VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Post-Secondary Educational Institution Policies and Practices on Indigenous Staff Recruitment and Retention
Keywords: Aboriginal
Indigenous
Policies
Post-Secondary
Procedures
Staff

There is very little published research that explores employment inequities in Canadian Post-Secondary Institutes as they relate directly to Indigenous people (Chan, 2005; Doyle-Bedwell, 2008; Dua Bhanji, 2012; Julien, Wright Zinni, 2010; Singh, 2012). The primary question this study addressed was what impact, if any, did a GTA Aboriginal Post-Secondary School Educational Institute’s (APSE’s) organizational policies, practices and processes have on the recruitment, support, and retention of Aboriginal staff. The participants from the APSE included part time, full time, and Aboriginal Staffing Pilot Program (ASP) employees. Informed by Institutional Ethnography, Ojibwe Medicine Wheel and Womanist theory, the study explored the daily work experiences of the Aboriginal participants as they connected to broader social structures, processes and relationships within the organization. The findings included that the participants were disconnected from the policies enforced by the APSE. Policies were largely constructed without the consideration of Indigenous knowledges and priorities. Another finding was the lack of Indigenized culture and curriculum development erroneously reinforced the belief that Indigenous college members ought to “get over it” and conform to the College’s corporate culture. Recommendations included increasing Indigenous staff representation; consistently Indigenizing the curriculum and culture of the APSE; and cultural safety awareness training for all staff. Given the Truth and Reconciliation calls to action directly hold educational institutions accountable for the needs and inclusion of Indigenous people, the experiences, and insights explored in this study are valuable information for post-secondary Human Resources departments and senior management examining their staff recruitment and retention efforts.
Investigating the Effects of Repeated Cocaine Exposure and Striatal Dopamine D1 and D2 Receptor Antagonism on Reward, Aversion, and Approach-Avoidance Conflict Resolution
Keywords: Approach-avoidance conflict
Cocaine sensitization
Dopamine
Dorsal striatum
Incentive motivation
Nucleus accumbens

Exposure to psychostimulant drugs induces an enduring state of heightened drug-seeking motivation, as well as cross-sensitization to natural reinforcers, which has been attributed to a sensitized mesolimbic dopamine (DA) system. In the striatum, medium spiny neurons expressing D1 (D1R) or D2 receptors (D2R) are suggested to regulate reward and aversion, and are known to undergo changes in synaptic plasticity following drug exposure. However, it is not known how D1R and D2R signaling may contribute to situations in which reward and aversive information are in conflict with one another (approach-avoidance conflict) and how a state of cocaine sensitization may alter the ability to effectively resolve approach-avoidance conflict. The purpose of this dissertation was two-fold. The first aim investigated the effects of cocaine sensitization on approach-avoidance conflict and negative incentive motivation. The second aim investigated the roles of D1R and D2R in regulating cue-elicited approach-avoidance conflict in the nucleus accumbens (NAc), dorsomedial (DMS), and dorsolateral striatum (DLS). In Chapter 3, rats were tested in a conflict scenario in which sucrose was paired with foot shock in the goal compartment of a runway apparatus. Cocaine sensitized rats displayed shorter goal latencies, indicating enhanced approach during approach-avoidance conflict. In Chapter 4, rats were trained to avoid foot shock in an active avoidance lever press task. In a subsequent active avoidance runway test, the animals traversed a runway to reach the active avoidance lever. Cocaine sensitized rats displayed longer goal latencies, indicating attenuated negative incentive motivation. In Chapters 5 and 6, rats were conditioned to reward, aversive, and neutral visuotactile cues. Subsequently, the rats were microinfused with the D1R antagonist (SCH23390) or the D2R antagonist (sulpiride) in the NAc, DMS, or DLS, and were tested for preference of neutral versus conflicting cues (superimposition of reward and aversive cues). D1R and D2R antagonism differentially altered conflict cue preference in the NAc and DMS, but was without effect in the DLS. Together, the results from this dissertation reveal that 1) cocaine sensitization attenuates negative incentive motivation and augments approach tendencies during motivational conflict, and 2) NAc and DMS D1R and D2R differentially regulate cue-elicited approach-avoidance conflict resolution.
Carotid Magnetic Resonance Imaging Depicted Intraplaque Hemorrhage and a High-Risk Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Phenotype
Keywords: Atherosclerosis
Carotid
Carotid stenosis
Intraplaque hemorrhage
MRI
Vessel wall imaging

