VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Approaches to Anti-sedentary Behaviour in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
Keywords: Behaviour Change
COPD
Health Promotion
Pulmonary Rehabilitation

Background: Decreasing sedentary behaviour has emerged as a distinct health target in individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), but effective approaches to reducing it are unclear. Objective: To explore the perspectives of people with COPD and healthcare professionals on reducing sedentary behaviour in people with COPD, to develop and test a sedentary behaviour reduction intervention for people with COPD, and to examine the feasibility of an alternate exercise modality (dance) to decrease sedentary behaviour for people with COPD. Methods: Two qualitative research studies, informed by the Theoretical Domains Framework, were conducted with 14 people with COPD (Study 1) and 16 healthcare professionals (Study 2). The feasibility of the “Get Up for Your Health” behaviour change reduction intervention, which was informed by the findings from Study 1, was tested in Study 3 using a single group, pre- and post-intervention design, among those with COPD enrolled on a PR program. Study 4 was a single group, pre-and post- study, which involved examining the feasibility of dance as an alternate exercise modality in individuals with COPD. Results: Study 1 revealed a lack of knowledge on the concept of sedentary behaviour among study participants. It identified behavioural determinants that could be targeted for a reduction in sedentary behaviour among people with COPD. Study 2 found that healthcare professionals need more education on sedentary behaviour with information about the determinants of behaviour relating to healthcare professionals targeting a reduction in sedentary behaviour in people with COPD. In study 3, the “Get Up for Your Health” intervention, emerged as being feasible, with an enrolment rate of 75%, a completion rate of 90%, adherence to wearing the activity monitor of 84% and participant satisfaction of 90%. The impact of the intervention on sitting time was unclear. In study 4, a dance program was safe and feasible, with an enrolment rate of 49%, a mean attendance rate of 78%, an absence of adverse events and a high participant satisfaction Conclusion: The current thesis provides important information for future sedentary behaviour research to support people with COPD.
Effects of Altered 7q11.23 Copy Number on Neural Stem Cell Physiology and Cortical Organization during Embryonic Development
Keywords: autism
copy number variation
neural stem cell
neurodevelopmental disorders
Williams Beuren syndrome

Williams-Beuren syndrome (WBS) and 7q11.23 duplication syndrome (Dup7) are two rare neurodevelopmental disorders caused by deletion and duplication respectively, of 25 genes on chromosome 7q11.23. Individuals with WBS or Dup7 present with an array of cognitive and behavioural phenotypes, including anxiety, autism, speech and language delay, and intellectual disability, but the biological basis for these neuropsychiatric symptoms remain unknown. Structural and functional abnormalities of the cortex have been identified in both WBS and Dup7, suggesting that cortical development is perturbed in these disorders. The effects of altered copy number variation (CNV) of two candidate genes, GTF2I and GTF2IRD1, on neural stem cell growth and fate determination was investigated using primary neuronal precursor cultures derived from mouse models with CNV of these genes. Altered Gtf2i and/or Gtf2ird1 expression disturbed neural stem cell physiology in early corticogenesis leading to abnormal cortical cytoarchitecture in late gestation embryos, in a gene dose dependent manner. Genome wide expression analysis of embryonic cortices of mouse models of Gtf2i and Gtf2ird1 CNV identified changes in transcriptome profiles underlying dysregulated corticogenesis. These data will help us understand how the developing brain is perturbed in people with WBS and Dup7 and may give insight into the pathological causes and possibly help identify therapeutic interventions to treat their cognitive symptoms.
Assessing the Effect of Tree Nut and Peanut Consumption on Adiposity: Is a Calorie a Calorie?
Keywords: Adiposity
Bioaccessibility
Fatty acids
Meta-Analysis
Nuts
Randomized Controlled Trial

