VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Perception vs Reality: The Idea of Al Qaeda Sleepers as a Threat to American National Security

The concept of a sleeper plays on society’s perception of security and fears of enemy infiltration. The foundation of the sleeper phenomenon is historical, as ideas have been imported from experiences with Second World War Fifth Columns and Russian espionage practices in the Cold War, but the idea has been leveraged into the post-­Cold War realm of terror threats. This dissertation examines how the fluid concept of a sleeper evolved from the 1990s onwards. This study investigates the reality of al Qaeda espionage methodology and how the idea of a sleeper was perceived and adapted to fit the terrorist threat posed by al Qaeda beginning with the attack on two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, then as a fear of sleepers ramped up for a time around the millennium with a foiled plot by Ahmed Ressam, but especially after the attack on September 11, 2001. Al Qaeda did not use sleepers in the classic Russian espionage sense of long-term cover creation and dormancy but the organization had an interest in deploying operatives, who had sufficient security awareness to avoid detection by authorities, to foreign countries who were meant to be in place to proceed to execute missions, usually on a shorter rather than longer time frame. This al Qaeda translation of methodology was based on the development of their own systems of operational security, as outlined in the Manchester Manual and training materials, which include borrowed tactics from other sources. While the tactics of patience, secrecy, deception, cover, and concealment operate on the fluid boundary of the sleeper concept, al Qaeda operational security diverged from the growing obsession over classic “sleepers”, particularly after 9/11. Adaptations of the concept of a sleeper often produced mis-­assessments of al Qaeda’s translation of methodology and after 9/11 this encouraged policy guided by fear. New terror threats have emerged, but a fear of sleepers persists. This dissertation brings clarity to the sleeper phenomenon by revealing how perceptions that become detached from reality both foster and are fuelled by alarmism, exaggerated threat reporting, and a failure to understand the enemy.

Keywords: 9/11
Al-Qaeda
Counterterrorism
Intelligence
Sleepers
Terrorism
Advisor: Wark, Wesley K
Conquest and Colonization in the Early Middle Ages: The Carolingians and Saxony, c. 751â 842

This thesis reconsiders longstanding questions regarding the economic and ideological forces that drove Frankish expansion into Saxony in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, Frankish strategies of rule in the newly conquered region, and the effects of conquest and cultural disposession on the Saxons themselves. Specifically, the dissertation seeks to present a new interpretation of this critical historical episode as a process of colonization. After an introduction that briefly outlines various conceptions and definitions of colonization and how these apply to the early medieval period, chapter one provides an overview of the main Latin and Old Saxon sources regarding Saxony and the Saxons in the Carolingian period from the coronation of Pippin III to the suppression of the Saxon Stellinga uprising in 842. The chapter emphasizes the tendentious nature of these sources and the ways in which they reflect the perspective of the colonizer while obscuring the experiences of the colonized. Chapter two looks at the ideological justifications for the conquest advanced in the Frankish primary sources, arguing that the Franksâ forcible Christianization of the Saxons was driven in part by the Carolingian dynastyâ s increasingly close ties with the papacy and by ancient imperial prerogatives regarding the extension of the faith. Chapter three, in contrast, examines the economic forces driving Frankish expansion into Saxony, demonstrating that the region possessed more material wealth than is generally assumed. Finally, chapter four turns to the effects of conquest and colonization on the Saxons themselves, analyzing the ways in which imperial ideologies and practices of rule were presented to a newly converted Saxon audience in the Old Saxon Gospel harmony known as the Heliand.

