VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
BUILDING DEMOCRATIC CONVIVENCIA (PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE) IN CLASSROOMS: CASE STUDIES OF TEACHING IN MEXICAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS SURROUNDED BY VIOLENCE

Mexico is suffering from an avalanche of violence and school surroundings are not the exception. Although teachers’ perceptions tend to consider that violent contexts around schools increase the levels of school violence, large-scale international studies show that even when schools are located in high-crime areas, they can develop low levels of school violence by promoting communitarian relationships, equal access to quality education, and democratic participation. Some qualitative inquiries in Latin America have attempted to explain causal pathways for building peaceful relationships in schools by applying the theoretical construct of democratic convivencia (peaceful coexistence). However, scarce research in this field has been accomplished. This qualitative multiple-case study examined how three purposely selected Mexican teachers (fifth and sixth grades), through their classroom pedagogies, fostered (or not) the development of democratic convivencia in regular urban elementary public schools located in violent neighborhoods, the apparent consequences of these pedagogies for student-participants, and the factors that helped or hindered this process. Data included 23 observations in classrooms (of 90 minutes each in average), six individual interviews with teachers, and six group interviews with 20 students. While these three teachers followed official textbooks, they found spaces –within and outside the curriculum– to include elements of the three dimensions of pedagogies for democratic convivencia: inclusion, equity and conflict (resolution) dialogue. Results show that these teachers offered students meaningful lived experiences of inclusion and community-building by recognizing and affirming (to different degrees) students’ identities. They offered valuable (though ambivalent) opportunities for students’ equitable access to academic success by balancing students’ academic status. They also tended to use educative peacekeeping (avoiding punishment) and/or some elements of peacemaking as main conflict resolution strategies. Contrastingly, these teachers offered limited opportunities for deliberation and collective decision-making processes, two important elements for facilitating the development of students’ democratic capacities. Despite contradictions and limitations: poverty, students’ painful experiences with violence, extensive official curriculum content, and national standardized tests, these teachers showed that it is possible to implement pedagogies based on the three dimensions of democratic convivencia that may offer students opportunities for experiencing new horizons of human relationships in impoverished and violent contexts.

Keywords: conflict resolution education
democratic convivencia
education for democracy
peace education
peaceful coexistence
school violence prevention
Advisor: Bickmore, Kathy
The Influence of the Aquatic Environment on Quasi-Static and Dynamic Domains of Posture: Towards Applications for Spinal Cord Injury Aquatic Rehabilitation

The objective of this thesis was to investigate the direct effects of the aquatic environment on quasi-static and dynamic domains of posture in able-bodied individuals and individuals with incomplete spinal cord injury (iSCI). The first and third studies (Chapter 2 and 4) investigated the influence of water immersion on postural sway during quiet standing of able-bodied participants. Time-domain measures of the center of pressure (COP), i.e. COP amplitude, velocity and area, revealed that individuals swayed more in water than on land. The frequency-domain parameters showed a predominance of low frequency sway in water. Further, a different postural strategy to maintain balance in water was detected: (i) individuals leaned more forward, (ii) mediolateral upper trunk instability was increased, and (iii) eyes closed in water led to increased mean velocity and sway area. The second and fourth studies (Chapters 3 and 5) demonstrated the effects of the aquatic environment on gait initiation among able-bodied participants. COP trajectories during anticipatory postural adjustments and execution of the first step were longer in length and time to execute in water than on land. Individuals adjusted their posture more rapidly in water prior to step execution, but the execution of the first step in water was slower than on land. Absolute and body-weight-normalized impulses demonstrated increased anteroposterior impulses showing a clear influence of water resistance, and decreased vertical impulses demonstrating the effect of the water buoyant force. The upper to lower trunk acceleration ratio in anteroposterior direction also increased under the effect of the immersion in water demonstrating the influence of water resistance on the lower body. The last two studies (Chapters 6 and 7) revealed that COP sway was larger when individuals with iSCI stood quietly in water, and that gait initiation performance was similar to the able-bodied participants, especially in individuals with high-functioning balance performance. The aquatic environment appeared to have challenged but also supported quasi-static standing and gait initiation in both able-bodied individuals and individuals with iSCI. Overall, individuals with iSCI felt safer performing standing and gait initiation in water than on land, with the exception of one participant with extensive sensory deficits.