Nuts have been shown to have diabetes and cardiovascular related health benefits, yet there remains concern that nuts may contribute to weight gain due to their high energy density. To address this concern, the research carried out in this thesis includes a systematic review and meta-analysis (SRMA) of prospective cohorts and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to investigate the role of nuts on measures of adiposity, and an exploratory analysis of a randomized crossover trial to assess the bioaccessibility of energy and macronutrients of almonds. The SRMA identified 7 prospective cohort studies and 86 RCTs involving 569,910 and 12,092 participants, respectively. Nut consumption was inversely associated with the primary outcome overweight/obesity, as well secondary outcomes (body weight, risk of ≥5 kg weight gain, waist circumference) in prospective cohort studies. Similarly, there was no adverse effect of nuts on the primary outcome of body weight or any of the secondary outcomes (BMI, body fat, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio or visceral adipose tissue) in RCTs. The 3-phase randomized crossover trial including 22 participants with hyperlipidemia indicated fat from almonds was only 78.5±3.1% bioaccessible with an average overall energy loss of 21.2±3.1% (40.6 kcal/d). When considering the diet as a whole, there was significantly less bioaccessibility of energy and fat with almond consumption, but not carbohydrate or protein, compared to the control. Inclusion of ~73 g of almonds each day decreased the energy bioaccessibility of the diet by approximately 2%. Thus, the energy content of almonds may not be as bioaccessible as predicted by Atwater factors. Current evidence demonstrates that nuts are not associated with increased overweight/obesity incidence or weight gain, possibly due to the reduced bioaccessibility of energy and fat content of nuts. The research conducted in this thesis suggest nuts may be recommended without the concern that they contribute to weight gain.
Safety and Accuracy of a Novel MR Imaging Based Method for Optimizing Deep Brain Stimulation Settings.
Keywords: deep brain stimulation
functional magnetic resonance imaging
magnetic resonance imaging
neuroimaging
neurosurgery
safety

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is most commonly used in Parkinson’s disease (PD) to modulate dysregulated motor circuits. This surgical treatment can produce striking clinical benefits when stimulation is properly programmed. DBS programming, the process of individually titrating the dose of electrical stimulation delivered to achieve maximal clinical benefits, remains largely a trial-and-error process predicated on clinical observations. This process imposes significant time and financial stress upon patients and healthcare systems. Hence, there is a need for a physiological marker that can rapidly and accurately predict clinical response to DBS parameters. We hypothesized that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) could serve as an objective predictor of treatment efficacy in PD DBS patients. This led to a four-step process: (1) determine the safety of 3 Tesla (T) MRI using a phantom model; (2) highlight the importance of using native optimal DBS programming settings; (3) determine the safety, and feasibility of 3T MRI in a large cohort of patients receiving DBS; and, (4) define a typical fMRI pattern resulting from clinically optimal stimulation in PD patients. Our results showed that optimal functional neuroimaging data (i.e., 3T MRI and body-transmit coil) could be acquired safely and effectively in patients with DBS. Then, we demonstrated that ethic approvals enabling the use of optimal native settings should be obtained since converting optimal native settings (i.e., non-bipolar) to equivalent bipolar settings — to meet MRI safety guidelines — does not yield equivalent fMRI maps. Finally, we defined a characteristic pattern of brain responses associated with clinically optimal stimulation. By contrasting the fMRI patterns obtained during optimal and non-optimal stimulations, we built a machine learning model classifying whether a given stimulation setting could be considered optimal based on its fMRI pattern of brain changes. Our results show that fMRI can rapidly define the optimal DBS stimulation in PD patients. Obtaining DBS-induced fMRI brain signatures associated with optimal clinical benefits, will not only allow us to obtain a better understanding of the mechanism of action of DBS, but could also facilitate individualized medicine for our patients and may represent a small step towards the possibility of autonomous, closed-loop DBS programming.
Public Art, Private Land: Settler Colonialism and Environment in New Deal Murals on the Great Plains
Keywords: Dust Bowl
Great Plains
Murals
Public Art
Settler Colonialism

“Public Art, Private Land: Settler Colonialism and Environment in New Deal Murals on the Great Plains” analyzes government-sponsored public art produced in the context of the Dust Bowl. While the national print media was dominated by images of environmental and economic disaster, the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts (1934-1943) placed murals in post offices across the country to provide an uneasy population with a reassuring vision of America. This dissertation focuses on the Great Plains, a region defined by environmental disaster narratives and the celebratory recent histories of white settlement. While the land appeared to be rejecting settlers through drought and dust storms, muralists offered scenes of reassuring history and agricultural bounty. However, the Dust Bowl was but one symptom of the ongoing disaster of settler colonialism. Through four thematic chapters, I ask how these artworks functioned to shore up settler faith in the land during a period of environmental crisis. In Chapter One, I examine land claim murals, works that emphasized settler arrivals and European histories on the Plains. Chapter Two considers extinction narratives that were employed against Native peoples and bison as a means of further solidifying settler land claims. However, these murals are considered alongside cultural production from Native artists that refutes settler claims and asserts survivance against colonization. Chapter Three examines agricultural murals, arguing that while some depictions of bounty ignored the surrounding Dust Bowl, others directly engaged with symbols of disaster. Finally, Chapter Four posits that symbols of oil extraction became hopeful signs of modernity and wealth for communities characterized by the Dust Bowl. In each chapter, I situate murals in a wider visual landscape that includes the visual culture of preceding festivals, photographs and print media of the 1930s, and more recent examples of community public art. My analysis draws from the rich archive of the Section of Fine Arts and from the fields of ecocritical art history, environmental and labor history, and settler colonial studies to argue that post office murals on the Plains worked to both reflect and to shape a community’s land ethic.
Owning Implicit Attitudes
Keywords: belief
conscious awareness
implicit attitudes
rationality
responsibility
the self

