Search

Since the 1970s, Brazil's authorities have regarded the country's past as a source of cultural and economic value (Gonçalves 2007; Collins 2015). In the late 2000s, a boom in Brazil's consumer economy served to make smartphones and social media ubiquitous across the country (Spyer 2017). This thesis focuses on how these two phenomena intersect in the city and state of Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on material gathered during fieldwork in 2019 and 2020, it examines how a selection of cultural-historical projects use digital media to explore Rio's past. This thesis argues that, through their exploration of Rio's past, each of these projects shapes how people engage with the city and state and reproduces their space (Lefebvre 1991). This analysis of how digital media intervene in the production of Rio's space contributes to scholarship that explores Rio's urban and cultural history (Sevcenko 2003; Needell 1987; Carvalho 2018). In so doing, it adds to literature exploring how the screens of digital media form an integral and constitutive part of the space of contemporary cities (McQuire 2016; Degen and others 2017). The thesis also contends that the projects it examines all reflect and remake contemporary understandings of how Rio should be in ways that are contingent upon and shaped by the material context(s) from which they emerge, namely, Rio's enduring history of racialised urbanism, its authorities' shifting attitude to the past, and changes in Brazil's approach to cultural funding following its return to democracy in the late 1980s (Sevcenko 2003; Gonçalves 2007; Rich and Vieira 2020). Through analysis of the impact of these factors and from the perspective of a city in the Global South, this thesis dialogues with a growing literature in media studies that examines how the historicity of different forms of technology shapes their affordances (Hu 2015; Crawford 2021). The structure of the thesis moves from Rio's centre towards its suburbs and rural hinterlands to examine the different ways that digital media are used to interrogate the past of these distinct areas. Chapter One focuses on Rio's centre. It examines how the circulation of early photographs of Rio on an Instagram page called rioantigo transforms them into axes of debate about what kind of city Brazil's former capital should be. Chapter Two moves from Rio's centre towards its suburbs. It interrogates how a walking-tour initiative, Rolé Carioca, and a virtual museum, Rio Memórias, use a mixture of digital platforms and in-person events to encourage residents of Rio to reconnect with their city's public spaces. Chapter Three considers how glitches, uneven provision of infrastructure, and deliberate acts of sabotage inform the shape of Passados Presentes, a project which uses digital media to explore the legacy of slavery across Rio state.

'Exploring America's Water Crisis: Austerity Urbanism and Narratives of the Financialization of Black-Majority Cities' investigates the relationship between municipal finance, governance, and uneven racialized development across and within U.S cities. Through a comparative analysis of Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis, I employ qualitative methods to examine how the emergence of financialized austerity urbanism as a mode of governance magnifies racialized patterns of uneven development, particularly regarding the United States' ageing urban water and sewerage systems. The project combines qualitative methods of household narrative interviews, semi-structured expert interviews, and participant observation to explore each city's effort to finance a court-ordered Environmental Protection Agency consent decree on their abating infrastructure. My qualitative analysis demonstrates that Black-majority U.S cities have become more reliant on the financialization of debt to finance water and sewer infrastructure following the decline of federal funding beginning in 1977 and deregulation of large parts of the financial industry in 2000. One of the consequences of this is that Black-majority cities employ disciplinary financial rules and routines around debt collection when issuing loans in the bond market, a process which has led to infrastructure inequalities through mass water shut offs. Field research reveals that Black-majority cities under austerity encounter complex financial arrangements in their search for infrastructural funding that has produced a crisis of water affordability and water insecurity. In this dissertation, I also show the innerworkings of the racialization of municipal finance through the speculative financing tools each city uses, the politics of municipal bond market around debt collection practices and the everyday experiences of water and sewerage disparities. In doing so, I present emerging ways in which financialized austerity governance is rearticulating racial hierarchies in the form of infrastructure inequalities. Austerity urbanism, I argue, is motivated by logics of financialization -- which is both a mode of accumulation, and significantly, works through urban geographies of racial capitalism. My research demonstrates an important comparative approach for working across and through the fields of urban studies, political economy, and geographies of race and racialization.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of rights restitution as an arrangement that establishes boundaries, and how those boundaries are translated, challenged, and exceeded. Following the guidelines of International Humanitarian Law and its version contained in the Law of Victims and Land Restitution (1448/2011), the Colombian government established a wide network of professionals in charge of registration and reparation for claimants registered as victims of the armed conflict (7,999,963 people in April 2016). In these procedures of recognition and reparation, technologies like forms and protocols become crucial for the mediation of rights restitution. As a starting point, I trace the trajectories of technologies of recognition and reparation across assistance centres, governmental offices and sessions of psychosocial assistance. I am interested in functionaries and applicants’ experiences of forms and protocols, the procedures of recognition and reparation, and the circulation of official numbers as narratives of rights restitution. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, a central concern of this thesis is to ask what technologies of recognition and reparation assemble. I interrogate the translation of experiences of pain and mobility into numbers and the circulation of those numbers by state representatives. I also explore some of the material forms of organisation developed by registered and unregistered interlocutors, as arrangements beyond the boundaries of state interventions. I describe how some of those alternative orders translate state interventions and enact spaces of material justice. Instead of reproducing the notion of reparation as a cornerstone of rights restitution in transitional justice societies, I suggest that a different sort of Reparation might occur beyond the boundaries of post-conflict statehood and within its intersections with alternative arrangements.

