VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Improving the Reading Achievement of Language Minority and Disadvantaged Youth At Risk of Academic Failure
Keywords: at risk
immigrant
intervention
mixed methods
reading comprehension
reading in a second language

BACKGROUND: Variability in individuals' response to intervention can contribute to smaller intervention effects. Integration of quantitative and qualitative findings can be instrumental in elucidating person-level and broader contextual issues related to differential intervention efficacy and inform overall intervention utility. In order to assess ecological factors implicated in differential response to intervention, three studies were conducted that together comprised a comprehensive program evaluation of the Vocabulary Learning Project, a manualized reading intervention targeting the vocabulary and reading comprehension skills of academically at-risk language-minority and economically disadvantaged high-school aged youth. METHODS: A sequential embedded quasi-experimental mixed methods research design consisting of three distinct yet interrelated phases was used. Across the three research phases, mixed analyses of variance, hierarchical linear regression and multi-case study analyses were conducted to assess intervention effects, factors predictive of outcome gains and contextual factors differentiating outcomes, respectively. RESULTS: Findings from the first two studies indicated that the intervention was differentially effective based on multiple factors at various contextual levels. At the person-level context, pre-intervention language comprehension skills, pre-intervention motivation to read, achievement orientation, academic self-concept and sense of future aspirations were implicated factors. At the intervention program level, investment in positive program outcomes, tutoring group climate and participant resourcefulness were identified factors. Within the peer and family social context, reliance on peers and nature of parental support were differentiating factors. At the broader school, community and cultural context, school perceptions, school and community engagement, as well as youths’ sense of cultural identity were factors that differentiated program effects. Findings from the third, integrative study resulted in the identification of a unifying meta-theme of motivation as a key factor underlying the differential responses to the VLP intervention. CONCLUSIONS: Consideration of the multiple contexts navigated by culturally and linguistically diverse youth is critical for maximizing intervention effects. IMPACT: This study provides multiple insights about opportunities worthy of consideration in optimally designing instructional interventions targeting marginalized youth populations in the Canadian context, and suggests a useful methodological approach for evaluating such programs.
Romances of Modern Enchantment at the British Fin de Siècle
Keywords: Enchantment
Fin de Siècle
Modernism
Novel
Romance
Victorian

This thesis examines the relationship between romance and Max Weber’s narrative of the disenchantment of modern life in which scientific calculation has mastered mystery. I argue that specific British novels at the fin de siècle deploy romance to resist the rationalization of experience and create new forms of enchantment. I re-read texts by major authors that include tropes of romance when the mode was synonymous with the Romance Revival of authors like Rider Haggard and R.L. Stevenson, but disavowed by proponents of realism and emerging modernism. Unless it appears to deconstruct itself, romance from this period continues to be viewed by critics as nostalgic. The novels I call “romances of modern enchantment” employ metafictional elements to subvert narrow understandings of romance as a conservative mode, instead drawing on areas of uncertainty in modern life as sources for romance. In Chapter One I examine discourses of play in Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean (1881). Hardy challenges romance’s association of play with childishness by exploring the gothic castle, the theatre, the telegraph, and the casino, demonstrating how these sites become material for romance. Chapter Two reads G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) as a metaphysical detective novel that combines Edwardian detection with the medieval dream vision to show how mystery might be sustained within modern romance. Chapter Three contends that Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s collaborative novel, Romance (1903), re-works the “boy’s adventure” story to challenge ideologies of imperial masculinity by drawing on Catholicism and literary impressionism as subversive discourses. Finally, Chapter Four attends to romance in Ford’s post-war tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-28), arguing that these novels challenge collective efforts to memorialize the dead and contain trauma by employing hagiographical tropes to depict the inconveniently returned soldier. My project demonstrates that both fin-de-siècle and current critical perceptions of romance ignore possibilities for the mode as an experimental literary strategy that explores uncertainty without rationalizing, controlling, or regulating it. Re-reading romance in these novels broadens our understanding of the connection between literary form and the disenchantment narrative, and reveals ways in which romance might enchant modern life.
Then and Now, Knowing and Leading: The Lived Experience of Ethnicity and its Implications for College Leadership
Keywords: college
equity
ethnicity
leadership
privilege
whiteness