Keywords: Aquatic Environment
Dynamic Posture
Postural control
Quasi-Static Posture
Spinal Cord Injury
Advisor: Verrier, Mary C
Popovic, Milos R
Effect of Handrail Height on Balance Recovery Reactions in Younger and Older Adults

Handrails can significantly reduce the risk of a fall, provided that their design enables fast, accurate and effective grasping reactions for balance recovery. This thesis characterizes the influence of handrail height on balance recovery reactions in younger and older adults. Common strategies for balance recovery and factors that are likely to influence a person’s ability to use a handrail for balance recovery are identified through a literature review. Lab-based studies involving perturbations of upright stance and during ongoing gait (level-walking and slope descent) are then used to explore the relationship between handrail height and balance recovery. Following perturbations of upright stance, higher handrails (within the range tested) increased the highest perturbation magnitude that younger adults could withstand without stepping or falling, while using the rail for balance recovery. Higher rails also resulted in reductions to peak center of mass and trunk angular displacement, velocity and momentum during balance recovery. The concomitant peak vertical and resultant handrail forces, and resultant handrail impulse, were reduced as rail height increased. Handrail height significantly affected handrail contact and movement time during slope descent, with movement time optimized for older adults around 64% of participant height (roughly elbow height). In general, increased handrail height also resulted in increased hand speeds, and reduced vertical handrail overshoot. For both slope descent and level gait, increased rail height led to reduced peak trunk displacements and velocities, and applied handrail forces. However, the peak thoracohumeral elevation angles required for recovery also increased with handrail height, clearly surpassing the range of motion of individuals with severe osteoarthritis in the shoulder. My results indicate that handrails installed at 56% to 66% of individual height (approximately mid-forearm- to elbow-height) may be advantageous for balance recovery, particularly in home environments where handrail installation height can be customized to the user.

Advisor: Novak, Alison C
Maki, Brian E
TOWARD A CONCEPTUALIZATION OF TRANSNATIONAL DISABILITY THEORY AND PRAXIS: ENTRY POINT, IRAQI CHEMICAL ATTACK ON IRAN

This thesis examines the capitalist, imperialist, and nationalist social relations that produce and sustain disability, organized within the global context of war, so as to trace these relations by engaging the dialectics of global politics. It uses the global context of class and ideology enfolded within the capitalist economy and the imperialist politics of the U.S. and Europe in the Middle East to understand how disabled bodies are generated through armed conflicts sustained by imperialist and nationalist social relations (always gendered, raced, and classed). This thesis has three main foci: a) bearing witness to injured/disabled war survivors ; b) developing the conversation further in Disability Studies (DS) about the creation of disability by war in the “third world” by the “first world”; and c) the formulation of a Transnational Disability Model (TDM) via the case study of Iranian chemical warfare victims in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. This study contributes to the field by engaging the dialectics of geopolitics, examining them in the context of the war, and proposing a new model for DS from a war-survivor Middle Eastern feminist woman’s standpoint. The theoretical framework that has been used to conduct this project has been dialectical and historical materialism (DHM), and the data collection and analysis methods have been case study and building a theory from that case study. Carrying out this project, my research axiology or my political/ethical commitment involved striving for conducting an emancipatory research through reflexive/relational thinking and acting. I developed my proposed model for a revolutionary understanding of disability, contextualized within transnational, non-ideological, and anti-imperialist class-consciousness and activism.

Keywords: disabling violence
imperialism
Iran-Iraq War
Kurdish
third world
transnational disability studies
Advisor: Burstow, Bonnie
Bodies Withdrawn: The Ethics of Abstraction in Contemporary Post-Minimal Art

This dissertation examines the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Doris Salcedo, Teresa Margolles, and Santiago Sierra, artists that redeploy the aesthetics of 1960s minimalism in relation to contemporary political crises. I argue that these artists make an important case for the political and ethical relevance of aesthetic abstraction, insofar as their work imagines forms of co-existence that resist the sovereign organization of human bodies. In each chapter, I discuss a selection of major works by an individual artist, emphasizing theoretical analyses that privilege deconstruction, bio- and necropolitical theory, and continental philosophy. I situate artistic practices in relation to their social and political contexts to consider how Gonzalez-Torres, Salcedo, Margolles, and Sierra respond to issues such as the AIDS crisis, state violence, and socio-economic subjugation. Specifically, I consider how they use minimalist formal strategies to convey the socio-political abstraction of human life and, further, to address the conditions in which certain bodies fail to appear. These artists demonstrate how the body’s disappearance produces an abstraction: not the sign of a body but the index of its withdrawal from appearance (to invoke the etymological meaning of abstrahere). By portraying the material traces of the figure’s negation, they account for the aesthetic and political challenge of presenting anonymous bodies and beings. Their work thereby inverts minimalism’s concern with the relation of objective forms to embodied viewers, in that it reveals art’s contradictory relation to inaccessible bodies. This approach carries important aesthetico-ethical ramifications: it exposes viewers to unknowable and imperceptible beings, challenging dominant ethical models based on the inter-subjective relation of autonomous individuals; hence, it illustrates an ethics of co-existence that is irreducible to subject-object binaries and to the subjectivization of embodied life.

