UC Santa Cruz

Desiring a Better Life: Heteronormativity, Mobility, and Generational Negotiations Among Latinas examines how heteronormativity (normative gender and sexuality) and undergoing a mobility experience of either migration or higher education shapes Latinas' gender and sexual subjectivities as well as generational conversations of sex, pleasure, and dating among mother-daughter dyads. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 53 college-going daughters and 11 of their migrant mothers, digital and in person ethnographic observations with 7 daughters, and a discourse analysis of 78 Tik-Tok videos utilizing the hashtag “#hotcheetogirl,” I offer heteronormativity matrix of domination, a framework rooted in intersectionality, Black feminist thought, and transnational feminist theory, for examining how multiple, historical, context-specific formations intersect to shape the social construction of heteronormativity. As such, my first chapter examines how national U.S. and regional power relations in Los Angeles produce the gender and sexual pathologization of low-income Latinas. The second chapter employs this framework to analyze how these relations rely on and. reproduce several discourses of heteronormativity, including the “hyperfertile” Latina immigrant, “disposable” immigrant, “chola,” and "hot cheeto girl,” and delineates the implications it has on daughters’ mobility trajectories.

This project also encourages mobility scholars to consider how migratory and educational experience shapes generational gender and sexual formations. I do this in Chapter 3 by utilizing a heteronormativity matrix of domination to delineate how the sexual politic of uno nunca sabe (you never know what bad thing(s) can happen) that migrant mothers draw on to teach their daughters about sex reflects how mothers’ migratory journeys and first-hand experiences with heteronormativity and other structural inequalities in Latin America and the U.S., shape Latina daughters’ college-going experiences and subjectivities. In Chapter 4, I employ my theoretical framework to examine how daughters’ new desires and pleasures as a result of going to college provide further insights into the various axes of power shaping heteronormativity. Similar to their mothers, daughters’ mobility experience and discourses of heteronormativity inform the ways in which they talk to their mothers about sex. Many daughters encourage their mothers to explore new desires and sexual pleasures. Overall, this project contributes to Sociology, Sexualities, Gender Studies, and Feminist Studies as it reveals that gender and sexuality are critical sites for resisting and reproducing intersecting inequalities, such as poverty, racism, and nation-making projects like settler-colonialism and imperialism.

The human pathogen and carcinogenic bacterium Helicobacter pylori infects half of the world’s population. H. pylori colonizes the stomach and is equipped with strategies to survive in the harsh environment. A particular challenge is the oxygen radicals generated by host immune cells. Moreover, H. pylori infection triggers chronic inflammation that leads to high host production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), including hydrogen peroxide. One way H. pylori navigates the host environment is through a chemotaxis system that permits directional motility. Chemotaxis signaling is critical for infection in numerous pathogens, including H. pylori. H. pylori has four chemoreceptors, including one named TlpD. TlpD contains three domains: an N-terminal domain with unknown function, a middle MA domain for signal transduction interactions with coupling proteins CheW and CheV1, and a C-terminal CZB domain. In this work, we sought to evaluate the role of the individual TlpD domains in TlpD function, using protein expression in H. pylori. The role of each domain was examined for its role in TlpD localization, association with chemotaxis signaling proteins, and effect on motility. Our results suggest that an intact cytosolic chemoreceptor is required to build a chemotaxis array with CheV coupling proteins, and particularly point to the importance of the region C-terminal to the CZB domain. These findings provide insight into the workings of cytoplasmic sensing proteins, particularly ones with a CZB domain, and lay the foundation for future work with these proteins. Another way that H. pylori can overcome exogenous reactive oxygen species is by using enzymes to decompose these harmful molecules. One interesting enzyme is Cytochrome c peroxidase (CCP), a protein shown to use hydrogen peroxide as a terminal electron acceptor in other microbes. CCP allows bacteria to gain a metabolic benefit from the decomposition of this oxygen radical. H. pylori encodes a putative CCP that contains 56% conserved amino acid identity with the CCP of C. jejuni but there are no studies on this putative H. pylori CCP. Therefore, we sought to evaluate the role of this putative CCP in H. pylori. Our results suggest that CCP plays a crucial role in H. pylori growth and survival in normal media, but did not appear to confer a benefit when exogenous hydrogen peroxide was added. These findings support the hypothesis that H. pylori CCP may not confer an advantage from ROS. Future studies utilizing the generated strains would provide a more complete characterization of this putative CCP. Altogether, findings from this work lay the foundation for future studies that can translate into therapies to treat or prevent H. pylori infection.

