VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The politics of the public sphere: English-language and Yoruba-language print culture in colonial Lagos, 1880s-1940s

This thesis studies print culture in colonial Lagos against the background of the public sphere, and brings together a variety of English-language and Yoruba-language newspapers. Such an approach allows for highlighting the practicalities of newspaper production and foregrounding the work accomplished by newspapermen in a changing ‘information environment’ and political context. It offers insights into Lagos politics, contributes to the history of the educated elite, and to more global histories of communication. Using newspapers as well as archival records, and focussing on events that strikingly reveal dynamics in the public sphere, this thesis narrates a nuanced history of a discursive field which was, amongst other things, central for Lagos politics.
This thesis complicates a Habermasian notion of the public sphere as an open discursive space, and not only highlights that the public sphere was an arena of contested meanings, but also illustrates axes along which the composition of this social structure was negotiated. When newspapers emerged in the late nineteenth-century, discussions in the press were largely restricted to the elite. The economy of recognition that was at play in the public sphere was to change in the 1920s. This thesis highlights how newspapermen and contributors sought to carve out niches for themselves in the public sphere in new ways and how their becoming a speaker in this discursive field was challenged and contested. It highlights the nuanced ways in which newspapermen and contributors convened publics through their papers: how they did so around particular issues, in distinction from each other, and how they adapted the convening of publics to new political dynamics in the 1940s. This thesis gives insight into the complex relationship between English-language and Yoruba-language newspapers, and moreover illustrates how the practicalities of the newspaper business were coming to bear on dynamics in the public sphere.

Keywords: civil society
West Africa
Nigeria
media history
print culture
newspapers
Advisor: Pratten, DT
Development and pre-clinical evaluation of HIV-1 vaccines

Infants born to HIV-1 positive mothers are at risk of acquiring the infection through pro-longed breastfeeding due to the presence of HIV-1 cell-free RNA and cell-associated DNA in breast milk. However, there is limited focus on vaccines to prevent mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) via breastfeeding. Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) the causative agent of Tuberculosis (TB) is the most common cause of AIDS-related deaths. Most infants in Africa receive Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) at birth or soon after birth and it is the only licensed vaccine for TB. The development of a dual platform vaccine against HIV-1 and TB would be a logical effort to combat these two deadly diseases. Thus, rBCG expressing an HIV-1 derived immunogen may induce HIV-1 responses at birth and these responses can be boosted at adolescence, by a heterologous vector such as modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) or Chimpanzee adenovirus serotype 63 (ChAdV63). In the first study, I assessed BCG-based vaccines derived from BCG Danish SSI-1331 (BCG1331), expressing an HIV-1 immunogen HIVconsv either by an episomal plasmid (BCG.HIVconsv401epi) or integrated into the BCG chromosome (BCG.HIVconsv401int) in a prime-boost regimen. BALB/c mice were immunised with the different prime-boost regimens. rBCG alone was unable to induce detectable HIV-1-specific T-cell responses, however, when used in a prime-boost strategy, elevated HIV-1-specific T-cell responses were observed.
In the second study, I aimed to construct marker-less mycobacterium-vectored HIV-1 vaccines using the operator-repressor titration (ORT®) system as an alternative system for antibiotic resistance gene free vaccines. This rBCG vaccine would express the HIVconsv immunogen. I first constructed plasmids carrying the lac operator lacO and tetracycline operator tetO to enable use in ORT Escherichia coli (E.coli) and Mycobacterium strains, respectively. The ORT system was successful in E. coli and not in mycobacterium. I also constructed plasmids carrying mycobacterium essential genes that would allow for genetic manipulation in Mycobacterium and the use of ORT in mycobacterium. Although the plasmid construction was successful, in the end, genetic manipulations in Mycobacterium and the production of an ORT based BCG (ORT-VAC) was not successful.
Finally, I evaluated the immunogenicity of conventional DNA plasmid pTH.HIVconsv compared to Semliki Forest virus replicon DREP.HIVconsv in rhesus macaques. Immunisations were done in a prime-boost strategy with heterologous vectors MVA or ChAdV63 delivering the same immunogen, HIVconsv. It was found that DREP.HIVconsv which was at least 20-fold lower dose than pTH.HIVconsv was capable of inducing comparable T-cell responses and in some experiments, the responses were superior to the conventional DNA plasmid pTH.HIVconsv.