Keywords: Doris Salcedo
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Latin American Art
Santiago Sierra
Teresa Margolles
Advisor: Ricco, John Paul
Mechanistic Insights and Neuroprotective Approaches to Enhance Recovery in Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy

The overarching term degenerative cervical myelopathy (DCM) describes the cervical spinal cord compression induced by degenerative changes in the cervical spine. DCM appears as the most common cause of spinal cord dysfunction. Cervical spondylotic myelopathy (CSM), the most common form of DCM, causes significant neurological disabilities including motor, sensory and autonomic impairments. Surgical decompression represents the mainstay of treatment for this common disease. However, many patients do not exhibit full neurological recovery and a number of them can experience neurological deterioration in the acute or subacute phase after surgery. Currently, no pharmacological strategies are available to these patients. Riluzole, a sodium channel blocker, has been shown to be neuroprotective in models of acute spinal cord injury and to attenuate neural degeneration in clinical trials of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. To test the efficacy of riluzole in experimental CSM, we initially administered riluzole in a rat model of CSM created by graduated mechanical compression of the cervical spinal cord. We found significant tissue sparing, alleviation of neuropathic pain and improvement in locomotor function. However, this model does not allow for surgical decompression and is not MRI compatible. This provided the impetus to develop a novel animal model of CSM that reproduces the chronic, progressive compression of the cervical spinal cord, mimics the clinical and histopathological features of human CSM, is MRI compatible and allows for microsurgical decompression. Using this novel model I discovered that surgical decompression induces early post-operative ischemia-reperfusion injury in the rat cervical spinal cord that was associated with subacute neurological deterioration. These changes were correlated to a subset of patients in the AOSpine CSM prospective study which also exhibited perioperative neurological decline. Of note, riluzole reduced the decompression-mediated reperfusion injury of neurons. Moreover, the combinatorial strategy of microsurgical decompression and riluzole administration resulted in superior preservation of neurons and improvement of neurological function compared to decompressive surgery alone. These results demonstrate the development of ischemia reperfusion injury after surgical decompression in CSM and the potential role of riluzole in alleviating this injury and promoting neurological recovery in CSM.

Advisor: Fehlings, Michael G
Scholastic Publics: Sanskrit Textual Practices in Gujarat, 1800-Present

This dissertation addresses the complex negotiations of “tradition” in colonial and postcolonial modernity through a study of the Swaminarayan sampradāy, a rapidly growing transnational community founded in Gujarat at the turn of the nineteenth century. It argues that the community produced Sanskrit texts partly to engage its “scholastic publics”—imaginative and interpretive sites of debate and contestation—to consolidate, strengthen, legitimize, and even divide the sampradāy over its 200-year history. In doing so, members of the sampradāy maintain a concerted privileging of classical Sanskrit knowledge systems, long after the purported demise of these systems. Chapter 1 outlines the Swaminarayan sampradāy’s perceived interlocutors through an analysis of a nineteenth-century text chronicling the sampradāy’s public debates. These debates provide the sampradāy with a template for a scripturally-based rationale for its code of conduct, its system of Vedānta, and its very notion of sampradāy. Chapter 2 extends the historical discussion into the early twentieth century, when the sampradāy makes use of a burgeoning print culture to vocally criticize powerful opponents, democratize the scholastic through Gujarati translations and monthly magazines, and legitimate apocryphal texts. The Swaminarayan scholastic commitment remains to sampradāy: safeguarding the community at large, nourishing the community from within, and mitigating nascent sectarianism. The second half of the dissertation addresses the questions of scholasticism and sampradāy through a connected lens: Vedānta commentaries. It traces the hermeneutical and exegetical patterns that characterize three separate moments of commentarial production in the sampradāy. These patterns demonstrate a shifting commitment to the more established school of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta over two centuries in the articulation of Swaminarayan Vedānta. In the wake of the sectarian division of the sampradāy, these very technical Vedāntic debates are used to authorize one particular Swaminarayan interpretation as the Swaminarayan interpretation, within a Vedānta scholastic public.

