VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The phenomenon of political authority: an analysis of selected issues pertaining to its nature and limits

In what way must people interact for the phenomenon, as opposed to the concept, of political authority to exist? What are the factual and normative conditions that must be satisfied for rule over others to be political and authoritative? In this thesis, I argue that answering these questions is essential to understanding the nature of the phenomenon of political authority and is analytically prior to any questions about the scope of its exercise and content of its justification. I argue that only when a plurality of persons—as members of a community—exchange conflicting (or incompatible) reasons for action, for the sake of determining how their actions should be regulated, with their conflicting proposals for action then finally resolved through a process of deliberation and decision, can the phenomenon of political authority in fact exist. My account of these factual and normative conditions means that the nature or form of political authority is characterised by practical conflict, deliberation, decision and action. Further, my account of political authority, which I model on an analysis of the nature of 'self-authorship', means that political authority can exist only when it is accompanied by a plurality of autonomous persons. If my account is right, it has implications for two of Joseph Raz's claims about the exercise and justification of political authority. First, legal systems qua political authorities do not by nature claim comprehensive authority. Second, for the 'normal justification thesis' to be logically tenable, it must be qualified so that political authority is justified only if its exercise is consistent with the autonomy and equality of its subjects. I conclude with a consideration of why I differ from Raz on these issues, suggesting that the reason for this disagreement is that we have different understandings of the nature of politics.

Keywords: Form
Nature
Raz
Normal justification thesis
Self-authorship
Comprehensive
Authority
Limits
Advisor: Yowell, P
Integration and separation of immigrants in Japan

International Social Survey Programme 2003 found that about 90% of the people in Japan favours the idea of maintaining the ethnic minorities' culture, rather than their adaptation to the dominant majority's culture. It is outstandingly high percentage, compared internationally. The result is consistent with the fact that multicultural coexistence ("Tabunka kyosei") policy is welcomed in many local governments to support the immigrants. However, it contradicts to some academics' argument that Japan puts assimilative pressure to ethnic minorities. Therefore, this thesis analyses why the idea of maintaining the ethnic minorities' culture enjoys such outstanding support in Japan. The mixed method approach of quantitative and qualitative study was used to solve this puzzle. International comparison based on the statistical analysis of national identity and attitude toward the ethnic minorities' culture revealed that (i) about 80% of the Japanese people have ethnic conceptualization of national identity, which is exceptionally high percentage than other countries, and (ii) the vast majority of both the people with ethnic and civic national identity favour the idea of maintaining the ethnic minorities' culture. Therefore, the qualitative analysis of interview data with schoolteachers of the immigrants' children were conducted to examine why, of which aspect and to what extent teachers expect the immigrants' children to maintain their ethnic identity and distinct culture, and expect them to adapt themselves to the dominant Japanese culture. It was found out that it is expected for the immigrants' children to maintain their ethnic minority identity and traditional culture in private, and to adapt themselves to group oriented and rule-based Japanese culture in public. However, such group orientated and rule-based culture is not regarded as "culture", but simply as "rules" to give an order to ethnic and cultural diversity. The findings of this thesis imply that multicultural coexistence is a new form of cultural nationalism in Japan ("tertiary nationalism"), meaning a nationalism which (i) has been brought about by confronting the growing ethnic and cultural diversity within a nation, particularly after '90s in Japan, and (ii) tries to preserve its rule-based culture and to spread it to the ethnic minorities by taking off its label of "culture", (iii) though not incorporating them to a member of a nation, but (iv) expecting them to maintain their ethnic identity and traditional culture in private.

