VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Farming for System Change: The Politics of Food Sovereignty and Climate Change in Canada

In this dissertation, I explore the overlap between climate change and food production, focusing on the concept of food sovereignty and the potential for ecological farming to help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. I unveil how the concepts of food sovereignty and agroecology are (and are not) being taken up by Canadian farmers, farmers’ organizations and others who have a stake in climate change debates. Based on two years of scholar-activist-oriented research, including interviews with farmers and ethnographic engagements on farms and at events focused on agricultural politics and practices, I describe the opportunities and constraints for agroecological approaches to contribute to mitigating climate change, as well as the significant political, geographical and socio-cultural challenges that are generally inhibiting the actualization of food sovereignty in Canada. Focusing on the work of La Vía Campesina’s two member organizations in this country, the National Farmers Union (NFU) and Union Paysanne, I am concerned with the basic problem of how tensions between systemic and pragmatic changes are articulated through agroecology initiatives and food sovereignty advocacy. My essential claim is that a broad counterhegemonic movement will be required in order for there to be a significant shift in climate and food politics in Canada. Food sovereignty and agroecology have the potential to be incorporated into a system change agenda, I argue, but any serious effort to move them forward, and tackle climate change, will require confronting capitalism itself. I do not suggest that this will necessarily require overt anticapitalist campaigns, but rather that farmers and other food sovereignty proponents will do well to grapple with the structural constraints within capitalism, while finding ways to talk about and pursue radical change through ostensibly more prosaic initiatives. As part of the counterhegemonic shift I am pointing to, I also argue that farmers’ organizations will need to prioritize both strategic alliance-building with various groups, as well as political education activities that can help both farmers and non-farmers make progress on these fronts, disrupting apolitical approaches to climate and food issues.

Keywords: Agroecology
Climate change
Ecological farming
Food sovereignty
Food systems
Political ecology
Advisor: Prudham, Scott
Integrating Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Spectroscopy and Virtual Reality into the Structural Biology Pipeline

The advancement of structural biology as a field is limited by the technology involved at the stages of the protein production, structure determination and dissemination to the greater community. This dissertation explores new applications of technologies at each of these three stages. Specifically, new use cases for EPR spectroscopy and VR will be established. Protein production: Refolding membrane proteins from material expressed in Escherichia coli inclusion bodies is an attractive alternative to more complex eukaryotic expression systems. However, detecting refolding on a solid support for the purposes of optimizing protein production is not feasible using standard spectroscopies. Since EPR employs microwave radiation, it can be applied to measure the degree of membrane protein refolding on standard Ni-NTA resins. Refolding workflows from denatured bacteriorhodopsin and bacterioopsin expressed into inclusion bodies are followed, and the refolded fractions are quantitated. Structure determination: DEER spectroscopy is a powerful pulsed EPR technique that measures distance distributions between spin-labelled side chains on proteins. However, the side chains are quite flexible, such that accounting for rotamers is complex and results in a large degree of error when making biological interpretations from distance distributions. To address this problem, the application is shifted away from using standard side chains to a more internally constrained one. Then, a crystallographic rotamer library of the few and discrete rotamers is generated, which can be used for spin-labelled side chain modelling on proteins of interest. Structure dissemination: Communicating intricate 3D biomolecular structures to others using 2D projections often does not deliver a complete picture of the important features of the structure. Options for exploring these structures in immersive environments like virtual reality (VR) exist. However, most of these require costly VR setups and are often limited to single units. How a browser-based molecular visualization tool can give rise to novel applications, such as large-scale VR seminars, is explored in collaboration with Autodesk Life Sciences.

Keywords: Biophysics
EPR spectroscopy
Protein crystallography
Protein refolding
Site-directed spin labelling
Structural biology
Advisor: Ernst, Oliver P
A Theory of Family-Class Immigration and its Policy Implications

