VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
When Safe Spaces aren’t Safe: Understanding the Relationship between Organizational Characteristics and Service User Experiences of Oppression in Social Service Organizations
Keywords: anti-oppressive practice
exploitation
marginalization
nonprofit management
service user oppression
social service organization

Introduction: Social service organizations (SSOs) can be sites of oppression, where service users experience discrimination judgment, and powerlessness. In response, service users either leave, never receiving the care that they need, or they remain, internalizing the oppression, becoming disempowered and dependent. This is devastating for both service users and society. It can contribute to loss of housing, relapse and substance use, social isolation, and deterioration of mental and physical health. This three-paper dissertation explores service user experiences of oppression by SSOs to better understand how organizational dynamics contribute to these outcomes. Methods: This study used an explanatory sequential mixed methods design using survey (n=374) and focus group (n=66) data. Paper 1 tested the validity and reliability of the Service User Oppression Scale (SUOS). Paper 2, evaluated the relationship between organizational characteristics and service user oppression and the validity and reliability of the Anti-Oppressive Social Service Organizational Environment Scale to assess an organization’s alignment with anti-oppressive practice. Paper 3 drew on findings from the focus groups on oppression within service user and staff relationships. Results: Paper 1 found the SUOS is a valid and reliable measure of service user oppression. The rate of oppression was 84.8%, with 60.9% of participants experiencing multiple forms of oppression. In Paper 2 staff retention, physical accessibility, service user participation, and relationship between staff and service users were found to decrease service user experiences of oppression while perceived higher levels of cultural competency was found to lead to higher experiences of oppression. Age and gender were associated with service user experiences of oppression. In Paper 3, the role of staff in service user oppression was highlighted, alongside the impact of oppression on service users and recommendations to prevent oppression. Conclusions: This dissertation provides a foundation to understanding service user oppression in SSOs from the perspective of service users and insight into the rate of service user oppression, the forms of oppression experienced and valid and reliable assessment tools to measure both service user experiences of oppression and an organization’s level of anti-oppressive practice. Finally, it provides recommendations to reduce and prevent service user oppression.
Scarecrows of the State: An Ethnography of Security Checkpoints in Contemporary Baghdad
Keywords: Baghdad
checkpoints
ethnography
Iraq
security
the state

Hundreds of checkpoints continue to dot Baghdad’s streetscapes nearly two decades after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. But these installations are widely deemed by the city’s residents and security personnel alike as incapable of engendering urban security. Why do checkpoints in Baghdad persist despite strong and lethal evidence of their ineffectiveness? What effects are being produced by these checkpoints if security is not one of them? This dissertation argues that even while struggling to produce the security they are intended to instil, Baghdad’s checkpoints remain generative of the entity deemed responsible for their failure: the state. This study extends Timothy Mitchell’s concept of the “state effect” through three conceptual lenses: performativity, topology and affect. Checkpoints give rise to routine security performances, social interactions and affective attachments amongst all who encounter them. These everyday forces help comprise mechanisms of power working to conjure the state through the checkpoint, and in turn show how the state is not an axiomatic entity but rather an unsteady collection of practices, relations and feelings. This dissertation is based on more than fifteen months of ethnographic research in Iraq, including two months of participant observation carried out at two respective checkpoints in the Baghdad districts of Karada and Mansour. This study also documents the history and evolution of the city’s checkpoints by putting written primary sources, including military and human rights reports, in conversation with ethnographic fieldwork. While this study is rooted in the field of comparative politics, I draw on theoretical and methodological contributions from anthropology, geography and cultural studies to further advance my arguments. Examining how the state is effected even as ‘it’ appears to be failing at providing security helps reveal the extent to which the constant production of political authority remains inescapable—even, or perhaps especially, when it lets us down.
Devotion in Colonial Islam: Representations of Muḥammad in Urdu Sīra (1842–1914)
Keywords: Islamic Studies
Prophet Muhammad
Religious Biography
Sira Literature
South Asia
Urdu Literature

