Since September 11, 2001 the U.S. Border Patrol has grown from 9,821 to 20,273 agents, more than doubling in size and in the process becoming the largest federal law enforcement agency in the United States. This dissertation queries the everyday geographies of the agency's practices; the ways that these geographies intersect with and affect circuits and practices of human migration; how the Border Patrol conceptualizes "threat" and maps this onto people and territory they may then police; the environmental conditions that limit or constrain the everyday reach and efficacy of Border Patrol operations in the remote Arizona desert; the discourses, anxieties and everyday conditions of encounter in rural border regions that drive some residents to call for an even greater increase in border policing; and finally, social movements in the City of Tucson, AZ that have sought to combat, resist and undermine immigration policing through the fabric of everyday life. The dissertation draws from two years of fieldwork in southern Arizona and southeast Michigan examining the complex interactions between residents, civil society actors and law enforcement personnel. Research methods included archival research; semi-structured interviews; and ethnographic observation alongside non-governmental organizations, non-status immigrants and at Homeland Security trade events. The research contributes to geographic literatures on security, migration and border policing in the United States, applying posthumanist theory and feminist methodologies to unpack how material conditions of encounter shape state security practice, how this security practice in turn affects people's everyday conditions of social reproduction, and how these everyday conditions of social reproduction may in turn shape or compel social movement practices that contest these outcomes.

This thesis investigates the historical relationship between understandings of human emotion, and how they manifest in our understanding of the political. Specifically, this thesis returns to the presentation of individual political psychology in ancient Greece (Thucydides, Aristotle), the 17th and 18th centuries (Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant), and the 20th century (Schmitt, Fukuyama, Lebow) to illuminate how these understandings have shaped our idea of Sovereignty as an idea, institution, and practice. By turning to the rich history in political thought on emotion and affect, this thesis demonstrates a consistent and prolonged constitutive relationship between presentations of individual political psychology and international political order. This thesis also rehabilitates the full scope of affective insights into political phenomena— by turning to literature on rhetoric and aesthetics—in order to open up new space to critique common understandings of Sovereignty. Moreover, given that the institution and concept of Sovereignty is central to research in the disciplines of International Relations and Political Theory, this thesis also argues for a much-needed closure of intellectual space between these two branches of Political Science. In short, this thesis demonstrates the centrality of the politics of affect and the divergent and disparate pictures of individual political psychology that are taken for granted in defenses and critiques of the concept of Sovereignty. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Student affect can play a profoundly important role in students' post-school lives. Understanding students' affective states within online learning environments in particular has become an important matter of research, as digital tutoring systems have the potential to intervene at the moment that students are struggling and becoming frustrated, bored or disengaged. However, despite the importance of assessing students' affective states, there is no clear consensus about what emotions are most important to assess, nor how these emotions can be best measured. This dissertation investigates students’ self-reports of their emotions and causal attributions of those emotions collected while they are solving math problems within a mathematics tutoring system. These self-reports are collected in two conditions: through limited choice Likert response and through open response text boxes. The conditions are combined with students’ cognitive attributions to describe epistemic (neither purely affective nor purely cognitive) emotions in order to explain the relationship between observable student behaviors in the MathSpring.org tutoring system and student affect. These factors include beliefs, expectations, motivations, and perceptions of ability and control. A special emphasis of this dissertation is on analyzing the role of causal attributions for the events and appraisals of the learning environment, as possible causes of student behaviors, performance, and affect.

