VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Beyond famines: wartime state, society, and politicization of food in colonial India, 1939 – 1945
Keywords: communalism
Second World War
South Asia
food
famine-relief
India
rationing
communal politics
history
famine

This thesis explores the origin of one of the most engrossing concerns of the post-colonial Indian state, that is, its extensive, intricate, and expensive feeding arrangements for the civilians. It tracks the colonial origin of the post-colonial welfare state, of which state-management of food is one of the most publicized manifestations.
This thesis examines the intervention of the late colonial British state in food procurement and distribution in India during the Second World War, and various forms of such intervention, such as the introduction of food rationing and food austerity laws. It argues that the war necessitated actions on the part of the colonial state to secure food supplies to a vastly expanded British Indian Army, to the foreign Allied troops stationed in India, and to the workers employed in war-industries.
The thesis brings forth the constitutional and political predicaments that deprived the colonial central government’s food administration of success. It further reveals how the bitter bargaining about food imports into India between the Government of India and the War Cabinet in Britain hampered the state efforts to tackle the food crisis.
By discussing the religious and cultural codes vis-à-vis food consumption that influenced government food policies, this thesis has situated food in the historiography of consumption in colonial India. In addition to adopting a political approach to study food, it has also applied sociological treatment, particularly while dealing with how the wartime scarcity, and consequent austerity laws, forced people to accept novel consumption cultures. It also contributes to the historiography of ‘everyday state’. Through its wartime intervention in everyday food affairs, the colonial state that had been distant and abstract in the perception of most common households, suddenly became a reality to be dealt with in everyday life within the domestic site. Thus, the macro state penetrated micro levels of existence. The colonial state now even developed elaborate food surveillance to gather intelligence about violation of food laws.
This thesis unravels the responses of some of the political and religious organizations to state intervention in quotidian food consumption. Following in this vein, through a study of the political use of famine-relief in wartime Bengal, it introduces a new site to the study of communal politics in India, namely, propagation of Hindu communal politics through distribution of food by the Hindu Mahasabha party. Further, it demonstrates how the Muslim League government’s failure to prevent the Great Bengal Famine of 1943-44 was politically used by the Mahasabha to oppose the League’s emerging demand for the creation of Pakistan.
Necessity in international law
Keywords: State Responsibility
Emergency
Necessity

This thesis examines the role of necessity, as a defence to State responsibility, in international law. Necessity provides a State with a defence to the responsibility that would otherwise arise from its breach of an international obligation where the only way that State can safeguard an essential interest from a grave and imminent peril is to breach an obligation owed to a less imperilled State. It is a defence that has generated a considerable body of jurisprudence in recent years and yet it continues to be plagued by a perception that States have abused it in the past and by fears that States will abuse it in the future – 'necessity', declared the German Chancellor on the eve of World War I, 'knows no law'.
This thesis contends that this perception is flawed and these fears are unfounded. The main claim of this thesis is that necessity operates as a safety valve within the law of State responsibility that mediates between the binding quality of international obligations and the harsh consequences that may follow from requiring compliance with those obligations at all costs. This safety valve promotes the reasonable application of international law and it recognises that international law must sometimes bend so that it does not break. The thesis bears out this claim by contending that necessity has a stronger pedigree than is commonly appreciated and that it is solidly grounded in, and its contours are constrained by, customary international law. It charts those contours by first examining the scope of the obligations to which necessity may provide a defence, which includes examining how necessity relates to fields of law that contain their own safety valves regulating emergency situations. It then proceeds to examine the conditions that a State must satisfy in order to establish necessity and it finally examines the consequences of necessity, including for the stability of international law. The thesis concludes that any suggestion that 'necessity knows no law' has no place in international law today.
The lightscape of literary London, 1880-1950
Keywords: Virginia Woolf
British literature
detective fiction
science fiction
spy fiction
modernism
literature and science
Arnold Bennett
gothic fiction

