This dissertation examines architectural engagements with communication technologies, within the framework of mid-twentieth-century efforts to institute a global community and engineer media democracies. I interrogate the sound modernities that architects constructed in collaboration with engineers, officials, and acousticians, and I demonstrate the architectural strategies that informed them: the theater, the concert hall, the cinema. These interiors, I argue, reconfigured the international community as a networked audience, and the institutions of world organization as the main stages of international diplomacy.

This dissertation is a study of science and medicine after the gas disaster in1984 in Bhopal, India. It looks at the discourses, debates, suspicions, and entangled events that have shaped the narratives of causality following the catastrophe, and the ways that ideas about relief, treatment, and illness have been constructed by experts, lay activists, and survivors. In it I address the issues of suspicion, research, and power by looking at the "cyanide controversy" in the early years after the disaster, and at the ways that the consequences of uncertainty affect patients and doctors within the hospital system designed to provide "gas relief" in the aftermath. I also describe the range of ways gas survivors have categorized and produced as subjects and citizens through an analysis of epidemiological, legal, and political discussions. I take on the history of medical research after the event, and show how a vast corpus of scientific work has remained dispersed and underutilized, leaving room for sometimes-dangerous narratives of certain illness or death. Finally, I look at the consequences of this indeterminacy for care and healing. I assess access to treatments, the diversity of medical care, the undermining of the status of the gas exposed, and the ways that detoxification has been approached through notions of dosage, potency, and traditional medicine. I produce a sociology of knowledge about the catastrophe and contribute to literatures on the problem of epistemic uncertainty and risk after disasters, the production of medicalized subjects, and the politicization of knowledge. I argue that interventions that have tried to encompass the disaster within a unitary framework have been persistently inadequate, and illustrate how attempts to reduce or subsume the consequences of the disaster - through recourse to scientific indeterminacy, under reductionist legal mechanisms, by imprecise categorization schema, within flawed research methodologies, and among hollow medical infrastructures - have not only failed to meaningfully represent it but also resulted in predictable forms of reductionist violence and social suffering, through obfuscation as often as through action. / Anthropology

This dissertation is an economic and institutional history of the first comprehensive public health and welfare system in the Western world. Based on previously unexamined archival and archaeological evidence from several European repositories, it argues that the Republic of Venice, at the beginning of the second millennium, implemented legislation of unprecedented scale, intended to regulate and improve the health and standards of living of its population. The Venetian empire, in this period, was unrivaled in its dominance of Mediterranean trade. Economic success and the densifying networks of communications brought new challenges, and new health stresses, including communicable disease, to key commercial hubs under Venetian control, on the Dalmatian coast and islands in the eastern Mediterranean. At this time, a period commonly known as the Commercial Revolution, Venice itself became one of the most populous and wealthiest European cities. The government of the Republic allocated a substantial portion of its surplus revenues to the establishment and funding of new welfare legislation, influenced by Roman and Byzantine legal precedents. The nature of the Venetian parliamentary system gave rise to a host of detailed norms aimed at subsidizing the import of food and primary necessities. In addition, the Republic created and funded the first and largest state-sponsored staff of medical practitioners in Europe, intended to preserve the public's health in the expansive territories under its control. These practitioners were chosen, by and large, on the basis of testimonies of magistrates and patients who vouched for their expertise and reputation. Through a detailed analysis of archival, archaeological and narrative evidence, this dissertation alters our understanding of the development of pre-modern states and their contribution to the creation of what historians have broadly defined "welfare policies." Comparisons between the prices of primary necessities among multiple cities of the Mediterranean test the effects of such policies on the standards of living of European populations. A comprehensive list of all public health infrastructures in Venetian territories outlines the long-term role of the state in the creation and funding of hospitals, hospices and orphanages. By contextualizing new and old evidence, this dissertation argues that, in crafting these new policies, Venetian legislators yielded to economic and political considerations, as well as popular expectations and traditions of evergetism. / History

