VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Democratic enfranchisement beyond citizenship: the all-affected principle in theory and practice
Keywords: democratic inclusion
all affected interests
inclusion of noncitizens
democratic theory
all-affected principle
democratic boundary problem
political participation
criminal disenfranchisement
economic participation

This is a collection of four papers about the All-Affected Principle (AAP): the view that every person whose morally weighty interests are affected by a democratic decision has the right to participate in that decision.
The first paper (“Narrow Possibilism about Democratic Enfranchisement”) examines how we should distribute democratic participation rights: a plausible version of AAP must avoid treating unlike cases alike, which would be procedurally unfair. The solution is to distribute participation rights proportionately to the risk that a person’s interests will be affected. AAP thus implies an account of political equality that requires adherence to the ‘one person—one vote’ model only if interests are indeed equally affected.
The second paper (“Economic Participation Rights and the AAP”) argues that AAP supporters have paid insufficient attention to economic participation rights. The exercise of such rights raises unique worries about democratic accountability, which is why their exercise is constrained by a number of duties.
The third paper (“What AAP Is, and How (Not) to Fight It”) explores how AAP fares in light of possible objections from desirability and feasibility. Unlike crude versions of AAP, a plausibly restricted version of AAP cannot be dismissed as easily as many AAP sceptics may have thought. My reflections here are useful for AAP supporters and sceptics alike: this paper helps clarify what kind of objection can cast serious doubt on AAP.
The fourth paper (“Criminal Disenfranchisement, Political Wrongdoing, and Affected Interests”) asks: is AAP compatible with criminal disenfranchisement? AAP, when endorsed in combination with a plausible theory of punishment, is compatible with disenfranchising a narrow set of criminal wrongdoers only: those guilty of ‘political wrongdoing’, which is wrong primarily because it undermines democratic procedures and institutions for private gain. The upshot is that current blanket policies of criminal disenfranchisement are incompatible with AAP.
Soft law, hard stakes? State commitment to non-binding international instruments and the case of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Keywords: United Nation Declarations
Soft Law
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Public international law
UNDRIP

Soft law is a common feature of international governance, occupying a grey zone between the realms of politics and law. The multifaceted concept can refer to vague provisions or norms generally, but is most useful when defined as international instruments adopted in a non-binding form. Whilst the advantages and appeal of soft law have been widely studied, with its effects explored in both International Relations (IR) and International Law (IL) scholarship, states’ behaviour on commitment to soft law per se has remained underexplored. It is often assumed that its non-binding status upon adoption makes commitment to soft law a relatively inconsequential endeavor, at least in comparison to hard law. In this thesis, incorporating insights from public international law into rationalist IR approaches, I argue that soft law instruments can have important effects over time and bring substantial costs for states to bear. This is particularly the case for soft law instruments ‘hardening’ through domestic law, treaties or customary international law, increasing the sovereignty and implementation costs attached to commitment. I further argue that those potential costs of soft law are taken into account by states when making decisions on commitment. Depending on the importance and likelihood of the costs foreseen, states can craft their commitment to mitigate these costs or block them from arising. Empirical evidence for the place of the costs of soft law in states’ decision-making on commitment is offered through an in-depth case study of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, with a focus on the opposition it faced upon adoption – an unusual occurrence for a UN declaration in the field of human rights. Recognizing the potential costs of soft law and their impact on state commitment helps to bridge theory and practice regarding the creation of non-binding instruments and sheds light on challenges raised by the use of soft law by states and non-state actors at the frontiers of international law-making.
Where to turn?: A case study of Czech student and local advisor experiences of writing personal statements for undergraduate Anglophone admissions
Keywords: genre
second language writing
personal statements
second language writing feedack
English for academic purposes
Czech Republic

