VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Youth Artists for Justice: Examining Participation in Social Movements and Envisioning Futures through Applied Theatre
Keywords: Applied Theatre
Arts Education
Marginalized Youth
Participatory Politics
Social Movements
Youth Studies

This study examines how racialized, socioeconomically under-resourced secondary school-age youth in Toronto conceptualize their current and future roles within contemporary social movements and the larger political sphere. This collaborative ethnodrama action research study, Youth Artists for Justice, involved 12 participants ages 15-20, consisting mainly of racialized, socioeconomically under-resourced youth. The study expands understanding of how youth envision and enact political participation within the current context of ongoing racism in this neoliberal era. A goal of the program was to garner within these particular youth a sense of hope and capacity to conceptualize and enact their political agency. This research contributes to scholarly discourses of drama methodology and secondary school-age youth participation in social movements by examining how ethnodrama as a methodology supports youth in further developing theories of change, envisioning their own potential political roles, and entering into participation on their terms. Applied theatre practices in this study created space to honour and to apply counter-hegemonic knowledges, to embrace and mobilize emotional expression, to disrupt power, to enrich collective agency, and to perform a public performance with political efficacy. Findings show the need to attend to the sense of existential displacement and foreboding that many youth participants reported experiencing when envisioning the future. Another major finding points to how the Toronto youth participants, through the theatre-making processes, related to the embodiment of solidarity. In this study, devised theatre work with marginalized youth serves as a means of analyzing, experiencing, and modeling solidarity and its strategic importance as a modality for countering systemic injustice. Using a critical youth studies and applied theatre lens, this research expands discourse on how youth desire and strategize the means by which to enact both major structural change and local movement-building outside of neoliberal structures.
Structural Characterization of Prion Protein Misfolding using Proteins from Resistant Species and Antibodies
Keywords: crystallography
misfolding
neurodegeneration
prion protein
prions
structural biology

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies are a group of infectious and currently untreatable neurological diseases of humans and farmed and wild animals, that are caused by a unique pathogenic mechanism – misfolding of the cellular prion protein (PrP). PrP is primarily expressed in the nervous system. It is highly conserved among mammals and has orthologs in other vertebrates. The mature PrP is a GPI-anchored glycoprotein attached to the outer leaflet of the plasma membrane. It has two main structural domains. The N-terminal half is flexible and contains four or more metal binding sites. The C-terminal half is folded into a unique prion fold composed of two short β-strands and three α-helices. The misfolding of PrP leads to a poorly understood and aggregation-prone prion species rich in β-sheets. A number of pathologic mutations have been identified, mostly in the C-terminal domain. Some species, such as horses or chicken are considered resistant to prion diseases. To further our understanding of PrP’s pathologic conversion I explored two main areas. Firstly, I determined the crystal structure of the C-terminal, folded domains of horse PrP at 1.08 Å and of chicken PrP at 1.7 Å resolution. Both structures show a typical prion fold and a disordered highly conserved helix-2 helix-3 loop which was structured in crystal structures of PrPs from other species. Secondly, I showed that the β-sheet-rich octameric PrP induced by intermediate urea concentrations at low pH is stable at least for 80 days upon urea removal and is recognized by several antibodies. I determined the crystal structure of PRB7 Fab, a putative β-PrP-specific antibody. This antibody however did not show any binding to PrP or its proposed epitope peptide in the tested conditions. Antibodies D18, P and AMF-1c-120 showed a highly pH-dependant binding to β-octamers. While D18 Fab did not bind β-octamers at low pH, P Fab formed a stoichiometric 1:1 complex with β-PrP octamer, even at pH 4.5. This thesis describes structural features of PrP that may contribute to resistance to prion diseases in some species and provides a roadmap for the antibody-mediated crystallization of the misfolded PrP.
Empathy in Education: A Narrative Study into Practicing Teachers’ Experiences
Keywords: empathy
empathy pedagogy
teacher narratives

