VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Invisible Human: A Reflective Autoethnography about the Lives of Pakistani Transgender People

Since the creation of Pakistan in 1947, transgender people in Pakistan have been isolated and denied substantive rights, due to dominant discourses of marginalization that have served to deny them basic human rights. These include rights to social services such as education and healthcare, in addition to the right to employment. The only profession seen as legitimate for transgender people is prostitution, or sex work. They live at the margins of society, disowned by their families and mocked and ridiculed by the rest of society. They are commonly targets for various forms of abuse at the hands of police and others in society. In 2016, an angry customer viciously attacked a transgender female sex worker, Alisha, shooting her eight times. Alisha later died because she was denied timely medical attention at the hospital. No one was held responsible for her death for three years. In this dissertation, I examine the murder of Alisha as an example of gendered racial violence and the continued colonization of marginalized people, as an entry point to consider how Pakistani transgender people are rendered invisible. This research explores how issues of race, gender and sexual orientation, among other factors, have defined transgender people in Pakistani society. This research is approached methodologically as a reflexive autoethnographic work. I worked with Alisha on a transgender empowerment project when I was Cultural Advisor for the U.S. Consulate General in Lahore, Pakistan. Her murder motivated me to apply to the Doctor of Education (EdD) program, in the Department of Social Justice Education (SJE), Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), at the University of Toronto, with collaborative specializations in Comparative International Development in Education, and Global Affairs with a special focus on South Asia. This dissertation in practice highlights the transformative power of practicum education as a step toward advancing the understanding of Pakistani transgender people. This EdD project is designed to serve as an educational toolkit for North American (Canada and US) educators. It includes two parts: 1) a written narrative that suggests strategies to empower transgender sex workers in Pakistan; and 2) a digital story board about the lives of Pakistani transgender people. I hope Alisha’s story moves you to join me, and to stand up and speak out for transgender people’s rights everywhere.

Advisor: Bakan, Abigail B
Wane, Njoki N
Dynamics of Electron-induced Recoil and Reaction On Single-crystal Copper

This thesis reports three studies of chemical reactions at the Cu(110) surface at 4.6 K, examined a ‘molecule-at-a-time’ by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and density functional theory. The first study reports widely different efficiencies for electron-induced reaction of an aliphatic adsorbate as compared with aromatic. The second describes a novel means of aiming an energized reagent at a fixed vinyl 'target' molecule. In the third an energized reagent is aimed to strike the target at its centre-of-mass, expelling an atom in a new type of reaction we term 'knock-on'. The first study compares electron-induced reaction of pentyl bromide (PeBr) and phenyl bromide (PhBr). A single ~2.0 eV electron induced C–Br bond dissociation for each reagent, with three orders-of-magnitude greater dissociation yield measured for PeBr (2.0 × 10-7 reactive events per electron) than for PhBr (1.7 × 10-10). Lower yield of the aromatic PhBr was attributed to the presence of two additional anionic states, absent for aliphatic PeBr. These additional states provide a pathway for electron transfer to the surface in the case of the aromatic, but not the aliphatic anion. The second study employs a new method permitting the miss-distance (‘impact parameter’) between colliding reagents to be controlled using a highly collimated reactive ‘projectile’ aimed along the surface at a stationary adsorbed ‘target’. Here, a CF2 projectile, recoiling from electron-induced dissociation of chemisorbed CF3, exhibits highly directional travel having

Keywords: Dehalogenation
Electron-Induced Reaction
Reaction Dynamics
Scanning Tunneling Microscopy
Selected Impact Parameter
Surface-Aligned Reaction
Advisor: Polanyi, John C
Gender Self-determination Troubles

