VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Then and Now, Knowing and Leading: The Lived Experience of Ethnicity and its Implications for College Leadership

In my research, I set out to ask if lived experiences related to ethnicity shapes and informed college leaders. From the findings, I have concluded that lived experiences of ethnicity do shape and inform college leaders. This was a heuristic exploration that allowed participants to find, discover, and understand the meaning in their lived experiences. I used a heuristic, qualitative research approach with semistructured interviews to question and learn from 10 participants during two interviews over a 1–3-month period. Participants were Maltese, Italian, Portuguese, or a combination, and were leaders in colleges in Ontario. For the purposes of this study, these college leaders were administrators in the positions of Associate Dean/Chair, Dean/Director, manager, and/or senior administration in Ontario. The experience of growing up ethnic, immigrant, and marginal, was juxtaposed to these participants’ experiences of whiteness, being educated, and privileged. Participant histories of marginality and difference were largely dismissed by others against their current positions of status and power. Implications of historical and current lived experiences of marginality on leadership practice were a central focus. The exploration of how participants negotiated, mediated, and reconciled past marginality with current privilege and how this informed their leadership practice was a core tenet of this work. I pursued this research and offer it not to right the wrongs for participants, but rather to inform leadership practice in ways that encourage white stories of marginality to be told; to disarticulate and rearticulate rules and systems that oppress and confine; and to continue to reimagine that whiteness is not sameness. The insights assembled in these findings may be of interest and informative to other scholars who work towards equity and inclusion.

Keywords: college
equity
ethnicity
leadership
privilege
whiteness
Advisor: Portelli, John P
Diversification of Antbirds Associated with Amazonian Flooded Forest Habitats

Rivers represent one of the few geographic barriers that bisect, and promote allopatric speciation, in an otherwise continuous landscape of the Amazon basin. In contrast to Amazonian understory forests birds, which replace each other across river barriers, a strong barrier effect has not been reported for flooded forest species, which may experience rivers as dispersal corridors rather than as barriers. The apparent lack of geographic barriers for flooded forest birds raises the possibility that parapatric rather than allopatric speciation, might drive divergence in this habitat. Parapatric speciation usually involves gradual divergence across a species range, frequently involving divergence across geographically structured ecological gradients. Here I used morphometrics, plumage and genome-wide SNP datasets to uncover clinal patterns in three species of flooded forest antbirds at different stages of divergence. I found weak phylogeographic structure in Hypocnemoides maculicauda and H. melanopogon and much stronger structure in Sclateria naevia. While the clinal patterns uncovered in H. maculicauda and H. melanopogon could be consistent with either parapatric divergence or secondary contact, Sclateria exhibited strongly concordant cline centres across nuclear loci, mitochondrial DNA and female plumage, consistent with secondary contact between an eastern and western lineage that diverged in allopatry. I also applied coalescent modelling to distinguish between allopatric, parapatric or mixed allo-parapatric models in driving the diversification of Hypocnemoides from their common ancestor. The parapatric model of diversification was rejected in favor of one including an allopatric phase followed by secondary contact prior to the completion of speciation. Thus, while parapatry may have played a role in speciation, an initial allopatric phase is supported by this model. I proposed that the main drivers of genetic differentiation in flooded forest birds were climatic fluctuations caused by glacial and interglacial cycles. These species probably suffered multiple cycles of population expansion and retraction that resulted in the current phylogeographic structure. Repeated episodes of secondary contact during interglacials might explain why speciation in flooded forest birds is rare. Allopatric barriers have rarely persisted long enough to cause speciation, and cycles of expansion of populations erased part of the accumulated genetic divergence, impeding the completion of reproductive isolation.