This dissertation studies selections of intellectual production on settler colonialism as it concerns the theory and history of capitalism. Part I engages the consolidation of an intellectual paradigm in the post-Cold War period, which I call, “settler colonial reason.” This critical orientation to the history and present of society combines a schematic theory of settler colonialism with the remarkable salience of Marx’s notion of so-called primitive accumulation in the same decades. In the paradigm, the passage of history, particularly the history of capitalism, is principally intelligible as a repetition of origins. Whatever might happen in history, it is always and ultimately an expression of its foundational and structural “logics”—so many new forms or rounds of enclosure, dispossession, and elimination. I elaborate a critique of this paradigm across two chapters: one treating it directly and the other assessing its recent application to the history of Palestine.

Part II seeks alternatives in a longer intellectual history of colonization and the uneven historical development of capitalism, beginning with classical political economy. The combined colonial and commercial policy of specific heterodox thinkers provided a conceptual solution to impasses in industrial capitalism’s early stages. I argue that “systematic colonization” in theory and Anglo settler colonialism in practice facilitated the co-existence, in metropole and colony, of high wages and high profits—in a word, “economic development.” This assigns paramount significance to the unprecedented and unrepeatable mass migration of working people from an industrializing center to an agrarian settlement for absolutely high wages, and the trade and investment relations between these regions. The final chapter tracks these themes into twentieth-century thought on economic development, including mainstream postwar development theorists, economic historians, and their critics. Through this investigation, I formalize the role of wage spreads to global patterns of economic development and underdevelopment, especially those opened by the non-replicable history of Anglo settlement.

Altogether, the dissertation advocates for an approach to settler colonialism that is not typological (differentiated by internal “logics” at the national level). It pursues instead the intellectual means for determining settler colonialism concretely within and as part of the uneven historical development of capitalism.

In order to harness the potential of deep learning and computer object recogni-tion in practical environments, a substantial collection of interesting features is essential. However, the creation of labeled image datasets is a significant challenge, hindering the broader adoption and autonomy by farmers, land managers, and ecologists. To address this challenge, we present a data collection, annotation, and pro- cessing pipeline utilizing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based optical sensing. Bird- sEye empowers non-deep learning experts to train, maintain, and deploy sophisticated computer vision methods on their own local land environments by substituting the need for aerial image feature identification with terrain based observation by subject matter experts. These annotated ground observations are then used to identify relevant image sections within UAV captured imagery. By facilitating the rapid generation of labeled datasets, our approach can iden- tify and characterize a diverse array of land and plant conditions. This has significant applications in areas such as disease monitoring, vegetation and pest identification, and precision treatments.

This dissertation addresses the challenges of cell segmentation and tracking in time-lapse microscopy using advanced deep-learning techniques. Analyzing microscopy images involves several challenges, including accurate segmentation and tracking of cells, handling the presence of artifacts and noise, and dealing with the proximity and overlapping of cells in densely populated images. Furthermore, there is a significant challenge in obtaining large annotated datasets necessary for training robust deep-learning models, as manually annotating microscopy images is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To overcome these issues, first, we developed DeepSea, a deep-learning model for efficient cell segmentation and tracking. DeepSea incorporates auxiliary models for cell edge detection, residual blocks for efficiency, and progressive learning techniques, achieving high segmentation accuracy and effective cell tracking. Additionally, we propose cGAN-Seg, a CycleGAN-based model that generates synthetic images to enhance the training process of cell segmentation models, incorporating style generation paths, linear attention mechanisms, differentiable image augmentation, and VGG perceptual loss. This significantly improves segmentation performance on limited datasets, with substantial improvements across various cell types and imaging modalities. A GAN-based super-resolution video generator is also introduced, generating annotated high-quality, realistic time-lapse microscopy videos, further addressing annotated dataset scarcity for live single-cell tracking models. Finally, we employed our quantitative single-cell image analysis pipeline to gain insights into cell size regulation and morphological diversity, as well as cell spatial and frequency feature distribution.

