VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Planning the Soviet everyday: Reimagining the city, home and material culture of developed socialism
Keywords: architecture
design history
urban planning
developed socialism
Soviet Union

This thesis explores professional visions for the planning of everyday life during the period of developed socialism. Considering a wide range of disciplinary literature, including architecture, urban planning, design and sociology, this thesis analyses how professionals imagined residential and domestic life in an urbanised and technologically advanced socialist society. Continuing the narrative of Khrushchev’s modernising programme to reform everyday life (byt) into the post-Khrushchev period, the thesis follows professionals of the last two Soviet decades who criticised the rationalising and collectivising planning paradigm inaugurated during the preceding decades. Professionals argued that this paradigm had produced a dehumanised and alienating everyday environment in the city and the home.
After setting out the theoretical framework and the historical context of developed socialism, the first empirical section addresses urban residential life. It focuses on the microdistrict planning unit to illustrate how professionals, disillusioned with functionalist planning, searched for ways to humanise the city and adapt it to the behaviours and needs of urban residents. Part two investigates shifting professional views on the home and the everyday processes associated with it, such as cooking and cleaning. No longer seen as a utilitarian space in which everyday processes transpire, the home came to be understood as a personal and emotionally resonant place. Part three focuses on material culture, investigating evolving views on consumption and aesthetics. It illustrates how professionals endeavoured to rehabilitate the object world and align it with populist preferences while nonetheless maintaining a commitment to technological and forward-looking principles. In contributing to the scholarly understanding of developed socialism, this thesis contends that the 1970s-1980s saw experts embrace individual agency and popular sentiments. This turn did not, however, signify a turn towards individualism or de-politicised malaise: professionals maintained their utopian aspirations to engineer and control everyday life.
Higher-order model checking with traversals
Keywords: software verification
intersection types
model checking
Theory and automated verification

Higher-order recursion schemes are a powerful model of functional computation that grew out of traditional recursive program schemes and generalisations of grammars. It is common to view recursion schemes as generators of possibly-infinite trees, which Ong showed to have a decidable monadic second order theory and opened the door to applications in verification. Kobayashi later presented an intersection type characterisation of the model checking problem, on which most subsequent applied work is based. In recent work, recursion schemes have been considered to play a role similar to Boolean programs in verification of first-order imperative programs: a natural target for abstraction of programs with very large or infinite data domains.
In this thesis we focus on the development of model checking algorithms for variants of recursion schemes. We start our contributions with a model checking algorithm inspired by the fully abstract game semantics of recursion schemes, but specified as a goal-directed approach to intersection type inference, that offers a unification of the views of Ong and Kobayashi. We build on this largely theoretical contribution with two orthogonal extensions and practical implementations.
First, we develop a new extension of recursion schemes: higher-order recursion schemes with cases, which add non-determinism and a case construct operating over a finite data domain. These additions provide us with a more natural and succinct target for abstraction from functional programs: encoding data using functions inevitably results in an increase in the order and arity of the scheme, which have a direct impact on the worst-case complexity of the problem. We characterise the model checking problem using a novel intersection and union type system and give a practical algorithm for type inference in this system. We have carried out an empirical evaluation of the implementation --- the tool TRAVMC --- using a variety of problem instances from the literature and a new suite of problem instances derived via an abstraction-refinement procedure from functional programs.
Second, we extend our approach from safety properties to all properties expressible in monadic second order logic using alternating parity tree automata as our specification language. We again provide an implementation and an empirical evaluation, which shows that despite the challenges accompanying liveness properties our tool scales beyond the current state of the art.
Beyond melancholia: Algeria and its spectres
Keywords: spectrality
melancholia
postcolonial
haunting
Algerian War
mourning
colonialism
Francophone
Sansal
psychoanalysis
memory
Djebar
Khadra
Algeria