When Apple announced the arrival of iOS 14.5 in early 2021, the company’s new App Tracking Transparency data tracking limitations made headlines for its potential to destabilize the digital economy. Platform companies have accumulated unprecedented social, economic, and political power over the course of the last two decades, and the collection and processing of data have been central to their rise. However, successive scandals and challenges to this model have increasingly put corporate data practices at the center of debates on reforming the digital sphere. Considered alongside users’ growing data privacy concerns and efforts by a rising number of countries to pass serious data protection legislation, Apple’s privacy proposals can arguably be seen as part of a broader fracturing of support for the model commonly referred to as ‘surveillance capitalism.’ This thesis argues that the production of ‘data friction’ constitutes an emerging lever of platform power, one which is particularly salient for platforms fulfilling an infrastructural role within the broader digital media environment. Drawing insights from media studies scholarship on platform studies and datafication, as well as from the Science and Technology Studies tradition of infrastructure studies, Apple’s iOS is framed as an infrastructural platform which plays a mediating role between app developers and end-users on devices used for everyday activity. Taking a multi-method approach through a Critical Discourse Analysis and socio-technical walkthrough, this study examines how data friction operates within the context of the mobile iOS platform. This study finds that Apple catalyzes data friction by positioning its iOS 14 privacy features as an intervention which: 1) promotes user choice, control, and transparency 2) equalizes power asymmetries within the ‘data industrial complex.’ Ultimately, these data friction mechanisms serve to both leverage and reinforce Apple’s role as an infrastructural platform and mediating force in the broader digital media ecosystem.

Scholars within science studies have paid a great deal of attention to climate change denial in the U.S. and have generated critical commentary for understanding larger patterns of distrust in climate science. This dissertation uses a different line of questioning and approach to instead analyze the public uptake of climate predictions in a specific place, South Florida, where scientists have garnered credibility across local governments and successfully advocated for adaptation efforts. This close qualitative study of a particularly socio-environmentally vulnerable region analyzes how actors, such as university scientists, activists, and state civil servants, come to know and respond to climate predictions at the local level. By building deep context around the uptake of predictions through explorations of local scientific practices, environmental histories, racial politics, and government structures this ethnography reveals novel social categories, epistemological artifacts, histories, and infrastructures as they emerge around processes of knowing and responding to climate predictions in Florida. Each chapter offers different analytics for unpacking these social forms, including scientist-activism, hindcasting the future, grassroots climate knowledge and expert ignorance, and infrastructures of denial. More broadly, this dissertation provides science studies scholars, anthropologists, and scholars within the environmental humanities a new approach for studying climate science as well as tools for unpacking the social forms emerging around responses to predictions developing on the ground.