Keywords: Carolingians
Charlemagne
Colonization
Medieval
Saxons
Saxony
Advisor: Murray, Alexander C
Ghosh, Shami
Controlling Transgene Expression in the Central Nervous System For MRI-Guided Focused Ultrasound Delivery of Adeno-Associated Virus

Adeno-associated virus (AAV) transgene delivery could provide sustained therapeutic support to the central nervous system (CNS). However, the blood-brain (BBB) and blood-spinal cord barrier (BSCB) impede intravenous delivery of AAVs. Therefore, MRI-guided focused ultrasound (MRIgFUS) was used to facilitate intravenous delivery of non-BBB penetrating AAV serotypes, or AAV9 at a dose approximately 50-fold lower than the systemic minimum, to targeted regions of the CNS. First, AAV9 distribution in the spinal cord tested whether physical differences in the BSCB compared the to the BBB cause alterations in MRIgFUS delivery. Two weeks after MRIgFUS delivery of AAV9 to a 7 mm, unilateral length of the rat cervical spinal cord 36% of oligodendrocytes and 87% of neurons in the FUS-targeted region were transgene-positive. GFP expression was also seen in the liver, heart, and muscle. Thereafter, targeting transgene expression to specific CNS cell types, while preventing expression in peripheral organs was investigated. Specifically, the glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) astrocyte promoter and the neuron-derived synapsin (syn) promoter were used to control expression of green fluorescent protein (GFP). Since AAV9 led to high levels of liver transduction, AAV1/2 and AAV6 were chosen to test transgene expression under the CNS-associated promoters and compared to the constitutive human beta actin (HBA) promoter. To evaluate whether transgene expression can be increased alongside GFAP near Aβ plaque, mosaic AAV1/2 expressing GFP under either the GFAP promoter or the HBA promoter was delivered to TgCRND8 amyloidosis model mice. Under the GFAP promoter, GFP fluorescence intensity, expression volume, and surface area were higher in astrocytes near Aβ plaque compared to Aβ-unassociated astrocytes. The GFAP promoter was astrocyte-specific in the brain, but allowed expression in the liver. Thereafter, AAV6 and AAV1/2 expressing GFP were compared using the syn promoter. Compared to AAV1/2-syn-GFP, AA6-syn-GFP delivery resulted in a two-fold increase in transgene-positive neurons, and over four-fold less liver transduction. The syn promoter prevented transgene expression in the liver, kidney, heart, muscle, spleen, and lung. In conclusion, MRIgFUS-facilitated gene delivery can target both the brain and spinal cord, and AAV6-syn is a promising candidate for liver-detargeted, neuron-specific transgene expression in the CNS.

Keywords: Adeno-associated virus AAV
MRI-guided focused ultrasound MRIgFUS
TgCRND8
Advisor: Aubert, Isabelle
Hynynen, Kullervo
Healthy is the New Thin: The Discursive Production of Womenâ s Healthy Living Media

This dissertation explores how food and fitness discourses are produced in the contemporary healthy-living mediascape for women. This is done through a content and discourse analysis of 640 blog posts from six foundational healthy living blogs and 230 articles from two high-circulation health and fitness magazines. In the first of three papers, I compare how food is framed in the magazines and blogs. I find that healthy-living magazines frame food as pathogenic, disease-promoting and dangerous in relation to body composition. In contrast, healthy living blog posts present food as a relatively “salutogenic” (Antonovsky 1996) force that promotes health and wellness. I argue that healthy living blog prosumers (who both produce and consume social media) are able to broaden the range of public health discourses, albeit without critiquing the moralization of health or thinness as an overarching goal. In the second paper, I use the analytical tool of biopedagogy to understand what bloggers are teaching readers about how to manage their bodies. I argue that, in order to generate the authority to disseminate health information bloggers, laypeople who are not health professionals must produce health media that includes a distinct knowledge base and evidence to support their recommendations. I offer the concept “blogspert” to describe the way in which bloggers’ authority to disseminate biopedagogy is produced through anecdotal evidence of successfully and intentionally cultivating bodily knowledge towards losing or managing weight. In the third paper, I study the construction of authenticity, a highly-valued trait in contemporary culture. I find that an authentic healthy persona is produced on healthy living blogs through “calibration” (Cairns and Johnston 2015) — a gendered self-presentation process whereby women continually work to position themselves away from pathologized extremes of feminine excess (e.g., obsessiveness perfectionism) and apathy (e.g., laziness, insufficient self-monitoring). Overall, in this dissertation I make the following conclusion: while healthy living bloggers remain compelled to navigate a broader context in which they are required to demonstrate self-regulation, they steer clear of restrictive and punitive discourses through presenting alternative logics of healthy living that reflect and reproduce the neoliberal fetishization of the individual and individual experience.

