The Trump Administration’s imposition of steep and discriminatory tariffs on much of the world with which the United States trades is often seen as a fundamental attack on the World Trade Organization (WTO), which may not survive unless extreme measures are taken, such as the removal (or voluntary withdrawal) of the United States from the WTO. This article questions this narrative, arguing that there are strong reasons to believe that the WTO has the resilience to survive and evolve despite the tension between the transactional power politics of trade and the values of legalism and non-discrimination that are emblematic of the multilateral trading system embedded in the WTO. A historical perspective reveals that the multilateral trading system has always been confronted with gaps between the ideology and ideals surrounding trade multilateralism and, on the other hand, the reality of the system, where rules and their enforcement are shaped by power and where non-discrimination is often honored in the breach. The system has adapted and accommodated to power politics. Proposals to remove the United States from the WTO would themselves constitute violations of international law, as the WTO constitution or charter does not contain any provision for expulsion of a WTO Member, much less any objective criteria for so doing. In recent years, the WTO has pivoted to new roles and agendas—generally under the rubric of inclusive trade—that deviate from the rule creation and enforcement through dispute settlement focus that many observers still see as the entire basis for the WTO’s existence. It is more equipped to withstand the current trade winds and to ride the waves than is appreciated by those with nostalgia for days when the WTO was widely seen as the poster child for neoliberal globalism in a neoliberal era, as well as for the post-Cold War liberal narrative of the global rule of law.

In recent decades, there has been an increasing trend of foreign investors challenging host states’ taxation measures in international investment arbitrations, arguing that host states have violated investment protection standards, including the widely recognized standard of non-discrimination. In international investment treaties, the non-discrimination standard is scattered between five different types of protection standards, including the national treatment standard, the most-favored nation treatment standard, the non-impairment clause, the fair and equitable treatment standard, and the expropriation clauses. Due to the overlapping status of non-discrimination elements among treaty protection standards, the meaning and scope of the non-discrimination standard were never clearly defined. Additionally, because taxation measures closely relate to states’ inherent sovereign power to tax, there are extensive debates regarding the criteria for determining the finding of an investment treaty obligation violation and the need to balance states’ sovereign power to tax with protection of foreign investors’ investment interests. This article analyzes the quandary between sovereign taxation power preservation and foreign investment protection, examines non-discrimination standards in different treaty protection standards, assesses the jurisdiction hurdles for application of non discrimination standards, and then presents an extensive case study of the arbitral precedents of Investor–State Dispute Settlement cases involving non-discrimination claims targeting the host states’ taxation measures. To address the challenge of inconsistent and diverging approaches to applying and interpreting non discrimination standards against taxation measures, this article proposes a redefined “Three-Prong” test to harmonize the chaos in existing jurisprudence. The Three-Prong test aims to establish a consistent methodology for determining the discrimination treatment standard applicable to all types of discriminatory treatment in international investment law and to balance the competing interests of sovereign taxation power and foreign investment protection.

The present dissertation examined the relationships between various social factors, including loneliness, social network size, and social isolation, and aspects of cognition, including executive functioning and autobiographical memory. Across three studies, two primary aims guided this work: 1) to explore the relationship between aspects of executive functioning and social interaction among older adults, and 2) to compare autobiographical memory shared in a structured interview setting to everyday conversations, and to explore the ecological validity of a widely used autobiographical memory measurement tool. Study 1 examined cross-sectional associations between executive functioning and both subjective loneliness and objectively assessed social isolation using an ecological assessment tool, the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR). There was no compelling evidence that, among cognitively healthy older adults, there is a cross-sectional relationship between multiple aspects of executive functioning and either subjectively experienced loneliness or objectively observed time spent alone. Study 2 extended this work by incorporating a more dynamic, socially oriented theory of mind task that utilizes executive functioning. While executive functioning was associated with theory of mind performance, loneliness and isolation generally were not, and age-related differences emerged primarily for cognitive theory of mind. Exploratory analyses suggested that isolation was more strongly associated with cognitive theory of mind among younger adults in models examining inhibition, a subdomain of executive functioning, with this association attenuating with age. Study 3 evaluated, for the first time, whether a laboratory-based estimate of autobiographical event memory specificity predicts a person’s level of specificity while sharing event memories in daily social conversations. Findings indicated that even though laboratory tasks may provide some insight into how autobiographical event memories and thoughts are shared in daily conversation, they nonetheless may underestimate older adults’ natural episodic specificity. Together, these studies underscore the nuance of social-cognitive relationships in aging and highlight the importance of measurement sensitivity and ecological validity.