This dissertation explores the growing legal recognition of what has become known as ‘gender self-determination.’ Examining sex reclassification policies on a global scale, I show a shift within sex reclassification policies from the body to the self, from external to internal truth. A right to self-attested gender identity amends the grave breach of autonomy presented by other legal schemes for sex reclassification. To secure autonomy, laws and policies understand gender identity as an inherent and internal feature of the self. Yet, the sovereignty of a right to gender identity is circumscribed by the system of sex classification and its individuating logics, in which one must be stamped with a sex classification to be an autonomous legal subject. To understand this failure, I turn to the legal roots of the concept self-determination by looking to international law, and to the origin moment of legal differentiation, sex assignment at birth. Looking at the limitations of the collective right for state sovereignty allows me to provide a critical account of the inability of a right to gender identity to address systemic harms. Self-attested gender identity inevitably redraws the public/private divide along the contours of the trans body, suggesting a need to examine the apparatus of assigning sex at birth and its pivotal role in both the systemic exclusions of trans people, and in the broader regulation of gender. Looking forward rather than back, I turn to what I perceive to be the ‘future challenge’ of a right to self-attested gender identity, trans parental designations. I show that when people ask that their gender identity be recognized as parents, and especially when using their own bodies to conceive, they become inconceivable, exposing the gaps between what the law imagines as natural and the realities of lived experience. Theorizing the self-determination of gender through sex reclassification histories and practices of international law, and through its articulation within family law, suggests that all its elements, the individual self and its assumed ability for autonomous determination, and the formulation of gender identity as a self-evident right, require new imaginaries.

Keywords: Dysphoria
Gender
Parents
Self Determination
Sex Classification
Trans
Advisor: Cossman, Brenda
Implementation of Bayesian Inference Technique to Address Data Limited Problems in Acology: A Case study with Peary Caribou in Canadian Arctic Archipelago

In the present era, rates of decline in species’ abundance provide some of the most compelling evidence of biodiversity loss rates globally. To address the problem of biodiversity loss, a critical piece of knowledge is the understanding of species interactions with their environment, because environmental variables are generally better predictors of population integrity than intrinsic biological traits. Peary caribou (Rangifer tarandus pearyi), the smallest of all caribou subspecies, are endemic to the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) and a characteristic example of species at risk. Climate change can affect their habitat availability, as well as the makeup of the entire Arctic ecosystem. Logistical and financial constraints in the CAA often compromise the frequency and the spatial extent of Peary caribou surveys, and therefore inconsistent sampling, errors in measurements, or faults in data acquisition encumber the robust assessment of their population status. To remedy such data gaps in surveys and, improve the robustness of any modelling exercise, I first developed a regression-based imputation framework to reconstruct the Peary caribou time series. The model was able to capture more than 65% of the variability in the dataset. To date, little work has been done to evaluate the net impact of changes from the climate on Peary caribou population dynamics, as it has been argued that the net balance of limited forage accessibility due to severe weather conditions relative to that of increased forage biomass due to prolonged growing season will depend on local climate, floral abundance and composition, and landscape characteristics. Using a two-pronged modelling approach, I characterized the year-to-year variability of the habitat conditions across the CAA, using meteorological variables, landscape features, and resource competition. My dissertation also introduced a spatially explicit modelling framework to examine the strength and nature of the relationships of snow density and vegetation with Peary caribou populations. My dissertation concludes by identifying critical augmentations of the available scientific knowledge that necessitate to design the optimal management actions of Peary caribou populations across the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

Keywords: Ecological modelling
Endangered species
Habitat analysis
Population viability
Statistics
Advisor: Arhonditsis, George
Essays in Development Economics

