VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
More than just a Fine Drink: Processes of Cultural Translation, Taste Formation and Idealized Consumption in the Wine World
Keywords: Consumption
Culture
Taste
Wine

My dissertation, presented as three interrelated studies prepared as standalone articles, uses the cultural practice of wine to examine how ideas, tastes and consumption practices travel and are adopted in new places. Through field observations, interviews and discourse analysis in the established Châteauneuf-du-Pape and the emerging Niagara, I begin by examining how the concept of terroir is expressed and used across a French and a Canadian regional cultural context in Chapter 3. Through a comparative analysis of terroir, a complex French cultural term used to identify and classify artisanal foods and drinks in relation to a specific place, this first study clarifies the factors that drive consistency and change in the translation of a cultural idea like terroir, advancing our understanding of what translates and what must be adapted when a cultural idea travels in a globalized context. In Chapters 4 and 5, I further deepen this questioning by examining how wine consumers and producers in the emerging, non-traditionally wine producing Ontario wine market consider the development of a taste for wine, a cultural good that is often viewed as complex and intimidating. In Chapter 4, I consider how consumers frame their interest in wine to understand how cultural practices and tastes “take”, and become more interesting to cultural consumers. I show that consumers frame their interest in learning about wine in terms of different cognitive, sensory and status pleasures. This chapter builds on emerging research that examines the pleasurable and embodied aspects of cultural practices by investigating how the sensory and cognitive interact to produce engagement with cultural objects and practices like wine appreciation. Chapter 5 examines how wine producers conceptualize the domestic market for their product in a context of emerging wine connoisseurship and nascent wine knowledge. I analyse how producers construct the “good wine consumer” through three key dimensions: 1) spending, 2) tasting, and 3) knowledge. This study contributes to better scholarly understanding of producers’ role in creating conventions of good taste, and of the contours of taste hierarchies in times of shifting cultural standards and cultural democratization trends, alongside continued patterns of distinction.
Tragic Moral Conflict and Endangered Species Recovery
Keywords: animal ethics
endangered species
Immanuel Kant
moral conflict
utilitarianism
W.D. Ross

Given the state of the art of conservation, and given the rapidity with which species are disappearing as the result of human economic activities, members of the societies that encourage and benefit from these activities, and that undertake the species recovery process, often face a terrible choice: either 1) intensively manage species populations and ecological communities by killing, harming, making vulnerable to harm, or controlling the most important aspects of the lives of many individual animals; or 2) allow entire species to go extinct. I call situations in which people face this kind of choice recovery predicaments. Such predicaments seem to be tragic moral conflicts, or situations in which whatever one does—even the right act that is right on the whole—will be seriously wrong. This dissertation explores whether working from within Kant’s deontology, Ross’s deontology, or utilitarianism excuses environmental ethics for neglecting the problem of tragic moral conflict, or for failing to recognize recovery predicaments as tragic moral conflicts. It asks three questions of each theory. Does it have what it takes to admit that the right act can be wrong in some way? If so, does it have what it takes to admit that the right act can be seriously wrong? And if it does, can it interpret recovery predicaments as situations in which whatever one does will be tragically wrong? The dissertation argues that, for each theory, the answer to the first two questions is yes. None of the theories excuses us for ignoring the problem of tragic moral conflict. For both Ross’s and Kant’s deontologies, the answer to the third question is also yes, but for utilitarianism, the answer is indeterminate. This means that from within utilitarianism, we cannot say whether a recovery predicament is a tragic moral conflict, but from within the other two theories we can say that it is.
Transforming Climate Resilience: A Case Study of Myanmar Migrants in Phuket, Thailand
Keywords: Climate resilience
Migration
Myanmar
Phuket
Structural violence
Thailand