This dissertation interweaves a study of how empathy is understood and talked about with an account of practicing teachers’ experiences. While empathy has long been proposed by educational thinkers as the remedy to social conflicts and divisions, it is also understood in myriad, and at times contradictory, ways. The ambiguity of the term does not seem to lessen empathy’s discursive cachet, however. And since the lack of clear or widely accepted conceptualization is no obstacle to empathy’s flourishing as an educational ideal, I propose that what empathy does (or what educators think it does) is much more important than what empathy is. Thinking of what empathy “does” – of what we are hoping for when we invoke it – frames empathy’s operation as a set of promises. Pedagogies of empathy and their interpretation by teachers thus become sites of examination for issues of systemic injustice in the education system. In fact, I suggest that behind most invocations of empathy are pressing systemic issues, unaddressed. I propose that while an uncomplicated “one-size-fits-all” model of decontextualized, prosocial, and teachable empathy is unlikely to be effective for students and teachers, neither is a model based primarily on teachers’ individual emotional responses to their students.
Biomedical Refusal: Pediatric Decision-making and the Settler State
Keywords: Ethics of Childhood
Ethnography
Pediatric Bioethics
Relational Autonomy
Settler Colonialism
Subjectivity and Resistance

This dissertation focuses on a recent case in which an 11-year-old Mohawk girl (whom I call Lyra) attempted, along with her family, to refuse chemotherapy in favor of Haudenosaunee healing practices. Drawing from 3 years of fieldwork, I unpack Lyra’s case at two interrelated levels. At the micro level, I foreground the lived experience of Lyra and her family, as well as the clan mothers, healers, clinicians, and state agents who became entangled in her care. I paint a thick picture of the decision to resist treatment and then of sticking to and living with that decision – one that illuminates the way participants’ moral worlds, discursive practices, and local epistemologies came together to shape their decision-making. At a macro level, I illuminate the sociocultural mechanisms and ideologies that structure “choice” in pediatric decision-making. Young people like Lyra who resist treatment reveal an intricate legal and medical infrastructure that dictates who is seen as capable of making medical decisions and who is not. Throughout I attend to the complex ways Indigenous sovereignty is asserted in settler states.
Vox Populi: Organized Crime, Media Politics, and Subaltern Publicity in Contemporary Naples, Southern Italy
Keywords: Italy
Media Studies
Neoliberism
Organized Crime
Political anthropology
Subaltern Politics

This dissertation investigates the organized crime sponsored mediascape of Naples, Southern Italy, through the ethnographic analysis of the "neomelodic" media industry. Neomelodic folk-pop songs and local TV shows constitute a main form of media entertainment among the current Neapolitan lower-classes. These cultural productions aim to depict the experience of the local poor, specifically those involved with the Camorra: a criminal organization that is also a major investor in the neomelodic mediascape. With this in mind, this dissertation explores the neomelodic media industry as a cultural, aesthetic, and politico-economic platform of informal governmentality, which attempts to reconcile the Neapolitan subaltern publics with the political violence managed by local Camorra networks versus the unaccountability of the Italian state toward its social peripheries. Complementing historical insights with ethnographic data collected amid neomelodic sites of cultural production, this dissertation shows that Camorra-mediated subaltern politics parallel the neoliberal policies engendering the populist take-over of the post-Berlusconian Italian state over the national media industries since the mid-1990s. These policies, in fact, turned Italian national media into platforms of informal engagement with the public sphere, which served the local subaltern as self-exploitative tools of socio-economic mobility and indirect governmentality. Through this comparison, this dissertation ultimately shows how the politics enacted by contemporary criminal cartels and the neoliberal state are articulated in tension with each other, since they hinge on similar logics of mediation. Together, they deploy an interactive regime of subaltern publicity, which reproduces historical conditions of social inequality while turning them into mediacratic forms of agency and populist reinterpretations of power and violence.
Assessing Indigenous Food Systems and Cultural Knowledges Among Smallholder Farmers in Ghana: Towards Environmental Sustainability Education and Development
Keywords: Development
Education
Environment
Food system
Indigenous knowledge
sustainability

