VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Docile Minds: Discursive Implications of Mental Health Policies Related to Young People in Ontario
Keywords: Academic Buoyancy
Challenge
Critical Discourse Analysis
Foucault
Mental Health
Psychological Resilience

This study investigated how administrative interests impact understandings of youth mental health in Ontario’s public education system. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s model of Administrative Control as a theoretical framework and Norman Fairclough’s five-stage method of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a research methodology, this report examined seven (7) policy documents released between 2011 and 2015. These documents include the Ontario secondary school Health and Physical Education curriculum document, two provincial policy documents, a report commissioned by an independent charitable organization, an online resource hosted by a children’s mental health centre, a report commissioned by a national non-profit organization, and a public school board implementation plan. Results of the study revealed a powerful underlying interest in Administrative Control that presents systemic barriers to the development of positive student mental health outcomes. Discursive constructions of youth mental health in Ontario were found to associate mental health with a set of adverse clinical outcomes to be monitored and reported. More specifically, existing discourses were found to (a) prioritize clinical approaches to addressing adverse individual outcomes over developmental approaches to promoting psychological resilience, (b) call for sweeping normalization, to promote simplistic notions of risk and protection, (c) discursively appropriate the concept of mental health through collectivization, and to exclude the role of challenge as a developmental tool. Instead, this study suggests that mental health should be reframed within the context of public education policies as an ongoing developmental process of adjustment to a range of environmental factors. Finally, this study recommends the application of psychological resilience, academic resilience, and academic buoyancy as underlying constructs in the development of future school mental health policies. This study contributes to ongoing discussions about the role of discourse in both reflecting and shaping mental health outcomes among young people in Ontario.
Peter Comestor’s Lectures on the Gospel of Luke and its Glosses (c. 1163-8): A Partial Critical Edition and Study
Keywords: Critical Edition
Gospel of Luke
Latin palaeography
Peter Comestor
Study of the Bible
Twelfth-Century Renaissance

This dissertation studies the Latin biblical lectures of Peter Comestor — a Paris-based scholar who lived and taught in the middle of the twelfth century — through the preparation of a critical edition of his lectures on the Gospel of Luke. Comestor’s corpus of writings formed part of a larger tradition of twelfth-century Latin biblical commentaries that were composed in the cathedral schools of Laon and Paris from roughly 1100 until the University of Paris superseded them around 1215. In recent decades, recognition that the medieval study of the liberal arts and sacred scriptures shared much in terms of didactic approach has led scholarship to revisit a once- common distinction made by modern historians between biblical commentaries and systematic, theological treatises. Emerging research has begun to emphasize the importance of the liberal arts for understanding medieval theology, in whatever literary form, in terms of the generic expectations of classical philology. In order to bolster these efforts to recontextualize the study of the Bible within the broader educational programs of the Latin Middle Ages, I explore Peter Comestor’s lectures on the Gospel of Luke according to one of the informative structures of education that provided continuity across medieval northern France: the methods of literary exposition originally taught in the Roman grammar schools and handed on throughout the Middle Ages in the ‘liberal’ study of the ars grammatica (the art of grammar).My study of Comestor’s Luke lectures, which is enabled by my preliminary work editing the manuscripts containing the writings of Comestor and some of his contemporaries, demonstrates how the lecturers at the cathedral schools of northern France conceived of Christian theology, especially biblical exegesis, as a work of textual criticism. The fact that this scholarly endeavor had as its object the totality of all intelligible reality thus afforded the exegete the right to use the biblical text as an opportunity to teach everything from geometry to canon law. Thus, my research illustrates how liberal arts pedagogies in turn influenced scholars’ conception of Christian theology as sacra pagina (philological exegesis of the Bible) in the decades before the advent of the first European universities.
Understanding Pathways Underlying Inpatient Mortality of Children with Complicated Severe Malnutrition
Keywords: Childhood Malnutrition
Enteropathy
Metabolomics
Proteomics
Statistical Learning
Survival Prediction

