VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
"Working out" the relationship between informal language contact and phrasal verb development of international students in the UK

Study abroad (SA) has long been regarded as a learning environment that is beneficial to second language acquisition (SLA), especially in competencies related to social interactions (Kinginger, 2011). However, little is known about whether SA students make actual gains in domains of English they are typically exposed to outside of classroom settings such as phrasal verbs (PVs), and whether their informal language contact contributes to such development. To explore this relationship, this study investigates students’ PV development and informal language contact, to understand how they make use of the L2 exposure during SA.
This longitudinal mixed-methods study collected data from over 250 international foundation year students studying in the UK three times in one academic year. PV data were collected through standardized tests and speech samples, while L2 contact was measured via language contact questionnaires, social network surveys, and semi-structured interviews. Paired-samples t-test revealed that there were significant gains in receptive and productive PV scores between Time 1 and Time 2, while the overall informal language contact and social networks of the participants did not see significant changes from Time 1 to Time 2. Correlation and multiple regressions analyses revealed a stronger relationship between informal language contact and PV knowledge at Time 2 than at Time 1. Mixed-effects modeling revealed that the overall English proficiency of the participants, corpus frequency of the PVs in the British National Corpus, and the amount of language contact were significant predictors of PV scores, while semantic opacity of PVs, the Chinese L1 of the participants, and L2 social networks were not.
This study underscored that the degree-oriented SA participants may have different prioritization and leisure time routines compared with summer school participants or exchange students abroad. With academic prioritization, the participants made limited gains in colloquial L2 vocabulary competency and their highly academic L2 contact did not greatly contribute to PV development.

Keywords: formulaic language
informal language contact
study abroad
phrasal verb
Advisor: Rose, H
Meara, P
Briggs Baffoe-Djan, J
Recasting the legality of resistance: the subaltern makings of international law

This thesis aspires to develop an epistemological understanding of international law as an outcome of ‘marginal-non-legal’ resistance. Inspired by subaltern histories of anti-colonial struggle and indigenous resistance to international law, it proposes a bottom-up, history-infused, praxis-driven framework that centres the role of marginal, non-legal resistance in constructing international law. Accordingly, it puts the disparate materials and methodologies of studying resistance prevalent in Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) in conversation with critical anthropological, sociological, and historical theories of resistance. A historical account of the negotiation between Palestinian resistance and international law in the 1960s and 1970s elucidates this framework. First, the ‘within-system’ resistance of the Palestine Liberation Organisation is scrutinised through its participation and advocacy at the Diplomatic Conference of 1974-1977. At the Conference, the PLO constituted the ‘non-legal, marginal’ and was able to effect substantive changes in international law—most notably encoding the right of national liberation movements to engage in armed struggle against colonial domination, alien occupation, and racist regimes. Second, ‘against-system’ resistance of the PLO and its affiliates, including the non-legal, marginal act of revolutionary violence, is also considered constitutive of international law. Further, a study of PLO’s deradicalisation in the mid-1970s led to an internal ideological split within Palestinian resistance because of its increased collaboration with international law and its institutional processes. Thus, as subaltern resistance and international law negotiate, new marginalities emerge, which consequently necessitate a framework of law that can accommodate the incommensurable nature of subalternity. An epistemological emphasis on resistance in the historiography of international law offers a framework for law as a tool of movement. As marginal resistance evolves, international law, historically a reflective outcome of resistance, can persistently bring those at its margins into the folds of justice.

Keywords: Palestinian statehood
Palestine
international law
subaltern
Fatah
national liberation movements
Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions
legal epistemology
PFLP
movement building
transnational solidarity
resistance
within-system resistance
against-system resistance
marginality
laws of armed conflict
self-determination
Diplomatic Conference of 1974-1977
Article 1(4) Geneva Conventions
1970s
legal history
decolonisation
Foucauldian post-structuralism
Palestine Liberation Organisation
PLO
TWAIL
Advisor: Atrey, S
The prerogative and third source: a critical analysis

