VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Victimhood and Socio-legal Narratives of Hate Crime Against Queer Communities in Canada, 1985-2003
Keywords: hate crime
victimhood
LGBT
gay/lesbian
psychoanalysis
narrative

This dissertation analyzes personal and institutional narratives that shape the Canadian phenomenon of anti-LGBT violence as hate crime and locate queers within and without the discursive figure of the responsible, legitimate and undeserving victim of hate crime. These socio-legal narratives were taken from interviews with LGBT community activists involved in anti-violence projects, mainstream and gay print news media reportage of two notable homicides, Parliamentary debates of the enhanced sentencing provision that sought to include ‘sexual orientation’ to the list of biased motivating factors, Senate witness testimony on the amendment to Canada’s hate propaganda statutes which sought to include ‘sexual orientation’ to the list of protected groups, interviews with police officers who had direct experience with anti-hate crime initiatives, and judicial reasons for sentence. Utilizing an interdisciplinary analysis and drawing on hate crime scholarship and victimology, this dissertation asks: how is legitimate and, consequently, illegitimate LGBT hate crime victimization being represented and constituted through Canadian socio-legal narratives? In revealing how socio-legal actors and institutions have positioned LGBT individuals discursively within or without legitimate victimhood, that is, within and without the status of innocent victim deserving of social empathy and socio-legal institutional response, my dissertation illustrates how the spectre of illegitimate victimization is repeatedly invoked in socio-legal narratives of anti-LGBT hate crime. My analysis of these narratives about queer victimization and hate crime suggests that the figure of the responsible, legitimate and undeserving victim of hate crime remains an elusive and unstable identity for the queer victim of hate crime. Insofar as hate crime scholars have argued that the mobilization of hate crime activism has produced a victim whose hate crime status ensures its legitimacy, I contribute to this scholarship by arguing that this status is particularly challenging for the queer victim of hate-motivated violence. I demonstrate that the resiliency of the figure of classic victimology’s self-endangering and risky ‘homosexual’ and the sustained ideological resistence to LGBT individuals as full citizens, despite their notable legal gains, positions LGBT individuals, particularly gay men, ambiguously, situating them conceptually both without and within legitimate victimhood.
Identification of Genetic Loci that Contribute to the Immunopathogenesis of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus using Congenic Mouse Strains
Keywords: Lupus
Congenic

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune disorder that is characterized by the production of antibodies directed against self-antigens, such as nuclear components. Genetic analyses of lupus patients have consistently demonstrated a complex genetic basis for disease susceptibility that involves multiple genes. Identifying genes and pathways that promote disease genesis has been aided by murine studies. In particular, congenic mouse studies that examine the role of chromosomal intervals from inbred lupus-prone mouse strains on a non-autoimmune background have been useful in dissecting the genetic contribution of novel susceptibility loci in lupus pathogenesis. In this thesis, the role of New Zealand Black (NZB) chromosomes 4 and 13 are examined in non-lupus prone C57BL/6 (B6) congenic mouse strains, denoted B6.NZBc4 and B6.NZBc13, respectively. Although repeatedly mapped to contain disease augmenting alleles,NZBc4 alone was not sufficient to initiate disease, despite an expansion of NKT and B1a cells–both with controversial pathogenic roles in lupus. Instead, by crossing the B6.NZBc4 mouse with another congenic mouse strain that develops fatal lupus autoimmunity, NZBc4 was unexpectedly found to contain a suppressor locus; disease suppression was mediated by a shift away from pathogenic immunoglobulin isotypes and associated with changes in the NKT and B1a cell compartments. In contrast to the NZBc4 locus, the NZBc13 locus is sufficient to initiate polyclonal B cell activation, ANA production and mild GN, similar to NZB mice. A B cell intrinsic defect was found to be responsible for initiating the abnormal cellular phenotype in B6.NZBc13 mice. Functional analyses of the B cell subset in B6.NZBc13 mice revealed normal BCR-signaling responses and tolerance mechanisms; however, they were hyper-responsive to TLR3 stimulation, resulting in increased survival and proliferation. Thus, the study of these NZB congenic mouse strains has been instrumental in confirming the presence of loci on NZB chromosomes 4 and 13 that modulate the development of disease and highlights that disease onset is mediated by a balance of both susceptibility and suppressor alleles. Collectively, these findings contribute to the current field of lupus immunogenetics and confirm the power of congenic mouse models in understanding the genetic basis of SLE.
El bildungsroman en el Caribe hispano
Keywords: Bildungsroman
Coming of age narratives
National identities
Puerto Rican Literature XXth Century
Cuban Literature XXth Century
Dominican Literature
Hernández, Ángela
Hernández, Rita Indiana
Marqués, René
García Ramis, Magali
Martínez Maldonado, Manuel
Díaz, Jesús
Sarduy, Severo
Soto, Pedro Juan
Spanish Caribbean Literature

