VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Mind the Gap: How Economically Disadvantaged Students Navigate Elite Private Schools in Ontario
Keywords: educational inequality
elite private schools
personal agency
social capital
social class
social mobility

“Mind the gap” is a qualitative study rooted in the sociology of education, dealing with educational inequality in Canada. It asked: what is the experience of working-class students in elite secondary schools, and are the benefits of achieving social mobility worth the costs? In a country whose populace has long seen itself as middle class, but where social inequality is a growing concern and social mobility increasingly rare, the study examined the journey of three working-class students seeking to become upwardly mobile by attending elite private schools in Ontario. The study examined their experiences, and employed a combination of semistructured, in-depth interviews, and follow-up conversations. It also drew on relationships that formed as a result of them, as well as on the researcher’s knowledge of the culture of the schools the students attended. In addition, it drew upon the lived experience of the researcher, who shares similar elements of the participants’ socioeconomic background. The data produced was used to develop literary and visual portraits. The process was collaborative and enabled the participants to become co-creators in the creation of their portraits, which were subject to analyses. More broadly, the study examined the ways in which the participants acquired social capital, and the role this capital played facilitating the acquisition of the Three C’s (credentials, connections, confidence), and personal agency. It explored the ways the participants’ social networks evolved. It revealed that the unconditional support of the participants’ families mediated their experience of habitus clivé, and that elite private schools provided a pathway to become socially mobile. The study affirmed that the benefits of achieving social mobility outweighed the costs, whether they were psychic, social, or financial. It also identified trace elements of class status that endured, and demonstrated that elite schools served as incubators of innovation. It revealed that the policies, practices, and cultures that characterize elite private schools in Ontario are worthy of consideration for policy makers and practitioners, as they seek to assist students to become socially mobile, wherever they may be.
Fighting Feelings: Racial Violence in Everyday Life
Keywords: Canada
multiculturalism
emotion and affect
race
racism
anti-racism
racial neoliberalism
schools
higher education
social justice
queer
feminist

This dissertation explores how women of colour live with and learn about racism. Through interviews, I mine microsites and memories of early racial aggression to examine their enduring effects and the varied meanings and practices that they produce. Integrating insights from feminist, critical race, queer and Foucauldian analytics, I trace understandings of racism formed under pressure from neoliberal interpretations of racial oppression and its attendant remedies. Principally, this study gives an account of racism and its effects and traces the accounts of racism that it is possible for people of colour to give. Women of colour are often caught between feelings and experiences that materialize oppression in their daily lives—and dominant postracial and neoliberal horizons that evacuate collective histories, politics and a public language with which to name racism. In other words, racial injury is privatized. I explore the tensions that they negotiate, of becoming entrepreneurs of the harm and pain that racism deposits in their lives and throwing responsibility for racism back to the people and conditions that produce it. Fighting Feelings: Racial Violence in Everyday Life renders a social, historical and structural account of encounters with racism, the harm that it leaves behind and the divergent orientations to racial politics that it engenders. Attending to women of colour’s everyday lives reveals and challenges the power of standardized accounts of racism that spatially and temporally contain racism to other times, places and people. In harder to find moments, racial and social justice materialize as a possibility and aspiration. I consider the conditions that cultivate it, the openings that it affords and sometimes, how hard it is to hold onto.
Bodies of Anxiety: The Female Nude in Modern Canadian Art, 1913-1945
Keywords: Canada
canadian art
modernism
nude
painting
photography

