VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Hate parties: limits on the freedom of extreme political parties

This thesis deals with the question of dissolution of extremist political parties at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Liberal democracies are characterised by freedom and pluralism. On the one hand, one could say that democracy is precisely about tolerating all opinions in politics; on the other, one could also say that democracy should only tolerate political parties to the extent that they do not jeopardise its own foundations. The ECtHR has to face the new paradigm in extremism that resulted in intolerant fringe parties replacing totalitarian parties. While the Court delivered a substantial number of judgments in party dissolution cases, yet it remains unknown what the oft-repeated high protection for freedom of association will mean in difficult dissolution cases in the future. The present study rethinks the ways the Court should interpret party dissolution cases to meet the challenge of new extremism. First, the thesis draws attention to the various aspects of a party’s activities that the Court should observe in dissolution cases. Second, the thesis further argues that the Court should revitalise the definition stage of adjudication instead of uniquely relying on proportionality and balancing. Any dissolution case should start from defining what political parties are in a normative sense. Third, balancing understood as principled reasoning, should follow only after the definition. Drawing on the jurisprudence on articles 10, the thesis tries to rethink the balancing process in party dissolution cases of new extremist parties. It argues that because the legitimacy of the democratic government depends in part on the respect for political rights, chief amongst them the freedom of association, only compelling reasons and extraordinary circumstances may justify party dissolution. Finally, the thesis will outline such extra reasons with the help of other jurisdictions.

Keywords: democracy
dissolution of political parties
political parties
extermism
Advisor: Lazarus, L
The right to political speech and the ban on hate speech

This thesis contributes to the debate on hate speech by arguing for a compromise solution. It breaks with the absolutist solutions under which either all hate speech should be banned or all should be protected. The prohibition of some hateful expressions is assumed to be legitimate. This follows the European constitutional tradition. However, the prohibitionist norm should be reconciled with the right to political speech. This flows from the normative importance of free political expression that is widely endorsed. The research relies on three theoretical pillars. First, it defines the strongest democratic justificatory case for political speech in liberal democracies. Then, it argues for a richer understanding of what should count as political speech. The proposed approach assigns more weight to the political circumstances than to the sheer content of speech. The argument then proceeds through investigating the strongest objections against protecting hate speech. These prohibitionist arguments assert that hate speech incites against, silences or vilifies vulnerable groups, moreover that hate speech harms democracy. The thesis disputes these objections as applied to political hate speech. The conclusion is that political hate speech narrowly defined should be an exception from the otherwise legitimate ban on hate speech. In the final two chapters, the theoretical findings are applied to the case law of the ECtHR and to the United Kingdom’s statutory hate speech regulation. The critical evaluation of hate speech judgments and statutes is coupled with suggestions how to reform the broadly prohibitionist position that these jurisdictions had come to endorse.

Keywords: freedom of expression
free speech
legitimacy
hate speech
Advisor: Rowbottom, J
Beta-adrenergic stimulation and cardiac arrhythmogenesis in the infarct border zone

Sudden cardiac death due to ventricular arrhythmias after myocardial infarction (MI) is a major cause of mortality worldwide. Following a MI, the heart undergoes considerable remodelling; however, the precise mechanisms of how the changes induce arrhythmia have not been fully elucidated. The role of sympathetic innervation in the infarct border zone (BZ) is particularly controversial: while historical evidence posits a strongly proarrhythmic role, recent clinical studies report that it is the lack of such innervation which is associated with future arrhythmic events. In this thesis, we aim to improve the understanding of the sympathetic nervous system after MI, focussing predominantly at how neurally mediated β-adrenergic stimulation affects cardiac alternans, an arrhythmic precursor which often affects post-MI hearts and is frequently observed before fibrillation. Using ex vivo rat hearts with a healed myocardial infarction, we demonstrate that infarcted hearts are vulnerable to alternans in the BZ. Pharmacological β-adrenergic stimulation, which emulates sympathetic nervous activation, powerfully attenuates alternans, supporting the view that the border zone innervation may play an important role in prevention of fibrillation. Furthermore, we develop a computer model of a ventricular myocyte which allows representation of the BZ phenotype, as well as β-adrenergic stimulation. The model behaves consistently with the experimental data obtained and its analysis reveals a mechanistic explanation for alternans attenuation via β-adrenergic stimulation. Finally, we provide a set of software tools for high-throughput processing of cardiac imaging data that we hope to be useful to be to the community.
Our work helps resolve the controversy of the role of sympathetic innervation after myocardial infarction. It suggests a dual role for the cardiac sympathetic nervous system after MI: anti-arrhythmic via alternans attenuation, but pro-arrhythmic by increasing the heart rate. The results of this thesis have implications both for understanding of cardiac physiology, as well as for existing and future therapies.

