Harold Garfinkel untersuchte in seiner ethnomethodologischen Studie über Agnes, die er 1967 im Prozess der Geschlechtsumwandlung begleitete, die Praktiken der alltäglichen, interaktiven Produktion des Geschlechts. Das hieraus entstandene Konzept des Doing Gender erkennt Geschlecht nicht als natürlichen Zustand, sondern als in sozialer Interaktion hervorgebrachtes Personenmerkmal.

Using new materialist approaches to intersectional theories of gender/sex –particularly Karen Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemological framework, agential realism– this thesis examines how knowledge about class is produced, through feminist performance art practices. Through this lens I will examine how two pieces of performance art by U.K. based artists, Sophie Lisa Beresford and Catherine Hoffmann, can express novel ways in which class is not simply a system acting upon bodies, but inextricably entwined with, and produced through, bodily matter. Furthermore, this essay discusses the ways in which performance art is uniquely positioned to examine this intra-action between discourse and matter; providing a way to bridge the gaps in the current theoretical discourses and creative practices. Keywords: Feminist performance art, agential realism, intersectionality, class, new materialism, class-drag, performativity, class-passing, intra-activity.

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No / This book takes a novel approach to the study of male eating disorders – an area that is often dominated by clinical discourses. The study of eating disorders in men has purportedly suffered from a lack of dedicated attention to personal and socio-cultural aspects. Delderfield tackles this deficiency by spotlighting a set of personal accounts written by a group of men who have experiences of disordered eating. The text presents critical interpretations that aim to situate these experiences in the social and cultural context in which these disorders occur. This discursive work is underpinned by an eclectic scholarly engagement with social psychology and sociology literature around masculinities, embodiment and fatness, belonging, punishment, stigma, and control; leading to understandings about relationships with food, body and self. This is undertaken with a reflexive element, as the personal intersects with the professional. This text will appeal to students, scholars and clinicians in social sciences, humanities, and healthcare studies, including public health.

Stefan Hirschauer kritisiert mit dem Konzept des Undoing Gender den Theorieentwurf des Doing Gender nach West & Zimmerman. Er begreift Geschlecht als Effekt von Interaktionen und lehnt sich dabei an Garfinkels ethnomethodologisches Konzept der Accountability und der Omnirelevanz von Geschlecht an. Aus institutioneller Perspektive wird die Möglichkeit der Neutralisierung der Kategorie Geschlecht betont. Forschungsperspektivisch ist Geschlecht auf seine konkrete Relevanzsetzung in Interaktionen unter der Bedingung unterschiedlicher kultureller Konfigurationen und institutioneller Arrangements zu untersuchen ("kontextuelle Kontingenz").

Anglo-Indians, a designation acquired in the 1911 Indian Census, had previously been known as Eurasians, East Indians, Indo-Britons and half-castes. ‘Anglo-Indian’ had previously denoted, and among some scholars continues to denote, Britons long resident in India. We will define Anglo-Indians as a particular mixed race Indo-European population arising out of the European trading and imperial presence in India, and one of several constructed categories by which transient Britons sought to demarcate racial difference within the Raj’s socio-racial hierarchy. Anglo-Indians were placed in an intermediary (and differentially remunerated) position between Indians and Domiciled Europeans (another category excluded from fully ‘white’ status), who in turn were placed below imported British superiors. The domiciled community (of Anglo-Indians and Domiciled Europeans, treated as a single socio-economic class by Britons) were relied upon as loyal buttressing agents of British rule who could be deployed to help run the Raj’s strategically sensitive transport and communication infrastructure, and who were made as a term of their service to serve in auxiliary military forces which could help to ensure the internal security of the Raj and respond to strikes, civil disobedience or crises arising from international conflict. The thesis reveals how calls for Indianisation of state and railway employment by Indian nationalists in the assemblies inaugurated by the 1919 Government of India Act threatened, through opening up their reserved intermediary positions to competitive entry and examination by Indians, to undermine the economic base of domiciled employment. Anglo-Indian leaders responded with varying strategies. Foremost was the definition of Anglo-Indians as an Indian minority community which demanded political representation through successive phases of constitutional change and statutory safeguards for their existing employment. This study explores various strategies including: deployment of multiple identities; widespread racial passing by individuals and families; agricultural colonisation schemes; and calls for individual, familial or collective migration.