Intraplaque hemorrhage is an independent marker of cardiovascular outcomes including stroke and myocardial infarction. Magnetic resonance imaging allows for the direct visualization of intraplaque hemorrhage in the vessel wall of the carotid arteries. This thesis reports data from an institutional magnetic resonance depicted intraplaque hemorrhage experience and clinical trials. The work herein addresses areas particularly sparse on the relationship of intraplaque hemorrhage with cardiovascular risk factors and its potential role in stroke, specifically reporting on i) age-specific sex differences in low-grade stenosis, ii) the role in ipsilateral embolic stroke of undetermined source, and iii) the relationship with a high-risk cardiovascular phenotype. The results in this thesis support our hypotheses that i) males have greater age-specific odds of magnetic resonance imaging depicted carotid intraplaque hemorrhage compared to females, and that with increasing age, the odds of carotid intraplaque hemorrhage in females becomes closer to that of males, ii) patients with embolic stroke of undetermined source have carotid intraplaque hemorrhage ipsilateral to the affected brain, and iii) patients with carotid intraplaque hemorrhage are of a high-cardiovascular risk. The culmination of projects supports the notion that intraplaque hemorrhage is related to a high-risk cardiovascular phenotype and a need for the quantification of intraplaque hemorrhage is realized to further understand the significance of volume of intraplaque hemorrhage, longitudinal changes in intraplaque hemorrhage over time, and relationship of intraplaque hemorrhage with clinical outcomes. The final project in this thesis therefore reports the development of a quantitative imaging analysis protocol, as well as its reliability and agreement with an established standard. The protocol is intended for use on carotid trial imaging data presently being acquired as part of the Canadian Atherosclerosis Imaging Network Project 1.
Encapsulation-Free Local Delivery of BDNF Enhances Recovery in Stroke-Injured Rats
Keywords: BDNF
biomaterials
drug delivery
hydrogel
nanoparticle
stroke

Until the early 1990s it was common belief that the adult brain did not possess the capacity to change or regenerate. We now know that the adult brain is not static and is able to repair itself to a small degree. Through examination of endogenous processes, brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) has emerged as a key modulator of plasticity in both the healthy and stroke-injured brains, and benefits to recovery have been demonstrated upon its administration; yet, current delivery strategies are highly invasive or inefficient. The work presented herein describes an effective, biomaterial-based strategy for minimally invasive local delivery of BDNF using a revolutionized approach to control protein release. BDNF incorporation into a composite consisting of poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) nanoparticles and a hyaluronan and methyl cellulose (HAMC) hydrogel provided sustained release of the protein, using electrostatics to control release without encapsulation. When delivered epi-cortically to a rat endothelin-1 model of stroke injury, BDNF diffused from the HAMC/PLGA composite into the lesioned tissue and resulted in improved early forelimb recovery and delayed hindlimb performance enhancement. Tissue analysis revealed synaptic plasticity in the contralesional hemisphere at the time of sacrifice, suggesting that these behavioural effects were due to increased plasticity in the uninjured tissue. These studies validate the use of BDNF for plasticity-mediated stroke treatment and provide a minimally invasive strategy for effective, local delivery to the brain.
Food for Empire: Wartime Food Politics on the Korean Homefront, 1937-1945
Keywords: Colonialism
Everyday Life
Food History
Japanese Empire
Korean History
Total War

