VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Role of GluR2-N-Cadherin Interaction in the Regulation of Hippocampal Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor-dependent Long-term Depression
Keywords: Synaptic plasticity
GluR2

Excitatory synaptic transmission and plasticity mediated by glutamate receptors are important for many brain functions, including learning and memory. Various molecular and cellular models have been established to study multiple forms of synaptic plasticity that coexist in the hippocampal CA1 region. Metabotropic glutamate receptor-dependent long-term depression (mGluR-dependent LTD) is a form of long lasting synaptic plasticity thought to play critical roles in diverse physiological and pathological processes. The GluR2 subunit of AMPA receptors has been a focus of neuroscience research over the last decade due to its important roles in endocytic trafficking and Ca2+ permeation in many forms of activity-dependent synaptic plasticity and homeostatic plasticity. However, the underlying mechanisms of mGluR-dependent LTD and the possible involvement of GluR2 in this form of plasticity remain unknown. In this project, I utilized GluR2 knockout (KO) mice and tested the requirement of GluR2 in multiple forms of hippocampal synaptic plasticity at different developmental stages. The results showed that although GluR2 is dispensable for long lasting synaptic plasticity in juvenile mice, it is essential for the expression of mGluR-dependent LTD in adult animals. Next, I examined the involvement of a number of GluR2-specific functions in mGluR-dependent LTD and found that GluR2 N-terminal interaction with the cell adhesion molecule N-cadherin is a key process required for GluR2 to regulate the expression of mGluR-dependent LTD. Furthermore, using a combination of approaches including electrophysiology, biochemical assays, and virus-mediated expression of several mutant GluR2 constructs, I identified a signaling cascade involving N-cadherin/β-catenin complex, Rac1 Rho GTPase, LIM-kinase 1 and cofilin, through which GluR2 exerts its effect on actin regulation and mGluR-dependent LTD. Importantly, the impaired LTD in GluR2 KO mice can be fully rescued by manipulating GluR2-N-cadherin N-terminus interaction or cofilin-mediated actin reorganization. Lastly, I showed that this signaling cascade also plays a critical role in the regulation of dendritic spine plasticity during mGluR-dependent LTD. Together, these results reveal a novel signaling process by which GluR2 regulates long lasting synaptic plasticity and provide insights into how functional and structural plasticity are coordinated in the mammalian central nervous system.
Essays on the Economics of Public Health
Keywords: influenza
immunization
air quality
respiratory health

This dissertation considers the economics of public health in the context of respiratory disease, a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. The pervasive nature of respiratory illness represents a significant reduction to health and longevity, but private actions to prevent illness may not consider the full-scale benefit of societal health improvement. In this thesis, I consider two determinants of respiratory illness: (1) the spread of influenza disease and (2) air pollution. In both cases, public policy aims to attenuate the effects of these factors by incentivizing or mandating preventative action. Because such interventions come at a cost, it is important to consider the magnitude of benefits associated with these actions. I consider each determinant in turn. First, I provide causal evidence on the health and economic consequences of an ongoing broad-scope vaccination program. The Ontario Influenza Immunization Campaign expanded the scope of vaccine coverage leading to a 20-percent increase in vaccination. Using the timing of this campaign and exogenous variation in vaccine quality, I link higher vaccination rates to decreases in lost-work-time, hospitalization, and death. Results indicate that, when vaccine quality is high, the program leads to higher gains for Ontario relative to other provinces and in short, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Second, I provide evidence of the impact of air pollution on respiratory health. Recent changes in standards for air pollution are highly contentious and represent stringent constraints on economic activity. Evidence from this dissertation directly informs this debate. By linking daily pollution to hospital admissions for municipalities across Ontario, I study the impact of air pollution at levels below those historically considered. Results indicate that particulate matter has a significant effect on respiratory health of children but that ozone and carbon monoxide have little effect on respiratory hospitalizations for all age groups.
Imaging and Genetics Investigations in Schizophrenia and Aging: A Focus on White Matter
Keywords: imaging
genetics
schizophrenia
aging