Climate resilience is a system’s ability to absorb climate change disturbances and reorganize in a way that the system retains the same function and identity. The concept of climate resilience is widely criticized for its neutral and post-political approach to planning for climate change. Resilience practitioners typically conduct vulnerability assessments to identify how institutions, systems, and actors are at risk from climate change. However, because practitioners focus on climate exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacities of essential infrastructure systems, such as settlement areas, water supply networks, and food systems, practitioners tend to overlook the inherently political nature of vulnerability and the broader social structures that create or reinforce it, especially for marginalized people. My research on the lives of 80 Myanmar migrants in Phuket, Thailand serves as a case study for the importance of taking a directly political approach to planning for climate resilience. In this thesis, I describe the vulnerabilities of Myanmar migrants in Phuket as embodied structural violence, which refers to the economic, political, and cultural dynamics that systematically cause human suffering and constrain human agency to meet personal needs and goals. Resilience practitioners in Phuket can apply a structural violence lens, particularly during the vulnerability assessment process, to identify and address social structures that create vulnerabilities, including elitism, nepotism, fragmentation, and discrimination in Thailand. Unfortunately, people who are underrepresented in policymaking and planning process in Thailand, including Myanmar migrants, are often the ones to bear the disproportionate costs of climate change. Thus, resilience practitioners must advocate for an explicitly political, inclusive, and participatory approach; for example, one that incorporates the experiences and knowledge of all inhabitants in Phuket. Through my research, I also add to the discourse of planning for migrant communities, especially at a time when renowned international institutions, such as the United Nations, are highlighting significant planning and policymaking challenges linked to climate change-induced migration.
An Investigation of Sociodemographic and Functional Influences on Academic Outcomes in a Canadian University and in a Cross-National Comparison
Keywords: Canada
Immigrant students
International students
Malaysia
Postsecondary academic outcomes
Predictors

Postsecondary institutions worldwide are concerned about rising rates of student underperformance and drop-out. Research suggests that several sociodemographic, psychosocial and academic functioning factors may be contributory. The extent of the problem and the type of contributors also appear to vary by world region and citizenship status. The main objectives of the current research were to evaluate the relative impact of key contributing factors (derived from published literature) on academic outcomes among local-born, immigrant and international students in a Canadian university, and in a cross-national comparison between Canadian and Malaysian university students. A series of three inter-related investigations were conducted at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). Statistical methods included linear and logistic regression analyses to identify contributors to academic outcomes. The first study evaluated retrospective data from UTSC administrative records that contained only a few demographic variables. It found that non-Canadian citizenship status was associated with negative academic outcomes, and that gender and first language were influential across student groups. The second study was a prospective evaluation at UTSC using a large set of variables drawn from the literature. It found that several psychosocial variables were associated with academic failure across student groups, but citizenship, gender and first language had no impact. The third study was a prospective, cross-national comparison between UTSC and UKM using a similar set of variables. It found that while local-born Canadians were mostly affected by psychosocial determinants, local-born Malaysians were more influenced by factors related to academic functioning. Taken together, the results suggest that irrespective of students’ backgrounds, psychosocial and academic functioning factors are more relevant to their academic outcomes than sociodemographic factors. Further, students’ life experiences, i.e. family and societal environments, major life events, and adjustments to postsecondary life, appear to be key influences on their academic outcomes, as reflected by these factors. The findings are also a good fit with several Western-developed theories of student development that had been little evaluated in non-Western world regions or with non-local-born students previously. The results may also have significant implications for institutional retention strategies to enhance student well-being and academic success.
Flexibility in the Federal System? Institutional Innovation and Indigenous Nations’ Self-Determination in the US and Canadian Far North
Keywords: Federalism
Indigenous Politics
Multinational Federalism
Policy Change
Public Policy

Since the early 1970s, Indigenous nations in northern Canada and the United States have secured a heightened level of governing autonomy through the creation of new institutions of self- and shared-rule. While much attention has been devoted to the political factors that allowed for development of these institutions, and their operation within the federal governance framework, this thesis argues that these new institutions have important political implications that have, as yet, been largely unexplored. The settlement of modern land claim agreements, beginning in the 1970s, was a response by the United States and Canadian federal governments to Indigenous demands for self-determination. The decision to settle modern land claim agreements marked a move away from the dominant policy paradigm of assimilation, and into a new paradigm that recognized Indigenous goals for economic self-determination, and which is increasingly responsive to Indigenous demands for political self-determination through self-government. This ideational shift enabled the development of new sites of Indigenous authority within the federal political system. By building a comparative analysis of the political dynamics across four cases—the Northwest Arctic and North Slope regions in Alaska, and the Inuvialuit and Gwich’in regions in the Northwest Territories—this thesis argues that early decisions by the state have had significant, and reinforcing, effects on the development of the institutional spaces for Indigenous minority nations. How these institutions were designed and implemented has had important implications for the degree to which they reinforce or reconstitute conceptions of national or cultural identity. It also has important implications for the degree to which these new institutions are successful at reducing conflicts between the minority nation and the state. By developing a novel framework of minority national conflict, I am able to illustrate how these decisions influence contemporary political dynamics.
Molecular Mechanisms of Self-Recognition by CD1d- and CD1c-Restricted Alpha/Beta T Cell Receptors
Keywords: CD1
self-recognition
T cell receptor

