VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Atheism and the Matter of Representation in the English Renaissance
Keywords: Atheism
Drama
Poetry
Religion
Renaissance
Shakespeare

One of the great Procrustean epithets of the Renaissance, “atheist” in the first century of its use in the English language could imply anything from Italianism and excessive learning to libertinism and tobacco-smoking. Its historical reception has been typified, in turn, by the scholarly slurs of categorical vacuity and semantic looseness. The first claim of my dissertation, however, is that the inclusivity of Renaissance atheism signifies vital connectivity rather than speciousness. Reading canonical works of English Renaissance poetry and drama alongside their antique and contemporaneous sources, I contend that atheism responds to the precarious hold on emergent accounts of materiality by the forms of belief. Rather than systematic denial of theology, atheism coalesces in the imagination of the English Renaissance like the remnants of a vivid but inchoate dream; it shares its content, abject material existence, with the moral, religious, and social authorities to which it is opposed. Evidence for this interpretation does not primarily emerge in clear records of confessional states or legal remains, but from the correspondingly dreamlike efforts of aesthetic representation. My dissertation follows their often-obscured contours and reveals that Renaissance atheism is as much a mode and function of verbal expression, energized by particularized language and the details of material reality, as a discrete category of devotion. Chapters on Edmund Spenser’s mutable universe and John Donne’s interrogation of the soul explore how humanist syntheses of antique texts mingle pagan philosophy with Christian doctrine, smuggling fragments of atheist cosmology into otherwise orthodox discourses. In a reading of Ben Jonson’s pathologized London, I explore how a chorus of Christian denominations proclaiming singular access to divine truth also uncovers its potential impossibility in the position of atheism. Pessimistic meditations about the place of human life within historical and natural orders challenge Providence and anchor two chapters on the reordering of private and public life in Shakespeare’s drama. Each of these focused studies finds a renewed understanding of premodern atheism in the imaginative topography of the English Renaissance, its spectral presence suggesting a world that begins, ends, and finds signification in the terms of material experience.
Conflict at the Crossroads: Redrawing Global Supply Lines in the Age of Logistics
Keywords: Globalization
Logistics
Urbanization

This dissertation examines the landscapes of logistics, the fast-growing industry responsible for managing the movement of goods, materials, and related information in the global economy. As commodity flows increase in volume, velocity, and distance, they depend on increasingly large-scale transformations of the physical and social environment. How is space being refashioned to accommodate new methods and patterns of circulation? And how do popular forces intervene in these processes? This research employs a multi-sited, relational methodology to investigate how the circulation of commodities is influencing the production of space at multiple scales. Its empirical focus is the recent expansion of the Panama Canal, a logistics megaproject with global reverberations, and the consequent rivalry among North American ports seeking to attract a new generation of oversized container ships. Drawing on a year of mixed-methods fieldwork in Panama City, Los Angeles, and New York, the dissertation analyzes competitive efforts to remake space in the image of smooth, efficient circulation and the struggles that have ensued over land, labour, and the environment. I argue that the landscapes of logistics are contradictory and conflictual spaces: even as global supply chains deliver the material provisions that make possible the reproduction of contemporary life, their development and functioning are undergirded by violent processes of community dispossession, labour exploitation, and environmental degradation. These impacts are disproportionately borne by poor and racialized residents and workers, whose struggles play a fundamental role in shaping corporate production and distribution networks. The research offers a critical reappraisal of the prevailing view that logistics provides a progressive and sustainable path to economic development. It shows that, as logistics has become increasingly vital to the operations of capitalism, the circulation of commodities exacts a heavy toll on those who live and labour in the arteries of global trade.
Virgil in the Northern Renaissance: Spenser, Milton, and Humanist Philology
Keywords: Milton
Renaissance
Spenser
Virgil

