VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Electrochemical and Photoelectrochemical Water Oxidation Using α-Fe2O3
Keywords: Hematite
Nanomaterials
Photoelectrochemistry
Water Oxidation

There is a global need to reduce the use of fossil fuels due to the negative impacts of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions on climate change. An alternative to a carbon-based energy system is therefore necessary, and hydrogen is considered one of the most promising energy carrier replacements. This thesis focuses on the renewable production of hydrogen via photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting using Earth-abundant iron oxide (α-Fe2O3, or hematite) as a photoanode. Hematite is considered a promising semiconductor candidate for PEC water oxidation due to its strong absorption of visible light, long-term stability under operating conditions, and low cost. However despite these benefits, rapid recombination of charge carriers and sluggish water oxidation kinetics have hindered its commercial applicability. Here, we have demonstrated that the effective application of three-dimensional nanoscaffolds, composed of a transparent conducting oxide, can significantly enhance the electrochemical surface area of solution-processed iron oxide thin films. The underlying scaffolds were also found to enhance the activity of the surface catalysts due to an electronic “spacer” effect, and light absorption was increased within the disordered structures due to effective trapping of photons and increased catalyst loading. Following this, we demonstrated that the solution-processed films, which were initially PEC-inactive, could be activated via high-temperature treatment under flowing hydrogen gas. The result was the formation of a non-stoichiometric α-Fe2O3-x photocatalyst that suppressed charge recombination and increased photoactivity. This photoactivity was further correlated to the build-up of charged species at the photoanode surface that mediate the water oxidation reaction. Finally, to improve the kinetics of our newly activated material, we functionalized our α-Fe2O3-x thin films with a stable homogeneous iridium co-catalyst. The co-catalyst was found to greatly enhance the activity of the system, and extensive electrochemical testing revealed that this was almost entirely due to improved kinetics at the semiconductor-electrolyte interface.
Power and Politics in Venezuelan Higher Education Reform, 1999-2012
Keywords: Higher education reform
State-society relations
Venezuelan politics

This dissertation explains why Venezuelan state and government elites were able to successfully design, adopt, and implement some higher education reforms but not others during the presidencies of Hugo Chรกvez (1999-2012). Conceptualizing universities as political institutions that occupy a liminal position within the borderlands of state and society, and using an approach that emphasizes the relational and procedural nature of political change, I compare four higher education initiatives advanced by Venezuelan reformers: a series of universalization programs, the 2001 Organic Education Law, the 2009 Organic Education Law, and the 2010 University Education Law. My analysis reveals that the adoption and implementation of these initiatives primarily depended upon how the distribution of institutional autonomy and capacity between the state and the oppositional university sector conditioned the strategic choices of key actors. In the case of universalization reform, actors within the executive branch were enabled by considerable autonomy relative to oppositional forces in the agenda-setting, design, and adoption stages of reform, while material capacity facilitated the implementation process. In the legislative arena, reformers relied upon similar institutional autonomy to set the agenda and design the three bills, but the constitutional guarantee of university autonomy and an increasingly deft use of intra- and inter-institutional connective structures (including governing councils, faculty unions, and student organizations) allowed the oppositional universities to form a cohesive bloc that constrained reformers and prevented the full implementation of any new legislation. This dissertation therefore challenges accounts of the Venezuelan state as exceptionally strong, provides a detailed account of extra-parliamentary opposition to the Chรกvez government, and foregrounds the university as an important but significantly understudied political actor in the context of state-society relations.
Caring for Caregivers: Establishing Resilience through Social Capital
Keywords: Informal caregivers
older adults
Policy
Resilience
Social capital
Social networks

There is growing agreement in the research literature that informal caregivers play a crucial role in supporting high needs populations as well as contributing to the sustainability of formal healthcare systems. This dissertation uses a convergent parallel design consisting of three main research phases: analysis of secondary qualitative data from two case studies providing supports to informal caregivers of community-dwelling high-needs persons, including both seniors and children with complex medical needs; collection and analysis of primary qualitative interview data from providers involved with the case studies; and qualitative interviews with informal caregivers and care providers from across Ontario. The dissertation applies social capital theory as a conceptual framework to analyze how care providers and informal caregivers perceive different formal approaches to supporting informal caregivers as contributing to caregiver resilience. Within the policy and academic literature, there has been increased recognition for supporting people and their informal caregivers. Yet, this focus remains largely at the individual level, and caregiver burden and burnout continues to be assessed solely as a byproduct of the complex (mainly medical) needs of the care recipient. The findings from this dissertation suggest the importance of cultivating broader understandings of the â caregiver problemâ in order to identify, support, and assess networks of support (both formal and informal). Applying social capital theory and the concept of resilience, this dissertation identifies the importance of the healthcare system and connecting people to it and within it. This dissertation provides evidence for supporting the development of formal and informal ties, particularly at the bridging and linking levels to improve a care networkâ s access to resources and produce longer-term capacity and resilience. The use of social capital presents a novel conceptual advance in research on caregiver resilience, the relationship between caregiver and system sustainability, and the benefits that can derive from the multidimensional aspects of social capital.
Homicide in North Italy: Bologna, 1600-1700
Keywords: Bologna
early modern
Europe
homicide
Italy
violence