Keywords: Amazon
Birds
GBS
Pleistocene
várzea
Advisor: Weir, Jason
Mining Capitalism and Contentious Politics in Bangladesh

This dissertation analyses a social movement in Bangladesh fighting a potentially environmentally destructive resource extraction project as well as the country’s neoliberal energy policies. Grassroots community grievances against an open pit coalmine in Phulbari in the northwest region started small but culminated in a multi-scalar social movement, including anti-corporate mobilization against privatization of resource extraction at the national level. It also inspired a group of transnational advocacy groups to support the anti-mining movement. Drawing on critical development, social movement, and critical globalization scholarships, the dissertation analyses three distinct scales of the anti-coalmine social mobilizations: local, national, and transnational. Based on a set of qualitative interviews with local/national activists and transnational advocacy groups, I examine each of these scales through the lens of a specific theoretical approach. At the local level, drawing on scholarship on critical development studies, I consider the development of contentious political agency of grassroots communities to analyse the dynamics of the counter-movement against ‘accumulation by dispossession.’ At the national scale, I engage with critical globalization scholarship to analyse discourses of a radical social organization to challenge neoliberal development and its dominant narrative of capitalist modernity. I pay attention to the significance of its political rhetoric (nationalist imaginaries) to articulate a counter-hegemonic political agenda. Finally, at the transnational level, I use sociological scholarship on transnational activism to analyse the mobilization of transnational advocacy groups supporting grassroots mobilization to critically reflect on the dynamics of alliances of differently positioned actors who, although united to achieve a common goal, share different worldviews on how to confront the power of global capital in the periphery. I conclude with the lessons learned from the analysis of the Phulbari movement. I focus on three issues: the salient features of the movement, which can be applied in other cases, the significance of the Phulbari movement to confront resource extraction, and a note on rethinking coal politics in the era of climate crisis.

Keywords: Bangladesh
Coal Politics
Mining
Neoliberalism
Social Movement
Advisor: Hannigan, John
“The Wilderness Within”: African Diasporic Religion in New Granada, 1690-1790

This dissertation examines African diasporic religions in New Granada in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In particular, it argues for the constitutive role of black mobility, space, and state institutions in their creation and circulation. Africans and their descendants—whether black or of mixed African, indigenous, and European heritages—had a deep engagement with Catholicism and its material culture in New Granada. There were significant common experience and variations in African-descended experience of the religious world and interactions with colonial institutions, shaped by ethnicity, gender, geography, mode of labour, and place of birth. This dissertation challenges the notion of separate histories of Caribbean and Pacific African-descended communities in Colombia through an examination of the movement of black bodies, religious knowledges, and ritual objects. It examines African diasporic religious creations situated within their social contexts, as well as the church and state’s criminalization of black ritual, medicine, and family life. New Granada was a space where culture and capital flowed between different regimes of slavery and systems of free labour. Diverse everyday epistemologies and material objects circulated among people of African descent across eighteenth-century New Granada within a shared world, one created by the power structures of the Catholic church, the colonial state, and the institution of slavery. This dissertation is based on a close reading of archival fragments from civil and criminal trials, government correspondence, and ecclesiastical records from collections in Colombia, Spain, and the United States. It seeks to challenge prevailing chronologies of African diaspora populations, moving away from political periodizations, and is framed around black experience—with the years 1690 and 1790 coming soon after fundamentally different campaigns of conquest of free communities of colour.

Keywords: African diaspora
Atlantic World
Colombia
New Granada
Religion
Slavery
Advisor: Newton, Melanie
Childhood Learning on Turtle Island: A Ceramic Analysis of Late Woodland Villages in the Lower Great Lakes Region