Keywords: HIV-1
Vaccines
Advisor: Hanke, T
Cranenburgh, R
Make it orijinal: literary modernism and the novel on the Turkish-British axis 1908-1948

This dissertation comparatively examines twentieth-century Turkish and Anglo-European novels to illuminate the how modernism functions as a vital, but theoretically neglected, paradigm for understanding the development of the Turkish novel. Building on the insights of the global turn in modernist scholarship, I argue that the Turkish novel in the early 20th century offers unique insight into the relationship between state-sponsored, westernizing modernity and literary experimentation. Exploring important novels of the Kemalist era alongside their equally canonical Anglo-European counterparts, this dissertation demonstrates that certain tropes of modernism long presumed unique to European culture have analogous strands in Turkish modernity. By connecting literary innovation in Turkey to the larger discourse of modernism globally, this research forges a model of literary connection predicated on European and Middle Eastern cultural exchange outside of the postcolonial model, and reshapes critical understanding of the Turkish novel as belated vis-à-vis Europe.
Organized into four chapters, each chapter compares a pairing of Anglo-European and Ottoman-Turkish authors and addresses debates central to the definitions of literary modernism to which both Turkish and Anglo-European modernism contribute. To this end, I pair Halide Edip Adıvar and Virginia Woolf to address debates over the gender of modernism; Nezihe Muhiddin and Rebecca West in reference to the divide between modernism and mass literature; Peyami Safa and Wyndham Lewis to examine how conservative ideology interacts with Bergsonian philosophy to shape modernist form; and finally, I turn to Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and James Joyce to address questions about modernism’s relationship to the literary tradition. These pairings allow me to examine and explore how debates on gender, conservative ideology, mass fiction, and the literary tradition are put to cultural work in Turkey and England, and to illuminate important convergences in literary modernism on the Turkish-British Axis.

Advisor: Mignon, L
What is unfair discrimination?

In this thesis, I seek to understand ‘unfair discrimination’ under the South African Constitution, as it has been interpreted and applied by the Constitutional Court. The Court holds that unfair discrimination involves differences in treatment that violate human dignity. However, it has not clearly explained what this violation of dignity involves. Without this explanation, its ‘Harksen test’ for unfair discrimination provides little guidance in identifying this wrong.
In response to this lack of explicit guidance, I examine the case law and extract three requirements for establishing the particular type of dignity violation that is required for a finding of unfair discrimination: a) there must be differentiation on the basis of group characteristics; b) that is disproportionate; and c) threatens to create or perpetuate patterns of group disadvantage. Requirements b) and c) are intertwined in important ways. I demonstrate that the Court’s judgments largely turn on a proportionality analysis, as the Court weighs the impact of the discrimination on the disfavoured group against its purpose. Having found that the discrimination is disproportionate, the Court regularly concludes that the law or action expresses impermissible ‘messages’ about the disfavoured group, messages that threaten to create or perpetuate patterns of group disadvantage. Using the literature on ‘legal expressivism’, I examine these messages and conclude that they primarily reflect the concern that the state may be reasonably construed to be acting on the basis of prejudice or impermissible stereotypes.
I then use this understanding of the violation of dignity to explain the key features of the Harksen test. While the Harksen test parcels out this enquiry in a slightly different form, these three requirements form the basis of this two-part test. The result is a clearer understanding of the Court’s jurisprudence and firmer guidance in identifying unfair discrimination.