Since the beginning of its economic reform in 1978, China’s extraordinary economic growth has been accompanied by increased migration and rapid structural transformation – the reallocation of economic activity from agriculture to nonagriculture. This significant labor reallocation and migration stemmed from a series of institutional reforms and policies that significantly reduced labor market barriers. My thesis studies the impact of changes in labor market barriers during China’s reform era. Chapter 1 constructs measures of sectoral reallocation and geographical relocation of labor at the provincial level for 1978-2015 resulting from a series of institutional reforms and policies that lowered labor market barriers. I find that the structural transformation process was uneven across provinces. Agriculture-to-nonagriculture worker reallocation began earlier and on a larger scale for coastal provinces. Since 1990, workers moving from inland agriculture to coastal nonagriculture became an important source of nonagricultural labor growth. Chapter 2 quantifies changes in barriers regarding sectoral reallocation and regional migration and studies their impact on China’s economic growth over 1978-2015. I build a two-sector two-region general equilibrium model focusing on labor market barriers both between agricultural and nonagricultural sectors and across coastal and inland regions. I find that the 1982-2015 decline in labor market barriers contributed to an increase in output of 26.5% in 2015. Despite this, there remain considerable gains for future improvement. In particular, eliminating barriers from inland agriculture to coastal nonagriculture in 2015 could further increase output by 12%. Chapter 3 presents the joint work with Ruiqi Sun, Trevor Tombe, and Xiaodong Zhu. Expanding on Chapter 2, we explore the effect of changes in capital market and trade frictions in addition to labor market barriers on resource allocation. Employing a rich spatial general equilibrium model, we quantify the size and impact of migration barrier changes, capital barrier changes, and trade cost changes, to growth, regional income convergence, and structural change in China over 2000-2015. While each contributed meaningfully to growth, migration policy changes were central to China’s structural change and regional income convergence.

Keywords: China
Economic Growth
Labor Misallocation
Migration
Advisor: Brandt, Loren
Prevalence and Phenotypic Characterization of Rare Genetic Disorders within Psychiatric Populations

Many rare genetic syndromes are known to phenotypically manifest with psychiatric symptoms that can be indistinguishable from primary psychiatric disorders. While the majority of ongoing research in psychiatric genetics has been dedicated to the identification and characterization of genes involved in primary psychiatric disorders, there has been a lack of research to determine the extent to which rare genetic variants contribute to the overall psychiatric disease load. This thesis aims to investigate the prevalence of clinically well-characterized pathogenic copy number variant (CNV) syndromes and treatable genetic disorders that can present with neuropsychiatric symptoms within the general psychiatric patient population. In our first study, a greater than expected number of syndromic CNVs was observed amongst a cohort of 348 schizophrenia patients. In our second, pilot, study of 2 046 psychiatric patients, an enrichment for variants associated with four treatable inborn errors of metabolism were found in comparison to the control population. In the third, expansion, study screening for 108 treatable genetic disorders, there was also an enrichment found for the screened genetic disorders in a general psychiatric patient population relative to the expected disease prevalence in the general population. Moreover, an increased carrier frequency for screened genetic disorders was also seen amongst psychiatric patients. Taken together, discovering genetic diseases in psychiatric patients will shift how health care is delivered to these vulnerable patients by addressing underlying conditions rather than masking symptoms with medications and will especially help patients who don't respond to regular medications. This will lead to significant cost savings to the health care system. Ultimately, this study will pave the way for the development of a genetic testing strategy screening psychiatric patients for genetic diseases and identification of specific characteristics associated with psychiatric symptomatology in treatable genetic diseases that will allow for earlier targeted screening and treatments.

Keywords: bipolar disorder
general anxiety disorder
major depressive disorder
obsessive compulsive disorder
rare treatable genetic diseases
schizophrenia
Advisor: So, Joyce
Kennedy, James L.
From Ink Traces to Ideology: Material, Text, and Composition of Qumran Community Rule Manuscripts

