VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Decoding 'balance': learning about the British Empire in English secondary schools

“Teach colonial histories in schools” became a placard slogan in 2020 England. This vindicated history teachers who in the preceding years were early adopters of a new module on the British Empire: Migration, Empires and the People. A key feature of this General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) module for 14 to 16-year-olds is that it does not require teachers to teach the supposed ‘pros and cons’ of empire, known as ‘the balance sheet’ approach, which is common at Key Stage 3 (KS3) when students are 11 to 14 years old. This study of students’ reception of the module is a useful test case for the broader movement to expand the teaching of imperialism. Using classroom ethnographies, focus groups and surveys allowed for a multi-dimensional exploration of students’ changing discourses of empire over the course of the module. To analyse this data, I drew on critical socioculturalism from within the history education subfield of difficult histories and supplemented this framework with specific concepts from the work of Stuart Hall including his model of encoding and decoding. In terms of how messages about empire were encoded, some teachers and textbooks used balance sheet approaches during the module while others did not. However, these encoded messages to students did not in themselves determine whether students framed empire as a balance sheet of ‘pros and cons’. Classmates decoded the same messages in different ways, with some asserting the virtue of ‘balanced’ views of empire and others taking a more critical stance towards empire. I describe how these differences are related to students’ identities, contexts and agency. As well as analysing others’ critiques of the balance sheet approach, I identify within students’ discourses the specific ways in which this framework limits and distorts students’ understanding of the imperial past.

Keywords: high modernism
encoding and decoding
British Empire
Stuart Hall
history education
critical socioculturalism
difficult histories
Exploring 'smart citizenship' as a socio-technical ecology: the case of Oxfordshire, UK

Critical social science scholarship on ‘smart citizenship’ has thus far emphasised ‘bottom-up’ participation as a democratising antidote to ‘top-down’ corporate or state-led smart cities. It is implied that contesting these powerful smart actors involves increasing the degree of citizen participation in smart programmes or projects and by enabling greater political agency in grassroots or citizen-centric alternatives. In this thesis, I emphasise the multiple and heterogenous ways ‘smart citizenship’ is enacted through a diverse set of discourses, practices, and materialities. Approaching these collectives as ‘socio-technical ecologies’, I seek to move beyond existing dichotomies that frame smart citizenship as either a condition of technologically-mediated authoritarian control (top-down) or of increased democratic participatory processes (bottom-up). My approach, I argue, helps to account for a wider set of interrelated ways in which citizenship is negotiated in actually-existing contexts of the smart city. The thesis draws on empirical materials generated through a study of how the UK county of Oxfordshire is being made ‘smart’. In doing so, I identify four overlapping, interconnected ways in which smart citizenship is constituted through ecologies of discourses, practices and materialities. The first is a type of ‘informational’ smart citizenship, which is centred on establishing and mobilising a fairly familiar mix of participatory deliberative engagement practices, procedures, and technologies. The second is the primarily discursive framing of citizens as living lab ‘beneficiaries’ who accrue relative advantages from experiments with technological products or services. Beneficiary citizens are enrolled in political-economic discourses of innovation to legitimise imaginaries of anticipated smart futures. The third raises the importance of 'expert' citizenship, which is deployed by partners to constitute local tech workers as experts engaged in making Oxford smart. I finally consider the ‘sim’ citizenships produced from machine learning methods of data analysis generative of road actor behaviour models for digital twin modelling. Sim citizens, calibrated by smart city data, populate the digital twin for iterative validation and verification testing of automated driving systems. The thesis altogether contributes to scholarly understandings of smart city citizenship by identifying emerging sets of relations between humans and technologies in digitally-mediated cities.

Keywords: smart citizenship
Oxfordshire
citizen engagement
smart city
citizenship
digital geography
qualitative methods
Oxford
Advisor: Rose, G
Doody, B
The ordinary within Islam: Javēd Ahmad Ghāmidī and the representation of prophethood in the Qur'ān