From the first electric lights in London along Pall Mall, and in the Holborn Viaduct in 1878 to the nationalisation of National Grid in 1947, the narrative of the simple ascendency of a new technology over its outdated predecessor is essential to the way we have imagined electric light in London at the end of the nineteenth century. However, as this thesis will demonstrate, the interplay between gas and electric light-two co-existing and competing illuminary technologies-created a particular and peculiar landscape of light, a 'lightscape', setting London apart from its contemporaries throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, this narrative forms the basis of many assertions made in critical discussions of artificial illumination and technology in the late-twentieth century; however, this was not how electric light was understood at the time nor does it capture how electric light both captivated and eluded the imagination of contemporary Londoners.
The influence of the electric light in the representations of London is certainly a literary question, as many of those writing during this period of electrification are particularly attentive to the city's rich and diverse lightscape. Though this has yet to be made explicit in existing scholarship, electric lights are the nexus of several important and ongoing discourses in the study of Victorian, Post-Victorian, Modernist, and twentieth-century literature. This thesis will address how the literary influence of the electric light and its relationship with its illuminary predecessors transcends the widespread electrification of London to engage with an imaginary London, providing not only a connection with our past experiences and conceptions of the city, modernity, and technology but also an understanding of what Frank Mort describes as the 'long cultural reach of the nineteenth century into the post-war period' (218).
Twilight of the pollsters: a social theory of mass opinion in late modernity
Keywords: Sociology
Political theory
Social theory
Louis Althusser
Marxism
Political science
Public opinion
Martin Heidegger
Opinion polls
Pierre Bourdieu

This thesis examines how the occupations people hold, and the social classes in which they are situated, affect the way in which they form and express opinions. At a theoretical level, it unites the 'deep-structure' macroanalysis of social theory with the individualised microanalysis of how subjects form and express opinions in opinion research, reviving an approach that has not been pursued since early-20th-century social research. At a practical level, it responds to several recent and prominent failures of prediction by the opinion polling industry, and asks whether a broader understanding of 'mass opinion' can help avert such failures in future. The thesis argues that opinions are subjects' judgments about their social conditions, based on mental pictures they have of these conditions that combine the values and attitudes they hold with the information they have about their environment. Subjects form opinions based on these pictures via three 'means of thinking'-personality-traits, emotions, and reason-and express them using two kinds of 'means of articulation'-bodily organs and media. The thesis shows how the variety of occupations subjects hold, and the extremity of class differentials between them, introduce substantial plurality into their values and attitudes, the way they acquire information, how they think, and how they articulate themselves. In particular, it highlights the considerable asymmetries between higher- and lower-class subjects regarding: which parts of their social conditions they are experts about, and how far they are influenced by others; whether they think about their conditions more emotionally or with reasoning; and how great a range and quality of opportunities they have to articulate their views. The thesis closes by suggesting that these findings offer opinion researchers and social theorists clear directions for measuring 'mass opinion' in new ways, and potentially emancipating the voices of subjects whose opinions are suppressed in late-modern society.
Influences of cell shape in microbial communities
Keywords: Pattern formation
Morphology
Simulation
Biofilm
Self-organisation

By growing together in dense communities, microorganisms (microbes) have a huge impact on human life. Microbes also come in a wide variety of shapes, but we have yet to understand the importance of these shapes for community biology. How are multi- species communities, such as biofilms and colonies, affected by the morphologies of constituent cells? Which morphologies might these environments select for in turn? To address these questions, we use individual-based modelling to investigate the effects of cell shape on patterning and evolution within microbial communities. We develop a flexible simulation framework, coupling a continuum model of the biofilm chemical environment to a cellular-level description of biofilm growth mechanics. This modelling system allows competitions between different microbial cell shapes to be simulated and studied, in different community contexts.
Our models predict that cell shape can strongly affect spatial structure and patterning within competitive communities. Rod cells perform better at colonising surfaces and the expanding edges of colonies, while round cells are better at dominating the upper surface of a community. Our predictions are supported by experiments using Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria, and demonstrate that particular shapes can confer a selective advantage in communities.
In summary, the work presented in this thesis predicts and examines new mechanisms of self-organisation driven by cell shape, demonstrating a new significance for microbial morphology as a means for cells to succeed in a dense and competitive environment.
The environmental rule of law in India
Keywords: fragmentation
rule of law