Keywords: Human dignity
Equality
South Africa
Constitutional Court of South Africa
Discrimination
Advisor: Khaitan, T
Power in political thought: a comparative conceptual morphology

The aim of this thesis is to resurrect interest in the concept of power in political theory by shedding light on some of its relatively unexplored discursive dimensions and developing a fresh approach to its understanding. Particularly, it studies an under-examined theme in the current literature, which, however, forms a crucial aspect determining different definitions of power: in what manner do different ways of thinking about power underpin variable conceptual formulations and theoretical interpretations of this key political concept? What types of cognitive, ideational and conceptual ‘micro-processes’ shape different ways of thinking about power in political thought?
The thesis suggests novel interpretative possibilities that may be distilled from developing a hermeneutical approach extending across the dimensions of historical time and disciplinary space, by combining methodological insights from the fields of morphology, intellectual history and interdisciplinary study. To that end, it engages perspectives gleaned from historical treatments of power, as well as recent understandings of spatiality and force provided by scientific discourse.
The concept of power is explored through the perspectives of (i) cultural historicity and (ii) interdisciplinarity. Along the axis of cultural historicity, the analysis studies Aristotle’s classical concept of ‘dunamis’ as the original conceptual modality of power in political thought. Along the axis of interdisciplinarity, the examination explores the concept of force in the discourse of physics, and its parallel development in political thought. This dissertation shows that the exploration of those conceptual modalities can yield a new appreciation of certain diachronic and contingent conceptual features of power and enhance our understanding of the multifaceted discursive processes through which those form, including the underpinning ‘micro-semantic’, linguistic and ideational processes which contribute to the emergence of variable modes of thinking about power. In so doing, the thesis aims at illuminating our modern understanding of the concept, moving the scholarly discourse forward towards new horizons of meaning and interpretation.

Keywords: dunamis
physics
interdisciplinarity
concepts
Aristotle
power
force
Advisor: Freeden, M
Some contemporary atheist and Christian responses to moral nihilism and amoralism

If the universe and our lives within it exist for no purpose and are destined to be annihilated for ever in death, perhaps nothing much matters including how we live and treat others. In particular, we may never have good reason to make substantial, enduring and uncompensated sacrifices of our own interests here and now in order to secure the interests of others. This is especially so in seeking realise our ambitions through pursiuing fame and fortune in competitive careers. Part One sets out three challenges to any morality which requires some unselfishness: from the perennial facts about the human condition; from the extreme pluralism of contemporary secular society; and from an updated Machiavellianism in relation to ambition. Part Two explores the answers to these challenges offered by three versions of contemporary atheist ethics: Isaiah Berlin's, Daniel Dennett's and Derek Parfit's. Part three builds on the work of the Chjristian ethicists Keith Ward and.Charles Taylor to show how a Christian ethics grounded in the theological virtues, in the virtiue of humility, and the concept of vocations offers more attractive and inspiring answers to the challenges of moral nihilism and amoralism than is available to atheists, who also need forms of faith if they are to rebut these challenges.

Advisor: Biggar, N
What is unfair discrimination?

This thesis offers an original account of the South African Constitutional Court’s reasoning in identifying unfair discrimination perpetrated by the state. I use this account to develop proposals for improving the Court’s jurisprudence, in line with its stated aim of addressing patterns of group disadvantage.
The Court’s Harksen test for unfair discrimination makes dignity the touchstone for identifying this wrong. However, the Court has not explained what is required to prove a violation of dignity or how dignity fits with its concern for group disadvantage. I demonstrate that three necessary conditions must be satisfied for the Court to conclude that dignity has been violated: there must be a) unfavourable treatment on the basis of protected grounds; b) that threatens to create or perpetuate patterns of group disadvantage; and c) that lacks adequate justification. I also investigate important features of the Court’s reasoning that have been overlooked in the existing literature, including its concern for messages expressed by discrimination and the fluctuating intensity with which it reviews justifications.
Among my proposals for developing this reasoning, I argue that the Court should remove human dignity from the Harksen test and openly acknowledge the considerations doing the work in its decisions. I also provide a detailed critique of five of the Court’s most controversial decisions where it found discrimination to be fair despite clear indications that it entrenched patterns of disadvantage. I show that in all five cases the Court applied an indefensibly weak intensity of review, falling below the baseline level of scrutiny which ought to be applied in unfair discrimination cases. I contend that consistent application of this baseline will help to make the Court better at preventing and addressing patterns of group disadvantage.
I conclude with a restatement of the Harksen test that consolidates the Court’s reasoning and my proposals.

