VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Politcal Symbols of Climate: Bodin, Montesquieu, Rousseau
Keywords: Bodin
Climate Theory
Montesquieu
Natural law
Rhetoric
Rousseau

My dissertation studies the discursive and performative functions of climactic determinism, a theory that explains human diversity as the natural effect of geographical influence. In a corpus which spans the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, I discover a common idiom in the famous "climate theories" of early modern France: representations of climate in Bodin, Montesquieu and Rousseau act as rhetorical straw men in which the scientificity of the discourse creates a veil for the expression of political thought and its controversies. Following a trajectory which leads from absolute to popular sovereignty, the role of climates is to stylize and reorganize different sociopolitical forces of the French kingdom. Beyond relativism and scientific validity, they reveal meta-juridical finalities of which the complexity is clarified through external metaphors. I show how the diverse reconfigurations of the "geography of others" reveals a social commentary of the philosopher, who reduces the components of a society into an imaginative and experimental schema.
A Duty to Minimize the Corporation's Environmental Impacts: Corporate Governance and Sustainable Development
Keywords: board of directors
corporate governance
future generations
sustainable development

The scale and scope of today's economic activity will impact the natural environment several generations into the future. Much of this economic activity is undertaken by corporations. The interests of future generations in the natural environment, which are not protected adequately by traditional forms of environmental regulations, require moving away from the shareholder primacy norm that currently dominates both academic writing and directors' understanding of corporate governance in North America. The nascent "responsible investing" movement may result in some changes to corporate behaviour, but it also is insufficient to protect the interests of future generations. For these reasons, a new legal duty imposed on corporate directors is proposed here. This duty should be enacted through the corporations statute in order to make clear the change in the duties of directors away from simply maximizing shareholder wealth. The duty would require the board of directors to minimize the corporation's environmental impacts. "Minimize" is defined as up to the point of causing "undue hardship" to the corporation's ability to generate a profit. The duty therefore requires directors to balance profitability and environmental sustainability. This balancing is inherent in the concept of sustainable development, and therefore asking directors to take on this task is necessary to achieve sustainable development. Although this proposal raises concerns regarding compliance, enforcement and accountability, these concerns are answerable.
Explaining Institutional Change: Local Special Purpose Bodies in Ontario, 1810-2010
Keywords: Institutional Change
Kitchener
Local Government
Ontario
Policy Change
Special Purpose Bodies

This dissertation examines the institutional histories of local special purpose bodies in Ontario from their origins in the nineteenth century to the present. The analysis is organized around two research questions. First, how have the institutional structures of special purpose bodies changed over the long term? Second, what can an analysis of the long-term dynamics of these institutions contribute to our present theories of institutional and policy change? The dissertation is divided into two parts. In the first part, I focus on special purpose bodies in the midsized city of Kitchener, Ontario. This part tracks a wide range of ABCs - from water commissions to conservation authorities to police commissions, among many others - through the course of Kitchener's history. In the second part, I examine changes to school boards, boards of health, and hydro commissions in municipalities across the province of Ontario. I make three general arguments in this dissertation. First, I argue that changes to local special purpose bodies have a distinctly patterned character, with just one or two kinds of change occurring again and again for long periods of time. Second, I argue that we can explain these patterns, and the shifts from one pattern to another, using a synthetic theoretical approach that I call "Policy Fields". This approach focuses our attention on the institutional and cultural structure of the environment or "field" in which policy decisions occur, as well as the wider interaction among those fields over time. Finally, I argue that we can understand the timing of institutional changes within the broader patterns using a typology of policy fields. This three-part typology enables us to understand the factors that tend to trigger changes within different kinds of fields.
Identification and Characterization of Novel Small Molecules Using Caenorhabditis elegans as a Model System
Keywords: anthelmintics
C. elegans
Chemical genetics
dafadine
nematodes

