ABSTRACT

William Girard

Enacting Pentecostalism: Spirit-Filled Development and the Honduran Coup d'État

This dissertation explores how Pentecostal Christians in the small town of Copán Ruinas, Honduras strive to remake both individual subjectivities and the national body as part of a drive towards development and modernization. In the process, these Spirit-filled Christians, which today make up as much as 35% of the Honduran population, fuse what are conventionally regarded as distinct religious and secular formations. The resulting politically charged practices and imaginaries draw on, but also significantly transform, long-standing and interwoven regional discourses of nationalism, progress, and race/ethnicity. Those engaged in this Pentecostal project also work to draw to their pastors the trust that is more commonly given to the state or translocal non-governmental organizations to develop the nation. The dissertation argues that this Pentecostal program is part of a far broader project of neoliberal governance, and that it is brought into being through the two types of power Foucault described as constitutive of modern life: discipline and security.

The hybrid and explicitly political nature of this Pentecostal project came into sharp focus after the June 28th 2009 Honduran coup, the first successful coup in Latin America since the end of the Cold War. In response to the coup, these Christians engaged in their own form of geopolitics, which aimed at defeating the deposed Leftist president, Manuel Zelaya, and the malicious demons they understood to be his allies. These efforts included praying to God to purify Honduras, imploring angels to defend the country's borders, carrying out "spiritual warfare," and currying favor with Israel, which they envision to be God's most beloved country.

Investigating this secular/religious project required that I not explore Pentecostalism as a discrete entity or imagine it as a preestablished whole, but rather that I trace how a range of modalities (forms of knowledge production, practices, sensibilities, technologies, texts, objects, and discourses) come together within diverse "enactments" of Pentecostalism. This perspective allowed me to identify the ways in which Pentecostals transform ostensibly secular projects of governance as they bring together previously disparate entities.

Rationale. Very preterm (VPT) birth, birth before 33 weeks gestational age, puts children at increased risk for a variety of neurodevelopmental, cognitive, and behavioral difficulties as they grow. Severe complications of VPT birth (e.g., Grade 3-4 intraventricular hemorrhage, cystic periventricular leukomalacia, bronchopulmonary dysplasia) are associated with more serious functional deficits and often prompt extensive follow-up. However, milder brain injury may result in subtle deficits that may only become apparent when children begin to struggle in elementary school, particularly with regard to neuromotor functioning, mathematics, and related skills. A better understanding of the neuropsychological and neuroanatomical variations related to VPT birth as these children are entering kindergarten is therefore needed to develop screening procedures and guide appropriate interventions in the future.

Design. 60 children born VPT without severe birth-related complications and 40 children born full term (FT) were enrolled in this study within six months of beginning kindergarten. Each child underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), diffusion-tensor imaging (DTI), and a battery of neuropsychological measures. The aims of this study were to (1) evaluate mathematics abilities and determine the set of skills across a set of a priori measures from related cognitive domains that mediate the group differences between performance on a mathematics measure using a multiple mediation model, (2) utilize structural MRI to conduct an exploratory analysis to compare cortical morphometry measures of gray matter volume, gray matter thickness, surface area, and sulcal depth between groups using a voxel-wise, surface-based method, and (3) examine overall group differences in motor task performance, and compare an a priori set of regional white matter integrity measures and brain structural volumes in VPT children with and without motor deficits.

Results. Groups did not differ significantly on age, sex distribution, or socioeconomic status (a combination of maternal education and household income). Study 1 found that children born VPT scored significantly lower on the mathematics measure. The difference between VPT and FT groups was mediated by scores on tests of visual-motor integration, verbal comprehension, and phonological awareness but not but by motor skills, parent-reported executive functioning, spatial working memory, or phonological working memory. In Study 2, VPT-born children showed a widespread pattern of reduced cortical thickness in the temporal and lateral parietal lobes and increased cortical thickness in the medial occipital lobe. Cortical surface area was larger in the medial cingulate in the VPT-born group but smaller in the fusiform area. Cortical volume was larger in the medial occipital lobe for the VPT-born group and smaller in the fusiform area. In Study 3, the VPT-born children performed significantly worse on the motor measure, with 50% demonstrating clinically significant deficits. The VPT-born children with motor deficits demonstrated lower fractional anisotropy (FA) and higher mean diffusivity (MD) in the forceps major compared to the VPT group without motor deficits. The VPT group with motor deficits also showed higher MD in the corpus callosum and lower FA compared to the FT group in the forceps major, anterior thalamic radiations (ATR), and cingulum. Both VPT groups had significantly reduced volumes of the thalamus, brainstem, and cerebellar white matter compared to the FT group. Additional regions that were initially hypothesized to be related but were not significant between-group predictors were volume of the corpus callosum, forceps minor, ATR, and cortical-spinal tract (CST), as well as volumes of the ventral diencephalon and basal ganglia. White matter diffusion measures (FA and MD) of the inferior frontal-occipital fasciculus, thalamus, basal ganglia, superior cortical striatal fibers, and CST were not significant predictors of group.