The prerogative and ‘third source’ are two sources of authority for executive action in British law. This dissertation subjects these two sources of authority to critical analysis, examining their legal histories, conceptual foundations, doctrinal structures, normative shortcomings, and comparative equivalents. It demonstrates that the prerogative and third source are even more unsettled than is commonly acknowledged, and have been a site of struggle over giving effect to the perceived needs of the state. The prerogative does not stretch back into the mists of time, but was actively shaped and developed by judges. The third source or something like it – the notion of some further common law authority for executive action where such action is not unlawful – did not first appear in the late 1970s, and was relied upon (at least in modified form) in at least as early the nineteenth century. The prerogative and third source are often given one-sentence definitions, when mentioned in case law and commentary, but the major attempts to define the prerogative and third source are full of undesirable ambiguity. That is both a cause and consequence of significant indeterminacy in the case law on the prerogative and third source. From a normative perspective, the prerogative and third source also fall short of values supposedly upheld by the British legal order: they are not subject to structured scrutiny or circumscribed by an authoritative text. But adopting a single codified constitution does not eliminate ambiguity and indeterminacy, as the experiences of Australia and the United States demonstrate. A promising response to these problems is to seek comprehensive legislative codification of the prerogative and third source, though this will not be a panacea to the problems of executive over-reach, and will not extinguish judicial discretion in determining the limits of executive action.

Keywords: legal history
constitutional law
capitalism
Public law
imperialism
prerogative
abuse of power
critical legal theory
state
Advisor: Craig, P
Polar and dipolar contributions to collective cell motility


Active materials take energy from their surroundings and use it to do mechanical work. The theories of active matter can describe a wide variety of living systems, such as bacterial colonies, actin-myosin networks and cell tissues. In this thesis, we investigate the collective behaviour of confluent, two-dimensional cell monolayers on a substrate, which is also one of the most common experimental systems to study collective cell motility. The cells are modelled using a computational phase field approach to study how polar and dipolar forces, the active, out-of-equilibrium force components, contribute to the cell motions.
We study the polar and dipolar contributions to collective cell motility using the phase-field model, which allows simulations of deformable cells. We study the interplay between the polar and dipolar forces in a confluent cell sheet and explore the collective behaviour emerging from different polarisation mechanisms. We find that either polar or dipolar forcing can drive the jammed-to-liquid transition. The mechanical properties, such as the cell deformation and speed, are independent of the polarisation mechanisms. However, a flocking state where most cells move in the same direction appears when the polar force of a cell aligns with its velocity as an exception.
Then we focus on studying the active inter-cellular force in a cell monolayer. We find that contractile inter-cellular forces elongate a cell and can give rise to a nematic state and active turbulence. Extensile inter-cellular forces cause frustration, where cells elongate perpendicular to their neighbours. Moreover, we show that anisotropic fluctuation in the inter-cellular forces can lead to the transition from contractile to extensile behaviour.
Finally, we investigate the interplay between the viscoelasticity of tissue and the inter-cellular forces for cells confined in a channel. We find that different collective behaviour emerges as viscoelasticity of the tissue is modulated by the cell-cell adhesion, repulsion. The transition between the jammed, nematic state, oscillation and spontaneous shear flow occurs as the cell-cell adhesion increases. The cells jam more easily with higher cell-cell repulsion, and cells of a higher aspect ratio favour steady shear.
The approaches developed in this thesis can be extended and applied to investigate other biological processes in cell mechanics, such as tissue expansion and the phase ordering of different cell types.

Keywords: Active matter
Biological physics
Collective behaviour
Cell mechanics
Phase-field simulations
Soft matter theory
Advisor: Yeomans, J
Fevers in the garden: a history of malaria in colonial Assam from 1826 - 1939

Malaria was the deadliest infectious disease in colonial Assam, but the malady received less attention from government officials and medical officers than other diseases. Additionally, malaria in Assam has received relatively little attention from modern historians. This project sits at the intersection of medical, colonial, and environmental histories, and contributes to discussions in the history of malaria, Assam, and British India. It explores the history of malaria in colonial Assam between 1826 and 1939. The approach is largely one of historical epidemiology; it analyses mortality and morbidity data on ‘Fevers’ and attempts made by the government and medical officers to understand and prevent the disease.
Assam was transformed by British rule, and the trajectories of both malaria and society were strongly influenced by colonial rule during this time period. The ecology of Assam was heavily modified to support the province’s biggest industry- tea. In the process, jungles were cleared, millions of immigrant labourers were recruited, and malaria flourished. Efforts to reduce malaria across the province failed, and public health as a practice was often structured around keeping immigrant labourers healthy and industrial enclaves productive. Exploring anti-malarial measures in the province and the relationship between the creation of medical knowledge and public health praxis, this project touches on the topics of colonial ‘development’, quinine, mosquito control measures, and epidemiology.
This dissertation argues that malaria played a pivotal role in the history of colonial Assam; that historians are able to gain some understanding of the presence and effects of the disease even when knowledge in the past was limited; and that perceptions of the disease, attempts to control it, and that both human and non-human factors that contributed to malaria were heavily influenced by colonial forces.

