Dialectic Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is a treatment specifically developed for individuals diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). DBT has been found to be effective in treating BPD related suicidality, substance use, and eating disorders. The weekly diary cards are one of the most essential components of DBT. Diary cards are a paper based standardized self-monitoring tool that can facilitate therapists in tracking the progress of clients in between therapy sessions. Previous studies have established many advantages of diary cards, such as its higher client retention rate than that of group-based DBT sessions. A typical diary card records the degree of urges for maladaptive behaviors such as self-harming, as well as the DBT coping skills the client has used for each day of the week. This current project strives to examine the potential correlation between weekly mean self-harm urge scores and number of skills used by examining diary cards from multiple previous DBT clients. It is speculated that increased self-harm urge level is related to decreased coping from clients. The result of this correlation study might warrant a full-scale randomized control trial on this subject matter to locate potential causation. This current project also strives to answer whether certain skills are highly related with self-harm urge, as previous studies indicated that some skills were used more than others by DBT clients. Correlation obtained here may serve to develop behavior-specific coping skills.

In the video installation, "IT WAS THE GAZE THAT KILLED", "illusion-building" exists in the overlaid, rendered drone footage of Afghanistan and my own iPhone footage of 20-something-year-old friends in clubs. The image of bodies in Afghanistan and in clubs in San Francisco and London captured under surveillance by the "all-seeing eye" of the drone and iPhone allows us question whether the gaze that kills is more familiar to us than we think.

We live in a state where there is a need to redefine economy of terror as materiality of unmanned aerial vehicles paint a new landscape of violence. The drone is an "all-seeing eye" that inflicts violence through the act of seeing. It is important to understand the process of seeing the Real that is fixed through its physicality of existence with it "having a foundation in fact." It is through the act of seeing the real (bodies) that destabilizes the fixity of the Real. Thus, the Real is the wound caused by the "all-seeing eye" as it inflicts violence through its materiality inherently embodied by the drone that allows it to see (nose camera, multi-spectral targeting system). In this particular distance that is created in the process of seeing between the drone and the wound of the bodies, "illusion-building" takes place in order to anticipate the pain. The process of "illusion-building" is necessary as this reduces the distance between the drone and the wound inflicted by its gaze. As a result, anticipation of pain emerges from this particular process of "illusion-building." This anticipation of pain is what re-defines terror, as it exists within economy of terror.
 

“William Faulkner’s Portrayal of Women” provides an in-depth literature analysis of the role women play in two of Faulkner’s major novels, The Sound and the Fury (1929) and The Wild Palms (1939). Following the characterization of Candace “Caddy” Compson and Charlotte Rittenmeyer, my paper confirms the meaning of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Connecting literary and social movements, such as modernism, the development and actions of the characters are explained in terms of the traditional versus modern woman. The paper also calls into question Faulkner’s motives behind not fully giving his women literary independence. We see this in Caddy who is never given a voice, but is instead shown to the reader through the eyes of dominant male characters and through Charlotte’s incapability to be a mother. The implication of this type of portrayal of women suggest that though Faulkner attempts to embrace the modernist view of women, he cannot fully let go of a tradition that dictates that women are defined by men.

In “Writing Against Culture,” Lila Abu-Lughod writes, “The process of creating a self through opposition to the other always entails the violence of repressing or ignoring other forms of difference.” This complicated discourse Abu-Lughod describes emerges from 19th century colonialist practices, which oppressed colonized peoples, and therefore rendered their "identities" troubled. As literary modernism gained traction in the 20th century, Caribbean writers such as Frantz Fanon and Jean Rhys responded to the suddenly complicated identity paradigm in which they become marked as the “Other.” How do Fanon and Rhys untangle modernist notion of the self while being deeply entwined with constantly alienating effects of colonialist practices? In this paper, I explore the extent to which “the violence of repressing or ignoring other forms of difference” causes colonized people to react loudly against these forces with their own newly constructed identities. Rhys and Fanon reacted loudly in their work, but other colonized people would react loudly through force and violent resistance. Black Power movements in the Caribbean and America, for example, feature the colonized seizing upon new identities in order to break free of colonialism and the identities it imposed. Fanon’s reaction to break free of those shackles are manifested in Black Skins, White Masks, which becomes essential for these Black Power movements. Rhys creates Wide Sargasso Sea to problematize the racism of 19th Century colonialism itself and highlight the vicious process of identity formation via a famous work of Victorian literature. Through my research, I have ultimately come to the conclusion that colonialist oppression produces identities contrary to it, whether that may be in the form of writing or other violent movements; it is that very narrative process by which colonial power breeds its own undoing.