At the intersection of language learning and international student mobility, the personal statement (PS) in United States and United Kingdom university undergraduate admissions is often an English as a foreign language (EFL) learner’s first exposure to the use of English for academic purposes. This case study was inspired by an EFL secondary school student’s emotional experience confronting this challenge in the semi-peripheral context of the Czech Republic and designed around the hypotheses that this problem occurred because of a lack of familiarity with the PS genre in Czech- and EFL-writing instruction, a lack of PS information and resources, and unstructured PS feedback.
In adopting a pragmatist stance, the study design aggregated practitioner voices to interrogate these hypotheses, as sources of the PS genre as a problem, and uncover solutions through research questions that probed (1) the student’s and three local Czech advisors’ experiences; (2) the input and feedback available from these local advisors and two Anglophone university gatekeepers; and (3) existing best practices. Semi-structured interviews, informed by narrative inquiry, served to elevate the six participants’ voices and incorporate contextual factors based on sociocultural theory and academic literacies. This study uniquely contributes to PS genre research in its juxtaposition of student, advisor, and gatekeeper voices, selected theoretical lenses, and attention to the Czech educational context and undergraduate admissions level.
The narrative analysis findings confirm that the PS was problematic because of conflicts between aspects of the student’s Czech background and six identified features of the PS genre. The construction of knowledge networks and comparison of feedback provision demonstrate that input and feedback informed by genre expertise are not equally available in the Czech EFL context to address these conflicts and mediate emotional consequences. Given the pragmatist urgency to find solutions, participants’ pedagogical recommendations span PS input and feedback, and EFL teacher training.
Deep learning for reading and understanding language
Keywords: Deep Learning
Reading Comprehension
Semantic Parsing

This thesis presents novel tasks and deep learning methods for machine reading comprehension and question answering with the goal of achieving natural language understanding.
First, we consider a semantic parsing task where the model understands sentences and translates them into a logical form or instructions. We present a novel semi-supervised sequential autoencoder that considers language as a discrete sequential latent variable and semantic parses as the observations. This model allows us to leverage synthetically generated unpaired logical forms, and thereby alleviate the lack of supervised training data. We show the semi-supervised model outperforms a supervised model when trained with the additional generated data.
Second, reading comprehension requires integrating information and reasoning about events, entities, and their relations across a full document. Question answering is conventionally used to assess reading comprehension ability, in both artificial agents and children learning to read. We propose a new, challenging, supervised reading comprehension task. We gather a large-scale dataset of news stories from the CNN and Daily Mail websites with Cloze-style questions created from the highlights. This dataset allows for the first time training deep learning models for reading comprehension. We also introduce novel attention-based models for this task and present qualitative analysis of the attention mechanism. Finally, following the recent advances in reading comprehension in both models and task design, we further propose a new task for understanding complex narratives, NarrativeQA, consisting of full texts of books and movie scripts. We collect human written questions and answers based on high-level plot summaries. This task is designed to encourage development of models for language understanding; it is designed so that successfully answering their questions requires understanding the underlying narrative rather than relying on shallow pattern matching or salience. We show that although humans solve the tasks easily, standard reading comprehension models struggle on the tasks presented here.
Skill and scepticism: an enquiry concerning the nature and epistemic value of intuitive judgement
Keywords: Epistemology
Intentionality
Metaphysics
Justification
Cognitive science
Psychology
Philosophy of mind
Intuition
Scepticism
Philosophy
Experimental philosophy

This thesis concerns two main questions: What is intuition? And can it be a source of knowledge or justification? In addressing these questions, it advances several ongoing philosophical debates, and does so in two main ways: firstly, by formulating a general account of the nature of intuitive judgement that establishes common ground amongst the often disparate views of scholars working on intuition (or intuitions) in psychology, linguistics, philosophy and various other disciplines; and, secondly, by developing a new epistemological position that combines scepticism about the evidential value of intuition with a new account of philosophical skill.
The general account of the nature of intuitive judgement mainly consists in drawing a distinction between intuitive judgement and intuitive appearance which is analogous to a distinction that can be drawn between perceptual judgement and perceptual appearance. It is argued that a common type of paradox entails the distinction for the non-perceptual case; it is then demonstrated how various related notions, such as intuitive belief, intuitive thinking and intuition as a cognitive faculty, can be derived from the notion of intuitive judgement.
The epistemological account receives additional support from a new theory regarding the objects of intuition, according to which the analogy between intuition and perception holds specifically for what is sometimes called 'aspect perception': it is argued that some intuitive appearances are partially constituted by an appearance of meaning and that, consequently, the analysis of intuitive judgement must distinguish between two types of object, an intentional object (typically, a thought) and a causal one (typically, an expression of thought). It is further argued that the focus on evidential value that has been prevalent in the philosophical literature is too restrictive. By contrast with the prevalent view, it is demonstrated that intuition plays a significant role in human thinking, including in philosophical and scientific enquiry, independently of whether intuition is of great or only of minimal evidential value.
Changing the conversation: An exploration into the impact of structured feedback and consultation in the English classroom
Keywords: MLT
English classroom
MLT2015