Couple(t): A Poetics of Love extends the theoretical apparatus of coupling (Luhmann, Sloterdijk) to the form of the poetic couplet (original poems) in order to elucidate how mimesis happens in the social and in excess of symbol as a production of relational difference. By thinking love untethered from the absolute truth value assigned it as societal ideal or literary trope, I activate coupling to posit affect and affection as mutually constituted and spread through connection; this connection can be read as a network of bodies, or a social body. If love is a technology of communication practiced materially as well as semiotically, the dynamic couplings formed in love can illuminate our relationships with ulterior agencies, including language. Couple(t) centers a poetics of love uniquely concerned with both form and feeling to enter directly into the media ecology of a functionally differentiated artistic social system: the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia. My sensory ethnographic fieldwork in this vernacular museum reenters love as ekphrastic ratios of description by intervening upon visual taxonomies and submitting my own testimonial relic to the collection. In evidencing and amplifying couplings between personal artifacts and public encounters, I participate in love’s orientation against the grain of totalization by attaching to multiple vectors like lines of verse. Coupling with this critical framework, my artistic practice summons desire as a generative apparatus. My poetry manuscript, Money with You, wields couplets as platforms of relationality: two lines toggling across their border and between their modular unit and the remaining poem to defamiliarize the ordinary. This distinctive vibration, engineered through juxtaposition and enjambment, renders the couplet a contact zone of subjectification and knowledge production. Money with You is part sensory autoethnography, part epistle to former and speculative lovers, part municipal ecopoetics, and 100 percent queer heuristics orientating love via the couple(t). By embodying both conceptual and formal architectures, Money with You forges new pathways through perceived binaries including personal/political, humor/despair, nostalgia/futurity, digital/actual, vulgarity/constraint, and creative/critical. Together, the creative and critical axes of my dissertation project open outwardly like arms, like a book, to embrace a media poetics of love. By honoring allocentric modes of being and interpretation that hold otherness in tension, the dyadic structure of Couple(t) aims to renew signification via transversals faithful only to the location and vacillation of difference.

Choreographic programming (CP) is an emerging paradigm for programming distributed applications that run on multiple nodes. In CP, instead of implementing individual programs for each node, the programmer writes one, unified program, called a choreography, that is then transformed to individual programs for each node via a compilation step called endpoint projection (EPP). While CP languages have existed for over a decade, library-level CP — in which choreographies are expressed as programs in an existing host language, and choreographic language constructs and endpoint projection are provided entirely by a host-language library — is in its infancy. Library-level CP has the potential to improve the accessibility and practicality of CP by meeting programmers where they are, in their programming language of choice, with access to that language’s ecosystem, however, the existing implementation approaches have portability, efficiency, and practicality drawbacks that hinder its adoption.

This thesis aims to advance the state of the art of library-level CP by proposing new implementation techniques: endpoint projection as dependency injection (EPP-asDI), and choreographic enclaves. EPP-as-DI is a language-agnostic technique for implementing EPP at the library level. Unlike existing library-level approaches, EPP-as-DI asks little from the host language — support for higher-order functions is all that is required — making it usable in a wide variety of host languages. Choreographic enclaves are a language feature that lets the programmer define sub-choreographies within a larger choreography. Within an enclave, “knowledge of choice” is propagated only among the enclave participants, enabling the seamless use of the host language’s conditional constructs while addressing the efficiency limitations of existing library-level implementations of choreographic conditionals. This thesis presents ChoRus and Choreography.ts, two library-level CP implementations for Rust and TypeScript, respectively, that use EPP-as-DI and choreographic enclaves. We discuss how EPP-as-DI and choreographic enclaves are implemented in these two languages, and evaluate the usability and performance through two case studies and performance benchmarks.