Keywords: Friederich
Ethan
Medicine
Quinine
Colonial
Malaria
History
Epidemiology
Mosquito
Fevers
India
Public Health
Assam
Empire
Advisor: Harrison, M
Exploring the landscape of international organisation in TVET sector of Central Asia

According to Agenda 2030, partnerships among sectoral stakeholders have an important and instrumental role in the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In fact, the lack of participation of actors is identified to be the biggest challenge in achieving the SDGs. Within educational policy, it is especially important for Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) as it significantly depends on the success of multistakeholder cooperation, in which international development organisations (IOs) are increasingly attaining their own stake and importance.
This study explores how IO employees navigate their relationships with other TVET stakeholders in five Central Asian countries. John Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Model (1995) is employed to analyse in which cases TVET as an educational public policy receives attention and funding from stakeholders and how in other cases it is being neglected.
From semi-structured interviews with 17 IO employees, it has been revealed that the main stakeholders in all five countries are state ministries responsible for TVET, but not in all countries these ministries are the driving forces of TVET development. According to Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Model (1995), the problem stream can be applied on Uzbekistan’s high population growth and Kazakhstan’s social discontent about unemployment. These problems are putting TVET in a priority position in the agenda-setting. Whereas Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan’s low economic capacities together with failed political bodies are not allowing them to prioritise and pay due attention to TVET development which, in turn, is bringing larger contributions from IOs. Turkmenistan was described by participants as a country with a neutral political stance and difficult cooperation both with public and private stakeholders. Finally, the research respondents believe that for successful stakeholder relationships in Central Asia it is necessary to understand social and cultural structures, specific to the region, such as old clan/tribal or regional divisions. Due to differences in economic structures and current levels of TVET development, the participants explained that the idea of one regional TVET system is not possible in the region. Instead, they stressed the necessity to strengthen learning from each other and exchanging best practices.

Keywords: Qualitative
Vocational education
Stakeholder management
Comparative education
Central Asia
Interviews
CIE2022
CIE
TVET
Advisor: Chankseliani, M
Data-driven methods for social complex systems: social media, data assimilation and how they connect

The explosion of big, granular social data has enabled us to observe society from a microscopic perspective. With major events driving and reshaping our social systems, it is essential to exploit these data so that we can help drive these systems to a state of social well-being and sustainability. This thesis develops data-driven methods to study social systems from a bottom-up perspective. We divide it into two parts: one where granular, individual-level social data are available to analyze and one where they are not, so that we have to infer them.
In the first part, we analyze massive social media data containing Twitter discussions around Covid-19 and climate change. We study each of these discussions from distinct but complementary perspectives. For Covid-19, we quantify the public risk perception and emotion during the pandemic by exploiting the natural language used in the tweets. We find evidence of psychophysical numbing: Twitter users increasingly fixate on mortality, but in a decreasingly emotional and increasingly analytic tone. For climate change, we quantify the polarization dynamics based on the interaction structure between Twitter users. We find two stable, highly polarized groups: climate believers and climate skeptics, whose polarization drops significantly during the “FridaysForFuture“ strikes of September 2019. In the second part, we develop methods for inferring individual-level data of complex system models when the data available are noisy, aggregated, and incomplete. Assuming our model is a dynamical system, we investigate under which conditions we can infer accurate initial conditions using incomplete data. The way the data are aggregated, their levels of noise, and the model’s complexity highly influence the quality of the inference. We thus propose methods to estimate individual-level data on the fly as observations become available. We validate these methods for several chaotic systems and an agent-based model of social opinion dynamics. We hope this work helps bridge the gap in designing models that better predict possible societal pathways.

Keywords: Bayesian statistics
natural language processing
polarization
Twitter
complex systems
model initialization
social &amp; behavioural sciences
chaotic systems
complex networks
data assimilation
dynamical systems
latent state estimation
Advisor: Farmer, JD
Hepburn, C
Algebraic properties of linear structural equation models

