VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Moving Toward Understanding: Negotiating Survival and Wellbeing while Living in Poverty
Keywords: Ethic of Care
Exercise is medicine
Physical Cultural Studies
Poverty
Production of Space
Social Justice

Poverty in Canada continues to be regarded as an individual problem, rather than a set of complex and institutional systemic failures. Moreover, there remains a longstanding and problematic belief that poverty, homelessness, and disenfranchisement can be ‘solved’ by those living in precarity by merely working harder, and that individuals remain in poverty because of their own independent choices and decisions. This is evidenced through dominant neoliberal discourses surrounding personal responsibilities which will be addressed in this dissertation. What these discourses have failed to address are the frameworks, contexts, and spaces within which poverty is structurally and systemically reproduced. Individuals and communities do not stumble upon poverty. Classism, colonialism, racism, homophobia, ableism, and marginalization, which are visible through poverty, lend themselves to the perpetuation of poverty across generations, as well as purposefully disenfranchising particular intersections of people. What endures then, is a both lack of understanding and wilful neglect about the lived experiences of poverty and homelessness, existing realities of risk, how cycles of poverty become reinforced through relational, institutional, and systemic means, and the role that physical activity and movement has on the lives of the poor. In this dissertation, I interrogate how macro level power structures impact the everyday, micro level lives of people experiencing poverty and homelessness. The data collected in this work comes from a nine-month institutional ethnography at Start Me Up Niagara (SMUN), in St. Catharines, Ontario Canada, where I observed, gathered field notes, and conducted interviews with staff and people who used SMUN. In my findings, I explore how individuals navigate health and wellbeing while experiencing poverty. I address the (in)accessibility to public and private spaces and emphasize the important role of care providers in space of care, like SMUN. I highlight throughout my findings how individuals in Canada experiencing poverty and homelessness, fundamentally, suffer from a lack of health justice, spatial justice, and justice of care. This work addresses the goal of eradicating cycles of poverty and injustice in Canada by highlighting the need for policy implementations at all levels of government. Ethical approval was received by the University of Toronto Research Ethics Board (protocol# 35175).
The Postnatal Effects of Prenatal Cannabinoid Exposure
Keywords: behaviour
cannabinoids
imaging
preclinical

The effect of prenatal cannabis exposure on offspring is an important clinical and societal concern which has limited evidence. Compounds in the cannabis plant, phytocannabinoids, cross the placental barrier and thus may act on the developing embryo. To address the knowledge gap, here I created and characterized a murine exposure model to explore potential postnatal effects of prenatal exposure to cannabinoids. The model involved administering cannabinoids – the synthetic cannabinoid nabilone and principal phytocannabinoids (−)-trans-Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) or cannabidiol (CBD) – via subcutaneous injection prior-to and throughout gestation. Herein, I describe effects of these gestational exposures on 1) the behavioural and neuroimaging outcomes in adulthood, and 2) the effects on peripheral immune cell populations. I assessed neuroanatomy in prenatally nabilone, THC, or CBD exposed offspring by magnetic resonance imaging. I found that prenatal nabilone exposure had sex-specific effects on neuroanatomy in juvenile (3-week-old) and adult (9-week-old) offspring. In juvenile mice, the amygdala volume was lower in females and higher in males exposed to nabilone compared to vehicle controls. In adult nabilone-exposed offspring, the basal forebrain was larger in females and smaller in males compared to vehicle controls. In prenatally CBD-exposed offspring, the volume of the arbor vitae of the cerebellum was larger compared to vehicle controls. Prenatal THC did not affect neuroanatomy. I also performed a battery of behaviour tests beginning at the 9-week timepoint in adult THC and CBD-exposed offspring. I found that both compounds produced an anxiolytic phenotype in males in the elevated plus maze. CBD affected novelty exploration in the novel object recognition test in females only. Thus, prenatal THC and CBD exposure produced sex-specific effects on behaviour in adulthood. Using cytometry by time-of-flight, spleen and thymus immune cell populations were quantified at two timepoints in CBD- and THC-exposed offspring. Prenatal THC, but not CBD, affected T cell populations in the neonatal thymus and juvenile spleen. From these results, I conclude that a disturbance in the developmental period caused by exposure to exogenous cannabinoids results in long-term effects to brain and immune systems. These consequences are compound- and sex-specific. Future work should focus on elucidating mechanisms underlying these changes.
Signaling, Machine Learning, Democracy: A Theory of Misinformation
Keywords: Disinformation
Machine Learning
Misinformation
Philosophy of Science
Politics
Signaling Theory