This dissertation is a study of three compositions of the sīra (biography of the Prophet Muḥammad), a centuries-old tradition by which Muslims have recorded the memory of their beloved Prophet and expressed religious devotion. The texts are the Jilāʾ al-Qulūb bi-Ẕikr al-Maḥbūb (1842) and al-Khut̤bāt al-Aḥmadīyah (1870) by Sir Sayyid Aḥmad Ḵẖān (1817-98), and the Sīrat al-Nabī (1914) by Shiblī Nuʿmānī (1857-1914). These little-studied Urdu works are examined in light of the significant political changes that occurred in nineteenth-century North India alongside new movements to vernacularize religious literature and rapid developments in print technology. By studying the forces that the authors encountered in composing Muḥammad’s life story that could, on the one hand, satisfy a modernizing Muslim population and, on the other, respond to Orientalist scholarship on Islam this dissertation examines the innovations that were introduced to convey the age-old sīra tradition in Urdu. Chapter One outlines the significant changes in the nineteenth-century experiences of Islam in South Asia and their impact on the traditional functions performed by the sīra. The changes included the reorganization of religious institutions, adjustments to the significance of the figure of Muḥammad, and modifications in the understanding of the concepts of religion, historiography, and biography. Chapter Two presents an analysis of the Jilāʾ, and argues that in addition to being a devotional work it displays reforms to the genre which challenge a predominant historiographical claim that these types of religious reforms were not instituted until after the 1857 Rebellion. Chapter Three presents an analysis of the Khut̤bāt, including an examination of how time is represented in Sir Sayyid’s writings. The chapter argues that Sir Sayyid’s conception of time disrupts the author’s aims of reconfiguring the representation of the figure of Muḥammad, for instance by the appearance of supernatural characteristics, not bound to place and time. Chapter Four examines Shiblī Nuʿmānī’s Sīrat al-Nabī by illustrating the challenges that “salvation history” presented to the composition of a sīra in the modern era and also addresses the role that conceptions of gender played in Nuʿmānī’s depiction of Muḥammad in narratives related to the Prophet’s wives.
Anomalous Bodies: Representations of Deformities in Children in Britain, 1740-1790
Keywords: 18th Century
Britain
Childhood
Children
History of Medicine

My dissertation examines the representation of anomalous bodies of children in 18th century Britain. Using the category of ‘deformity’, defined during this period as a lack of virtue, ugliness, and irregularity of the body, it considers how the 18th century child is represented in each of these areas. I argue that the bodies of children participate in the construction of the defective body as defined in the 18th century, but that this participation does not always conform to the dominant historical narrative that children are seen as medically unique from adults. Using a wide range of sources, including archival materials and published texts from different genres that present the physically anomalous child in different arenas, including the prescriptive literature, child labour, physical growth, and anatomy, I show that perceptions of, responses to, and the understanding of their physical differences was influenced by the cultural and medical worlds of the period. Children, I show, were special and the knowledge gained from observing them contributed to information about the broader adult world they inhabited and not just the world of children. My thesis lies at the intersection of the history of childhood, medicine, and disability. Through my analysis of the prescriptive literature that constructed the “ideal” child as free of or cured of their deformity, the dual representation of childhood in chimney sweeps in texts and images, the numerical gauging of irregular growth in children, and the use of child and foetal cadavers in anatomical pursuits, I show the defective body of the child calls into question the strengthening boundaries that separate the child from the adult during the 18th century and suggest the history of children’s medicine requires a more nuanced approach. The defective body of the child, therefore, brings into focus the nature of the connection between the worlds of children and adults during the 18th century.
Interrogation of the Non-small Cell Lung Carcinoma Proteome Landscape Uncovers Proteotypes and an ACO2-Iron Axis associated with Tumor Aggressiveness and Patient Outcomes
Keywords: Engraftment
iron homeostasis
patient-derived xenografts
Proteomics

Tumor engraftment in immunodeficient mice is an independent indicator of poor prognosis in early-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). We hypothesized that a shared molecular mechanism among the engrafting tumors allow for engraftability. To develop biological and clinically meaningful insights, this work aimed to first identify and verify the molecular mechanism responsible for engraftment by comparing the proteome of engrafting (XG) and non-engrafting (Non-XG) primary NSCLC tumors and second to annotate the scope of molecular heterogeneity that exists within the more aggressive XG tumors through proteome classification of NSCLC patient-derived xenografts (PDXs). Proteome comparison of XG and Non-XG primary tumors revealed a signature of 12 metabolism proteins that predict engraftment. Low level expression of mitochondrial aconitase (ACO2) protein was the strongest single predictor of engraftment. Consistently, knockdown of ACO2 in normal lung fibroblasts increased the cell proliferation and colony formation. While ectopic expression of ACO2 in H226 NSCLC cells inhibited cell proliferation in vitro and tumor growth in vivo. ACO2’s proliferative role was associated with modulation of iron homeostasis by controlling the delivery of mitochondrial iron-sulphur clusters to cytosolic aconitase through CISD1. Insufficient cytosolic iron sulphur clusters maintenance results in an iron starvation response, leading to increased iron, iron toxicity and consequent cell death. The data suggest a model wherein lower iron level provides the appropriate signal for the stromal cells to support the growth and engraftment of tumor cells. The scope of heterogeneity among the engraftable subset was also assessed by tumor proteome profiling of PDXs. This resolved the known major histological subtypes, and 3 proteome subtypes (proteotypes) within lung adenocarcinoma and 2 in squamous cell carcinoma were further identified. These identified proteotypes were associated with different patient outcomes, protein-phosphotyrosine profiles, candidate targets, and in adenocarcinoma, distinct stromal immune features including a higher acute phase response (APR) in the proteotype with the worst survival. As many APR proteins have important roles in reducing the iron environment, the possibility of APR involvement in the lower iron observed in the more aggressive XG tumors is discussed in the final chapter of the thesis.
“Farre More Then Himselfe”: Figures of Women’s Friendship in Early Modern England
Keywords: early modern
friendship
Shakespeare
Spenser
women writers
Wroth

