VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Recycling the City: The Impact of Urban Change on the Informal Waste-Recovery Trade in Hanoi, Vietnam
Keywords: Waste Management
Vietnam
Informal
Urbanization

This three-paper dissertation explores how broader (and often unchallenged) changes to political economy at multiple geographic and economic scales impact long-standing ‘informal’ practices of waste recovery and recycling in Hanoi, Vietnam. This research is based on a survey of 575 informal waste collectors and 264 waste intermediaries as well as 73 in-depth interviews. Paper I engages in a critique of methodological disclosure in current academic writings on informal waste-recovery activities and discusses the methodological difficulties of researching informal populations. My aim in this paper is to highlight that the lack of methodological disclosure in waste-recovery literature is problematic because it compromises the academic rigour of this field and impedes the reliability of researchers’ policy recommendations as well as to initiate a dialogue with the aim of improving methodological rigour in waste-recovery literature. Paper II examines urbanization processes in contemporary Vietnam and how these changing spaces accommodate labour, and in turn support livelihoods. I argue that Vietnam’s globalizing economy and urban transition have been a catalyst for the growth of the informal waste collector population in Hanoi, as well as a partial player in the gendering of the industry. Paper III explores how one particular segment of the informal waste-recovery trade, waste intermediaries, is impacted by Hanoi’s rapid urban change. I demonstrate in this paper that 1) waste intermediaries simultaneously gain and lose as a result of Hanoi’s urban transition; and 2) the underlying forces of urban spatial change in different areas of the city are quite distinct, which will have an impact on the future of waste-recovery in Hanoi. The key findings of this dissertation are: 1)A more thorough engagement with methods and a broader approach to understanding waste-recovery actors (through an engagement with political economy at multiple geographic and economic scales) will produce a more context-appropriate and compassionate understanding of this group of urban actors. 2)The livelihoods of informal waste-recovery workers are both directly and indirectly impacted by shifts in political economy, albeit in Hanoi these impacts (both positive and negative) vary by sex and sub-occupation (with respect to waste collectors), and scale of business and location in the city (with respect to waste intermediaries).
Learned Citizenship: Geographies of Education in Ontario Schools
Keywords: citizenship
education

Citizenship study of the past several decades has revealed citizenship as a multi-layered, multiply-scaled, and often exclusionary concept. Despite increasing and multi-disciplinary scholarly interest in the multi-faceted nature of citizenship as a political, social, and identity-oriented construct, it remains true that the majority of citizenship theory has developed in relation to adults, rendering children all but invisible to much citizenship discourse. Traditional citizenship theory has tended to position children as future adults and therefore as future citizens of the nation-state who prepare for citizenship through participation in public schools. Recent scholarship has also advocated children’s rights education as a key priority to help empower children as citizens in the present-day. This project investigates how citizenship in Ontario elementary schools, through curricular learning as well as non-curricular activities. I use multi-method research comprised of discursive analysis of provincial documents, semi-structured interviews with elementary school teachers in three school boards, and interactive activity sessions with elementary school students. These findings consider how provincially-scaled discourses persist through curriculum and policy which situate children as future adults and as responsible, competitive citizens in the present day. Teachers value such responsible citizenship as they negotiate the demands of delivering curriculum and maintaining functional classrooms, but concurrently contribute to local citizenship education through community knowledge and empowering student interaction. Children’s contributions reveal a willingness to associate citizenship with ‘good’ citizenship, law-abiding behaviour, and thus situate the school as a site where citizenship expectations are delineated. While these findings reveal the significant mediating role of local school teachers in delivering citizenship education as a supplement to standardized curriculum, only limited connections between citizenship and rights, and often between citizenship and the nation-state, are present overall. Children do figure as present-day citizens through their ability to perform responsible actions at any age, but this remains at best only tenuously connected to a citizenship of both rights and responsibilities.
Challenges and Opportunities for Implementing Sustainable Energy Strategies in Coastal Communities of Baja California Sur, Mexico
Keywords: Renewable Energy
Mexico
Energy Policy
Climate Change
Energy Security
Efficiency
End-use
Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems
Rural electrification
Sustainable Energy