This thesis problematizes the recent transdisciplinary turn to melancholia by grounding the concept within the literature of three contemporary Algerian authors: Assia Djebar, Yasmina Khadra, and Boualem Sansal. If Freud figured melancholia as a pathological response to loss, much recent scholarship has reconceptualized it as an ethico-political model of remembrance that safeguards the memory of the lost or marginalized other. Yet the recent and ubiquitous depathologization of melancholia is only possible insofar as theorists overlook its more insidious elements. By analyzing how melancholia emerges within the postcolonial novels of Djebar, Khadra, and Sansal, this thesis reveals how melancholia in fact undermines an ethico-politics of remembrance, further displacing those lost others that theorists of melancholia would recuperate. Divided into two sections, the first part of the thesis thus challenges the ethico-political viability of melancholia as a mnemonic model. Through close readings of the texts, the first four chapters reveal postcolonial melancholia in Algeria to be imbricated in amnesia, immobility, repetition, victimhood, apolitical retrospection, and the unethical appropriation of the lost object. Part II investigates how the authors imagine different models of remembrance that move beyond the limits of the mourning and melancholia dyad. If melancholia has been depathologized, it nonetheless remains ensnared within a binary system in which the subject either forgets (mourns) or engages in a putative act of hyper-remembrance (melancholia). Building upon the recent theory of Dominick LaCapra, Mireille Rosello, and Judith Butler, the final two chapters explore the critical potential of ‘working upon’ the past. As an on-going and conscious model of remembrance, ‘working upon’ actively resists the closure inherent to mourning but it also circumvents the melancholic (re)appropriation of the past and its lost others. Ultimately, then, this thesis signals the need for emergent models of memorialization that move beyond the restrictions of the Freudian binary of mourning and melancholia.
Italian postwar experimentalism in the wake of English-language modernism
Keywords: Ezra Pound
Modernism
Neoavantgarde
Edoardo Sanguineti
T.S. Eliot
Amelia Rosselli
James Joyce
neoavanguardia

After World War II in Italy the cultural scene was in need of resuscitation. Artists searched for tools with which to revifify their works. Central to this, for many key figures in the fifties and sixties, was an engagement with English-language Modernism. This phenomenon has been widely recognised, but this thesis is its first sustained analysis.
I draw together the receptions of three English-language Modernist authors – T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce – who, as a triad, were instrumental in the radicalisation of the arts in Italy in the fifties and sixties. I show that their works were elevated as models of an experimental approach to language that was revisited by Italian artists – most notably by poets associated with the Neoavantgarde. The specific Modernist linguistic techniques which were adopted by the Italians that we will consider here are the mingling of languages and styles, the use of citations, and the perversion and manipulation of single words and idioms.
The poets considered in most depth to exemplify this phenomenon are Edoardo Sanguineti, who was a major exponent of the Neoavantgarde, and Amelia Rosselli, who was more peripherally and problematically associated with the movement. Both poets desecrated the traditional language of poetry and energised their own poetry with recourse to Modernist techniques which they consciously and deliberately adopted from Eliot, Pound and Joyce.
An unpicking of the mechanics of these techniques in Sanguineti's and Rosselli's poetry reveals that their texts necessitate an active mode of reading. This aligns with the intellectual ideas propounded by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, all of whom grounded their theories on readership in analyses of the linguistic experiments of Modernism. Sanguineti's and Rosselli's poetry fulfil the characteristics of Eco's “open” work, Barthes' “polysemous” work, and bring about Benjamin's “shock-effect” in the reader. These radical linguistic techniques, appropriated from the Modernists, contribute to each poets' overall poetic projects – they enact Edoardo Sanguineti's anarchic and revolutionary impulses, and stage Amelia Rosselli's thematic conflicts.
Weakened by strengths: drugs in solution, medication error and drug safety
Keywords: drug dose calculation
patient safety
drug infusions
medication error
drug error

The concentrations of some drug solutions are often expressed as ratios or percentages. This system simplified prescription and dispensing when Imperial measures such as grains and minims were used. Ampoules of powerful vasoactive drugs such as catecholamines and potentially toxic local anaesthetics are still labelled as ratios and percentages, seemingly through habit or tradition than for any useful clinical reason. This thesis argues that adherence to this outdated system is confusing, causes drug administration errors, and puts patients at risk. Internet-based questionnaires were used to quantify medical students’ and doctors’ understanding of ratios and percentages. A substantial minority of almost 3000 doctors could not convert between ratios, percentages and mass concentration correctly, made dosing errors of up to three orders of magnitude in written clinical scenarios, and struggled with conversions between metric units. These findings are strong arguments for expressing drug concentrations as mass concentration and providing better drug administration teaching. High fidelity patient simulation was used to examine the influence of clearer ampoule labelling and intensive drug administration teaching. This allowed critical incidents to be reproduced realistically, clinical performances to be assessed, and outcome measures to be accurately recorded. Randomised controlled trials were conducted that demonstrated positive influences of both interventions for doctors and students. The difficulties that nurses encounter when preparing infusions of these drugs on critical care units were also studied and are reported. The findings presented should be sufficient to persuade regulatory authorities to remove ratios and percentages from ampoule labels – a straightforward, cheap, commonsense intervention. The lack of effective clinical error reporting systems and the extreme practical difficulties of conducting clinical trials in this field mean that a firm link between this intervention and patient outcome is unlikely ever to be made, but this should not be an excuse for maintaining the status quo.
The fragile state: essays on luminosity, normativity and metaphilosophy
Keywords: luminosity
knowledge
metaphilosophy
Cartesianism
luck