Identity as a learner in the classroom is a field that needs negotiating. As a teacher one must remember that the learners of any given class bring with them their own identities, pedagogies and experiences of learning. Thus it is worthwhile, as a researcher, thinking about the dynamics of the classroom and the need for both learners and teachers to negotiate the environment and educational climate we foster as a school.
All learners and teachers must mediate identities in the classroom in order to be effective learners. These identities have been defined by curriculum demands, targets, schools and the continual cycle of testing, assessment and reporting that we place upon students to see if they are, according to external parameters, characterised as effective learners
The question is; how do learners negotiate these identities successfully and to what extent can they really feel they have some sense of control or say within the context of the classroom?
From my perspective, in order to solve such questions, one must strive to create a conducive learning environment and foster a love of learning, hence, it is of the utmost importance; to consider how we as teachers create an inclusive classroom which promotes self-efficacy and self-reflection. The paradigm? A classroom where one is not just concerned with the whole but the individual and the relationship between these two is the ideal; a classroom that develops learners to be self-regulating, empowered and in control of their learning.
What impact do pedagogies that encourage students to take ownership of their own learning have on self-esteem and attainment?
Keywords: MLT
MLT2015

This research and development project expands on research conducted at a comprehensive school in South West London over the last two years. Its aim is to explore the link between self-esteem and attainment, particularly considering whether there is a link between pedagogies that offer students more control in the classroom and their levels of self-esteem and academic attainment. My previous research had highlighted the fact that students in lower sets felt that they were not a high priority for the school and as a result, they felt that their efforts and achievements did not matter as much as some of their peers. Participants were selected using Key Stage 4 prior achievement data and their responses to Rosenberg’s Self Esteem test (1965). Three students were selected to act as ‘teachers’ in a whole-class setting or as ‘experts’ in group work, taking responsibility for their learning and the instruction of others. In addition, the class was permitted to select their own groups for small-group tasks, allowing them to decide whether they worked with their friends or other classmates to complete specific tasks. Self-esteem tests were then re-administered at the end of the action research phase as well as an academic assessment to measure progress. The action research revealed that in general, the self-esteem scores of the ‘teachers’ did improve, and along with the levels of some of their classmates. Academic results also improved but with much greater success than self-esteem levels, as all students showed progress when re-assessed at the end of the test phase. Again, ‘teachers’ showed a similar rate of progress to their classmates which suggested that while they had been empowered to a greater degree by being placed in positions of authority, they had not been unduly advantaged by this process. Students preferred student-led lessons and expert sessions to self-selected groups which some felt offered them the chance to socialise rather than learn. However, data collected did suggest that these sessions were successful and created a collaborative learning environment that was not present before the action research had taken place.
Life has value, but non-existence does not
Keywords: Population
Value
Ethics
Death

Epicurus argued that death is not bad for the one who dies, because death is annihilation of the experiencing subject and we need a subject of badness for anything to be bad. Epicurus' argument is widely thought to lead to indifference about death, as well as indifference about creating new life, and thus is mostly rejected.
In his essay “Death and the Value of Life,” McMahan offered an alternative framing of the Epicurean position on death. He called this the “Epicurean Reconciliation Strategy” (ERS). The ERS entails that non-existence is not intrinsically good or bad, and non-existence is not comparatively better or worse than existence, but that existence can be non-comparatively bad or non-comparatively good. This non-comparative value provides axiological reasons to create and extend good lives, and to avoid creating and avoid extending bad lives.
In this thesis, I will defend the premises that underlie the ERS, before defending the ERS more directly. I will look at implications that the ERS has on the value of creating and ending lives, and defend it from objections.
Improving simulation training in orthopaedics
Keywords: Orthopaedics
Arthroscopy
Motion analysis
Simulation
Learning curve
Feedback