The work presented in this dissertation provides an analysis of clinical documentation that challenges the concepts and thinking surrounding missingness of data from clinical settings and the factors that influence why data are missing. It also foregrounds the critical role of clinical documentation as infrastructure for creating learning health systems (LHS) for pediatric rehabilitation settings. Although completeness of discrete data is limited, the results presented do not reflect the quality of care or the extent of unstructured data that providers document in other locations of the electronic health record (EHR) interface. While some may view imputation and natural language processing as means to address missingness of clinical data, these practices carry biases in their interpretations and issues of validity in results. The factors that influence missingness of discrete clinical data are rooted not just in technical structures, but larger professional, system level and unobservable phenomena that shape provider practices of clinical documentation. This work has implications for how we view clinical documentation as critical infrastructure for LHS, future studies of data quality and health outcomes research, and EHR design and implementation. The overall research questions for this dissertation are: 1) To what extent can data networks be leveraged to build classifiers of patient functional performance and physical disability? 2) How can discrete clinical data on gross motor function be used to draw conclusions about clinical documentation practices in the EHR for cerebral palsy? 3) Why does missingness of discrete data in the EHR occur? To address these questions, a three-pronged approach is used to examine data completeness and the factors that influence missingness of discrete clinical data in an exemplar pediatric data learning network will be used. As a use-case, evaluation of EHR data completeness of gross motor function related data, populated by providers from 2015-2019 for children with cerebral palsy (CP), will be completed. Mixed methods research strategies will be used to achieve the dissertation objectives, including developing an expert-informed and standards-based phenotype model of gross motor function data as a task-based mechanism, conducting quantitative descriptive analyses of completeness of discrete data in the EHR, and performing qualitative thematic analyses to elicit and interpret the latent concepts that contribute to missingness of discrete data in the EHR. The clinical data for this dissertation are sourced from the Shriners Hospitals for Children (SHC) Health Outcomes Network (SHOnet), while qualitative data were collected through interviews and field observations of clinical providers across three care sites in the SHC system.

The infrastructure of US national security has never been more bloated and obfuscatory, US leaders insist that terroristic threats have never been more real and dangerous, and the US War on Terror wages in more nations than ever before. Arguably since the color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System, our post-9/11 terrorism predicament tasks us with modulating our state of alertness to meet the level of mass threat. One of national and local threat rhetoric’s most important functions is to manage public anxiety surrounding the potential for rogue citizen and noncitizen terrorists to attack the homeland. This project isolates a new object of homeland security governance revealed by these affective manipulations: the diffusion of terroristic threats. Homeland security rhetoric manipulates public anxiety about threats’ capacity to spread. This project thus charts US counterterrorism as an affective infrastructure of anxiety. It defines an affective infrastructure of anxiety as a subterranean network of intermittent interruptions in sense. Within the past 14 years, a predominant rhetorical maneuver to counter threat diffusion has become intelligence fusion, defined as the conversion of public suspicions into actionable knowledge through the homeland security institution of the local “fusion center.” Through ethnographic interviews and observations, this project investigates the interoperations of fusion in Texas. The ethnography reveals a host of threat matrixes, pressure points, sore subjects, anguish, failures, stupidities, and surveillance measures that comprise the local and national anxious infrastructure of US counterterrorism. It shows that the rhetorical manipulation of anxiety is an essential component of local and national homeland security strategies. To attend to anxiety within intelligence fusion, this project develops a method for closely reading affect called “sleuthing.” This method reclaims both suspicion and close reading within the rhetorical tradition for the purpose of describing the extra-linguistic. Making space for affect in rhetorical theory is challenging but essential. Affect tasks us with rethinking fundamental postulations about the coherence of texts, the role of the responsible rhetorician, and the force of persuasion. Most importantly, affect theory can show how homeland security operates through racial phobia. This project represents the first full-length study of race, policing, and surveillance in the context of local intelligence fusion. The project’s goal is to read the far-reaching effects of homeland security’s newest transformations, especially considering recent intensifications in the War on Terror. To do so, one must see homeland security not just as a technical infrastructure but a quivering mass of connected affects.

At the heart of this dissertation sits a question: why have access to infrastructures and services emerged as key metrics by which people evaluate and debate the meaning of social and political belonging in contemporary Kenya? Part of the answer, I argue, lies in the long and entangled history of marketization and state-formation in this corner of Eastern Africa. The tensions between the public and the private, the state and the corporation, were the basis of early infrastructural projects undertaken by the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA) under the dual mandate of “commerce and civilisation.” This marriage, I argue, formed the durable foundations of the austere state. Indeed, the tension between private capital and the commonweal did not end with the formalization of colonial rule, but critically shaped the infrastructural landscape of both the Kenya colony and later the postcolonial state. In understanding these dynamics, this dissertation addresses three infrastructures ‘in the making’—roads in the interwar period, radio broadcasting in the postwar period, and services offered by Safaricom, Kenya’s wildly successful communications company, in the present. Beginning in the nineteenth century, I explore how the state and Kenya’s various communities have negotiated the technopolitics of infrastructures enacted under durable conditions of austerity. As I argue, public austerity over the longer term has repeatedly undermined infrastructures’ purported status as public goods to which all should have access. Specifically, conditions of austerity not only guided the distribution of infrastructures and services, but critically shaped the conditions of infrastructural work. Considering infrastructures as multiply authored cultural and material objects, this dissertation pursues two lines of inquiry. First, I explore the ways in which designers and administrators imagined how infrastructures could materialize new economic, political, and social orders. Second, I trace the unforeseen ways that Kenya’s multiple publics, including ordinary and extraordinary experts, reshaped infrastructural networks in staking out the domain of the political.