In this thesis I defend the view that we are attributability-responsible for at least some of our “implicit” attitudes, because they are propositional attitudes. Implicit attitudes are attitudes that can be measured by indirect tests, those tests where subjects are not informed what the test is measuring. It is often claimed that indirect tests are measuring uncontrolled or unconscious attitudes, and researchers draw a contrast with “explicit” attitudes, that are thought to be controlled or conscious attitudes. Unsurprisingly, the claims about control and consciousness seemingly map on to debates about responsibility for attitudes. It is often thought that to be responsible for an attitude, it must be a conscious attitude or a controlled attitude. A natural conclusion is that we are never responsible for our implicit attitudes. In this thesis I distinguish different senses of “control” and “conscious” from each other, and I show that implicit attitudes are not best understood as attitudes that we lack the ability to become aware of, nor as attitudes that we lack the ability to control. These abilities (to know or control one’s own attitudes) may be important for responsibility as accountability, but I argue that these abilities are not important for responsibility as attributability. I argue that we are attributability-responsible for an attitude when that attitude is a part of our self. Since implicit and explicit attitudes may dissociate, this commits me to a “mosaic” conception of the self, where our “selves” are often dissociated and contradictory, and not necessarily rationally consistent.
Nerves on the Loose: Gendering Nervousness in Ottoman and Early Republican Turkish Novels
Keywords: hysteria
nervousness
neurasthenia
Ottoman
tuberculosis
Turkish

This dissertation analyzes the literary representations of nervousness and its cognates, such as neurasthenia, hysteria, and nervous sensibility, which were coded as feminine in the novels of several canonical Ottoman-Turkish authors in the period between 1880 and 1940. It explores the complexity and many idiosyncrasies surrounding the idea of female nervousness together with its relevance to cultural and political discourse within the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey. Although its relevance has eluded scholars, the notion of female nervousness, as represented both in fiction and nonfiction, deserves its place as a noteworthy category within Ottoman and Turkish narratives of disease. Two chapters of this dissertation examine the array of hysteric and neurasthenic female characters in Ottoman-Turkish literature and demonstrate that these disorders were malleable and varied in definition, drawing from changing socio-cultural and medical contexts. The other two chapters focus on different manifestations of female nervousness. Inspired by the frequent references to the concepts of nerves, the nervous system, and female nervousness in print media from the turn of the century, this dissertation ultimately demonstrates four things. First, the ways in which the authors narrativize female nervousness in their novels reveal prevailing gender and class norms of the era. A closer analysis of the novels supported by secondary sources called for widening the analysis beyond gender and class to include race, ethnicity and socio-economic expectations of the period. Second, female nervousness is rarely treated as a mere medical condition or diagnosis; authors often capitalize on nervousness, or any related diagnostic label, to promote their own views of concepts such as civilization (medeniyet) or emotional etiquette (hiss-i terbiye). Third, female nervousness is mobilized to cast a light on the conditions of modernity, and to express anxieties around it. Lastly, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Turkey as a nation state, female nervousness takes on metaphorical meanings in the service of nation-building and the construction of a national identity. Together, these four arguments demonstrate that the exploration of female nervousness cannot be contained within a single, definitive narrative.
History and Literature Interwoven yet Distinct: The Paşanāme, a Seventeenth-century Ottoman Turkish Mes̠nevī on Conflicts in Rumelia and the Northern Black Sea Region
Keywords: Cossacks
Gazavatname
Ottoman history
Ottoman literature
Rumelia and Black Sea history
Turkish literature

The Paşanāme is a 2180-couplet Ottoman Turkish mes̠nevī that, in my assessment, represents the continuation of the ġazānāme genre in evolved form during the first half of the seventeenth century. The work is by Ṭulūʿī, an Ottoman court poet patronized by Murād IV (r. 1623–40). It primarily consists of accounts of two campaigns led by the vizier Kenʿān Paşa. Kenʿān Paşa was appointed in the 1620s first on an expedition to restore imperial authority in parts of Rumelia, and later to campaign in the northern Black Sea region against the Crimean Tatar prince Şāhīn Giray, a Polish-Lithunian army under the command of Chmielecki (Meleşki), and parties of Cossacks. This thesis argues for an integrated historico-literary approach to understanding the genre of work and the type of primary source that the Paşanāme represents. Chapter 1 preliminarily assesses the historicity of the accounts of events in the Paşanāme. Relevant historical sources are cross-referenced; they include the Feẕleke of Kātib Çelebī, the Tārīḫ-i Naʿīmā, the Topçular Kātibi ʿAbd ul-Qādīr Efendi Tārīḫi, decrees in the mühimme defteri, and the Seyāhatnāme of Evliyā Çelebī. To better understand the Paşanāme holistically, Chapter 2 is devoted to examining the specific places in the work where Ṭulūʿī concentrates his display of literary/poetic skills, which were intended to enhance the overall narrative, but not to substitute the central goal of relating past events. In Chapter 3, a full transcription and translation of the Paşanāme is provided, so that more readers/researchers can decide for themselves how to understand the work.
An Aesthetics of Endurance: Art, Visual Culture and Indigenous Presence in Nagaland, India
Keywords: Aesthetics
Art
Indigeneity
Politics
South Asia
Visual Culture