This dissertation advances a novel theory of misinformation by way of five chapters. Chapter 1 argues that, contrary to mainstream scholarship, misinformation ought not to be conceived of with respect to either truth or accuracy, which we call alethic theories of misinformation. Against both intuitions and mainstream academic opinion, this chapter is oriented towards showing problematic consequences of alethic theories of misinformation that suggest abandoning this methodological paradigm. Chapter 2 argues that an act of communication ought to be considered misinformation if and only if dissemination of that information is conducted in a context that is misleading and non-trivially violates the informational preferences of relevant stakeholders in that context relative to social goals. I show how misinformational discourse ought to be modelled within the context of theories of institutions and signaling theory, employing the resources of game-theory. Chapter 3 applies the theory to four cases studies. The first is a discussion of the history of blood-letting in modern medicine, followed by a second example concerning a prominent conspiracy theory regarding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. A third example concerns several cases of disinformation in the history of espionage, particularly the foreign policies of the United States and the former Soviet Union, with a fourth example discussing the plight of persons with albinism in modern Tanzania. Chapter 4 describes methodological issues of operationalizing concepts of misinformation in the context of contemporary machine learning models of misinformation. The intrinsic value-ladenness of models, pluralistic content of misinformation, and dynamically updating relationship between citizens' and social scientists' concepts of misinformation, jointly suggest that both the construct legitimacy and the construct validity of these models needs to be assessed via more democratic criteria than has previously been recognized. Lastly, chapter 5 argues against the ways in which misinformation has often been described as exhibiting a dynamics analogous to contagious disease epidemics. Prominent epidemiological and inoculation theories of misinformation are discussed illustrating how idiosyncratic features of the social construction of misinformation violate the analogy with contagious diseases resulting in comparative loss of predictive and explanatory power.
Optical Studies of Topological Magnetic Materials
Keywords: Magnetism
Magneto-optical effects
Skyrmions
Topological materials
Ultrafast dynamics

In this thesis, we discuss our optical studies of magnetic materials with known or proposed topological features. The control and detection of spin states is an important area of study within condensed matter physics, with many potential applications in future device design. Materials with both magnetic order and interesting topology present new opportunities for this field via the possibility of hosting topologically non-trivial spin states. The itinerant ferromagnet SrRuO3 has been proposed to host a topological spin texture called a skyrmion due to observations of a bump feature in the Hall resistivity. By carefully studying the magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE), supported by measurements of the Hall resistivity and magnetization and theoretical calculations, we show that such bump features could be explained by a complicated dependence of the Kerr angle on the magnetization, and do not require the presence of skyrmions. This indicates that such bump features cannot be relied upon as valid evidence for skyrmion formation. In our final two studies, we investigate the novel magnetic topological insulator MnBi2Te4. At room temperature, we observe large oscillations in the time-resolved reflectivity caused by the excitation of breathing-mode interlayer phonons. Our observations were complemented by polarized Raman measurements, which confirm the interlayer phonon origin and additionally reveal the shear-mode interlayer phonon frequencies. By studying these phonons as a function of sample thickness, we determine the interlayer force constants. At low temperature, we measure static MOKE, time-resolved MOKE, and time-resolved reflectivity at a variety of applied external fields. We observe ultrafast demagnetization signals which can also serve as an effective probe of the magnetic order, revealing discrepancies between the predicted and observed transitions to ferromagnetic order. When applying an in-plane field, we also observe coherent magnon oscillations in the time-resolved MOKE and reflectivity signals which are strongly layer- and field-dependent. As the first comprehensive overview of ultrafast dynamics in MnBi2Te4, these results are a key step towards further explorationof this exciting new material.
The Role of Treatment-Seeking Stigma on Treatment Engagement and Outcome
Keywords: Stigma

Mental Health treatment-seeking stigma (TSS) is a significant barrier to accessing mental health services prolonging clients’ distress (Breslau et al., 2008; Livingston & Boyd, 2010). Clients continue to express concerns about stigma even after they have entered therapy (Owen et al., 2013), yet little is known about the impact of TSS once clients have begun treatment. Using archival data from a study on the efficacy of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and process experiential-emotion-focused therapy (PE-EFT) for depression, this study sought to elucidate the relationship between TSS, client engagement in therapy and treatment outcome. The findings provided support that TSS remains a barrier during the course of treatment. Higher TSS predicted less change in treatment outcomes from pre- to post-therapy. The relationship between TSS and treatment outcome was not mediated by client engagement as assessed by clients’ depth of experiencing, but it was completely mediated by the working alliance. Additionally, TSS declined over the course of treatment and the decline was predicted by therapists’ empathy. The findings suggested that TSS continues to be an issue even after clients have entered the therapy room highlighting the importance of ongoing research examining TSS and its impact during treatment.
Exploring Perspective-taking in Peer Assessment
Keywords: Peer Assessment
Peer Feedback
Perspective-taking