This dissertation examines how Black ecological practices generate forms of knowledge, belonging, and world-making within landscapes structured by settler colonialism and racial capitalism in the Pacific Northwest. Drawing on ethnographic research with Black-identifying outdoor practitioners, environmental professionals, educators, and community organizers in the Seattle region, I argue that ecology is not a neutral domain of environmental management but a relational terrain shaped through histories of settler colonial dispossession, racialized governance, and survival. Rather than approaching Black relationships to land through frameworks of exclusion, access, or environmental injustice alone, this project foregrounds the everyday practices through which Black communities cultivate livable relations to place. Building on scholarship in Black geographies and Black ecologies (McKittrick 2006; Wright 2021; Hosbey and Roane 2021; Moulton and Salo 2022), this dissertation reframes the production of ecological knowledge as emerging through relations of care. Care, as I develop it here, is not simply an ethical disposition but an organizing force that shapes how environments, publics, and subjects are constituted (Gumbs 2020; Sharpe 2016; Hartman 2007; Collins 2000). Within settler colonial land regimes, care sustains projects of property, citizenship, and environmental governance, reproducing racialized hierarchies of belonging (Tuck and Yang 2014; Wynter 2003). At the same time, Black ecological practices mobilize care differently, orienting it toward relation, collective survival, and ongoing negotiation with uneven landscapes. Drawing on ethnographic encounters and public-facing media, the dissertation traces how Black ecological thought circulates through embodied practice, affective relations, storytelling, and pedagogy. In outdoor recreation, participants navigate racialized geographies through practices of attentiveness, risk assessment, and collective presence. In environmental institutions, Black professionals sustain commitments to ecological unity despite bureaucratic constraints that fragment care and limit belonging. In public media and community archives, Black ecological knowledge moves through affective infrastructures that reshape how land, environment, and the public are understood. Together, my research demonstrates that ecological knowledge is not confined to scientific or policy domains but is produced through lived, relational practices that refuse the separation of land from social life. Methodologically, this project draws on Black feminist and decolonial approaches that treat theory as emergent from relation rather than imposed abstraction (Collins 2000; Hartman 2008; McKittrick 2006; Simpson 2014). It employs a mosaic form that moves across ethnography and public media, attending to fragments, repetition, and resonance as analytic tools. This approach foregrounds participants as co-theorists whose practices of care, refusal, and creativity generate conceptual insights into ecological life. As a Black diasporic researcher whose own relations to land are shaped by histories of displacement, I approach this work as a relational practice grounded in accountability to the communities and ecologies that make this research possible. By centering Black ecological practices, this dissertation contributes to anthropological, environmental humanities, and Black studies scholarship in three key ways. First, it shifts the study of environmental knowledge away from institutional production toward relational and embodied forms of knowing. Second, it extends Black ecological and Black feminist theory by elaborating care as a central analytic for understanding how ecological worlds are made and contested. Third, it offers an account of environmental politics that attends simultaneously to structure and possibility, demonstrating how alternative ecological relations are sustained within, alongside, and against dominant regimes. This project opens several directions for future research. It invites comparative work across regions to examine how Black ecological practices take shape within distinct colonial and environmental histories. It calls for deeper engagement with Afro-Indigenous frameworks to further theorize relational land practices across differently positioned communities. It also suggests new avenues for studying public environmental discourse, particularly how affective and relational forms of knowledge reshape environmental governance and pedagogy. More broadly, this research points toward the need for environmental scholarship that takes seriously the relational, lived, and world-building dimensions of ecology as a site of ongoing struggle and possibility.

Saudi students returning from studying abroad may experience reverse culture shock (RCS), which can affect their social, emotional, and professional readjustment. Despite the increasing number of Saudi students studying overseas, limited research has examined the factors associated with RCS among Saudi returnees. The purpose of this study was to examine reverse culture shock among Saudi students who returned from studying abroad within the last five years and to explore whether RCS differs based on gender, parental status, employment status, and whether returnees’ expectations about life after returning were met. Guided by Expectancy Violations Theory (EVT), this study used a quantitative research design. Data were collected through an online survey using researcher-created, plus RCS parts of the MRSS (Niesen, 2010), a validated scale measuring reverse culture shock. Independent t-tests and regression analyses were conducted using R programming. The sample consisted of 170 Saudi students who had returned from studying abroad within the past ten years. Results: Independent t-tests indicated no significant differences in reverse culture shock based on parental status, gender, or employment (all p > .05). Regression analysis revealed that returnees whose expectations regarding family and social communication and community reintegration were met experienced lower RCS. Similarly, having a job guarantee significantly predicted lower levels of RCS. However, career expectations, length of stay abroad, time since return, gender, parental status, and the interaction between gender and parental status were not significant predictors. Implications: The findings contribute to a better understanding of the reentry experiences of Saudi returnees and provide insights for universities, policymakers, and support services to develop programs that facilitate smoother cultural and social readjustment after studying abroad.