Advisor: Bub, G
Rodriguez, B
Paterson, D
Corporeal theology: the nature of theological understanding in light of embodied cognition

Appropriating insights from empirical findings and theoretical constructs of ‘embodied cognition,’ this study explores how theological understanding is accommodated to the bodily nature of human cognition. An emerging paradigm in cognitive science, embodied cognition proposes that human cognition depends upon bodily sensorimotor systems to ground concepts and to exploit environmental resources. A theological framework for exploring the human capacities which embodied cognition describes is the principle of accommodation, because it posits that revelation is accommodated to human capacities.
Embodied cognition’s hypothesis that human concepts are grounded in sensorimotor states poses a theological quandary for God-concepts, since identifying God with sensorimotor content risks idolatry. The incarnation resolves this problem in theological epistemology by grounding God-concepts in bodily understanding, while avoiding idolatry. Thus, the incarnation represents an accommodation to human conceptual capacities.
Embodied cognition further hypothesises that cognition relies on sensorimotor engagement with the world rather than internal mental representations. Subsequently, in addition to the brain, bodily states and environmental artefacts ‘scaffold’ cognitive processes. A scaffolded view of cognition highlights the cognitive import of embodied religious practices, which choregraph the body and curate material culture. I apply dozens of studies identifying mechanisms by which bodily or environmental factors influence cognition to the embodied and material dimensions Christian practices. On account of their inherent cognitive effects, practices are theorised to have intrinsic ‘embodied’ meanings alongside ‘symbolic’ ones established by conventions. Consequently, liturgy is seen as a bearer of theological content rather than merely an expression of it; a locus of religious experience; and a crucial determinate of religious and ethical formation. Again, the embodied nature of Christian liturgy is understood in terms of accommodation. Embodied cognition research helpfully illuminates the details of human embodiment to which theological understanding must be accommodated.

Advisor: Ward, G
The graphene surface force balance

The importance of capturing, storing and converting energy, exemplified through the desire for independence from fossil fuels and everyday use of portable electronic devices, has magnified interest in understanding processes at the interface between solids and electrolytes.
This thesis explores different experimental approaches towards measuring surface forces across electrolytes confined between polarizable surfaces in the Surface Force Balance (SFB). The main findings of the thesis concern the fabrication and implementation of graphene SFB (gSFB) lenses, which use graphene as transparent conductor for surface force measurements at the solid/electrolyte interface. Such lenses consist of hemi-cylindrical quartz discs, with a reflective coating and a graphene layer supported by epoxy.
The suitability of different graphenes produced using Chemical Vapor Deposition was investigated, concomitant with the development of a fabrication method for such lenses, including the fabrication of uniform epoxy layers and the template stripping of epoxy supported graphene from mica templates. It was found that the smoothness of the graphene surfaces on the lenses was limited and factors contributing to this limitation are discussed. Analysis techniques were developed for the efficient determination of the contact distance without performing a contact calibration and determination of the radius of curvature using secondary Fringes of Equal Chromatic Order. Using these procedures, the surface and interfacial energy of graphene in dry nitrogen and liquids was determined by applying JKR-theory to adhesion force measurements.
The presented fabrication and analysis techniques are not limited to gSFB and may be applied to different SFB setups. As such, the exciting prospect of using the newly developed methods in an alternative 3-mirror setup is discussed as well.
The work presented in this thesis contributes two novel techniques for the measurement of surface forces across electrolytes with control of the surface electrical potential and will allow for exciting new experiments.

Advisor: Perkin, S
Grobert, N
The grand machinery of the world: race, global order and the black Atlantic

This thesis examines the ways in which the interwar global order came to be theorised by African writers, and those of African descent, in specific territories bordering the Atlantic. It asks how those views can inform a richer understanding of the construction of our contemporary world. In particular, it seeks to understand the centrality of race to the imperial order and to many of the oppositional projects that emerged in relation to the order. A global order perspective can, it is argued, help to explain the salience of race to the interwar world as well as its enduring power beyond that period.
Using as its primary sources the vibrant black print cultures and circuits of the interwar period, the thesis examines the close concomitance of national and transnational thinking during the ‘Belle Époque’; the global vision of Marcus Garvey’s black nationalism in the United States; the emergence of critical theorisations of colonialism across British-controlled West Africa; the languages of race and whiteness in interwar France, from the black press of Paris to the early texts of Négritude; and the role played by Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia—the only independent states of the period governed by Africans or African-descended people—as instantiations of the racialised nature of interwar sovereignty, targets of both imperial designs and anticolonial activism.
Interrogating the conceptual boundaries between race, nationalism, and pan-nationalism, the thesis suggests that such affinities are best understood not as abstractly-definable and opposing doctrines, but as political projects that have emerged historically in relation to global order as a whole and out of specifically enabling material conditions. As well as assessing diverse bodies of writing in terms of their contribution to international theory, the thesis explores how changes in material conditions and imperial infrastructures—particularly the spread of newspapers—facilitated a range of counter-readings of dominant discourses, imaginative acts of traversal, and other practices of oppositional power, whose consequences reach far beyond the interwar period.