Adoptive T cell immunotherapy has demonstrated clinically relevant efficacy in treating malignant and infectious diseases. However, most of these therapies have focused on enhancing, or generating de novo, effector functions of conventional T cells recognizing human leukocyte antigen (HLA) molecules. Given the heterogeneity of HLA alleles, mismatched patients are ineligible for current HLA-restricted adoptive T cell therapies. The family of CD1 molecules are monomorphic homologs of HLA class I, and their restricted T cells possess unique T cell receptor (TCR) specificities against an entirely different class of antigens. CD1 molecules present lipid antigens and offer a new front of targets for HLA-unrestricted T cell therapies. This thesis first examined the differences between the recognition of human and mouse CD1d-lipid complexes by murine invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cell receptors. Murine HLA-restricted TCRs have been safely used in the clinic, but the cross-species reactivity of mouse iNKT TCRs has not been studied in detail. Next, how residues encoded at a particular complementarity-determining region (CDR)3β position of human iNKT TCRs impacted the overall structure and function of the TCR was investigated. Encoding serine or arginine at the third position of CDR3β influenced self-lipid recognition, possibly by an indirect mechanism via modulating the TCRα chain conformation. Finally, the molecular identity of TCRs restricted by other members of the CD1 family is largely unknown compared to CD1d-restricted iNKT TCRs. In the last chapter, a novel molecular motif, TRBV4-1, associated with autoreactivity of human CD1c-restricted TCRs was identified. Together, these data advance our understanding of CD1-self-lipid-TCR interactions, potentially facilitating the development of immunotherapies targeting CD1 in malignancies and autoimmunity.
Temporal-controlled Release of Bioactive Molecules for Dentin-pulp Engineering Using Nano-systems
Keywords: Bioactive molecules
Chitosan nanoparticles
Odontogenic differentiation
Regenerative endodontics
Stem cells from apical papilla
Temporal-controlled release

The two available current treatment options for dental pulp infection of a tooth are either tooth extraction or root canal treatment. The root canal treatment leads to permanent loss in pulp vitality and compromise in the mechanical integrity of tooth. A potential method to restore pulp vitality is by stimulating the endogenous stem cells from apical papilla (SCAP) of tooth, so as to participate in tissue regeneration or repair. Bioactive molecules (BM) play a key role in tissue regeneration, although their application in tissue engineering presents different challenges. Some of the major challenges of using exogenous BM are their short half-life and their requirement in a spatiotemporal controlled manner over a prolonged period during regeneration or repair. This study was aimed to (1) synthesize and characterize nano-systems capable of releasing mono/dual BM in a temporal-controlled manner over a minimum period of two weeks and (2) assess the ability of these nano-systems to enhance migration, adherence, proliferation and odontogenic differentiation of SCAP in root canal dentin. Two bioactive polymers, namely chitosan and sodium alginate were used owing to their inherent physicochemical and biological properties. Bovine serum albumin (BSA) and dexamethasone (Dex) were discretely loaded on chitosan nanoparticles (CSnp) by two methods, namely encapsulation and adsorption. BSA encapsulated CSnp (BSA-CSnpI) showed release of BSA for four weeks and significantly enhanced alkaline phosphatase activity of SCAP (p
Securities Enforcement: An evaluation of recent legislative changes
Keywords: Business Law
Canada
Capital Market
Enforcement
Law
Securities

Typically approached in terms of efficiency, accountability, deterrence, and the best interests of the public, recent research has attempted to determine whether public or private enforcement provides more investor protection and effective market discipline. Instead of pitting public and private enforcement against each other and suggesting that one offers a superior approach, this research work determines that each serves essential and complementary roles in protecting the interests of the investing public. Although a comparative approach between Canadian capital markets and those in the United States will be used, the principal objective is to analyze how the current financial context and recent legislative changes have influenced the Canadian securities landscape. Are recent developments in Canadian securities regulation (public enforcement) truly effective?
Persistent ergativity: Agreement and splits in Tsimshianic
Keywords: agreement
ergativity
features
gitksan
syntax
tsimshianic