This thesis offers a new conceptual framework—the environmental rule of law—to describe weaknesses in the development of Indian environmental law, and uses this description to critique the dominant discourse on environmental institutional reform. A secondary framework—fragmentation is also used to supplement the analysis of Indian environmental law.
Part I develops the conceptual framework of the environmental rule of law by considering the special challenges that the inherent polycentric and interdisciplinary nature of environmental law present for commonly understood rule of law values such as clarity, certainty and consistency. It also relies on Jeremy Waldron’s conception of articulated governance to demonstrate that the rule of law is linked to the principle of separation of powers. This conception lays emphasis on the role of the three institutions of government—the legislature, the executive and the judiciary—in strengthening or weakening the rule of law. To determine institutional contribution to the rule of law, I develop three broad indicators to assess the legal quality of the instruments of each of these institutions of government. These indicators are: a) capacity of statutes to guide executive and judicial behaviour by goal-setting and balancing competing interests; b) the ability of the executive to make flexible yet reasoned decisions grounded in primary legislation; and c) the use of statutory interpretation and consistent standards of judicial review by the courts as they give effect to environmental rights and principles. Through the use of case studies in Part II that span environmental impact assessment, forest conservation, and indigenous rights, I demonstrate that the lack of adherence to these indicators produces a body of environmental law that is fragmented i.e. one characterised by multiple overlapping yet self-contained legal regimes with conflicting provisions and the absence of unifying norms.
In Part III, I use this understanding of fragmentation to critically analyse environmental legal and institutional reform proposals. I show that existing proposals address only the structure, rather than the process of functioning of the institutions of government. The rule of law framework that I develop also has potential for application to other areas of the law.
Monstrous soundscapes: listening to the voice of the monster in Greek epic, lyric, and tragedy
Keywords: Homer

Although mythological monsters have rarely been examined in any collective and comprehensive manner, they constitute an important cosmic presence in archaic and classical Greek poetry. This thesis brings together insights from the scholarly areas of 'monster studies' and the 'sensory turn' in order to offer readings of the sounds made by monsters. I argue that the figure of the monster in Greek poetry, although it has positive attributes, does not have a fixed definition or position within the cosmos. Instead of using definitions of monstrosity to think about the role and status of Greek monsters, this thesis demonstrates that by listening to the sounds of the monster's voice, it is possible to chart its position in the cosmos. Monsters with incomprehensible, cacophonous, or dangerous voices pose greater threats to cosmic order; those whose voices are semiotic and anthropomorphic typically pose less serious threats.
The thesis explores the shifting depictions of monsters according to genre and author. In Chapter 1, 'Hesiod's Theogony: The Role of Monstrosity in the Cosmos', I consider Hesiod’s genealogies of monsters that circulate and threaten in the nonhuman realm, while the universe is still undergoing processes of organisation. Chapter 2, 'Homer's Odyssey: Mingling with Monsters', discusses the monster whom Odysseus encounters and even imitates in order to survive his exchanges with them. In Chapter 3, 'Monsters in Greek Lyric Poetry: Voices of Defeat', I examine Stesichorus’ Geryoneis and the presence of Centaurs, Typhon, and Gorgons in Pindar’s Pythian 1, 2, 3, and 12. In lyric, we find that these monsters are typically presented in terms of the monster’s experience of defeat at the hands of a hero or a god. This discussion is followed by two chapters that explore the presence of the monster in Greek tragedy, entitled ‘Centripetal Monsters in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and Oresteia' and 'Centrifugal Monsters in Greek Tragedy: Euripides and Sophocles.' Here, I argue that in tragedy the monster, or the abstractly 'monstrous', is located within the figure of the human being and within the polis. The coda, 'Monstrous Mimesis and the Power of Sound', considers not only monstrous voices, but monstrous music, examining the mythology surrounding the aulos and looking at the sonic developments generated by the New Musicians.
New contradictions: the activism of middle-class youth in Delhi
Keywords: Youth activism
Delhi
middle class

This thesis examines forms of activism among middle-class youth in the context of neoliberal urban change in Delhi. The research is set within four interdisciplinary bodies of literature reflecting the experiences of young activists: middle-class identity, everyday politics and new modalities of social action, intersectionality, and active citizenship. What emerges from each of these bodies is a view to the contradictory politics of the young middle-class. Focusing on new forms of social action at the community level, this thesis uses an expansive definition of both activism and middle-class to encompass a range of activities from social enterprise, to technology-enabled mobilization around social issues, to political campaigning among India’s expanding middle-class. The research is framed within young peoples' period of waiting: for full adulthood, marriage, and importantly, full-time employment.
Grounded in qualitative fieldwork, this thesis concentrates on young people, aged 18 to 30, in the middle-class with putatively distinct activist practices. Young people in Delhi are engaged in various activities that loosely correspond to different ideals of social justice or social work. I illustrate the innate differences in these ideals, their motivations, and methods. I analyze the limitations of different activist projects and the extent to which the social action is constructive—in the sense of enhancing the capabilities of marginalized sections of society and promoting inclusivity. The young people at the core of this project contend to be anti-politics, yet they are quite political. Additionally, the interlocutors show contempt for the state and the commercial interests of the market but deploy and rely on strategies from both.
My examination gives prominence to the improvised nature of young people's lives and the decisions they make at key life stages. Activation of the self, and actualization for the researched youth, manifests in entrepreneurial activity, community work short of politics, and the negotiation of class, caste, and gender on an everyday basis.
This thesis argues for more scholarly attention to the everyday lives of middle-class youth that can offer insights into this key demographic and connect individual decisions to broader social and political change.
Rethinking materialism: a question of judgements and enactments of power
Keywords: French materialist
Consumerism
power
etymology
social stratifications
Enlightenment philosophers
Foucauldian discourse analysis
American history
Materialism