The North Italian Papal State of Bologna suffered high and at times increasing rates of interpersonal homicide throughout eleven sampled years of the seventeenth century. The powerful criminal court of Bologna, the Tribunale del Torrone, prosecuted homicides as capital crimes through the deployment of inquisitorial process and a public image of impartial justice; but its officers remained unable to overcome deep impulses to revenge and vendetta among the various populations of the city and hinterland. In sentencing homicides, judges erred on the side of exile over execution, and when judges attempted to condemn participants in vendetta to death, they found themselves made party to revenge violence. The court’s inability to effectively police interpersonal violence was indicative of a developing state whose institutions and social structures were failing. Socio-economic crises of the early-seventeenth century contributed to this deteriorating situation. In particular, the Great Plague of 1630 overturned social norms and, in the “world upside down” that followed, ordinary Bolognesi of the contado committed more homicides in pursuit of gain or in protection of fragile resources. The stresses of endemic rural poverty bore heavily on rural violence. From rural bases, republican and oligarchic factions of urban nobility launched a renewed assault on papal authority in the mid-sixteenth century. A civil war broke out in the city’s streets, and homicide rates peaked at levels exceeding any thus far documented in early modern Europe. Officers of government bodies and of the criminal court were killed on multiple occasions. This dissertation contextualizes these trends through interdisciplinary approaches to the history of violence and homicide in the west, and by qualitative analysis of patterns emerging from quantitative data collection. By combining these two approaches, the massive wave of mid-century violence is placed into a long history of Bologna’s failure to establish a meaningful civil society.
Contested Colonialism: The Rise of Settler Politics in Yukon and the Northwest Territories
Keywords: Northwest Territories
political development
responsible government
settler colonialism
social movements
Yukon

Despite forty years of institutional innovation across Northern Canada â including the creation of Indigenous governments and Nunavut â why do the governments of Yukon and the Northwest Territories (NWT) so closely conform to the established norms of Canadian parliamentary and bureaucratic governance? In this study, I argue that these governments reflect the political preferences of non-Indigenous settlers, and that these preferences were embedded in the design of territorial institutions during their formation in the 1960s and 1970s. The institutional legacy of this period continues to structure political and economic dynamics in the territories today. To make this argument, I develop the theoretical concept of contested colonialism, which explains the distinct position of non-Indigenous peoples in Northern society as actors who simultaneously bring colonialism to the North, while also contesting elements of that same colonial order. It is marked by the emergence of a stable settler society, the structural alignment of settler interests with those of colonial federal administrators, and the capacity of settlers to take advantage of political opportunities to further their own interests. Using interpretivist and qualitative methods, including extensive archival research, I trace the rise of settler politics through the prism of liberal autonomy movements and the development of responsible government in both territories. Demographic, geographic, and economic factors account for differences in the effectiveness of settler movements across Yukon and the NWT.
Castilianization in the Archdiocese of Lima, 1600-1700
Keywords: Castilianization
Colonial Peru
Indios Ladinos
Spanish Language

Historical studies of the Spanish language in colonial Peru have overwhelmingly focused on explaining broad changes in the Spanish Crown’s language policies for its viceroyalty, on evaluating the putative outcomes, successes and failures of those policies, and on examining the writings of indigenous notables who read, wrote, and spoke Spanish – a broad collection of people known as ‘Indios Ladinos.’ While assumptions reign, however, relatively little is known about the process of Castilianization itself. Who learned to speak, write or read Spanish? Under what circumstances, why, how, and with what repercussions? My study approaches Castilianization in the seventeenth-century Archdiocese of Lima not as a completed – or even “completeable” – process that was – or could be – decided by policy, but rather as an on-going and discontinuous process in which Andeans created their own linguistic and broader cultural realities within the confines of colonial society. I draw upon a wide range of sources, from the seventeenth-century leaflets used to teach Spanish in Iberia and Peru, through the dictates of spiritual and secular establishments, to the inspection records which reported on the state of Spanish language education in Andean parishes and provided contemporary snapshots of the complexities of day-to-day language use in overwhelmingly multilingual communities. The study is divided into five chapters: Chapter one examines the official approaches to Spanish and Quechua in mid-colonial Peru from a new perspective of coexistence and complementarity rather than that of competition. Chapter two introduces the Archdiocese of Lima’s episcopal inspection records, which, among other things, report on Spanish language schools – escuelas de muchachos indios – meant to be operating across the archdiocese. Next, I examine the ways in which intended schools intersected with the aims and fears of seventeenth-century extirpators. In chapter four I explore the purported “escuelas” themselves, contending that they are best understood not as permanent spaces or consistent features of Andean parishes but rather as transient – even periodic – endeavours of communities and individuals. Finally, chapter five examines the thoughtworlds and experiences of speakers – indigenous and mixed-race people who employed Spanish and Quechua, and whose language use – and lives – beg our re-thinking of the category of Indios Ladino and much else besides.
die sah man weinen. The Representation of Emotion and Dispute in Middle High German Heroic Epic
Keywords: Conflict
Emotion
Feud
Honor
Middle High German
Nibelungenlied

