VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Internationalising sea power: ideas of world order and the maintenance of peace, 1890-1919

Between 1890 and 1919, loosely-grouped communities of policymakers, strategic thinkers, and naval elites in Britain, France, and the United States of America developed visions of a new world order, in which peace would be enforced by sea power. Their designs culminated in the creation of the League of Nations at the end of the First World War. Existing studies of the League project have focused on legal-internationalism, the outbreak of the war, and the role of President Woodrow Wilson. This thesis uses an array of sources from archives in Europe and North America, along with contemporary publications, to present a new interpretation. It argues that debates over imperial defence and grand strategy prior to and during the war, especially in Britain, shaped the design of the League. These conceptions centred on multinational naval co-operation, ‘internationalising’ sea power through the League. Its leading members, Britain, France, and the United States, would wage economic warfare at sea to punish recalcitrant states and uphold the new liberal international order.
This thesis makes three major contributions to the literature. Firstly, it recovers the role of strategic thought and ideas of ‘liberal militarism’ in the origins and creation of the League of Nations. Visions of global strategic alignments underpinned by sea power were pioneered by strategic theorists including Halford Mackinder and Julian Corbett throughout this period. Secondly, it reconsiders perceptions of the utility of sea power during the war. Contemporaries believed that it was the great strategic tool. In turn, discussions over ‘freedom of the seas’ led to plans for an ‘internationalised’ sea power for enforcing peace. Lastly, in doing so it frames a new understanding of sea power both in the international system of this period, and the systemised forms of international thought which pre-dated the emergence of ‘International Relations’ as an academic discipline.

Keywords: Freedom of the Seas
First World War
World Order
Sea Power
League of Nations
Advisor: Rodger, NAM
Morgan-Owen, D
Infrastructure for sustainable development

The long-term planning of infrastructure systems will be crucial in the quest for sustainable global development given the role it can play in achieving a wide range of social, economic, and environmental outcomes. While there is an increasing body of research addressing the need for global investment in infrastructure, there remains a gap in aligning the infrastructure planning process with performance outcomes defined by the global development agendas: the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on climate change.
This thesis develops an interdependent modelling approach for national infrastructure that links specific investments and policies to progress toward development and climate targets. As part of this approach, a robust indicator set aligned with the SDGs is developed. In addition, a systematic process to define infrastructure portfolios – or ‘strategies’ – to meet desired outcomes, is outlined. Two country case studies are used to demonstrate and apply these methods in the context of addressing key development challenges. In the first, a 28 percent decline in average SDG achievement across infrastructure-linked targets by 2030 is estimated in the absence of interventions in the energy, water, wastewater, and solid waste sectors. In the second, a feasible path to achieve SDG and Paris targets is demonstrated using a portfolio of strategic interventions in these four sectors, arrived at through an interdependent planning process drawing on participatory methods.
Furthermore, at the global scale, a means of aligning mitigation action in infrastructure and land use sectors – defined by each country’s Nationally-Determined Contributions – with a range of development outcomes defined by the SDGs is developed, illustrating the contextual approach required for national infrastructure planning. This is particularly relevant given the lack of quantified ambition in the current commitments of the 195 signatories to the agreement: 23 percent of countries report no quantified sectoral targets across the energy, transport, waste, agriculture, and forestry sectors, and a further 16 percent define only qualitative targets.
The studies contained in this thesis contain important insights for infrastructure researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers in national governments as we mark ten years, or the ‘decade of delivery’ in which extensive progress toward sustainable development outcomes must be achieved.

Keywords: Performance indicators
Renewable energy
Environmental policy
SDGs
Systems modelling
Sustainable infrastructure
Advisor: James W. Hall
Sex and the spirit: embodiment and sexual difference in a global deliverance movement

This thesis offers a critical analysis of sexual difference and the status of the body in deliverance Christianity. It aims to contribute to a new anthropological approach which attends to the role that theological beliefs play in the formation of religious subjectivities. It does this by demonstrating that attention to theology – done by both ordinary people and academics – deepens and enriches our understanding of religious communities.
The striking visibility of women in the Pentecostal churches has led some to celebrate the movement as an example of grassroots female empowerment. Others have pointed to women’s ongoing exclusion from the highest echelons of Pentecostal institutions, owing to a rhetoric that characterises ‘submission’ as a female virtue. This tension, captured in the phrase, ‘the Pentecostal Gender paradox’, continues to serve as the central problematic within anthropological studies of gender dynamics in Pentecostal communities. Taking this discussion as its starting point, this thesis proposes that the tendency to cast women as either empowered or disempowered is reductive in its treatment of the intricate and complex matter of how bodily subjects imagine and experience sexual differences. Rather than looking at examples of women enjoying positions of authority, or embodying modes of resistance, the thesis interrogates more closely the theology that shapes perspectives and experiences of the body, gender and sexuality, in the first place. It offers a nuanced construction and analysis of the theological way that these Christians think about and, in turn, feel in their bodies, which are fundamental to the way gender dynamics unfold on the ground. To that end, this thesis presents a theologically engaged ethnography of a particular international deliverance church with Nigerian origins, across three central fieldwork sites in Nigeria, the UK and the US.