This dissertation is a set of three essays connected by the common theme of our epistemic fragility: the way in which our knowledge – of our own minds, of whether we are in violation of the epistemic and ethical norms, and of the philosophical truths themselves – is hostage to forces outside our control. The first essay, “Are We Luminous?”, is a recasting and defence of Timothy Williamson’s argument that there are no non-trivial conditions such that we are in a position to know we are in them whenever we are in them. Crucial to seeing why Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument succeeds, pace various critics, is recognising that the issue is largely an empirical one. It is in part because of the kind of creatures we are – specifically, creatures with coarse-grained doxastic dispositions – that nothing of interest, for us, is luminous. In the second essay, “What’s in a Norm?”, I argue that such an Anti-Cartesian view in turn demands that epistemologists and ethicists accept the ubiquity of normative luck, the phenomenon whereby agents fail to do what they ought because of non-culpable ignorance. Those who find such a view intolerable – many epistemic internalists and ethical subjectivists – have the option of cleaving to the Cartesian orthodoxy by endorsing an anti-realist metanormativity. The third essay, “The Archimedean Urge”, is a critical discussion of genealogical scepticism about philosophical judgment, including evolutionary debunking arguments and experimentally-motivated attacks. Although such genealogical scepticism often purports to stand outside philosophy – in the neutral terrains of science or common sense – it tacitly relies on various first-order epistemic judgments. The upshot is two-fold. First, genealogical scepticism risks self-defeat, impugning commitment to its own premises. Second, philosophers have at their disposal epistemological resources to fend off genealogical scepticism: namely, an epistemology that takes seriously the role that luck plays in the acquisition of philosophical knowledge.
Reading between the lines: Arabic fiction in Israel after 1967
Keywords: Palestine - in literature
place and space
Arabic literature
Arabic literature - Palestine - history and criticism
Imil Habibi
geographical perception in literature
Palestinian citizens of Israel

Arabic literature in Israel has evaded critical attention, or has been treated as an uncomplicated part of Palestinian national culture, on a quest for unification and an identity that was devastated in 1948. This dissertation complicates that narrative through close readings of short stories by five Arab citizens of Israel—Imil Habibi, Muhammad ‘Ali Taha, Muhammad Naffa‘, Hanna Ibrahim, and Zaki Darwish—between 1967 and 1983. Focusing on the relationship between geography and fiction, I suggest that literary constructions of “place” and “space” by these authors reveal a range of cultural negotiations that break down entrenched dyads: Palestinian yet Israeli; Palestinian on the one hand, Israeli on the other; spared exile, but suffering occupation. Instead, these writers evoke the hybrid and ambivalent experiences produced in the paradoxical spaces of Israeli-Palestinian life.
I develop an analytical framework that incorporates geographic and literary theory. I use the work of humanists such as Gaston Bachelard, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Edward Casey to suggest that literature mediates geography in a way that communicates belonging, alienation, or personal and collective meaning. The framework is bolstered with the work of postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, along with historical and political sources, to capture the contextual resonance of the texts.
After laying out these theoretical guidelines, I offer a historical account of Arabic literature in Israel and embark on four analytical chapters. Chapter Two explores Imil Habibi’s portrayals of anxiety around post-1967 Palestinian reunions. Chapter Three focuses on the themes of Muhammad ‘Ali Taha’s Palestinian collective identity in Israel. Chapter Four takes up the theme of “the land” in the works of Muhammad Naffa‘ and Hanna Ibrahim, in the context of 1970s land expropriations. Chapter Five explores a long story by Zaki Darwish and its depiction of the body’s phenomenological relation to the homeland.
Rather than portraying counter-narratives that suggest a binary of “Israeli” and “Palestinian” always at odds, these authors portray the spaces and characters in between. They disclose the anxieties of finding a sense of place in the context of a dispersed Palestinian nation, geopolitical uncertainty, social marginalization within the state, and the subtle geographies of a historic homeland that both is—and is not—one’s own.
The role of environmental principles in the decisions of the European Union courts and New South Wales Land and Environment Court
Keywords: environmental principles
environmental law methodology
environmental law