Distributed systems are everywhere. From large datacenters to mobile devices, an ever richer assortment of applications and services relies on distributed systems, infrastructure, and protocols. Despite their ubiquity, testing and debugging distributed systems remains notoriously hard. Moreover, aside from inherent design challenges posed by partial failure, concurrency, or asynchrony, there remain significant challenges in the implementation of distributed systems. These programming challenges stem from the increasing complexity of the concurrent activities and reactive behaviors in a distributed system on the one hand, and the need to effectively leverage the parallelism offered by modern multi-core hardware, on the other hand. This thesis contributes Kompics, a programming model designed to alleviate some of these challenges. Kompics is a component model and programming framework for building distributed systems by composing message-passing concurrent components. Systems built with Kompics leverage multi-core machines out of the box, and they can be dynamically reconfigured to support hot software upgrades. A simulation framework enables deterministic execution replay for debugging, testing, and reproducible behavior evaluation for large-scale Kompics distributed systems. The same system code is used for both simulation and production deployment, greatly simplifying the system development, testing, and debugging cycle. We highlight the architectural patterns and abstractions facilitated by Kompics through a case study of a non-trivial distributed key-value storage system. CATS is a scalable, fault-tolerant, elastic, and self-managing key-value store which trades off service availability for guarantees of atomic data consistency and tolerance to network partitions. We present the composition architecture for the numerous protocols employed by the CATS system, as well as our methodology for testing the correctness of key CATS algorithms using the Kompics simulation framework. Results from a comprehensive performance evaluation attest that CATS achieves its claimed properties and delivers a level of performance competitive with similar systems which provide only weaker consistency guarantees. More importantly, this testifies that Kompics admits efficient system implementations. Its use as a teaching framework as well as its use for rapid prototyping, development, and evaluation of a myriad of scalable distributed systems, both within and outside our research group, confirm the practicality of Kompics. / Kompics / CATS / REST