In my research, I set out to ask if lived experiences related to ethnicity shapes and informed college leaders. From the findings, I have concluded that lived experiences of ethnicity do shape and inform college leaders. This was a heuristic exploration that allowed participants to find, discover, and understand the meaning in their lived experiences. I used a heuristic, qualitative research approach with semistructured interviews to question and learn from 10 participants during two interviews over a 1–3-month period. Participants were Maltese, Italian, Portuguese, or a combination, and were leaders in colleges in Ontario. For the purposes of this study, these college leaders were administrators in the positions of Associate Dean/Chair, Dean/Director, manager, and/or senior administration in Ontario. The experience of growing up ethnic, immigrant, and marginal, was juxtaposed to these participants’ experiences of whiteness, being educated, and privileged. Participant histories of marginality and difference were largely dismissed by others against their current positions of status and power. Implications of historical and current lived experiences of marginality on leadership practice were a central focus. The exploration of how participants negotiated, mediated, and reconciled past marginality with current privilege and how this informed their leadership practice was a core tenet of this work. I pursued this research and offer it not to right the wrongs for participants, but rather to inform leadership practice in ways that encourage white stories of marginality to be told; to disarticulate and rearticulate rules and systems that oppress and confine; and to continue to reimagine that whiteness is not sameness. The insights assembled in these findings may be of interest and informative to other scholars who work towards equity and inclusion.
Diversification of Antbirds Associated with Amazonian Flooded Forest Habitats
Keywords: Amazon
Birds
GBS
Pleistocene
várzea

Rivers represent one of the few geographic barriers that bisect, and promote allopatric speciation, in an otherwise continuous landscape of the Amazon basin. In contrast to Amazonian understory forests birds, which replace each other across river barriers, a strong barrier effect has not been reported for flooded forest species, which may experience rivers as dispersal corridors rather than as barriers. The apparent lack of geographic barriers for flooded forest birds raises the possibility that parapatric rather than allopatric speciation, might drive divergence in this habitat. Parapatric speciation usually involves gradual divergence across a species range, frequently involving divergence across geographically structured ecological gradients. Here I used morphometrics, plumage and genome-wide SNP datasets to uncover clinal patterns in three species of flooded forest antbirds at different stages of divergence. I found weak phylogeographic structure in Hypocnemoides maculicauda and H. melanopogon and much stronger structure in Sclateria naevia. While the clinal patterns uncovered in H. maculicauda and H. melanopogon could be consistent with either parapatric divergence or secondary contact, Sclateria exhibited strongly concordant cline centres across nuclear loci, mitochondrial DNA and female plumage, consistent with secondary contact between an eastern and western lineage that diverged in allopatry. I also applied coalescent modelling to distinguish between allopatric, parapatric or mixed allo-parapatric models in driving the diversification of Hypocnemoides from their common ancestor. The parapatric model of diversification was rejected in favor of one including an allopatric phase followed by secondary contact prior to the completion of speciation. Thus, while parapatry may have played a role in speciation, an initial allopatric phase is supported by this model. I proposed that the main drivers of genetic differentiation in flooded forest birds were climatic fluctuations caused by glacial and interglacial cycles. These species probably suffered multiple cycles of population expansion and retraction that resulted in the current phylogeographic structure. Repeated episodes of secondary contact during interglacials might explain why speciation in flooded forest birds is rare. Allopatric barriers have rarely persisted long enough to cause speciation, and cycles of expansion of populations erased part of the accumulated genetic divergence, impeding the completion of reproductive isolation.
Mining Capitalism and Contentious Politics in Bangladesh
Keywords: Bangladesh
Coal Politics
Mining
Neoliberalism
Social Movement

This dissertation analyses a social movement in Bangladesh fighting a potentially environmentally destructive resource extraction project as well as the country’s neoliberal energy policies. Grassroots community grievances against an open pit coalmine in Phulbari in the northwest region started small but culminated in a multi-scalar social movement, including anti-corporate mobilization against privatization of resource extraction at the national level. It also inspired a group of transnational advocacy groups to support the anti-mining movement. Drawing on critical development, social movement, and critical globalization scholarships, the dissertation analyses three distinct scales of the anti-coalmine social mobilizations: local, national, and transnational. Based on a set of qualitative interviews with local/national activists and transnational advocacy groups, I examine each of these scales through the lens of a specific theoretical approach. At the local level, drawing on scholarship on critical development studies, I consider the development of contentious political agency of grassroots communities to analyse the dynamics of the counter-movement against ‘accumulation by dispossession.’ At the national scale, I engage with critical globalization scholarship to analyse discourses of a radical social organization to challenge neoliberal development and its dominant narrative of capitalist modernity. I pay attention to the significance of its political rhetoric (nationalist imaginaries) to articulate a counter-hegemonic political agenda. Finally, at the transnational level, I use sociological scholarship on transnational activism to analyse the mobilization of transnational advocacy groups supporting grassroots mobilization to critically reflect on the dynamics of alliances of differently positioned actors who, although united to achieve a common goal, share different worldviews on how to confront the power of global capital in the periphery. I conclude with the lessons learned from the analysis of the Phulbari movement. I focus on three issues: the salient features of the movement, which can be applied in other cases, the significance of the Phulbari movement to confront resource extraction, and a note on rethinking coal politics in the era of climate crisis.
“The Wilderness Within”: African Diasporic Religion in New Granada, 1690-1790
Keywords: African diaspora
Atlantic World
Colombia
New Granada
Religion
Slavery

