VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Writing the Young Diasporic Muslim Female: A Study in Creating Culturally Sustaining Narratives

This doctoral dissertation begins with the central research question: How might the act of writing a creative literary text both capture the lived experience of an adolescent diasporic Muslim female and critique the social conditions that aggravate her marginalization? To answer it, I wrote THE LAST STORY, a young adult novel, with a female diasporic main character of Muslim origin living in a speculative and divided world. As I wrote, I kept thorough journal entries about the creative, critical choices being made. Accordingly, while the novel itself does not make up the dissertation, it is the main data source in what is, essentially, an autoethnographic (Ellis Bocher, 2000) project. Because I have composed a reflexive written piece about the process of writing and the context in which it happened, the result of this research project in the form of this thesis is what Richardson (2000) terms “a writing story.” My theoretical framework encompasses philosophies of narrative and utilizes Bricolage (Kincheloe, 2005) as a guiding principle. Creative Analytical Practices (CAP) (Richardson, 1999) autoethnography and Cooper and White’s (2012) five contexts of qualitative inquiry serve as conceptual framework to methodologically structure the thesis. Stimulus for the work is guided by the development of a social imagination within the creative writing field, attempting to do so by taking up what Greene (2000) describes as “the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society” (p. 5). It hopes to contribute to the discourse around the inclusion of culturally sustaining materials (Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris, 2012) in the English language and literature classroom through the Decolonizing Praxis of Narrative (DPN) method, which I developed from the writing and inquiry process.

Keywords: Autoethnography
Creative Analytic Practice
Critical Literacy
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy
Decolonial Praxis of Narrative
Young Adult Literature
Advisor: Cooper, Karyn
On Nonadiabatic Dynamical Simulations near Conical Intersections via Surface Hopping Methods

Many chemical processes involve nuclear dynamics on multiple potential energy surfaces. These often involve conical intersections, which cause nonadiabatic couplings and diagonal Born-Oppenheimer corrections to diverge and thus a complete breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. Furthermore, conical intersections make electronic and nuclear wavefunctions double-valued, requiring proper consideration of the boundary conditions of molecular wavefunctions. In this work we rationalize why the fewest switches surface hopping method, despite not involving nuclear wavefunctions nor any consideration for diagonal Born-Oppenheimer corrections, can approximate the exact quantum dynamics of conical intersection-induced interstate crossings. In addition, we identify regimes when it is beneficial to include diagonal Born-Oppenheimer corrections in surface hopping dynamics through the phase-space formalism. Lastly, we consider the use of neural networks within the surface hopping framework, to approximate the nonadiabatic dynamics of fewest switches surface hopping by emulating its hopping criterion. We show that a properly trained “neural network-induced surface hopping” algorithm can approximately simulate populations dynamics without the need to propagate electronic wavefunctions.

Keywords: conical intersection
diagonal Born-Oppenheimer corrections
geometric phase
surface hopping
Advisor: Izmaylov, Artur F
Advances in Incomplete Data Methods for Statistical Genetics

Handling incomplete or missing data is a common aspect of modern statistical methods. In this thesis, I focus on novel solutions for current problems pertaining to statistical genetics that can be framed in the context of incomplete data. In particular, three methods are proposed that are underpinned by the EM algorithm, arguably the most common yet powerful approach to make statistical inference in the presence of incomplete data. First, motivated by developments in metagenomic sequencing data and the apparent systematic exclusion of the X-chromosome in genetic studies, I propose a finite mixture regression model (FMM) that infers association between a genetic variant in the X-chromosome and an operational taxonomic unit. The proposed FMM accounts for complex biological mechanisms governing the X-chromosome, namely X-chromosome inactivation (XCI), escape of XCI, and skewed or non-random XCI by introducing an latent indicator variable. Second, I investigate two-phase sampling designs in post-genome-wide association studies (GWASs), which can be a cost-effective strategy to infer association between missing-by-design sequencing data and a trait of interest. In phase 1, given a GWAS-identified genetic region, a subsample is selected for which expensive targeted-sequence data are collected using outcome measures and auxiliary covariates to inform the sampling. Phase 2 consists of performing inference using combined phase 1 2 data. In particular, I develop semi-parametric maximum likelihood for analysis and examine heuristic allocations to select the phase 2 subsample. Lastly, derived from the second project, I propose two strategies that aim to optimally select subjects for sequencing when the subsample size is fixed due to budget constraints. These strategies aim to minimize features of the variance-covariance matrix based on predefined optimality criteria found in previous literature and common to experimental design. The proposed strategies implement such minimization via (1) Lagrange multipliers and (2) a genetic algorithm. In all cases, the proposed methods are evaluated through comprehensive simulation studies. In addition, I illustrate their usage in real genetic studies or realistic synthetic data in absence thereof. Overall, the methods perform satisfactorily, moreover, these findings can serve as the basis of further research.