Systems with multiple transmitting and receiving antennas in large-scale (LS-MIMO - large-scale multipleinput multiple-output) enable high spectral and energy efficiency gains, which results in an increase in the data transmission rate in the same band, without increasing the transmitted power per user. In addition, with the increase of the number of antennas in the base station (BS) it is possible to attend to a larger number of users per cell, in the same occupied band. Furthermore, it has been found in the literature that the reported advantages of LS-MIMO systems can be obtained with a large number of antennas on at least one side of the communication, usually in BS due to physical restriction in user equipments. However, such advantages have their cost: the use of a large number of antennas also difficult tasks involving signal processing, such as estimation of channel coefficients, precoding and signal detection. It is at this juncture that this Doctoral Thesis is developed, in which the computational complexity of performing efficient detection methods in LSMIMO communication systems is explored through the analysis of algorithms and optimization techniques in the solution of specific problems and still open. More precisely, this Thesis discusses and proposes promising detection techniques in LS-MIMO systems, aiming to improve performance metrics - in terms of error rate - and computational complexity - in terms of the number of mathematical operations. Initially, the problem is introduced through a conventional MIMO system model, where channels with imperfect estimates and correlation between transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) antennas are considered. Preprocessing techniques based on lattice reduction (LR) are applied in linear detectors, in addition to the sphere decoder (SD), which proposes a lookup table procedure in order to provide a reduction in computational complexity. It is shown that the LR method in the pre-detection results in a significant performance gain in both the condition of uncorrelated and correlated channels, and in the latter scenario the improvement is even more remarkable due to the diversity gain provided. On the other hand, the complexity involved in the application of LR in high correlation scenarios becomes preponderant in linear detectors. In the LR-SD using the lookup table procedure, the optimum gain was reached in all scenarios, as expected, and resulted in a lower complexity than maximum likelihood (ML) detector, even with maximum correlation between antennas, which represents the most complex scenario for the LR technique. Next, the message passing (MP) detector is investigated, which makes use of Markov random fields (MRF) and factor graph (FG) graphical models. Moreover, it is shown in the literature that the message damping (MD) method applied to the MRF detector brings relevant performance gain without increasing computational complexity. On the other hand, the DF value is specified for only a restricted range of scenarios. Numerical results are extensively generated, in order to obtain a range of analysis of the MRF with MD, which resulted in the proposition of an optimal value for the DF, based on numerical curve fitting. Finally, in the face of the MGS detector, two approaches are proposed to reduce the negative impact caused by the random solution when high modulation orders are employed. The first is based on an average between multiple samples, called aMGS (averaged MGS). The second approach deploys a direct restriction on the range of the random solution, limiting in d the neighborhood of symbols that can be sorted, being called d-sMGS. Numerical simulation results show that both approaches result in gain of convergence in relation to MGS, especially: in regions of high system loading, d-sMGS detection demonstrated significant gain in both performance and complexity compared to aMGS and MGS; although in low-medium loading, the aMGS strategy showed less complexity, with performance marginally similar to the others. Furthermore, it is concluded that increasing the dimensions of the system favors a smaller restriction in the neighborhood. / Sistemas com múltiplas antenas transmissoras e múltiplas antenas receptoras em larga escala (LS-MIMO - large-scale multiple-input multiple-output) possibilitam altos ganhos em eficiência espectral e energética, o que resulta em aumento da taxa de transmissão de dados numa mesma banda ocupada, sem acréscimo da potência transmitida por usuário. Além disso, com o aumento do número de antenas na estação rádio-base (BS- base station) possibilita-se o atendimento de maior número de usuários por célula, em uma mesma banda ocupada. Ademais, comprovou-se na literatura que as vantagens relatadas dos sistemas LS-MIMO podem ser obtidas com um grande número de antenas em, pelo menos, um dos lados da comunicação, geralmente na BS devido à restrição física nos dispositivos móveis. Contudo, tais vantagens têm seu custo: a utilização de um grande número de antenas também dificulta tarefas que envolvem processamento de sinais, como estimação dos coeficientes de canal, precodificação e detecção de sinais. É nessa conjuntura em que se desenvolve esta Tese de Doutorado, na qual se explora o compromisso desempenho versus complexidade computacional de métodos eficientes de detecção em sistemas de comunicações LS-MIMO através da análise de algoritmos e técnicas de otimização na solução de problemas específicos e ainda em aberto. Mais precisamente, a presente Tese discute e propõe técnicas promissoras de detecção em sistemas LS-MIMO, visando a melhoria de métricas de desempenho - em termos de taxa de erro - e complexidade computacional - em termos de quantidade de operações matemáticas. Inicialmente, o problema é introduzido através de um modelo de sistema MIMO convencional, em que são considerados canais com estimativas imperfeitas e com correlação entre as antenas transmissoras (Tx) e entre as receptoras (Rx). Aplicam-se técnicas de pré-processamanto baseadas na redução treliça (LR - lattice reduction) em detectores lineares, além do detector esférico (SD - sphere decoder), o qual é proposto um procedimento de tabela de pesquisa a fim de prover redução na complexidade computacional. Mostra-se que o método LR na pré-detecção resulta em ganho de desempenho significante tanto na condição de canais descorrelacionados quanto fortemente correlacionados, sendo que, neste último cenário a melhoria é ainda mais notável, devido ao ganho de diversidade proporcionado. Por outro lado, a complexidade envolvida na aplicação da LR em alta correlação torna-se preponderante em detectores lineares. No LR-SD utilizando o procedimento de tabela de pesquisa, o ganho ótimo foi alcançado em todos os cenários, como esperado, e resultou em complexidade inferior ao detector de máxima verossimilhança (ML - maximum likelihood), mesmo com máxima correlação entre antenas, a qual representa o cenário de maior complexidade a técnica LR. Em seguida, o detector por troca de mensagens (MP - message passing) é investigado, o qual faz uso de modelos grafos do tipo MRF (Markov random fields) e FG (factor graph). Além disso, mostra-se na literatura que o método de amortecimento de mensagens (MD - message damping) aplicado ao detector MRF traz relevante ganho de desempenho sem aumento na complexidade computacional. Por outro lado, o valor do DF (damping factor) é especificado para somente uma variedade restrita de cenários. Resultados numéricos são extensivamente gerados, de forma a dispor de uma gama de análises de comportamento do MRF com MD, resultando na proposição de um valor ótimo para o DF, baseando-se em ajuste de curva numérico. Finalmente, em face ao detector MGS (mixed Gibbs sampling), são propostas duas abordagens visando a redução do impacto negativo causado pela solução aleatória quando altas ordens de modulação são empregadas. A primeira é baseada em uma média entre múltiplas amostras, chamada aMGS (averaged MGS). A segunda abordagem realiza uma restrição direta no alcance da solução aleatória, limitando em até d a vizinhança de símbolos que podem ser sorteados, sendo chamada de d-sMGS (d-simplificado MGS). Resultados de simulação numérica demonstram que ambas abordagens resultam em ganho de convergência em relação ao MGS, destacando-se: em regiões de alto carregamento, a detecção d-sMGS demonstrou ganho expressivo tanto em desempenho quanto em complexidade se comparada à aMGS e MGS; já em baixo-médio carregamentos, a estratégia aMGS demonstrou menor complexidade, com desempenho marginalmente semelhante às demais. Além disso, conclui-se que o aumento do número de dimensões do sistema favorece uma menor restrição na vizinhança.