Small molecules are useful tools to probe biological function using chemical genetic approaches. Unlike genetic mutations, small molecules are readily transferable reagents that can be screened in multiple organisms or systems. Data from multiple systems allows for a detailed profile of small molecules that target more than one organism, suggesting that the target is potentially conserved, or molecules that likely act species-specifically, representing potential drug leads such as antifungals. I, along with collaborators, screened a total of 98,898 small molecules in multiple species. I used the model organism C. elegans to identify a dauer-inducing molecule called dafadine whose target is functionally conserved in mammals. In addition, molecules that likely act in a nematode-specific way were discovered as potential anthelmintic drug leads. Using genetic and biochemical techniques, we identified the target of dafadine as the cytochrome P450 DAF-9. DAF-9 is required in the production of dafachronic acids that are crucial for normal reproductive development. Exploiting the transferability of small molecules, I, together with my collaborators, showed that dafadine was able to inhibit its mammalian functional homolog, CYP27A1. I used dafadine to understand more about daf-9's role in aging since previous genetic data was not clear, and found that DAF-9 functions in the adult worm to restrict lifespan. C. elegans has been previously proposed as a potentially useful model for parasitic worms. To test C. elegans as a model for anthelmintic discovery, I found 279 C. elegans lethal small molecules and found that compared to a random set of compounds, molecules that caused lethality in C. elegans were at least 19 times more likely to cause lethality in the parasitic worms Cooperia onchophora or Haemonchus contortus. Importantly, screening the chemicals in multiple systems such as zebrafish, identified that 68 molecules likely act in a nematode-specific way. C. elegans genetic screens for resistant mutants of two nematode-specific lethal molecules, wact-11 and 12, indicate that their likely target is succinate dehydrogenase of the electron transport chain. Both dafadine and the discovery of potential anthelmintics demonstrate the benefits of C. elegans as a chemical genetic system.
Towards a Radical Republican Conception of Power
Keywords: Power
Republicanism

What is social power and when is it acceptable? In this dissertation I argue for a radical republican solution to this question. My solution is republican in that it understands power to be acceptable when it does not involve domination (or when it is not arbitrary). My solution is radical, however, in that it involves a much more expansive understanding of the basic nature of power than is typically found in contemporary republican political philosophy. My dissertation has two main parts. The first part develops an analytically rigorous account of social power that overcomes two shortcomings common to contemporary accounts of power. The first shortcoming is that many views of power do not adequately take into account the distinction between an agent exercising power and an agent's power manifesting itself. Such `activist' views of power deny that an agent's power can manifest itself when he does not exercise it (or when he is not actively involved in bringing about the outcome). In contrast I argue that an agent's power can manifest itself - or make a difference in the world - even when he does not exercise it. The second shortcoming is that, due to their focus on exercises of power by agents, many views of power do not pay adequate attention to the ways in which (structures of) social relations confer powers on agents, without the agents' involvement and sometimes even against their will. The second part of my dissertation works out an account of how to understand domination (or unacceptable power). I begin with the contemporary (civic) republican understanding of this notion found in the political philosophy of Philip Pettit, but I argue that this understanding of domination needs modification because it is based in a broadly activist view of the basic nature of power. My suggestion for reinterpreting the republican understanding of domination is based on the structural differences between three different ways that power can be exercised. I suggest that dominating or arbitrary power is in essence power that can be exercised over (and so not with) others without also being exercised for them.
Regulators of Shh Signaling in Limb Patterning and Development
Keywords: limb development
mouse models
organizing centers
patterning
signal transduction
Sonic hedgehog signaling

The embryonic limb is one of the best understood examples of pattern formation in vertebrates. Patterning, along its anterior-posterior (AP) and proximo-distal (PD) axes, has been studied almost exclusively within the framework of positional information - the idea that the fate of individual cells is determined by their positional value in an embryonic field. This value is conferred through signaling molecules, called morphogens, in a concentration dependent manner. This idea is best illustrated in the chick wing whose AP pattern is imposed by an organizing center called the "zone of polarizing activity" (ZPA), through secretion of the morphogen Sonic hedgehog (Shh). Studies over the past 20 years show that Shh regulates patterning and growth through regulation of Gli-family transcription factors. The mouse has been an excellent genetic model for the study of Shh-mediated limb patterning and signal transduction, as well as the pathway's role in development and disease. However, these studies have also revealed critical differences between the mouse and chick models resulting in a need to re-evaluate positional information as a universal framework for vertebrate development. In this thesis, I propose the two-population model as a complimentary framework that allows us to reconcile the discrepancies of existing models. Using genetic models in the mouse, and pharmacological manipulation in the chick, I demonstrate that specific changes in Gli activity produce a defined spectrum of limb malformations and I utilize this spectrum as a tool to study a previously uncharacterized component of the Shh signal cascade, the receptor Ptch2, demonstrating that it is a critical, context-dependent regulator of the Shh signaling receptor Smoothened. This body of work illustrates that the vertebrate limb remains a prescient model for the study of signal transduction, development and disease and opens the door for the study of universal mechanisms of patterning in vertebrate organisms.
Behind the 2009 Tamil Diaspora Protests in Canada: A Critical Analysis of the Production of Race, Resistance, and Citizenship across Borders
Keywords: citizenship
protest
race
social activism
space
Tamil diaspora protests