This research examines how the minute details of food production and consumption in colonial Korea became a target of wartime food politics under the rubric of improving productivity and efficiency for war efforts. In examining the politics, this research takes a more expansive approach to power and politics by locating the agency of power beyond the state and understanding its nature as more than simply totalitarian or suppressive. To this end, this study investigates the knowledge production of a group of experts—ranging from agronomists (Chapter 1 and 2) and nutritional scientists (Chapter 3 and 4), to cookbook authors (Chapter 4) and gardening manual writers (Chapter 5)—who, each in their own way, voiced opinions on the political, cultural, and social issues of the time beyond the sheer material concerns of enhancing productivity in food production and consumption. This research pays especially close attention to three recurring and entangled topics: first, the changing position of the colony and its population in the expanding empire; second, the geographical relationship between city and countryside in the urbanizing peninsula; and finally, ideal gender roles in the bourgeois domestic space. By attending to these themes through the lens of race, region, gender, and class, this study traces how a range of varied social aspirations betray tensions, dilemmas, and contractions of the time rather than converging in the fascist ideology for continuous improvement in total harmony, free from social conflicts.
Developing and Coordinating Autonomous Agents for Efficient Electricity Markets
Keywords: cooperative games
energy
market design
Markov decision processes
preference elicitation
sequential decision-making

Whether for environmental, conservation, efficiency, or economic reasons, developing next generation electric power infrastructure is critical. Temporally relevant, granular data from smart meters provide new opportunities for data-driven management of the power grid. New developments—for example, electricity markets with multiple suppliers, the integration of renewable power sources into the system, and spikier demand patterns due to, say, electric vehicles—create new challenges for efficient grid operation. Computer science is uniquely positioned to assist with increasingly sophisticated techniques for handling and learning from large amounts of data. The methods of game theory and multi-agent systems provide a natural framework for modeling the competing incentives of electricity market participants. This thesis focuses on the use of learning, optimization, mechanism design, and preference elicitation methods to coordinate electricity demand and supply while respecting the incentives of market participants. Specifically, we propose an approach where an autonomous agent acts on behalf of each household, coordinating with inhabitants to relay information and make decisions on their behalf about electricity consumption. We focus on three problems that arise in developing such agents: (i) how to coordinate consumers' electricity use, (ii) how to share the costs of consumption among households (via their agents), and (iii) how to gather consumption preference data from consumers. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on different aspects of the first two problems. Both use a matching markets approach. In Chapter 3, we focus on the impact of demand smoothness and peaks on the supplier’s cost, and in Chapter 4, on the impact of predictability. In both chapters, we develop new cost sharing schemes that are resilient to certain forms of strategic behavior on the part of the agents and that achieve strong performance in experiments. Chapter 5 studies the third problem. Motivated by control of heating and cooling systems, we present a new approach to preference elicitation, where the cost and accuracy of query responses is dependent on the user’s familiarity with the conditions specified in the query. We show that despite the theoretical difficulty in this setting, we can build solvers that perform well in practice.
Immanent Causation in Spinoza and Scholasticism
Keywords: Causation
Immanent Causation
Metaphysics
Scholasticism
Spinoza
Suárez

Spinoza is well-known for his claim that God is the only substance that exists, and that everything else is a mere “mode” of that substance. At the same time, Spinoza maintains that all things depend causally on God for their being. But if all of reality is in some sense identical with God, in what manner can God be its cause? Spinoza’s answer is found in his claim that “God is the immanent, and not the transeunt, cause of all things.” In this thesis, I investigate the scholastic roots of this distinction and its implications for understanding the fundamental features of Spinoza’s monistic ontology. The scholastics commonly distinguish between two kinds of activities, one which “remains” in the subject doing it and the other which “passes” outside. Those classified as immanent were primarily mental operations like thinking and willing. The first part of this thesis examines how the scholastics disagree over whether this kind of activity ought to be construed as a kind of production; the nature of its relation to its subject; and whether it is produced by means of ‘emanation’. The concept of an immanent cause emerges within this context. In the second part of this thesis, I bring this research to bear on our understanding of Spinoza’s metaphysics. First, I support the interpretation that Spinoza’s immanent cause emanates its effects within itself, in the manner that the properties of a thing follow from its essence. Contrary to what some scholars have suggested, however, this entails neither that it is a form of formal causation, nor that Spinoza’s conception of immanent causation is fundamentally discontinuous with the scholastic tradition. Second, I look at how Spinoza’s claim that an immanent cause undergoes what it does can be reconciled with the apparent impossibility of God undergoing anything on Spinoza’s system. I argue that we should distinguish between two senses of undergoing in Spinoza: God cannot undergo in the sense of being determined by external causes. But as the immanent cause of all things, God undergoes in the sense of being the thing that is affected by his own action.
Staging the Future: The Politics of Photographic Representation in Postsocialist China
Keywords: Chinese cultural history
Chinese history
Chinese photography
Chinese politics
intellectual history