My dissertation examines how advances in sixteenth-century classical scholarship shaped the Virgilianism of Edmund Spenser and John Milton. Critical studies on the Virgilian commentary tradition have focused on commentaries written no later than the early decades of the sixteenth century, and hence have detected little development in the Renaissance interpretation of Virgil. I argue that, if we are to understand Spenser’s and Milton’s Virgil, we must appreciate the revolutionary advances achieved by mid-sixteenth-century humanists. What made the latter possible was a much-improved knowledge of Greek literature, which gave humanists newfound insight into Virgil’s engagement with both Hellenistic poetry and Attic tragedy. I focus mainly on the French school of humanists including Jean Dorat and his circle of philologists and poets. Their Greek studies allowed these humanists to innovate upon Servius, who lacked firsthand knowledge of Virgil’s Hellenistic models, and to recover the Alexandrian dimension of Virgilian poetics. A new Virgilianism then emerged in the poetry of the Pléiade, one that accounts for the richness and complexity of Spenser’s Virgilian imitations in The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene more comprehensively than the Virgil of modern career criticism. I also examine how the study of Aristotle’s Poetics helped humanists to recover the dramatic dimension of the Aeneid, and hence to read Dido’s tragedy mimetically rather than allegorically. This approach led, first, to a more sympathetic reading of Dido’s character, and second, to an interest in the theological questions raised by her death. Milton’s imitations of Aeneid 4 in Paradise Lost illustrate how this interpretation shaped the legacy of Dido and the attitude toward eros in English epic. The dissertation thus aims to capture the dynamic nature of Renaissance Virgilianism by exploring how poetic practice kept pace with philological discovery. The first chapter focuses on French philology and the recovery of Virgil’s Alexandrianism; the second, on Spenser’s March and the reception of Hellenistic pastoral; the third, on Book 3 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Joseph Scaliger’s scholarship on the Ciris; and the fourth, on Milton’s Paradise Lost and the influence of the Poetics on humanist interpretations of Dido’s tragedy.
Functional Analysis of the Motor Circuit of Juvenile Caenorhabditis elegans
Keywords: All-optical interrogation
C. elegans
Extrasynaptic transmission
Motor circuit
Symmetry

Caenorhabditis elegans generates alternating dorsal-ventral bending waves across developmental stages. The overall level of dorsal and ventral muscle output is symmetric. In adults, this behavioral symmetry correlates with anatomy symmetry: distinct pools of cholinergic motor neurons activate dorsal and ventral body wall muscles, whereas distinct pools of GABAergic motor neurons contra-laterally inhibit dorsal and ventral muscles, respectively. However, in the first stage larva (L1), cholinergic motor neurons only make neuromuscular junctions to the dorsal muscle, and GABAergic motor neurons to the ventral muscle. How does an asymmetric motor circuit produce symmetric motor output? In the past five years, my colleagues and I undertook anatomical and functional analyses of the L1 larva motor circuit to address this question. First, my colleagues fully reconstructed the connectivity of a complete L1 larva, from which we identified all candidate cellular components for muscle activity. Next, to elucidate the functional contribution of these candidates, I developed a novel all-optical manipulation methodology that allows fast and systemic probing of functional connections of neural circuits. Third, I led the effort to combine free-moving calcium imaging, cellular ablation, chemogenetics, optogenetics, and all-optical interrogation to pinpoint mechanisms for the symmetric L1 muscle output. Collectively, results from these studies show that all cells that make anatomic synaptic connections are insufficient to explain the symmetry of body wall muscle excitability in L1 C. elegans; instead, extra-synaptic transmissions play a crucial role in underling muscle activity regulation. In the L1 motor circuit, the anatomically asymmetric circuit is functionally compensated by extra-synaptic transmissions from both excitatory premotor interneurons and inhibitory motor neurons to operate as a symmetric circuit. Excitatory premotor interneurons can bypass the motor neurons layer to directly regulate excitability of muscle cells, thus assuming dual roles. Animals with distinct wirings can produce similar motor patterns. Our findings in the juvenile C. elegans motor circuit show that structurally divergent neural circuits can functionally converge on the functional output, and that neurons can multiplex. This study further demonstrates a larger role of functional communications devoid of ultrastructural features in a developing neural circuit.
Exit Music: The Experience of Music Therapy within Medical Assistance in Dying
Keywords: End of life
MAiD
Music Therapy
Palliative care
Phenomenology
Qualitative