Recent research has demonstrated that multisensory enrichment and visual support can facilitate second language (L2) learning. However, despite growing interest in this research field, the effects of enrichment on second language learning remain mixed and not fully understood. In particular, it remains unclear which forms of enrichment are most beneficial, whether enrichment effects differ depending on the type of linguistic item being learned, how enrichment compares to more traditional translation-based learning, and whether visual support can also facilitate the learning of difficult non-native contrasts beyond what translation alone can provide. This dissertation addresses these central questions through three empirical studies that investigate the role of multisensory and visual enrichment in L2 learning across lexical and phonological domains. Study 1 examines whether gesture-based and image-based encoding support vocabulary learning more effectively than a translation-only control condition, and whether emotional properties of lexical items, such as valence and arousal, are associated with recall and retrieval performance. Study 2 focuses on gesture-based learning and investigates whether gestures differentially support the learning of nouns and prepositions, two lexical categories that differ in concreteness and contextual dependence. Study 3 extends the investigation to speech sound learning by examining whether orthographic support facilitates the perceptual learning of difficult Arabic emphatic consonant contrasts by naive English-speaking learners under high variability phonetic training. Together, the three studies are united by the broader goal of understanding how additional sensory and visual support helps learners build new linguistic representations in an L2 under difficult learning conditions. Across the dissertation, enrichment is examined as a tool for supporting both form–meaning mappings in vocabulary learning and form–category mappings in phonological learning. This dissertation contributes to theoretical discussions in psycholinguistics and second language acquisition, particularly in relation to embodied cognition, dual coding theory, revised hierarchical model and multisensory learning, while also offering practical implications for language pedagogy and technology-enhanced instruction.

Nostalgia, the longing for the lost home and a yearning for a different time,1 is afrequently-visited motif of literature and cinema in China since the 1980s. Red nostalgia, specifically, refers to the commemoration of the socialist times or “Red China” (1950s-1970s) in the postsocialist era. My dissertation plans to examine the theme of red nostalgia in postsocialist China through the literature and films of educated youths (zhishi qingnian 知识青 年, or “zhiqing” for short). Precisely, I attempt to unravel the ways that red nostalgia is formed through the articulation of memory, and how such processes interplay with the sociocultural changes that took place in China during the last three decades. To this end, the dissertation will mainly address the following questions: how the memories of the past are (re)configured and how red nostalgia is informed in such context; how the representation of memories interacts with human agency and body; how (red) nostalgia questions the past and affects the ways that future is envisioned; how red nostalgia is gendered in the narratives of female educated youths, and how the gendered language of red nostalgia suggests a new reading of life and identity of women. Studying red nostalgia in zhiqing literature is not to argue that all zhiqing literature has nostalgic sentiments; rather, the formation of nostalgia is a less-unified but continuous and dynamic practice. The process and implication of red nostalgia represented in zhiqing literature and films is the focus of this dissertation.

This dissertation enhances the representation of clear-sky solar (shortwave) radiation in support of the NASA Libera mission by resolving spectral and directional structure from top-of-atmosphere radiance retrievals through surface radiative forcing to land-surface impacts. It addresses three coupled challenges: developing an operational method to partition broadband shortwave radiation into visible (VIS) and near-infrared (NIR) components, establishing a physically based benchmark for evaluating clear-sky spectrally resolved surface irradiances, and quantifying the extent to which these spectral and directional refinements alter land-surface model responses.First, the dissertation develops a ratio-based radiance-to-irradiance partitioning framework for clear-sky land scenes that avoids the immediate need for dedicated spectral angular distribution models. The approach solves for the ratio between NIR and VIS anisotropic factors (β) and anchors spectral partitioning to an operational broadband shortwave irradiance product. Sensitivity analyses show that β is controlled primarily by viewing-illumination geometry and aerosol loading, enabling a low-order polynomial parameterization that remains physically interpretable. Internal validation against radiative-transfer simulations demonstrates high accuracy, with root-mean-square errors in retrieved VIS and NIR irradiances consistently below 3.0 W m-2 across diverse land surface types and viewing geometries. Second, the dissertation establishes the physical credibility of clear-sky spectrally resolved surface shortwave irradiances using a hierarchical radiative-transfer framework and demonstrates that broadband agreement can mask substantial errors in the internal VIS-NIR partitioning due to spectral cancellation. Across Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) SYN1deg, MODTRAN 6.0, and a modified CCCma model, NIR irradiance sensitivities to precipitable water vapor exhibit consistent sign, magnitude, and spatial structure. Broadband clear-sky surface shortwave irradiance decreases by approximately 0.71 W m-2 per kg m-2 of precipitable water, with more than 90% of this attenuation attributable to NIR absorption. Third, the dissertation uses the Community Land Model at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Southern Great Plains (SGP) site to perform orthogonal forcing experiments that independently correct (i) VIS-NIR partitioning (VIS-ONLY), (ii) direct-diffuse partitioning (DIF-ONLY), and (iii) both together (ALL). Canopy-integrated impacts are regime-dependent and crop-specific. Relative to the control forcing, summer crops exhibit net productivity gains dominated by diffuse corrections: Gross Primary Production (GPP) increases by +0.13% (VIS-ONLY), +2.84% (DIF-ONLY), and +3.06% (ALL) for corn, and by +0.57% (VIS-ONLY), +3.64% (DIF-ONLY), and +4.41% (ALL) for soybean. Winter wheat exhibits net reductions, with GPP changes of -1.08% (VIS-ONLY), -1.72% (DIF-ONLY), and -2.93% (ALL). Consistent structural responses occur in leaf area index, with corn changing by +0.61% (VIS-ONLY), +0.76% (DIF-ONLY), and +0.92% (ALL), soybean changing by +0.43% (VIS-ONLY), +0.43% (DIF-ONLY), and +0.63% (ALL), and winter wheat changing by -1.21% (VIS-ONLY), -2.28% (DIF-ONLY), and -3.18% (ALL). These carbon and structural responses propagate to surface coupling through albedo, net radiation, and turbulent flux partitioning, and they redistribute the growing-season hydrologic budget by shifting evapotranspiration components and soil-water storage, even under fixed incoming shortwave. Overall, this dissertation shows that resolving spectral and directional structure improves both the physical interpretation of Earth radiation budget observations and the realism of land-surface modeling, providing an end-to-end foundation for connecting Libera spectral measurements to surface radiative forcing and terrestrial energy, water, and carbon responses.