This dissertation explores the potential of renewable energy and efficiency strategies to solve the energy challenges faced by the people living in the biosphere reserve of El Vizcaíno, which is located in the North Pacific region of the Mexican state of Baja California Sur. This research setting provides a practical analytical milieu to understand better the multiple problems faced by practitioners and agencies trying to implement sustainable energy solutions in Mexico. The thesis starts with a literature review (chapter two) that examines accumulated international experience regarding the development of renewable energy projects as a prelude to identifying the most salient implementation barriers impeding this type of initiatives. Two particularly salient findings from the literature review include the importance of considering gender issues in energy analysis and the value of using participatory research methods. These findings informed fieldwork design and the analytical framework of the dissertation. Chapter three surveys electricity generation as well as residential and commercial electricity use in nine coastal communities located in El Vizcaíno. Chapter three summarizes the fieldwork methodology used, which relies on a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods that aim at enabling a gender-disaggregated analysis to describe more accurately local energy uses, needs, and barriers. Chapter four describes the current plans of the state government, which are focused in expanding one of the state’s diesel-powered electricity grids to El Vizcaíno. The Chapter also examines the potential for replacing diesel generators with a combination of renewable energy systems and efficiency measures in the coastal communities sampled. Chapter five analyzes strategies to enable the implementation of sustainable energy approaches in El Vizcaíno. Chapter five highlights several international examples that could be useful to inform organizational changes at the federal and state level aimed at fostering renewable energy and efficiency initiatives that enhance energy security, protect the environment, and also increase economic opportunities in El Vizcaíno and elsewhere in Mexico. Chapter six concludes the thesis by providing: a summary of all key findings, a broad analysis of the implications of the research, and an overview of future lines of inquiry.
Three Essays on Real Options Analysis of Forestry Investments Under Stochastic Timber Prices
Keywords: Real options
forestry investments
stochastic timber prices
mean reversion
jumps
stochastic trend

This thesis has applied the theory of real options to study forestry investment decision-making under stochastic timber prices. Suitable models have been developed for the stochastic timber prices, after addressing major issues in characterisation of the price process. First, the assumption of stochastic timber price process was based on detailed unit root tests, incorporating structural breaks in time-series analysis. The series was found to be stationary around shifting mean, justifying the assumption of mean reversion model. Due to shift in the mean, long-run mean to which the prices tended to revert could not be assumed constant. Accordingly, it was varied in discreet steps as per the breaks identified in the tests. The timber price series failed the normality test implying fat tails in the data. To account for these fat tails, ‘jumps’ were incorporated in the mean reversion model. The results showed that the option values for the jump model were higher than the mean reversion model and threshold levels for investment implied different optimal paths. Ignoring jumps could provide sub-optimal results leading to erroneous decisions. Second, the long-run mean to which prices reverted was assumed to shift continuously in a random manner. This was modeled through the incorporation of stochastic level and slope in the trend of the prices. Since the stochastic level and slope were not observable in reality, a Kalman-filter approach was used for the estimation of model parameters. The price forecasts from the model were used to estimate option values for the harvest investment decisions. Third, investment in a carbon sequestration project from managed forests was evaluated using real options, under timber price stochasticity. The option values and threshold levels for investment were estimated, under baseline and mitigation scenarios. Results indicated that carbon sequestration from managed forests might not be a viable investment alternative due to existing bottlenecks. Overall, the research stressed upon the need for market information and adaptive management, with a pro-active approach, for efficient investment decisions in forestry.
Foaming of Wood Flour/Polyolefin/Layered Silicate Composites
Keywords: wood flour
polyolefin
nanocomposite
foaming

This research provides a new insight on various properties, such as rheological, mechanical, and flame-retarding properties, as well as the foaming behaviors of wood flour /plastic composites (WPCs) through the addition of a small amount of nanosized clay particles. Although WPCs have replaced natural wood in many applications, their industrial usage has been limited because of their weak modulus, low impact strength, low screwing-ability/nailing-ability, high density compared to natural wood, as well as their flammability compared to plastics. In this context, the incorporation of nanoclay and foam structure into WPC has been studied to dramatically alleviate these drawbacks. The melt blending method was used to prepare different types of clay-filled wood flour composites such as intercalated and exfoliated clay nanocomposites. The effects of key processing variables such as the mixing time, mixing temperature and screw speed on clay dispersion were investigated from the thermodynamic and kinetic point of view. Their nanostructure was determined by using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Accordingly, effective strategies for controlling intercalation and exfoliation of polyolefin/clay nanocomposites were proposed and evaluated. Wood flour composites with high levels of clay dispersion were synthesized successfully using a general new route (i.e., maleated-polyolefin-based clay masterbatch and dilution). The effects of nanoclay particles on the rheological, thermal, and mechanical properties were identified. In addition, it was demonstrated that a small amount of well-dispersed nanoclay in WPC significantly improved flame retardancy of WPCs. The mechanism of improved flame-retarding effects on nanoparticles was elucidated as well. The relationship between the clay dispersion and the material properties were also clarified. Furthermore, the foaming behaviors of HDPE-based and PP-based wood flour/nanoclay composites were investigated using N2 as the blowing agent in an extrusion process. The cell nucleation and growth behaviors of wood flour/polyolefin/clay composite foams were elucidated while varying the temperature, pressure, wood flour content, clay content and dispersion degrees.
Exploiting Task-document Relations in Support of Information Retrieval in the Workplace
Keywords: information retrieval
information seeking
tasks
genre