The introduction of hydrogen fuel for passenger vehicles faces many technology development and policy challenges. These include the establishment of a hydrogen refueling infrastructure, limitations of hydrogen storage technologies, high fuel cell production costs, lack of public awareness of the benefits of hydrogen, and production of inexpensive hydrogen from low-carbon energy sources. Of these major challenges, the coupled deployment of refueling infrastructure and vehicles, often referred to as the chicken-and-egg problem, will require significant technology innovation, policy intervention and business initiative. One hydrogen infrastructure development strategy is to install a large number of refueling locations within a short period of time, providing a minimal level of refueling availability to a significant percentage of the general population before hydrogen vehicles are introduced. This initiation strategy, if coordinated with the mass production of hydrogen vehicles, could reduce many of the risks posed to major stakeholders, including vehicle manufacturers, fuel providers, government agencies and consumers. This strategy has been modeled on a national scale, relying upon: (1) estimates of a sufficient number of early hydrogen stations, (2) a cost analysis of hydrogen stations employing onsite steam-methane reformer technology, and (3) a characterization of relative station sizes within urban refueling station networks. Installing 9,200 hydrogen stations within major U.S. urban areas and along major interstates would require approximately $5.1 billion in capital. As hydrogen vehicles are deployed and infrastructure utilization rates increase, the cost of hydrogen is reduced over time. In an optimistic deployment scenario, the average cost of hydrogen could approach $3.50 per kg by 2030. The high risk and interdependent nature of stakeholder decisions during the early phases of hydrogen infrastructure development suggests that some type of government intervention will be required to ensure the successful introduction of hydrogen fuel for vehicles. Based upon challenges posed by the structure and rate of deployment of early hydrogen station networks, it is proposed that a regulatory environment supporting longterm development goals could ensure adequate early stakeholder coordination. As hydrogen fuel markets become robust, competitive mechanisms could be introduced to ensure efficient use of resources and stimulate further technological innovation.

This dissertation investigates Engineered Cementitious Composite (ECC) as a potential repair material for durable rehabilitation of concrete infrastructures. The ECC is designed to satisfy the requirement of the interfacial crack trapping mechanism first introduced and analyzed in this study. The trapping mechanism is effective in delaying the delamination and/or spalling failures commonly observed in concrete repaired systems. Interface fracture mechanics serves as the analytical tool to predict interface fracture behavior in rehabilitated structural systems. An interface appears when a repair material is applied to an aged infrastructure. The interface in a bimaterial system is relatively weaker than either side of materials. Thus, the failure of repaired structures is usually related to the failure of the interface. Better understanding of this interface fracture behavior can provide a longer life of the repaired structures. The bond strength concept accepted in the repair industry is not enough to predict interface fracture behavior. Therefore, interface fracture mechanics is adopted as a predictive analytical tool in this study. Also, interface fracture mechanics provides the theoretical foundation for the interface crack trapping mechanism uncovered in this research. To utilize interface fracture mechanics, interface toughness is an important system property. In this study, the interface toughness in concrete/cementitious composite interface systems is measured at varied phase angles. The interface toughness in concrete/cementitious composite systems is found to increase with increasing phase angle. The fracture parameters (interface fracture driving force and phase angle) at the interface crack tip are evaluated based on finite element method. This numerical method can provide solution for problems with various boundary and loading conditions that are intractable with available close-form solutions. The fracture parameters for pavement overlay systems subjected to various environmental loading conditions are evaluated. The trapping mechanism with ECC as a repair material confirmed in interface fracture toughness tests was further investigated in specimens which mimic an overlay on a concrete substrate with an existing joint. This trapping mechanism can enhance durability in practical repaired systems. As a potential repair material, the shrinkage behavior of ECC is also investigated. In addition, the influence of shrinkage on early age flexural properties is included in this thesis research.