VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The social construction of domestic space in the Brezhnev era
Keywords: doing gender
discourse analysis
second shift
welfare state
Soviet history
gender studies
family roles
social policy

This thesis examines the historical grounds and constitutive elements of the Soviet public discourse on women’s roles in the 1960s-1980s, and how this discourse was reflected and realised in private, or family, communication. Taking as a starting point discussions on the decrease in the birth rate and the availability of leisure time for women, I analyse the insights of newly produced knowledge: how social sciences participated in the construction of public discourse, to what extent policymakers engaged with social sciences research, and what the impact was of new knowledge in communication between the media and a wider, largely female, audience.
I argue that Soviet social sciences, although they acknowledged the global trends that had brought about changes in the family throughout the world, remained faithful to Marxism-Leninism and biological determinism. This fact limited their analysis of the social and economic outcomes of urbanisation, as well as of the ‘second shift,’ the combination of paid jobs and unpaid homemaking that shaped married women’s lives. At the same time, their studies on time expenditure contributed to public awareness of this ‘second shift.’ Demographic research directed government on towards legislation on maternity leave, improved working conditions for women, as well as improved services, such as crèches, canteens, or laundries. This state patronage, however, was juxtaposed with propaganda promoting pro-natalist policies and articulating the increasing social demand for a ‘good wife,’ who would prioritise her family over socially active roles.
The thesis argues that Soviet discourse on domestic space supported and at the same time devalued the concepts it was based on. This contributed to the contradictory role of the woman in the family. She was responsible for receiving and adopting the state discursive directives for all family members, and while doing so, she manifested her own agency, taking personal elements, family circumstances, and historical experience into account.
Investigating DNA replication perturbance induced by CRISPR-Cas9 variants
Keywords: Replication perturbance at Cas9/Cas9n induced SSBs/DSBs
Cas9d
Replication perturbance at catalytically dead Cas9
as a R-loop associated DNA-binding protein barrier
CRISPR-Cas9

Single-Stranded DNA breaks (SSBs) represent one of the most abundant DNA lesions occurring in the cells of living organisms. If encountered by the DNA replication machinery, SSBs can be converted into double-stranded DNA breaks (DSBs). Homologous recombination (HR) pathways are deployed to repair these DSBs and initiate replication restart. However, HR-mediated replication restart, whilst helping to ensure that DNA replication is completed prior to cell division, is a potential cause of genome instability due to the possibility of recombination between ectopic homologous sequences, and the compromised stability and fidelity of the restarted replication fork. In this study, I have established a site- and strand-specific nicking system using CRISPR-Cas9 nicking variants (Cas9n) to investigate the formation and repair of replication associated DSBs in fission yeast. I discovered that SSBs induced by Cas9n in the leading/lagging strand template are converted into two-ended DSBs upon concerted replication fork stalling and fork convergence at the SSB. The Cas9n induced replication associated DSBs give arise to high levels of direct repeat recombination through Rad51 mediated Synthesis Dependent Strand Annealing (SDSA)/Sister Chromatid Exchange (SCE) and Rad52 mediated Single Strand Annealing (SSA). I have also shown that Cas9n induced SSBs in both leading and lagging strand templates can trigger Break-Induced Replication (BIR) and associated template switching downstream. Other than SSBs, DNA-protein complexes are also proposed to be major impediments to ongoing DNA replication. Examples of such barriers include the programmed DNA-protein barrier RTS1 and non-programmed DNA-protein barriers such as lacO-LacI. To further investigate what happens when replication forks encounter DNA-protein complexes in fission yeast, I used catalytically dead Cas9 (Cas9d) to create a site-specific barrier. As the Cas9d-DNA complex contains an R-loop, it may mimic other R-loop containing protein complexes such as the transcription machinery and, therefore, provide a model for better understanding of transcription-replication conflicts. I found that Cas9d is only a weak barrier to DNA replication in fission yeast, yet it can strongly induce direct repeat recombination that is primarily driven by Rad51. Intriguingly, this recombination is restricted to ~2kb region adjacent to the gRNA binding site and does not lead to any recombination dependent replication (RDR) associated template switching downstream of the gRNA site. These features distinguish Cas9d from the RTS1 replication fork barrier, which causes a wider spread of recombination activity adjacent to it and high levels of template switching downstream.
Dengue virus evolution and vertical transmission in Wolbachia-infected Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes