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This thesis examines attentional and cognitive biases for particular facial expressions in delusion-prone and deluded individuals. The exploration of cognitive biases in delusion-prone individuals provides one means of elucidating psychological processes that might be involved in the genesis of delusions. Chapter 1 provides a brief review of the continuum approach to schizophrenia, and outlines recent theoretical conceptualisations of delusions. The study of schizophrenia phenomena at the symptom level has become a popular method of inquiry, given the heterogeneous phenotypic expression of schizophrenia, and the uncertainty surrounding the existence of a core neuropathology. Delusions are one of the most commonly experienced symptoms of schizophrenia, and have traditionally been regarded as fixed, false beliefs that are pathognomonic of an organic disease process. However, recent phenomenological evidence of delusional ideation in the general population has led to the conceptualisation of delusions as multi-dimensional entities, lying at the extreme end of a continuum from normal through to maladaptive beliefs. Recent investigations of the information processing abnormalities in deluded individuals are reviewed in Chapter 2. This strand of research has revealed evidence of various biases in social cognition, particularly in relation to threat-related material, in deluded individuals. These biases are evident in probabilistic reasoning, attribution style, and attention, but there has been relatively little investigation of cognitive aberrations in delusion-prone individuals. In the present thesis, social-cognitive biases were examined in relation to a standard series of faces that included threat-related (anger, fear) and non-threatening (happy, sad) expressions, in both delusion-prone and clinically deluded individuals. Chapters 3 and 4 present the results of behavioural (RT, affect recognition accuracy) and visual scanpath investigations in healthy participants assessed for level of delusion- proneness. The results indicate that delusion-prone individuals are slower at processing angry faces, and show a general (rather than emotion-specific) impairment in facial affect recognition, compared to non-prone healthy controls. Visual scanpath studies show that healthy individuals tend to direct more foveal fixations to the feature areas (eyes, nose, mouth) of threat-related facial expressions (anger, fear). By contrast, delusion-prone individuals exhibit reduced foveal attention to threat-related faces, combined with �extended� scanpaths, that may be interpreted as an attentional pattern of �vigilance-avoidance� for social threat. Chapters 5 and 6 extend the work presented in Chapters 3 and 4, by investigating the presence of similar behavioural and attentional biases in deluded schizophrenia, compared to healthy control and non-deluded schizophrenia groups. Deluded schizophrenia subjects exhibited a similar delay in processing angry faces, compared to non-prone control participants, while both deluded and non-deluded schizophrenia groups displayed a generalised affect recognition deficit. Visual scanpath investigations revealed a similar style of avoiding a broader range of negative (anger, fear, sad) faces in deluded schizophrenia, as well as a common pattern of fewer fixations with shorter duration, and reduced attention to facial features of all faces in both deluded and non-deluded schizophrenia. The examination of inferential biases for emotions displayed in facial expressions is presented in Chapter 7 in a study of causal attributional style. The results of this study provide some support for a �self-serving� bias in deluded schizophrenia, as well as evidence for an inability to appreciate situational cues when making causal judgements in both delusion-prone and deluded schizophrenia. A theoretical integration of the current findings is presented in Chapter 8, with regard to the implications for cognitive theories of delusions, and neurobiological models of schizophrenia phenomena, more generally. Visual attention biases for threat-related facial expressions in delusion-prone and deluded schizophrenia are consistent with proposals of neural dysconnectivity between frontal-limbic networks, while attributional biases and impaired facial expression perception may reflect dysfunction in a broader �social brain� network encompassing these and medial temporal lobe regions. Strong evidence for attentional biases and affect recognition deficits in delusion-prone individuals implicates their role in the development of delusional beliefs, but the weaker evidence for attributional biases in delusion-prone individuals suggests that inferential biases about others� emotions may be relevant only to the maintenance of delusional beliefs (or that attributional biases for others� emotional states may reflect other, trait-linked difficulties related to mentalising ability). In summary, the work presented in this thesis demonstrates the utility of adopting a single-symptom approach to schizophrenia within the continuum framework, and attests to the importance of further investigations of aberrant social cognition in relation to the development of delusions.

This dissertation analyzes the appropriation of the political theory "soft power" within Japanese national bureaucracies as a discursive mechanism through which anxious concerns for Japan's present are manufactured into hopeful sentiments for its future. In doing so, it examines how certain nonconscious capacities to feel, affects , are made knowable in more formally narrated and perceived sentiments, emotions . These terms constitute the two sides of what I call the affect-emotion gap , whereby the slippages between what one feels and what one knows about what one feels are made into sites of political and economic investment. Based on two years of fieldwork conducted at the major national bureaucracies engaged with cultural diplomacy and policy in Japan--the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and the Japan Foundation--I observe how soft power ideologies are translated into administrative policies that seek to turn aesthetic production, specifically within the field of Japanese popular culture, into political resource. Ultimately, I argue that the uneasy accommodation of soft power ideology to everyday bureaucratic practice reveals a contradictory movement in which soft power is at once delegitimized as practical policy and activated as discursive ideology which, in suturing economic anxiety in the present to hope for Japan's culture industries in the future, nonetheless sustains soft power's circulation.