Un grand nombre des problèmes d'optimisation, ainsi que des problèmes inverses, combinatoires ou hors équilibre qui apparaissent en physique statistique des systèmes complexes, peuvent être représentés comme un ensemble des variables en interaction sur un certain réseau. Bien que la recette universelle pour traiter ces problèmes n'existe pas, la compréhension qualitative et quantitative des problèmes complexes sur des graphes a fait des grands progrès au cours de ces dernières années. Un rôle particulier a été joué par des concepts empruntés de la physique des verres de spin et la théorie des champs, qui ont eu beaucoup de succès en ce qui concerne la description des propriétés statistiques des systèmes complexes et le développement d'algorithmes efficaces pour des problèmes concrets.En première partie de cette thèse, nous étudions des problèmes de diffusion sur des réseaux, avec la dynamique hors équilibre. En utilisant la méthode de cavité sur des trajectoires dans le temps, nous montrons comment dériver des équations dynamiques dites "message-passing'' pour une large classe de modèles avec une dynamique unidirectionnelle -- la propriété clef qui permet de résoudre le problème. Ces équations sont asymptotiquement exactes pour des graphes localement en arbre et en général représentent une bonne approximation pour des réseaux réels. Nous illustrons cette approche avec une application des équations dynamiques pour résoudre le problème inverse d'inférence de la source d'épidémie dans le modèle "susceptible-infected-recovered''.Dans la seconde partie du manuscrit, nous considérons un problème d'optimisation d'appariement planaire optimal sur une ligne. En exploitant des techniques de la théorie de champs et des arguments combinatoires, nous caractérisons une transition de phase topologique qui se produit dans un modèle désordonné simple, le modèle de Bernoulli. Visant une application à la physique des structures secondaires de l'ARN, nous discutons la relation entre la transition d'appariement parfait-imparfait et la transition de basse température connue entre les états fondu et vitreux de biopolymère; nous proposons également des modèles généralisés qui suggèrent une correspondance exacte entre la matrice des contacts et la séquence des nucléotides, permettant ainsi de donner un sens à la notion des alphabets effectifs non-entiers. / A large number of optimization, inverse, combinatorial and out-of-equilibrium problems, arising in the statistical physics of complex systems, allow for a convenient representation in terms of disordered interacting variables defined on a certain network. Although a universal recipe for dealing with these problems does not exist, the recent years have seen a serious progress in understanding and quantifying an important number of hard problems on graphs. A particular role has been played by the concepts borrowed from the physics of spin glasses and field theory, that appeared to be extremely successful in the description of the statistical properties of complex systems and in the development of efficient algorithms for concrete problems.In the first part of the thesis, we study the out-of-equilibrium spreading problems on networks. Using dynamic cavity method on time trajectories, we show how to derive dynamic message-passing equations for a large class of models with unidirectional dynamics -- the key property that makes the problem solvable. These equations are asymptotically exact for locally tree-like graphs and generally provide a good approximation for real-world networks. We illustrate the approach by applying the dynamic message-passing equations for susceptible-infected-recovered model to the inverse problem of inference of epidemic origin. In the second part of the manuscript, we address the optimization problem of finding optimal planar matching configurations on a line. Making use of field-theory techniques and combinatorial arguments, we characterize a topological phase transition that occurs in the simple Bernoulli model of disordered matching. As an application to the physics of the RNA secondary structures, we discuss the relation of the perfect-imperfect matching transition to the known molten-glass transition at low temperatures, and suggest generalized models that incorporate a one-to-one correspondence between the contact matrix and the nucleotide sequence, thus giving sense to the notion of effective non-integer alphabets.