For students to learn how to evaluate the quality of their own work, they need to be able to make sense of different sources of feedback. Peer assessment provides a useful opportunity for students to develop these feedback strategies through learning from the production and reception of peer feedback. One powerful way that students learn through peer assessment is to gain an appreciation of different peer perspectives. This experimental study uses multiple methods to investigate how perspective-taking affects peer assessment judgement and peer scoring. As past research suggests that similar experiences influence the ease of perspective-taking, similar past answering experiences of peer assessors are operationalized to examine perspective-taking in this study. Participants were randomly assigned to two experimental groups; each group answered a different question. Participants then used a rubric to rate four peer answers, two from the question they had answered, and two from the other group’s question. While peer scoring, a think-aloud interview and a reflection interview was conducted. Quantitative findings showed that there were no statistically significant differences in peer assessment scores between experimental groups. However, there were some descriptive differences between experimental groups on peer scoring patterns. Groups with similar past answering experience showed more central tendency in their peer scoring. Qualitative findings showed that perspective-taking during peer assessment was happening in several ways. Peer assessors were considering peer perspectives (other information), as well as their own perspectives (self-information). The reflection interviews revealed that similar past experience enhanced an appreciation for different perspectives. The quantitative and qualitative results were integrated in two ways. The integration of think-aloud interviews with peer assessment scores suggests that peer scoring patterns, whether lenient or severe, showed similar forms of perspective-taking, and that perspective-taking could be used to frame both positive appraisals and negative appraisals of peer assessment judgements. The integration of the reflection interviews with the correspondence analyses showed that the central tendency in peer scoring was influenced by both an appreciation of newer perspectives and a stricter appraisal of peer work after self-comparisons were made. The theoretical contributions and pedagogical considerations for peer assessment design are discussed.
Imperial Debt and the Global Economic Imagination in British and Anglophone Indian Romantic Literature, 1780–1835
Keywords: Byron
Credit
Debt
Don Juan
Imperialism
Romanticism

Introducing The New Imperial Histories Reader (2010), Stephen Howe locates one of the “great interpretive schisms” defining current scholarship on India’s colonial history between “histories of capitalism” and “histories of colonialism.” Amidst recent global financial crises, that chasm continues to impede our attempts to grapple with the legacies of colonialism by way of several fields, from new imperial and economic histories to critical finance studies. Seeking to bridge that gap, my dissertation turns to literary studies and, in particular, late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century literature, to examine stories told about money, debt, and their increasingly global circulation in an age of economic empire. In so doing, I reveal how authors between imperial Britain and colonial India began to imagine the movements and relationships of a nascent global economy, where debt features centrally as an agent of cultural and commercial exchange and as an aspect of imperial power. Drawing on approaches from new imperial history, new economic history, and critical finance studies, I first read these visions of global indebtedness in eighteenth-century “object narratives” before moving on to sentimental fictions of empire, including the anonymously published The Disinterested Nabob (1787) and Phebe Gibbes’ Hartly House, Calcutta (1789). Next, I turn to Romantic poetry, reading works by Robert Southey and Lord Byron along with Henry Derozio’s Don Juanics (1825–26) and Sir Charles D’Oyly’s Tom Raw, the Griffin (1828). These works distinguish themselves from standard accounts of debt as a personal, social, or national phenomenon by featuring debt and its circulation as part of the narrative of imperial expansion. Together, these works offer contemporary visions of indebtedness as a condition of the modern, global experience under capitalism. By studying texts that conceive of debt globally, my dissertation makes explicit the historical and literary connections that join histories of capitalism and colonialism to our present indebted state; the globalization of debt to the projection of imperial power; and the British imperial imagination to early conceptions of an emerging global economy in Romantic literature of and about early British India.
Reading Creativity and Meritocracy in Korea’s Education Policy Debate Through Bourdieu’s Field, Habitus, and Interest
Keywords: Bourdieu
creativity discourse
education policy
habitus
interest
Korean education