Keywords: Microbiome data
Missing data
Statistical genetics
Two-phase studies
X-chromosome
Advisor: Bull, Shelley B
Xu, Wei
Inclusivity in Children’s Literature: Examining Quality of Text, Accuracy of Representation of Children with Cancer in Picturebooks, and Children’s Response to Three Specific Texts.

Children’s picturebooks are considered to be accessible, multimodal texts effective for increasing knowledge, awareness, and an understanding of underrepresented populations, including children with disabilities. Reading picturebooks to children with disabilities has proven validating, comforting, and helpful in the development of a positive self-image. While content analyses examining the portrayal of characters with various disabilities have been conducted, none have looked solely at characters with cancer, and few have considered reader response. This study combines a qualitative content analysis of children’s picturebooks whose main characters have cancer with semi-structured interviews of five children in active cancer treatment. Overall, I analyzed twenty picturebooks written in North America from 2006 to 2017 for quality and accuracy of representation. Following this analysis, I read the top three-rated texts to five children with cancer in the grade four to six range. The findings indicate improvements in the overall quality of the books and the portrayal of the main characters as most books include multidimensionality, excellent illustrations, appropriate language, and relatable but predictable plot lines highlighting common treatments and stressors (e.g., hair loss). Weaknesses in the texts are also noted. Gender stereotyping; underdeveloped secondary characters and relationships; a lack of diversity; the inability to accurately portray the illness experience; and low entertainment value problematized the stories. While complementing the content analysis, children’s interview responses revealed additional information about the lived experiences of having cancer related to diagnosis impact; communication and comprehension; means of approaching cancer; and the desire for agency. Overall, this study highlights the usefulness of triangulating content analysis findings with reader response and the effectiveness of using children’s books as a medium for garnering information about children’s lived experiences. Furthermore, it stresses the value of books featuring main characters with cancer and, in turn, provides suggestions for individuals interested in selecting, using, or writing these types of texts.

Keywords: childhood cancer
children's picturebooks
content analysis
disability
inclusive literature
reader response
Advisor: Kosnik, Clare
The Girl Who Looked by the Window

The Girl Who Looked by the Window was inspired by a picture from American photographer Gregory Crewdson’s Twilight series of 1998-2002. The untitled photograph shows a young girl looking outside of her living room window, while a woman standing in the background is looking at her. The décor and the characters’ clothing are quite ordinary, old fashioned and mismatched, showing the modesty of an American small-town lifestyle. The girl’s gaze is unfocused and seems melancholic, but the many details in the picture inform us of the subject’s complexity, of the many emotional experiences that led her to this moment. I wrote this piece by planning out sections that would represent different emotional experiences or states of mind, neutral contemplation to extreme discomfort to hysteria. The 11 sections are rather short in length, between 17-31 bars long, and arranged in a fast sequence of contrasting moods. What connects them to one another is the progressive timbral evolution of sound throughout the piece, allowing the music to move fluidly even though it sometimes takes unpredictable turns. While the music is organized horizontally over the course of the piece, with a focus on melodic motifs, it ultimately culminates with all the instruments playing vertical harmonies in rhythmic unison. Since the emotions explored in this piece are “negative” ones, I wanted to create a constant underlying tension. I did this partly by using the beatings resulting from two instruments holding notes that are close in pitch. I applied this technique to background elements of the music, but I also brought it to the middle and foreground in various ways. For instance, in certain sections, melodic fragments are played a semi-tone or a microtone apart. In other sections, one instrument plays a glissando whose range overlaps the pitch held by another instrument, creating an evolution in the beatings. Another important aspect of the piece is the opening gesture played by the piano, which outlines the second inversion of a c-minor triad with its bass note subsequently dropping to an F. The melodic and/or harmonic material of each section derives in some ways from this motif.

Keywords: Canadian composer
Composition
Gregory Crewdson
Music Score
Orchestra
Orchestral Music
Advisor: Kulesha, Gary
Democracy Makes a Difference? Political Competition, Social Spending, and Economic Development in Mexico

This dissertation explains one possible way to move from clientelism to policy-oriented politics. It does this by explaining the conditions under which political competition spurs incumbent parties and politicians to increase social spending rather than investing on clientelism. Through an econometric analysis that uses electoral, economic, social, and financial indicators of 29 Mexican states between 2000 and 2015, I provide statistical evidence that the effectiveness of political competition in driving social spending hinges on the level of economic development of the states. To specify the causal mechanism underlying this correlation, I shift the methodology from quantitative to qualitative. Based on an in-depth case study of the state of Queretaro in central Mexico, I propose that economic development matters for political competition because it has the potential to disrupt established clientelist networks by attracting economic migrants. This is what happened in Queretaro in the second half of the twentieth century, when the state underwent a capital-intensive process of industrialization that created an migration flow coming from relatively affluent Mexico City that changed the nature of politics in the state. Taken together, the quantitative and qualitative findings in this dissertation clarify scholarly debates on when politicians engage in programmatic competition and when in clientelism.

