VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The role of epigenetic modulators on circadian rhythms and metabolism

The earth’s rotation on its axis with a 24-hour period gave rise to circadian rhythms, which originated pervasive biologic fluctuations in gene expression, cellular physiology and whole-organism behaviour. The advancements in technology and culture accentuated behaviours and phenomena that implicated a disruption in the synchronisation between our inner circadian clock and the outer environment. This desynchrony was associated with a deregulated molecular clock and an increased incidence of metabolic disorders. We have identified circadian rhythm enhancers as a potential chronotherapeutic mechanism in tackling the circadian deregulations that could be key in the pathogenesis of these associated metabolic deregulations.
Here, we describe the characteristics and efficacy of bromodomain inhibitors, a novel class of epigenetic modulators, in enhancing the amplitude of mammalian circadian clock, with the aim of improving on the pathophysiologies correlated with dampened circadian rhythms. IBET-762, a selective and potent bromodomain inhibitor, is shown to enhance the expression of several clock genes including Bmal1 and Per2, via BRD4 and Specificity Protein 1 (SP1), a transcription factor with widespread metabolic effects, and impact on metabolic pathophysiology at least partially through SP1.
IBET-762 reduces both glucose uptake and adipogenesis in 3T3-L1 cells, giving rise to the potential of being useful in tackling obesity and diabetes. The drug was further tested in-vivo in a C57BL/6 mouse model of diet-induced obesity, and showed to be efficacious in reducing weight gain and hepatosteatosis. This demonstrates the usefulness of BRD inhibitors in tackling obesity and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). However, IBET-762 also induced a pre-diabetes like phenotype that was not associated to either insulin insensitivity or to β-cell toxicity, but rather to an acute inhibition of several genes involved in glucose metabolism and transport. It is therefore pivotal to further dissect the mechanism of action behind the metabolic effects of IBET-762 and identify the molecular mechanisms and pathways activated, such that one could be tackled independently from the deleterious effects of the others.

Keywords: T2D
obesity
epigenetics
metabolism
circadian rhythms
bromodomain inhibitors
Advisor: Vasudevan, S
Foster, R
The weaponisation of the camera: filmic interventions into (and out of) extraordinary political events

I begin this thesis by exploring the postmodern status of the camera, theory, and audio-visual art in early reactions to 9/11. I outline my theoretical framework: from the concepts of weaponisation and the frame to the responsive eye and reflexive intervention. In Chapters 2 and 3, I offer a genealogy of the ‘weaponised camera’ by showing how Jean-Luc Godard has visibly practiced his own frame-work in his explicitly political films. Beginning with a modernist self-obsession with failing to enact a political event in the 1960s, he moved further into strident Maoism after the failure of May ’68, attempting to immerse himself in collectivist filmmaking. By Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), he was using montage and sustained juxtaposition to force a series of postmodern confrontations with the ‘cinematographic form’ of twentieth-century French history and collective memory.
Chapter 4 traces how the concept of ‘the event’ has developed across academic disciplines and the arts. Chapter 5 considers ethnographic docufiction films by Jean Rouch, Joshua Oppenheimer and Rithy Panh which, through acts of performance and reconstruction, have made reflexive interventions into significant political events in national histories. Each filmmaker stages confrontations with and through ritual, propaganda, trauma, and culturally enforced silences. These films, I argue, are positioned as performative, Austinian ‘film acts’: they reorganise the enduring narrative and ‘documentary’ forms of past events. In turn, they are intended to provoke ‘film events’, which might reorganise cultural understandings of the past. In Chapter 5, I describe how some protesters of the Arab Spring sought to use the distributed technology of the ‘global village’ as a weapon of revolution: not simply to record the event as it happened, but using this mediatisation as a reflexive frame itself, to bring the event into being as a global event and simultaneously as an act of postmodern filmic autoethnography.

Keywords: 9/11
reflexivity
event as concept
Panh
Rouch
militant cinema
film and violence
political cinema
Godard
media and violence
September 11
cinema and violence
Oppenheimer
Arab Spring
Advisor: Due, R
Crafting a continent: Jesuits, Puritans, Franciscans, and the creation of an early American missiology, 1542-1763