Advisor: Heath, A
Kariya, T
The biological role of DNA modifications deposited over gene bodies

5-methylcytosine (5mC) and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) are the most common DNA modifications in vertebrate genomes. Promoter-residing 5mC is a well-established transcriptional repression mark. However, the role of gene body DNA modifications, especially those involving 5hmC, remains elusive and controversial. In this study, the role of genic 5mC and 5hmC in transcriptional regulation is investigated. By engineering a cell line with inducible 5hmC it is shown that deposition of 5hmC causes elevated expression of genes with the highest accumulation of this modification. The transcriptional elevating potential of 5hmC is also confirmed via expression analysis of integrated and transfected artificial reporters. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that promoter proximal gene body DNA modifications can modulate transcription initiation in cis. Finally, the ability of methyl-CpG-binding domain protein 1 (MBD1) to interact with genic DNA methylation and repress transcription is analysed. Upon oxidation of 5mC to 5hmC or demethylation, MBD1 binding is abolished and 5mC-mediated repression is relieved. Altogether, this study suggests that 5hmC plays a de-repressive role and proposes a mechanism by which this is achieved.

Advisor: Kriaucionis, S
Structural and functional studies of K2P channels

Two-pore domain potassium channels (K2Ps) are a family of dimeric potassium channels responsible for regulation of cellular excitability. In 2012, crystal structures of TREK-2 were solved revealing this channel in two different conformational states. In the down state, transmembrane helices M2, 3 and 4 descend further into the cytoplasm than in the up state. This reveals two gaps (fenestrations) that link the membrane directly to the ion conduction pathway. However, the functional relevance of these two states was not known.
In this work, I use state-dependent modulators of TREK-2 to investigate the functional relevance of helical movement in K2P channels. By solving the co-crystal structures of these modulators with TREK-2, I aimed to uncover which states these modulators bind to and how this modifies potassium conductance through the channel. As small molecule binders have weak affinities for TREK-2, brominated ligand derivatives were used to increase sensitivity and specificity of ligand detection.
The co-crystal structures of TREK-2 with brominated fluoxetine (Prozac) derivatives revealed functionally inhibited down states with reduced occupancy in the selectivity filter. These inhibitors bind within the fenestration of TREK-2. Since the fenestration is absent in the up state, inhibition must work by stabilising the down state of the protein. This finding supports a gating mechanism of TREK-2 that links movement of the M2-4 helices with gating at the channel filter.
TREK-2 was also co-crystallised with derivatives of the small molecule activator BL-1249. Crystals of this complex were produced using both vapour diffusion and lipidic cubic phase. These crystals produced diffraction at both synchrotron and free electron laser sources. Initial low-resolution structures provide the first insight into where BL-1249 may bind to TREK-2.

Advisor: Tucker, S
Carpenter, L
Ceria morphologies as Pd nanoparticles support for heterogeneous catalysis

Ceria is well known for its unique properties in fast oxygen mobility and formation of oxygen vacancies which makes ceria an excellent catalyst support for metal nanoparticles. Promotional effect of ceria has been well established in a number of reactions including three-way catalyst and CO oxidation. These unique properties of ceria are dependent on the surface facets it exposes, where they can be enhanced by the exposure of high energy surfaces such as (100) and (110).
The work presented in this thesis involves controlling the surface exposed by the ceria support by making them into cube and rod morphology, which predominantly expose the (100) and (110) surface, respectively. Hence, the effect of these surfaces on the ceria support can be investigated. The ceria morphologies were deposited with Pd nanoparticles and their catalytic properties were tested on methane combustion and gas-phase formic acid decomposition reactions. In both of the catalyst test reactions, the Pd deposited on the ceria cubes support had shown superior catalytic properties compared to the Pd deposited on the ceria rods support, indicated by the former's higher activity, TOF and resistance to poisoning. Based on the characterisation techniques performed in this study such as TPR, ambient pressure XPS, STEM-EELS and pulse isotopic oxygen exchange, the enhanced catalytic properties of Pd/ceria cubes were attributed to the high energy ceria (100) surface which led to more favourable formation of oxygen vacancies and faster oxygen mobility.