Schizophrenia has long been considered a disorder of impaired brain connectivity, and such disconnectivity might be due to disruption of white matter tracts that connect brain regions. This thesis investigates the oligodendrocyte/myelin/white matter pathway in schizophrenia in vivo, and also considers aging effects, as similar substrates are affected during the healthy aging process. In study one, association of oligodendrocyte/myelin genes is examined with schizophrenia, and in study two association of a myelin gene is examined with basic MRI volumetric phenotypes. Then, in study three, diffusion tensor tractography, a technique that can visualize and measure white matter is applied, and is shown to be reliable in healthy controls and schizophrenia patients using a novel clustering segmentation method. In study four, this method is then used to examine interaction of schizophrenia and aging with respect to white matter, where fronto-temporal disconnectivity is demonstrated in younger chronic schizophrenia patients, but not in elderly community dwelling schizophrenia patients compared to age-matched controls. In study five, relationships among age, white matter tract integrity, and cognitive decline in healthy aging are demonstrated using diffusion tensor tractography and structural equation modeling. Genetics and neuroimaging are then combined using the intermediate phenotype approach in study six to demonstrate a key role for the BDNF gene across adult life in healthy aging. In these individuals, the BDNF val66met variant influenced neural structures and cognitive functions in a pathological aging risk pattern. Finally, in study seven, complex relationships are then demonstrated among oligodendrocyte gene variants, white matter tract integrity and cognitive performance in both healthy controls and schizophrenia patients. The combination of genetics and neuroimaging can parse out heterogeneity of disease phenotypes, and characterize the effects of gene variants on at-risk neural structures and cognitive functions in healthy and disease populations.
Death in American Letters
Keywords: Death
Puritans
Thoreau, Henry David
Edwards, Jonathan
Mather, Cotton
Norton, John
Cotton, John
Crane, Stephen
Derrida, Jacques
Brown, John
Religion
Thanatology

This dissertation examines American attitudes towards death from the colonial era to the end of the nineteenth century. I begin with a close analysis of the thanatology of the Congregational church in New England, before demonstrating the lasting influence of Puritan thought on three later writers: Jonathan Edwards, Henry David Thoreau and Stephen Crane. In contrast to purely cultural studies of mortality in America (including those by Phillipe Ariès, David Stannard and Michael Steiner), my investigation discusses the philosophical difficulties that obstruct any attempt to speak about death. Building on Jacques Derrida’s work in Aporias (1993), I identify three logical impasses that interrupt Puritan writing on mortality: the indeterminacy, singularity and finality of death. While Edwards, Thoreau and Crane write in different circumstances and diverse genres, I argue that they are sensitive to these same three aporias when they discuss death. In this regard, they resist a broader post-Puritan tendency (in both scientific and sentimental texts) to minimize the uncertainties surrounding human mortality and approach death as a universal (rather than radically singular) phenomenon. While my study situates each of its authors in the cultural and intellectual contexts in which they worked, it also challenges the notion that it is possible to write a history of death. Speaking strictly, mankind’s relationship to death can never change. It is always, in fact, a non-relation. The very idea of death destabilizes our most fundamental historical and literary assumptions. Accordingly, my second chapter uses a deconstruction of Edwards’ theory of revivalism to argue that the New-England awakenings of the eighteenth century expressed the converts’ desire to renounce responsibility for their souls, rather than accept it. In my third chapter, I argue that those writings in which Thoreau registers what might seem to be a nihilistic fascination with dead and decaying bodies in fact express a sentimental desire for a peaceful death. Chapter four reads Stephen Crane’s poetry, fiction and journalism in the context of his Calvinist heritage, breaking down the distinction between his textual play with the concept of death and the Puritans’ “serious” attempts to come to terms with mortality.
Seeing Like a Racial State: the Census and the Politics of Race in the United States, Great Britain and Canada
Keywords: census
race
mixed-race
racial categories

This thesis compares the political development of racial categories employed by the United States, Canada and Great Britain on their national censuses, particularly focusing on the enumeration of mixed-race individuals in the late 20th century. Though literature on race and the U.S. census often stresses the causal influence of social mobilization, this analysis reveals that the common explanations for the development of racial classifications such as interest group mobilization, demography and civil rights legislation are not viable in comparative context. To explore and explain how the racial state sees, this thesis conceptualizes race as a system of power relations and develops a framework of the schematic state, which operates concurrently as both an actor responsible for putting the underlying organizational pattern of race into place, solidifying a particular set of racial meanings, and implementing a scheme for the racial configuration of society, and an arena in which policy alternatives are contested and where the state itself participates among other actors. This characterization demonstrates that the schematizing impetus of the census is not an exemplar of a dichotomous relationship between an all-powerful state and powerless racial subjects; instead, the power and meaning of race exist well beyond the control of the fragmented and sometimes contradictory schematic state, from the transnational realm to the level of the group or individual. Contrary to the majority of the literature on race, this thesis demonstrates that state institutions do not act for purely domestic reasons; rather, institutions mediate between national nuances and transnational ideas about race that exist in excess of national boundaries. Thus, while the decision to count mixed-race can be explained by a crystallization of transnational ideational trends that are mediated by national politics, the domestic arena of policy making – or the policy network itself – emerges as a key factor that determines the method of multiracial enumeration. However, these domestic political and policy outcomes are not contained by borders. Once a policy is in place, it has the potential to reinforce domestic policy and contribute to the global discourse of race itself – and in its travels among these levels of abstraction, race transforms.
Moral Performance, Shared Humanness, and the Interrelatedness of Self and Other: A Study of Hannah Arendt's Post-Eichmann Work
Keywords: Arendt
Moral Theory
Political Theory
Moral Performance
Moral Decisions
Nazi Collaborators
Eichmann
Moral Judgment
Moral Reflection
Moral Action
Free Will
Autonomy
Ricoeur
Bauman
Selfhood
Otherness
Empathy
Practical Wisdom
Humanness
Shared Responsibility
Moral Responsibility
Morality and Politics
Vetlesen