This study is a fresh analysis of a collection of scrolls and fragments grouped under the rubric, The Community Rule or Serekh ha-Yaḥad. As part of the manuscripts discovered in the Judean Desert, the Community Rule manuscripts are all fragmentary to various degrees, yet attest to important issues of legal dispute and community formation in the Second Temple era. Whereas the previous 70 years of scholarship bifurcated some of these scrolls into different “works,” I argue for a process of compositional development which revolved around issues of legal authority and purity. It is my contention that textual similarities and differences—ink traces as it were—provide opportunity to probe into the legal ideology of the tradents, in terms of how anterior sources were configured to establish and project political authority in contradistinction to the tradents’ opponents. Consequently, I propose a compositional hermeneutic model that accounts for textual stability and change with respect to disputes of legal authority and notions of textuality in the Second Temple era. In addition, I provide several new editions, most importantly a new edition of 4QSerekh ha-Yaḥade (+ olim 4QOtot), 4QSerekh ha-Yaḥadb, and 1QS+ab (= 1QS, 1QSa, and 1QSb). These new editions were made by drawing on advanced manuscript studies in the digital humanities and material philology. Consequently, I provide a plethora of new textual readings and reconstructions. In short, this study observes and takes account of the various semantic and textual drifts in the compositional development attested in, among, and between the manuscripts of the so-called Communty Rule at Qumran.

Keywords: Ancient Law
Community Rule
Dead Sea Scrolls
Digital Humanities
Material Philology
Media
Advisor: Fox, Harry
Evolutionary Population Genomics and Transcriptomics in Cancer

Cancer progression is an evolutionary process: somatic mutations can confer selective advantages to certain cells, eventually causing them to abnormally proliferate. Parallels can be drawn between the evolution of organismal populations and cancer cell populations. In both, selective forces act on mutations to promote or obstruct the transmission of alleles to future generations. As an integral component in shaping the genomic landscapes of populations, recombination and selection have a high potential to contribute to cancer progression. Despite the clear similarities between evolutionary processes in populations and in cancer cell populations, many theoretical evolutionary concepts remain to be applied to a cancer context.This thesis characterizes processes known to drive the evolutionary trajectory of populations in a cancer context. I first uncover the role of the meiotic recombination factor PRDM9 in cancer. I identify the aberrant expression of PRDM9 in cancer and uncover the association between sites of somatic structural variant breakpoints and sites of PRDM9 binding and activity, reminiscent of the role of PRDM9 in recruiting the double stranded break machinery in meiosis. This study is the first to provide evidence of an association between the aberrant expression of the meiosis-specific gene PRDM9 with genomic instability in cancer. To further investigate the role of selection and linkage in cancer, I model the evolution of cancer cell populations to infer a comprehensive history of the evolution of beneficial, deleterious and neutral mutations within individual biopsies. In 172 Barrett’s esophagus samples, an esophageal adenocarcinoma cancer risk condition, and 47 samples from esophageal adenocarcinoma, sarcoma, prostate, and pancreatic cancer, I capture previously under-detected selective processes in tumors. Negatively selected mutations occur alongside positively selected mutations in many tumors where a signature of positive selection is observed. The accumulation of damaging mutations concurrently with beneficial mutations is associated with increasing the age of sub-clones harboring these mutations, slowing down tumor progression, implying that early detection diagnostics should be developed to screen individuals for tumor progression to improve survival outcomes. Overall, my research highlights the role of evolutionary processes in cancer which has important ramifications on personalized treatment opportunities, resistance and timing of diagnosis.

Keywords: Cancer
Evolution
Genomics
Recombination
Selection
Transcriptomics
Advisor: Awadalla, Philip
Stein, Lincoln D
Structural Dynamic Analysis and Health Monitoring of Aeroengines: Nonlinear Modelling of Bolted Flange Connections and Transfer Path Analysis