Keywords: democracy
democratization
Mexico
migration
Queretaro
social
Advisor: Way, Lucan A.
Bejarano, Ana María
Fathering: Increasing their Visibility In Research and as Influencers of Child Development

This dissertation makes small and important contributions to various literatures, especially fathering, domestic violence and child development literatures, and contributes to efforts in making fathers visible to research and as influencers of child development. In the two papers presented, fathers are made visible in two ways – first by examining ways to recruit them and then by examining their impact on child development. This first paper examined the challenges involved in recruiting fathers with and without a history of domestic violence into longitudinal research. Recruitment data were collected on 257 fathers over an eight-month timeframe. Results indicated violent fathers and their families required similar efforts to recruit initially as fathers without a DV history, but required more effort for follow-up. Tests of two specific recruitment strategies demonstrate advantages of in-person and immediate scheduling of research appointments. Finally, descriptive information is provided on the time and resources required for recruiting DV fathers into research. This second paper sought to understand the fathering processes impacting children’s development with 60 father-child dyads diverse in terms of men’s level of parenting risk. Explored were the relationships between fathers’ internal emotional capacity/competence (i.e., emotion recognition, perspective taking, narcissistic features, emotional regulation skills) and child emotion dysregulation, with fathers’ emotional socialization practices (i.e., use of supportive and unsupportive behaviours with their children) as potential mediators of this relationship. Only one out of eight mediation models hypothesized were supported: Fathers’ emotion recognition accuracy mediated the relationship between fathers’ unsupportive socialization practices and child dysregulation. Exploratory analyses also revealed a moderating role of fathers’ history of DV perpetration on fathers’ emotion competence and child dysregulation such that fathers’ emotion dysregulation and child dysregulation was significantly and positively related within a domestic violence context but not in a non-DV context. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Keywords: Domestic Violence
Emotion Competence
Emotion Regulation
Parental Emotion Socialization
Advisor: Scott, Katreena
Technical Skills Assessment in Robotic Surgery: Using Patient Outcomes to Set the Standard

Introduction: Outcome-based assessments form a central component of the new wave of educational reform in surgical residency. Evaluation of technical performance in the operating room is at the heart of the move to competency-based surgical education. Despite the numerous tools available to educators to utilize within a program of assessment, key questions remain unanswered on the application of these assessment scores, particularly around setting standards for high-stakes evaluations, and their impact on clinically meaningful outcomes. This thesis focuses on the use of technical skills assessment tools in robotic surgery, the available methods of standard setting in procedural skill, and the proposal of a novel benchmarking method that uses patients' outcomes to set the standard. Methods: Data were prospectively collected and analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics (both parametric and non-parametric). Research designs contained within the thesis include: two systematic reviews in accordance with PRISMA guidelines, a case-control study, two methodological manuscripts, and a prospective multicenter cohort study. Contemporary validity frameworks were used throughout to provide validity evidence for all assessment tools. Results: Six studies comprise the thesis. Two systematic reviews collated, summarized, and appraised the existing literature on robotic-assisted surgery technical skills assessment strategies, and the methods used to create absolute standards in procedural technical skill. The case-control pilot study examined a single surgeon’s experience with robotic-assisted radical prostatectomy and provided important proof of the predictive relationship between technical skill and patient outcomes. A methodology paper utilized this predictive model to describe a method of standard setting that uses the clinical outcome as the fulcrum around which the technical performance benchmark is set. A prospective multicentre study used a diverse cohort of patients and surgeons to build predictive models using multiple assessment strategies across a number of clinical outcomes. Finally, an additional methodological study took the multiple predictive models to create a final, weighted composite score that can be used to set performance standards that control for important clinicopathological factors. Conclusion: This thesis describes the predictive relationship between technical performance in robotic surgery and patient clinical outcomes, and leverages this association to create a novel method of benchmarking surgical skill.

