VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Segregated in Life and in Death: A Black Woman's Critical Exploration and Narrative Account of Early African Descended Communities and Graveyards in New Brunswick

This almost ten-year journey of ancestral teachings has become my PhD dissertation. The exposure of the systemic abandonment and erasure of Black communities in New Brunswick, Canada, is the primary focus of this thesis. It centers on the segregation in life and in death of the early people of African descent in Fredericton and surrounding area of the province. I am a sixth generation descendent of those early African families; my fifth great-grandmother Sabina Grant (according to the Carleton Papers) arrived in Nova Scotia in 1783. I speak to the oppression my ancestors endured and, specifically, what happened to their bodies after death. The dissertation provides evidence to show how my ancestors’ bodies were placed in segregated graveyards that were later abandoned or destroyed and their communities erased from the historical record. I include personal poetry and photographs to help illustrate this erasure. This work is an academic, and a decolonization project. My dissertation is guided by my spiritual epistemology and is grounded in anti-colonial and critical race theories. I draw on historical research methodology and multiple methods of primary and secondary sources of data collection from archival, to academic publications, oral histories, and the exploration of six graveyards in Fredericton and the surrounding area of the province. The intent of this thesis is to decolonize the current narratives surrounding the history of my ancestors and to insert more accurate narratives about their lives and deaths, which I will pass on to my descendants and all people interested in New Brunswick Black History. I include recommendations for action by local government and communities to help preserve this historical record, and for schooling and higher education. I conclude the dissertation with a chapter about my community advocacy work, titled “Speaking Back”, which includes a discussion of my successful Human Rights case against racial profiling in an incident in a shop in Toronto in 2011. Keywords: Black History, Segregation, Death, Graveyards, Spirituality.

Advisor: Wane, Njoke
Re/producing Legitimacy: Midwifery and Indigeneity in the Yucatán Peninsula

This dissertation is rooted in ten years of collaboration and eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with both professional and traditional midwives in the Mexican states of Quintana Roo and Yucatán. This project takes a historicized approach, tracing current configurations of race and gender in Mexico through over one hundred years of nationalist intertwinements with science, medicine, and public health projects to illuminate how Indigenous epistemologies are trivialized and marked for elimination by biomedicine. Midwifery in Mexico is a precarious profession and tradition, and over the past ten years a multiplicity of government and NGO actors have attempted to shape, constrain, support, and eliminate Indigenous midwifery practices throughout the country, sometimes simultaneously and through the same programs and laws. This research, based in a midwife-run birth house in Quintana Roo and tracing particular local, national, and international networks that midwives in seemingly peripheral places draw upon to sustain their work, examines how global health priorities such as the Millennium Development Goals become appropriated through local government programs to promote and extend nationalist projects of ethnic and racial homogenization. Through a reproductive justice framework, I reveal how this agenda inherently promotes the elimination of Indigenous midwifery practices while entrenching systems that are particularly violent for Indigenous women, a reality embedded in historically-mediated racial logics deployed by both advocates and critics of midwifery. By blending an analysis of participant observations of births, pre-natal appointments, activist meetings, Secretariat of Health midwifery training workshops, and midwifery conferences, with a focused attention to the peninsula’s history as a site of Indigenous uprising during the Caste War and as a continued site of racial imaginaries and erasure via the tourist industry, I argue that histories of Indigenous dispossession in the Yucatán are intimately linked to Indigenous women’s experiences of birth and the precarious right to practice traditional midwifery.

Keywords: Medical Anthropology
Mexico
Midwifery
Yucatan
Advisor: Boddy, Janice
Wardlow, Holly
Fraternity on the Front Lines: Siegfried Sassoon, Fictive Kinship, and the First World War