This study applies a multi-scalar pottery analysis of 15th century assemblages to investigate northern Iroquoian childhood learning experiences in the Lower Great Lakes prior to European contact. My analysis is based on the two villages in southern Ontario: Keffer and Draper, and three villages in upstate New York: Garoga, Smith-Pagerie and Klock. I employ an ontogenetic approach that recognizes childhood perspectives and the different cognitive and physiological experiences of children as they develop. I rely on ethnographic and child development data to reconstruct past learning experiences. Through this framework, I integrate a modified approach to meshworks through a systematic study of the material interactions of social learning of community members involved with the forming, shaping, and decorating of pottery vessels. Meshworks of learning allow for the identification of the development of knowledge and skills related to a technological practice. These learning growths further included new spatial interactions in their communities, and so I conducted a spatial analysis of Keffer and Draper vessels to investigate the presence of specialized learning locales, and how spatial areas around the village were involved in learning and craft production. The results of my analysis demonstrate a learning practice that did not isolate younger potters from adult activities but relied on flexible learning that encouraged a certain level of artistic freedom with minimal adult interference that adhered to fundamental principles of potting traditions. Pottery learning did not take place in specialized learning locales, but throughout the village. Furthermore, the data indicates regional patterning in which potters in Ontario and upstate New York learned to make pottery through similar practices. I argue that during the process of making pottery, learning experiences were mediated by deeply rooted cosmologies and traditions built around maintaining balanced social relations between community members of all ages and genders in Lower Great Lakes communities.

Keywords: Childhood archaeology
Material culture
Northern Iroquoian
Pottery production
Socialization
Social learning
Advisor: Smith, David G
"No to Mining Yes to Life": An Ethnographic Account of Buen Vivir in Postneoliberal Ecuador

At a time of heightened, global conflict over resource extraction, the Intag valley, Ecuador is an exemplary case of long-term mining resistance, halting the development of a mega-mining project for over two decades. Significantly, extractive politics in Intag mobilizes a politics of life, a shift from protests of the past that have employed a politics of labor. The politics of life uses a relational worldview where assuring livelihoods goes hand in hand with the reproduction of nature. This has unfolded within the landscape of postneoliberal Ecuadorian politics, where the state has asserted its role in extractive development. President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) rejected neoliberal political economy in favor of a model adapted from the Quechua life philosophy, sumak kawsay (buen vivir or good living) -which prioritizes (non)human well-being. But, the buen vivir political project is at odds with the economic model of the postneoliberal state, neoextractivism –a type of resource nationalism. Considering the importance of communities and the state as negotiators of mega-mining projects under the neoextractivist model, as well the propensity of these two groups to have conflicting objectives, my research follows state-led development programs, from the vantage point of Intag. I ask how are the politics of life used to legitimize neoextractivism? I contend that the legitimacy of the postneoliberal era hinges on buen vivir -an emergent conceptual apparatus. A conceptual apparatus is a purposefully crafted political ideal that congeals a set of objectively desirable values and meanings that justify a political economic model of development, both enabling and inhibiting politics. Intag is a place where two spectral forces -the utopian ideal of buen vivir and the mine that has never been -saturate sociality and politics. It is a place where what it means to live well, and how this can best be achieved, is debated and informs everyday practice. Once a place defined by its remoteness, Intag is exactly the kind of place that the postneoliberal state has sought to bring into its orbit. My exploration of the politics of life traces how meanings of buen vivir are contested, negotiated, and fixed by the postneoliberal state and Inteños.

Keywords: Buen Vivir
Ecuador
Livelihoods
Neoextractivism
Political Ecology
Postneoliberalism
Advisor: Krupa, Chris
The Early Pianoforte School in London’s Musical World, 1785–1800: Technology, Market, Gender, and Style