Bodies of Anxiety: The Female Nude in Modern Canadian Art, 1913-1945 Doctor of Philosophy, 2016 Devon Smither Department of Art, University of Toronto Often censored and much debated, the female nude in Canadian art has held a contentious position since the early twentieth century. In 1927, Canadian artist John W. Russell was driven to return to Paris following public outcry over his nude paintings. In 1931, Bertram Brookerâ s Figures in Landscape was removed from an Ontario Society of Artists exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto and in 1933 Lilias Torrance Newtonâ s painting Nude was deemed too immodest and censored from a Canadian Group of Painters show. The nude garnered moral criticism from conservatives; yet, according to critics and artists, it remained central to the development of modern art in Canada. While the nude in Europe has been the subject of both theoretical and historical studies there exists to date no scholarly study of the nude in Canada. The historic focus within Canadian art history on the landscape painting of the Group of Seven has meant that themes concerning the figure and the nude have largely gone unexamined. This study examines the female nude as an artistic genre in Canada from 1920 to 1940 in an effort to understand how it became the site of moralizing discourse, as well as attending to the reasons for the disenfranchisement of the genre in Canadian art history. It is important to read the nude in modern Canadian art for what it reveals about concerns over gender, class, race, and national identity. I address how masculinity was central to the historic emphasis on the Group of Sevenâ s work, an emphasis that has meant that predominantly urban themes concerning the figure and the nude have been censored and repressed. In my analysis of a selection of artworks by Canadian artists from the interwar period I contend that the nude was a nexus point for the often diverse, and at times incompatible, ways that artists and the public responded to the development of modern art and the conditions of modernity.
Personality, Privacy, and Property: Trans-systemic Perspectives on Self-ownership
Keywords: ownership
personality
personality rights
privacy
property
self-ownership

In this Thesis, I supply a conceptual foundation for an understanding of the “rights of the personality” at civil law and of the “right of privacy” at common law as expressing the fundamental idea of self-ownership. While this is not an uncontroversial proposition, a conceptualisation of personality as an object of property, and of the “rights of the personality” and the “right of privacy” as property rights, yields at least three conceptual and doctrinal advantages: first, it may serve as a legal justification for the recognition that personality should be protected by property rules, and not by mere liability rules; secondly, it may explain why personality rights at civil law and privacy rights at common law should be understood as protecting non-economic as well as economic interests; and thirdly, it may bring coherence to the law governing the status of the human body.
Privatized Censorship – Developing Solutions to the Increasing Role of Platforms in Moderating Global Freedom of Expression
Keywords: Censorship
Digital Rights
Freedom of Expression
Hate Speech
Internet Governance
Online Platforms

This paper addresses the challenges in online content moderation by private sector platforms, proposing an approach rooted in international human rights standards as the only legitimate source for defining the contours of global speech, and the best potential bulwark against platforms being subverted as tools for abusive government censorship. The paper begins by introducing freedom of expression as an international human right, and discussing its applicability to online speech, and the challenges in enhancing freedom of expression protections among online platforms. The paper then discusses the evolution of platforms’ content policies, and the role of global governments and their growing demands for aggressive moderation. The paper introduces a proposed solution, whereby international freedom of expression rules are adapted to create general standards for private sector content moderation structures, which may be interpreted and enhanced through a self-regulatory system. The paper ends by addressing potential challenges in implementing this system.
Free Energy Models for Surfactant-Oil-Water Systems
Keywords: interactions
Microemulsion
oil
solubilization
surfactant
water