This thesis argues for the significance of ‘the ordinary’ within Islam, closely examining and building upon the work of Pakistani Islamic thinker Javēd Aḥmad Ghāmidī (b. 1952). It makes the case that moral life, according to Islam, primarily consists of our everyday thoughts, feelings, and actions, in comparison to Islamic traditions in contemporary South Asia, which often resist the prominence of the ordinary. Instead, most Islamic traditions assert that ‘the extraordinary’, an event beyond our everyday actions and causes, shapes our moral lives.
This thesis explores the intellectual tension over the ordinariness of moral life in Islam within the context of prophethood. It is argued that for many Islamic traditions, prophethood represents the extraordinary par excellence, viewing post-prophetic moral life as characterised by a genre of prophetic events, namely transcendence, shock, and apocalypse. Ghāmidī instead maintains that the event of prophethood cannot be experienced again but remains morally significant to everyday life.
The thesis examines these contrasting views of prophethood through two analytical endeavours. Firstly, it utilises recent scholarship in everyday life studies to formally identify and evaluate various forms of the ordinary and extraordinary in contemporary Islamic discourses on prophethood. Secondly, it builds upon Ghāmidī’s unique literary exegesis of the Qur’ān as the narrative representation of prophethood to classify different representations of prophethood in Islamic traditions.
Focusing on Ghāmidī’s intellectual context of contemporary South Asia, this thesis closely examines his body of work, which exists entirely in Urdu, alongside relevant Sufi, Islamist, and Sunnī texts from South Asia. This examination is supported by relevant secondary literature, including everyday life scholarship on twentieth-century European and American literary modernism. The thesis comprises six chapters: an introduction, four core chapters, and a conclusion. The core chapters trace conflicting representations of prophethood across four selected topics: prophethood, politics, eschatology, and moral life.

Keywords: the ordinary
Qur’ān
Javēd Aḥmad Ghāmidī
prophethood
Advisor: Jones, J
Methods for large-scale genome-wide association studies

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have led to the identification of thousands of associations between genetic polymorphisms and complex traits or diseases, facilitating several downstream applications such as genetic risk prediction and drug target prioritisation. Biobanks containing extensive genetic and phenotypic data continue to grow, creating new opportunities for the study of complex traits, such as the analysis of rare genomic variation across multiple populations. These opportunities are coupled with computational challenges, creating the need for the development of novel methodology.
This thesis develops computational tools to facilitate large-scale association studies of rare and common variation. First, we develop methods to improve the analysis of ultra-rare variants, leveraging the sharing of identical-by-descent (IBD) genomic regions within large biobanks. We compare ∼ 400k genotyped UK Biobank (UKBB) samples with 50k exome-sequenced samples and devise a score that quantifies the extent to which a genotyped individual shares IBD segments with carriers of rare loss-of-function mutations. Our approach detects several associations and replicates 11/14 loci of a pilot exome sequencing study. Second, we develop a linear mixed model framework, FMA, that builds on previous techniques and is suitable for scalable and robust association testing. We benchmark FMA and several state-of-the-art approaches using synthetic and UKBB data, evaluating computational performance, statistical power, and robustness to known confounders, such as cryptic relatedness and population stratification. Finally, we integrate FMA with recently developed methods for genealogical analysis of complex traits, enabling it to perform scalable genealogy-based estimation of narrow-sense heritability and association.

Keywords: association
linear mixed model
heritability
GWAS
population stratification
rare variation
UK Biobank
SNP
sequencing
genealogies
identity-by-descent
Advisor: Palamara, P
Production and characterisation of dipolar Bose–Einstein condensates

Remarkable progress in the field of ultracold atoms has enabled the study of a great variety of topics in many-body quantum mechanics. The precise control of key parameters, such as interactions, temperature, density, internal and external degrees of freedom, dimensionality and the trapping geometry makes them a powerful and flexible experimental platform.

The ability to create degenerate samples of atoms which feature long-range and anisotropic dipole–dipole interactions besides the more conventional short-range and isotropic contact interactions drew considerable attention, enabling the creation of quantum droplets and a supersolid phase. This thesis reports on experimental and theoretical progress in investigating dipolar many-body quantum systems. We present an overview of our experimental apparatus and the techniques used for obtaining a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) of erbium. We then discuss our experimental sequence for producing a quantum degenerate gas, creating a quasi-pure BEC with 2.2 x 10^5 atoms. To optimise the production of erbium BECs, we explore density- and temperature-dependent losses in 166Er and identify six previously unreported resonant loss features. Finally, to enable studies of density-dependent phenomena, we present a theoretical investigation of dipolar condensates in box-like traps, where we explore stability and how one can use it to replicate properties of an infinite, homogeneous system to study dipolar physics. We found that traps with hard walls trigger roton-like density oscillations even if the bulk of the system is far from the roton regime, so smoother potentials are better suited to recreate homogeneous conditions. This sets the ground for future experiments, where the atoms will be loaded into a box trap to enable studies of systems which are tightly trapped in one direction but homogeneous in the other two.