Keywords: Heterogeneous Catalysis
Ceria
Morphologies
Nanoparticles
Advisor: Tsang, S
"Speaking politically, not politics": an Adornian study of "apolitical" twentieth-century fiction

My thesis is concerned with Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), the Frankfurt School theorist, and the implications of his philosophy for literary studies. I show that Adorno's thought may offer a valid contribution to the analysis of literary texts, even texts with which he is not historically associated. More specifically, I link Adorno with texts that emerge out of situations of political extremity but are not necessarily understood as "political" protest literature.
Drawing on a variety of Adorno's texts, I assert that key concepts within Adorno’s thought – truth content, immanence, the non-identical – allow us a way of understanding literary texts that appear apolitical, but in fact are speaking to the social and material relations of their specific (political) context. Adorno's exposition on the interface between the artwork and history usefully engages authors that problematise or dismantle our traditional conception of what constitutes the "political" – overt manifest content that aligns itself with a particular ideological position.
I have chosen three twentieth-century authors (J.M. Coetzee; Margarita Karapanou; Michael Ondaatje) whose literature bear the burden of political extremity (respectively, South African apartheid, the 1970s Greek military junta, and the Sri Lankan civil war), and is at loggerheads with the literature of political commitment emerging from each of those situations. Each of these authors asserts his or her aesthetic autonomy over prescriptive understandings of literature as a vehicle actively espousing a particular nationalist, political, ideological or even aesthetically formalist position. The work of these authors, I argue, embodies an alternative Adornian version of engaged literature.
In short, my thesis operates as a two way conversation asking: "What can Adorno's concepts give to certain literary texts?", and reciprocally, "What can those texts give to our traditional understanding of Adorno and his applicability?" This thesis is an act of rethinking the literary in Adornian terms, and rethinking Adorno through the literary.

Advisor: Mukherjee, A
New templates for porphyrin nanorings

New templates based on the structures of cyclodextrin and ferrocene have been developed for porphyrin nanoring syntheses. Flexibility can be taken into account of the molecular template design. The flexibility of butadiyne bonds allow the formation of a 5-porphyrin nanoring, which is the smallest fully-conjugated porphyrin nanoring to date.
Chapter 1 describes the general information of porphyrin, cyclodextrin and ferrocene, which are used as basic structures in the thesis. The polymer chemistry of porphyrins is reviewed as the background knowledge of the work. Meanwhile, chelate cooperativity of supramolecular systems and the corresponding measurement method are introduced.
Chapter 2 presents the chemistry towards 6- and 7-porphyrin nanorings using molecular templates T6&ast; and T7&ast;, which are based on the α- and β-cyclodextrin scaffolds. The cooperativity of respective template-nanoring complexes was investigated by UV-vis titrations. Chapter 3 describes the Vernier-templated syntheses of porphyrin nanorings using T7&ast; and different linear porphyrin oligomers (l-P2, l-P4 and l-P8). Both chapters focus on the influences of spatial preorganization and flexibility to the cooperativity of supramolecular systems.
Chapter 4 introduces the chemistry towards a ferrocene-based five-dentate template T5 which successfully directed the syntheses of 5-porphyrin nanorings. Investigation of the cooperativity in the nanoring-template system is presented. Chapter 5 investigates the cooperativity between T5 and linear porphyrin oligomers in detail; and focuses on the contribution of partially-bound complexes in the measurement of equilibrium constants of the host-guest systems. Both chapters focus on the influences of intramolecular strain to the cooperativity in supramolecular systems.
Chapter 6 provides experimental procedures and characterization data of the known and novel compounds synthesized in the course of completing the thesis.