This work introduces thermodynamic free energy models to predict and explain the behavior of surfactant-oil-water systems based on molecular and functional group approaches. Using a functional group approach, the Universal Functional Activity Coefficient (UNIFAC) was modified for use with surfactant-oil-water systems. Temperature dependence was provided to the interactions of functional groups known to establish hydrogen bonds. This UNIFAC version predicts the partition coefficient of alkyl and alkyl phenol ethoxylate surfactants in the excess alkane-water phases of middle phase microemulsions, alkane-water systems at equilibrium and bioconcentration factors. The molecular approach consists in estimating the free energy of transferring oil from its continuum liquid phase and surfactants from empty micelles to form oil-swollen micelles. The lipophilic and hydrophilic energetic contributions to this process are balanced to evaluate the extent of the solubilization of non-polar oils in micelles of non-ionic surfactants. This framework was implemented in the so called Integrated Free Energy Model (IFEM). The lipophilic contributions arise mainly from van der Waals (VDW) molecular interactions estimated with the microscopic approach of Hamaker using either classical or Lifshitz-based Hamaker constants. To estimate these interactions, VDW sphere-shell and cone-shell interaction potentials were introduced and validated with the concepts of surface tension and cohesive energy. The hydrophilic energetic contributions to oil solubilization were estimated considering conformational changes in the hydrophilic shell of the micelle during the solubilization of oil. IFEM`s oil solubilization predictions considering variations of alkane, surfactant tail size and headgroup size agree well with experimental data. A comparison between IFEM and the semi-empirical Hydrophilic-lipophilic-difference+Net-Average-Curvature (HLD-NAC) revealed that both oil solubilization prediction trends agree. In addition, IFEM predicts the Equivalent Alkane Carbon Numbers (EACNs) of aromatics and cycloalkanes, a parameter that was only experimentally measured before.
Afrique en Créations 1990-2011: Transnational Patronage in the Francophonie
Keywords: African Arts
France
Francophonie
Globalization
Patronage
Primitivism

This dissertation analyzes Afrique en Créations, a French government patronage program devoted to contemporary arts from Africa and the diaspora. Established in 1990 as a foundation, Afrique en Créations operated at arms length from the French government until 2000, when it was placed under the purview of the French ministries of Culture and Foreign Affairs. Afrique en Créations is best known for its high-profile biennials on the continent, the “Bamako Encounters: African biennial of photography” held in Bamako, Mali since 1994 and “Dance Africa Dance!” an itinerant dance biennial established in 1995. However, it has also funded and organized residencies, workshops, exhibitions and touring programs for artists working in various media in France and Africa. My project examines Afrique en Créations in relation to French post-colonialism, the globalization of the contemporary art world and the growing presence of contemporary arts from Africa and the diaspora within it. It argues that Afrique en Créations, controlled primarily by members of France’s elite political class and later embedded in the French bureaucracy, has been strongly informed by the continuing legacies of primitivism in France, French politics in the Francophonie and neoliberal business practices, particularly “vertical integration.” While this may be the case, my dissertation also contends that curators and arts administrators from the diaspora working for Afrique en Créations have challenged primitivistic stereotypes and improved the relevance of its initiatives to artists and audiences on the continent. It also argues that several artists patronized by Afrique en Créations in the diaspora have made works that encourage the recent re-appraisal of French culture and identity from a post-colonial perspective. Thus, while specific to France and the Francophonie, this study sheds light on the role of institutions such as NGOs, foundations and government cultural agencies in the art world and therefore, its workings in our contemporary, post-colonial era.
Osteohistology and Growth of Edmontosaurus and Assessment of Life History Changes in Hadrosaurid Dinosaurs
Keywords: dinosaur
growth
hadrosaur
histology
population structure
taphonomy