Keywords: mosquito
Dengue virus
Wolbachia
evolution

Aedes aegypti is the primary vector of dengue, which causes an estimated 100 million infections annually. Biocontrol methods, specifically using the endosymbiotic bacterium Wolbachia for population replacement of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes and population suppression, have recently emerged as novel strategies for dengue vector control. However, the evolutionary adaptation of DENV under Wolbachia pressure within Ae. aegypti could potentially compromise the antiviral properties of this bacterium, thereby affecting the long-term efficacy of this approach in dengue prevention. In addition, the influence of Wolbachia on the vertical transmission of DENV in wild-type Aedes aegypti mosquitoes remains unexplored.
In Chapter 3, I developed a robust whole-genome sequencing assay designed to recover DENV genomes. This assay laid the foundation for the evolutionary exploration detailed in Chapter 4, where I detected and investigated the adaptive variant E203K of DENV-wMel within Ae. aegypti. I have shown the fitness trade-off of this variant in the absence of wMel infection in Ae. aegypti and in human cells. In Chapter 5, I demonstrated that vertical DENV transmission in field-reared Ae. aegypti does occur but is rare, and this vertical transmission rate is reduced significantly in the presence of wMel.
Overall, this thesis contributes to understanding the molecular evolution of DENV in Wolbachia-infected Ae.aegypti, and the significant inhibitory effect of Wolbachia on vertical transmission of DENV. These results have addressed some vital questions in the field of dengue biocontrol and provides insights regarding the long-term benefits of Wolbachia- introgression field releases.
Perceptions of marriage, family and work in Nigeria : a study of Lagos market women
Keywords: Lagos
Nigeria
marriage
women merchants
market women
family
merchants
perceptions
markets
work

This study investigates Nigerian women's views and perceptions of marriage, family and work as represented by Lagos market women traders. The analysis centres primarily on a small market which I have called Koso, even though data collected from other market women traders in Lagos are also incorporated into the analysis.
Women's views are compared with that of men in order to discern the extent to which these differ or are in congruence with those of men, on such issues as: changing definitions of marriage, function of bride-wealth (termed by the Yoruba owó ōrí), relationships between co-wives, between a wife and her husband's mother and sisters, between a married woman and her uterine kinsmen, the rights and obligations between husbands and wives, role of sex in marriage, attitudes towards divorce, and the like.
The study concludes that Koso women's models of their lives are heavily influenced by the dominant models of male Yoruba (Nigerian) society. However, certain differences emerge. For instance, the study indicates, among other things, that women's perceptions of the institution of polygyny are at variance with the male dominant models. Thus, while women agree with men that this institution has certain values that are good, this belief is based on conceptions of polygyny that differ markedly from their male counterparts. In the women's view, polygyny is seen as defending their interests in that it reduces the woman's obligations towards her husband and his kinsmen, as well as lessening the senior wives' burdens, thereby allowing them more time in which to concentrate on their trading ventures as well as their children.
Continued in thesis ...
Myeloid cells at the onset of colitis in the context of IRF5 deficiency
Keywords: spatiotemporal pattern
colitis
Mucosal immunology
immune-microbe crosstalk

Innate immune cells are at the frontline of balancing the host response to microbiota and dietary antigens in the intestine. Dysregulation of the intestinal immune system can lead to chronic inflammation like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Emerging evidence supports a regional specialization of immune cells due to different microenvironments along the gastrointestinal tract. Macrophages are known to play a pivotal role in homeostasis and in orchestrating the initiation and maintenance of inflammation. Neutrophils are the first immune cells to be recruited to the site of inflammation and are used as a hallmark of disease in IBD. The tissue microenvironment and the microbiota are two major factors influencing immune cell function in the intestine.
Interferon Regulatory Factor 5 (IRF5) is a transcription factor expressed in myeloid cells, activated during inflammation and mediating the transcription of pro-inflammatory mediators. Recently, its role in murine colitis was uncovered alongside a previously undefined role in controlling neutrophil activation.
In this thesis, we set out to investigate the the spatiotemporal patterns of myeloid cell infiltration over a time course of Helicobacter hepaticus + aIL10R mediated model of murine colitis. We discovered a distinct infiltration of neutrophils in areas of higher inflammation, together with a two-fold monocyte recruitment wave. Recent studies have demonstrated the ability of neutrophils to tailor their functions to mount tissue-specific and transcriptionally regulated inflammatory responses. Despite their central role in the onset of inflammation, modulation of their function and its effect in diseases is understudied. As Irf5-/- mice were completely protected from colitis at peak of inflammation, we aimed to unravel the mechanisms by which immune cells interact and set up the pro- inflammatory microenvironment. By deleting a IRF5 specifically in neutrophils using a novel genomic mouse model, we deciphered the crucial role of neutrophils in mediating monocyte recruitment through lower CCL2 secretion. Our results thus open a new area of investigation as well as lead to novel therapeutic avenues targeting neutrophil activation.
Furthermore, we investigated immune-microbe crosstalk at the onset of Helicobacter hepaticus + aIL10R-mediated colitis, by modulating the microbiome through cohousing. We found a major role of the microbiome in regulating neutrophil function, acting via IRF5. Microbiome sequencing revealed a selection of bacterial species significantly associated with inflammation, warranting further investigation in the exact molecular mechanisms involved. We found higher lipocalin 2 secretion by Irf5-/- neutrophils, which could lead to an altered microbiome, as well as affect the function of other immune cells.
The Brady collection and the mediation of eighteenth-century women's performance in theatrical ephemera
Keywords: epilogues
actresses
women
ephemera
eighteenth century
playbills
mediation
prints
archives
performance
theatre
scrapbooks