Fraternity on the Front Lines examines the relationship between kinship and commemoration in the Great War diaries, poetry, and autobiographical prose that Siegfried Sassoon composed between 1915 and 1945. I contend that Sassoon’s account of his front-line service first developed as a direct consequence of the fictive kinship bonds that united fighting men together in France, to the exclusion of the Homefront civilians from whom these soldiers felt themselves irreparably exiled. These men perceived their shared combat experience as forming the foundation of their interdependent relationships, and of the war narrative that they soon produced. That narrative’s publication in their war-poetry and memoirs in turn supplied vivid details of the war that had remained otherwise inaccessible to most civilians even after 1918. Whatever its hostility to non-combatants, then, Britons began to adopt much of the combatant- writer’s seemingly unimpeachable account nearly verbatim: soldiers’ writings retroactively redefined the nation’s larger relationship to the war so that the collective British war narrative after 1930 came to over-emphasise the figure of the soldier-poet, around whom it began to build a canon of war-books. While recent scholarship has worked to rediscover writings by the very groups that soldier-kin sought to exclude—women, conscientious objectors, colonial subjects, and others still—it has so far missed how the once-dismissive Sassoon was himself forced to radically reconsider his earlier ideas of what “qualifies” one to testify to wartime sufferings. As I show in my last chapter, Sassoon experienced another great war, this time as a superannuated non-combatant at home in England. My reading of the long-ignored autobiographies that he began as this Second War approached (and only finished in August 1945) will update the reputation of one of the First World War’s best-known writers, now beginning to suffer from the success of his earlier, exclusionary writings. By showing how the older Sassoon finally expanded his conception of valid, experience-informed testimony well beyond his combatant kinship group, therefore, Fraternity on the Front Lines supports scholarship working to extend the Great War library beyond the received handful of soldier-poets that includes the young Sassoon and his closest comrades.

Keywords: fictive kinship
First World War
Siegfried Sassoon
twentieth century
war-writing
Advisor: Leonard, Garry
Masculinity Contest Culture Under the Microscope: A Critical Analysis of Gender Relations Within Ontario Police Services

Even though traits associated with masculinity contest culture have always existed within policing forces, this phenomenon is understudied. Masculinity contest culture has four principal characteristics: 1) show no weakness; 2) always demonstrate strength and stamina; 3) put work first; and 4) dog-eat-dog competition. This project investigated how police officers in Ontario, Canada negotiate gender in an industry where any deviation from masculinity contest culture results in negative consequences for the officer. Masculinity contest culture exists to varying degrees in occupations that are predominantly controlled by male workers but policing and the military are the two occupations with the strongest affiliation. There is no leniency for police officers to deviate from masculinity contest culture, regardless of their gender.In this study, 23 police officers from five police organizations were interviewed. Each interview was based on 20 open-ended questions. The researcher analyzed two models of policing commonly practiced in North America from a gendered perspective: community policing and traditional policing. Community policing is referred to as “soft” policing. The duties of policing are so highly gendered that women are geared towards community policing whereas males are geared towards traditional policing. Males who engage in community policing are sometimes feminized by officers in traditional policing who do not consider this model to be real ii policing. This research demonstrates women in policing in Ontario continue to struggle to achieve parity with males because of masculinity contest culture. The findings demonstrate that masculinity contest culture could eventually be transformed from an observed phenomenon to a theoretical framework once testing is conducted on a larger scale. To reduce some of the toxic effects of this culture, the researcher recommends police officers should reorganize some of their off-duty time according to a caring masculinity framework, which is another understudied theoretical framework. This study contributes to the field by demonstrating the existence and effects of masculinity contest culture. It is hoped that it will provide a starting point for a closer analysis of masculinity contest culture by scholars and workers within the police services.

Advisor: Wane, Njoki
Target-recognition Mechanism of Non-coding Small RNAs in Mycobacterium Tuberculosis

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis), the causative agent of tuberculosis, is a major public health threat. The success of M. tuberculosis as a human pathogen is dependent on its ability to rapidly cope with the stresses imposed by the highly variable host microenvironment. To adapt to the diverse microenvironments in the host, M. tuberculosis has to coordinate its gene expression for its survival. While the transcriptional regulation of M. tuberculosis has been extensively studied, the non-coding small RNAs (sRNAs) remains poorly understood.In this thesis, I investigate the target-recognition mechanism of sRNAs in mycobacteria. Bacterial sRNAs are important post-transcriptional regulators that have been shown to regulate metabolic processes, stress adaption and virulence. Compared to the vast knowledge of bacterial sRNAs in Gram-negative bacteria, the number of identified sRNAs is limited and their target-recognition mechanisms are unknown in mycobacteria. A major enigma in the field of mycobacterial sRNA research is the lack of RNA chaperones in this genus, such as Hfq. Hfq belongs to the Sm/Sm-like (Lsm) family RNA binding proteins and is required for the interactions of many sRNAs with their target mRNAs. The lack of RNA chaperones has thus prevented sRNA discovery and target identification in mycobacteria. Here using 6C sRNA as an example, I show that the sRNA-mRNA interaction mediated by the C- rich loops of sRNAs could be a common mechanism of action of sRNAs that contain unpaired C- rich regions in mycobacteria. This interaction is independent of protein accessory factors. For sRNAs that do not contain this C-rich motif, it is possible that an RNA chaperone is required. I discovered that Rv3208A may play a role in mycobacteria that is equivalent to Hfq in other bacteria and represent a new bacterial member of the Sm/Lsm family proteins. I present evidence that Rv3208A is an RNA binding protein and exhibits a quaternary structure feature that is characteristic of the Sm/Lsm family RNA binding proteins. Taken together, my works have partially filled in the large knowledge gap of understanding the mechanism of action of M. tuberculosis sRNAs and open up new opportunities to further study the roles of sRNA-mediated regulations in the biology of M. tuberculosis.