Data on the life history of an organism provides an important window into its biology, ecology, and evolution but has been challenging to obtain for the extinct due to limitations of fossil sampling and the inability for direct observation. The recent utilization of osteohistology, which is the study of the internal bone microstructure, has revolutionized paleontological research and permitted quantitative assessment of numerous life history aspects in extinct organisms. Hadrosaurid dinosaurs, the dominant large-bodied terrestrial herbivores in most Late Cretaceous ecosystems, have an exceptional fossil record consisting of over 60 species and multiple ontogenetic bonebeds making them an ideal clade on which to conduct life history studies. The objectives of this thesis were to integrate new data and methods to investigate ontogenetic growth and test life history strategies in hadrosaurid populations from the Late Cretaceous of North America, with a particular emphasis on the integration of osteohistological methods with limb growth and size frequency distributions for inferring biomechanical gait shifts, growth and population dynamics, and mass death preservational patterns. The results in this thesis demonstrate that the proportions of the appendicular skeleton of hadrosaurid dinosaurs did not undergo allometric growth through ontogeny and provide no compelling evidence to support the previously hypothesized ontogenetic gait shift in hadrosaurids. Size-frequency distributions underestimate age and overestimate growth rates. However, when paired with osteohistology, the data reveal that juvenile hadrosaurids segregated from adults providing essential insight into the population dynamics of these animals. The comprehensive growth curve analysis indicates that hadrosaurids exhibited a similar growth trajectory regardless of a wide ranging asymptotic body size (~3000–6000 kg) suggesting that the clade as a whole inherited a similar growth strategy attaining adult size within 7–9 years. This thesis strongly recommends both the independent assessment and the integration of allometric scaling, size-frequency distributions, and osteohistology to provide more accurate and precise paleobiological interpretations of life history characteristics.
Bioprospecting Carbohydrate-Active Enzymes in Lignocellulose-Degrading Microcosms Enriched from Pulp Mill Anaerobic Granules and Digestive Microbiomes of Canadian Beaver and North American Moose
Keywords: amplicon sequencing
carbohydrate-active enzyme
lignocellulose degradation
metagenomic
metasecretomic
microbial enrichment

Lignocellulosic biomass, including wood fibre, is an abundant resource for biorefining; however, the structural heterogeneity and occurrence of inhibitors present challenges to corresponding bioconversion technologies. In an effort to identify carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAZymes) with potential to transform wood-derived feedstocks, multiple lignocellulosic microcosms were established from pulp mill anaerobic granules, beaver droppings and moose rumen and cultivated for over 3 years on (i) cellulose, (ii) cellulose + lignosulphonate, (iii) cellulose + tannic acid, and (iv) pretreated poplar. Microbial community analysis of 16S rRNA amplicons revealed post-enrichment decrease in species richness and substrate-induced convergence. Amendment with added inhibitors (ii, iii) or pretreated poplar particularly enriched known biomass degraders along with microbes belonging to poorly-described lineages including BSV26, SJA-28, TG3 classes, OPB54 and Cloacamonales orders. Comparative metagenomics targeting cellulose- and pretreated poplar-fed microcosms revealed CAZyme profiles that converged based on substrate for gut microbiomes, while a separate cluster for anaerobic granules revealed the impact of inoculum. Compared to the cellulose-fed microcosms, the pretreated poplar-fed counterparts were enriched with reported broad substrate families with cellulolytic and hemicellulolytic activities (GH2, GH3, GH5, and GH43), as well as putative β-L-arabinofuranosidases (GH127), glucuronoyl methylesterases (CE15), and pectinases (PL1, GH28, CE8, and GH105). While no major differences emerged from the profiles of proteins with unknown function within the 416 predicted polysaccharide utilization loci and catalytic cellulosomal subunits, 2 carbohydrate-binding proteins with domains of unknown function (DUF3459-CBM48-GH13_10 and DUF5011-CBM4) were consistently present in pretreated poplar-fed microcosms only. Metasecretomes from the microcosms at ~50% and ~80% g COD substrate to biogas conversion were functionally characterized. Despite the similar saccharification capacities of different enrichments, protein profiles of the pretreated poplar-fed microcosms observed by SDS-PAGE were distinct from the cellulose-fed ones. Moreover, the emergence of new bands and greater activity on pectin, xylans and mannans from secretomes at the later stage implied a succession of enzymes that hydrolyze β-(1→4)-glycosidic bonds in cellulose before other polysaccharides. Collectively, putative lignocellulolytic proteins specialized for processing forest fibre were revealed via comparative meta-analyses for downstream characterization. Also, the potential of the microcosms serving as a repertoire of biocatalysts for developing wood specific-enzymatic cocktails was confirmed.
A New Narrative for “Keir’s Metal”: The Chemical and Commercial Transformations of James Keir’s Copper Alloy, 1770–1820
Keywords: alloy
chemistry
industry
James Keir
Keir's metal
metallurgy