Exploration was a defining aspect of how European societies encountered and established relations with the wider world. It set the stage for worldwide empires and laid the foundations for understandings of planetary existence. Exploration facilitated the exchange of commodities and ideas, the migration of peoples and the construction of scientific knowledge. This dissertation examines the nexus between ice and imperium through a study of how citizens of the Habsburg Monarchy contributed to polar exploration. In the long nineteenth century, the two main objects of European exploration were Africa and the polar regions. In the former, the dynamic between exploration and empire was fairly straightforward. But how did imperialism function in the frozen, uninhabited, latitudes of the world? This question becomes more problematic for the Habsburg Monarchy, a multinational polity with eleven officially recognized languages, and a self-professed empire that was the one European "Great Power" at the time without overseas colonies. This dissertation analyzes how the symbology and practice of polar exploration was used in the service of sundry - and frequently contradictory - political projects, including various nationalist activisms, Habsburg loyalism, and the liberal politics of notables. The analysis incorporates a case study in the convoluted road between discovery and empire, Franz Josef Land, the northernmost terrain in Eurasia, discovered by an Austro-Hungarian expedition in 1873. This dissertation then traces fractures within the Austro-Hungarian culture of exploration, as explorer/scientists could reach little consensus on the goals and practices for expeditions to the farthest latitudes of the globe. Finally, it examines how the rise of mass-data driven inductive sciences, such as geomagnetism, caused a fundamental redefinition in the practice of polar research toward a model of corporate, coordinated scientific effort and transnational cooperation. With the emergence of nation states and colonial empires, the basic frameworks of sovereignty, legitimacy and political meaning were changing and this study highlights how Habsburg subjects contributed to these modernization processes. In so doing, it brings to light neglected but lasting aspects of nineteenth century imperialism and treats both nationalism and empire as research problems rather than given ends. / History

Almost everyone agrees that doctors' handwriting is not the only indecipherable and alienating communication practice in healthcare. The oral communication between doctors and patients is equally problematic. Few scholars in the field of rhetoric have attempted to analyze why and how these discursive practices have come about. Equally absent from the medical and rhetorical fields are alternative models that construct a better discourse between doctors and patients. My dissertation, Look Who's Not Talking: Recovering the Patient's Voice in the Clinique, not only examines how doctors talk to patients, but also begins an effort to change present discursive practices in healthcare. Michel Foucault began an academic conversation in The Birth of the Clinic and in Power/Knowledge that deconstructed certain institutionalized discourses. While his study went a long way toward analyzing the discourse of medicine, his language and theories have not moved into medical journals or patient rooms. My dissertation acts as a bridge between "high" rhetorical theory and the "marketplace" of medicine (an unfortunately apt metaphor for healthcare in this country). Foucault supplies one of the lenses I use to look at the discourse. Other lenses include those of Kenneth Burke and Lloyd Bitzer. One underlying assumption in the dissertation is that practices are more easily changed once they have been analyzed. I place the analysis within history and within current contexts. This strategy enacts a model opposing the usual acontextualized, ahistoric doctor/patient discourse. Both chapters 3 and 4 look at how doctor/patient discourse was constructed in Europe and America. In addition to making a contribution to the medical field, this dissertation breaks new ground within rhetoric and lays the basis for further explorations. Because of my extensive work in the healthcare field as cardio-pulmonary technician and special procedures nurse, I was able to draw on my own experience to use as examples of the particular problems within the discourse I isolate and propose alternatives to. The fifth chapter features a two-semester course I designed for first-year medical students. This course is rhetorically based and teaches doctors-to-be why the language they use with patients is important and how to effectively address patients.