The late-eighteenth century was a period shaped by curiosity and fast-paced industrial, technological, and social growth in London. Collaborations between musicians and artists were frequent, and the boundary between musical understanding and “natural philosophy” was fluid. While market forces contributed to the popularity of the pianoforte in London, the technological development of the instrument and its multinational professional players performed key roles in the genesis of a London school of piano composition. This dissertation studies major factors that contributed to this evolution in pianism, focusing on matters of technological progress, collaboration, and stylistic revision in professional practice. I contend that a dynamic “early” London pianoforte school flourished from approximately 1785–1800. My goal is to insert new players and contexts into an incipient London-based pianoforte school so as to better understand how the early English piano functioned within its local market during this period. I examine the work associated with a cosmopolitan group of influential pianists, composers, and visual artists who were active in London during the 1780s and 1790s, including Joseph Haydn, Sophia Dussek, Theresa Jansen, and Francesco Bartolozzi. To elaborate further upon the work of these individuals, I study the increasingly innovative and responsive pianos that developed locally. In Chapter 1, I trace the history of the piano in England through Charles Burney’s writings, relevant patents by builders including those of Sébastien Érard, and documents from the Broadwood company archives. Chapter 2 develops our understanding of the English piano’s striking point through the collaborative work of Broadwood and scientists Tiberius Cavallo and Edward Whitaker Gray. Chapter 3 considers the rich evolution of Haydn’s compositional style through connections to London-based pianists Theresa Jansen and Maria Hester Park, and visual artists Francesco Bartolozzi and Thomas Park. Chapter 4 focuses on the short-lived music periodical Pleyel, Corri, and Dussek’s Musical Journal, and considers composer representation and marketing for the London audience in the 1790s. Through this dissertation, I demonstrate that shared stylistic principles and collaborative efforts forged strong connections among piano builders, musicians, and artists within the city’s vibrant urban environment of the late-eighteenth century.

Keywords: Broadwood
eighteenth century
Haydn
London
organology
piano
Advisor: Clark, Caryl
Mechanism of Galactosaminogalactan Biosynthesis and Modification in Aspergillus fumigatus Biofilm Formation

The opportunistic fungal pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus adopts a biofilm mode of growth during infection. The exopolysaccharide galactosaminogalactan (GAG) is essential for A. fumigatus biofilm formation and is a key virulence factor in the murine model of A. fumigatus infection. Biosynthesis of the GAG polymer has been linked to a five-gene cluster reminiscent of bacterial synthase-dependent exopolysaccharide operons. As little is known about the mechanisms of exopolysaccharide synthesis in fungi, the structure and function of three of the proteins encoded by the GAG cluster were investigated. Ega3 and Sph3 were found to be endo-acting glycoside hydrolases active on galactosamine and N-acetylgalactosamine regions of the GAG polymer, respectively. Sph3 has a (β/α)8-barrel fold with a conserved shallow active site groove. Ega3 similarly adopts a (β/α)8-barrel fold but had a much deeper electronegative substrate binding cleft. Whilst Ega3 was found to belong to glycoside hydrolase (GH) family GH114, Sph3 did not belong to an existing GH family and thus GH135 was created around Sph3 and its homologues. These GHs were found to disrupt A. fumigatus biofilms and potentiate some antifungals against A. fumigatus. The third protein, Agd3, has a unique three domain structure with an N-terminal reductase-like fold, a central distorted (β/α)7-fold followed by a small β-sandwich domain. The (β/α)7-fold has low structural and primary sequence similarity to the carbohydrate esterase (CE) 4 family. Agd3 deacetylates oligo-N-acetylgalactosamine in a metal-dependent manner. This domain defines a new carbohydrate esterase family. The N-terminal domain was found to be a novel carbohydrate binding module. Agd3 deacetylation of GAG renders the polymer adherent to multiple surfaces and mediates virulence in the murine model of invasive aspergillosis. The structure and functional characterization of these proteins sheds light on the mechanism of GAG maturation, enriches our understanding carbohydrate active enzymes, and reveals new possibilities for therapeutics against fungal infection.