This dissertation examines the bildungsroman genre in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. A close examination of the development of this genre demonstrates that it has ideological implications that link the young protagonists’ development with that of the nation. The authors on whom I focus—Ángela Hernández, Rita Indiana Hernández, René Marqués, Pedro Juan Soto, Magali García Ramis, Severo Sarduy, and Jesús Díaz—do not merely imitate the European model but revise, adapt, and often subvert it thematically and, in some cases, aesthetically. I argue that these bildungsromane differ, for the most part, from the European prototype due to their openly political themes, such as the establishment of the Estado Libre Asociado in Puerto Rico, the 1959 Revolution in Cuba, and, in the case of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo’s dictatorship. I claim that Dominican bildungsromane do not propose national projects or models but rather question the purported homogeneity of identity of the country as a normalized political body. On the other hand, in Cuba and Puerto Rico the genre has been used to promote absolute discourses of nationality as well as political projects that must be questioned due to their discriminatory and sometimes racist and violent nature.
Charge Transfer Processes in the Excited Dynamics of II-VI Semiconductor Nanocrystals
Keywords: Nanocrystal
Type-II
Spectroscopy
Charge Transfer

In large molecular systems such as DNA, supramolecular complexes and dendrimers, functional groups located at different parts of the molecular structure can act as charge donors or acceptors, and photoinduced intramolecular charge transfer can occur. An analogous scenario can be found in colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals, most evident in type-II heterostructures, where the relative band-alignment of the constituent materials are in a stagger configuration. Such a configuration, provides an energetically favourable situation for an photo-generated electron to be transferred from one material to the other, confining the electron and the hole in different domains of the nanostructure. A less obvious scenario in nanocrystals is when the core is thought of as the donor group, and the surface as the acceptor group. In such a scenario, the localization of electron or hole at surface defect sites, a process that occurs in every nanocrystal, can be thought of as an ``intramolecular" charge transfer. The studies presented in this dissertation are an attempt to further understand charge transfer processes in semiconductor nanostructures, in particular, those occurring within the same nanocrystals. This is carried out by a combination of spectroscopic techniques and modelling. First, time-resolved fluorescence measurements are used to investigated surface trapping/de-trapping dynamics in CdSe and CdSe/CdS/ZnS core/shell/shell quantum dots. A kinetic model, in which trapping/de-trapping is described with Marcus' classical electron transfer theory, is used to analyzed our results, yielding excellent agreement between model and experiment. Second, the influence of temperature and solvent environment in the optical spectra of CdSe/CdTe nanorods are examined. Solvatochromic shifts in these heterostructures are found to be larger than those observed in core-only quantum dots. Finally, ultrafast dynamics and biexciton states in CdSe/CdTe quantum dots are probed using two-dimensional optical spectroscopy. The fine structure of the lowest exciton and biexciton states are calculated for a model system with type-II band-alignment and simulations of 2D spectra are performed.
William James and the Force of Habit
Keywords: James, William
habit
agency
democracy

By paying attention to the habitual register of politics this dissertation has sought to contribute to the theoretical literature on democratic citizenship. More precisely, I offer a more complex account the moral psychology of political agency presumed by the turn to ethics within democratic theory. The central question of this dissertation is how do citizens come to feel empowered to act on their convictions in politics? Political theorists often celebrate civic action as spontaneity and willfulness, and at the same time lament the agency-foreclosing complexity and fragmentation of late-modern politics. Drawing out this tension in Michel Foucault’s analysis of docility and transgression I argue that a middle path between disembodied autonomy and docile passivity is articulated in the moral psychology found in William James’s account of habit. The study makes this case by looking at three episodes of the foreclosure and recovery of action in James’s thinking: his engagement with Darwinian science and his nervous breakdown in the 1870’s and 80’s; his critique of democratic docility and debate on strenuousness with Theodore Roosevelt during the Spanish-American war; and the cynical adaptation of James’s psychology by the democratic realism of Walter Lippmann in the 1920’s. In each case I argue that James’s lively account of habit as a force of unruly spontaneity functions as a therapy of action against feelings of powerlessness, docility, and incompetence constrain democratic conviction. The result is at once a novel continuation of the American tradition of democratic individualism and a contribution to the contemporary debates on the democratic ethics of self-making.
Effect of Innate Immune Collectin Surfactant Protein D and Adaptive Immune Protein IgM on Enhancing Clearance of Late Apoptotic Cells by Alveolar Macrophages
Keywords: lung
collectin
SP-D
IgM
alveolar macrophage
apoptotic cell
surfactant
lung disease
innate immune
natural IgM
clearance
phagocytosis
inflammation
small particle