This dissertation examines African diasporic religions in New Granada in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In particular, it argues for the constitutive role of black mobility, space, and state institutions in their creation and circulation. Africans and their descendants—whether black or of mixed African, indigenous, and European heritages—had a deep engagement with Catholicism and its material culture in New Granada. There were significant common experience and variations in African-descended experience of the religious world and interactions with colonial institutions, shaped by ethnicity, gender, geography, mode of labour, and place of birth. This dissertation challenges the notion of separate histories of Caribbean and Pacific African-descended communities in Colombia through an examination of the movement of black bodies, religious knowledges, and ritual objects. It examines African diasporic religious creations situated within their social contexts, as well as the church and state’s criminalization of black ritual, medicine, and family life. New Granada was a space where culture and capital flowed between different regimes of slavery and systems of free labour. Diverse everyday epistemologies and material objects circulated among people of African descent across eighteenth-century New Granada within a shared world, one created by the power structures of the Catholic church, the colonial state, and the institution of slavery. This dissertation is based on a close reading of archival fragments from civil and criminal trials, government correspondence, and ecclesiastical records from collections in Colombia, Spain, and the United States. It seeks to challenge prevailing chronologies of African diaspora populations, moving away from political periodizations, and is framed around black experience—with the years 1690 and 1790 coming soon after fundamentally different campaigns of conquest of free communities of colour.
Childhood Learning on Turtle Island: A Ceramic Analysis of Late Woodland Villages in the Lower Great Lakes Region
Keywords: Childhood archaeology
Material culture
Northern Iroquoian
Pottery production
Socialization
Social learning

This study applies a multi-scalar pottery analysis of 15th century assemblages to investigate northern Iroquoian childhood learning experiences in the Lower Great Lakes prior to European contact. My analysis is based on the two villages in southern Ontario: Keffer and Draper, and three villages in upstate New York: Garoga, Smith-Pagerie and Klock. I employ an ontogenetic approach that recognizes childhood perspectives and the different cognitive and physiological experiences of children as they develop. I rely on ethnographic and child development data to reconstruct past learning experiences. Through this framework, I integrate a modified approach to meshworks through a systematic study of the material interactions of social learning of community members involved with the forming, shaping, and decorating of pottery vessels. Meshworks of learning allow for the identification of the development of knowledge and skills related to a technological practice. These learning growths further included new spatial interactions in their communities, and so I conducted a spatial analysis of Keffer and Draper vessels to investigate the presence of specialized learning locales, and how spatial areas around the village were involved in learning and craft production. The results of my analysis demonstrate a learning practice that did not isolate younger potters from adult activities but relied on flexible learning that encouraged a certain level of artistic freedom with minimal adult interference that adhered to fundamental principles of potting traditions. Pottery learning did not take place in specialized learning locales, but throughout the village. Furthermore, the data indicates regional patterning in which potters in Ontario and upstate New York learned to make pottery through similar practices. I argue that during the process of making pottery, learning experiences were mediated by deeply rooted cosmologies and traditions built around maintaining balanced social relations between community members of all ages and genders in Lower Great Lakes communities.
"No to Mining Yes to Life": An Ethnographic Account of Buen Vivir in Postneoliberal Ecuador
Keywords: Buen Vivir
Ecuador
Livelihoods
Neoextractivism
Political Ecology
Postneoliberalism

At a time of heightened, global conflict over resource extraction, the Intag valley, Ecuador is an exemplary case of long-term mining resistance, halting the development of a mega-mining project for over two decades. Significantly, extractive politics in Intag mobilizes a politics of life, a shift from protests of the past that have employed a politics of labor. The politics of life uses a relational worldview where assuring livelihoods goes hand in hand with the reproduction of nature. This has unfolded within the landscape of postneoliberal Ecuadorian politics, where the state has asserted its role in extractive development. President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) rejected neoliberal political economy in favor of a model adapted from the Quechua life philosophy, sumak kawsay (buen vivir or good living) -which prioritizes (non)human well-being. But, the buen vivir political project is at odds with the economic model of the postneoliberal state, neoextractivism –a type of resource nationalism. Considering the importance of communities and the state as negotiators of mega-mining projects under the neoextractivist model, as well the propensity of these two groups to have conflicting objectives, my research follows state-led development programs, from the vantage point of Intag. I ask how are the politics of life used to legitimize neoextractivism? I contend that the legitimacy of the postneoliberal era hinges on buen vivir -an emergent conceptual apparatus. A conceptual apparatus is a purposefully crafted political ideal that congeals a set of objectively desirable values and meanings that justify a political economic model of development, both enabling and inhibiting politics. Intag is a place where two spectral forces -the utopian ideal of buen vivir and the mine that has never been -saturate sociality and politics. It is a place where what it means to live well, and how this can best be achieved, is debated and informs everyday practice. Once a place defined by its remoteness, Intag is exactly the kind of place that the postneoliberal state has sought to bring into its orbit. My exploration of the politics of life traces how meanings of buen vivir are contested, negotiated, and fixed by the postneoliberal state and Inteños.
The Early Pianoforte School in London’s Musical World, 1785–1800: Technology, Market, Gender, and Style
Keywords: Broadwood
eighteenth century
Haydn
London
organology
piano