This thesis is a critical discussion of political thinker Hannah Arendt’s moral thought, as developed in her works from EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM onwards. Arendt, I argue, sought to respond to the moral challenge she saw posed by the phenomenon of banal evildoing, as revealed in Nazi Germany. Banal evildoers are agents who, under circumstances in which their ordinary moral triggers and guides (conscience, moral habits and norms, the behavior of their peers, etc.) are subverted, commit evil despite having no evil intent. Such subversion of ordinary moral voices would appear to absolve these agents from moral responsibility for their acts, which led most commentators to reject claims to such subversion by Nazi collaborators. Arendt, who sees the phenomenon of banal evildoing as factually substantiated, set out to show that such agents possessed other mental capacities (namely, critical and speculative thinking, reflective judging, and free willing), more appropriate for moral decision-making, on which they could have relied even under Nazi conditions. It is for their disregard of such capacities that banal evildoers can be held morally responsible. In this thesis I critically engage with this Arendtian argument. I show how the Nazi subversion of German agents’ ordinary moral voices was achieved. I then exegetically explicate Arendt’s (unfinished) analysis of the above mental capacities and of their moral role. I then argue for the addition of the capacities of empathetic perception and practical wisdom to this understanding of moral performance. In the course of this analysis I show that in responding to this challenge, Arendt develops a powerful argument regarding the moral dangers of overreliance on mental shortcuts in decision-making, a strong argument regarding the interconnectedness between morality and humanness, and implicitly, a novel conception of selfhood that sees otherness as interrelated and interconnected with selfhood, such that concern for others is part of what constitutes, and therefore is inscribed into, care for the self. I end by critically assessing the applicability of Arendt’s moral analysis to more ordinary decisional circumstances than those of Nazi Germany, and the insight this analysis points to regarding the relationship between moral and political decision-making.
The Mask as a Literary Trope between Decadence and Modernism
Keywords: Masks
Decadence

This dissertation is a study of the mask as literary trope in European literature between 1890 and 1914. Through a comparative analysis of literary and dramatic works, and through a juxtaposition to works of visual art produced in the period, I illustrate how the mask takes numerous shapes and configurations as it is treated as a synecdoche, a metonymy, as a figure of antithesis. I show how, in spite of the mask’s changeability, it continues to echo the same concerns and to function as an image of death and rebirth. Moreover, I argue that the mask can be considered an uncanny phenomenon because of its flexibility as a signifier, as a “symbol that takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes” (Freud 1919, 244) and thus as an image of ambiguity and unintelligibility. I begin by pointing out the importance of masks in visual arts and in the philosophical and dramatic discourse of the period. I explain how the mask assumes in these years a new significance as a form of portraiture and how it is associated with the idea of fragment; I summarize the notion of masks in Nietzsche and examine how the mask relates to the concept of “uncanny” as formulated by Freud. I then show how several writers use masks to approach the matter of a conscious and unconscious self, constructing texts that parallel, and often prefigure the Freudian approach. In addition, I explain how the use of masks merges with sensibilities that are developing at the time, such as the notion of aestheticism, the fear of and fascination with the exotic, the assimilation of Darwinist theories, the notion of degeneration and of a declining phase in Western civilization. The analyses leads to the conclusions that, in all these texts, the mask becomes a trope for a potentially threatening alterity. The act of recognizing one’s mask coincides with a process of self knowledge, and is linked to the awareness of an uncomfortable resemblance with a dangerous, often “exotic” Other which is reflected in the repressed component of one’s self, but which is also an image of estrangement felt by the individual in a time of rapid change.
Italian Internet Terminology: A Corpus Based Approach to Banalised Language
Keywords: Lexicology
Italian
Internet
Corpus Studies

