VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Language teachers' professional learning: in search of impact
Keywords: professional learning
Modern (foreign) languages
language teacher education
student perception survey
language teacher evaluation
second language acquisition
CPD

There is a growing evidence base suggesting that the effectiveness of individual teachers is one of the most significant factors in predicting valued pupil outcomes. This has led to much debate about how in-service teachers might continue to develop and improve their practice.
This study takes a single subject area (Modern Foreign Languages - MFL) as the context in which to explore teachers’ Professional Learning (PL) needs, experiences and motivations from July 2016 to July 2018. During Year 1, data tracking the PL priorities, experiences, well-being and self-efficacy of 57 MFL teachers clustered in 14 state school languages departments were collected via four iterations of an online questionnaire. Year 8 Students of French in 13 of the 14 schools (n=1370) completed a student perception questionnaire to gauge their classroom experiences. Questionnaire data were followed up with in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Heads of Department in six of the schools. Two languages departments were subsequently identified as productive contexts for teacher PL and in-depth case-studies of these departments were conducted in Year 2.
Languages teachers expressed strong interest in accessing PL and they particularly identified the need to develop their preparedness to teach towards new examinations at GCSE and A Level. They also highlighted a need to develop students’ speaking skills and motivation. Over the course of the study, analysis shows very low levels of engagement in PL that shares characteristics with the effective PL practices identified by Cordingley et al. (2015). Very few teachers reported extended engagement in PL activities over the course of multiple sessions. Teachers’ access to PL experiences was shaped by a sharp focus on instrumental organisational aims related to the introduction of new examination specifications and curricula. Although no significant associations were found between teachers’ engagement in PL and pupils’ outcomes at GCSE, a strong correlation was noted between the size of the language department and pupils' value-added outcomes in language GCSEs. The possible underlying reasons for this pattern are discussed.
Some Heads of Department perceived the changing curriculum as an opportunity for development and innovation, whereas others conceptualised the changes as a threat to established ways of working and to colleagues’ wellbeing. Working conditions and the nature of relationships between colleagues within institutions shaped the conditions for PL, with accompanying impacts on individual teachers’ sense of self-efficacy, engagement and intention to remain in the profession. The findings of this study have implications for policy makers, school leaders and Heads of Department wishing to build better conditions for teacher learning.
In search of utopia in post-political Beirut: The pragmatic turn and the decline of radical imaginaries in activist Lebanon
Keywords: Activism
Utopia
Protest
Lebanon
Technocracy
Political imagination
Pragmatism
Resistance
Social Movements
Anthropology
Neoliberalism

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Beirut, Lebanon, this dissertation examines the turn towards a pragmatic and technocratic approach to politics in Lebanese civil society, in the aftermath of the ‘garbage protests’ that gripped the country in 2015. It situates this development within a global political conjuncture characterized by what other scholars have designated an anti-political, or post-political turn amongst activists in disparate contexts. Such activists are seen as focusing increasingly on uncontroversial questions of livability and wellbeing imagined to have the capacity to transcend binaries of Left and Right and, in so doing, instigate change.
This dissertation tells the story of a middle class urban social movement concentrated largely in Beirut, which drew on the technocratic expertise of its adherents to market an alternative vision for the city and wider country. The activists that made up this movement rejected the divisiveness of ‘ideology’ and the messiness of ‘politics’ proper in favor of what they put forward as a neutral discourse of the ‘right to the city’ – a non-contentious approach to socio- political agitation. In addition to making sense of the appeal of this approach to activism, I highlight its limitations.
My research unfolded in the aftermath of a political event that activists saw as charged with potential, yet quickly fizzled out, stranding them in a post-evental moment of ‘dead time’ heavy with the debilitating sense of having yet again failed to facilitate transformative change. I examined the ways in which activists in Lebanon attempted to work their way out of this impasse and towards new moments of rupture in an endeavor to create new processes of political subjectivation.
This dissertation charts ways in which activists in Lebanon attempted to challenge the hopelessness that was assumed to have enabled mass complicity with the status quo. It employs ethnographic methods to discern the ways in which activists in contemporary Lebanon made sense of and worked against what was designated as a prolonged period of ‘stuckedness’. It asks how the experience of routine failure within Lebanon’s post-civil war activist scene transformed contentious politics in the country, examining the decline of once popular radical political imaginaries, and the emergence, in their stead, of a pragmatic approach to politics. In exploring the limitations of this form of activism, I explore the effects that neoliberalism as a governing rationality has had on the political imagination, and on the ability of dissenters to think a more radical socio-political otherwise.
Lexical opposition: an investigation into canonical and peripheral phenomena of antonymy
Keywords: Antonymy
English
(Cognitive) Semantics
Psycholinguistics
German