Keywords: Competency
Credentialing
Medical Education
Robotic Surgery
Standard Setting
Surgical Education
Advisor: Grantcharov, Teodor P
Determinants of Altered Brain Development from Cranial Radiation Therapy

Approximately 15% of children diagnosed with cancer will receive radiation therapy treatment to part or all of the central nervous system. In this population, 5-year event-free survival rates are as high as 75%. While an effective treatment modality, cranial radiation therapy results in changes to normal brain development, manifesting as long-term deficits in brain structure and function in these children. Clinical studies and preclinical research have characterized different facets of radiation response, but the relative contributions of each to altered development is unclear. Presented in this thesis are experiments designed to investigate if manipulation of the radiation response can rescue long-term neuroanatomic development in the mouse. High-throughput MRI and genetically engineered mouse lines were exploited to test different treatment, demographic and cellular-response variables. First, younger age at treatment and increasing radiation dose, factors that increase risk for cognitive dysfunction in paediatric patients, were found to increase structural deficits in the mouse brain. Second, reduction of radiation-induced programmed cell death and chronic inflammation, by genetic manipulation, were shown to reduce neuroanatomic volume loss. Finally, since being of the female sex has also been suggested as a risk-factor, the outcome of all these experiments were compared between males and females. It was demonstrated that manipulation of the inflammatory response had different effects on neuroanatomical outcome depending on sex. These studies provide a foundation for future research aimed at developing interventions for mitigating long-term neurocognitive deficits in survivors of paediatric cancer.

Keywords: brain development
late effects
MRI
neuroanatomy
paediatric cancer
radiation therapy
Advisor: Nieman, Brian J
The Transnational Making of Ontario Tobacco Labour, 1925-1990

This dissertation explores the transformations in tobacco farm labour in Ontario from approximately 1925 to 1990, advancing a significant reinterpretation of the histories of agricultural labour and guestworker programs in Canada. Contrary to portrayals of Canadian agriculture as permanently plagued by labour shortage, this case study demonstrates the heterogeneity of the sector, which included not only labour-starved growers but also farmers like those in tobacco whose high profits enabled them to attract a diverse range of harvest workers each year. Indeed, for much of the 20th century, Ontario’s tobacco sector, located primarily in Norfolk County and the surrounding areas, was the premier destination for seasonal farmworkers in Canada. In the sector’s early decades, tobacco workers enjoyed significant freedom of movement, unusual opportunities for social mobility, and a vibrant culture of worker organization and resistance. However, the opportunities in Ontario tobacco were never equally available to all prospective workers, and incorporation into the sector was always marked by patterns of inclusion and exclusion. For those workers who could gain access to the tobacco labour market, the benefits of working in tobacco steadily declined over the 20th century. By the 1980s, the sector no longer offered opportunities for social mobility and the possibilities of worker organization were greatly constrained. Guestworkers from the Caribbean and Mexico found their labour and geographic mobility much more tightly restricted than any previous or contemporary groups of tobacco workers. These transformations were complex and the result of many contingent factors (in both Canada and migrant-sending countries), including: political economic trends; ideologies of race and gender; the actions of employers, local communities, and workers themselves; and the efforts of multiple levels of the state to exert greater control over tobacco farm labour. The thesis pays particular attention to the transnational dynamics of labour migration systems, guestworker program structures, and worker resistance. By historicizing farm labour in a single crop and single region over approximately seven decades, the dissertation demonstrates that farm labour is not by definition a station of poverty and extreme exploitation, but instead is made so by historical processes.

Keywords: Farm Labour
Guestworkers
Migration
Tobacco
Transnational
Advisor: Radforth, Ian
Protecting Myself and My Child: A Grounded Theory of Parents’ Journey through Diagnostic Feedback for Autism

The diagnostic feedback meeting represents the first time that parents hear the news that their child has autism. Given the essentially unanimous agreement around the significance of this event, surprisingly little of substance has been said about it in the clinical and empirical literature. In this project, I developed a social-psychological conceptualization of parents’ journey through this pivotal period. My work was guided by the methodology of grounded theory and the onto-epistemological lens of critical realism. I generated data from in-depth interviews with 27 parents of children (ages 1-10) who were recently diagnosed with autism at a clinic in Ontario, Canada. The central process, labelled protecting myself and my child, indicated that parents rapidly make meaning of, feel, think, and respond to the delivery of the diagnosis as signalling a hazard from which they must protect their family. Primary categories of action-interaction consisted of an undercurrent of anticipating in the lead-up to the feedback meeting, sounding the alarm when hearing the official pronouncement, followed by swelling distress and uncertainty. Depending on a complex interplay of conditions, parents dealt with their situation in three ways: protective maneuvering, instrumental responding, and/or processing-oriented advancing, which, in turn, affected their swell of distress and uncertainty. These findings can help clinicians and service providers to think deeply about their role and how they can best use their expertise to facilitate parents’ journey through what is, primarily, an emotional process.

Keywords: Assessment
Autism
Critical realism
Diagnosis
Feedback
Grounded theory
Advisor: Brian, Jessica A