Even though research on Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) has increased the use of more critical pedagogies (Beaudrie & Wilson, 2021; Leeman & Serafini, 2016), there is still very limited empirical evidence on how functionalist translation can be used as a critical tool to develop heritage learners’ (HL) Critical Language Awareness (CLA). Most of the existing studies have focused on lexical acquisition, without exploring how translation, from a functional and multimodal perspective, can develop critical reflection on linguistic ideologies, power structures, and identity.This study seeks to address this gap by analyzing the impact of a pedagogical intervention in an SHL course at the University of Arizona. The proposed module is based on a functionalist approach to translation (Nord, 1997) within a multiliteracies framework (New London Group, 1996; Kalantzis & Cope, 2005, 2010), using CLA lenses for both instruction and analysis. A mixed sequential design (Creswell & Creswell, 2018) was used to collect data. The study gathers both quantitative and qualitative data through questionnaires, interviews, translation tasks, critical reflection activities, and classroom observations. Thirty-four students participated: 23 were assigned to the experimental group, which completed the translation module, and 11 to the control group, which followed the regular course sequence. The research questions guiding this project are: (1) Does a multimodal translation module have an impact on the development of students’ Critical Language Awareness (CLA)? If so, how? (2) Do students’ translation competences evolve throughout the module? If so, how? (3) Are there changes in students’ attitudes toward linguistic varieties and their own linguistic identities? The aim is to investigate the effects of this module on students’ CLA and translation competence. In doing so, the study contributes to the advancement of empirical research in heritage language pedagogy and translation studies, providing evidence of how translation can be meaningfully integrated into SHL curricula as both a linguistic and sociopolitical practice. The results show significant improvements in the development of CLA and in the strategic subcompetence of translation competence in the experimental group. Participants in this group progressed from translations focused on linguistic equivalence to more contextualized productions oriented toward audience and translation purpose. Also, positive changes were observed in attitudes toward linguistic diversity and Spanglish, whereas the control group showed no significant transformations.

Well-prepared teachers with marginalized identities are critical to supporting diverse students in P-12 education; currently, a significant gap exists between the number of diverse students and diverse teachers in schools, demonstrating a need to identify ways to increase the number of marginalized teachers in the profession. This study analyzes the identity-based strengths that support marginalized teacher candidates in navigating through teacher preparation and certification, while identifying barriers that must be overcome for their success. This study contributes to research in the field by investigating multiple marginalized identities combined in unique ways through an asset-based lens using mixed methodology through the theory of CRT, sub-Crits of LatCrit, TribalCrit, and DisCrit, through the frame of intersectionality. While research exists on specific identities in teacher preparation and disparate exam outcomes for certification, none could be identified that bridge the teacher preparation through the certification experience; this study addresses this gap by centering the voices of marginalized teacher candidates through rich counter-storytelling to yield recommendations for improvements to policy and practice around teacher preparation and certification. By surveying and interviewing recent graduates from an Elementary Education bachelor’s degree program in the southwestern United States, and interviewing faculty and staff who work with students in this program, quantitative and qualitative insights were generated that speak to the importance and value of marginalized identities, of grow-your-own programs to increase college and teacher preparation access for marginalized groups, and of policies and practices that are needed to support marginalized teacher candidates through teacher preparation and certification.