This dissertation examines the changing nature of photographic representation in China from 1976 until the late 1990s, and argues that photography and photo criticism self-reflexively embodied the cultural politics of social and political liberalisation during this seminal period in Chinese history. Through a detailed examination of debates surrounding the limits of representation and intellectual liberalisation, this dissertation explores the history of social documentary, realist, and conceptual photography as a form of social critique. As a contribution to scholarly appraisals of the cultural politics of contemporary China, this dissertation aims to shed insight into the fraught and often contested politics of visuality which has characterized the evolution of photographic representation in the post-Mao period. The first chapter examines the politics of photographic representation in China from 1976 until 1982, and explores the politicisation of documentary realism as a means of promoting modernisation and reform. Chapter two traces the internationalisation of photographic theory and practice in China throughout the 1980s, while exploring the pervasive engagement among photo critics with issues of historical representation, national progress, and the role of the photography in representing social change. The third chapter examines the photographic oeuvre of Mo Yi from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s, and situates his work within the broader photographic and cultural politics of the period, while chapter four examines the history of conceptual photography and photo theory in China during the 1990s.
Identity, Subjectivity, and Schooling: Portugueseness and the Educational Deselection of Portuguese-speaking Students in Toronto
Keywords: ethnography
Portuguese
Portuguese-speaking youth
push-through
schooling
youth studies

The academic trajectories of Portuguese-speaking students in Toronto, Canada, have been characterized as underachieving and truncated. Concurrently, the voices of Portuguese-speaking students themselves have been relatively absent from reports on their rates of underachievement and school dropout. This critical school ethnography explores Portuguese-speaking students’ school experiences in a Toronto high school to contextualize these statistics and expose how identity and subjectivity inform their school (dis)engagement. While peers and parents inform aspects of said (dis)engagement, thus far these have been the main if not only factors to explain this underachievement phenomenon. This ethnography, however, demonstrates that school personnel and their expectations appear to also play a role in some students’ decisions to deselect schooling. This dissertation exposes discourses that circulate in classrooms and other school spaces that construct Portuguese-speaking students and their parents in Toronto as working class immigrants. These discourses (inclusive of phrases and actions) draw on language, nationalism and diaspora, and class and labour to construct dominant depictions of what I and others (da Silva, 2012) have termed portugueseness. Portugueseness becomes a subjectivity that marks the Portuguese-speaking student subject for certain experiences in schools. In addition to reflecting on their experiences to illustrate how portugueseness is constructed, participants’ experiences and narratives revealed that association with portugueseness (or being marked as Portuguese(-speaking)) placed them disproportionately at risk of experiencing certain disciplinary practices in school. These disciplinary practices reference dominant depictions of portugueseness, namely disciplining language, dropout and disability. And, participants recounted both their defiant and compliant responses to these disciplining practices. Finally, disciplinary practices appear to inform educational deselection, a process that sees some students drop out of school and others remain enrolled despite deeply disengaging with school and putting forth a bare minimum of effort to be pushed through, rather than be pushed out of, their high school trajectory.
Sociophonetic Variation and Change in Northern Ontario English Vowels
Keywords: Canadian English
Language variation
Phonetics