Children admitted to hospitals with severe malnutrition are exceptionally vulnerable to death and account for a large proportion of early childhood mortality globally. In low- and middle- income countries, inpatient mortality rates of severely malnourished children remain high, despite implementation of the empirical management guidelines developed by the World Health Organization. Upon hospital admission, this group of children often present with a wide range of life-threatening illnesses and complications, making risk stratification and identification of underlying causes challenging. Severe malnutrition is also associated with concurrences of subclinical conditions, such as metabolic defects and enteric dysfunctions, that may not be clinically addressed but contribute to mortality. However, very few studies have investigated the pathophysiological pathways involved in the mortality of these children.Using medical records and biological samples among children hospitalized with severe malnutrition in African countries, Malawi and Kenya, the present research aimed to (1) identify clinical warning signs associated with inpatient mortality and evaluate their values in monitoring risks over the course of hospitalization, (2) define systemic pathways associated with mortality employing a multi-omic approach, and (3) evaluate the role of intestinal disturbances in mortality. It was found that monitoring the clinical warning signs: hypoglycemia, reduced consciousness, chest indrawing, not able to complete feeds, nutritional edema, diarrhea, and fever, can serve as a valuable tool for assessing children’s mortality risks during hospitalization. Compared to children who were discharged alive, children who died had distinct biomolecular profiles at admission, indicating that altered energy metabolism and systemic inflammation are associated with inpatient death. Furthermore, enteropathy was found to have a partial contributory role in the mortality of severely malnourished children. These findings alter our thinking around management of children hospitalized with severe malnutrition with important implications in providing novel evidence for guideline optimization to ultimately improve survival outcome of vulnerable children.
A Phenomenological Study of Gratitude-based Educational Assessment
Keywords: Assessment
Gift Phenomenology
Gratitude
Holistic Education
Metaphor
Visualization

Although recent studies confirm the benefits of gratitude practices in professional settings, relatively few have explored benefits of gratitude practices for teachers (Griffith, 2016; Howells, 2012). Gratitude practices can conceivably be of value in areas where teachers experience difficult or conflicted emotions, such as assessing and evaluating students’ written work. This study explores the effect of a gratitude practice on assessment of student written work, through a visualization practice in which student writing is imagined as a gift. Specifically, the study explores what teachers experience when they assess student writing alongside a visualization designed by the researcher which metaphorically positions student writing as a gift to teachers. The research question guiding this study is: How do teachers experience the practice of assessment when student writing is metaphorically reimagined as the process of ‘receiving a gift’? In posing this question, the study explores both the teachers’ experiences of the visualization and how it affected their assessment practices and orientations. The methodological framework for this study is transcendental phenomenology (Hycner, 1985) while conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff Johnson, 1980) forms the guiding theoretical framework. Data was drawn from questionnaires and reflective journals of ten secondary and post-secondary teachers. The teachers assessed two separate pieces of student writing, both before and after the guided visualization, for a total of four periods of assessment, and wrote reflections on what they experienced when they reframed assessment as a process of receiving a gift. The study findings indicate that the gift visualization enriched the teachers’ experiences of assessment by fostering a more relaxed approach to assessment; an attitude of discovery and surprise; a growing trust in the student’s inner truths; greater attentiveness to the meaning of the student writing; an enhanced empathy for the students’ intentions and efforts; and, finally, a desire to reciprocate on students’ efforts through extensive feedback. Over time, the guided visualization tended to orient teachers toward a more expressivist approach to assessing student texts, with an enhanced perception of writing as the revealing and expression of a student’s unique voice, rather than an exercise in conformity to established forms and genre.
Life in a Mixed Neighbourhood: Three Essays on Tenure Mix and Sociality in the Redeveloped Regent Park
Keywords: Housing policy
Social mix
Tenure mix
Urban redevelopment

This dissertation comprises three chapters of original empirical research concerning the mixed-tenure redevelopment of Toronto’s Regent Park public housing community. These chapters use survey data from 517 unique respondents in two different surveys to provide the first systematic account of attitudes towards the mixed community among both residents and users of Regent Park’s public spaces. It provides a quantitative complement to the large body of qualitative research that has so far been produced on the redevelopment and contributes to our understanding about how programs of mixed-tenure redevelopment may impact individuals on a range of social, health-related, and economic dimensions. Two chapters are based on data collected in a survey of residents of the redeveloped portions of the neighbourhood and investigate perceptions of stigma and collective efficacy. Another chapter uses data from a street-intercept survey to assess more general attitudes towards the redeveloped neighbourhood among all users of its public spaces. In general, responses to the various survey measures employed are broadly positive, although differences between tenure groups and along certain demographic lines are also apparent. An important contribution of this research is the explicit measurement of variation between individuals and the treatment of this variation as a phenomenon of fundamental interest. It is uniformly the case across chapters in this dissertation that variation between individuals explains vastly more of the observed variation in outcomes than do any other variables considered, helping to contextualize the diversity of experience reported in other research. The findings of this dissertation are broadly consistent with expectations that mixed-tenure redevelopment primarily tend to improve ‘placed-based’ outcomes and provides support for the policy, if expectations are limited to the provision of improved housing and public amenities with relative comity between neighbours rather than meaningful interaction between residents of different tenures.
Characterization and Reconstruction of the RNA-guided Cascade Complex from Escherichia coli
Keywords: CRISPR
E.coli Cascade
multi-protein effector complex
partial Cascade