Advisor: Johnston, Josee
Soft Materials at Interfaces for Controlling and Studying Marine Biofouling, Cellular Growth, and Phonon Polaritons

Several â softâ material systems are investigated at the nanoscale through the application of surface sensitive techniques. The first family of projects focus on providing environmentally-friendly solutions to challenges faced in aquaculture, including marine biofouling and sea lice infestations. To address fouling, an aqueous-based method was developed for fabricating nanostructured block copolymer films. Specifically, a water-insoluble triblock copolymer, Poly(styrene-block-2 vinyl pyridine-block-ethylene oxide), was phase transferred from a water-immiscible phase into an aqueous environment, where it was found to self-assemble into core-shell-corona type micelles. These micelles were then coated onto surfaces to form thin films and adhesion studies using atomic force microscopy (AFM), zoospore settlement assays, and field tests reveal its ability to serve as a potential marine antifouling coating. Conventional drugs used to control sea lice infestations are becoming less effective as parasites grow tolerant and have been found to harm non-target local species. Here, I present the efficacy of biologically extracted ingredients to serve as potential biopesticides. Liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry techniques are developed and optimized to monitor the fate of azadirachtin (extracted from neem oil) when orally administered to Atlantic salmon and exposed to aqueous environments. Field trial results reveal that azadirachtin levels as low as 0.01 ppm accumulated in the tissue of salmon results in over 85% efficacy against sea lice, relative to controls. The next group of projects investigates properties of synthetic materials at the nanoscale. We show that by supporting hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) on materials with varying dielectric responses in the infrared results in control of surface momenta of hyperbolic phonon polaritons (HPhPs). Our results show that by supporting hBN on materials with higher dielectric responses leads to a higher surface momenta of HPhPs. Furthermore, propagating waves in hBN were found to be highly sensitive to the reflections at the upper and lower interfaces, which provides opportunities for energy to dissipate. The damping behavior of HPhPs was shown to be sensitive to adjacent layers and a method of applying HPhPs in hBN as a sensor is demonstrated.

Keywords: Materials
Nano
Surface Science
Advisor: Walker, Gilbert C
The Water-Energy Nexus â A Modern Case Study to Reassess Hydropower in the Niagara River

The advent of variable renewable energy has created an urgent need for demand-based generation and storage. At present, with batteries still awaiting a major technological breakthrough, hydropower combined with pumped storage is suggested as a key response to demand variability. Even overlooking the technical demands, developing this potential resource in a sustainable way presents formidable challenges. While sustainability is a concern, the vulnerability of the resource to changing climatic conditions poses a major threat. The present study proposes five modelling approaches (and/or frameworks) as a foundation to a systems approach to hydropower and shows how these tools address the key challenges. Overall, the research addresses the current demand for dispatchable generation particularly in Ontario and proposes several alternatives including their sustainability assessment. Of the five models, the first two explore a variety of remuneration structures for pumped storage in the context of Ontario. The work begins with an optimization approach that evaluates the wholesale market for optimal profit. The tradeoff between hydropower and ecological targets is explored using a Constraint Method. The results are compared with models based on contracted price and an integrated valuation approach that accounts for the socioeconomic attributes of storage using representative applications. While the first two approaches concentrate on the project economies, the third model evaluates the potential for increased hydroelectric generation and assesses its vulnerability scenarios of climate change. A 1D simulation model of the existing power system at Niagara is used to evaluate a variety of innovative operating plans. One such scenario includes a revised approach to daily operation with use of additional storage during the night and timed release during peak demand hours. The final section seeks to improve the existing frameworks for sustainability assessment and then to use these improved metrics to evaluate various proposed generation options. The developed decision support framework, applied to Niagara, allows quantitative evaluation based on survey responses from key stakeholders. In contrast, the fifth and final approach uses the concept of resilience within probabilistic graphical model to account for the inherent uncertainty associated with climate projections. Overall, the five approaches (optimization, integrated valuation, simulation, sustainability and resilience assessment) facilitate rethinking the hydropower system with changing circumstances and subsequent shift in priorities by the development, analysis, and interpretation of models. This thesis contributes towards evaluating the merits of transitions between these approaches for future modelling applications.