The thesis is a comparative legal analysis of environmental principles in environmental law. Environmental principles are novel concepts in environmental law and they have a high profile in environmental law scholarship. This high profile is promoted by two factors – the high hopes that environmental law scholars have for environmental principles, and the increasing prevalence of environmental principles in legal systems, particularly in case law. This thesis analyses the latter, mapping doctrinal developments involving environmental principles in two jurisdictions and court systems – the courts of the European Union and the New South Wales Land and Environment Court.
This doctrinal mapping has both narrow and broad aims. Narrowly, it identifies the legal roles in fact taken on by environmental principles within legal systems. Broadly, and building on this assessment, it responds to scholarly hopes that environmental principles (can) perform a range of significant roles in environmental law, including solving both environmental problems and legal problems in environmental law scholarship. These hopes are based on assumptions about environmental principles that have methodological weaknesses, including that environmental principles are universal and that they fit pre-existing models of ‘legal principles drawn from other areas of legal scholarship. The thesis exposes these methodological problems and concludes that environmental principles are not panaceas for pressing and perceived problems in environmental law. It does this by showing that the legal roles of environmental principles, which are significant in environmental law and its current evolution, can only be understood by closely analysing the legal cultures in which they feature. This is a conclusion for environmental law scholarship generally – while environmental issues and problems may be urgent and often global, legal analysis of the law that applies to those problems requires close engagement with legal systems and cultures, as they are and as they develop.
Challenging the calligraphy canon: the reception of rubbing collections in Ming China 
Keywords: Art
calligraphy
China
Ming dynasty
reception
Chinese rubbings
reproductions

Calligraphic rubbing collections or rubbing collections of model calligraphy (fatie 法帖) are frequently described as a source of canonical models for the learning of calligraphy. They are often associated with and usually refer to the calligraphy of the Two Wangs (Wang Xizhi 王羲之, 303-61, or 321-79, and his son Xianzhi 獻之, 344-86). They also became acknowledged as embodying the classical tradition transmitted mostly from the Jin (265-420) Dynasty, one which was well-known as the calligraphy canon. In general, recent scholarship on rubbing collections holds that rubbing collections often transmitted important and highly recognized works which represented the classical tradition or calligraphy canon. This thesis aims to analyze how Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) people received new forms of rubbing collections, and explores some of their social roles in Ming China.
Apart from traditional concerns, for instance for the aesthetic value and the origins of various editions of rubbing collections, other aspects of rubbing collections of the Ming, for example, socio-historical and material culture perspectives, have not been explored in detail. The development of this form of calligraphy reproduction in China is important as an instance, alongside original works of calligraphy, of how the history of calligraphy was created and contested. The thesis will evaluate which calligraphers were chosen to be reproduced in rubbing form, which of their works were included, and what proportion of rubbing collections their work occupied, as well as who the patrons were and when the collections were published. An analysis of this information will show how the rubbing collections challenged the calligraphy canon and facilitated social mobility between various social groups particularly, scholars-officials, merchants and commoners. It will be demonstrated that Ming rubbing collections were no longer exclusively devoted to the traditional canon, nor did they contain only calligraphy of high aesthetic value. Calligraphy after masterpieces written in the copiers’ own styles and writings of those without significant reputations in calligraphy were made into rubbing collections as well. The thesis will attempt to show the cause(s) for this change.
Neurodegeneration and brain cancer: a longitudinal field study of rest-activity and sleep
Keywords: Alzheimer's disease
sleep
brain cancer
circadian
neurodegeneration

This thesis investigates rest-activity and sleep profiles in neurodegeneration and brain cancer. Study 1 comprised longitudinal field assessments of rest-activity, sleep and memory in controls and memory-impairment individuals with: subjective memory complaint (SMC), amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), mild and moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Four questions were addressed: (1) is SMC a prodromal stage of AD? (2) do characteristics of SMC predict future decline? (3) does cholinergic medication (ChEI) impact rest-activity and sleep of moderate AD patients? and (4) are there factors predicting response to ChEI? Study 2 assessed rest-activity and melatonin rhythms in a brain cancer patient (JJB), and post-mortem analysis of brain tissue assessed infiltration of cancer cells on the circadian clock (SCN). Both studies used questionnaires, cognitive tests, electroencephalography and actigraphy simultaneously at patients’ homes. In Study 1, the SMC group showed a reduced activity amplitude to be correlated with increasing memory impairment severity, lower sleep quality and efficiency. Increased sleep fragmentation was observed in all memory-impaired groups, although not correlated to impairment severity. Increased fragmentation of rest-activity rhythm correlated with increasing memory impairment severity in all groups except SMC. Following ChEI medication with donepezil, moderate AD patients showed increased sleep fragmentation, probably due to potentiation of available acetylcholine known to maintain arousal. Higher daytime-activity and lower activity in the rest-phase, when drug-naïve, predicted improved cognition following ChEIs. In Study 2, cancer cell infiltration of the patient’s SCN was confirmed. However, a robust circadian rest-activity period with a misaligned melatonin phase, was recorded, indicating that the effects of partial SCN lesions in humans are complex and this result was possibly in part are due to the masking effect of social behaviour.