CRISPR immunity utilizes a wide range of effector complexes in order to target and destroy invading nucleic acids. CRISPR Type I systems employ a multi-subunit protein-RNA complex (termed Cascade), with varying protein composition and activity. They have already been harnessed to regulate cellular metabolism, silence genes, and edit genomes in bacterial and human cells. The E. coli Cascade complex (Type I-E) includes 11-subunits (CasA (Cas8), CasB2 (Cas112), CasC6 (Cas76), CasD (Cas5), and CasE (Cas6)) and 61nt crRNA guide making it a versatile tool for bacteria to safeguard against invading generic elements throughout CRISPR immunity. Cascade shows functional flexibility, with its main function as an effector complex through Protospacer Adjacent Motif (PAM)-specific dsDNA targeting, R-loop formation and Cas3 nuclease recruitment for DNA cleaving. Here I describe the characterization of the minimal E. coli Cascade components required for specific RNA binding, dsDNA targeting, R-loop formation and Cas3 recruitment. I show that all eight nucleotides of the crRNA 5-handle are critical for binding to Cascade and target DNA recognition, whereas most of the 21 nucleotides of the 3-handle (up to 20 nt) were dispensable for Cascade activities. Furthermore, the E. coli Cascade tolerates significant alterations in the crRNA spacer length (32 nt) being able to form functional effector complexes (though with altered stoichiometry) with crRNAs containing either elongated (+ 6 nt) or reduced (-12 nt) spacers. I also show that CasCD (Cas7-5) is the minimal Cascade preparation that can specifically bind Type I-E crRNA at efficiency analogous to full Cascade. Moreover, CasCD (Cas7-5) can be programmed using the crRNA sequence to specifically target dsDNA in a PAM-less manner, with both spacer sequence and repeat handles contributing to DNA targeting specificity, with the former having a greater effect. Cascade reconstitution experiments using purified proteins revealed that both CasA (Cas8) and CasB (Cas11) are needed to achieve the downstream functions of R-loop formation and subsequent Cas3 nuclease recruitment. Together, these results highlight the plasticity of the Cascade-crRNA system and indicate that the E. coli Cascade represents a viable alternative to single-protein effector complexes in developing novel genome editing tools.
Reward Machines
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence
Knowledge Representation
Partial Observability
Reinforcement Learning
Reward Machines
Reward Specification

Reinforcement learning involves the study of how to solve sequential decision-making problems using minimal supervision or prior knowledge. In contrast to most methods for automated decision making, reinforcement learning agents do not require access to a formal description of the problem in order to find optimal solutions. Instead, such agents learn optimal behaviour using a trial-and-error strategy. This learning strategy makes reinforcement learning a strong candidate to tackle real-world problems with complex dynamics. However, there are two core challenges that limit the use of reinforcement learning in the real world: sample efficiency and partial observability. In this dissertation, we tackle these two problems through the creation of reward machines. Reward machines are automata-based representations of a reward function that expose reward structures to the agent. We show that agents can exploit these structures to improve their sample efficiency and their performance under partial observability. In particular, we propose (i) to use decomposition methods and reward shaping to improve sample efficiency based on a given reward machine, and (ii) to use reward machines as external memory and solve partially observable tasks by learning reward machines. In both cases, we provide theoretical and empirical evidence of the benefits of utilizing reward machines to tackle these problems. Finally, we conclude this dissertation with a discussion of the role that reward machines can play in tackling other long-standing problems in reinforcement learning, such as developing agents with interpretable behaviours, providing guarantees that an optimal policy is safe, and creating agents that can understand instructions.
Young Black Men's Embodied Experiences of Traumatic Gun Violence
Keywords: Black male youth
Embodiment
Gun Violence
Masculinity
Systemic Violence
Trauma

This thesis examines the experiences of 10 young Black men who have been impacted by traumatic gun violence either directly through being shot or indirectly by witnessing gun violence in their communities or losing loved ones to gun violence. Few studies have considered the traumatic and embodied impact of gun violence on young Black men. Using trauma theory and embodiment as theoretical frameworks, this research demonstrates how due to the lack of resources and recognition of young Black men’s experiences of traumatic gun violence, young Black men begin to “embody” experiences of traumatic gun violence physically and emotionally. Young Black men’s experiences of gun violence within the city of Toronto continue to be stigmatized, criminalized, and disregarded as a traumatic issue and the main approaches to solving gun violence have focused on criminal justice interventions and policing which do not engage with the actual “embodied trauma” of gun violence. This thesis demonstrates that to understand how young Black men embody traumatic violence we first need to understand how systemic violence and structural oppression, as expressed through racial profiling, over-surveillance, incarceration, police brutality, and experiences of poverty, coincide with the traumatic impact of gun violence, and directly relate to young Black men’s experiences of ongoing exposure to gun violence.
Interorganizational Relationships in British Columbia’s Community Overdose Response: Evaluating Community Partnerships as a Network Intervention
Keywords: community collaboration
networks
overdose prevention