Keywords: Electricity market
Hydropower
Modelling
Niagara Power System
Sustainability assessment
Systems resiliency
Advisor: Karney, Bryan W.
Life in the Midst of Superlatives: Exhibitions in Postwar Rotterdam and Hamburg, 1946-1973

Between 1946 and 1973 political authorities in the cities of Rotterdam and Hamburg, often in partnership with local business communities, organized and hosted no less than seven major national or international exhibitions, as well as a significant number of smaller events, activities, and expositions. This dissertation explores the context, purpose, and cultural significance of these exhibitions in order to reveal insight into the postwar period. In addition to encouraging tourism and increasing trade, the exhibitions promoted the host city’s recovery. Specifically, they highlighted progress that had been made since 1945 and casted a favourable light on the business and political elites under whose auspices these successes had been achieved. This dissertation contributes to our understanding of postwar development and reconstruction in western Europe. I argue that the exhibitions provided a framework through which the material and immaterial aspects of postwar recovery were presented to the outside world. They were the stage upon which the process of recovery was performed and imbued with meaning. An investigation of these exhibitions in two cities and over a period of thirty years shows that postwar understandings of “recovery” were not static, but instead shifted and were interpreted differently at different times. In the early 1950s, exhibitions highlighted collective overcoming and investment in large public infrastructure projects as the main aspects of recovery and as the foundation of future prosperity. By the mid- to late 1950s and into the 1960s, prosperity had arrived in both Hamburg and Rotterdam, and exhibitions stressed private prosperity and individual consumption as the key aspects of postwar rebuilding. After the mid-1960s this changed. Exhibitions in Rotterdam and Hamburg, rather than focusing on radical renewal or economic growth, began to pay more attention to lived experience and quality of life. When looked at over an extended period of time, the exhibitions demonstrate that the “postwar period” was neither static nor monolithic, but instead was fraught with tension, highly locally specific, and full with competing ideas of what was desirable.

Keywords: Exhibitions
Hamburg
Postwar
Rotterdam
Advisor: Jenkins, Jennifer L.
Chanting Nuns, Chiming Bells: Sound in Late Medieval Mystical Literature and Devotional Culture

The High and Late Middle Ages have often been regarded as an ocular age. Research on medieval religious culture has primarily focused on visuality and techniques of visualization in textual and social practices of piety. Up until quite recently, the role of other sensory faculties has been neglected in this context. This dissertation expands this research from the focus on visuality to the auditory field and draws attention to functions and effects of sound in selected late medieval mystical narratives and devotional practices. The acoustic mise-en-scĂ¨ne in the Eucharistic celebration and acoustic phenomena that figure prominently in Dominican Sister Books and related texts serve as prime examples of the ways in which sound produces, shapes, and supports devotional practices and contributes to a multisensory reception of the sacred. The study draws on recent findings in the fields of medieval media, sound studies, and the conceptualization of space and place to explore the interplay of visual and auditory perception, the correlation of sound and space, and historical medialities in the performance and staging of the divine.