This thesis approaches the depiction of conflict and emotion in Middle High German heroic epic from an anthropological perspective, thereby establishing the norms and practices that obtain within the fictive societies the texts present. I argue that these epic narratives problematize the anxieties of medieval aristocratic society, critique those human elements deemed most disruptive to it, and establish positive and negative models for its ordering through variations upon a traditional progression of conflict and through the representation of communicative emotion within this progression. Across many texts, medieval German heroic epics present a remarkably consistent set of practices and behaviour associated with conflict. With recourse to medieval law codes and anthropological observations of societies lacking effective centralized authority, I demonstrate that these practices provide the texts with a flexible narrative structure and are a framework for engaging with social and political concerns. In chapter one, I begin with a consideration of the role played by displays of emotion as symbolic communication within heroic narrative, demonstrating that such displays are a primary means by which status and identity is expressed and established. In chapter two, I contextualize these displays within a semi-standardized progression of conflict comprising more-or-less discrete stages of dispute. In so doing, I show that the communicative content and performative valence of emotion is dependent upon its position within the conflict progression. In the third chapter, I establish these disputes as the expression of an economy of symbolic capital with honour as its essential currency. Approaching these strategic performances in such a manner reveals that the dispute practices previously outlined function as a form of status competition in which the negotiation and valuation of honour serves to establish and consolidate social hierarchies. The final chapters are devoted to the varied communicative valences of specific emotion displays in this context. Here, I demonstrate that public displays of grief are utilized to delineate and confirm membership within the honour group, even as they broadcast collective injury, solicit aid, and legitimize violence. Public anger, on the other hand, serves to make or refute status claims, threatening or accompanying reactive violence.
Changeable Conditions: British Writing About the Weather in Canada, 1700-1775
Keywords: Early Canadian literature
Eighteenth-century British literature
Environmental literature
Travel writing

This dissertation investigates the politics of the weather in eighteenth-century British literature. From Swift’s “City Shower” to Smollett’s complaints about Bath’s “perpetual rain,” eighteenth-century literature is saturated with the rhetoric of meteorological science – so much so that, like Samuel Johnson, we have come to assume that “when two Englishmen meet” to talk “of the weather, they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know.” Changeable Conditions argues we know only half the story – and explains how, in the midst of the technological and epistemological changes reconceiving the weather as a “natural fact,” eighteenth-century anxiety about environmental influence also turned the weather into a prominent and productive term in public debate about Britain’s imperial obligations. Prior to the 1759 turn in British fortunes during the Seven Years War, British writers treated inclement weather as a levelling condition, a check on human hubris, or, as in Johnson’s Rasselas, a metaphor for all that seemed too far away to verify and too “changeable” to control about the diverse environments of empire. As British imperial interests turned away from territory and towards trade and settlement, however, a new pattern emerged: vivid descriptions of bad weather continued to cast the risk of being overwhelmed as inevitable and dire, but now, “weather-beaten” bodies – like those that litter Smollett’s Humphry Clinker – appeared not to mark the limits of human agency, but rather to call the reader to action, the sure sign of a place and people that could be managed more effectively. How, in so little time, did weather turn from a force that governs the mind and marks the body into a force that could be mitigated by more forward-thinking governance? To answer this question, the case studies in Changeable Conditions propose that eighteenth-century writers amplified the threat of environmental influence to justify a British right to govern all over the world, and demonstrate how this the process helped to entrench the limited view of human agency and narrow sense of responsibility for change in the weather that continue to drive debate about the anthropogenic origins of the present climate crisis.
Charisma in Everyday Life: Conceptualization and Validation of the General Charisma Inventory
Keywords: charisma
leadership
personality
social influence
social psychology