This thesis traces the etymology of 'materialism' using a Foucauldian discourse analysis to bring to the fore the word’s use as discursive mode of power. Through examining over 5000 texts, spanning across 400 years, I trace a line from the origins of materialism in philosophical thought of the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras to its uptake in American rhetoric and integration into the consumer behaviour literature.
This approach leads to a reconceptualization of materialism. Commonly viewed in consumer studies as a measurable value, trait, or motive inherent in the consumer, I situate materialism as external to the consumer. The word’s history, especially in consumer studies, demonstrates that it embodies moral condemnations.
I find that accusations of materialism rise in discourses during moments of intense social dislocations. It is wielded by social groups as part of a play for status. In this analysis, concepts of power as per Foucault and social distinctions as per Bourdieu, are used to explain the motives residing behind the use of the word. These motives, which reflect sociocultural dynamics and geo-political agendas, manifest in the meanings attributed to 'materialism', and the directionality of the allegation.
Thus I argue that 'materialism', at its essence, is an epithet used to advance or demobilise a set of interests. This is what I term, delegitimizing discourse—words used to debase other social groups. Studying 'materialism' as a case in point, I note that groups use delegitimizing discourse either an assimilative measure—rhetoric geared towards indoctrination—or as a defensive mechanism—rhetoric used to debase threatening elements and behaviours.
It is hoped that this new perspective will encourage academics to be rethink their approach to studying materialism, or in the least, to be aware of what is being measured, and what moral judgements and interests they are perpetuating through their continued studies.
Stated ambitions: the politics of developmentalism and dissent in Tanzania
Keywords: natural resource management
Tanzania
Development
Media

This thesis analyzes the political effects enveloped in developmental state theory and practice. It focuses on events that took place in Tanzania between December 2012 and June 2013 in the context of transforming development practice, coupled with high levels of suppression of speech in Tanzania. It examines cases from the Mtwara and Dar es Salaam regions, targeting aspects of sustainable development planning through natural resource management, micro-level features of state repression, and forms of civil disobedience. These issues coalesce at the important intersection of politics and development. With this in mind, I seek to answer the question: To what extent do local discourses affect the composition of developmental states, and how is this enmeshed in a calculation of political effect?
Structure and mode of action of the TolA-TolB complex from Pseudomonas aeruginosa
Keywords: NMR, Protein-Protein Interaction, Tol-Pal, TolA, TolB

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) across the cell envelope of Gram-negative bacteria are critical for mediating signal transduction pathways that underpin cellular homeostasis. The Ton and Tol Pal systems are two conserved, ancestrally related protein networks that are also required for bacterial pathogenesis. Both Ton and Tol-Pal traverse the periplasm to effect different functions at the outer membrane (OM). Tol-Pal is composed of a homologous complex of three inner membrane proteins, TolQ-TolR-TolA (linked to proton motive force) and two additional periplasmic proteins TolB and Pal. The physiological role of the Tol-Pal system is to stabilise the OM, however the mechanism involved is unknown. TolA is however known to form a crucial protein-protein interaction via its C-terminus with the disordered N-terminus of TolB.
Prior to this thesis, determination of the molecular features underlying a protein-protein complex between TolA and an endogenous binding partner TolB had never been accomplished. In this work, I describe the first structure comprising the TolA-TolB complex from Gram negative bacteria. The structure of this complex was determined from Pseudomonas aeruginosa by solution NMR spectroscopy. I determined the interaction between P. aeruginosa TolA and a TolB N terminal peptide to be relatively weak using fluorescence anisotropy. I found that TolB interacts with TolA through an analogous mechanism to that seen in TonB-dependent transporters. Based on these studies and bioinformatics analyses, I hypothesize that the evolutionary resilience of the Tol-Pal system to external pressures is contingent on the preservation of the TolA-TolB interface. Structure-based mutations within the TolA-TolB complex were also evaluated for their effect on in vivo function of the Tol-Pal complex and impact on complex formation in vitro. Taken together, the results demonstrate that protein networks which transduce energy to the OM through PMF-dependent systems in bacterial cells appear to follow a common β-strand augmentation mechanism.