This thesis presents a morphosyntactic analysis of agreement patterns in the Tsimshianic language family (primarily Gitksan, with some focus on Coast Tsimshian). These ergative languages demonstrate several distinct splits in the distribution of agreement, conditioned by differences in clause type, nominal type, and person. Despite the presence of such agreement splits, the ergative pattern of agreement is largely unaffected: I refer to this property as persistent ergativity, as opposed to split ergativity. A pattern of particular interest is that of agreement switch (Kalin 2014; Kalin and van Urk 2015), or pivoting ergativity (Davis to appear). In this type of split, the morphological paradigm used to mark ergative in one context is used to mark absolutive in another context, with the overall ergative/absolutive alignment of the system remaining unchanged. At the heart of the proposed analysis is the use of feature relativization to generate several different arrays of potential agreement targets. I propose that agreement in Tsimshianic can be modeled with an ergative agreement probe on v which consistently agrees with the transitive subject, plus a higher agreement probe with several options for how it may be relativized, and consequently several potential agreement distributions: absolutive, nominative, or ergative. In particular, I analyze agreement switch as the result of the high probe agreeing directly with the lower ergative probe. This is accomplished by relativizing the higher agreement probe to uninterpretable phi-features, found exclusively on the lower phi-agreement probe. I capitalize on several familiar featural distinctions (including the interpretable/uninterpretable distinction), and apply them in new ways through feature relativization to generate typologically unusual splits without affecting the ergative pattern of v-agreement. The proposed analysis is novel among accounts of Tsimshianic in its approach to the factor conditioning the clause type split, and in its connection between agreement and A'-patterns. It is furthermore comprehensive, in explicitly accounting for agreement and word order patterns across both the Interior and Coast branches of the family. The analysis of the complex agreement patterns presented is of interest to theories of ergativity, as well as theories on the mechanics of features and agreement systems.
Selling What No One Can Buy
Keywords: Bedford v Canada
legal process theory
legal reasoning
Lon Fuller
Parliament
prostitution and sex work

Through legal process theory, this thesis examines Parliament’s deliberations leading up to the enactment of Bill C-36, which was introduced to govern the exchange of sexual services for consideration after the Supreme Court of Canada’s landmark decision in Bedford v Canada. Grounded in legislative principles and functions, Part I’s “objective-perceptual” approach to legislative intent conceives of Parliament as an institution comprised of rational, reason-giving agents who must have a reasoned apprehension to legislate. Part II evaluates the evidence, argument, and participation at Committee Hearings to demonstrate that Parliament’s democratic, legal, and institutional legitimacy deteriorated from misapprehending polls, social science, and testimony. After analyzing Bill C-36’s Preamble and legislative objectives at Part III’s outset, the connection between the form and content of law is illustrated by arguing that s 213(1.1) of the Criminal Code has an invalid purpose, which in turn shows the inextricable link between rationality and legitimacy.
From Michael Brown To Yosef Salamsa: The Racialization of Ethiopian Jews in Israeli Law
Keywords: Criminal Law
Critical Race Theory
Diversity
Ethnicity Studies
Law and Religion
Multiculturalism

This thesis presents a comparative analysis of the racialization of Israelis of Ethiopian descent in the Israeli justice system. Located at the intersection of criminal law doctrine and Critical Race Theory, the thesis analyses Israeli search and seizure cases by comparing them to Fourth Amendment law cases in the U.S. I argue that the lack of a lexicon with which to express harms caused to racialized minorities in the Israeli context stems, in part, from a reciprocal relationship between the Israeli national and legal cultures. I will show how aspects of this relationship can be used to reform the legal system. As the first extensive legal research on racial disadvantage faced by Ethiopian Israelis in the criminal justice system, this thesis seeks to add to the conversation regarding the lived experience of vulnerable communities of colour.
The Role of the Judge in Wrongful Convictions: R v Mullins-Johnson
Keywords: expert evidence
judicial education
role of trial judge
wrongful conviction

This thesis examines the role of the judgeicial education in preventing wrongful convictions. It focuses on the case of R v Mullins-Johnson. William Mullins-Johnson was accused of killing his niece by mechanical asphyxiation during an episode of sexual assault. He was convicted of first degree murder. After twelve years in jail, he was acquitted by the Ontario Court of Appeal. Fresh expert evidence revealed that the trial Crown expert opinions were unreliable, and that the pathology evidence was inconclusive of murder. This thesis explores what went wrong at trial, by comparing trial expert testimony to appeal expert testimony. It examines the role of a judge in a trial involving expert evidence, and in particular, whether thjudicial interventioneducation could have avoided thein avoiding wrongful conviction in this cases. It also reviews some of the issues that arise in the common law adversarial system when judges specially trained to handle scientific expert evidence are prohibited from applying their knowledge at trial.