UW offers an excellent research environment. But is there a way to further improve undergraduate experience in research? What is a way to put greater emphasis on student growth while achieving the faculty’s research agenda? We, the interns of Newbook Digital Texts, have sought a new model of undergraduate research model that would answer this question. The core of this interdisciplinary research model is undergraduate leadership. It divides teams into different specialties. In each team, one or more undergrads work as team leads to plan the research project, assign tasks, and gain feedback—not leadership—from research professors and/or advisors. It also gives students opportunities for outreach activities, where they present their research project at regional and national symposiums and grant committees for funding. This model hypothesizes that undergraduates can learn interdisciplinary communication, the skill which would become increasingly important in any career. It also teaches students to autonomously choose a topic, plan, and lead a project with independence and creativity for any kind of post-undergraduate work. How do we know that this model of research works? We have sent out a survey to all of our former and current interns to ask their opinions and experiences with the model. Based on the survey, the remarkable result of this new model is as follows: by showcasing the skills that they learned from this research framework at Newbook, our past interns have obtained notable scholarships and awards such as Mary Gates and McNair, and after their graduation, have secured jobs at Dell, Amazon, digital start-ups, and several NGO’s. The key implication of this model is its applicability to any other fields of study. We believe that this model of undergraduate research carries many positive implications for undergraduate education and helps incorporation of technology into humanities studies.

With the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria, understanding how pathogenic bacteria invade and survive within our bodies is becoming more important as we search for novel ways to combat bacterial infection. Some pathogens, such as Salmonella typhimurium, inject host cells with proteins that suppress the host cell’s ability to respond to bacterial invasion. One such protein, SspH1, is an E3 ubiquitin ligase. E3 ubiquitin ligases attach ubiquitin, an important regulatory protein used to mark other proteins for degradation, to a substrate. Ubiquitin, the biochemical machinery that activates ubiquitin, and the pathways that utilize ubiquitin as a signaling molecule, are not found in bacteria, only in eukaryotes. However, bacteria have evolved proteins, such as SspH1, that hijack a host cell’s biochemical machinery in order to target host proteins for degradation. SspH1 consists of two domains: a catalytic E3 domain that transfers ubiquitin to substrate, and a substrate recognizing Leucine-Rich-Repeat (LRR) domain. I have shown through biochemical assays that the LRR domain inhibits the catalytic activity of the E3 domain. I have also shown that this inhibition is relieved in the presence of substrate. Through the use of 2D NMR and further biochemical assays, I hope to characterize the binding between the LRR and E3 domain in order to further the understanding of how SspH1 is inhibited. Understanding the mechanism of SspH1 auto-inhibition can increase our knowledge of the mechanisms and activities of related bacterial effector proteins, furthering our understanding of how pathogenic bacteria evade our immune system, and potentially lead to the development of novel treatments that can combat bacterial infection.

Listeria monocytogenes is the causative agent of listeriosis, an infection which causes flu-like symptoms in most individuals after ingesting contaminated food, but can severely harm immunocompromised individuals, newborn children, and the fetus of an infected pregnant woman. L. monocytogenes is a facultative intracellular pathogen which escapes a phagocytic vacuole early in its life cycle. Once in the cytosol of the enterocyte, the master virulence regulator PrfA activates virulence factor production. However, what initiates PrfA and allows L. monocytogenes to sense that it is in the cytosolic environment is still not understood. Recent discoveries have indicated that the translation of at least one of the nine virulence genes, actA, requires several genes involved in bacterial redox regulation, including the protein YjbH. In the Bacillus subtilis model, a homologous YjbH interacts with the protein Spx, an important regulator of thiol-specific oxidative stress. Under normal conditions, YjbH binds to Spx and facilitates its degradation via the ClpXP protease. During disulfide stress, YjbH aggregates, freeing Spx to regulate oxidative stress response genes. Although the B. subtilis and L. monocytogenes YjbH are homologs, the function of the L. monocytogenes YjbH is uncharacterized. My research project seeks to extract and purify the protein. I first generated two strains of E. coli that express a tagged version of either the wild type YjbH or a mutant YjbH which lacks two cysteines that may be involved in its interaction with Spx. The second half of my project will focus on limiting the aggregation of recombinant YjbH. After successful purification of the proteins, these two strains will be a useful tool in characterizing the function of L. monocytogenes YjbH, and its role in the virulence pathway. Understanding the role of YjbH in the virulence pathway could ultimately lead to novel ways to inhibit the pathogenicity of L. monocytogenes.