This thesis presents the first sociophonetic analysis of vowel variation and change in Temiskaming Shores (population 9,920) and Kirkland Lake (population 7,981), two small communities in northern Ontario. I compare the speech of these two communities to that of Toronto, Ontario, the largest and most linguistically diverse city in Canada (population 2,731,571), and Thunder Bay, Ontario (population 107,909), a smaller urban centre 950 km northwest of Temiskaming Shores and Kirkland Lake and 1400 km northwest of Toronto. I analyze four vowel variables: Canadian Raising, the phonologically conditioned raising of the onset of front upgliding and back upgliding diphthongs /aɪ/ (as in the word price) and /aʊ/ (as in mouth) before voiceless consonants, the merger of the low back vowels /ɑ/ (as in lot) and /ɔ/ (as in thought), the Canadian Shift, the retraction and lowering of the front lax vowels /ɪ/ (as in kit) and /ɛ/ (as in dress) and /æ/ (as in trap), and the fronting of the high back vowel /u/ (as in goose). The data for the project comprises over 52,000 tokens of Canadian English vowels in 11 vowel categories drawn from two large corpora of Canadian English and based on a speaker sample that is stratified by community, age, and sex. I use linear mixed-effects regression models fit to Lobanov-normalized F1 and F2 of each vowel token to analyze the influence of the social factors of community, sex, and age, as well as the linguistic factors of following and preceding phonetic context on each phonological variable. The main findings of the thesis are that despite some regional differences, the vowel systems of Kirkland Lake and Temiskaming Shores are essentially similar to those of Toronto and Thunder Bay, and that this underlying stability corroborates the longstanding claim of homogeneity of English across Canada.
Neurophysiological mechanisms underlying deep brain stimulation for the treatment of movement disorders
Keywords: deep brain stimulation
essential tremor
neurophysiology
Parkinson's disease
synaptic plasticity

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an invasive neuromodulation therapy for management of the motor symptoms of several movement disorders; however, its mechanisms are complex, varied, and remain unclear. We employed a dual-microelectrode methodology for intraoperative measurement of neuronal activity and synaptic events, in order to assess the physiological response properties of different subcortical DBS target structures to electrical stimulation at different settings. A total of 50 patients with Parkinson’s disease undergoing DBS surgery of the subthalamic nucleus (STN; n=40), globus pallidus internus (GPi; n=8), or ventral intermediate nucleus (Vim; n=2); and nine patients with essential tremor undergoing DBS surgery of the Vim (n=9) participated in the studies. We found that the STN required higher frequencies for inhibition during stimulation compared to the substantia nigra par reticulata (SNr), likely due to a higher prevalence of GABAergic terminals on SNr somas; although both structures receive predominantly GABAergic inputs. In the Vim, a structure with predominantly glutamatergic synapses, higher (200Hz) frequencies were required for neuronal inhibition compared to the STN (100Hz) and SNr (50Hz). Additionally, unlike the STN and SNr, a transient period of neuronal excitation occurred prior to inhibition, reflective of the glutamatergic predominance. Thus, the effects of electrical stimulation are site specific and dependent on the weighted composition of inhibitory and excitatory inputs. We furthermore determined that an enhancement of inhibitory synaptic plasticity occurred in the SNr and GPi after continuous high frequency stimulation (HFS) at 100Hz; demonstrated by increased amplitudes of extracellular inhibitory field evoked potentials (fEPs). We found greater plasticity in the GPi compared to SNr, and that intraoperative administration of levodopa had a potent effect on SNr plasticity. Further, we determined that during stimulation at ≥30Hz, synaptic depression occurred in the SNr; demonstrated by rapid attenuation of successive fEPs. Clinically, we determined that lower levels of SNr plasticity were related to higher severity axial and global motor symptoms, and that neuronal inhibition in the Vim was necessary for tremor suppression. These findings expand upon the understanding of the physiological stimulation response properties of different brain structures in movement disorders patients, and may have implications for advancing DBS technologies.