This dissertation uncovers how women become visible as friends in early modern literature through acts of imaginative invitation and poetic creation. My project intervenes in a critical discourse largely focused on men’s relationships to expand our understanding of friendship as a gendered phenomenon in the period, reading works across the genres of drama, romance, and poetry by both male and female authors. I explore the way that isolated female speakers take ownership of the ethical and performative layers of friendship, analyzing the strategies and figures they use to rework the utopian vision of friendship and define a space for themselves to speak.Historicizing texts by Shakespeare, Spenser, Wroth, and Whitney alongside other early modern sources published in England, I show how early modern women claim participation in the term “friend,” which signifies broadly across a spectrum that runs from the intimate commitments of ideal friendship to the utilitarian economic benefits of patronage. Each of these case studies confronts how the discourse of amicitia falls short for early modern women in its exclusionary masculinity and unrealistic idealism, and provides an amplified set of narratives for how friendship can be made. Rhetorical and literary performances are means for the exemplary female friends of my study to establish themselves as subjects in friendship—once “authors,” so also “friends.” The first part of my dissertation tracks how memory and imagination offer modes of transforming the present: Emilia (The Two Noble Kinsmen) and Celia (As You Like It) shape fresh realizations of friendship by recalling distant pasts, while Britomart and Amoret (The Faerie Queene) imagine an alternate future to transform discord to friendship. The second part examines poetry that acts as a placeholder in friendship’s absence and articulates its authors’ need for real companionship: Urania and Pamphilia (Urania) invoke echoic voices from the natural world, while Isabella Whitney (A sweet Nosgay) invites readers to share her relationship with her garden-text. These case studies illustrate how early modern women might claim the discourse of friendship, revealing dynamic models of female friendship that go beyond the masculine mythologies of amicitia.
Unravelling Mechanisms of Repeat Expansions and Pathogenesis in Neurodegenerative Repeat Diseases
Keywords: DNA damage response
Genetic instability
Huntington Disease
Repeat Diseases
Replication protein A
Spinocerebellar Ataxia

More than 50 neurodegenerative diseases are caused by expansions of repetitive DNA tracts. This includes Huntington disease (HD), spinocerebellar ataxia type 1 (SCA1), and dentatorubral–pallidoluysian atrophy (DRPLA), caused by gene-specific repetitive CAG/CTG expansions. Expansion size is linked with disease age-of-onset, severity, and progression. Patients exhibit continued somatic expansions as they age, accelerating neurodegeneration and disease manifestation. The molecular mechanisms which control this process are still unclear. DNA repair proteins are known to participate by processing mutagenic slipped-DNA structures formed at expansions, however the breadth of proteins involved, and their exact functional roles, are largely unknown. Here, we assess a role for two single-stranded DNA binding protein complexes (evolutionarily conserved RPA and the primate-specific Alt-RPA) on CAG/CTG expansions and pathogenesis. We found that both were differentially upregulated in post-mortem HD and SCA1 patients. In vitro repair and melting revealed that RPA enhances, and Alt-RPA inhibits, slipped-CAG melting and repair. BioID protein-protein association analysis reveals that RPA interacts with a multitude of DNA repair proteins, while Alt-RPA does not. Overexpression of RPA in SCA1 mouse brains leads to suppression of somatic expansions and rescue of molecular, motor, and behavioural disease phenotypes. We conclude that RPA is protective against somatic expansions and disease, while Alt-RPA is likely promoting them. We also characterise a small-molecule, Naphthyridine-Azaquinolone (NA), which specifically binds slipped-CAG structures. We found that NA specifically induces contractions of expanded CAG repeats in HD and DRPLA mouse brains, with no observable off-target or cytotoxic effects - the first compound that can induce contractions of any expanded repeat. NA-mediated contractions lead to rescue of molecular, motor, and behavioural disease phenotypes in HD and DRPLA mice. NA also rescues spontaneously elevated levels of DNA damage and DNA damage response proteins in HD, SCA1, and CDM1 patient-derived fibroblasts. We discover that some of these proteins (prominently ATM and RFC1) are active participants in expansions. Overall, this work reveals a role for several proteins in somatic expansions, further links somatic instability to pathogenesis, and characterises the first small-molecule that can elicit contractions of an expanded repeat, highlighting its potential for further therapeutic development.
Exploiting Caenorhabditis elegans as a Discovery Platform to Identify Nematode Parasiticides that Act Through Neuromuscular Disruption
Keywords: anthelmintic
antiparasitic
caenorhabditis elegans
egg laying
nematicide
parasiticide