This thesis presents a multi-method approach to the investigation of lexical opposition, taking into account central as well as peripheral opposites. One of the distinguishing factors of the present research is the investigation of a wide variety of opposite pairs (e.g. converses) alongside the canonical gradable adjectival antonym pairs which have thus far been the focus of most of the research on lexical opposition. Three main questions concerning lexical opposition are addressed from a data-driven perspective. Firstly, the question of which factors determine the antonymic strength of a pair of opposites. Secondly, whether there is a clear distinction between good and bad opposites or whether the internal structure of the category of antonymy can be described in term of prototype theory. Lastly, whether antonymy is a relation between cognitive concepts (Murphy & Andrew 1993) or between the words which encode these concepts (Gross et al. 1989).
This study employs a wide range of methodologies: corpus analysis, judgement tasks, attribute listing and behavioural lexical decision tasks in English and German. This allows for the detection of discrepancies between the results of the separate investigations which provide the starting points for the analyses. The data shows that the existing criteria for ‘good’ opposites influence a pair’s antonymic strength to different degrees. All factors which have previously been put forward with the addition of those which are proposed in this thesis are integrated into a holistic approach based on the theory of cognitive concepts and cognitive models (Lakoff 1987).
The evidence shows strong support for antonymy as a prototype category with antonym pairs distributed along a continuum of antonym canonicity on which each pair’s place is determined by both its antonymic strength (which is influenced by a certain distribution of factors) and its associative strength. The contrastive data provides the strongest evidence for antonymy as a conceptual relation since opposite pairs in both languages exhibit very similar behaviour.
Ideas about Social Rights: Changing Social Assistance in Britain and Ireland, 1985-2015
Keywords: ideas and public policy
Britain
social rights
social assistance
Ireland

This thesis examines the significance of ideas of social rights in shaping social assistance policies for the unemployed and lone parents in Britain and Ireland over the period 1985-2015. Adopting a qualitative, comparative case study approach and based on a combination of elite interviews and primary and secondary data analysis, the study finds that different ideas about social rights account for substantive and otherwise unexplained social assistance policy variation across Britain and Ireland. A blended human rights-positive rights idea was consistently relevant to Irish social policy-making while varying ideas of positive rights and social citizenship rights were associated respectively with periods of Conservative and Labour Party governance in Britain. The thesis shows that cultural legacies and political ideologies were significant in determining the ideas of rights that became salient in each country context, suggesting important three-way interactions between ideas, interests and institutions and lending support to theoretical arguments about the ‘mutual constitution’ both of ideas and interests, and of interests and institutions.
Pathogen evolution and spread in the face of host genetic diversity
Keywords: Host diversity
Novel infection
Pathogen evolution
Monoculture effect
Meta-analysis

Despite the strong forces of genetic drift and directional selection, virtually all natural populations are genetically diverse. Declining within-host population diversity is nevertheless a growing problem, with homogenous populations (known as ‘monocultures’) predicted to suffer the most from pathogen (and/or parasite, herein used interchangeably where the same principles apply to both) infection given the increasing likelihood of uniform susceptibility. The literature has shown conclusively that genetically diverse populations stand a better chance of limiting infection by natural pathogens (otherwise known as the monoculture effect) or pathogens for which genetic variation for resistance exists in the host population. However, the impacts of within- and between-host population genetic relatedness in the face of novel pathogens has not been tested. In this thesis, I combined meta-analytic and experimental evolution approaches to explore the impacts of host population genetic diversity on pathogen spread and evolution. Firstly, I gathered data from a wide range of host-pathogen interactions to test the effects of two levels of host within-population diversity (low and high) on parasite success in a formal meta-analysis. Among other findings, this study revealed broad-spectrum support for the observation that low diversity increases the chance of parasite success across systems. Secondly, I used experimental evolution and follow-on genomics analysis to track the evolutionary dynamics of Staphylococcus aureus as a novel infection in an array of natural, susceptible Caenorhabditis elegans isolates. I found that the pathogen evolved similar virulence in closely-related hosts, with infection load evolving along an independent trajectory. I also found that S. aureus performs better (i.e., more virulent and higher infection loads) in a diverse population of distantly-related hosts compared to a population of closely-related hosts. Thirdly, I investigated whether S. aureus maintained its generalist infection ability throughout evolution in the novel C. elegans populations. I discovered that despite evolving in monocultures of particular host isolates, evolved S. aureus was able to infect sympatric and novel hosts equally. Moreover, pathogen performance between these host types was not negatively related to the genetic distance between them. As a whole, this body of work confirms that the host genetic diversity shapes the ecology and evolution of natural and novel pathogens across the tree of life. It additionally extends on knowledge of the monoculture effect to the wider concern of novel infections, and thereby improves our understanding of how host population genetic composition might be used to control the spread and evolution of new emerging infectious diseases.
Confidence in protein interaction networks
Keywords: protein interaction networks
protein interactions
network analysis