Keywords: feminist theology
exorcism
Evangelical Christianity
embodiment
witchcraft
Nigeria
spirit possession
Pentecostalism
sexual difference
deliverance
African Christianity
gender and sexuality
Demonology
Advisor: Ward, G
Apetrei, S
The impact of outsourcing on state school systems: the case of the academies programme in England

This thesis investigates the consequences of outsourcing the running of state schools to private providers, focusing on the Academies programme in England. The aim of the Academies programme has been to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of state school system by making schools more autonomous of the state. Nevertheless, sociologists of education have feared that Academization is accelerating the commercialization of state education and will have adverse consequences for the workforce, expenditure, and organization of the state school system. However, scholarly understanding of these issues remains limited. This is, in part, because researchers have yet to adequately exploit nationally comprehensive data sources made available by the Department for Education, except in the analysis of pupil performance. In this thesis, analyses of this data reveal that, despite the concerns of critics, Academy leaders have not prioritized the restructuring of their workforces. Academies have not substantially contributed towards the substitution of teachers by cheaper, less qualified colleagues, or the deeper penetration of managerial hierarchies. Moreover, analyses of expenditure patterns fail to find significant relationships between the extent of Academies’ commercial connections and their spending on consultancy or frontline education. Contrary to the fears of critics, corporate connections to Academy Trusts have substantially declined under Conservative-led governments, from 2010, relative to the earlier New Labour era. However, Academy-level autonomy has also declined as governments have encouraged the growth of Multi-Academy Trusts to facilitate the administration of thousands of outsourced schools. Overall, these findings challenge the empirical assumptions and theoretical expectations of both proponents and critics of the Academies programme. In so doing, this thesis makes a significant contribution to the sociology of work and education while providing an in-depth case study of outsourcing reforms of public services at a time when these policies are becoming increasingly popular in state education systems around the world.

Keywords: Schools
Spending
Academies
Director Networks
Workforce
Outsourcing
Privatization
School System
Advisor: Biggs, M
Three essays on the role of higher education in inequality

Educational expansion has raised questions of whether higher education alleviates, maintains, or exacerbates inequality. This thesis discusses the role of higher edu- cation in socioeconomic inequality in contemporary societies, focusing on two types of inequality associated with higher education: first, intergenerational inequality among college graduates, and second, inter-household inequality originating from educational assortative mating among men and women with higher education. The first two chapters, which concern the first type, aim to identify potential locations and mechanisms of social origin gaps in socioeconomic outcomes among individuals with higher education in the UK. Results from the first chapter confirm substan- tial social origin gaps among college graduates but with extensive heterogeneity by educational attainment, labour market sector, socioeconomic outcome of interest, and gender. The second chapter reveals differentiated pathways through higher ed- ucation associated with unequal access to top occupations among individuals with a postgraduate degree. The third chapter addresses the second type of inequality using the most recent US data. Although there have been changes in factors determining inter-household economic inequality over the past two decades, results suggest that changes in educational assortative mating have not contributed to inter-household earnings inequality. Results of the thesis shed light on promising lines of future research that are relevant to higher education and inequality: the role of family formation in intergenerational inequality and heterogeneity among individuals or households of the same educational attainments.

Keywords: UK
Class Inequality
US
Higher Education
Advisor: Breen, R
Quantitative biophysical methods to study immune cell mechanobiology

Mechanobiology is increasingly thought to critically underpin health and disease. During their lifetime, cells carry out their function interacting with the external biophysical environment through mechanical and biochemical events. This is the case for T cells of the adaptive immune system during their activation via interactions with Antigen Presenting Cells (APCs). T-cell activation critically depends on the binding of the T-cell receptor (TCR) to the foreign antigen presented by the APC at the immunological synapse, leading to an orchestrated series of events including cytoskeletal rearrangement, the release of calcium from the endoplasmic reticulum and a change in the expression of surface proteins. TCR cluster migration is a consequence of actin cytoskeleton mediated forces in the range of pico-Newton and sub-second time scale. Hence, dissecting the significance of mechanobiology during T-cell activation requires quantitative biophysical methods for force and calcium readouts. However, the existing technologies do not offer the required sensitivity, robust quantification, and high statistical power. In this work, we present three new methods for planar and axial force generation on the nanometre length scale and sub-second time scale, combining Traction Force Microscopy with Structured Illumination Microscopy. Next, we establish a new machine learning based single-cell high-throughput platform, to quantify automatically and simultaneously the calcium responses of > 100,000 cells. Taken together, these techniques represent a powerful quantitative biophysical platform, opening up new directions for interrogating the role of mechanobiology in health and diseases.