At the turn of the century 18/1900 Swedish law looked upon young people as being adults at about the age of 15. At 15, the young person had left school, had his first employment and provided for himself and also had been confirmed to full membership of the Swedish State Church. Thus he was to be considered an adult and responsible for his actions. Parents, society/school and Church had done what was expected of them and now it was up to the 15-years old to live according to the laws and to be punished if the laws were broken. Over the following hundred years, at the time of the millennium, Swedish society changed a lot. So the laws did not and still a young person of 15 is considered an adult in the eye of the Swedish law. This paper looks upon the ideas that the law was based on at the turn of the century 18/1900 and the ideas that are put forward by Swedish courts today. The law has not changed, but today Swedish young people leave school between the ages of 19-25, and find their first employment even later. The paper gives the historical background and looks at the underlying ideas of adulthood. How people think and what is considered being important in defining aduldthood has not changed much over those hundred years. In deciding if a person could pass as an adult, the Swedish law still use the same premisses today as it did a hundred years ago. As these premissies and ideas are the same, though society has changed, you can’t today be considered an adult until in your twenties.

This work begins by examining the history of aphasia studies, placing them in the context of historically concurrent theories about speech and language. The historical analysis can be read as a deconstructive incision into contemporary discourses which use information about language to make inferences about brain functioning or thought processes. A deconstructive critique of aphasiology and those sciences upon which it is built, including linguistics and localization theory, suggests that aphasia is constructed artificially so that it cannot be localized or explained by brain mechanisms. Anthropological influences in this work inform the style of analysis as well as the range of inquiry. Situated in postmodern anthropology, the thesis includes an investigation of positioning: positioning of the author within medicine (neurology) and anthropology; and positioning as a phenomenon brought about by certain sets of practices. Among these practices are those related to the scientific method and those related to more interpretive or hermeneutic strategies. Several controversies within anthropology are related to the clash between science and not-science, including feminist and postmodern debates. Practices, which are situation-dependent, are not as conflicted as theories are and provide reasonable ways to separate sense (or meaningfulness) from non-sense (or artifacts) in daily life and work. Related to questions of method and interpretation are questions about "data." What count(s) as data? Should units of significance be predetermined, or discovered in the process of investigation? How do standardized methodologies or interpretive expectations shape the outcome of clinical, scientific, and anthropological studies? A narrative style is employed to discuss these questions by telling particular stories involving research and publication: case reports in neurology; semantics of sentence accent in Alzheimer's disease; and fieldwork in northern Thailand concerning nonliteracy and its effects on cognitive processes among Karen hilltribes. These disciplinary projects are contrasted and data creation discussed. What began as an examination of the history of aphasia studies concludes in discussion of aphasic speech as an example/critique of postmodern and anthropological discourse. Practices that cluster around the study of aphasia, particularly those involving living patients, provide useful critiques to scientific, anthropological and postmodern theorizations.