Keywords: Ferrocene derivatives
Cooperativity
Template-directed syntheses
Porphyrin nanorings
Cyclodextrin derivatives
Self-assembly
Advisor: Anderson, H
Of blood and belonging: the practice of antiretroviral treatment among HIV-positive youth in South Africa's Eastern Cape

HIV-positive adolescents are an increasingly numerous and challenging population in the South African HIV/AIDS epidemic. Their access to, and retention in, ART care has become a pressing public health concern. Comprised of four journal articles, this thesis explores the practice of antiretroviral treatment (ART) among a cohort of HIV-positive adolescents (age 10–19) in South Africa's Eastern Cape. By 'practice', I mean the volatile, situated and relational 'work' that goes into young people's everyday achievement of ART — into consuming daily medication, regularly attending health appointments, and participating in HIV programmes. Through an exploration of the ways in which some HIV-positive adolescents use, appropriate, or reject ART care; this thesis contributes to a much-needed evidence-base on the needs and survival strategies of adolescent ART users. Data for this study was gathered through eight months of multi-method ethnographic fieldwork with 23 HIV-positive youth, their families, and local health workers.
The findings elucidate adolescent ART as a complex (and often volatile) form of social incorporation, through which young people negotiate survival, care and moral connection in contemporary South Africa. Enrolling in ART meant being encompassed into a (often hierarchical) set of social relationships, through which adolescents sought belonging, recognition and protection, amid profound insecurity. Through ART and its associated programmes, adolescents and their families attempted to strengthen familial ties, appeal to powerful patrons, petition for care, and access basic resources. Yet these pursuits were often deeply ambivalent, as discipline, blame, and resentment often came encased in the terms of care. At the crux of each article is an attempt to understand how adolescents, often alongside their families, negotiated both the social stakes and possibilities of ART. Through these discussions, we might better be able to grasp the fragility and complexity of young people's retention in ART.

Advisor: Cluver, L
Steinberg, J
Genetic basis of rhizoid development in the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha

The evolution of specialised rooting structures was one of the key morphological innovations that allowed the first multicellular plants to colonise land more than 470 million years ago. The first land plants likely resembled modern bryophytes with a rooting structure that consists of filamentous rooting cells called rhizoids, which are morphologically similar to the root hairs of vascular plants. This thesis describes identification of genes required for rhizoid development in a model bryophyte, the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha. The aim was to identify the conserved and novel aspects of the gene regulatory networks for filamentous rooting cell development in land plants. Agrobacterium-mediated T-DNA transformation of haploid M. polymorpha spores was used to generate 150,000 M. polymorpha T-DNA insertion lines, which were screened for defects in rhizoid development. 204 rhizoid defective mutants were isolated which allowed identification of 25 genes required for M. polymorpha rhizoid development. The role of the class I RSL (ROOT HAIR DEFECTIVE SIX-LIKE) genes as positive regulators of root hair and rhizoid differentiation was found to be conserved between liverworts and vascular plants. This suggests that the class I RSL gene mechanism is ancient and originated before the two lineages diverged more than 440 million years ago. Furthermore, the M. polymorpha class I RSL gene MpRSL1 is required for development of gemmae and mucilage papillae, which similarly to rhizoids form from single epidermal cells that elongate to form an outgrowth. Moreover, MpRSL1 is under negative feedback regulation of the FEW RHIZOIDS1 (FRH1) microRNA. Many genes required for rhizoid elongation were similar with those required for root hair elongation, suggesting that these genes are likely to have been part of the genetic network downstream of class I RSL genes in the common ancestor of liverworts and vascular plants.

Keywords: tip growth
rhizoid
evolution
liverwort
root hair
rooting structure
plant development
Advisor: Dolan, L
Order and insecurity under the mara: violence, coping, and community in Guatemala City

Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in a poor and notorious neighbourhood, this dissertation examines how evolving dynamics of urban violence have affected life in a Guatemala City gang territory.
The maras of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—the gangs that help give these countries some of the world's highest homicide rates—have changed dramatically in their group cultures and criminal economies since they appeared in the 1990s. I trace what I call the mara's predatory turn: the elaboration of an extortion economy, which has had far-reaching consequences for the relationship between gang cliques and their barrios. This transformation has re-shaped the experience of chronic insecurity in the communities that maras operate from: inhabitants report that it is now less manageable, less predictable, and more frightening. They speak of a heightening of danger in their lives brought about by the decline of certain local norms and mechanisms that had previously moderated gang violence and bolstered community resilience.
Local narratives of insecurity and decline illuminate when, how, and why violence disrupts and disorders social life. What many informants emphasized was not a cataclysmic appearance of violence in their lives, but rather a catastrophic breakdown in the mechanisms that had controlled it. In this distressing context, residents struggle to minimize their insecurity and to reclaim or create forms of order. I examine two principal ways that they seek to do so: by working to maintain a moral order based on narratives about the neighbourhood and its values or 'codes', and by looking to external providers of order in the state and its security forces.
Exploring the complex relationships and interactions between inhabitants, gang members, and state forces in this barrio, I contribute to academic debates about local and state responses to insecurity in Latin America and propose modifications to prevailing models of state and criminal 'governance' in marginal urban communities.

Keywords: Legal anthropology
Maras
Street gangs
Insecurity
Guatemala City
Guatemala
Urban violence
Urban ethnography
Advisor: Pirie, F
Design of artificial metalloenzymes for C-C cross-coupling reactions

Artificial metalloenzymes enable several non-natural chemical transformations by hosting a metal catalyst and providing activating microenvironments to the metal. New strategies to combine the complementary features of enzyme and transition metal catalysis are crucial for exploiting the pre-evolved selectivities of enzymes in chemical synthesis. In order to exploit the inherent selectivity of a serine protease Subtilisin (SBL) for C-C crosscoupling reactions, the interplay of natural substrate binding pockets and the nucleophilic machinery of the enzyme with the metal catalyst was central to our approach. A catalytically potent metal catalyst (palladium) was appropriately positioned to carry out oxidative Heck reaction between an alkene and arylboronic acid substrates in the active site of SBL. Further characterization of SBL-based artificial metalloenzymes and step-wise elucidation of the biotransformation pathway was accomplished through X-ray crystallography and mass-spectrometry studies. Such interlacing of the metal and the enzyme steps for cross-coupling reactions presents an attractive route for performing important organic reactions enzymatically.

Advisor: Davis, B
Hilvert, D
Expression, regulation and function of lectin-like transcript 1 (LLT1)

Receptor-ligand pairs of C-type lectin-like proteins have been shown to orchestrate and modulate immune responses within particular immune cell subsets or in distinct body locations. The function of CD161 and Lectin-Like Transcript 1 (LLT1) has not been extensively studied, partially due to the lack of validated anti-LLT1 antibodies. Here, I characterised two novel anti-LLT1 monoclonal antibodies (2H7 and 7G7). Using them for flow cytometric and immunohistological staining, I characterised the expression of LLT1 in different healthy human tissues and found that LLT1 levels were particularly high in immune-privileged sites.
Germinal centres (GC) are microanatomical structures that are critical for the development of high-affinity antibodies and B cell memory. They are organised into two zones, light and dark, with coordinated roles controlled by local signalling. LLT1 protein is known to be expressed on B cells, but its functional role in the GC reaction has not been explored. I found high expression of LLT1 on GC-associated B cells, early plasmablasts and GC- derived lymphomas. LLT1 expression was readily induced via BCR, CD40 and CpG stimulation on B cells. Ubiquitous expression of CD161 on Follicular Dendritic Cells (FDCs) was revealed, as well as on a subset of T follicular cells. Triggering of LLT1 supported B cell activation, CD83 upregulation and Chemokine (C-X-C Motif) Receptor 4 (CXCR4) downregulation, which is consistent with a role in drivingtransition from a dark to a light zone phenotype. Overall, these data suggest that LLT1-CD161 interactions play a novel and important role in B cell maturation within the GC in humans. A deep understanding of the GC reaction and the process of B cell selection could provide invaluable knowledge into effective vaccine design, generation of auto-antibodies and malignant transformation.

Advisor: Willberg, C
Klenerman, P
Phillips, R