In this research, a full and comprehensive category of analysis techniques were proposed, developed, and implemented on aircrafts, specifically aeroengines. Initially, by proposing a novel nonlinear experimental protocol in conjunction with finite element modelling methodologies, the underlying nonlinear dynamic characteristics of the aeroengine casing assemblies were determined at a significantly reduced testing duration. Due to lack of a computationally efficient and accurate nonlinear bolted flange connection modelling methodology, a set of nonlinear analytical bolted flange connection models was developed and proposed. Using finite element techniques, the proposed nonlinear analytical model was incorporated in the finite element model of the aeroengine to capture the underlying nonlinearities. The proposed nonlinear analytical model illustrated a very good correlation compared to the experimental results. Moreover, the proposed nonlinear analytical model demonstrated outstanding computational efficiency. In the second stage, to address noise and vibration problems arising from the aeroengine, a novel bond graph transfer path analysis was implemented on a reduced aeroengine-wing assembly. Using this novel approach and process, vibration energy transmission paths and path contributions in the aeroengines were investigated and determined based on the bond graph transfer path analysis methodology. Moreover, vibration reduction strategies are proposed to minimize and attenuate vibration energy transfer in the aeroengine-wing assembly. The theoretical bond graph transfer path analysis methodology has proven to be extremely time efficient while reducing associated costs in performing conventional methodologies. The proposed bond graph transfer path analysis methodology was validated using finite element simulations. In the last stage, a novel theoretical approach was proposed using the bond graph methodology to perform structural health monitoring on the aeroengine-wing assembly. The proposed analytical structural health monitoring technique permits the rapid detection of damage in the structure while also allowing the determination of damage severity in the structure. The analytical findings of the proposed methodology can be used as a benchmark against experimental measurements to rapidly detect, localize, and analyze the severity of damage in the structure. Moreover, design guidelines and strategies were proposed to minimize damage and defect formation in the structure. The proposed structural health monitoring methodology was validated using finite element simulations.

Keywords: Aeroengine
Bolted flange connections
Finite element analysis
Nonlinear dynamic analysis
Structural health monitoring
Transfer path analysis
Advisor: Behdinan, Kamran
Encoding of Touch: An Investigation into the Neural Representation of Tactile Stimuli

The encoding of touch starts at the periphery where the terminals of mechanosensitive neurons, called low threshold mechanoreceptors (LTMRs), convert mechanical forces into action potentials, or spikes. These spikes eventually propagate to the cortex where perception occurs. Here, I investigated how tactile stimuli are encoded in LTMRs and in somatosensory cortical neurons. LTMRs generate spikes in a two-step process: a transduction step where mechanical stimuli are converted into a local depolarization, or receptor potential, and a spike initiation step, where the local depolarization is transformed into spikes. While LTMR spike patterns in response to different tactile inputs have been investigated, the individual contributions of transduction and spike initiation have eluded investigation owing to the small size of LTMR terminals, which preclude direct recording. To overcome this limitation, I used a novel optogenetic approach to replace natural, hard-to-measure mechanopotentials with artificial, easy-to-control photopotentials. I discovered that slow-adapting type 2 (SA2) and rapid-adapting (RA) terminals have qualitatively different transduction and spike initiation properties, which is critical for spike-based coding of tactile input. In a subset of SA2 LTMRs, I also discovered integer-multiple-patterned spiking, comprising a fundamental interspike interval and multiples thereof. Using a combination of computational and experimental approaches, I showed that this pattern arises from intermittent failure of spike propagation. Because propagation failure was rare, I deduced that propagation in LTMRs is reliable while remaining energy efficient. Lastly, I investigated how cortical neurons encode tactile stimuli after inputs conveyed by functionally distinct LTMRs have converged. I showed that cortical neurons can simultaneously encode stimulus intensity in the rate of asynchronous spikes, and abrupt changes in stimulus intensity in the timing of synchronous spikes. The ability of neurons to simultaneously encode multiple stimulus features using different neural codes is an example of multiplexing. Similarly, I found that SA LTMRs are themselves capable of multiplexing. Deciphering the strategies by which neurons form multiplexed representations is needed to ultimately understand how information is decoded in downstream neural circuits. Taken together, these findings inform us how neurons generate and use spikes to represent tactile information.

Advisor: Prescott, Steven A