Advisor: Liu, Ju JL
When Citizens Judge: Democratic Judgment in the Courts and Theater of Athens

Abstract In When Citizens Judge, I compare judgment in the popular courts and in the theater of democratic Athens, examining how citizens reflect on questions of inclusion, political identity and the public good in these alternative sites. The Athenian case provides a particularly useful occasion for theorizing democratic judgment in theatrical settings, where citizens are brought together in a congregation of leisured listening, and legal arenas, where citizens as jurors must reach a definitive decision that carries the weight of penal sanction. My project proceeds along two tracks simultaneously: I argue that both the courts and the theater were spaces in which citizens reflected upon and reconstituted their common project; at the same time, I challenge the perceived unity of the Athenian public sphere. The dominant view is that Athenians learned vital lessons at the theater (about the excesses of empire, the instability of civic boundaries, or the tragic limits of human agency), and that these lessons informed their political judgment in the popular courts and in the Assembly. My research challenges this view both at a historical level and by rethinking the theory of judgment that undergirds it. I draw attention to the puzzling disunity of the Athenian public sphere, and in particular the dissonance between judgment in the theater and in the courts. Instead of theorizing judgment as a faculty or capacity that one develops in one site and then exercises in another, I argue that we should theorize judgment as a situated political practice. This requires attending to what I call “institutional charge,” including the political and institutional pressures placed on the judge, the required outcome or telos of a given judgment, the institutional constraints on narrative, and the civic role and relationship between the judges and those judged. Theorizing judgment in this way helps to explain the puzzle of the Athenian public sphere and is a resource for studying judgment in the contemporary context.

Keywords: Ancient Law
Athenian Democracy
Attic Tragedy
Democratic Theory
Judgment
Political Theory
Advisor: Balot, Ryan
The “Silent” Shrew: The Taming of the Shrew in Text, Adaptation, and Performance

This dissertation writes a new performance history of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew that considers the play in a range of social, political, and historical contexts. I analyze the play’s texts, adaptations, and performances through theories of adaptation, while also deploying abject theory in response to my observation that, in order to insist on its real-world relevance in challenging injustice, the play has staged deeply unsettling epistemic and systemic violence as a way of mobilizing audiences to take action. My methodology also involves theories of the anecdote: Shrew actors have been received as enacting their notorious lives on stage, bringing the play to life, and giving it real-world efficacy. The first of this project’s four chapters addresses Shrew and its early responses, showing how nascent intertextualities in the discourse of Shrew and non-dramatic texts of the seventeenth-century gender debate resonated across modes in a way that I argue brought the debate to life. Chapter 2 explores how Katherine has been a defining role for the actress; I contend that Katherine-focused Shrews depended upon an idea that the actress was enacting her real persona, and that this made the role into a star-vehicle. Chapter 3 focuses on notorious and married couples who have played Katherine and Petruchio; I argue that anecdotes connected to leading actors were deliberately fashioned in service of transforming the play into a story about actors’ offstage relationships. The final chapter discusses how violence and the abject have been staged in radical adaptations, contending that these productions implicated audiences and demanded they acknowledge their privilege and reconsider their contributions to unequal and harmful power systems. My conclusion uses a production of an all-female Shrew I directed in 2013 in Saudi Arabia in order to reflect on what my performance history has demonstrated about Shakespeare’s play: Shrew has worked in the world as a reflection of real relationships and actual domestic violence, in turn functioning as an agent for challenging oppressive systemic structures. When audiences leave the theatre believing they have witnessed real violence, Shrew gains pressing real-world relevance, with audiences compelled to actively participate in social change.