Keywords: Race
Internationalism
Africa
Nationalism
Postcolonialism
Advisor: Hurrell, A
Incentives for teachers: a theoretical framework and a structural model

This study provides structural analysis of teacher behaviour under the provision of individual and group monetary incentive schemes using data from a randomised control trial conducted in India (Muralidharan and Sundaraman, 2011). I develop a theoretical principal-agent model explicitly allowing for both intrinsic motivation and a crowding out effect of explicit performance pay on intrinsic incentives. Theoretically, I show that intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation through performance pay are substitutes under the optimal incentive scheme in the presence of motivation crowding out. Applying the theoretical framework for structural analysis, I identify the sets of teacher heterogeneity consistent with each effort choice in the treatment and control group schools. Using the barycenters of these sets, I calculate that increasing the effort of the average teacher who did not change his/her effort under the experimental incentive payment of Rs. 500, would require increasing the incentive bonus to Rs. 730 under the individual incentive scheme. The corresponding figure lies between Rs. 720 - Rs. 1020 depending on the reported group cooperation level under the group incentive scheme.

Keywords: set identification
intrinsic motivation
structural model
performance pay
motivation crowding out
group incentives
Advisor: Meyer, M
Crawford, I
Market power: traders, farmers, and the politics of accumulation in Pakistani Punjab

This thesis examines traders' strategies of accumulation in agricultural commodity markets in Pakistani Punjab. It contributes to the literature on markets as social and political institutions as well as to broader debates on patronage, informality, urbanization, and class formation in South Asia. The principal aim of the thesis is to identify the institutions and ideologies facilitating exchange and study how they function in the market. It also aims to account for the increased political importance of traders, understood as members of Pakistan’s intermediate classes, and reflect on the nature of their political participation. Non-programmatic, functional alignments are shown to be the norm and compatible with both military and democratic regimes.
Through a close look at activities in one agricultural commodity market – or mandi, as it is known in Punjab – the present work explores the practices and linkages traders cultivate to bolster their economic and political power. Plunging into everyday mandi life in small-town Punjab, it illustrates how customary institutions articulate with the state and capital to co-regulate economic activity and create conditions for durable domination. Enmeshment in patron-client relations, links with the local state, associational activity, ownership and control of capital, and thick social ties are demonstrated to be key means by which wealth and power are accumulated. Class is shown to articulate closely with caste and kinship while being irreducible to them, and the role of dominant social institutions is demonstrated to be highly variable across the many processes ongoing in the market.

Advisor: Harriss-White, B
Sensorimotor adaptation: mechanisms, modulation and rehabilitation potential

Adaptation is a fundamental property of the nervous system that underlies the maintenance of successful actions through flexible reconfiguration of sensorimotor processing. The primary aims of this thesis are 1) to investigate the computational and neural underpinnings of sensorimotor memory formation during prism adaptation (PA) in humans, and 2) how they interact with anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (a-tDCS) of the primary motor cortex (M1), in order to 3) improve efficacy of prism therapy for post-stroke spatial neglect.
In chapter 4, we modify an influential state-space model of adaptation in order to characterize the contribution of short and long memory timescales to motor behaviour as sensorimotor after-effects (AEs) develop during PA. This enables us, in the multimodal 7 Tesla MRI experiment reported in chapter 5, to demonstrate that the level of M1 excitation:inhibition causally sets the relative contribution of long versus short memory timescales during PA, thus determining behavioural persistence of the AE at retention in young healthy adults. This finding offers a bridge between different levels of investigation by providing a biologically plausible neuro-computational model of how sensorimotor memories are formed and enhanced by a-tDCS. In chapter 6, we use the ageing motor system as a model of reduced GABAergic inhibition and show that the age-related decrease in M1 GABA explains why older adults demonstrate more persistent prism AEs. Taken together, these data indicate that the reduction in M1 GABAergic inhibition via excitatory a-tDCS during PA has the potential to enhance persistence of adaptation memory in both young and older adults.
Informed by these results, we subsequently ask whether standard (multi-session) PA therapy combined with left M1 a-tDCS translates to greater and/or longer-lasting clinical improvements in post-stroke spatial neglect patients. In chapter 7, we compare the multimodal neuroimaging data of six neglect patients to normative data of age-matched controls. We show that in all patients, the lesion interrupted long-range frontoparietal connections, and we provide direct evidence for a pathological left dominance of activity within the lateral occipital cortex during deployment of bilateral visuospatial attention. In chapter 8, we present the behavioural performance of these patients throughout the two phases of the clinical study (i.e. before and after either PA + real M1 a-tDCS or PA + sham M1 atDCS). There was no clear effect of a-tDCS on the therapeutic effect of PA in these patients.
The results of the studies presented in this thesis provide a novel insight into the neurocomputational mechanisms of sensorimotor memory formation and its modulation by a-tDCS in the healthy brain. Further investigation of how these mechanisms relate to therapeutic improvements following PA in certain neglect patients is needed.