Conclusion. Advances in medical care have resulted in decreased mortality and reduced rates of more severe neurological complications in children born preterm. However as shown here, even children born very preterm with a relatively benign early health history often demonstrate difficulties in mathematics and motor skills. These difficulties are related to subtle differences in neuroanatomical areas often affected by very preterm birth. Pre-kindergarten screening of motor functioning, mathematics, and related cognitive skills may assist in early detection of difficulties, leading to increased opportunities for appropriate support and interventions, and potentially improvement of long-term outcomes.

The anaphase-promoting complex/cyclosome (APC/C) is a large, multi-subunit E3 ubiquitin ligase that governs key mitotic events in eukaryotes. The APC/C catalyzes the transfer of ubiquitin from an E2 ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme to a protein substrate, building polyubiquitin signals that mark substrates for destruction by the proteasome. In yeast, the APC/C collaborates with two E2s, Ubc4 and Ubc1: APC/CUbc4 catalyzes the attachment of the initial ubiquitin to the substrate, while APC/CUbc1 elongates ubiquitin chains. Both E2s seem to interact with the same site on the APC/C, and it is not clear how their competing activities collaborate to generate a polyubiquitin chain that is sufficient for proteosomal recognition. We hypothesized that E2 synergy requires a finely tuned balance of the affinities of the two E2 proteins for the APC/C, allowing E2s to alternate on the APC/C. In this work, we uncovered new insights into this problem by studying the role of a C-terminal ubiquitin-associated (UBA) domain in Ubc1. Deletion of the UBA domain decreased the length of polyubiquitin chains and increased the concentration of Ubc1 required for half-maximal APC/C activity in vitro. Surprisingly, the stimulatory effect of the UBA domain does not depend on previous initiation of a ubiquitin chain on the substrate, suggesting that the UBA domain does not promote polyubiquitination by interacting with ubiquitin on a substrate. Instead, deletion of the UBA domain reduced Ubc1 binding to the APC/C. Finally, deletion of the UBA domain from Ubc1 decreased its ability to compete with Ubc4 and reduced polyubiquitin chain length, while attachment of the UBA domain to Ubc4 increased its ability to compete with Ubc1 and reduced polyubiquitin chain length. Thus, the extra affinity provided by the UBA domain of Ubc1 ensures efficient polyubiquitination of substrate by balancing Ubc1 affinity with that of Ubc4, resulting in an efficient collaboration between the two E2s.

For many years the consistency of the Standard Model(SM) of particle physics has been unflinching. The structure and content of the Standard Model has remained whole in the face of shockingly many experimental tests. Predicting the existence of new particles and yielding incredibly accurate calculations of fundamental measurements have been the hallmark of the Standard Model. Currently, experimentalists are testing several Standard Model quantities to such precision that 5th order terms are needed in theoretical calculations to match this precision. Never-the-less, the predictions of the Standard Model have kept pace with experiment and have yet to be contradicted.

Unfortunately, this incredible stretch of experimental validation comes at a cost. Several very large problems still are without solutions and finding them in the particle content of the Standard Model alone is unlikely. The huge range of scales seen in nature, a dark matter candidate, and the cosmic baryon asymmetry still loom as major flaws in the Standard Model. In this manuscript we aim to increase the accuracy of several Standard Model predictions to push the experimental limits of the Standard Model. We start with a brief introduction to the Standard Model and its sector we will be mainly concerned with, namely QCD. In Chapter 2, we will consider the Standard Model as an effective field theory for a new physics model that resides at a mass scale much higher than the electro-weak scale. By interpreting the SM as an effective theory it allows us to extend the Standard Model Lagrangian with new, higher-dimensional operators that depend on the scale of new physics. We then calculate the next-to-leading order corrections to these operators in QCD and combine these calculations with parton showers via the \texttt{POWHEG} method. In the final section of Chapter 2 we present a discussion of the bounds on the scale of new physics that can be drawn from comparing our results to Large-Hadron-Collider(LHC) searches. In the third chapter of this manuscript, we will briefly introduce the importance of W+charm events at the LHC followed by a discussion of NLO QCD calculations and heavy meson fragmentation resummation. Next, we give a general method for combining a fixed order, massive calculation with a massless calculation with large logarithms resummed. Numerical results of resummation and an implementation of the afore mention method are discussed followed by future outlook.