Suleyman Mohammed Demi Doctor of Philosophy Department of Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto 2019 Abstract Africa is expected to experience elevated temperatures and frequent drought that will decrease crop yields by half (Boko et al., 2007). Unpredictable weather patterns negatively impact Indigenous food systems (IFSs) across Africa, including Ghana. This study sought to (a) examine Indigenous food production practices among smallholder farmers in Ghana; (b) investigate how cultural knowledge(s) offer pedagogical lessons in environmental sustainability education in Ghanaian schools; (c) identify specific environmental challenges and adaptation strategies confronting smallholder farmers in their food production activities and their implications on IFSs and farmersʼ livelihoods; and (c) identify the implications of development as understood by smallholder farmers on IFSs. The study is grounded in three theoretical frameworks: political ecology, anti-colonial theory, and Indigenous knowledge (IK) perspectives. The mixed-methods study surveyed 136 participants and selected 105 for in-depth interviews and focus group discussions in addition to workshops, participant observations, and document analysis. Quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS 24 and Excel while coding and thematization using NVivo software for qualitative data. Results indicate that although smallholder farmers use considerable IK in in their farming practices with Indigenous food crops—including soil and seed selection, food processing and preservation, management of various diseases, and adaptation to adverse environmental conditions—IK is seldom taught in schools. The study further indicates farmers face numerous environmental challenges including prolonged drought, deforestation, indiscriminate grazing, and misuse of agrochemicals, resulting in acute water shortages, extinction of Indigenous food crops, and increases in poor health and social insecurity. Participants understand development as any happenings in human life both negative and positive be it on a personal, community, or nationwide scale. The study recommends that civil society and farmer groups should demand the government of Ghana to improve its meteorological resources and services for greater precision in weather forecasting and better support farmers in growing both Indigenous and new varieties of crops. Research institutions should identify Indigenous sciences that can be included in the science curriculum to augment Western-based sciences.
Immunotherapy for Alzheimer’s Disease: IVIg Delivery to the Hippocampus in a Mouse Model of Amyloidosis
Keywords: Alzheimer's disease
Amyloidosis
Focused Ultrasound
Inflammation
Intravenous Immunoglobulin
Neurogenesis

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by cognitive decline, neuronal degeneration and pathologies, which include toxic amyloid beta peptides (Aβ) and tau. To date, there is no cure for AD and therapies are only symptomatic. A Phase III clinical trial using intravenous immunoglobulins (IVIg) - natural antibodies collected from the plasma of healthy blood donors and shown to reduce AD-related pathologies in mouse models - recently failed to prevent cognitive decline in people living with AD. IVIg treatment efficacy may be suboptimal due to the blood-brain barrier (BBB), which restricts the bioavailability of IVIg to the brain. We propose to address this problem by administering IVIg intravenously combined with focused ultrasound (FUS) to temporarily increase BBB permeability. Our hypothesis is that IVIg will enter FUS-targeted hippocampi, promote neurogenesis and decrease amyloid pathology in the TgCRND8 (Tg) mouse model of amyloidosis. In 3-month-old Tg mice, we found that the hippocampal bioavailability of IVIg was increased by 7-fold with FUS. Within one week, IVIg was cleared from the hippocampus. We discovered that two weekly treatments of IVIg with FUS promoted hippocampal neurogenesis by 3-fold compared to IVIg-alone, significantly increasing both the proliferation and survival of neural progenitor cells in the dentate gyrus. Compared to IVIg-alone, IVIg-FUS also increased pro-neurogenic cytokine interleukin-2 in the serum and decreased pro-inflammatory cytokine tumor necrosis factor alpha in the hippocampus. Aβ pathology was significantly decreased by IVIg-FUS, IVIg-alone and FUS-alone treatments. The findings in this thesis point to the benefits of coupling IVIg therapy with FUS to enhance its bioavailability and engage neuronal systems, in addition to reducing Aβ pathology and modulating the inflammatory environment. Compared to traditional intravenous administration of IVIg and other amyloid targeted antibodies, brain targeted IVIg treatment using FUS could provide greater benefits in the treatment of AD.
Investigation of Vascular Function and its Modulation in a Mouse Model of Amyloidosis
Keywords: Alzheimer's disease
Amyloidosis
Focused Ultrasound
Tie2
Vasculature
Vasculotide