Critical social workers emphasize activism for social justice, and acknowledge that global justice movements can inform the evolution of social work practice. Yet, scholarship on community practice and citizen participation has shown varying levels of attention to the interests and context of racialized populations. This dissertation engages this discussion by developing an understanding of what activism comes to be for migrant communities who experience social injustices across local, national and transnational scales. I draw upon a framework of citizenship, racialization and spatiality to problematize conditions of resistance through the 2009 Tamil diaspora protests in Canada. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis of print media and key informant interviews, I explore the following: (1) What are the ideologies underlying media representations of the movement in Canada? (2) How can social work researchers ethically represent the resistance movements of others? (3) Why and how does race frame the production of suffering and spectacle through protest? (4) How can we unpack representations of racialized local groups who protest an issue unfolding elsewhere? This project highlights the challenges experienced by racialized communities' in their struggles towards citizenship, social justice and decolonization. Chapter 1 presents the context of the 2009 Tamil diaspora protests, the conceptual framework, and methodology guiding this study. In accordance with the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work's 3-paper dissertation format, Chapter 2, 3 and 4 are stand-alone papers geared towards different peer-review journals. Chapter 2 problematizes how we should represent contested resistance movements in the age of terrorism. Chapter 3 examines how racial logic frames the expression of protesters' suffering, and the construction of the Canadian public's racial apathy. Chapter 4 explores how national media discourses racially and spatially mark protesters as "others," "outlaws," and "outsiders." The findings of this interdisciplinary study demonstrate how resistance by racialized groups in a white settler state is distorted by the indirect and direct representational politics imposed by a hegemonic West. In Chapter 5, I offer implications for social work theory, practice and education to reconsider the boundaries of social justice, incorporate a conceptualization of transnational activism as citizenship, and forefront the politics of protest.
Heterogeneous Encounters: Tolerance, Secularism and Religious Difference at Turkey's Border with Syria
Keywords: border
religious diversity
secularism and the secular
tolerance
Turkey

This dissertation is an ethnographic investigation into the politics of religious difference in Turkey. Drawing on fieldwork in Antakya, a city near Turkey's Syrian border populated by Arabs and Turks of Sunni, Alawi, Jewish, and Orthodox Christian backgrounds, it explores the mundane, political, and aesthetic representations of religious difference and demonstrates how such difference is constructed, lived, and configured in everyday realms of sociality. Four such realms are focused on: a multi-religious choral ensemble, Antakya's historical marketplace, domestic and communal sitings of guesthood (misafirlik), and places and discourses of common worship. Official representations of Antakya's religious diversity imply a pluralist and "tolerant" form of national citizenship as compared to Turkey's Republican secularist model. I argue, however, that daily practices, artistic expressions, and networks of exchange between different denominations of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish residents of the city inhabit a more heterogeneous field characterized by interpersonal relations of negotiation, hospitality, intimacy, and hostility. These interrelations are further informed and delimited by structures of power embedded in local, national, and transnational regimes of diversity management and implicated in the minoritization of non-Sunni and non-Turkish communal identities. Nevertheless, they also rework and transcend such regimes of governance. In illustrating what it means to cohabit an interreligious milieu near a national border, this dissertation is positioned among other anthropological explorations of religious diversity and the growing literature on secularism, as well as anthropological studies of borders and marginality. It shows that religious difference is produced at the intersection of multiple discourses, practices, and boundaries, and as such it evades both pluralist (multi-community) and dualist (i.e. religion vs. secular) models of religious co-existence.
Orienting Attention to Object Representations in Short-term Memory
Keywords: attention
auditory
EEG
fMRI
memory
visual

Sounds unfold and disappear across time, implying a crucial role of auditory short-term memory (STM) in coherent discourse comprehension. Yet, few studies have examined how sounds are represented and selectively attended within STM, particularly when multiple sound representations coexist in STM. Thus, the goals of my research were: 1) to elucidate the neural processes and networks involved in reflective attention (i.e., orienting attention to auditory representations with STM), 2) to determine if the feature used to access a representation modulates these processes/networks, and 3) using both visual and auditory stimuli, to assess the contribution of supramodal and/or modality-specific networks involved in orienting attention to STM. The results revealed that the feature used to access a representation (e.g., spatial, semantic, or sensory modality) can modulate the neural underpinnings of reflective attention. In addition to these feature-specific effects, feature-general correlates of reflective attention were observed, suggesting the role of a general attentional control process in reflective attention. The implications of these findings on current theories of how concurrent sounds are represented and attended in STM are discussed.
Tropologies of Indianness in Anglophone Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Fiction
Keywords: Arundhati Roy
Caste
E. M. Forster
Indianness
Postcolonial
Raja Rao