Keywords: Aspergillus fumigatus
Biofilm
Carbohydrate deacetylase
Exopolysaccharide
Glycoside hydrolase
X-ray crystallography
Advisor: Howell, Lynne
Regulation of CFTR function and stability by phosphorylation and its membrane environment

Cystic Fibrosis is caused by mutations of the gene that codes for Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane conductance Regulator (CFTR), an ATP-Binding Cassette anion channel. The major disease-causing mutation, deletion of phenylalanine at position 508 (F508del), results in misfolding, mistrafficking and loss of CFTR at the cell surface where CFTR normally functions to maintain proper hydration of epithelia. Protein kinase A (PKA) phosphorylation enhances CFTR function at the cell surface. However, not much is known regarding the structural consequences of full-length CFTR upon PKA phosphorylation. Towards this, I developed biophysical methods to study purified full-length CFTR and showed that PKA phosphorylation modifies its overall structure, possibly at the transmission interface between coupling helices and nucleotide binding domains. Channel function studies with disease-causing mutations at the transmission interface further support the role of transmission interface interactions for phosphorylation-mediated channel gating. Recent structural studies have found that PKA phosphorylation causes subtle changes in zebrafish CFTR structure. However, the channel remains closed. We propose that this may be due to the detergent environment of the protein. We developed a novel purification method that maintained CFTR: lipid interactions. We conducted ATPase and iodide efflux assays to show that purified CFTR associated with lipids resulted in significantly higher CFTR activity than purified CFTR in detergent micelles. These experiments suggest involvement of lipids in regulating CFTR function. Potentiator drugs, like ivacaftor, enhance CFTR function at the cell surface. I conducted biochemical experiments to find that high concentrations of ivacaftor non-specifically destabilized F508del-CFTR and other membrane proteins. This non-specific destabilization of ivacaftor appears to be associated with its lipophilicity which disrupts the membrane. This further highlights the importance of lipids for stabilizing and modifying CFTR function in the lipid bilayer. In summary, CFTR function and stability are regulated by PKA phosphorylation and lipids of the membrane environment of CFTR.

Keywords: channel activity
cystic fibrosis
cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator
lipids
phosphorylation
stability
Advisor: Bear, Christine E.
Scramble for Photographs of Empire: Complicating Colonial Visions of the Philippine American War (1899 - 1913)

This dissertation explores how a scramble for photographs of the Philippine American War helped capture a more complicated history of the United States empire in the Philippines from 1898 to 1913; preserving traces of Americans’ emotions, Filipinos’ resistance, and less common sights of colonial violence. As the war in the Philippines faded from American historical consciousness during the twentieth century, a few well-known colonial officials’ ethnographic photographs, aftermath images of dead Filipinos, and cliché phrases such as “civilize ‘em with a krag” or “the water cure” summarized it. In contrast, this dissertation’s case studies extend the work of photo theorists Laura Wexler, Tina Campt and others, to the Philippines, arguing that re-framing colonial representations reveals more complexity in colonial relations, same-sex sexual violence, and Filipino peoples’ resistance or a less overt refusal to accept colonial domination. The first case study re-situates one photograph of dead Filipino soldiers in the broader history of colonial relations on the ground in 1898 and 1899, demonstrating how the image documents same-sex sexual violence and what anti-imperialist Harvard professor of psychology William James denounced as American martial hysterics. Next, the dissertation goes beyond existing histories of photography and the Philippines to argue that many more individuals contributed to a multivalent, layered, visual discourse about the islands during an initial scramble for souvenirs and visual trophies of empire in 1898 and 1899. Looking at how images of the Philippines shifted increasingly towards depictions of progress and the continued need for American governance after 1899, the third case study considers what is often outside the frame of the U.S. government’s preferred depictions of benevolent assimilation. Undermining the social death implicit in racial typing, as Laura Wexler advocates in a different context, the final case study analyzes the colonial uncanny, or the secretly familiar resistance, refusal, and variation in American colonial structure on the ground. Moving beyond traditional analyses of how dominant gazes racialize, sexualize and objectify, this dissertation demonstrates how Americans scramble for photographs of empire created a more complicated visual discourse, recording Americans’ emotions, systemic and continuing violence, as well as different forms of Filipino resistance.

Keywords: Colonial
Photography
Postcolonial
Visual Culture
Advisor: Brown, Elspeth