In this thesis, I argue for a right to family reunification: a right against one's state to bring in one's foreign family members to reside in the state permanently. Though this conclusion runs against current legal norms, I argue that it flows directly from liberal values and ought to persuade liberal states to recognize this right. My argument is consistent with states' general (though limited) right to exercise their discretion in controlling their borders, foregoing cosmopolitanism. Chapter 2 articulates a functional definition of the family as a group of individuals who share in a relationship of mutual care, responsibility, and sharing of resources and experiences, and defends a right (against one's own state) to family life based on our interests in care and sharing our lives. It also discusses two specific applications of the right to family life: the right to form a family of one's choice and the right to uninterrupted family life. Chapter 3 argues that the right to family life also entails that we have a civil right (against our state) to be reunited with our foreign family members within our state. It also considers and refutes the objection that such a right would be uniquely and unacceptably burdensome. Chapter 4 contextualizes this theoretical defence of the right to family reunification within the broader immigration ethics literature. It examines the debate between open-border and closed-border positions, and reviews immigration theories grounded in communitarianism, individualism, and cosmopolitanism. Most theories do not attend, or attend with limited sensitivity, to the unique considerations at play in family-class immigration. Chapter 5 examines and critiques a number of typical limitations imposed on family reunification: restrictive definitions of family, quotas, the `elsewhere approach.' It also considers a group of limitations that could be permissible so long as they are proportionate. This thesis offers an exhaustive account of the considerations at play in a right to family reunification, building it from its theoretical foundations in the right to family life, assessing its power in the cross-border context, contextualizing it within the broader immigration ethics literature, and discussing its practical implications.

Keywords: borders
family
family reunification
migration
rights
Advisor: Shachar, Ayelet
Women Organizations for Peace: Moving Beyond the Rhetoric of the Cyprus Problem

Abstract This research examines enduring women’s organizations working towards women’s rights and a peaceful solution to the Cyprus Problem which has taken precedence over gender equality on the island. This study was based on a 13-year period from 2001 to 2014 examining Hands Across the Divide (HAD), the Gender Advisory Team (GAT), and the Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies (MIGS) as important groups who have played a key role in women's activism that spans the long-standing partition of Cyprus. This qualitative research-based project applies a transnational feminist lens the following research questions: The central research questions for this study are: 1) How have women’s groups organized for peace? 2) What have been their key issues and organizing strategies? 3) What have been their organizing successes and challenges? I use feminist methods to collect data through participant observation, one-on-one interviews, and focus groups to show how women's organizing within these long-standing groups have played a key role in bicommunal women's activism on the island including the mobilization of the women, peace and security agenda during significant periods in Cypriot history. Each organization is examined through the multi-layered and fragmented ways that the demand for women’s rights has occurred on the island, as well the ways that multigenerational women have sought to make their voices heard in the midst of Cyprus Problem. I conclude with an analysis of how working against ethno-nationalist culture and the need to move beyond the binary of ethnicity and ethnic divisions has resulted in the fight against gendered violence and the marginalization of women’s rights. There is a need to develop a third space in which intersectionality allows women’s groups to engage island-wide with groups fighting other forms of oppression and to create opportunities to work together.

Keywords: Cyprus Problem
divided societies
peace building
transnational feminist theory
women
peace and security
women's organizations
Advisor: Mojab, Shahrzad
Hardware Specialization for Transaction Processing

Hardware specialization has been considered as a promising way to overcome the power wall, ushering in heterogeneous computing paradigm. Meanwhile, several trends, such as cloud computing and advanced reconfigurable computing technology (FPGA), are converging to eliminate the barriers to custom hardware deployment, allowing it to be both technologically and economically feasible. In this thesis, we report a case of hardware specialization for OLTP databases and present a fast and power-efficient transaction processing system, called BionicDB. We first discuss the main challenges of modern software OLTP systems on general-purpose CPUs: frequent memory stalls from indexing and unscalable inter-worker communication. We then design and implement several hardware acceleration techniques to address the problems. Also, we develop a custom processor to deal with heavy control-flow, such as dynamic loops and conditional branches, in transaction logic and tightly integrate it with the acceleration fabric, comprising a hybrid processor-accelerator (software-hardware) architecture. We build BionicDB on FPGA and show that it performs faster or comparable to state-of-the-art software OLTP systems with an order of magnitude higher power-efficiency inherently offered by FPGA.