While previous studies have explored the literary representation of "India" as a place, a colony, or a modern nation-state, this dissertation focuses on the idea of Indianess as a civilizational essence within the field of Anglophone colonial and postcolonial South Asian fiction. The central finding of this project is that Indianness is often imagined in fiction through a system of recurrent tropes. These tropes include the Neo-Vedantic concept of metaphysical oneness (brahman); the centripetal dynamics of Sanskritization; the ontological modes of "impersonal" being; the Hegelian allegory of "History"; and most importantly, the rhetoric of caste subjectivity (varna). The use of these tropes in fiction reveals a critical disassociation with contemporary grand narratives of "India" as a postcolonial nation-state as well as the fascist Hindutva ideology of purified Hindu-ness. For these reasons, this project uses the term "Indutva" to classify the unique tropologies of Indianness within colonial and postcolonial South Asian literature. The primary texts of this study are E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), Raja Rao's The Serpent and the Rope (1960), and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997). In Passage, Forster illustrates his idea of Indianness through the rituals of the Gokul Ashtami festival, its Brahminical agents of varnic order and its heterotopic confrontations with History. In Serpent, Indianness is explored through the marital crises of Rao's Brahminical protagonist and the symbolic rebirth of varnic Indianness in post-imperial Europe. Finally, in Small Things, Roy engages an allegorical, counter-Indutva critique of civilizational Indianness, as represented by the "History" of violence against lower-caste "Untouchables." This study of Indianness in fiction is grounded in a historical and theoretical framework that takes late eighteenth-century British Orientalism as a starting point for the modernity of Indianness, and it also draws on Sanskrit and vernacular Indian discourses of religion, caste, and metaphysics. The methodology of this project thus draws equally from postcolonial and pre-colonial sources.
Thinking in Pieces: Victorian Notebooks and Notation
Keywords: aestheticism
aesthetics
notebooks
queer theory
sociality
victorian literature

This dissertation argues for the coherence of the Victorian notebook as a genre, challenging the critical convention that treats writers' notes as rudimentary preparations for published works. Instead of reading authors' papers as meaningful only when they are located in a developmental timeline leading to a novel, poem, or essay--that is, instead of reading notebooks teleologically--"Thinking in Pieces" approaches them as an archive with collective resemblances. If we suspend our commitment to the "ends" to which authors may or may not have put their notes, what kinds of fantasies and concerns emerge from these scrappy documents, and how might attending to them in this way expand our definition of literary form? What would happen, in other words, if we took notes as notes? What emerges, I argue, is a genre in which writers inhabit states of open-endedness, making minimalist descriptive documents that do not have to lead anywhere or cohere systematically: thinking in pieces. I present the notebook as a shelter for inconsequence. By "inconsequence" I mean that which is apparently useless, and (in the older sense of the word) that which foregoes order, arrangement, or sequence. I show how Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, George Gissing, and Gerard Manley Hopkins take note of seemingly insignificant, fleeting, and useless subjects and phenomena, without having designs upon these documents' future redemption in other literary forms. As such, note-taking represents an ethical position that values containment and preservation over total synthesis and systematic explanation. I will also propose that in their refusal of telos and their resistance to holistic synthesis, notebooks present a style of queer thought.
The Role of Iroquois 3 and 5 in Limb Bud Pattern Formation and Morphogenesis
Keywords: Irx3
Irx5
Limb morphogenesis
Limb patterning
Mouse
Sonic hedgehog

Limb skeletal pattern heavily relies on graded Sonic hedgehog (Shh) signaling. As a morphogen and growth cue, Shh regulates identities of posterior limb elements including the ulna/fibula and digits 2 through 5. In contrast, proximal and anterior structures including the humerus/femur, radius/tibia and digit 1 are regarded as Shh-independent and the mechanisms governing their pattern formation are unclear. Here I show that patterning of the proximal and anterior limb skeleton involves an early specification phase dependent on two transcription factors, Irx3 and Irx5 (Irx3/5). They are expressed in the anterior margin of the limb field to regulate expression of the key anterior prepattern gene Gli3 and specify the anterior population during limb initiation. The early specification phase is followed by a late modulation phase during which Shh signaling negatively regulates these anterior elements. In addition, Irx3/5 also play a role in limb bud morphogenesis. Irx3/5-DKO hindlimb buds are small with abnormal shape due to prolonged cell cycle time and division defects including anaphase bridge and altered cell division orientation in the anterior hindlimb field. Therefore, pattern formation of anterior limb skeletal elements requires functions of Irx3/5 during limb bud initiation for the specification and expansion of anterior population followed by negative modulation by Shh signaling.