Keywords: adaptation
feminist performance
performance studies
Shakespeare
The Taming of the Shrew
theatre history
Advisor: Lopez, Jeremy
Plautinopolis: Imagination and Representation in Plautus' Roman Comedy

Scholarship on self-referentiality in Plautus’ Roman comedy has historically concentrated upon metatheater, highlighting the artificiality of performance conventions but largely taking the content of his plays as reflective of contemporary Greco-Roman reality, however stylized. By identifying a broader range of self-referential effects at work in his plays, including metageneric commentary upon the characters and plots of the New Comic tradition, I demonstrate that Plautus calls attention to the artificiality not only of their performance but also of their content. Plautine comedy is not set in the real world, I argue, but in a made-up, conventional location, “Plautinopolis.”Informed by scholarship on the worlds of science fiction and fantasy media, my first chapter offers a systematic model of Plautine generic conventions, conceptualizing them as the rules of an imaginary world in which all Plautus’ surviving plays are set. My second and third chapters propose that in emphasizing Plautinopolis’ artificiality, the plays’ self-referential effects encourage spectators to gain competence in the generic and theatrical conventions that define it; approaches from fan studies, theater semiotics, and narratology elucidate the processes through which viewers do so. Readings of Mercator in Chapter 2 and Poenulus in Chapter 3 illustrate how characters, too, may gain competence, and I argue that by habitually giving happier endings to more competent characters, Plautus shows spectators the stakes of understanding his play-world. With a reading of Curculio’s choragus speech, my final chapter argues that the imaginative worldbuilding that Plautine comedy encourages creates immersive effects through which spectators may participate as co-creators in playmaking. Recognizing the role that metagenre plays in reinforcing Plautinopolis’ artificiality reveals Plautus’ innovation in the representative dynamics of the New Comic tradition, which he casts as distinct from other theatrical genres in its aesthetics and relationship to its spectators. The imaginative demands that Plautine comedy makes of its viewers show Plautus’ persistent concern with their appreciation of drama as not merely a representative project, but a creative one, as well. The implications of this new model of Plautine representation extend from theater history to historicist work on Roman comedy to reception studies.

Keywords: Latin drama
metatheater
performance criticism
Plautus
Roman comedy
Secondary Worlds
Advisor: Welsh, Jarrett
A Protective Role for Breast Cancer 1 (BRCA1) in Fetal Brain Development

Physiologically produced reactive oxygen species (ROS) optimize CNS activity. Enhanced ROS production by alcohol (ethanol, EtOH) consumption during pregnancy via multiple pathways, including fetal NADPH oxidase (NOX) induction, and EtOH metabolism, may contribute to disordered development, including behavioural disorders. ROS may alter signal transduction and/or oxidatively damage proteins or DNA, the latter acting as epigenetic modifications altering gene expression. The breast cancer 1 protein (BRCA1) regulates multiple DNA repair and possibly antioxidative pathways. Additional to ROS-mediated effects, acetaldehyde production via EtOH metabolism can result in DNA damage capable of stalling and collapsing replication forks to generate enhanced DNA strand breaks (DSBs) in BRCA1-deficient cells. Studies herein used a Brca1 knockout mouse model to determine the impact of BRCA1 on the susceptibility of the fetal brain to ROS, modulated by a NOX inhibitor/free radical spin trap (phenylbutylnitrone, PBN), and a ROS enhancer (EtOH). Multiple markers of oxidative stress (enhanced NOX, antioxidative and proteasomal activities, DSBs) in the untreated +/- Brca1 fetal brains, were worsened by saline exposure and blocked by PBN, as were cognitive deficits, suggesting a pathogenic potential for physiological ROS production. In utero EtOH exposure further exacerbated markers of oxidative stress, including DNA (8-oxoG, γH2AX, DSBs) and protein (males only) damage, and NOX, antioxidative and proteasome activities in +/- Brca1 fetal brains. EtOH also enhanced postnatal behavioural deficits in +/- progeny, compared to +/+ controls. Both molecular and behavioural findings were partially blocked by PBN, suggesting ROS-mediation. EtOH also reduced BRCA1, enhanced most markers in +/+ fetal brains and induced postnatal anxiety-related behaviour in +/+ progeny. A Brca1 gene-dose dependent sensitivity to EtOH was also evident among embryos and postnatal progeny, where a larger BRCA1 deficiency resulted in enhanced DNA damage and postnatal deficits. The enhanced ROS-mediated DNA damage and impaired behaviour in +/- Brca1 fetal brains and progeny, exacerbated by EtOH suggests that BRCA1 plays a major role in protecting the embryo and fetal brain from physiological and drug-enhanced levels of ROS production. These results provide the first evidence of BRCA1 deficiency enhancing risk for behavioural disorders and highlight important underlying mechanisms/targets for preventive strategies.

Keywords: Breast cancer 1
DNA damage
ethanol/alcohol
Fetal brains
NADPH oxidase
reactive oxygen species
Advisor: Wells, Peter G