The way surgical trainees acquire technical skills is changing in modern surgical training programmes: simulation is proposed as a key part of those changes. Arthroscopy is a surgical technique that is increasing in both incidence and technical complexity; where simulation is becoming common, but evidence is limited. Real-world performance improvements can be measured following simulation training in other fields, but equivalent measures of intra-operative performance are inadequate. Thus, although surgical simulation is popular and improves simulated performance, there is little objective evidence that it improves intra-operative performance.
The original contribution of this thesis is to objectively demonstrate the transfer of simulation training into improved intra-operative technical skills. To achieve this, a systematic literature review investigated the quantitative metrics currently used to measure arthroscopic performance, identifying wireless motion analysis as a potential method to assess performance intra-operatively. Motion analysis is a recognised objective method to measure surgical activity which correlates with surgical experience, so wireless motion analysis was validated against a wired motion analysis method commonly used in simulation but not feasible for intra-operative use. Wireless motion analysis metrics were further validated with a simulated arthroscopy list: this environment allowed deliberate practice of arthroscopic sub-skills with proximate feedback for independent practice.
This simulated arthroscopy list with wireless motion analysis was used in two randomised studies: the penultimate study of this thesis investigated the impact of simulated practice on the arthroscopic learning curve and showed that performance improved rapidly with independent practice but was not modified by feedback, while the final study investigated additional simulation practice during early surgical training, and objectively demonstrated that additional simulation training improved intra-operative performance compared to traditional training alone.
This thesis is the first to objectively show that simulation affects intra-operative behaviour. It sets the groundwork for further investigations into efficient, cost-effective simulation and the impact of simulation training on patient outcomes.
Schizophrenic justice: exploring ‘justice for victims’ at the International Criminal Court (ICC)
Keywords: Transitional Justice
International Criminal Court
Kenya
Restorative Justice
Uganda
Victims
International Criminal Justice

This thesis examines how the promise and institutionalization of ‘justice for victims’ has shaped the ICC’s justice vision and identity. Drawing on interviews with 90 practitioners in The Hague, Kenya and Uganda, it undertakes a sociological and institutional analysis of how ‘justice for victims’ has evolved in the Court’s first two decades through the definitions and redefinitions, pushes and pulls, strategies and miscalculations of the Court’s diverse actors both in The Hague and in the field. It argues that the introduction of ‘justice for victims’ has led to a rift within the Court between those who embrace a narrow understanding of justice as ‘fair trials’ and those who see the ICC as an opening for broader justice processes.
These rifts and gaps are reinforced by the Court’s actors in the field such as victims’ lawyers and intermediaries who sometimes assume political advocacy roles beyond what the Court’s judges envisaged or follow their parochial interests on the ground. While the ICC’s judges have increasingly curtailed victim participation and reparation in the court room, the Court’s practices on the ground reflect an uneasy fusion of legal justice, development, local and national politics with a proliferation of new justice concepts including ‘transformative justice’ and ‘gender justice’. So far, these justice contestations have not chipped away, much less undermined, the Court’s legitimacy. Rather, the Court has thrived on its justice contradictions; its failure to commit to any particular justice vision while loosely relating to all possible visions, has made the Court impervious to critique. But the thesis will also show that ‘justice for victims’ at the ICC is schizophrenic: it is inherently unstable and its contradictory dynamics may at some point rip the concept apart - and with it the Court’s legitimacy.
Against indexicality: photography as a formation of thought
Keywords: poiesis
indexicality
photography
phenomenology

Guided by the question of what does photography bring into being, ‘Against Indexicality’ is a proposition to rethink the foundation of the philosophy of photography – to rethink the supposed relation of truth between the photograph and the world. Taking Indexicality as a messy and convoluted conceptual field comprised of the notions of pointing, stillness, and fragmentation, this study works to untangle the three from each other, separately challenging each individual notion. In analysing each of the three through their conceptualisation by prominent thinkers, including Charles S. Peirce, Susan Sontag, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, Rosalind Krauss, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes, and examining them against and through examples of photographic images, this study points to the imprecisions, insufficiencies, and incompatibilities of Indexicality in relation to the photographic image and form. Undoing Indexicality as a field, this study resists Indexicality as a paradigm, proposing a new theoretical framework for photography: rather than looking at photographic images as truth bearers that can evidence the photographed, it proposes to look at photographic images as formations that form a thought out of the photographed. In that, this study works to remedy the Indexicality fever, or compulsion, which it identifies as the root cause of theoretical mess within the philosophy of photography. By evincing that Indexicality is a wrong, albeit necessary, solution to a problem that is to do with identifying the relation of the photograph to the world, it not only lifts photography out of a Procrustean bed in which it was never comfortable, but also allows for a new solution to develop. This solution is the theory of photo-poiesis: a move beyond the materiality and away from the referentiality of photography towards its being in the world and the thought that it forms and brings-forth – towards thinking.