<p>Modern scholars cannot agree how extant fragments of thought attributed to Leucippus and Democritus integrate (or do not) to form a coherent perspective on the ancient Greek world. While a certain degree of uncertainty is unavoidable, given the nature of the evidence available and the fact that Democritus wrote many different works (including at least one in which he deliberately argued against positions that he defended elsewhere), this study demonstrates that we know enough to take a more integrative view of the early atomists (and of Democritus in particular) than is usually taken. In the case of Democritus, this study shows that it makes good sense to read what remains of his works (physical, biological, and ethical) under the presumption that he assumes a single basic outlook on the world, a coherent perspective that informed every position taken by the atomist philosopher. </p><p> Chapter 1 provides an in-depth portrait of the historical and philosophical context in which early atomism was born. As part of this portrait, it offers thumbnail sketches of the doctrines attributed to a representative catalogue of pre-Socratic philosophers to whom published work is attributed (Anaximander, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Philolaus). It demonstrates how each philosopher presumes that his theory offers a universal outlook on human reality, a perspective on the universe which purposely encompasses (and builds into a single theoretical framework) physics and biology and practical ethics.</p><p> Chapter 2 introduces the early atomists as respondents to the pre-Socratic movement before them (a movement which this study refers to as the Critical Tradition). It presents evidence for an integrated reading of early atomist fragments, a reading that construes the Leucippus and Democritus as men of their time (working with and responding to the positions taken by their predecessors in the Critical Tradition).</p><p> Chapter 3 shows how Democritus' ethics arise naturally from his physics via an historical process of development. Like his predecessors in the Critical Tradition and many of his contemporaries, the atomist deliberately imagines nature (physics) providing the raw material from which culture (ethics) naturally and inevitably rises. </p><p> Chapter 4 offers an original reading of extant ethical fragments of Democritus, showing how the atomist uses his unique outlook on the world to develop a practical approach to living well.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation consists of two parts: a chamber opera and an article on the work of Claude Vivier.</p><p>"Cardano" is a new chamber opera by composer Bryan Christian about the work and tragic life of the Renaissance polymath Gerolamo Cardano (1501-1576). Scored for three vocal soloists, an actor, and an eleven-part ensemble, "Cardano" represents a coalescence of Christian's interests in medieval and Renaissance sources, mathematics, and intensely dramatic vocal music. Christian constructed the libretto from fragmented excerpts of primary sources written by Cardano and his rival Niccolo Tartaglia. The opera reinvigorates Cardano's 16th-century scientific and philosophical models by sonifying and mapping these models to salient musical and dramatic features. These models prominently include Cardano's solution to the cubic equation and his horoscope of Jesus Christ, which was deemed so scandalous in the 16th century that it ultimately led to Cardano's imprisonment under the Roman Inquisition in 1570 - the opera's tragic conclusion. Presenting these ideas in opera allows them to resound beyond the music itself and project through the characters and drama on stage. In this way, the historical documents and theories - revealing Cardano's unique understanding of the world and his contributions to society - are given new life as they tell his tragic story.</p><p>Claude Vivier's homophonic treatment of combination tones--what he called les couleurs--demands an extension of traditional methods of harmonic and spectral analysis. Incomplete explanations of this technique throughout the secondary literature further demand a revised and cohesive definition. To analyze all variations of les couleurs, I developed the analytical concept of combination-tone classes (CTCs) and built upon Angela Lohri's (2010) combination tone matrix to create a dynamic CTC matrix, from which CTC sets may be extracted. Intensive CTC set analysis reveals a definitive correlation between CTC set and formal sections in Vivier's composition "Bouchara." Although formally adjacent CTC sets are often markedly varied, all sets share a subset of lower-order CTCs, aiding in perception of spectral cohesion across formal boundaries. This analysis illuminates the interrelationships of CTC sets to their parent dyads, their orchestration, their playing technique, and form in "Bouchara." CTC set analysis is compared with Vivier's sketches for "Bouchara," which suggest that les couleurs were intended as integral components of the work's musical structure.</p> / Dissertation

<p>Historically, the wind has functioned in multiple capacities, both physically and symbolically. The following study explores the ways in which natural history, myth and folklore, craft knowledge, and religion contributed to a growing body of knowledge about the wind at a moment in British history when wind knowledge assumed unprecedented political and economic significance. How did people come to know the wind and to narrate and communicate wind knowledge in the seventeenth century? What work did these complex and competing narrations perform? And what do they make visible? In pursuing these lines of inquiry, my work brings together three principle bodies of knowledge: Environmental History, History of Science, and British Imperial history; and it draws upon documents that include scientific treatises, written records of oral anecdotes and weather wising, religious sermons, travel narratives, fictional novels, and imperial correspondence. I argue that because the wind and wind knowledge were ubiquitous to the emerging success and identity of the British empire, a great variety of historical actors sought to control and narrate what wind knowledge was, where it came from, and what political work it should do. These efforts were unequivocally rooted in first hand experience and observation of the wind--maker's knowledge--and created what I call an intellectual commons that enabled commoners as well as elites to shape and briefly control the contours of wind knowledge in early Modern Britain and its expanding empire.</p> / Dissertation