Pathogens and colonialism are interconnected threats. Pathogens are imperceptible to the naked eye and sometimes deadly. Colonialism similarly can cause death and long-lasting destruction while the structural violence often goes obscured or unacknowledged. Ancient DNA has the power to untangle stories where these “invisible enemies” intersect. This dissertation investigates the pathogens brought to South America during colonization, pathogens present in South America before colonization, alternative wet lab methodologies, and the involvement of colonialism in the field of paleogenomics itself. Using metagenomic and high-throughput ancient DNA methods, I report on pathogens found in Peru during the early period of Spanish colonization, a 5,500-year-old Treponema pallidum-like pathogen from the Sabana de Bogota, and human mitochondrial data recovered from ancient high-touch items such as moccasins. Connecting the past to the present, the impact of pathogens and colonialism on societies leaves a heavy imprint that can be traced through to the future.

This dissertation explores the complex relationship between time, history, and judicial decision-making in the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts. I address the Court's prevailing "present-past" orientation—a tendency to anchor decisions in historical precedent without adequately considering the differentiating power of time to alter the experience of living under the Constitution. This approach, while respectful of tradition, often results in judicial outcomes that fail to resonate with the dynamic conditions of contemporary society.

I interrogate this issue from a philosophical—as opposed to political—perspective by applying Henri Bergson’s concepts of "duration" and "simultaneity" to reveal the temporal aspects of Supreme Court decision-making. Bergson’s philosophy provides a framework for critiquing the Supreme Court's static view of history. When applied, that framework suggests that legal precedents should not be seen as fixed points but as evolving constructs that must be interpreted in light of current societal contexts. The dissertation contrasts the Court's historical approach with what I call a "present-future" orientation—one where the Constitution’s founding principles are adapted to the experiences of modern Americans.

The dissertation argues that the Roberts Court's historical consciousness, with its emphasis on static interpretations of the past, often constrains the Court’s ability to engage with the Constitution as a living document that must answer to contemporary contingencies. Further, the dissertation reveals a real but often overlooked dynamic of judicial opinion writing—namely, that precedent cases self-differentiate over time and thus must constantly be checked to ensure their continuing relevance to contemporary experience. This has significant implications for the Court's role in shaping legal principles that are responsive to modern challenges.

I conclude by proposing a method for rethinking constitutional interpretation—one that embraces the fluidity of time and history as integral to judicial creativity. This approach would allow the Supreme Court to better fulfill its role as a guardian of constitutional values in a manner that is both historically informed and future-oriented, thereby ensuring that its decisions remain relevant to the lived experiences of the American people.

While dance training is widely recognized for its benefits, my extensive experience in the field has revealed that the prevalent authoritative teaching methods often encourage a toxic environment. This research investigates the rigid obedience expected of dancers, the discouragement of questioning, and the normalization of potentially harmful and unethical practices within dance studios. Such environments stifle creativity and contribute to a culture of fear where teachers are viewed as figures of authority not to be questioned, and students are dissuaded from voicing concerns. This study explores the reasons behind these traditional teaching methods and proposes ways to cultivate a healthier, more equitable environment in dance education. Through this work, I aspire to contribute positively to the dance community by advocating for reforms that prioritize the well-being and empowerment of dancers. In this thesis, I employ autoethnography to critique the elitism and entrenched superiority within classical dance, drawing on my extensive experience and the privileges I have observed as a dancer. This field is marked by a protective reluctance against evolution from its current critical pedagogy. I argue for a pedagogical shift that recognizes student discourse as an integral part of the learning process, advocating for a classroom environment where every student is nurtured. Inspired by Paulo Freire's humanizing pedagogy and the insights of bell hooks, my goal is to create a dance class that encourages critical engagement, deepens technical understanding, and challenges dancers in healthy ways. This approach aligns with dance scholars' push towards more progressive and inclusive teaching methods. This thesis outlines the continuing implementation of new strategies tailored for the 21st-century student, aiming to create an optimal learning environment characterized by inclusivity, equity, humanity, and integrity. It challenges the traditional valuation of specific backgrounds and appearances, paving the way for transformative and thought-provoking experiences in the dance studio.