Vascular integrity and function is critical for maintaining homeostasis of the central nervous system. Compromises in vascular structure and function are observed in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and associated with amyloid pathology. Vascular dysfunction affects cerebral blood flow (CBF), including vascular reactivity which can be regulated by arachidonic acid (AA) and nitric oxide (NO). This thesis investigates vascular dysfunction and response to challenges in the TgCRND8 mouse model of amyloidosis. Biochemical and functional vascular characteristics were evaluated to better understand the extent of vascular dysfunction in this mouse model. With the goal of evaluating vascular plasticity and vascular response to challenges in presence of amyloid, we disrupted the blood-brain barrier (BBB) with focused ultrasound (FUS) in TgCRND8 and non-transgenic mice. We then used Vasculotide (VT), which was previously characterized as a Tie2 agonist to assess the effects of a 3-month VT treatment on vascular integrity and repair. VT-treated TgCRND8 mice required less pressure to induce permeability and demonstrated an accelerated restoration of the BBB after FUS. Using functional MRI, hippocampal, but not cortical, vascular hyporeactivity was found in TgCRND8 mice at 7.5 months, at which point there is significant vascular pathology. A higher cerebral amyloid angiopathy burden was identified in the hippocampus, compared to the cortex. At the mRNA level, we identified increased expression of cyclooxygenase (COX)-1, essential for AA metabolism, in the hippocampus and increased expression of endothelial and neuronal NO synthases (NOS) in the cortex of TgCRND8 mice. These results indicate modulation of AA and NOS enzymes in the brain of TgCRND8 mice that may be relevant to the observed vascular dysfunction. In conclusion, these results provide evidence of cerebrovascular dysfunction in presence of amyloidosis and they characterize potential regulators of vascular dysfunction, such as AA, NOS and CAA, in the mouse brain, which could be engaged for plasticity and repair. Lastly, the combined use of VT and FUS suggests that VT enhances vascular plasticity, which is promising for its future use in combating insults to the BBB. Overall, a better understanding of cerebrovascular dysfunction in the context of AD pathologies is critical for the understanding and treatment of AD.
Visions and Shadows: A Socio-history of the Mental-health Policy Reform Agenda in Canada
Keywords: Critical studies
Discourse analysis
Health services
Mental health
Policy studies
Ruling Relations

This dissertation offers a critical, contextualizing analysis of government policy and discourse pertaining to mental-health reform in Canada, with a focus on the province of Ontario. It represents my attempt to craft an analysis and contextual history of government policy visions pertaining to mental disorder and wellness. I define the study’s problematic broadly, as an attempt to understand how problems are defined and solutions enacted through institutions organized under the auspices of government, insofar as problems and solutions in public discourse are depicted as pertaining to mental disorder. My investigation proceeds through an analysis of government texts and their social, political and historical context, influenced by Dorothy Smith’s contributions to institutional ethnography and political economy, Arthur Frank’s project of socio-narratology, and, (in a more complicated way), the historical and methodological works of Michel Foucault. My history of reform is in many respects a history of how problems have been constructed and understood, and my deconstruction of discourses of recovery and reform is in many ways an exploration of institutional developments (as well as certain concrete policy proposals that authorized discourse seems to preclude, actively or implicitly). Drawing on literature from policy studies related to policy subsystems and state capacity, I interpret actual policy developments and visionary discourse pertaining to mental-health policy as the vanguard movement of neoliberalism within the Canadian social-welfare state. I suggest that a biomedical era of mental-health discourse may be usefully thought of as giving way to, and merging with, an ascendant economic understanding of disorder itself – the antecedents of which are well-described in Foucault’s analysis in the 1970s of the then-nascent political implications of neoliberalism.
Heck Fun Ya! (Let's Eat!) An Autoethnographic Cookbook: Memories of a Chinese-Canadian Upbringing Beyond
Keywords: Autoethnography
Culture
Food
Identity
Otherness
Writing