Over more than two centuries, Christian missionaries laboured to convert Indians across early America. The effect on Indian individuals, communities, and nations has been emphasised in recent scholarship on the religious encounter; this thesis focuses instead on the reciprocal effects on the missionaries themselves. The religious encounter in early America had profound and varied effects on missionaries in each space that they claimed. Letters, speeches, and publications produced by Jesuits, Franciscans, and Puritans are analysed as discursive spaces through which missionaries interrogated, adapted, and added to the complex of concepts, paradigms and strategies that guided their evangelical endeavour. This thesis traces the subsequent evolution of their respective missiologies in New France, the Spanish borderlands, and New England, a process understood as inextricable from the broader dynamism of Indian and colonial power. Through a deliberate process of manipulation by the missionaries themselves, all three missiologies were localised as early American phenomena, suitable to the colonial spaces that members of each tradition encountered on the continent. Then, from the early-eighteenth century, those who continued to articulate the logic of missionization in each region began expressing common missiological themes, finally forging a continental, early American philosophy of mission. These successful transformations of each missiological tradition sustained missions as institutions promoting imperial-colonial, diplomatic and commercial interests; the conclusions of this thesis therefore necessitate analysing the history of colonialism across the continent as, in part, shaped by the dynamic intellectual response of Jesuits, Franciscans and Puritans to the early American cultural encounter.

Keywords: early America
missionaries
Franciscans
Indians
Puritans
Jesuits
Missiology
Advisor: Hämäläinen, P
The political psychology of issue selection in transnational advocacy networks

Why do international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) expend considerable resources to alleviate some forms of humanitarian crises, while other crises fail to attract similar levels of attention? How can we explain why some humanitarian issues are selected for attention by transnational advocacy networks (TANs) over others? Existing scholarship suggests that issue attributes help determine the advocacy agendas of transnational actors. Issues which fit well with pre-existing national and international political agendas, resonate with accepted transnational norms, or exude a simple causal chain of blame, are putatively conducive to selection. However, explanations emphasising these factors remain without empirical corroboration. Recent empirical studies suggest such factors co-occur with instances of non-selection and that variation in choice outcomes cannot be accounted for through existing explanatory frameworks. This study advances a political psychology approach to the question of issue selection by INGOs. Drawing on insights from behavioural decision research, it empirically tests the proposition that heuristic-led judgment on the part of key decision-makers is a central determinant in the (non-)adoption of issues by INGOs. The proposed explanation is investigated empirically through a mixed-method research design, encompassing case studies of three major INGOs and a conjoint survey experiment with INGO practitioners. The study finds both qualitative and experimental evidence that heuristic-led judgment contributes to choice outcomes across organizational contexts. Additional factors such as access to reliable information, probability of policy impact, and issue coverage by other INGOs, also appear to affect patterns of selection.

Keywords: international relations
heuristics
decision-making
INGOs
selection
Advisor: Caplan, R
Ruggeri, A
'In no time': representations of suspended time in contemporary literature

In consciousness and literature, it is through narrative that meaning is habitually constructed, but in Anglo-American writing of the twenty-first century the relationship between time and meaning is studied, rather than routinely produced. Considering texts in which temporality is of explicit concern, my thesis interrogates how suspended time works at once in opposition and conjunction with narrative, as a being beyond meaning is explored. In representation, suspended time embeds the unseen, unknown, or unrealized within causality, and so forces texts too into suspension. Through metafiction, ekphrasis, intertextuality, and invocation, a lyric temporality is established within prose.
My first chapter reads works by Don DeLillo, Tom McCarthy, and Ben Lerner to consider how suspended time opens the narrativization that consciousness enforces, deferring closure in its recognition of the unknown. Pursuing the ethics to which these authors gesture, my second chapter explores the writing of Ali Smith, in which the plurality of time is consistently revealed through encounters with temporal absence or suspension. In Smith’s fiction individual perceptions of time are relativized; it is an affective mode of meaning-making that succeeds. Discussing works by Denise Riley, Joan Didion, Helen Macdonald, Max Porter and Yiyun Li, my final chapter explores the genre of grief writing, which, prominent within the current period, uncovers the affective potential of suspended time itself. Imagining a disjuncture from time that is shared, the atemporality of grief, and, indeed, of the literary, maintains for these writers the connection between the living and the dead.
Contributing to recent discussions of ‘the contemporary’ and of literature’s affective turn, my conclusion contends that in its representation of suspended time, twenty-first century writing enforces the detemporalization of its reader, promoting an affective mode of interpretation as it enables new ways of being in and being with time.