Protein interaction networks are a commonly used tool in bioinformatics, e.g. for the purposes of gene function prediction or drug target identification. They are built from often heterogeneous and error-prone protein-protein interaction data. In this thesis we study the effects of data uncertainty on the structure of protein interaction networks and on downstream network analysis.
Some databases provide confidence scores for protein-protein interactions, and networks are built from the data after a minimum score cut-off, or threshold, is applied. We study the effects of threshold choice on network structure. We argue that robust, biologically-relevant network analysis results should be replicated across networks obtained at different thresholds, and develop a methodology for quantifying this robustness in the context of node metrics. Our results indicate that the same node metrics are robust across a range of protein interaction networks, but are not necessarily robust in synthetic networks.
We further investigate uncertain networks as a possible approach to incorporating confidence scores explicitly into network analysis. Uncertain networks are a way of conceptualising the difference between the "true" network of biologically-relevant protein-protein interactions and the observed scored data. We show that any inference on the structure of the "true" network is strongly influenced by assumptions made about the dependence - or lack thereof - between edges in the scored network.
Finally, we focus on networks constructed from gene co-expression data. Gene co-expression can be measured in a number of different ways. Moreover, when networks are constructed, different thresholds can be applied to the co-expression values. It is not always clear which network construction method should be preferred. We develop a software package, COGENT, designed to aid network construction choice without the need for external validation data.
Structured membranes for biomedical and tissue engineering applications
Keywords: Tissue engineering
3D-printed membranes
3D-Printing
Membranes

Although biological/biomedical membranes may look like two-dimensional (2D) assemblies, depending on their functions, they may have detailed and complex configurations in their 3rd dimension. In such cases, three-dimensional (3D)-printing—as a process of layer-by-layer deposition of materials—can provide an effective and unique methodology for manufacturing of such membranes.
In this regard, 3D-printing of biocompatible hydrogels needed for fabrication of cell-free soft membranes with proper surgical handling is challenging, due to the rheological characteristics of hydrogels. This dissertation introduces and examines a newly developed generic hydrogel ink that can address such difficulties due to its several properties, including:
1) The ink is compatible with most biomedical applications in terms of the biomaterial composition and provides the appropriate cell attachment for different cell types.
2) It is easily printable without rheological complexities.
3) It is relatively inexpensive, making it appropriate for clinical use by different patients.
Using our developed printing protocol, we employed this ink for 3D-printing of structured soft thin and thick membranes for different biomedical purposes. More specifically, three applications were examined. The first application involves a structured 3D-printed membrane with the design criteria suitable for guided tissue regeneration (GTR). Its bio-stability, mechanical strength, surgical handling and in vitro biocompatibility were fully characterized and successfully evaluated for GTR application.
Reconstruction of ocular surface/conjunctival defects, using the 3D-printed membrane produced by the generic ink, is the second application that was examined. Both in vitro and in vivo (rabbit model) studies were performed to evaluate the function of the 3D-printed membrane in comparison to the amniotic membrane, which is a conventional membrane used in reconstruction of ocular surface/conjunctival defects. The use of the 3D-printed membrane indicates some advantages, including predictable degradation pattern, higher goblet cell density on the healed epithelium, reduced scar tissue formation and less inflammation.
Cartilage regeneration is the third application considered for the membranes printed by this ink. For this purpose, a new knee plug was developed, and a 3D-printed membrane was fabricated with the specific design criteria for assembling in the plug. The physical analyses and the in vitro examinations confirm the suitability of the fabricated membrane for cartilage regeneration.
Finally, the limitations and capabilities of the produced ink for future works are discussed at the end of the thesis.
Tradition in the theological thought of Basil of Caesarea: context and connotations
Keywords: Patristics
Eustathius of Sebaste
Early Christianity
Eunomius
Basil of Caesarea
Tradition
Ancient Philosophy
Theology
Late Antiquity