The innate immune protein surfactant protein (SP-) D is a carbohydrate binding protein that was originally isolated from mucosal lung tissues. Recently, studies show that SP-D binds to antibodies, including immunoglobulin M (IgM), which interacts with late apoptotic cells. Here we focus on the interaction between SP-D and IgM as they pertain to late apoptotic cell clearance. We hypothesized that the three-way interaction between IgM, SP-D and late apoptotic cells is functionally applicable to clearing late apoptotic cells from the lungs, thereby reducing lung inflammation. We show that SP-D binds to IgM and that IgM binds to the late apoptotic subclass of dying cells. We demonstrate that IgM and SP-D can both bind to late apoptotic cells in mutually distinct regions while also displaying some regional overlap. We show evidence that during LPS-induced lung inflammation both IgM and SP-D levels are elevated and this corresponds to an augmentation of apoptotic cell clearance. We illustrate that the protein interaction of IgM and SP-D is functionally relevant to apoptotic cell clearance in the lungs by showing that late apoptotic cells coated in IgM and/or SP-D are cleared more efficiently than control cells, by alveolar macrophages in vivo. Our ex vivo studies further show that these cells internalize apoptotic cells by engulfing very small particles released from the dying cells. We then showed that IgM preferentially directs the engulfment of small particles (~1 μm) by macrophages, in an apparent size-specific antibody-dependent particle clearance function. Our data reveals a novel relationship amongst IgM, SP-D, apoptotic cells, and alveolar macrophages that contributes to our understanding of apoptotic cell clearance, which may be used in the future to generate strategies addressing apoptotic cell accumulation or clearance deficiency in disease.
A Climate Model of the Deep (Neoproterozoic) Past
Keywords: Snowball Earth
Neoproterozoic
Paleoclimate
Carbon cycle

It has been commonly recognized that a series of global glaciation events occurred during the late Neoproterozoic Era (800 - 540 million years ago (Ma)). However, the extent of these glaciations continues to be hotly debated, namely whether the whole Earth was ice covered (ie. a “hard snowball”) or only the continents were fully ice covered but the oceans were not (“slushball/soft snowball”). Through a combination of climate modeling and carbon cycle modeling, I have investigated the plausibility of the “soft snowball” Earth hypothesis. It is demonstrated that the flow of land ice is critical to the formation of a “soft snowball”, such that low latitude land ice must be generated through ice transported from high latitudes. In order for a climate state of this kind to be realizable, continental fragments at low latitude must be well connected to those at high latitude, and the high latitude continents must be sufficiently extensive that a large ice sheet may initiate and subsequently flow to low latitude. It is found that these constraints are satisfied by the most accurate available continental reconstruction for both the initial Sturtian glaciation of the late Neoproterozoic and the subsequent Marinoan event. It is furthermore proposed that the alternative “hard snowball” hypothesis would have been prevented by a negative feedback due to the enhanced remineralization of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in the ocean due to increased oxygen solubility in seawater at lower temperature. This process would release CO2 to the atmosphere, thus counteracting the initial climate cooling. I have also carried out detailed simulations in which an explicit model of the carbon cycle is coupled to the ice-sheet coupled climate model to investigate this feedback quantitatively. It is found that the remineralization of the DOC does indeed provide a strong negative feedback that counteracts climate cooling. The action of this feedback not only prevents the descent of the climate into a hard snowball state, but also enables the model to re-produce the δ13C carbon isotopic anomalies observed to accompany Neoproterozoic glacial events. The resistance of this carbon cycle coupled climate system to descent into a “hard snowball” state is further tested against stochastic perturbations, and shown to be robust in the presence of such influence.
Expansion and Equality in Access to Chinese Higher Education: A Cultural Perspective
Keywords: higher education
equality
access
China
cultural analysis
indigenous

This study is a sequential multi-methods research effort which examines the issue of equality in Chinese higher education after the recent expansion, and explores how educational equality has been shaped by policies which reflected the shifting value orientations of the government since 1949. Quantitative methods were used to discover the current patterns of educational equality. The dataset is derived from a survey carried out under a project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Logistic regressions were conducted to discover the relations between students’ social background characteristics and their likelihood of studying in different part of the differentiated higher education system. The findings show that while overall access has increased greatly, advantaged groups have maintained their advantage in gaining entry to higher status universities and attractive disciplines. The study went deeper to explore the changing patterns of educational equality through historical analysis of policy using the lens of culture, since social phenomena are context-based and culture is a deep yet decisive force which has previously been given inadequate attention in relation to this issue. Applying a multidisciplinary approach, an indigenous analytical framework was developed which identified six dimensions of culture relating to educational equality, and Chinese cultural values were then organized along these dimensions. This framework was used to explain the results of the quantitative analysis at a deeper level. It was also used to construct ideal types of elitism and populism as a means of analyzing the historical process of policy change. The study found that policies regarding educational equality swung between these two poles in post 1949 China, due to an internal tension in the Chinese cultural value system which was in turn stimulated or provoked by diverse external influences. Four major modes were identified: politically restrained elitism, politically restrained populism, inclusive elitism, and a tendency toward harmony. This approach represents an original attempt to develop an indigenous framework to interpret educational equality through a cultural lens. The dissertation also seeks to contribute to knowledge and theory development in the comparative research on educational equality more widely, and to provide insights that may inform policy making.
Solute-solvent Interactions in Folded and Unfolded Proteins
Keywords: volumetric properties
solute-solvent interactions

