthropophagy, the search for aesthetic excellence, the desire for a utopian state). The company’s production highlights the interactivity between the African and folkloric influences that shape it; and, through its grassroots work, Corpo Cidadão, some company members are exploring the links between the stage and the city, global culture and regional problems, international spectacle and local realities. The company’s work, as it has evolved over the years, emphasizes the plurality of histories, races, ethnicities, memories, rhythms, and possibilities. Joined to form one body, they metaphorically represent the body of Brazil, one body that works as a unit but is distinctively shaped by many elements. Their recent outreach project, Corpo Cidadão takes individual, socially neglected bodies and, through dance, integrates them into the larger unit of citizenry in Brazil. Dance and movement arts do not depend on literacy or social status to transfer traditions, reshape communities, and/or reconstitute otherwise marginalized bodies.

Grupo Corpo once brought the imagination of Brazil to the world; it now introduces the possibility of integration and survival to the poor of the city. Through the project of Corpo Cidadão poor and abandoned children discover the ways in which they do not have to be the victims of a growingly divisive and cruel global economy.

In this essay, I outline key moments in the groups’s history to propose that staged dance performance and community dance movement arts both perform and resist hegemonic impulses of social transformation. I highlight transitoriness as a viable state through which the ruins of socio-political failures can be challenged. And I propose that bodies, albeit physical, real, and materially present, are at the heart of transition, as they are never static, from birth, they are en route to death, through experiences of flourishing and inevitable decay. Like the cities and the conditions that exist within cities bodies in space are in movement.

Reflected in this study is the global phenomenon of dance as a long-standing historical, social, transatlantic linkage. In New York City, Angolan dancer and choreographer Julio Leitao has a group that works with inner city children bringing them out of high-risk situations. Leitao brought some of his students to Brazil where new works were choreographed that included Angolan dance tradition, Brazilian rhythms, and Afro-American compositions. Similarly, in the United States, groups like Alvin Ailey work very closely with inner city children bringing them a sensibility of the arts and survival that would otherwise remain amiss. The great late Catherine Dunam worked for years in Haiti, in New York, and in Brazil. Her anthropological dance research, revival, and choreography, not only kept the transatlantic rhythms of dance, survival, resistance, and community alive, but they introduced and integrated new ways of valuing the self, creating community, and communing with a growing global culture, and challenging the abhorrent violence global economy wreaks on the poor. Dance movement arts transcend national borders, retain, and mold African traditions. Because of its non-static quality, dancing bodies confront the ruins of late capitalism throughout the world.

In this article, I focus, specifically, on the internationally acclaimed Brazilian modern dance company, Grupo Corpo, and its grass-roots social program for street children, Corpo Cidadão, to trace the ways through which African dance has mutated through the centuries to enact different formulations of resistance, survival, community coherence, and alternative models of human-social citizenship.

Christopher Tirres, Harvey Mudd College

John Dewey, Religious Faith, and Mestizo Liturgy

More than any other philosopher of his time, John Dewey (1859-1952) explored the social and political implications of pragmatism. Building on C.S. Peirce's work in logic and William James's contributions in psychology, Dewey promoted pragmatism as a method of social criticism. At root, he was interested in how this method could be used to render life more meaningful and make democracy more vibrant.

In light of Dewey's social and political orientation, I am particularly interested in his theory of religious faith. How, in Dewey's view, does religious faith help or hinder the creation of a more vibrant democracy? Dewey's most sustained answer to this question is found in his small but significant book, A Common Faith (1934). There, he creates a sharp separation between a naturally-occurring sense of "the religious," on the one hand, and institutional "religion," on the other. The initial objection that Dewey, a philosophical naturalist, makes of institutional religion is that it adheres to a supernaturalistic metaphysics, embodied in the belief that God is an otherworldy Being. Dewey's sharper critique, however, is that supernaturalism breeds a form of ethical acquiescence. When God's Will is accepted, human agency is played down, and this, Dewey fears, thwarts efforts at social transformation.

I share Dewey's concern, but I believe that he severely short-shrifts institutional religion, in particular, prophetic religion. A Common Faith is so intent on showing what the religious is not (namely, institutional religion) that it suffers from providing a rich and positive account of what it is. My own research seeks to provide such an account, and it does so by creatively and subversively drawing on key aspects of Dewey's philosophy found largely outside of A Common Faith -- namely, Dewey's aesthetics, social ethics, and theory of education. I argue that "the religious" is best understood not as the automatic inverse of institutional religion, but rather, in terms of its aesthetic, ethical, and educative possibilities.

In this presentation, I will highlight some of the ways in which my reconstructed Deweyan hermeneutic may be applied to a particular set of institutional religious practices -- the Good Friday liturgies at the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas. As I will show, these mestizo liturgies are less about the limitations of institutional religion and more about the possibilities of aesthetic experience, social transformation, and personal education and growth. In offering this interpretation, I seek to show how a Deweyan approach to religious faith, when properly reconstructed, may still prove valuable for prophetic religion.