The late-eighteenth century was a period shaped by curiosity and fast-paced industrial, technological, and social growth in London. Collaborations between musicians and artists were frequent, and the boundary between musical understanding and “natural philosophy” was fluid. While market forces contributed to the popularity of the pianoforte in London, the technological development of the instrument and its multinational professional players performed key roles in the genesis of a London school of piano composition. This dissertation studies major factors that contributed to this evolution in pianism, focusing on matters of technological progress, collaboration, and stylistic revision in professional practice. I contend that a dynamic “early” London pianoforte school flourished from approximately 1785–1800. My goal is to insert new players and contexts into an incipient London-based pianoforte school so as to better understand how the early English piano functioned within its local market during this period. I examine the work associated with a cosmopolitan group of influential pianists, composers, and visual artists who were active in London during the 1780s and 1790s, including Joseph Haydn, Sophia Dussek, Theresa Jansen, and Francesco Bartolozzi. To elaborate further upon the work of these individuals, I study the increasingly innovative and responsive pianos that developed locally. In Chapter 1, I trace the history of the piano in England through Charles Burney’s writings, relevant patents by builders including those of Sébastien Érard, and documents from the Broadwood company archives. Chapter 2 develops our understanding of the English piano’s striking point through the collaborative work of Broadwood and scientists Tiberius Cavallo and Edward Whitaker Gray. Chapter 3 considers the rich evolution of Haydn’s compositional style through connections to London-based pianists Theresa Jansen and Maria Hester Park, and visual artists Francesco Bartolozzi and Thomas Park. Chapter 4 focuses on the short-lived music periodical Pleyel, Corri, and Dussek’s Musical Journal, and considers composer representation and marketing for the London audience in the 1790s. Through this dissertation, I demonstrate that shared stylistic principles and collaborative efforts forged strong connections among piano builders, musicians, and artists within the city’s vibrant urban environment of the late-eighteenth century.
Mechanism of Galactosaminogalactan Biosynthesis and Modification in Aspergillus fumigatus Biofilm Formation
Keywords: Aspergillus fumigatus
Biofilm
Carbohydrate deacetylase
Exopolysaccharide
Glycoside hydrolase
X-ray crystallography

The opportunistic fungal pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus adopts a biofilm mode of growth during infection. The exopolysaccharide galactosaminogalactan (GAG) is essential for A. fumigatus biofilm formation and is a key virulence factor in the murine model of A. fumigatus infection. Biosynthesis of the GAG polymer has been linked to a five-gene cluster reminiscent of bacterial synthase-dependent exopolysaccharide operons. As little is known about the mechanisms of exopolysaccharide synthesis in fungi, the structure and function of three of the proteins encoded by the GAG cluster were investigated. Ega3 and Sph3 were found to be endo-acting glycoside hydrolases active on galactosamine and N-acetylgalactosamine regions of the GAG polymer, respectively. Sph3 has a (β/α)8-barrel fold with a conserved shallow active site groove. Ega3 similarly adopts a (β/α)8-barrel fold but had a much deeper electronegative substrate binding cleft. Whilst Ega3 was found to belong to glycoside hydrolase (GH) family GH114, Sph3 did not belong to an existing GH family and thus GH135 was created around Sph3 and its homologues. These GHs were found to disrupt A. fumigatus biofilms and potentiate some antifungals against A. fumigatus. The third protein, Agd3, has a unique three domain structure with an N-terminal reductase-like fold, a central distorted (β/α)7-fold followed by a small β-sandwich domain. The (β/α)7-fold has low structural and primary sequence similarity to the carbohydrate esterase (CE) 4 family. Agd3 deacetylates oligo-N-acetylgalactosamine in a metal-dependent manner. This domain defines a new carbohydrate esterase family. The N-terminal domain was found to be a novel carbohydrate binding module. Agd3 deacetylation of GAG renders the polymer adherent to multiple surfaces and mediates virulence in the murine model of invasive aspergillosis. The structure and functional characterization of these proteins sheds light on the mechanism of GAG maturation, enriches our understanding carbohydrate active enzymes, and reveals new possibilities for therapeutics against fungal infection.