Keywords: Database
FPGA
Hardware specialization
OLTP
Advisor: Brown, Angela D
A Network-based Analysis of Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a high-fatality cancer with complex pathogenesis, often arising in the setting of various chronic liver diseases when it is too late to offer any curative therapy. This PhD thesis is divided into two parts, the first of which was completed at McGill University under the supervision of Dr. Nahum Sonenberg, and evaluated inhibition of translation downstream of mTOR. This work was performed in the context of much interest in inhibiting the mTOR pathway in HCC, given its identification as a dominant pathway in this cancer. In the first part of this thesis, I evaluated how metformin inhibits HCC growth, by decreasing translation of anti-apoptotic proteins such as Mcl-1 downstream of mTOR. In the second part of this thesis, I sought to better understand the role of the mTOR pathway in relation to other commonly dysregulated pathways in HCC. All publicly available, high-throughput gene expression data in HCC was curated at http://ophid.utoronto.ca/CDIPLiver. Clinical variables such as etiology of liver disease and liver function parameters, important to understanding clinical relevance of gene expression data, were only available in around 50% of studies. Betweenness centrality calculation was performed on genes differentially expressed between HCC and corresponding background liver tissue, and revealed Estrogen Receptor 1 (ESR1) to be most central to the HCC Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) network. HCC cells transfected with ESR1 and exposed to estradiol had significantly decreased proliferation and viability. Gene expression revealed that ESR1 upregulation significantly affected cellular processes such as histone methylation, transcription, and cell cycle. High expression of ESR1 in HCC tumors was found to be protective. Finally, we curated all publicly available whole exome sequencing, DNA methylation, microRNA, and proteomics data in HCC. Pathway analysis was performed on significantly dysregulated genes, and overlapping pathways identified. The following pathways overlapped among the 5 different datasets: Epidermal Growth Factor (EGFR), B1-integrin and axon guidance proteins, suggesting pathway dependencies in HCC. A systems biology approach to HCC allowed us to elucidate the role of sex-specific differences and importance of specific pathways in HCC biology, providing biological rationale for a more targeted therapeutic approach to HCC.

Keywords: Hepatocellular carcinoma
Network Analysis
Advisor: Jurisica, Igor
The Neoliberal Incentive Structure in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This dissertation argues that the persistence of certain aspects of neoliberal market orthodoxy, such as capital account and trade liberalization, fiscal austerity and the inflation targeting (IT) regime, over a twenty-year period in post-apartheid South Africa can be attributed to series of economic incentives and constraints that accompanied the country’s integration into global capital markets in 1995. Specifically, it is posited that capital account liberalization, as well as a new accumulation regime adopted by the South African conglomerates predicated on financialization and outward expansion, has rendered the business community and the political elite dependent on portfolio capital inflows to fund the fiscal deficit and the balance of payments. This development has enabled global credit rating agencies and international investors to wield a potential veto over potential unorthodox economic policies. Global financial integration has thus compelled the Treasury and Reserve Bank to craft orthodox economic policies in line with interests of global asset managers and domestic corporations. Moreover, the ANC’s cash transfer programs to impoverished South Africans, which have been a crucial factor in the party’s electoral success, are partially funded through the international capital markets. Finally, organized labor’s integration into a corporatist governing arrangement has served to dampen the resistance to this neoliberal regime.

Advisor: Kingston, Paul
Investigation of Shear-critical One-way Concrete Slabs Internally Reinforced with GFRP Bars

With increasing attractiveness among industry professionals, the application of Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) bars as internal reinforcement for concrete structures has been rapidly growing for specific conditions such as corrosive or electromagnetic environment. Only limited design guidelines are available primarily due to the fact that the experimental database is also limited. This dissertation presents both experimental data and numerical analysis of GFRP reinforced slabs subjected to one-way shear. The experimental component was conducted on 20 specimens categorized into two groups of small and large slabs with cross-sectional dimensions of 200x1000 mm and 400x1500 mm, and shear-span-to-depth ratios of 6.6 and 3, respectively. The specimens were simply supported, and tested to failure under monotonic four-point loading. To explore the shear behavior, variables included concrete strength, longitudinal reinforcement ratio, longitudinal bar spacing, bar type and surface characteristics, and amount of shear resisting GFRP headed studs. The effect of each variable was investigated and the main findings were reported. In general, it was found that using high strength concrete may not always be of advantageous, and in small slabs particularly resulted lower capacity. Improved performance was observed by increasing the reinforcement ratio, and reducing longitudinal bar spacing. Application of GFRP headed studs, acting as shear reinforcement, also showed promising results in specimens with larger depth and made with normal strength concrete. The results from the current experimental work and those from the previously tested specimens were compared against the predictions using selected design codes including ACI440.1R-15, CAN/CSA S6-14, CAN/CSA S806-12, and previously suggested modifications incorporating 2nd orders of  and θ. A new optimized equation was proposed for mid-depth longitudinal strain, and improvement was observed in the prediction of shear capacities compared with studied design codes and previously suggested methods.