Keywords: T-cells
Traction Force Microscopy
Mechanobiology
immunology
Machine learning
Calcium signalling
Structured Illumination Microscopy
Super-resolution microscopy
Advisor: Fritzsche, M
Eggeling, C
Colin York, H
Digital materiality: creativity and collaboration in digital design at 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation

This DPhil thesis is about digital design at the Copenhagen based architecture studio 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation. In it, I examine how digital tools saturate design practices at the studio to develop a framework for analysing how design software and studio institutions come to shape architects’ creative and collaborative work. The concept of digital materiality analyses the way successive layers of mathematics, code, and software come to mediate and shape creativity and collaboration for architects. I explore this through 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork at the studio where I interned and worked from 2017-2019. Taking the starting point that architects think with and through their social and technical environments, I argue that the organisation of these environments profoundly impact their creative capacity. The ethnographic side of this argument follows several design and research projects in the studio to analyse how social organisation and technics combine to enable creative and social extension of mind in design teams. I find that computational tools allow for intuitive creation of advanced 3D geometries. They integrate the mathematics and numerical calculations that underlie these into digital models that expand from being technical tools to also becoming vital design platforms at 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation. There is a certain flexibility to digital models and workflows in the studio. This flexibility is created from the combination of several software into one connected platform that can integrate the many moving parts of architectural practice and projects. This technical flexibility finds its parallel in the social organisation of the studio where different institutionalised practices allow architects to think about the same project in diverse ways, shifting between them by shifting relationships in their digital models. The wider theoretical contribution of the thesis examines productive overlaps between anthropological theory and enactive philosophy of mind by asking how these overlaps can help us study creativity as fundamentally enacted within shifting technical and social environments.

Keywords: digital materiality
philosophy of technology
computational design
philosophy of mind
anthropology
materiality
parametric design
architecture
material engagement theory
design
enactivism
cognition
Advisor: Rayner, S
Malafouris, L
Characterization of non-apoptotic roles of Dronc (Caspase-2/9) as a tumor Suppressor in Drosophila wound-like tumors

Caspases are proteases best known for their ability to carry out the process of programmed cell death known as apoptosis. Through this function, caspases can act as tumor suppressors, and the evasion of apoptosis and cell death is an established hallmark of cancer. However, caspase activity has also been shown to be involved in a plethora of non-apoptotic physiological processes, and when deregulated, can also contribute to many other aspects of tumor initiation and progression. Because caspase functions are often context-dependent, the functional and mechanistic intricacies between caspase activity and tumorigenesis remain poorly characterized. To investigate the regulation and pleiotropic effects of non-apoptotic caspase activity in tumors, I took advantage of the powerful genetic tractability of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, and a recently described Drosophila model of cooperative oncogenesis which is relevant for humans. This tumor model relies upon the upregulation of both the EGFR and JAK/STAT signaling pathways. My results indicate that widespread non-apoptotic activation of the initiator caspase Dronc (orthologous to mammalian caspase-2/9) limits tumor growth. Importantly, this caspase-dependent tumor-suppression occurs independently of apoptosis. Instead, I reveal that the tumor-suppressive function relies on Dronc negatively regulating the JNK-signaling pathway. Furthermore, my data show that JNK-signaling is responsible for several malignant features in the tumor model (e.g. hyperplasia and loss of cell identity) and contributes to the recruitment and potential in situ proliferation of tumor-associated macrophage-like cells, which further fuel tumor growth. Interestingly, the tumors bear several similarities to tissues undergoing regeneration, including regenerative signaling profiles as well as the presence of tumor-promoting inflammation. Therefore, my results indicate the suitability of the tumor model to further understand the complex relationship between caspases, cancer, and inflammation in a wound-like tumor. Altogether, my findings regarding novel non-apoptotic tumor-suppressing mechanisms provide details that broaden our understanding of caspase biology and tumors and can eventually lead to improved potential therapeutic strategies against cancer that involve caspase-modulation.