Increasingly, workplace information seeking takes place in digital information environments and is reliant upon search systems. Existing systems are designed to retrieve information that is relevant to the query, but are not capable of identifying information that is well-suited to the context and situation of a search. This is a problem for professionals who often are searching for a small amount of useful information that can be applied to a problem or task, and have limited time to browse through large sets of results. This inability of search systems to discriminate between relevant and useful documents is one of the core problems in information retrieval. In this dissertation, I address this problem by studying the role that contextual factors play in determining how a group of professionals searches for and selects information. The central question concerns the nature of the relationships between these contextual factors, specifically between the genres in the document collection and the tasks of the searcher, with an aim to exploit such relationships to improve workplace information retrieval. Research was conducted through multiple studies in three phases, moving from an exploratory study of workplace information behaviour to a controlled experimental user study. Findings confirm that workplace context shapes search behaviour. This relationship is modeled as a set of key contextual factors and sets of context-dependent access constraints, preferred document characteristics, and search strategies. Among the contextual factors identified, work tasks and information tasks were found to be significantly associated with document genres. This task-genre relationship was modeled as a matrix of associations between domain-specific task and genre taxonomies and successfully implemented as a filtering component in a workplace search system. This is the first major study of the relationship between task and genre in information seeking and of its application to information retrieval systems.
Canadian Cossacks: Finding Ukraine in Fifty Years of Ukrainian-Canadian Literature in English
Keywords: ethnic
multicultural
diasporic
identity politics
transnational
nationalism

Discourses of diaspora and transnationalism have begun to question previous traditional assumptions about the inevitability of ethnic assimilation by drawing attention to various kinds of hybrid identities, but I contend that, in contemporary Canadian literature, we cannot replace an outmoded model of eventual integration with an uncritical vision of ethnic persistence and hybridity. Much thinking about diasporic and ethnic identities suggests that, on the one hand, there are genuine marginalized identities worthy of inquiry and, on the other, there are symbolic ones undeserving of serious study. This dissertation focuses on the supposedly disingenuous or symbolic kinds of ethnic and diasporic identities, providing an analysis of Ukrainian-Canadian ethnic identity retention in a case study of second-, third-, and fourth-generation Canadians of Ukrainian descent who both read and write in English (not Ukrainian). Looking at Ukrainian-Canadian literature from 1954 to 2003, this dissertation argues: (1) ethnic identity affiliation does not necessarily dissipate with time; (2) ethnic identity in a hostland manifests itself as imagined ties to a homeland; and (3) lacking meaningful public and private recognition of ethnic group membership yields anxiety about subjectivity. I first argue that as multicultural policies drew attention to racial marginalization, Ukrainian-Canadian ethnic identity shifted from being an aspect of socio-economic disenfranchisement to becoming a hyphenated identity with links to Ukraine. I then suggest that in order to make that connection to Ukraine viable, writers attempt to locate Ukraine on the Canadian prairie as a substitute home-country. Such attempts give rise to various images Ukrainian-Canadian uneasiness and discomfort, primarily as authors struggle to account for First Nations’ prior presences on the landscape that they want to write as their own. Further, I analyze attempts to locate ethnic authenticity in post-independence Ukraine that also prove unsatisfactory for Ukrainian-Canadian subject formation. The many failed attempts to affix Ukrainian-Canadianness as a meaningful public and private identity give rise to unsettled and ghostly images that signal significant ethnic unease not to be overlooked in analyses of ethnic and diasporic identities. In these ways, this dissertation contributes to ongoing debates and discussions about the place of contemporary literary ethnicity in Canada.
Shakespeare's Telling Words: Grammar, Linguistic Encounters, and the Risks of Speech
Keywords: Shakespeare
English language
literature
grammar
early modern English
modal verbs
early modern drama