Keywords: Concrete Slab
GFRP
High Strength Concrete
Reinforced Concrete
Shear
Advisor: Sheikh, Shamim A.
The Death of the Character in Modern Fiction and Criticism

This study is a critical history of the conflict over literary character in the first half of the twentieth century. It explores the tension between conceiving of character either as a linguistic construct or as a simulated person. Rejecting the teleological metanarrative that modernist characters represented the self more authentically than earlier writers, the study treats that metanarrative as a mythos and reveals the intellectual labour that modernist writers and critics put into constructing it. The first chapter deals with A.C. Bradley, F.R. Leavis, T.S. Eliot, G. Wilson Knight, and L.C. Knights and their debates over representation of character in Hamlet. Bradley emerges as a nuanced critic, who, far from seeing Hamlet as merely the imitation of a real person, recognizes the role of the reader in filling narrative gaps, smoothing over inconsistencies and errors, and, ultimately, accepting the incompleteness of the text. The second chapter deals with the disagreement between, on one side, E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey, who both assert the power of text to communicate both fictional and historical people, and, on the other, Virginia Woolf, who in her criticism and experimental biographies challenges readers’ assumptions that we can ever know another individual – even a fictional one. The final two chapters explore grassroots organizations of readers who resisted modern trends in criticism because they viewed a character’s reality as an essential aspect of a great work of literature. First are the Holmesians, who circulated mock-essays with the conceit that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were real people. Second are the first Bloomsday celebrants, who followed the path of the protagonists of James Joyce’s Ulysses through the streets of Dublin, reading the work as a passionate national epic. This model of reading character emphasizes the vivid feeling of reality that simulated persons produce and rejects any attempt to reduce characters to a mere collection of words on a page. The legacy of this divergence between enthusiastic lay readers and academics can still be felt in the academy today and demonstrates the urgent need for a new understanding of how character is communicated, and how character is read.

Keywords: Arthur Conan Doyle
Criticism
James Joyce
Modernism
Virginia Woolf
Advisor: Henderson, Greig
Asian Conservatives in Canada's Parliament: A Study in Race and Governmentality

This dissertation argues that the political integration of the figure of the Asian Conservative MP has become part of racial governmentality, a part, that is, of how racial minorities are governed. In Canada, official multiculturalism emerged and evolved as the dominant discourse to regulate political heterogeneity. My research finds that the neoliberalization of multicultural discourse as led by the Reform Party of Canada has configured the Asian Conservative member of parliament (MP) as the upwardly-mobile, bootstrap-immigrant, difference-that-integrates into the modern polity. Insofar as multiculturalism as incorporation is a project of assisting racial others into modernity, it requires the utter exclusion of those that have been cast as antithetical to the modern: Indigenous, Black, and working class or poor life. Using a Foucauldian approach to the study of governmentality, the study traces how multiculturalism discourse has given rise to the ideal multicultural subject as necessarily a narrowly imagined Asian Conservative subject. That is, the thesis explores how the Asian Conservative MPs take up the narrowly imagined space of legitimacy that has been carved out for racial others â in which they remain regarded as duplicitous - as conduits to a settler colonial, anti-Black politics. To suggest that the figure of the Asian Conservative parliamentarian is a paradox presupposes the incommensurability of racial identity and conservative politics. By analyzing their text and talk, particularly their contributions to parliamentary debate on national identity, multiculturalism, and immigration policies, this thesis challenges this supposed incommensurability and investigates how Asian Conservative MPs, particularly since 1997, have contributed to the reproduction of racism in the Canadian context. Paradoxically raced in the name of racelessness, my research finds that the figure of the Asian Conservative MP has become vital to the stateâ s narrative of progress and tolerance. At the same time, speaking in the name of race, these politicians promote a discourse of integration and lend legitimacy to the project of managing racial populations. The study finds how politicians of colour also have the capacity to uphold the racial order, leave inequities uncontested, and often augment them with renewed vigour.

Keywords: Conservative parties
Ethnic Politicians
Multiculturalism
Political Representation
Race
Racial Governance
Advisor: Razack, Sherene H.