This dissertation emerges out of the conceit that food, more than mere sustenance, is significant cultural artifact. Rooted in the premise that there is educative value in life story as research, Heck Fun Ya! (Let’s Eat!) An Autoethnographic Cookbook: Memories of a Chinese-Canadian Upbringing Beyond is a performative text using food as a vehicle to discuss culture, identity, and otherness. Blending academic analyses, life story writing, and multi-media, its creative format is an expression of the uniqueness of this process. Thematically organized, the cookbook structure of starters, mains, and desserts is comprised of food experiences punctuated by recipe in a variety of narrative forms. Narratives will be analyzed through interdisciplinary lenses that explore how food shapes various identities in order to ask: What role does food play in identity construction? And how can storying and/or re-storying food experiences be used to live a good life? In approaching this, the work aims to recalibrate my understanding of past experiences to create resonance with new ones, and thus, deepen knowledge. Starters offers two opposing effects of food experience: one that considers food shame and stigma through a psychoanalytic lens (Kristeva, 1982; Goffman, 1963), and the other that explores the role of disgust in igniting imagination (Korsmeyer, 2011). Mains will address the part food plays in the identities that emerge from having a sense of home and belonging. Narratives serve as entry points for discussions that emphasize the home, food, eating, and family connection (Bell Valentine, 1997; Blunt Dowling, 2006). Food’s role in identities that evolve out of the things we do are also considered: teaching and food writing including the physiology of taste, impact of hunger and whether it sharpens one’s descriptive abilities (Brillat-Savarin, 1949/2009; Hemingway, 1964/2009; Zola, 1873/2009). Desserts, the last cookbook section, takes a dramatic turn to consider the non-alimentary ways of food and feeding; this discussion explores music, yoga, meditation, and narrative medicine as expressions of “nourishment” (Pretorius, 2017; McGonigal, 2008; Lazar et al., 2005; Charon, 2008). Finally, the significance of the study and implications for next steps will be presented.
Anselm of Laon, the Glossa Ordinaria, and the Tangled Web of Twelfth-century Psalms-Exegesis
Keywords: Anselm of Laon
Biblical Commentary
Cathedral Schools
Glossa Ordinaria
Psalms
Twelfth Century

This thesis studies the textual relationships between a group of related early scholastic commentaries on the Psalms. At the centre of the discussion stands the commentary which is often said to epitomize the developments in teaching which emerged within the cathedral schools in the twelfth century, namely the so-called Glossa ordinaria on the Bible, and its association with Anselm of Laon, one of the most celebrated theologians of the period. Despite its central place in twelfth-century intellectual culture, relatively little has been able to be conclusively established regarding the origins of the Gloss. Likewise, the authorship of many of the early scholastic Psalms-commentaries related in some way to the Gloss remains uncertain. A great many suggestions have been put forward by modern scholars, but rather than looking only at one or two of the attributions, this thesis broadens the scope of the question and takes a comprehensive view of a larger group of these commentaries, showing that this is necessary if we want to be able to say anything conclusive about their authorship. The first chapter examines the latest scholarship on the Gloss on some other books of the Bible, showing how this bears on the question of Anselm’s authorship of the Gloss on the Psalms. The second chapter analyses the relationship of the Gloss on the Psalms to its two closest relatives and attempts to settle conclusively the question of the direction of influence. The third chapter examines the evidence and arguments for the attribution of one of the other Psalms-commentaries to Anselm, arguing, on the basis of the expanded scope of the examination, against the attribution. Chapter Three also begins to examine the relationships that exist within the larger group and introduces a new hypothesis for the place of the Gloss in the family tree and for Anselm’s involvement in its creation. The fourth chapter analyses the relationships of the group as a whole, demonstrating how they are all related to one another, but that none can be the sole source of the rest of the group, and arguing further for the hypotheses introduced in Chapter Three.