This thesis explores the mediation of eighteenth-century women’s dramatic performance in contemporary print both within, and outside of, the theatre. Taking the performance ephemeron as its subject, and the theatrical archive as its setting, it interrogates the presence of eighteenth-century actresses’ performances in specific forms of printing found in one collection. This is the Brady Collection, a large assemblage of theatrical ephemera dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, collected by Francis Bridgford Brady (1890-1981) and held at Christ Church Library, Oxford.
Using a series of case studies of individual print forms to reflect on the mediation of performance, this thesis analyses the interconnected relationship between theatrical celebrity, gender, and print in the period. It adopts an interdisciplinary and self-reflexive methodology to explore the different layers of mediation that pervade theatrical performance, printing, and the writing of theatre histories.
This work opens with an overview of the Brady Collection and its collector as crucial context for the following chapters that interrogate individual forms of theatrical ephemera. Chapter 1 argues that the theatrical playbill, and its typography, played a crucial role in constructing an actress’s career. Chapter 2 considers how an actress’s theatricality is translated into text by the printed epilogue. Chapter 3 turns to theatrical portraiture, arguing that portraits published by John Bell appear to mediate an imagined instance of performance read against an actress’s repertoire. The fourth and final chapter, homing in closely on the Brady Collection, uses a case study of a scrapbook of Sarah Siddons to explicate the mediatory power of the theatrical archive itself. Additional appendices provide limited lists of some of the Brady Collection’s significant contents that are relevant to and can serve as a guide for, fellow researchers interested in eighteenth-century theatrical ephemera and its collection.
Following (big) data in the smart city: control rooms, expertise and obligatory passage points in Santiago's public transport
Keywords: transport
critical data studies
big data
transantiago
smart cities
science and technology studies

Smart cities and big data have been at the forefront of urban discussions and projects over the last decade. Big data has arisen as a critical feature of the smart city to face urban challenges, usually framed by projects and policies promoting a direct relationship whereby more volume, variety, velocity and fine-detailed data will necessarily lead to better-informed decisions and, therefore, to the more effective and efficient government of cities. However, these approaches generally ignore how big data circulates and what it does.
In this dissertation, I offer an alternative to previous formulations of big data in the smart city. Accordingly, I aim to analyse how data circulates in Santiago de Chile's public transport and what it does when it circulates. Drawing on the case of Santiago de Chile's public transport, I describe and analyse the emergent configurations, practices and governing techniques which enable big data to circulate. This creates what I call the data dispositif.
I work with an experimental "following the data" methodology to identify how data circulation problems and their subsequent solutions emerge in Transantiago after more than ten years of implementation. Accordingly, I find that enabling big data circulation requires taking care of three emerging problems: the problem of control room fragmentation, the problem of experts and expertise, and the problem of translation. I argue that these problems are generative of specific solutions, taking the form of policies, indicators, standards, and new skills, which together produce new arrangements that allow data to circulate in ways beyond the initial operational objectives of public transport.
An investigation of virial coefficients of gases
Keywords: virial
investigation
adsorption
gases
coefficients
virial coefficients

The most widely used experimental method for studying the forces between pairs of molecules is the determination of the second compressibility virial coefficient, B, defined by: z = Pvm/RT = 1 + B/Vm + C/V2 + . . .
For non-polar gases at temperatures well removed from the normal boiling point, it is relatively easy to measure values of B with adequate accuracy for assessing the merits of various model intermolecular potential energy functions, However, at temperatures little above the normal boiling point, especially for the more polar gases, adsorption effects can prove troublesome.
The density balance method can, in principle, give Values of the second compressibility virial coefficient free from adsorption errors. In practice, there remain other drawbacks to such an approach, particularly the notorious instability of the density balance zero point, and the need for the molecular weight of the gas to be very precisely known, or at least constant within very small limits. The recent extensive development of vacuum micro- and ultramicro-balances suggests that the difficulty of instability should now be superable. A simple theoretical consideration of the treatment of data from such a balance shows that adsorption effects which are not compensated in the balance design may be corrected for, to a first order, and second virial coefficients obtained which are accurate to about +5 cm3 mole-1.
Continued in thesis ...
Darwinism in global international thought, c.1859–1914
Keywords: Darwinism
international relations
English school
international thought
intellectual history