Although both scholars and lay people are fascinated with charismatic individuals, relatively few theorists have attempted to define charisma. Much of the empirical research examining charisma has been concerned with the study of leadership. Even within that literature, however, theorists have focused on charismaâ s outcomes, leaving unarticulated precisely what charisma is. Here, I tested a new operational conceptualization of charisma in the context of everyday life. Specifically, I proposed that charisma is composed of the interpersonally-focused dimensions of influence and affability. I validated this conceptualization in a series of studies, demonstrating (i) that lay people possess a consensual idea of charisma; (ii) that charisma consists of two quantifiable dimensions, influence and affability; (iii) that charisma is distinct from other constructs of interest to psychologists and leadership theorists; (iv) that charisma is observable; and, finally, (v) that assessments of charisma predict important real world outcomes, such as persuasion and liking. These studies, therefore, provide a new, comprehensive contextualization of charisma that extends beyond the study of formal leadership. Furthermore, the current work highlights that charisma is a relevant construct to leaders and laypeople alike. Thus, this research not only attempts to conceptualize and measure charisma but also demonstrates that charisma might be important to people every day.
The Bounds of Human Empire: Early Modern English Utopias and the Early Capitalist Imagination
Keywords: early modern literature
paradise in literature
utopias in literature

Utopia has often been defined as an imaginary, secular, rational ideal that marks a break with older, mythic, pre-political forms of social ideality such as paradise, Cokaygne, arcadia, or the Golden Age. The utopian order—whether understood as an expression or critique of emergent capitalist ideology—is conceived as the seed-form of a future commonwealth in which natural scarcity and social conflict are transcended through the rationalization of the production process or the extension of human control over nature. This dissertation examines the social and historical context for the emergence of early modern utopian literature as a genre; it also challenges the dominant narrative of rationalization and disenchantment by showing how paradise and utopia are not discrete stages in the development of an idea but form a structural opposition through which we in the present define our own modernity. This dissertation is divided into three chapters, each exploring a different mode or subtype of utopia—social, scientific, and paradisial. Through a close reading of two influential works of early modern utopian literature—Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis—alongside John Milton’s Paradise Lost, I argue that early modern utopian literature provides an image of the future constructed out of disparate pre-modern cultural forms and modes of production that are brought into contact and projected into a fictional space opened up or made imaginable by the discovery of the New World. Europe’s mythic prehistory is made coincident with its early capitalist present; an original, humanized nature or an original form of communal property is juxtaposed with and partially integrated into a rationalized system of labour discipline and knowledge production, animated by an early capitalist ethic of improvement.
Identification and Characterization of ARGLU1, a Novel Glucocorticoid Receptor Coactivator
Keywords: Coactivators
Diabetes
Glucocorticoids
Nuclear receptors
Obesity
Splicing

Glucocorticoids (GCs) are stress-induced hormones that signal to multiple tissues in the body to increase glucose levels in circulation. Prolonged GC stimulation, however, leads to hepatic GC-stimulated glucose production and GC-induced adipogenesis contributing to the development of hyperglycemia, insulin resistance and obesity. At the molecular level, GC actions are mediated through the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) and its associated accessory proteins. Therapeutically, GC drugs (i.e., dexamethasone) are prescribed for their anti-inflammatory effects. We are interested in understanding the underlying mechanisms of GR signaling to separate the therapeutic from the deleterious effects of GCs. Studies presented in this thesis detail the discovery and characterization of arginine and glutamate rich 1 (ARGLU1), a dual function protein able to co-activate GR and modulate splicing. ARGLU1 is a polarized protein with the N-terminal end important for interaction with splicing factors; and the C-terminal end interfacing with GR via an LXXLL motif. In neuronal cells, we found that genes regulated transcriptionally by ARGLU1 were different from those alternatively spliced. Loss of function studies revealed ARGLU1 to be critical for neuronal development in zebrafish. In tissue specific studies, we show that ARGLU1 is important for GC-mediated hepatic gluconeogenesis but is dispensable for the immune suppressive actions of GCs. Using chromatin immunoprecipitation assays we demonstrate that ARGLU1 knockdown decreases GR recruitment to the Pepck (a key gluconeogenic enzyme in liver) promoter in vivo decreasing the expression of the Pepck gene. We also show that animals lacking hepatic ARGLU1 are protected against GC-induced dyslipidemia. In adipocyte differentiation, ARGLU1 was essential very early in the differentiation process, by affecting the recruitment of GR and other factors to the PPARÎł gene, which is the master regulator of adipogenesis. In conclusion, we identified ARGLU1 as a novel GR coregulator important in both GC mediated transcription and alternative splicing. Moreover, we showed that ARGLU1 is critical for GC-mediated gluconeogenesis and adipogenesis.