In this dissertation, I examine the explosion of the notion of “creativity” in Korean education policy reform discourse of the last three decades, providing a close reading of interview narratives from public-school teachers who were navigating the changes these reforms ushered in. Between November 2017 to May 2018, I conducted in-depth interviews with 20 public school teachers in Korea, focusing on how they understood “creativity” and what they did to adapt to the current context where the education reform is administered by the local and central government. Using a combination of Foucault’s understanding of governmentality to describe the policy discourse, and Bourdieu’s concepts of game, habitus, and interest to interpret my interviews, I show how teachers situated in different locations in the “educational field” struggle to implement evolving policies as they simultaneously interpret the major shifts in Korean society that serve as the backdrop for their classroom work.These policy reforms should be understood in light of the creativity discourse that is circulating globally, rather than a problem that is specific to Korea or an agenda of a particular political group. Comparing the public discourse with the interview narratives of the teachers, I analyze the critiques of the reformed policy using Bourdieu’s notion that the social field is characterized by shifting relationships among the valuation of the forms of capital associated with different “fields,” here the cultural field and the economic field. In comparing the discourses and practices of two competing sets of “rules” of struggle for rewards within the education field, I argue that the game of exams rewarded academic achievement mediated by features of students’ habitus, but that the game of competencies rewards students who come from a specific habitus more instantly in each moment of performance than in the game of exams. Engaging with Bourdieu’s notion of disinterested interest, I argue that the social movement to bring change in the field of education plays the role of an agent who possesses the habitus to recognize the value of the field, and thus, is especially invested in the game, and ends up unwittingly reproducing its structure.
Large-Scale Seismic Soil-Structure Interaction Simulation of Civil Infrastructures
Keywords: Civil Infrastructures
Finite Element Model
Seismic Simulation
Site-City Interaction
Soil-Structure Interaction
Supercomputer

Developing detailed finite element models considering site terrain, accurate soil profile, structural details, and soil-structure interaction (SSI) is crucial for designing earthquake-resilient civil infrastructures. However, practical projects often overlook these factors due to their complexity and high computational demand. Therefore, four frameworks were created to address these challenges, thus allowing for the creation of large-scale infrastructure models with high fidelity.The soil-foundation-bridge interaction framework provides a practical tool for modelling complex soil-bridge systems. It incorporates borehole log data, simulates various foundation types, represents accurate embankment and abutment geometries, and reduces computational resources. The framework accurately modelled the Meloland Road Overpass bridge, captured inelastic soil-bridge responses, and matched measured acceleration time histories. The site-city interaction (SCI) framework overcomes challenges in modelling site-city models by accounting for site terrain and soil lithology from boreholes and buildings' arrangement and geometry. A pilot study of a city block in downtown Toronto revealed that buildings reduced the free-field surface ground motion by 15%. The study emphasized the importance of considering the actual geometry of buildings for accurate structural responses. An extensive parametric study further illustrated the SCI effect on the response of the site and city under various conditions. Accurately replicating the seismic response of critical components in large-scale numerical models requires component- and system-level decomposition techniques due to limitations in analyzing these models with a single tool. The integrated site-city interaction framework integrates a detailed target building model with a macro-scale site-city model using system-level decomposition. Dynamic analysis is conducted on a supercomputer for the large-scale site-city model, while the target building model is analyzed on a desktop computer. A pilot study investigating the effect of SCI on a residential city block showed minimal impact on the site and dynamic response of buildings when the target building was incorporated into the model. The soil-tunnel interaction framework employs component-level decomposition through multi-platform simulation to accurately capture the complex response of soil and tunnel systems. The framework successfully replicated the failure of the Daikai tunnel during the 1995 Kobe earthquake, highlighting the significance of capturing shear-related failure mechanisms of the center column on the tunnel failure.
“If They Don’t Offer You a Seat at The Table Bring a Folding Chair”: Schooling To Produce Equitable Outcomes For Black Students in Ontario Schools
Keywords: Achievement
Black Students
Delphi Study
Policy implementation
Politics
Poverty

The persistence of inequitable schooling outcomes for Black students in Ontario is unacceptable. Literature codes this student achievement disparity as the achievement gap, a race binary comparison. This research uses inequitable schooling outcomes instead shifting the burden for schooling outcomes to the schooling production systems and structures. Black Feminist Thought (BFT) and Critical Race Theory in Education (CRT) inform the theoretical and conceptual frameworks. The Delphi Technique is the method of the research. Its panel is comprised of six Black youth aged 18-24 who attended K-12 schools in Ontario. The composition of this panel challenges the status quo regarding who carries expertise. This research also supports the notion that achievement based on meritocracy is a flawed concept as it excludes from the matrix of the production systems and structures of schooling outcomes major elements such as race, gender, wealth, and health. Recommendations from the Delphi panel concerning change include making the Ontario curriculum inclusive, replacing academic streaming with a non-linear K-12 process in which students progress through school based on interest and readiness, prioritizing student belonging, rethinking and replacing the current regimen of discipline and punishment practices with student centered conflict-resolution approach, and funding schools for full inclusion. The panel also re-imagines notions of discipline and punishment suggesting the engagement of a collaborative learning approach.