This thesis examines attentional and cognitive biases for particular facial expressions in delusion-prone and deluded individuals. The exploration of cognitive biases in delusion-prone individuals provides one means of elucidating psychological processes that might be involved in the genesis of delusions. Chapter 1 provides a brief review of the continuum approach to schizophrenia, and outlines recent theoretical conceptualisations of delusions. The study of schizophrenia phenomena at the symptom level has become a popular method of inquiry, given the heterogeneous phenotypic expression of schizophrenia, and the uncertainty surrounding the existence of a core neuropathology. Delusions are one of the most commonly experienced symptoms of schizophrenia, and have traditionally been regarded as fixed, false beliefs that are pathognomonic of an organic disease process. However, recent phenomenological evidence of delusional ideation in the general population has led to the conceptualisation of delusions as multi-dimensional entities, lying at the extreme end of a continuum from normal through to maladaptive beliefs. Recent investigations of the information processing abnormalities in deluded individuals are reviewed in Chapter 2. This strand of research has revealed evidence of various biases in social cognition, particularly in relation to threat-related material, in deluded individuals. These biases are evident in probabilistic reasoning, attribution style, and attention, but there has been relatively little investigation of cognitive aberrations in delusion-prone individuals. In the present thesis, social-cognitive biases were examined in relation to a standard series of faces that included threat-related (anger, fear) and non-threatening (happy, sad) expressions, in both delusion-prone and clinically deluded individuals. Chapters 3 and 4 present the results of behavioural (RT, affect recognition accuracy) and visual scanpath investigations in healthy participants assessed for level of delusion- proneness. The results indicate that delusion-prone individuals are slower at processing angry faces, and show a general (rather than emotion-specific) impairment in facial affect recognition, compared to non-prone healthy controls. Visual scanpath studies show that healthy individuals tend to direct more foveal fixations to the feature areas (eyes, nose, mouth) of threat-related facial expressions (anger, fear). By contrast, delusion-prone individuals exhibit reduced foveal attention to threat-related faces, combined with �extended� scanpaths, that may be interpreted as an attentional pattern of �vigilance-avoidance� for social threat. Chapters 5 and 6 extend the work presented in Chapters 3 and 4, by investigating the presence of similar behavioural and attentional biases in deluded schizophrenia, compared to healthy control and non-deluded schizophrenia groups. Deluded schizophrenia subjects exhibited a similar delay in processing angry faces, compared to non-prone control participants, while both deluded and non-deluded schizophrenia groups displayed a generalised affect recognition deficit. Visual scanpath investigations revealed a similar style of avoiding a broader range of negative (anger, fear, sad) faces in deluded schizophrenia, as well as a common pattern of fewer fixations with shorter duration, and reduced attention to facial features of all faces in both deluded and non-deluded schizophrenia. The examination of inferential biases for emotions displayed in facial expressions is presented in Chapter 7 in a study of causal attributional style. The results of this study provide some support for a �self-serving� bias in deluded schizophrenia, as well as evidence for an inability to appreciate situational cues when making causal judgements in both delusion-prone and deluded schizophrenia. A theoretical integration of the current findings is presented in Chapter 8, with regard to the implications for cognitive theories of delusions, and neurobiological models of schizophrenia phenomena, more generally. Visual attention biases for threat-related facial expressions in delusion-prone and deluded schizophrenia are consistent with proposals of neural dysconnectivity between frontal-limbic networks, while attributional biases and impaired facial expression perception may reflect dysfunction in a broader �social brain� network encompassing these and medial temporal lobe regions. Strong evidence for attentional biases and affect recognition deficits in delusion-prone individuals implicates their role in the development of delusional beliefs, but the weaker evidence for attributional biases in delusion-prone individuals suggests that inferential biases about others� emotions may be relevant only to the maintenance of delusional beliefs (or that attributional biases for others� emotional states may reflect other, trait-linked difficulties related to mentalising ability). In summary, the work presented in this thesis demonstrates the utility of adopting a single-symptom approach to schizophrenia within the continuum framework, and attests to the importance of further investigations of aberrant social cognition in relation to the development of delusions.