Keywords: time
affect
contemporary literature
suspended time
Advisor: Marcus, L
Guy, A
On the International Monetary System (IMS): A case of background injustice and parasitic exploitation 

In this thesis I discuss three stylized scenarios of the International Monetary System (IMS): one with floating exchange rates, one with fixed exchange rates and one with closed capital markets. Within the first scenario, I identify two problems of background injustice: the problem of monetary spillovers and the problem of currency speculation. The first problem happens because exchange rates are relative to one another, hence, when the central bank of a country applies monetary policy, it also changes the exchange rate of all other countries vis-à-vis this country. In order to address this problem, I offer a Limited Regressiveness Principle (LRP) and argue for the creation of a global fund. In order to address the second problem, I offer a framework of parasitic exploitation, which includes three conditions of build in mechanisms, vulnerability, and non-proportionality. I argue that the case of currency speculation, is not only a problem of background injustice, but also a case of parasitic exploitation. Then, I discuss the scenario of fixed exchange rates. I consider two stylized but historical cases, the Gold Standard and the Reserve Currency Standard. I also consider a hybrid case, the case of the Eurozone. I argue that the framework of parasitic exploitation can be extended to the stylized fixed scenarios. However, I suggest that both the principles and the responsibilities that arise in the fixed cases are different from those that arise in the general floating case. Finally, I address the case of closed capital markets, or financial autarky, such as the system that existed during Bretton Woods. I argue that a generally open system with embedding institutions - which may include non-extensive capital controls - is better than a completely closed scenario of extensive capital controls, such as the one that existed during Bretton Woods.

Keywords: International Monetary System
Financial Crises
Central Banks
Parasitic Exploitation
Foreign Exchange Market
Background Injustice
Advisor: Laborde, C
Confidence and information seeking in decision making under uncertainty

Confidence and information-seeking are aspects of metacognition that help people make better choices under conditions of uncertainty. However, previous research has found that these metacognitive functions can vary greatly between individuals and can become maladaptively decoupled or decalibrated in psychiatric disorders. This thesis explores the relationship between confidence and information-seeking behaviour when making decisions under uncertainty, and individual differences in these measures.
This work begins with the development of two decision tasks that provide parallel measures of confidence and information-seeking in the domains of perceptual judgment and probabilistic reasoning. I then investigate whether psychiatric dimensions of interest might be reliably associated with certain patterns of confidence and information-seeking. I present data showing that, while trait anxiety tended to be associated with a small underconfidence bias across domains, psychiatric dimensions on the whole fail to be consistently predictive of confidence or information-seeking.
I then proceed to explore specific aspects of confidence and information-seeking. While previous literature and preliminary findings had suggested that people might employ strategies other than information-seeking to manage uncertainty during decision-making, I present results suggesting that participants do not typically engage in time-effective strategies like seeking feedback or opting out of decisions, even when they are available as alternatives to information-seeking.
I then look more closely into the relationship between choice and confidence in the decision process. I report a robust increase in confidence at the point of decision, even after accounting for differences in the objective probability of being correct. After investigating possible mechanisms for this effect, I suggest that the act of committing to a decision evokes a boost in confidence, but that this decision-evoked confidence boost fails to have lasting effects on subsequent confidence, information-seeking, or choices.
Overall, my results suggest that confidence and information-seeking generally help us make more adaptive decisions under uncertainty. The thesis concludes with a brief discussion of the broader implications of the findings for psychiatric and cognitive research.

Keywords: cognitive
information seeking
individual differences
confidence
decision making
metacognition
psychiatric
decision
uncertainty
Advisor: Yeung, N
Clark, D
Probing high energy Higgs bosons using H → bb̄ decays in √s = 13 TeV proton-proton collisions at the ATLAS experiment

This thesis presents a novel study of Higgs boson production using H → bb̄ decays produced with large transverse momentum boosts, with an additional high energy jet in the event, using √s = 13 TeV proton-proton collision data collected by the ATLAS experiment, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 136 ifb. Higgs boson signal estimates were extracted from candidate jet mass spectra using binned likelihood fits. The Higgs boson signal estimate was probed inclusively using Higgs boson candidate jets with pTjet > 250 GeV. The inclusive Higgs boson production cross-sections were examined in a fiducial region defined by Higgs boson pTH > 450 GeV, and differential bins of pTH = [300, 450] GeV; [450, 650] GeV; [650, 1000] GeV; and > 1000 GeV inclusively. As sensitivity was not sufficient to make statistically significant measurements of the Higgs boson cross-section, in all cases 95% CLs limits were set, including a first-time limit set for Higgs bosons with pTH > 1 TeV, σH (pT > 1 TeV) < 74 fb. A differential Z boson signal measurement was also made under the same conditions and compared to theoretical predictions. All results were found to be consistent with Standard Model predictions. Particular emphasis is given to the development and validation of the analysis fit model.