Advisor: Smith, R
Engineering optoelectronics and smart sensors leveraging metal-organic framework materials

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have emerged as promising nanomaterials for the development of advanced sensing technologies. Indeed, their unparalleled features comprising structural diversity, tailorability, high porosity, large surface area, and adsorption affinities can offer superior sensing performance unattainable by the array of conventional materials for selective, fast, and sensitive detection of gases. However, for the integration of MOFs into sensor devices, a thorough understanding of the material’s underpinning properties and mechanisms is vital. In this integrated thesis, the key principles, which are used for functionalising MOFs with desired properties, are studied from the single-crystal level (Chapter 1). Herein, Chapter 2 introduces near-field infrared spectroscopy techniques for the chemical characterisation of individual MOF-type crystals at the nanoscale.
Based on this technique, Chapter 3 presents a new strategy to reveal the encapsulation of luminescent ‘guest’ molecules in the pores of the ‘host’ MOF framework. This so-called guest@MOF principle is a smart way to engineer novel material for sensors and optoelectronics, however, unambiguously proving the successful encapsulation in lieu of surface adsorption has been challenging thus far.
Turning to defect tuning - another strategy to tune MOF materials for sensing applications - Chapter 4 demonstrates how the combination of nanoscale analytics and density functional theory calculations can probe point defects in individual MOF crystals, further scrutinising their impact on mechanical properties.
Chapter 5 offers insights into the sensing mechanism itself by studying the exceptional response of a guest@MOF material towards volatile acetone. Herein, several spectroscopy techniques ranging from nanoscale analytics to in situ and operando techniques based on inelastic neutron scattering and synchrotron radiation, all corroborated by theoretical simulations, are used to explore the underlying principles of the unique sensing performance.
Building upon the findings of Chapter 3-5, Chapter 6 presents a detailed characterisation of a promising MOF material for sensing applications. Specifically, theoretical calculations and spectroscopy techniques can explain the interplay between the physical, chemical, and mechanical properties to provide a fundamental understanding of the material’s behaviour and structure-function relations.
Finally, Chapter 7 serves as a critical review of the presented findings, further highlighting their contribution to the future development of tailored MOF materials as next-generation sensors.

Keywords: metal-organic frameworks
near-field infrared spectroscopy
nanoscale analytics
density functional theory
Advisor: Tan, J
Can 'word' and 'sword' cooperate? Reforming Christian theo-political witness to Muslims

This thesis offers a fresh articulation of the gospel’s significance for the relationship between the church (the ‘word’) and the exercise of coercive rule (the ‘sword’) to Muslim audiences. Setting the stage, Chapter One proposes that Christian theo-political witness to Muslims be viewed through a dramaturgical lens, where the primary task is to adapt faithfully the ‘drama’ of the gospel for Muslims through study of its ‘script’ (Scripture) and previous adaptations. In this spirit, Chapter Two and Chapter Three offer a novel ‘performance review’ of historical Christian theo-political witness to Muslims. It shows how pre-modern Christian theo-political witness manifested an increasingly negative attitude towards the Old Testament, contributing to Muslims critiques that Christianity’s lack of faithfulness to the entirety of its Scriptures made it politically dysfunctional. These critiques have not been surmounted by the selective Old Testament retrievals found in modern and contemporary Christian theo-political witness, which present the gospel as creating an antithesis between the church and coercive rule. Chapters Four and Five offer a ‘performance reform’ in response to this inadequate incorporation of the Old Testament, retrieving the biblical themes of kingship and priesthood. By letting these themes shed light of the meaning of the gospel, Christian theo-political witness can move beyond presenting an antithesis between church and coercive rule to Muslims. It can instead present them as both authorized by the ascended Christ and capable of acknowledging one another’s authority through a modest form of religious establishment. Additionally, it can present the exercise of coercive rule by Christians as accountable to the church’s exercise of the keys of the kingdom, alleviating Muslim concerns about Christianity’s ‘other-worldliness’ and proneness to assimilation. In Chapter Six, the theological permissibility of religious establishment is defended against three critiques, strengthening the case for this thesis’ way of retrieving the Old Testament.

