Contemporary Kashmir valley is seen in a terminal colonial situation within India. Since the armed movement broke out in 1989, the Indian government has deployed massive number of armed troops and implemented lethal counter-insurgency laws. Human rights groups claim that over 70,000 people have been killed and more than 8000 men have been forcibly disappeared in custody by the Indian army. This study focuses on the women activists of the Association of the Parents of the Disappeared Persons who organized in 1994 to search for the disappeared men. The everyday gendered politics of mourning emerges as, what I conceptualize as "affective law" which reveals a fine-grained understanding of women's agency that does not appear as only stereotypically confrontational but as nuancedly cultural. I trace the genesis of affective law within the paradigm of hauntology; a spectral space, of departure and return of the disappeared. The hauntological interiorization emerges as mourning, memory, and resistance. The women use performative politics which converges in the spectacle of mourning and allows them to transcend the limitations of the heavily militarized society. The performative politics of mourning makes it possible to resist oppression and through forms memory capture what might be rendered insignificant by hegemonic discourses of the state. The analysis of the work of mourning as a mode of affective politics traces women's social invisibility and how they become visible in the public. The activist-women emerge as agents of change that alter social constructions relating to body, justice, human rights and gender.

The single disappearing body becomes a crucial counterpart in the state's political economy. The state's surveillance thinly masked in the disappearance becomes a symbol of panopticism - a theater, symbol, and a ritual. Even though spectacle has been conceptualized as separate, in this dissertation enforced disappearances come closer to the spectacular nature of punishment and become a "staging" visible to thousands of eyes. Thus, the society of surveillance emerges as deeply enmeshed with the spectacle and not as mutually exclusive. The spectacle of gendered activism allows tracing the state of exception that India has created in Kashmir valley. The punitive measures imposed by India, become means of forced assimilation of Kashmir. In this dissertation we see how the state becomes operational through dual modes including punitive measures like enforced disappearances and what is termed as military humanitarianism. The state terror emerges as a part of foundational violence for an ethnonational struggle to consolidate the Indian nation on what were pre-1947 heterogeneous territories.

Chemistry at interfaces is of profound importance in the natural world, but only recently have the tools been developed to adequately study such finite boundaries. Much work has gone into the study of aqueous interfaces, as they play crucial roles in atmospheric, electrochemical, and biological phenomena. The bulk of this dissertation is focused on the application of nonlinear spectroscopy to study the behavior ions at the air-water interface and their effects on interfacial chemistry. I also discuss the latest work on the elusive characterization of liquid carbon produced from diamond samples.Chapter 1: A summary of the work done in the last century surrounding interfacial ions in water is provided. Today, we know that the surface tension of salt solutions increases with added solute concentration, but at the time this observation was first made, the molecular-level understanding of ions at the air-water interface was still in its infancy. This chapter focuses on the origins of the first widely-accepted theoretical model of interfacial ions developed by Wagner, Onsager, and Samaras in the early 1930s, and on key experimental evidence that influenced the development of more sophisticated computer models. This recollection emphasizes the enormous progress made in this field, particularly in the last decade. Chapter 2: The theory of nonlinear deep ultraviolet second harmonic generation spectroscopy is reviewed. I describe the theoretical framework vital to understanding the origin of the generated second harmonic response. From this, I describe the development of a Langmuir model, used to quantify the adsorption of ions. The optical DUV-SHG setup is described in detail and data analysis methods are discussed. Chapter 3: The first experiment to identify a polyatomic cation adsorbed to the air-water interface using DUV-SHG is described. Guanidinium is found to adsorb to the interface with a similarly strong propensity as the thiocyanate anion. MD simulations identify a strong interfacial orientational preference for guanidinium ions wherein the cation lies parallel to the air-water boundary. Furthermore, the data are suggestive of ion-pairing effects, the exact nature of which remain to be established. This work highlights an important milestone in the study of interfacial specific ion effects. Chapter 4: DUV-SHG, microdroplet mass spectrometry, and kinetic modeling are employed to study atmospherically-relevant sulfur oxyanions at the air-water interface and reexamine the mechanism of thiosulfate ozonation. Previous work highlighted that the doubly- charged carbonate anion exhibits a stronger affinity for the interface than does the singly-charged bicarbonate. To determine if other multiply-charged anions are also surface active, sodium sulfate, sulfite, and thiosulfate solutions are studied. It is found that thiosulfate exhibits a strong propensity for the air-water interface, while sulfate and sulfite do not. A new kinetic model for thiosulfate ozonation is developed which agrees well with the experimental data. Chapter 5: Efforts to produce and characterize the liquid state of carbon from irradiation of diamond samples are described. Mega-electronvolt ultrafast electron diffraction is used to study the structure of crystalline diamond thin films following excitation from an ultrafast laser pulse. Additional resonant inelastic x-ray spectroscopy measurements are performed to determine the electronic structure of laser-excited diamond. It is then determined that the physical and electronic structure of diamond remains unchanged when probed at picoseconds after excitation. This work highlights the resilient nature of diamond and the experimental challenge of evidencing a clear liquid carbon signal.

This dissertation is an ethnography of an artistic neighborhood, Jabal al Luweibde in Amman. It aims to call attention to a spatial politics of art, distinct from the expressive or meaningful politics more often attended to in studies of art. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including extensive participant observation, interview, and archival research, this dissertation traces Jabal al Luweibde’s emergence as an artistic neighborhood and analyzes how, as artists center in this neighborhood, they rework boundaries of inclusion and exclusion along lines of class, gender, and national origin. It also examines how art’s rising political and economic power, closely tied to wider economic changes, has led to this neighborhood becoming known as a uniquely inclusive site, hailed by politicians and planners as an idealized image of Amman’s potential future. This neighborhood is a transformative site of political possibility in Amman, opening different futures, transforming communal boundaries, and setting the stage for confrontation. By tracing these developments, the dissertation develops theorization of a dynamic, agentive, urban politics, rooted in the structural and aesthetic impacts of discreet artistic practices.