Keywords: Higgs Boson
Experimental Particle Physics
Higgs decay to b quarks
High energy Higgs Boson
inclusive Hbb
High energy limit on Higgs Boson production
ATLAS
Higgs momentum Higgs Boson
H to bb
Hbb
CERN
Advisor: Frost, J
Issever, C
The therapeutic alliance, dropout from psychotherapy and the role of formal feedback in repairing alliance ruptures

The therapeutic or ‘working’ alliance in psychotherapy has consistently been shown to be an important factor in patient outcome from psychotherapy. Poor alliance has been suggested to be a factor in patients dropping out or prematurely terminating therapy. Developing a strong alliance and identifying and resolving any tension or difficulties between therapist and patient, described as therapeutic alliance ‘ruptures’, has been suggested as a means of retaining patients in therapy so that they can derive a benefit from it and as a potential mechanism of change.
The systematic review evaluates the links between the strength of the therapeutic alliance and dropout from individual psychotherapy for adults. A moderate link was found between with stronger alliance being associated with a reduction in the risk of dropout from psychotherapy.
The empirical paper used a Task Analytic design to validate a previously developed model of repairing ruptures in the therapeutic alliance using a ‘formal feedback’ tool to aid patients in giving feedback on the alliance to their therapists and to provide a basis for the dyad to identify, discuss and attempt to resolve ruptures. Dyads were observed to complete the model stages and more model stages being completed was linked to greater observed resolution of ruptures. However, rupture resolution did not appear to link to the session being found more helpful for the patient from either the patient or therapist perspective. Rupture resolution was also not found to link to the overall clinical outcome for patients. The limitations of the study, possible implications for clinical practice and further research are discussed.

Keywords: Dropout in Psychotherapy
Task Analysis
Therapeutic Alliance
Feedback Informed Therapy
Alliance Ruptures
Advisor: Macdonald, J
Cooper, M
Caregivers of intellectually disabled children: a qualitative study of caregivers’ perceptions on educational services in developing areas of China

This research was of concern to the fields of inclusive education and educational equity, specifically investigating caregivers’ perceptions of educational services for their intellectually disabled children in China. The study adopted a constructivist perspective that emphasised the diversity of perceptions and self-constructed understanding of reality as an important information source to learn the social phenomenon. By employing Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and capital, an in-depth understanding of the educational inequality and segregation towards children with intellectual disabilities (ID) was acquired within developing areas of China. Through the use of semi-structured interviews, the study collected perceptions from a purposive sample group of 19 caregivers whose children receive different types of primary education in a prefecture of Henan province. The results showed that almost all the caregivers experienced a challenging process in seeking appropriate education for their children due to limited schooling opportunities, scarcity of educational support, and public stigmas towards disability. These results suggest that the children with ID were disadvantaged in accessing, and benefitting from, formal education, despite their caregivers having sacrificed excessive family capital to improve the situation. Thus, these children and their families require more social support and public awareness to participate in schools and even in society. Caregivers’ perceptions should be taken into account as an indicator of the accessibility and quality of education for future service implementation and improvement.

Keywords: China
Inclusive education
Qualitative research
Special education
Caregivers
RDM2021
Rural areas
Thematic analysis
Interviews
Home schooling
Special education needs and disabilities
RDM
Advisor: Thompson, I
The implementation of digital communication (DC) in parent-teacher partnership in China: teachers’ and parents’ views.

Focus - Two-way communication is at the heart of the Parent-Teacher Partnerships (PTPs) and paves the way for consistent and congruent perspectives and involvement from both parents and teachers. This study aims to investigate how Digital Communication (DC) has been implemented into the current education system in China, according to parents’ and teachers’ views. Specifically, this dissertation analyses (1) both parents’ and teachers’ views of DC using a modified version of the Digital Communication Scale (DCS), (2) how these views of DC are associated with personal characteristics of teachers and parents, and (3) how these views were reflected in three open-ended questions to both. The current study investigates the implications of PTPs guidance and policies and their collaborative DC patterns in China. At the same time, from the perspective of individual characteristics and the contents of DC, this study understood how individuals generate different opinions in DC, thus affecting the efficiency and quality of PTPs.
Research Design - Online surveys were selected as the data collection method, including a Chinese version of the Digital Communication Scale (DCS) and three open-ended questions. The DCS was initially created and examined in Finland, after which exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted, allowing the relevant factorial structure of DCS to be extracted. A Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was specified to associate characteristics of Chinese parents (n = 537) and teachers (n = 149) and the extracted factors. Following the open-ended questions, the qualitative data were coded using inductive coding.
Findings - A four-factor structure of DC elucidated parents’ and teachers’ views on their involvement, partnership, sufficiency of information, and feedback. Parents’ and teachers’ views of DC were overall congruent in their partnerships and positive attitudes towards DC. Gender and attitudes towards the usage of DC were found to be associated with involvement affect respondents’ experience of using DC significantly. The responses to the open-ended questions revealed that both parents and teachers saw DC as a valuable tool for receiving and providing study-related matters.

Keywords: RDM
Parent-teacher partnership
RDM2021
Quantitative research
China
Digital communication
Online questionnaires
Involvement
Advisor: Malmberg, LE