This thesis reinserts Charles Darwin into the history of international thought and excavates a distinctive idiom of ‘Darwinian internationalism’ inspired by his theory of evolution by natural selection—one widely influential across the globe in the latter half of the long nineteenth century, yet oddly overlooked in existing scholarship.
Part I of the thesis presents a portrait of Darwin as a thinker both created by and concerned with international politics. This is established through an exegesis of his corpus of scientific writings, which were in themselves produced by travel and encounter, and which also engaged with themes of war (transposed into nature as the ‘struggle for existence’) and intersocietal difference (with a focus on what ‘savagery’ reveals about evolution), foregrounded respectively in two major texts: the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man. I argue that we see Darwin caught between a mid-century liberal way of thinking about international politics and a radically new way of thinking latent at the heart of his theory, which others would more fully embrace.
An interlude pivots from Darwin to the Darwinians, where I define the distinctiveness of ‘Darwinian internationalism’ through its four core motifs: evolutionism, national selectionism, organicism, and naturalism.
Part II of the thesis then examines the spread of this idiom in a global reception history. I unpack the ideas of a broad cast of Darwinian internationalists in three ‘contexts of position’ in the late nineteenth century: the core, with a focus on late Victorian Britain; the semi-periphery, with a focus on the Eastern polities (China and Japan) and Latin America; and the periphery, with a focus on South Africa. It is shown how flexible Darwinism proved for articulating a myriad of strategies across the range of positionalities in late nineteenth-century international social space—becoming an accessible ‘weapon of the weak’ as much as of the strong—and how as a way of thinking about international relations it thus cut across the moral-cultural hierarchies of the period.
By ‘bringing Darwinism back in’, an alternative narrative of late nineteenth-century international society is found—one which dislocates the dominant notion of the period as wholly defined by the ‘standard of civilisation’, instead showing how infused the period also was with a competing ‘standard of nature’ which prophesised and produced conditions of holistic, ineliminable existential conflict, and which sowed the seeds of the catastrophes of the short twentieth century.
Oral-cavity platform for monitoring physiological signs during physically demanding activities
Keywords: in-body wearables
athletic performance
intraoral sensing
biosensors
mouthguard
physiological assessment
physiological measurement

The focus of this research is the development of a platform to measure physiological signals in the oral cavity during real-world conditions. Starting from a literature review the current state-of-the-art for oral-cavity sensors was determined. No existing measurement system that could capture all relevant physiological data during physically demanding activities was found. A novel wearable oral-cavity measurement system was proposed to address this.
Respiration and fatigue data was obtained using the oral measurement system with a microphone. Recreational athletes completed physically demanding activities whilst wearing the device. Respiratory metrics derived from the oral system were strongly associated with perceived exertion. However, the data suggested that respiratory signals alone do not fully explain the variance in perceived exertion and additional metrics were needed.
A temperature sensor was added to the oral system, as it is important to monitor body temperature and prevent exertional heat exhaustion. The performance of the temperature sensors was assessed using lab bench and in-vivo tests. The steady-state errors of the oral-temperature measurement were determined to be within the clinical limit, indicating suitable performance of the system under these controlled conditions.
Finally, photoplethysmographic (PPG) sensors were included in the design to measure cardiac signals. The most appropriate sensor placement, light wavelength and signal intensity were explored through in-vivo experiments. The best-performing configuration was determined based on this data. Nonetheless, an additional study was needed to determine the impact of materials and manufacturing processes. A lab-bench investigation explored how the embedding materials affected the PPG’s signal-to-noise ratio, providing further avenues for optimisation of the system.
The findings from each phase of this research were used to design a new oral device for the study of physiological signals during demanding physical activities. The designed device could allow for insights into the performance and health during real-world applications.
Influence of spin-orbit coupling on solid-state NMR parameters
Keywords: magnetic shielding
special relativity
electric field gradient
nuclear magnetic resonance
spin-orbit coupling
computational
density functional theory

Nuclear magnetic resonance is a widely utilised spectroscopic technique for the structural determination of molecules and solids. The development of density functional theory methods have allowed for the computation of many nuclear magnetic resonance parameters, supporting experimental studies. Heavy atoms introduce additional difficulties, that currently, are typically ignored. They require a fully relativistic treatment to include the effects of spin-orbit coupling, which ultimately dictates the magnetic response of nearby light nuclei.
In this thesis, we develop the theory to accommodate the prediction of nuclear magnetic resonance properties in the solid-state, with the inclusion of spin-orbit coupling. We develop the planewave pseudopotential method, in its application to density functional theory, to account for relativistic effects. This involves the extension of the projector augmented-wave method for two-component spinor wavefunctions, and its gauge-including counterpart. This allows for the investigation of the electric field gradient and magnetic shielding parameters of inorganic compounds and molecular crystals.