Nematodes that parasitize humans, non-human animals and plants are an underappreciated burden to human health, food security and economic development. The compounds that rid animals and plants of parasitic nematode infections, termed nematode parasiticides, are tremendously important for human development. The emergence of genetic resistance and warranted restriction on the use of toxic parasiticides beckon the development of a new generation of effective compounds to combat nematode parasites. Most nematode parasiticides developed to date act through neuromuscular disruption. this is an effective strategy as several behaviours that are essential for maintaining a state of parasitism including feeding, reproduction, and attachment to host tissues rely on neuromuscular function. The non-parasitic nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has emerged as a powerful biological study model. The neuromuscular biology of C. elegans is well conserved with nematode parasites of plants and animals. Here, I describe my efforts towards identifying and characterizing novel parasiticidal compounds using Caenorhabditis elegans as a discovery model. I first exploited C. elegans egg-laying behaviour to identify small-molecules that disrupt C. elegans neuromuscular function. I identified two scaffolds that disrupt C. elegans neuromuscular function that also demonstrate potent activity against nematode parasites of animals and plants. The first scaffold that I describe, wact-55, disrupts nematode motor behaviours by eliciting the release of neurotransmitter containing vesicles through yet uncovered mechanisms. Wact-55 demonstrates a strong synergistic interaction with inhibitors of acetylcholinesterase, an established class of nematode parasiticides. The second scaffold that I describe, wact-45, is an inhibitor of the vesicular acetylcholine transporter that flaccidly paralyzed nematodes. Wact-45 synergistically kills C. elegans with the most commercially successful nematode parasiticide ivermectin. Thus, I have identified two novel parasiticide scaffolds that may prove useful for combatting nematode parasites that plague humans.
Collusive Critique: Paranoid Reading and Contemporary American Literature
Keywords: Contemporary American Literature
Ecocriticism
Genre
Paranoia
Race and Ethnicity
Theories of Reading

My dissertation argues that recent deployments of paranoia in American literature enable new paradigms for paranoid reading and epistemology. With the advent of Trumpism and the public visibility of conspiracy theory groups like QAnon, what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style” has once again taken centre stage in the American political theatre. At the same time, inspired by Eve Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” the current methodological debates in literary studies continue to negotiate the merits of paranoid practices of critical reading in the forms of critique and the hermeneutics of suspicion. The dissertation argues that paranoia’s unique conceptual lexicon and discursive force makes it a powerful tool for conceptualizing and contesting some of the most pressing problematics of our time: the structures of anti-Black racism, climate change denial, repressive surveillance apparatuses, and nascent forms of late capitalist commodification. My first chapter argues that the Black protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist rejuvenates older forms of paranoid detection to mobilize a roster of racialized styles of paranoia that contain the tools for perceiving and dismantling the structures of anti-Black racism. Chapter Two argues that, whereas Don DeLillo’s Libra uses conspiracy thinking to ascribe cosmic significance to an embattled and precarious white male hegemony, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog represents anti-Black violence as a form of political assassination that must be understood as conspiratorial. In the third chapter, I argue that Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange deploys the precepts of paranoid thought to give readers a unique purchase on the ongoing anthropogenic eco-apocalypse. The dissertation’s final chapter interrogates how two novels about consumer capitalism—William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt—counteract hegemonic and racializing forms of surveillance capitalism by undermining the visual logic of commodification. In the dissertation’s coda, I contemplate the simultaneous difficulty and necessity of rejuvenating paranoia in the wake of the Trump presidency, asserting that a kind of collusive critique between reader and text might enable the dismantling of the types of discursive and coercive forms of violence that Trump fomented. Paranoia, I ultimately assert, is itself in need of reparation.