Monica Tsethlikai, University of California, Santa Cruz

The Influence of another Perspective on Children’s Recall of Previously Misconstrued Events Abstract

Children’s abilities to reframe their memories of events after hearing another childs perspective of the same events was examined, and links between memory reframing, cognitive ability, and social competence were explored. Nine- to 11-year-olds (N = 79) were told to imagine the events in a narrated story happened to them. Next, they heard another story that described either the same events (experimental condition) or unrelated events (control condition) from another child’s perspective. The children in the experimental group reframed their memories in light of the alternative perspective, whereas the children in the control condition did not. Children with higher cognitive scores had higher memory reframing scores, and they received higher social competence ratings than children with lower cognitive scores.

Cord J. Whitaker, Duke University

‘Race War’ in the Siege of Jerusalem and Africa

Her nys king noþer knyyt comen to þis place,

Baroun ne burges, ne burne, þat me folweþ,

Þat þe cause of his come nys Crist forto venge

Upon þe fayþles folke þat hym fayntly slowen.

-Siege of Jerusalem, 489-92.

The anonymous late 14^th century English Siege of Jerusalem was written in a historical moment when Christian monarchs gave lip service to the Crusades, proclaiming Christian community, and doing nothing more. Petrarch’s Africa depicts the Second Punic War. Both foreground war as the theater of power and difference—religious and ‘racial’—and both do it in the context of the Roman Empire: the Siege situates the Crusading movement in medieval Europe’s Roman past while the Africa presents a medieval vision of Rome’s own relationship with its competitors.

Both texts are racked with concerns of community and genealogy. In his 1976 lectures, collected as Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault argues that modern society is undergirded by what he terms ‘race war’ between a dominant group and the race that comes to represent that group’s past. In a 1998 article and a 2002 chapter entitled “Profiting from Precursors in the Siege of Jerusalem,” Christine Chism finds that the Jews in the Siege are figured as Roman and medieval Christianity’s heritage even while Christians try to erase them. When Petrarch writes Jove’s prophecy of exile for Roman Scipio and Carthaginian Hannibal, he writes a shared and very human fate that collapses difference between the foes while simultaneously relegating Carthaginian power to the past. In both texts, the foes of imperial and Christian Rome are made into racialized others.

In my study, I will explore how the Siege and Africa identify, complicate, and investigate difference between Christians and Jews in the Siege and Romans and North Africans in Africa. I will focus on the Crusades and the late-fourteenth century English context of the Siege, Roman and Carthaginian relations in Petrarch, Christianity’s relationship to its Jewish genealogy, and England’s foundational Roman genealogy and its burgeoning assumption of empire. The examination of these texts will lead to a better understanding of power, political and religious community, and, central to this study, race, with all its defining assumptions and presuppositions about a given people, in the Middle Ages.

Shanna Williams, University of Florida

Orbit Shape Variation between Populations and the Sexes

Eye shape and orientation within the human face is the basis for many of our perceptions of identity, character, and beauty. The orbital region surrounding this area is generally discussed in terms of soft tissue interactions, while the skeletal framework upon which these soft tissues rest is often overlooked. However the differences which allow us to visually distinguish populations are intrinsically linked to the hard tissue layer. In skeletal biology, orbit morphology is typically discussed qualitatively in terms of simple, descriptive labels (e.g., round, square, sloping, etc.). While inherently understandable, such labels are incapable of meaningfully characterizing the continuum of shape variability within and between human populations. Further, these descriptors rely upon individual subjective observation to demarcate between one character state and another. Even when measurements are taken of the orbital region, they are typically in the form of linear distance measures (height and breath). The resultant orbital index is then partitioned into descriptive ranges of wide, average, or normal. These established qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection fail to capture all of the available biological information regarding individual and populational orbit shape.

The present study addresses this issue by applying 3D semi-landmarks to the orbital region. Semi-landmarks are often employed to capture anatomical structures lacking distinct landmarks, such as boundaries and surface curvature. One hundred twenty individuals evenly distributed by current cultural classifications of race (i.e., black and white) and sex were compiled from the Terry Collection, Smithsonian Institution. Superior and inferior rim curvature for both orbits was captured by collecting a sequence of points along the structure’s gross outline (continuous stream data) using a portable digitizer. Semi-landmarks were then created within a beta program (Slice 2005), which applies an algorithm that resamples each curve into a user-defined number of evenly-distributed points (10 points per curve; four curves). The semi-landmark data was transformed by generalized Procrustes analysis (GPA), which optimally translates, scales, and rotates the points into a common coordinate system.