Keywords: Gujarat
Modernity
Print Culture
Sanskrit
Swaminarayan
Vedanta
Advisor: Rao, Ajay K.
The H3K4-specific Methyltransferase MLL3 Regulates Cell Proliferation and Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition in Pancreatic Cancer

Pancreatic cancer is the 4th leading cause of cancer-related death in Canada. A major reason for the disease’s extremely high overall mortality-to-incidence ratio (0.98) is that most (60%) pancreatic cancer patients present with aggressive metastatic disease at the time of diagnosis, yet mechanistic understanding of tumourigenesis process is incomplete. Intrigued by the relatively high frequency of MLL3 somatic cancer mutations in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, I undertook a series of experiments to understand the molecular and phenotypic impact of MLL3 knockdown in pancreatic cancer cell lines. My results showed that MLL3 regulates cell proliferation in a bi-directional fashion. I also demonstrated that MLL3 knockdown resulted in precocious epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition in cell culture. Analysis of gene expression profiles indicates that MLL3 knockdown likely acts through up-regulation of TGF-2 and BMP4 signalling pathways, which converge on transcription factors ZEB1 and SNAI2, two master regulators of EMT, associatced with altered morphology and migratory capability. To examine the pathophysiological relevance of my results, I exploited the availability of genomic and transcriptomic sequencing datasets from the International Cancer Genome Consortium. I undertook a systematic survey of genetic alterations in MLL3-associated interacting protein components (ASCOM complex) and further compared the transcriptome patterns of tumour samples with mutant and wild-type ASCOM genes in various cancer types. Strikingly, I found that while genetic alterations were generally infrequent in ASCOM genes, with 14% of 2583 cancer samples carrying non-synonymous mutations and 7.6% bearing nonsense or frameshift mutations, the distribution of function-damaging mutations was highly skewed in terms of both cancer type (ranging from 60% to 0%) and ASCOM genes (over 90% found in MLL3, MLL4 and KDM6A). Notably, immunoglobulin production and complement activation pathways were also down-regulated in pancreatic cancer samples carrying function-damaging mutations in ASCOM genes, implicating TGF- signalling pathway. Taken together, my results establish an unexpected role for MLL3 in the malignant transformation within the pancreatic tumour microenvironment that facilitates tumour progression and metastasis. Given that genetic alterations in MLL3 and other ASCOM genes are frequently found in several other cancers, my results have implications in other tumor contexts, opening up promising new mechanistic avenues for cancer research.

Keywords: cell migration
epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition
MLL3
pancreatic cancer
TGF-beta 2 signalling pathway
transcriptome
Advisor: Stein, Lincoln
Emili, Andrew
User Perceptions of Security Risks in Multiple Authentications

Authentication is an everyday practice in the information economy. When people use Facebook, Google, or Twitter to log in a third-party app they perform tertiary authentications. Authentication is often the only protection users have for personal information held by platforms and third parties. This personal information and the metadata produced by people has an exchange value for platform operators. This dissertation explores people's perceptions of security and confidentiality as they perform tertiary authentications and how platform operators benefit from data generated in the process. The research design consisted of a 20-participants experiment and a policy analysis reviewing privacy and security policies of Facebook, Google, and Twitter answered these questions. What is the extent of the interplay between security and usability for platform operators that are commodifying from users' personal data through tertiary authentication; how are people managing and controlling their security and confidentiality as they perform tertiary authentications and what are the implications of those actions for users’ perception of identity and privacy, and; which conditions and variables create a perception of false security in users performing tertiary authentications, and what factors of tertiary authentication affect users’ sense of security? Through diagrammatic representations of their mental models and a questionnaire, the experiment measured how the test and control groups rated the value of their personal information after reviewing platform policies and how they managed their data when offered the chance to adjust their security and privacy settings before performing tertiary authentications. Results show that while participants tried to secure their data, they were not as aware of commodification processes. Guided by the transactional token framework used to theorize the process of commodification of people's personal information when performing authentication, the policy analysis explains how platform operators commodify users’ data. This framework is a dialectic model that analyzes at once authentication and the monetization of attention while focusing on tertiary authentication. It unearths strategies used by platforms operators to collect users’ information through their interaction with gamified security and privacy settings. It is argued that tertiary authentication which protects users’ personal information sacrifices security for usability’s sake. Security becomes a feature which people unknowingly interact with to provide more data to platform operators.

Keywords: authentication
commodification
confidentiality
human-computer interaction
privacy
usable security
Advisor: McEwen, Rhonda N.