Background: Surging overdose deaths in British Columbia (B.C.) prompted the development of Community Action Teams (CATs) - interorganizational networks that deliver overdose prevention strategies. The formation of CATs is a network intervention, aiming to optimize implementation by fostering connectivity. My research questions were: 1) How were the network intervention components (relational antecedents, structure, processes and outcomes) enacted in each of the participating CATs, and how (and why) were these similar or different?; 2) How did each of the CAT components influence strategic goals/collaborative objectives? Methods: This was a multiple case study using multiple methods. I adapted a framework for evaluating interorganizational relationships (IORs ) to understand partnership building relative to implementation goals/tasks. I selected 5 CATs as cases and used multiple sources of data to compile the case studies: social network survey; community survey; interviews; and document review. I conducted a social network analysis, a descriptive analysis of the community survey, a thematic analysis of interview transcripts, and a content analysis of key themes from documents. Findings were compiled into summary tables and narratively integrated. Results: Three cases were ultimately included. CAT 1 took on a ‘whole network’ approach in which strategic goals involved most CAT members and pertained to enhancing partnering. Structures, processes and outcomes in this CAT were more participatory and cohesive. CAT 2 funded small projects, which led to a few organizations participating in pockets of action. This may have led to lower network cohesiveness, higher centralization (compared to CAT 1), and relational challenges. CAT 3 funded small projects involving the participation of many CAT members, which fostered better relational processes compared to CAT 2. Formality and fairness were key convening processes. All three CATs were operating network-wide at a mid-range level of collaboration, and all met their implementation tasks but not necessarily their collaboration goals. Conclusion: Information about implementation tasks/goals can help us better understand network formation. Evaluating IORs as network interventions can lend insights about how and why certain networks are built in certain ways, and better enables us to study and provide guidance on these relationships in the future.
Deeply Conserved Cardiac Enhancers Guide Zebrafish Heart Regeneration
Keywords: Cardiac
Development
Enhancers
Heart
Regeneration
Zebrafish

Adult mammalian hearts do not replenish lost cardiomyocytes (CMs) after injury, replacing them with akinetic scar tissue. One strategy for promoting cardiac healing in humans involves re-activation of regeneration programs conserved through evolutionary history in vertebrates such as the teleost fish Danio rerio, commonly known as the zebrafish. The zebrafish heart robustly regenerates cardiac tissue in multiple injury models, restoring myocardium via pre-existing CMs that de-differentiate assume a proliferative cellular phenotype. Non-coding cis-regulatory regions such as enhancers determine the spatiotemporal dynamics of gene expression and have been leveraged as tools for deployment of pro-regenerative factors into the hearts of non-regenerative species. Despite prediction of developmentally linked enhancers for promoting adult cardiac regeneration, there has been a dearth of such enhancers reported in the literature. In this thesis, I examine the role of conserved cardiac enhancers identified as active in zebrafish embryos during the phylotypic period of development. These enhancers represent Accessible Conserved Non-coding Elements (aCNEs) that label specific cardiac compartments during cardiac development and regeneration, with several active in wound-proximal endocardium and de-differentiated myocardium. I find evidence that orthologous human aCNEs fail to activate in response to cardiac injury, implicating divergent evolutionary trajectories for post-injury enhancer activation between species. I also utilize the regulatory sequence representing an enhancer for hey2 (aCNE 21), de-coupled from endogenous hey2 expression in the adult heart, to define the contributions of trabecular myocardium to zebrafish heart regeneration. Through mutational analysis of a hand2-linked enhancer element (aCNE 1), I uncover critical activating and repressive regulatory modules required for regulation of enhancer activity during development and regeneration. Finally, genetic deletion of aCNE 1 reveals an essential role for directing the cardiac repair process. Loss-of-enhancer mutants retain scar tissue and fail to regenerate; aCNE 1 mutants further display impaired recruitment of leukocytes and dysregulation of matrix metalloproteinase activity within the wound area. Together, these results serve to identify regulatory elements with the unique ability to target gene expression to specific cardiac compartments, and further explain the differences in cardiac regenerative potential between regenerative and non-regenerative species.