Keywords: Immune Response
Drosophila
Non-apoptotic
Macrophages
Caspases
Microenvironement
Tumor
Advisor: Baena Lopez, LA
A mixed methods evaluation of a two-day cognitive behavioural therapy workshop for medicines-related consultations

Medication adherence describes the health-related behaviour of the ingestion of medicines by those prescribed them, and in the manner prescribed by their Health Care Professionals. Non-adherence and poor adherence to medication regimes is a common, highly complex problem that contributes to substantial worsening of disease, death and increased healthcare costs. In 2003 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a major public health concern.
There is a known psychological component to non-adherence and rates of non-adherence have been associated with patients’ beliefs about medication, specifically doubts about the need for medicines and concerns regarding their use.
There are no clear-cut, universally recommended, evidence-based guidelines or strategies to tackle the problem of adherence, but there is evidence to suggest that successful interventions often contain both cognitive and behavioural components, and when these are combined with traditional approaches (reminders and pill boxes etc.), outperform them.
A novel intervention aimed at addressing non-adherence was designed using principles and techniques drawn, primarily, from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which could be delivered by healthcare professionals (HCPs) during routine consultations with patients about medicines.
The intervention was taught to 93 HCPs. It was evaluated using parallel-design mixed methods, and utilised existing models for evaluating training impact, assessing various stages of outcome.
Numerous quantitative and qualitative investigations revealed that HCPs were highly satisfied with the course, that their knowledge and skills statistically significantly improved and that this effect lasted for at least 6-months. Furthermore, aspects of job satisfaction statistically significantly improved from the beginning to the end of the course. Qualitative investigations at 6-months reported behavioural change amongst course attendees leading to helpful, productive consultations with their patients. Patients who had received a consultation with trained HCPs found them to useful and empowering with regards to choices and actions about their health and treatment. The final study failed to demonstrate a statistically significant improvement in self-reported adherence or beliefs change in regard to prescribed medication but showed trends that warrant further investigation.

Keywords: adherence
intervention
cognitive behaviuoral therapy,
medicines-adherence
compliance
CBT
Advisor: Rakovshik, S
Brain-wide cell assembly patterns for memory-guided behaviour

The brain uses functionally specialized regions to represent information in the sensory, motor, and cognitive domains. How does the brain integrate discrete representations spread across the brain to drive effective behaviour?
I trained male mice to approach or avoid a dispenser delivering either rewarding or aversive outcomes contingent on sets of visual and auditory cues. I found that groups of neurons scattered across the hippocampus, amygdala, prefrontal cortex, nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area cooperate to form cross-regional firing patterns of millisecond-timescale coactivity. These distributed assembly patterns report multimodal task-cue contingencies and require a common input from glutamatergic VTA neurons to support the expression of appropriate behaviour in our task relying on the integration of multiple external cues. Our findings uncover a diverging glutamatergic VTA pathway for organizing multiple local representations into brain-wide cell assemblies, dynamically adapting behaviour to environmental contingencies.

Keywords: Assemblies
VTA
memory
distributed processing
dopamine
glutamate
Advisor: Dupret, D
Instinctive synthesis: exploring and explaining the Australian model of sentencing

The instinctive synthesis [IS] model of sentencing applied by Australian courts is a deliberately unstructured approach. It requires sentencers to consider all of the relevant factors in a single step to arrive at the appropriate sentence. There is no common decision-making process or methodology to which sentencers must adhere. Instead, IS is designed to allow sentencers maximum judicial discretion and flexibility so that they may deliver individualised justice with each sentence.
Using doctrinal analysis and data from interviews with judges from the Victorian County Court, Supreme Court and Court of Appeal, this thesis examines how the unstructured IS model is applied in practice. Interview responses suggest that the majority of sentencers are willing to be guided in general ways, for example through the application of sentencing principles, but are opposed to hard limits on their discretion. Many are willing to overlook issues of transparency and consistency surrounding IS in order to preserve their very broad discretion.
Sentencing judges in Victoria appear to have developed their own informal means of structuring sentencing decision-making. Addressing relevant factors under wide headings such as ‘objective seriousness of the offence’ and ‘factors relating to the offender’ suggests that judges are not opposed to approaching sentencing decision-making in a structured manner. In fact, the vast majority find it a useful means of organising the many different, at times competing, factors.
The informal process applied by many interviewees is broadly similar to that in sentencing guidelines applied in England and Wales and proposed in Victoria. Such guidelines bring clarity, order and transparency to sentencing decision making but are heavily opposed by many sentencers, often mistaking the guiding or structuring judicial discretion as imposing strict limitations on discretion. This misunderstanding compromises the ability to secure judicial support for changes to the sentencing status quo.

Keywords: Sentencing Guidelines
Sentencing - Australia
Instinctive Synthesis
Sentencing
Advisor: Roberts, J