The present study offers strong evidence that the World Wide Web is a unique domain of use that can be categorized as a banalised context based on certain defining criteria. Italian Internet Terminology is worthy of investigation because of its unprecedented extent and rich context of use. The goal of chapter one is to make a case for the utility of a corpus-based study, explain the primary theoretical underpinnings of the study, which I base on the concept of central meaning linked to the compositionality of elements, and give important historical and sociological motivations for such a study . In chapter two, I explain how term are selected and discarded, how my corpus is created, and how it proves suitable and representative of this lexical domain. In the third chapter, I elucidate the classificatory system I employ which allows me to view the lexical items in grammatical context. To gain a better understanding of the conceptual system of the terms studied, I introduce another important analytical framework: qualia structures. In chapter four, the analysis of the morphosyntactic and semantic character of the terminology allows for greater insight into the processes and pattering of denomination of Internet terminology. To conclude this study, I show that Italian Internet terminology is a banalised language governed by a systematic set of morpho-syntactic rules in which Italian selects, uses, and lexicalizes terms based on core units of meaning.
"It's Better to be Bad than Stupid": An Exploratory Study on Resistance and Denial of Special Education Discourses in the Narratives of Street Youth
Keywords: street youth
special education
narratives
resistance

This dissertation study examined and gave voice to the experiences of a group of street involved youth, those who had received special education support and services during their school years. They are not spoken about in the literature. Special education is complex, diverse, and encompasses many exceptional pupils for whom services and supports are provided in the school system. Many street youth belong to this group with exceptionalities such as learning disability, mild intellectual disability or behaviour. Using narrative analysis and structuration theory frameworks, the life history narratives of fifteen street youth who were in special education classes were co-constructed and analysed. In addition, a survey question gathered how many new in-takes at a drop-in for street youth self-identify as youth who were in special education. Furthermore, data was gathered from service providers in education and social services through semi-structured interviews and two focus groups. Youth participants considered citizenship in special education as exclusionary and actively resisted it because of the social connotations such as ‘being stupid’ which were attached to it. Youth emphasized that teachers and support staff seemed unaware of the complex environmental factors that impacted on their ability to be successful in school. They reported that once they were formally identified and placed in special education, they were put in a holding pattern that often did not lead to graduation. Special education was focused on classifications according to deficit discourses rather than engaging these students in learning or in having their identified learning needs met. Although study participants dropped out of school a number of times, they kept returning either to complete secondary school or enroll in college, mostly without special education designation and supports. Service providers, educators and special services staff should mentor such youth, provide opportunities for addressing learning problems, and deliver quality instruction for students with identified learning difficulties and needs. There is a dearth of alternative and transitional post-secondary programs to meet the specific needs of these students.
Spiritualité et réalisme merveilleux dans la littérature caribéenne francophone: la (re)construction d'une identité
Keywords: Marvellous Realism
French Caribbean Literature
Spirituality
Identity

Si pour les ethnographes les mythes sont essentiels à la survie de toute société, cela pose problème quand on considère la Caraïbe et la rupture de l’esclavage. Une étude de la littérature antillaise réaliste merveilleuse nous montre que si les romans sont imprégnés par la spiritualité et le folklore, nous n’y trouvons aucun mythe des origines. Comment une société peut-elle subsister sans ces éléments fondamentaux ? Combinant une approche mythocritique à une mythanalyse des oeuvres d’auteurs antillais contemporains, nous émettons cette hypothèse : en s’inspirant de multiples héritages, ils se constituent une identité par la reconstruction de mythes spécifiquement antillais. Vu l’absence de romans antillais contemporains dans les études du magical realism et du réalisme merveilleux, notre première partie explore ce dernier concept pour en proposer une nouvelle catégorisation : le réalisme mystique. Notre deuxième partie examine les principes narratifs des romans en se demandant comment les auteurs parviennent à concilier un double héritage oralité/écriture et à sauvegarder leur identité. Notre dernière partie illustre enfin comment, par l’utilisation de schémas mythique spécifiques et un recentrement sur l’île natale, les textes mettent en place sa (re)mythisation.Cette étude permet la mise à jour de nouveaux paradigmes dans la littérature antillaise contemporaine. Elle montre comment le réalisme mystique est une modalité rattachée au magical realism qui, combinant réalisme historico ethnographique et folklore local, s’applique spécifiquement à la région des Antilles. Dépassant l’impossibilité théorique de transition de l’oralité vers l’écriture, nous révélons aussi que l’utilisation de l’ « oraliture » par les écrivains et le rôle de « guerriers de l’imaginaire » associé à certains d’entre eux propose une harmonisation oralité/écriture de même qu’une sauvegarde identitaire. Enfin, nous voyons qu’un certain nombre de romans réalistes mystiques proposent, outre une mise à distance de l’Afrique et de la France, un nouveau mythe originel centré sur la traversée de l’océan et un passage matriciel par la cale des négriers. Nous voyons également comment, loin de territoires d’acculturation comme les plantations, les auteurs développent une restructuration mythique de l’espace, notamment par une mise en valeur de la nature primordiale devenue propice à une renaissance identitaire.