Keywords: acoustic
devotion
monastic
mysticism
senses
sound
Advisor: Stock, Markus
Peroxisome Quality Control Factors in Pexophagy and Peroxisome Biogenesis Disorders

Peroxisome biogenesis disorders (PBDs) are metabolic disorders caused by the loss of peroxisomes. Most PBDs result from mutation in one of 3 genes that encode for the peroxisomal AAA ATPase complex (AAA-complex) that is required for cycling ubiquitinated-PEX5 in peroxisomal matrix protein import. A smaller percentage of PBDs are due to mutation in PEX13, which is also involved in matrix protein import, yet has an elusive function. Mutations in all these genes are thought to result in a defect in peroxisome assembly. However, we show here that loss of the AAA-complex or PEX13 causes an upregulation of selective peroxisome degradation by macroautophagy, or pexophagy, an ubiquitin-mediated process used to recycle damaged organelles. What is unclear, however, is the mechanism by which these damaged organelles are selectively ubiquitinated, while healthy organelles are protected from degradation. Since pexophagy is ubiquitin-mediated, as is the import of matrix proteins into peroxisomes, I hypothesized that damaged peroxisomes are selectively ubiquitinated as a result of defective ubiquitinated-PEX5 export. Using immunofluorescence, immunoblotting, subcellular fractionation, immunoprecipitation, and LC-MS/MS methods I demonstrate in this thesis that the loss of AAA-complex and PEX13 function in cells results in the accumulation of ubiquitinated PEX5 on the peroxisomal membrane that signals ROS-mediated pexophagy. Furthermore, inhibiting autophagy by genetic or pharmacological approaches rescues peroxisome number, protein import and function. Our findings suggest that the AAA-complex and PEX13 are required for peroxisome quality control, and their absence results in pexophagy. Thus, the peroxisome loss in PBD patients with mutations in their peroxisomal AAA-complex or in PEX13 is a result of increased pexophagy. Our study also provides a framework for the development of novel therapeutic treatments for PBDs, as well as speculation regarding a potential function of PEX13 in ubiquitinated-PEX5 export.

Keywords: Autophagy
Peroxisome
Peroxisome Biogenesis Disorders
Pexophagy
Reactive Oxygen Species
Advisor: Kim, Peter K
International Crimes as Familiar Spectacles: Socially Constructed Understandings of Atrocity and the Visibility Politics of International Criminal Law

This thesis examines the role aesthetic considerations play in the development of shared social and legal understandings of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Utilizing a social constructivist, interactional legal theory analytical framework, I argue that aesthetic considerations play a major role in identifying these international crimes. The “visibility politics” resulting from this heavy reliance on aesthetic factors in turn, influence social interactions through which shared understandings of these crimes are developed, resulting in shared understandings of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes being embedded in a particular aesthetic model of atrocity. According to this model, atrocity crimes are expected to manifest themselves as familiar spectacles of violence and abuse that are both shocking and intuitively “criminal” in nature. While at first glance, this understanding may appear to merely reflect the extraordinary scale of atrocity crimes themselves, the notion that such crimes will necessarily manifest themselves according to this aesthetic model ignores the complexities of mass harm causation, and the substance of international criminal law (ICL). Chapter one, combining insights from interactional legal theory and the field of neuroaesthetics, theorizes ICL as an environment conducive to aesthetic considerations influencing relevant norm development processes. Chapter two, through an analysis of how the language of atrocity is deployed within ICL discourses, argues that shared understandings of atrocity crimes are grounded in an aesthetic model of atrocities as familiar spectacles of violence and abuse. Chapter three demonstrates that this aesthetic model fails to account for the complexity of real-world atrocity situations and the wide variety of means through which genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes may be committed. Chapter four examines how visibility politics have shaped social and legal understandings of processes of mass killing and abuse in Khmer Rouge era Cambodia and elsewhere. Chapter five argues that visibility politics undermine the aims of ICL and negatively influence historical memory and the distribution of human rights, transitional justice, and peacebuilding resources. Chapter six, returning to interactional legal theory, argues that the visibility politics of ICL also impair the legality legitimacy of ICL itself, by undermining ICL’s adherence in practice to interactionalism’s criteria of legality.

Keywords: Aesthetics
Atrocity
Interactional Legal Theory
International Criminal Law
Social Constructivism
Visibility
Advisor: BrunnĂŠe, Jutta