This thesis is devoted to understanding solute-solvent interactions in folded and unfolded proteins. To this end, we have studied partial molar volume, Vo, and adiabatic compressibility, KoS, of 20 amino acid side chains using low weight molecular model compounds, N-acetyl amino acid amide and its derivatives, between 18 oC and 55 oC. We used our data to develop an additive scheme for calculating the partial specific volume and adiabatic compressibility of fully extended polypeptide chains as a function of pH and temperature. We compared our calculated volumetric characteristics of the fully extended conformations of apocytochrome c and apomyoglobin with the experimental values measured in neutral pH (for apocytochrome c) or acidic pH (for apomyoglobin). The comparison between the calculated and experimental volumetric characteristics suggested that neither apocytochrome c nor apomyoglobin are fully unfolded and retain solvent-inaccessible amino acid residues. To study cosolvent-solute interactions, we determined Vo and KoS of amino acid side chains and glycyl units as a function of urea concentration. We analyzed these data within the framework of a statistical thermodynamic formalism to determine the association constants, k, for the reaction in which urea binds to each of the amino acid side chains and the glycyl unit replacing two water molecules in solvation shell. Our determined k range from 0.04 to 0.39 M with the average of 0.16 ± 0.09 M. There was no apparent correlation between the values of k and the ratio of polar to nonpolar solvent accessible surface areas. This study supports a direct interaction model in which urea denatures a protein by concerted action via favorable interactions with a wide range of protein groups. In addition, we have presented buffer ionization effect on the volume of protein denaturation could be significant with the potential to affect not only its magnitude but also its sign using a pressure perturbation calorimetric technique. Our results identified buffer ionization as an important determinant of protein transition volume that needs to be carefully taken into account. Results described in this work provide fundamental understanding of solute-solvent interaction in both folded and unfolded proteins.
Adsorption of Alkaline Copper Quat Components in Wood-mechanisms and Influencing Factors
Keywords: ACQ
Alkaline copper quat
amine
chemisorption
cation exchange capacity
copper precipitation
hydrophobic interaction
ion exchange
ligand exchange
micelle
physisorption
Quat
quaternary ammonium compound
wood preservatives

Mechanisms of adsorption of alkaline copper quat (ACQ) components in wood were investigated with emphasis on: copper chemisorption, copper physisorption, and quat adsorption. Various factors were investigated that could affect the adsorption of individual ACQ components in red pine wood. Copper chemisorption in wood was affected by ligand types coordinating with Cu and the stability of the Cu-ligand complexes in solution. For Cu-monoethanolamine (Cu-Mea) system, the prevailing active solvent species at the solution pH, [Cu(Mea)2-H]+ complexes with wood acid sites and loses one Mea molecule through a ligand exchange reaction. The amount of adsorbed Cu was closely related to the cation exchange capacity of wood. An increase in Mea/Cu ratio increased the proportion of the uncharged Cu-Mea complex and resulted in decreased Cu chemisorption in wood. Copper precipitation is also an important Cu fixation mechanisms of Cu-amine treated wood. X-ray diffraction analysis revealed that in vitro precipitated Cu was a mixture of copper carbonates (azurite and malachite) and possibly Cu2O. Higher concentration Cu-amine solutions retarded the Cu precipitation to a lower pH because of higher free amine in the preservative-wood system. The changes in zeta potential of wood in relationship to the quaternary ammonium (alkyldimethylbenzylammonium chloride: ADBAC) adsorption isotherm showed two different adsorption mechanisms for quat in wood: ion exchange reaction at low concentration and additional aggregation form of adsorption by hydrophobic interaction at high concentration. Because of the aggregation effect, when wood was treated with ACQ, high amounts of ADBAC were concentrated near the surface creating a steep gradient with depth. This aggregated ADBAC was easily leached out while the ion exchanged ADBAC had high leaching resistance. Free Mea and Cu of ACQ components appeared to compete with ADBAC for the same bonding sites in wood.