Keywords: David VanDrunen
Oliver O'Donovan
Christian-Muslim relations
Old Testament
Kenneth Cragg
establishment
Church discipline
theo-political witness
missiology
shari'a
political theology
Noahic Covenant
Dramaturgy
Ibn Taymiyya
Jonathan Leeman
Advisor: Horden, J
Al-Akiti, M
Education in the climate emergency: school sustainability practices, climate imaginaries, and teaching hope

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported with very high confidence that human activity is changing the climate, that climate change has severe impacts for human and natural systems, and that we have a limited window to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming to 1.5 °C. Our future is being shaped by this crisis and our collective responses to mitigate and adapt to it. This article-based thesis presents interdisciplinary research on the response of secondary schools in England to climate change. The chapters first introduce a doctoral journey over 3.5 years, including adaptations in response to COVID-19. They then present a combined literature review, weave together the three academic articles, and end by exploring the contributions of this research and sharing future plans. The first paper (Chapter 3) was based on a large number of semi-structured interviews and focus group conversations with different school stakeholders at both state and independent schools. Theories of social practice and practice architectures were used to explore bundles of practices and the arrangements that support them related to sustainability, especially in terms of semantic (sayings), material (doings) and social (relatings) dimensions. The article, currently under peer review by the journal Energy Research and Social Science, argued for expanding whole-school approaches to sustainability to incorporate insights from practice architectures. The second paper (Chapter 4) involved data collection through a questionnaire distributed to Sixth Form students and teachers, primarily comprising measures of action competence and climate hope that were previously developed and validated by other researchers. Quantitative analysis of this data revealed the relationship between teacher practices and student reported hope, and compared responses based on students from independent versus state schools and students that identified as female versus male. This article was published in the journal Environmental Education Research. The third paper (Chapter 5) used the creative, participatory method of speculative digital storytelling, in which 16-18-year-olds in the UK and Ireland participated in workshops to produce a short ‘letter from the future’ in a video format. Through reflexive thematic and narrative analysis, themes related to the scripts and visuals were identified, as well as different narratives of climate futures. This article was published in the journal Children’s Geographies. The discussion (Chapter 6) outlines three threads that weave together the research – education, futures, storytelling – and offers a series of methodological, theoretical and empirical contributions, including speculative digital storytelling, practice-informed whole-school sustainability, and hope-based pedagogies in climate education.

Keywords: climate education
school sustainability
digital storytelling
Advisor: Darby, S
Fawcett, T
'We are Muslims too': the politics of identity, practice, and discourse among British progressive Muslims

This ethnographic study explores organisations in the UK that identify with the label ‘progressive Muslim’. The main organisation it studies is the Inclusive Mosque Initiative (IMI) together with other organisations that offer points of contrast and similarities with the IMI. The thesis describes the key academic and theological principles of contemporary progressive Islam and the ways these are utilised in specific socio-historical contexts. Specifically, it explores through participant observation and interviews the key areas of debate where progressive Muslim theology and principles are applied within the British context: female ritual leadership; LGBTQIA+ rights; Islamophobia and racism; and the counterterrorism and criminal justice systems. The thesis claims that the same theological resources and hermeneutical approaches can lead to contrasting and oppositional political positions and practices, thereby challenging any essentialist understanding of ‘progressive Muslims’ as either pro- or anti- ‘secular’ state actors. Progressive Muslims engage with religious resources in diverse ways and with diverse goals, ranging from rational textual hermeneutics aimed at creating a new orthodoxy to somatic and affective personal mystical experiences aimed at projects of ‘self-care’. Furthermore, they often straddle the boundaries between discourses, practices, and identities that are constructed as ‘incompatible,’ creating unique challenges as well as opportunities for religious and political responses that are unavailable or ineffective for other social actors. The thesis claims that this positionality of progressive Muslims within Western socio-political contexts makes them valuable subjects to interrogate the fault-lines of sensitive public and academic debates on Islamophobia, racism, feminism, queer rights, secularism, religious violence and extremism, and the criminal justice system.

Keywords: hermeneutics
abolitionism
British Islam
counter-terrorism
queer Muslims
feminism
British Muslims
homonationalism
progressive Islam
counter-radicalisation
anthropology of Islam
sexuality
female imams
securitisation
police
progressive Muslims
LGBTQIA+ rights
Islamophobia
secularism
prevent
gender
queer theory
racism
Advisor: Gellner, D
Clarke, M