Keywords: Equality
Human dignity
South Africa
Constitution of the Republic of South Africa
Constitutional Court of South Africa
Unfair discrimination
Advisor: Khaitan, T
Reducing human effort in web data extraction

The human effort in large-scale web data extraction significantly affects both the extraction flexibility and the economic cost. Our work aims to reduce the human effort required by web data extraction tasks in three specific scenarios.
(I) Data demand is unclear, and the user has to guide the wrapper induction by annotations. To maximally save the human effort in the annotation process, wrappers should be robust, i.e., immune to the webpage’s change, to avoid the wrapper re-generation which requires a re-annotation process. Existing approaches primarily aim at generating accurate wrappers but barely generate robust wrappers. We prove that the XPATH wrapper induction problem is NP-hard, and propose an approximate solution estimating a set of top-k robust wrappers in polynomial time. Our method also meets one additional requirement that the induction process should be noise resistant, i.e., tolerate slightly erroneous examples.
(II) Data demand is clear, and the user’s guide should be avoided, i.e.., the wrapper generation should be fully-unsupervised. Existing unsupervised methods purely relying on the repeated patterns of HTML structures/visual information are far from being practical. Partially supervised methods, such as the state-of-the-art system DIADEM, can work well for tasks involving only a small number of domains. However, the human effort in the annotator preparation process becomes a heavier burden when the domain number increases. We propose a new approach, called RED (abbreviation for “redundancy”), an automatic approach exploiting content redundancy between the result page and its corresponding detail pages. RED requires no annotation (thus requires no human effort) and its wrapper accuracy is significantly higher than that of previous unsupervised methods.
(III) Data quality is unknown, and the user’s related decisions are blind. Without knowing the error types and the error number of each type in the extracted data, the extraction effort could be wasted on useless websites, and even worse, the human effort could be wasted on unnecessary or wrongly-targeted data cleaning process. Despite the importance of error estimation, no methods have addressed it sufficiently. We focus on two types of common errors in web data, namely duplicates and violations of integrity constraints. We propose a series of error estimation approaches by adapting, extending, and synthesizing some recent innovations in diverse areas such as active learning, classifier calibration, F-measure estimation, and interactive training.

Keywords: Web data extraction
Advisor: Gottlob, G
Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells as an In Vitro model for Human Cardiomyocytes to Study Maturation and Metabolism

This project aimed to generate a mature population of human induced pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CM) which would have the metabolic phenotype of cardiomyocytes in the adult heart as metabolic disorders are strongly linked with cardiovascular disease. Two published differentiation protocols were assessed, and the Wnt-modulation protocol was chosen as it upregulated the gene expression of cardiac genes. In addition, after introducing some alterations, such as transient hypoxia and the addition of Activin A, spontaneously beating human induced pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs) were generated.
We characterised the changes in substrate metabolism after differentiation and showed that as hiPSCs are differentiated into beating hiPSC-CMs, there was an increase in both glycolysis and fatty acid oxidation, associated with changes in mRNA expression of glucose and fatty acid metabolism genes. Addition of a PPAR-α agonist (WY14643) to hiPSCs during differentiation did not induce changes in gene expression or substrate metabolism, however addition of the agonist in combination with oleic acid to beating hiPSC-CMs upregulated fatty acid oxidation and respiratory reserve capacity. Interestingly, in beating hiPSC-CM, the addition of oleic acid alone upregulated pyruvate oxidation but not that of oleic acid. There was no change in glycolytic flux with either treatment, suggesting that although activation of PPAR-α increased the capacity of the cells for fatty acid oxidation, they could generate sufficient energy from the high glucose in the culture medium via glycolysis.
In conclusion, as hiPSC-CMs are differentiated there is an upregulation in both glycolysis and fatty acid oxidation. This maturation of metabolism can be further enhanced when PPAR-α is activated using WY14643 in the presence of fatty acids. This provides a method to metabolically mature hiPSC-CMs, so that they more closely resemble mature cardiomyocytes.