This dissertation analyzes undertheorized grammatical and linguistic details of Shakespeare’s language. Using tools derived from the fields of linguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis, I trace the ways that Shakespeare’s speakers represent themselves in language, and how they position themselves relative to their interlocutors. Grounding my study in a selection of Shakespeare’s works in which questions of self-positioning are particularly fraught, I argue that the nuances of grammar that undergird the linguistic performance of Shakespeare’s speakers encode significant clues about interaction and interpersonal relationships. I maintain that the minute details of linguistic encounters, easily overlooked words such as modal verbs (particularly shall and will) and deictic markers (words such as I, this, and now), hold important information about speakers’ perceptions of themselves, their interlocutors, and their environment. Attention to such details, and to charged moments of linguistic encounter in which speakers must negotiate their modes of self-positioning, helps to illuminate the troubled processes of self-representation and changing self-perception. Chapter one focuses on Shakespeare’s sonnets, and suggests that these poems provide a productive model for the examination of the nuances of speech and interactive dialogue. I anchor my discussion in the particular resonance of the word shall in the sonnets, and explore the ways in which the sonnet speaker attempts to preserve linguistic control relative to a threatening interlocutor. The second chapter extends these concerns to consider how the speakers of Troilus and Cressida respond to a wide network of potentially threatening interlocutors. In this chapter, I focus on linguistic encounters such as arguments and gossip to examine the risks that speakers encounter when they enter the fray of communal discourse. My third chapter turns to Coriolanus to consider moments of aggressive linguistic collisions, in which speakers vie for the right to speak a potent and contested word such as shall. The fourth and final chapter analyzes Richard II through the frame of deictic markers and grammatical modes of self-reference to consider the protective strategies afforded by language in moments of crisis.
Visions and Revisions: The Sources and Analogues of the Old English Andreas
Keywords: Andreas
Old English
Hagiography
Saints

This dissertation investigates through the paradigms of the opus geminatum genre the relationship of the Old English verse Andreas to its potential exemplars, influences and subsequent renderings. The study focuses specifically upon the ways in which inherited textual dynamics of the opus geminatum—a pair of texts, one in verse and one in prose, which ostensibly treat the same subject—contribute to substantive and stylistic parallels or deviations between Andreas and these other texts. The first chapter positions the paradigm of the opus geminatum alongside the ongoing discussions about the relationships both of internal elements within Andreas, and between Andreas and its Latin or Old English analogues. It provides a detailed overview of the opus geminatum as this grows out of late antique traditions of paraphrase and into the distinctive and highly nuanced genre which Anglo-Saxon authors made their own. It argues that amidst the debates about Andreas’ relationship to other texts, the opus geminatum affords both an historically appropriate and potentially very productive paradigm. The second chapter considers within this paradigm the interplay of content and style between Andreas and what is often thought to be its closest Latin exemplar found in the Casanatensis manuscript, for I contend here that the shift in style, from Latin prose to Old English verse, bears a necessary, dramatic and consistently overlooked influence upon the content of the Old English Andreas, changing not only how one reads that content, but the very substantive nature of the content itself. In Chapter Three the discussion shifts to the relationship Andreas has with an indigenous work, Beowulf, for which a number of recent studies have laid a new groundwork which suggests exciting possibilities for analysis, most significantly at the formulaic level, exploring the tension between explicit oral and literary indebtedness between the two poems. Finally, in Chapter Four the focus shifts to a comparison between the verse Andreas and its Old English prose version of the legend, in MS Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 198, fols. 386r–394v, allowing one to explore in concrete detail the assertions which opus geminatum writers like Alcuin made about the difference and affinities between prose and verse treatments of opus geminatum texts. My conclusion draws together the broad tendencies mapped throughout this inquiry and considers the intrinsically relational nature of a text like Andreas. It argues in light of uncovered evidence for the efficacy and flexibility of the methods intrinsic to the opus geminatum as a highly appropriate analytical lens and explores from the broad perspective how this paradigm opens numerous horizons of engagement, such as with the embedded language of the liturgy in MS Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 198, or the self-conscious investment of secular literary traditions in Beowulf with Christian literary projects, such as Andreas.