This doctoral dissertation explores objects of Indigenous art and visual culture in Nagaland, northeast India as sites of emergence informed by a temporally layered Indigenous present that foreground the aesthetics of endurance that characterizes Indigenous lifeworlds and their settler-colonial marginalization by the postcolonial state in contemporary South Asia. It is based on ethnographic interviews with regional artists and activists, and visual analysis of objects as sites that world multiple conceptions of time and space, associated with the ever-changing practices of Naga Indigeneity and with discursive understandings of them, in layered ways. The primary objects of my research—craft objects, memorial monuments, and house museums—were produced in the predominantly Indigenous and Christian Nagaland after 1997. This was when an armed, pan-Indigenous, transregional and transnational Naga movement for political autonomy, which began in 1953, ended with a ceasefire agreement between the Indian government and Naga nationalists. I argue that the plural and layered temporality of the objects materialize intersubjective conceptions of time and space constituted by Indigenous practices, relationships to land, and their overlapping re-significations as heritage within the terms of culture, and as history, statecraft, sovereignty, and Indigenous rights within the terms of democracy. It also grounds the newness of the monument, the museum and craft object, which shows the aesthetics of endurance to be a space of emergence as well. This highlights an Indigenous present co-constituted by Indigenous rituals and Christian practices, forms of collective memory, and the contestations that characterize them, which illuminate regional processes of identity-formation. Based on discursive analyses of colonial and post-independence scholarship, this thesis also shows that the institutionalization of Indigenous arts as India’s “tribal” crafts both essentializes them and appropriates them to Hindu hegemonic notions of craft and culture. This reveals the art historical lineage of the postcolonial Indian state’s settler-colonial logic of the marginalization of regional Indigenous lifeworlds. The layered nature of my objects exemplifies the enduring and emergent qualities of Indigenous presence in the face of this ongoing discursive appropriation, while also exemplifying the plural and layered temporality of art as such and the present that we all inhabit.
The Neoliberal Politics of Queer Men of Colour’s Erotic Lives
Keywords: erotic agency
erotic racism
neoliberalism
queer erotics
queer of colour critique
women of colour feminism

The growth of queer digital spaces that offer queer men of colour the ability to find each other for sex and dating has produced a set of challenges for researchers. While these spaces are seen as significant for opening up new erotic sites, they are simultaneously mired by erotic practices rooted in racism. This dissertation asks, what significant ways do racial differences play a role in queer men of colour’s erotic lives, particularly in the digital era, and what kind of agency do queer men of colour practice in regard to erotic racism? I argue that despite evidence of increasing racism in digital spaces, queer men of colour continue to navigate, (re)shape and participate in online discourses including even those considered ideologically problematic. My project undertakes an in-depth study of the practices and experiences of queer men of colour to better understand how racial difference and configurations of neoliberalism shape queer men of colour’s intimate lives. Based on interview data, this dissertation demonstrates that many queer men of colour, including those who see themselves as anti-racist, are often erotically attached to what I characterize as racial and neoliberal economies of desirability. Racial and neoliberal economies of desirability refer to preferences for particular forms of (economic and cultural) capital rooted within white middle-class ideals. This dissertation focuses on racism within quotidian (erotic) practices in order to understand the depth through which racial difference organizes our intimate lives. My analysis builds from the theoretical framework of queer of colo(u)r critique to explore how queer erotic lives are sutured to intersecting configurations of gender, sexuality, race, capital, nation and disability/normalcy. Extending queer of colour critique theorizations of power differentials between differently racialized groups and within each community of colour, I theorize eroticized power relations that exist between queer men of colour. My research underscores that queer men of colour’s erotic attachments often align with sexual and gendered racial discourses while they are simultaneously committed to anti-racist and often feminist politics. By underscoring this point, this research provides new ways of understanding queer subjectivities as vexing and contradictory, because in reality there are no ‘perfectly’ non-racist subjects.