In this thesis, we explore the problems of identifiability and finding constraints in linear structural equation models (SEMs) and explore the applications of such results.
We start by analysing the effects of interventions on linear SEMs and provide sufficient conditions for when the resulting distribution is identifiable. We then demonstrate how we could use a series of interventions to find constraints in linear SEMs, as long as each resulting distribution is identifiable.
Next, we study algebraic properties of a subset of linear SEMs that can be represented by an \emph{HTC-identifiable graph}. HTC-identifiable graphs are a large family of graphs known to be generically identifiable. We prove that a mixed graphs is HTC-identifiable if and only if all the parameters in the model can be recovered from the covariance matrix using straightforward linear algebra operations. We can then exploit this algebraic property to construct an algorithm that recovers the parameters of the model. We also find a set of polynomials, whose indeterminates are entries of the covariance matrix, that generates the zeroes of the model.
Finally, we prove that the maximum likelihood function is strictly convex in a local neighbourhood around the MLE for HTC-identifiable graphs. In particular, for large sample sizes and assuming we specify the correct model, we find a starting point that is in this convex neighbourhood. We then use hill-climbing to find the MLE of the covariance matrix associated with any HTC-identifiable graphical model G. Using this, we can test whether a particular graphical model G is a good fit for a particular data set.

Keywords: graphical models
structural equation models
causal inference
Advisor: Evans, R
Aspects of BSM theories in the early universe

The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics is a tremendously successful explanation of the nature we observe, both in Earth-based experiments and cosmological observations of the past history of the universe. However its failure to account for gravity, dark matter and dark energy, as well as for various hierarchy and naturalness problems, motivates the formulation and investigation of Beyond-the-Standard-Model (BSM) theories.
In this thesis we will first review the evidence for and current understanding of dark matter (DM), including the mechanisms of freeze-out and freeze-in, before discussing the idea of ‘secluded’ dark matter without non-gravitational interactions with the SM. This will form the motivation for chapter 2, where we consider the emission of such secluded DM from an early population of primordial black holes, and for chapter 3, where we present a new mechanism by which an initially underpopulated secluded DM population may account for the observed DM in the universe today.
We will also discuss the hypothetical axion particle, which arises from an elegant so- lution to one of the problems with the SM (the Strong CP problem), and its generalisation, the Axion-Like-Particle (ALP). We will also introduce the one-dimensional topological defects called cosmic strings, and show how they can arise from ALP fields. ALPs serve as a candidate DM particle, and, further, are expected to appear in great numbers in the 4-dimensional effective theories arising from string theory (ST), a multiplicity known as the ‘string axiverse’. We shall review the foundations of ST with a focus on the creation of the string axiverse by the compactification of extra dimensions; finally in chapter 4 we construct global cosmic string solutions arising from string axiverse ALPs and analyse aspects of the resulting physics. In particular, we include the physically-crucial presence of a stabilising potential.

Keywords: string theory
cosmic strings
axiverse
dark matter
axions
Advisor: March-Russell, J
West, S
Magnetic resonance imaging of oxygen nano-carriers for the treatment of hypoxic tumours

In cancer therapy, tumour hypoxia is an important predictor of disease progression, treatment outcomes, and metastatic potential. To date, methods for reducing tumour hypoxia have delivered limited success owing to either a lack of proven efficacy, unwanted side effects, or logistical limitations. Therefore, there remains an urgent requirement for an effective hypoxia reduction mechanism that is safe, cost effective, biocompatible, and easy to use. To address this, oxygen-filled micro and nanobubbles have been investigated as a method of oxygen delivery and have shown promising results in improving therapeutic response. To develop and optimise oxygen carriers and other hypoxia reduction strategies, however, consistent methods for measuring changes in tissue oxygenation need to be established. The ideal method should be noninvasive and quantitative, allowing tumour oxygen measurements to be obtained before, during, and after treatment. This thesis examines whether clinically available MRI techniques can be used to detect the change in tissue oxygenation caused by the nano-carriers.
A combination of phantom and preclinical experiments, mathematical modelling, and the analysis of data from two clinical trials are used. First, original results from phantom and preliminary in vivo MRI experiments are reported, which demonstrate the feasibility of detecting the effects of oxygen carriers. Second, three separate mathematical models are developed and presented in order of increasing complexity 2 first addressing simple bodily fluids, then blood, and finally, tissues 2 each of which are useful for areas of MRI research beyond the focus of this thesis. Third, original research results from recently completed clinical studies of oxygen-enhanced MRI are analysed and used to assess the viability of using these MRI measurements to monitor oxygen delivery from nanobubbles in a clinical MRI setting. Lastly, the broader potential applications of the conclusions and tools presented in this thesis are discussed.

Keywords: oxygen
medical imaging
longitudinal relaxation
hypoxia
oxygen-enhanced MRI
targeted delivery
magnetic resonance imaging
Advisor: Stride, E
Bulte, D