Since the 2015 legalization of medical assistance in dying (MAiD), healthcare professionals across the interdisciplinary spectrum have been exploring their roles within this practice, and a number of professions have created guidelines and policies to define their role(s). Many Canadian music therapists also found themselves implicated in care for those requesting MAiD. No prior research has been done to gain insight into the role of music therapy within the context of MAiD. This qualitative hermeneutic phenomenological study, the first of its kind, examines the experience of music therapy within medically assisted dying from three perspectives: the patient, their primary caregiver, and the music therapist/researcher. Ten cases that vary in duration of involvement of the music therapist, demographic, characteristics, and nature of the music therapy are presented through a hermeneutic phenomenological methodology lens. A total of 24 music therapy sessions and seven caregiver interviews were transcribed and analyzed. A total 28 researcher reflections were analyzed. The analysis of data revealed thematic trends of life reflection activated by the musical interaction (wherein the music functioned as a narrator and a trigger), control (over musical and ritualistic choices), communication and connectedness (with the self and others through music), and aesthetic pleasure (as a catalyst for therapeutic outcomes such as pain and symptom management). Caregiver participant results revealed trends of immediacy of access to emotion through music, reflection (on personal narratives within music), witnessing (of patients’ emotional and narrative expressions), and unexpected opportunities (for life review through music). Researcher reflection data analyses revealed thematic trends of trusting (in the midst of uncertainty), witnessing (of the unfolding of narratives through music), therapeutic relationship creation (with a sense of immediacy), and support for patients and caregivers in their navigation of their MAiD processes. These results may have implications as to how music therapy is offered, standardized, and implemented in settings where MAiD is provided, as the overarching thematic findings show therapeutically beneficial outcomes in terms of quality of life, life review, and symptom management. Further research is merited to continue to explore the role of music therapy in the context of assisted dying.
Toward Feminist Geographies of Cycling
Keywords: Bicycling
Embodiment
Fear
Gender
Household-Serving Travel
Urban

Transport cycling uptake is on the rise in many cities; in Toronto, Canada, cycling is the fastest growing mode of transportation. In many of these cities there is evidence that cycling participation rates are not distributed equally across the population. Notably, a gender-gap in cycling has been observed in many cities with low cycling rates, including Toronto, whereby approximately two thirds of commuter cyclists identify as men and one third identify as women. This thesis is concerned with gender and cycling. Drawing from perspectives from feminist geography, this research examines how the embodied experience of cycling shapes, and how is it shaped by, intersecting axes of identity. A critical literature review of articles concerned with gender and cycling finds that two hypotheses are commonly explored to explain the gender-gap in cycling: (1) that women cycle less than men due to greater concerns over safety and (2) due to their tendency to complete more household-serving travel, a type of travel said to be more challenging to do by bike because it often involves carrying goods and/or children. The social factors underpinning these trends, as well as the ways in which other axes of identity intersect with gender to shape cycling behaviours is lacking from the current literature. This research aims to address this research gap by providing a feminist geography of cycling. To do so, a research project was completed in collaboration with Bike Host, a cycling mentorship program targeting immigrants and refugees in Toronto, Canada. Amongst other research activities, semi-structured interviews were completed with participants to explore the embodied experience of cycling. Key results from this study are presented in three chapters. The first examines the gendered and classed embodied practices that shape and are shaped by cycling. Then, the social, temporal, and spatial dimensions of many different types of fear of cycling are explored. Finally, the ways in which participants used bicycles to complete household-serving travel, a gendered mobility, are reported. Taken together, this dissertation demonstrates the role patriarchal and classist power relations play in shaping who cycles.
Model-Predictive Control of HVDC Grid
Keywords: communication delay
converter
HVDC grid
Model Predictive Control
partially decentralized
regulation

This thesis introduces, develops and verifies a control strategy for a Voltage-Sourced Converter (VSC)-based High-Voltage Direct-Current (HVDC)-grid. The envisioned control: (1) regulates and retains the HVDC-grid variables within their permissible ranges during transients and steady-state conditions; (2) shares control objectives among all operational converter stations; (3) generates control-command variables without infeasibility problem; and (4) mitigates impacts of communication delay on the HVDC-grid control. The proposed control strategy has a distributed control structure and includes a local outer controller (LOC) for each converter station. Each LOC consists of five building blocks: setpoint calculator SCdc; local estimator LEdc; DC-side local outer controller LOCdc; AC-side local outer controller LOCac; and control-command generator CCG. The proposed LOCdc comprises a two-level control structure. The lower level is based on discrete-time infinite-horizon Linear-Quadratic Regulator (LQR) method. The higher level, which is based on Model-Predictive Control (MPC) method, is formulated such that the MPC optimization problem always possesses one and only one optimal solution. The formulation of the two levels is such that the output of the higher level and the optimal solution of the MPC optimization problem are known, if the output of the lower level satisfies the HVDC-network constraints over the MPC prediction horizon. A cooperative approach is adopted in formulating the MPC optimization problems of all LOCs. As different communication delays affect the receiving time-instants of different measured signals at each LEdc, the proposed LEdc is formulated to mitigate the communication-delay impacts on the HVDC-network state-vector estimation. The SCdc computes setpoint values based on a steady-state model of the HVDC network, considering its variable limits. The LOCac is formulated based on continuous-time infinite-horizon LQR method. The proposed CCG is formulated based on assigning priority levels to the conditions that the CCG aims to satisfy and obtaining a set of control-command vectors restricted by the priority levels. The proposed approach guarantees that the CCG always can generate control-command variables, and the generated control-command variables minimize violations of the conditions. The control system performance is evaluated based on time-domain simulation studies in MATLAB/Simulink environment. The investigations conclude that the proposed control system meets the expectations.
Somewhere in the Middle: Understandings of Friendship and Approaches to Social Engagement among Postsecondary Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Keywords: Adults
Autism
Friendship
Postsecondary Students