Advisor: Carr, C
Heather, L
Undefined myasthenias: clinical and molecular characterisation and optimised therapy

Congenital myasthenic syndromes (CMS) are a group of heterogeneous disorders caused by mutations in genes encoding for proteins that are essential for neuromuscular transmission. All CMS share the clinical feature of fatigable muscle weakness. The differential diagnosis of CMS is wide, with a range of diseases going from autoimmune myasthenia gravis to muscle disorders. In this thesis, it was shown that measuring antibodies to clustered acetylcholine receptors (AChRs) by cell-based assay is helpful in the differential diagnosis of CMS.
The findings of the current investigations showed that mutations in COL13A1, encoding the Collagen Type XIII α1 chain, were responsible for the symptoms of several patients with previously undefined myasthenias. In addition, this work described the clinical and complementary features of a novel CMS subtype due to mutations in the glycosylation pathway gene GMPPB. Investigations on a novel MUSK missense mutation (p.Ala617Val) uncovered previously unrecognised mechanisms of how levels of MuSK phosphorylation are critical to maintain synaptic structure, and guided suitable treatment for the patient.
The study on the clinical and molecular basis of stridor, a novel clinical feature recently identified in patients with DOK7-CMS, prompted the identification of a novel DOK7 isoform, which warrants further investigation to elucidate its role in AChR clustering.
Finally, the therapy of patients with severe AChR-deficiency was optimised thanks to a case series study that showed a robust improvement following the addition of ß2-adrenergic agonists to their long-term treatment regime that included pyridostigmine.

Keywords: MuSK
DOK7
N-glycosylation pathway
COL13A1
AChR-deficiency
salbutamol
neuromuscular junction
congenital myasthenic syndrome
Acetylcholine receptor
stridor
clustered-AChR antibodies
rapsyn
congenital myasthenia
myasthenia gravis
GMPPB
Advisor: Beeson, D
Palace, J
Towards a grammar of theatrical blindness

Since the fifth century, the theatre has been a place for seeing. In spite of this, blind figures repeatedly appear on the stage, from Oedipus, Polymestor, Tiresias and the Cyclops to Shakespeare's Gloucester, Beckett's Hamm, Friel's Molly Sweeney and Kane's Ian. These blind characters have an important role to play in articulating the task of the spectator, both in their aural and imaginative construction of the fictional world in pre-naturalistic theatre, and also in their ability to see through the dramatic illusion in later drama. These scenes of blindness and blinding also have consequences for reception studies, since the relationship between them is not straightforwardly a textual reception history. Instead, these blind characters and the scenes in which they appear are read as what Deleuze and Guattari term an 'assemblage': a heterogenous multiplicity that is produced at the moment of reading / watching with reference to other scenes of blindness and blinding.
This thesis sketches out a grammar for such an assemblage, and each chapter focuses on a rule in this grammar. When read as part of an assemblage of blindness, blind characters always have a special relationship with death (Chapter 2), showcase their own performance (Chapter 3), undermine the fictional setting that has been established onstage (Chapter 4), have access to a kind of superhuman knowledge (Chapter 5) and alter the position of their spectators (Chapter 6). Each chapter is structured around a particular moment when the theatre's interest in blind characters resurges, as a response to changes in the social, cultural or scientific understanding of vision and visual impairment. In each chapter, the grammar that is outlined in Chapter 1 with reference to ancient plays returns to the fore, but is refracted through the historical period back on to the grammar of the assemblage.

Keywords: Theatre
Disability Studies
Classical Reception
Blindness
Advisor: Macintosh, F