Keywords: Computational neuroscience
Sensorimotor adaptation
Stroke rehabilitation
Neuroimaging
Brain stimulation
Advisor: O'Shea, J
Johansen-Berg, H
Ce qui s’enseigne. The Querelle des collèges and the Emergence of Littérature, 1750–1789

This study examines an important eighteenth-century French querelle about literary education which has so far gone unacknowledged by scholars as a querelle and which, I argue, helped redefine contemporary notions of littérature. This querelle is the series of disputes about how to reform literary education in the collèges, which gathered momentum in the early 1760s, following the expulsion of the Jesuits and the publication of Rousseau’s Émile (1762). I propose that we call this querelle the Querelle des collèges.
Using a combination of close reading, sociological methodologies, and scholarly approaches to the study of early modern querelles, I examine how a diverse corpus of texts debated how to reform collège literary teaching practices. By resituating Émile in this context, I show that it was one among many interventions in the Querelle des collèges. My study of this Querelle demonstrates that querelleurs increasingly reached a consensus that practices associated with the disciplines of rhétorique and belles-lettres should be replaced by new practices of littérature, which were intended to turn boys into French ‘grands hommes’. This Querelle was not only constituted by texts, but also by pedagogical practices, as evidenced by the results of my original archival research into the literary teaching practices of the École royale militaire, founded in 1751. Finally, my analysis situates the Querelle des collèges in the context of broader eighteenth-century debates about education, which I argue should be understood as the Querelle de l’éducation, and I provide the first corpus of this Querelle.
This thesis challenges scholarly claims that littérature is a nineteenth-century invention. It argues, instead, that modern notions of littérature as ‘an aesthetically pleasing, valued text’, and ‘a national canon’, which began to appear in the late seventeenth century, were stabilised and legitimised by being written into the school discipline of littérature, which emerged between 1750 and the Revolution, in the context of the Querelle des collèges.

Keywords: Émile, ou de l'éducation
Querelles
Littérature
Rousseau
École militaire
Collèges
Jesuits
Advisor: Tunstall, K
Cardiovascular risk scoring for the prevention of cardiovascular disease in low-resource settings

The aim of this thesis was to examine the use of total cardiovascular risk scoring for the prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in low-resource settings. While risk scoring is popular in high-income countries, the overarching hypothesis was that it was sub-optimal for the prevention of CVD in low-resource settings. To achieve its aim, this thesis first synthesised evidence through a systematic review of systematic reviews on the impact of total CVD risk scoring on important patient outcomes. Second, it developed an R package to calculate World Health Organisation/International Society of Hypertension (WHO/ISH) CVD risk scores for all epidemiological subregions of the world. Third, using mixed methods and intensive fieldwork, it evaluated the practical implementation of WHO/ISH CVD risk scores in Médecins Sans Frontières clinics for Syrian refugees in Jordan. Lastly, it explored the potential to simplify CVD risk scores by replacing cholesterol information with body mass index using a contemporary CVD risk cohort from New Zealand. Overall, the findings showed that CVD risk scoring is sub-optimal for low-resource settings due to a lack of evidence of effectiveness, its difficulty to implement and test, and its potential to be simplified. Focus should be shifted towards conducting high quality randomised trials in low-resource settings, using simplified risk scores that can be completed in a single consultation, and further implementation studies in primary health care. With this in mind, cardiovascular risk scoring as a pivotal intervention for the prevention of CVD in low-resource settings should be judiciously compared to other alternatives, and if implemented, closely monitored for its impact on health outcomes.

Advisor: Heneghan, C
Ward, A
Jackson, R