Multivariate statistical analysis was then performed on the resulting shape variables. The results of this study not only concur with qualitative descriptions of orbit shape by race, but indicate the presence of sexual dimorphism in this structure. More specifically, a rounding of the orbits occurs from males to females, while whites exhibit a shorter, more sloped orbital appearance when compared to the black individuals. This methodology highlights the potential for characterization of orbital morphology both within and between groups. Perhaps more significantly, the method could serve to explore the degree to such societal classifications of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationality’ are (or are not) based in biological reality. Clinically, it could play a valuable role in establishing known shape ranges in cases of orbital fracture reduction and restoration. In the end, I believe that this research will help to create a model of orbital structure for multiple human populations from around the globe.

Psyche Williams-Forson, University of Maryland College Park

What the Colored Women Need[s] is an Opportunity to Make Money: African American Women, Food Service, and the Railroad

After the Civil War, many blacks viewed the railroads as a means of escaping the vicious social and economic conditions of the rural south. The railroad served as a major link between the south and other geographical locations, and it provided numerous opportunities for African American men (and women). Among these opportunities was a chance to engage in formal and informal aspects of entrepreneurship. This was particularly the case for women hucksters, vendors, and hawkers.

This talks employs cultural, historical, and critical methods to document the traditions and practices of African American women who served as hucksters and vendors around train tracks. Personal narratives, travel logs, newspaper accounts, historical manuscripts, and oral lore are replete with stories of women, many black, some bearing trays of food on their heads, lining the tracks and walking the aisles of stations waiting for trains to approach. Using these sources, this talk delves into the informal economic activities of African American women.

Uncovering these informal enterprises brings to the fore the agency of women often rendered invisible in early capitalist economies. It also reveals how their work often led to property ownership and other material acquisition. Overlooking this aspect of material culture leaves a dramatic dearth in our understanding of African American daily lives. Moreover, an opportunity is missed to understand the complexities of black women’s legacies with food as a form of cultural work—work that had an immense economic and social impact.

Ulrica Wilson, University of California, San Diego

Classifying Division Algebras

In science, much attention is given to organizing knowledge so that it is readily accessible to all those who wish to build upon its foundation. A primary goal for such organization is classifying the objects studied. Biologists study the distinguishable kinds of organisms inhabiting the earth; chemists study the distinct elements found in the universe; and algebraists study various number systems. To make order out of the diversity in each area, a method of classification is necessary. Precise definitions and designations of objects are essential in communicating information. The goal of classifying the different types of (finite-dimensional) division algebras is far from being realized, but there is much that can be said. One strategy is to identify all the possible constructions of division algebras over a particular field. For example, thanks to Frobenius, we know that there are exactly two R-division algebras, R itself, and Hamilton’s quaternions. This kind of classification is optimal because we have an explicit list of R-division algebras(up to isomorphism). Classifying division algebras over other fields has proven to be much more difficult. In this talk I will describe the problem of classifying finite dimensional division algebras.

Nazera S. Wright, University of Maryland, College Park

Girlhood in African American Literature, 1880-1950

This dissertation analyzes African American literature through the social construction and the allegorical function of black girlhood. By examining the paradigm of the black girl between 1880 and 1950, I argue that her representation is based on an ethic of conduct and behavior that holds political meaning in the print culture and speeches after emancipation for two important reasons: to encourage the inclusion of the black race into the body politic and to dismantle racial logic that characterized the race as immoral and without ancestry. However, Post World War II constructions of black girlhood challenge early models of conduct. 20^th century modernist figures such as Gwendolyn Brooks reject Victorian models of conduct and older models of race progress and foreground instead a national agenda that privileges a black feminist politics that predate the call for Black Nationalism of the 1960’s. Analyzing how race leaders imbue the black girl with political meaning will reveal the latent power the black girl holds in her image. They believed the image was powerful enough to restore the tainted image of the black woman, represent a race entering modernity, and ultimately change the way we view African American literary history.

OrLando Yarborough, III, Yale University
Molecular mechanisms of WNK kinase blood pressure control and electrolyte homeostasis: Canine Transcriptome & Proteome Comparative Analysis

Hypertension is a complex disorder affecting one billion people worldwide. Human genetics studies have identified missense mutations in WNK4 to cause Pseudohypoaldosteronism type II (PHAII), a hereditary form of hypertension with elevated serum potassium. A recently described serine/threonine kinase, WNK4 in kidney localizes to tight junctions in distal nephron and has been demonstrated to regulate paracellular chloride flux, transcellular sodium chloride reabsorption and potassium secretion. Though some downstream effectors have been identified, it remains largely unknown the upstream regulators of WNK4 and what steps are between WNK4 and its final effectors. A comparative transcriptome and proteome analytical approach of kidney cell lines with inducible expression of WNK4 will help to identify direct and secondary consequences in pathways upstream or downstream of WNK4. Work to further elucidate the molecular role of WNK4 in the pathophysiology of PHAII and the mechanism of normal electrolyte homeostasis will also advance work towards connecting monogenic hypertension to the essential hypertension observed in the general population.