My thesis is an analysis of Basil’s appeals to tradition in his theological works, with a focus on Against Eunomius and, most importantly, On the Holy Spirit. The work begins with an analysis of Against Eunomius, focusing primarily on the context of the work, the influences on Basil’s thought and arguments in the treatise, and Basil’s attempt to refute Eunomius’ appeal to tradition. I have then traced ideas of tradition from Against Eunomius to On the Holy Spirit, and established the context of and purpose for the publication of the latter in 375 against Eustathius of Sebaste. Establishing the necessity of tradition for Basil’s argument in On the Holy Spirit, I have broken down the jargon and reconstructed the exact nature of the “non-scriptural tradition” to which he appeals. Following this, I have analysed the context to consider whether this idea of non-scriptural tradition is an innovation, or a development of both Christian and Hellenistic influence (though of course the two are indelibly linked in the fourth-century Christian tradition). The latter appears to be the case. The final task has been establishing how this idea of tradition fits into Basil’s theological epistemology. I argue, based on the tradition’s apparent equality in establishing knowledge of divine things with Scripture, that Basil takes a holistic view of the Christian experience, in that all aspects of it have hidden within the (in Basil’s eyes) undeniable truth of God as Trinity. To me, this holistic view is a natural product of his ascetic beliefs.
The scholarship on Basil’s idea of tradition has, since the works of Hanson and De Mendieta in the mid-60s, been scant and cursory, with most generally agreeing with the pronouncements of De Mendieta on the matter. However, though De Mendieta’s work is of significant value, it is very much a product of its time in the discipline of Patrology – the last fifty years have transformed the study of the early church, especially the fourth century. Both this, and the previous focus on On the Holy Spirit alone – often in far too small a space to explore the particularities of Basil’s language, context and influences, and the theological implications of non-scriptural tradition – mean that, in my view, a new and more focussed study is very much required.
Structural basis of centrosome assembly in flies
Keywords: centrosome
Cnn
PCM
mitosis
Calmodulin
Plk1
Centrosomin
centriole

Centrosomes are the main microtubule-organising centres in many animal cells. They consist of a pair of centrioles surrounded by a dense mass of protein known as the pericentriolar material. As the cell enters mitosis, this pericentriolar material expands dramatically in a process called centrosome maturation. In flies, the protein Centrosomin (Cnn) assembles into a network that acts as a scaffold for the recruitment of the hundreds of other proteins making up a mature centrosome. Cnn network formation is known to depend on phosphorylation of a central region within Cnn. However, it is unclear how Cnn assembles into a network and how this process is controlled.
In this thesis it is shown that Cnn network formation in vitro depends on an interaction between the conserved C-terminus of Cnn and the phospho-regulated central region. The crystal structure of part of this central region is solved, revealing that it forms a dimer of α-helical hairpins that are sterically incompatible with binding of the Cnn C-terminus. The structure is therefore proposed to constitute an “inactive” state. Furthermore, the structure suggests a mechanism wherein phosphorylation acts by disrupting the hairpin fold, thereby exposing the Cnn C-terminus binding site and hence allowing formation of an “assembly-competent” state where the Cnn C-terminus is bound. In addition, the calcium-binding protein Calmodulin is shown to crosslink the Cnn C-terminus in crystallo. However, Calmodulin inhibits network assembly of Cnn constructs in solution, possibly by preventing the assembly-competent state from forming a network. Taken together, this thesis draws on structural and functional data to provide important atomic-level insights into the mechanism of mitotic centrosome assembly in flies.
Flexibility in avian migration across scales
Keywords: forecasting
light pollution
global change
bird migration
movement

Migratory birds form a network of organisms that connect the world, serving as indicators of ecosystem health and biodiversity on a hemispheric scale. Unfortunately, avian migrants are threatened by the rapidly increasing pressures of global change. Understanding the capabilities of migratory birds to respond to established and emerging challenges requires knowledge of the complex interactions among individuals, populations, species, and natural and built environments. In this thesis, I surveyed the drivers of bird migration across scales. I focused on the contributions of the innate migratory program, birds’ responses to environmental cues and conditions, and the influence of human activity on migratory behavior. First, I investigated birds’ innate migratory programs. I demonstrated that stonechats (genus Saxicola) possess inherited programs that vary among taxa according to migratory tendency, but also readily interact with environmental factors to influence migratory phenotypes (Chapter 1). Next, I combined field and laboratory studies to show that ongoing responses to climate change in a long-distance migrant, the pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca), involve not only phenotypic plasticity, but microevolutionary change as well (Chapter 2). I then shifted to a wild context and examined the migration of the Eurasian blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla) across its European range, illustrating two different ways that natural selection can act on migratory strategies (Chapter 3). Expanding to a continental perspective, I showed that migratory flexibility is important not only on evolutionary timescales, but also to enable short-term responses to variable environmental conditions during active migratory flights—and that these responses are predictable enough to reliably forecast avian movements (Chapter 4). Finally, I focused on human impacts on migration, showing that artificial light at night can drastically affect migratory journeys (Chapter 5). Human activity can impact not only migrants’ in-flight behaviors, but also their broader ecology (Chapter 6). Overall, this thesis shows that the flexibility we observe in migratory birds stems from a range of sources, innate and external, and that variation in migratory phenotypes may be key to responding to environmental change.