Abstract This study examined the social experiences and understandings of friendship of postsecondary students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Ten students from Ontario postsecondary institutions participated in semi-structured interviews and data were analyzed according to the principles of modified grounded theory. Participants’ responses indicate that they had conventional understandings of friendship that included compatible interests and aspects of intimacy. They expressed confidence about their strengths, personalities, and social abilities, and were motivated to develop and maintain friendships and participate in social activities with their peers. They also described experiencing communication challenges and difficulty engaging in various social environments. Participants positioned themselves as “somewhere in the middle” of peers with and without ASD in terms of social functioning, viewed supports as appropriate for others with ASD but not themselves, and employed strategic approaches to socializing in order to balance their desire for social connection with the impacts of the challenges that they experienced. They described areas of satisfaction and dissatisfaction or ambivalence with regard to their social lives. They expressed positive views about their friends, social activities, and ability to manage social situations, and described feelings of discomfort, concerns about making social errors, being evaluated negatively by others, the number of friends they had and how much time they spent with them. Participants’ descriptions revealed two pathways in terms of context selection, social engagement, and satisfaction that correspond with gender. Females prioritized maintaining contact with friends from before postsecondary and described higher levels of social engagement and satisfaction than males who emphasized socializing with peers from postsecondary. The relationship between context selection and level of social engagement on satisfaction was mediated by actively pursuing social goals and having a gradual approach to social development. The findings of this study have implications for research, advocacy, and support provision. These include the importance of accounting for differences among individuals with ASD in terms of their experiences, perspectives, skills, and goals, and the extent to which they identify with their diagnoses. Supports may also vary in relation to characteristics such as gender and cognitive abilities, and factors such as life stage and environmental contexts.
A New Approach to Active Removal of Space Debris
Keywords: Active Debris Removal
Attitude and Orbit Control
Attitude Dynamics
Deorbiter CubeSat
Orbital Dynamics
Space Debris

As a result of human space activities for over sixty years, there exist numerous man-made debris objects in the Earth orbits. Such objects not only jeopardize current operations of important space assets, but can also seriously hinder future space missions through a potential chain reaction of colliding space debris. This research addresses mitigation and remediation of the space debris environment. The thesis entails research in four critical subject areas: i) characterization of the debris environment, ii) assessment of the active debris removal methods proposed in the literature, iii) detailed engineering of a novel removal concept using a CubeSat spacecraft, called Deorbiter CubeSat, for sizable debris objects in low-Earth orbit, and iv) design of attitude and orbit controllers for the proposed spacecraft. The research first develops a probabilistic method for the prioritization of debris objects to be consid- ered in near-future removal missions. Then, a comparative study and in-depth analysis is conducted on the removal methods proposed in the literature to investigate their viability, through a number of multi- criteria assessment techniques. A Monte Carlo analysis is used in the study to quantify the intrinsic uncertainty associated with the space debris population. Next, a new debris removal mission utilizing Deorbiter CubeSats is conceptualized, and the design of CubeSat subsystems is detailed. A mothership spacecraft carries and deploys a number of Deorbiter CubeSats into designated orbits near their target debris. Each CubeSat uses an eight-unit form factor, and consists of commercially-available components with substantial space heritage. The actual performance specifications of the components are used to examine the proposed space debris removal approach. Finally, control schemes are synthesized for the critical maneuvers in the mission, using a unilateral low-thrust propulsion and a three-axis reaction wheel systems onboard the CubeSat, namely, i) concurrent rendezvous and attitude synchronization maneuver for approaching and attaching to the debris, ii) detumbling maneuver for stabilizing the debris attitude motion, and iii) deorbiting maneuver for transferring the debris from its original orbit to a deorbit altitude along a time-optimal trajectory. Several numerical simulations verify and validate the proposed approach as well as the control schemes.