In the 1770s, the chemist and industrialist James Keir (1735–1820), along with the English manufacturer Matthew Boulton (1728–1809), developed an alloy of copper, zinc, and iron that became known as “Keir’s metal”. The material was initially marketed for ship parts, but later became the “Eldorado metal” of Georgian windows and décor. Production of Keir’s metal ceased in the 1820s, which has led to the assumption that it was a failed material of the early Industrial Revolution. Seemingly short-lived materials, however, can still be important inroads for histories of chemistry, consumption, and technology. Upon closer inspection, “Keir’s metal” is a label that has been applied to iterations of the same substance. Because the material was a product of different sites of inquiry and industry, the alloy had unique functions and meanings imparted to it over several decades. Hence, the alloy is a multifaceted material in need of a new historical narrative. I argue that Keir’s metal is a complex substance whose nuanced identities resulted from movement between sites of production and application, where chemical, social, and technological factors shaped the alloy’s properties and purposes. This new narrative for Keir’s metal unfolds in three parts. The first chapter demonstrates the centrality of Matthew Boulton’s Soho Manufactory in producing, protecting, and promoting the new material. The second part analyzes the collaboration of Keir and the London-based coppersmith William Forbes as they improved Keir’s metal between two different sites of industry and reintroduced it to the Navy Board for ship bolts. The third chapter examines the intentional transformation of Keir’s alloy into the Eldorado metal of neoclassical architecture through a new name, location, and marketing strategy. As an object on the move, Keir’s metal prompts analyses of the perceptions of eighteenth-century materials, the influences of place and space in material production, and the interface of science and technology (knowledge of the head and hand). Investigating the provenance and use of this metal reveals a wealth of relatively underexamined sources on James Keir and is important for present-day conservation of period buildings by restoration architects and decorators.
Foreground: A Poetics of Place in Transnational Memoir
Keywords: autobiography
memoir
place
space
transnationalism

Foreground: A Poetics of Place in Transnational Memoir explores place and identity in contemporary transnational memoirs, asking how writers conceive of each in relation to the migratory experiences that they depict in their works. Although featuring both physical and psychic border crossings characteristic of transnationalism, the memoirs I study couple their shared focus on displacement with a drive toward alternative forms of emplacement. These alternatives stand in contradistinction to assumptions about place and social identities mapping neatly onto one another with an inherent or naturally bound givenness. Rather than understanding the self as “belonging” in or to a certain place, this dissertation brings to bear theories of articulation by Doreen Massey and Stuart Hall to argue that place and identity are dynamic relational expressions. In doing so, the dissertation also aims to convey dialogic interactions between identity and place that expand conventional structural and synecdochical modes of spatiality operative in literary analyses. The thesis explores the theoretical contexts and objectives set forth in the introductory chapter by way of attention to four primary works: memoirs by Mourid Barghouti, Eva Hoffman, Michael Ondaatje, and Edward Said. Chapter Two compares Said’s and Barghouti’s reconfigurations of self in relation to the Levantine landscape, concluding that both writers refuse simple recuperative formations of either. With Chapter Three, I contend that Hoffman’s focus on linguistic translation following emigration from Poland reflects a wider concern about fashioning the self in abstract spaces of writing and material places of being. Rather than being degraded through translation, place, like language, becomes enlivened. The next chapter focuses on intersections of genealogy and geography for Ondaatje, arguing that his memoir figuratively excavates at this conjunction in Sri Lanka while making explicit the active aesthetic processes that transform his findings toward a sense of emplacement. In Chapter Five, I return to Said to argue that, beyond its youthful recollections, his memoir operates as a literary extension of his theoretical work, offering a model of ethical emplacement. Taken together these chapters promote articulations of place and identity that emerge relationally through, rather than despite, displacement.