VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Rebels, Wanderers, and Castaways: Characterizing Small Social Groups in the Literature of Empire, 1849-1914

This project uses pivotal texts belonging to several nineteenth-century literary subgenres—adventure fiction, school stories, the historical novel and spy fiction—to argue that literary representations of small social circles create distinct narrative shapes and modes of characterization. The small groups that shape these texts generate an ambivalent dynamism of small circles that offers modes of resisting, renegotiating or extending models of authority in the age of empire. While studies of the literature of empire often focus on the figure of the solitary “imperial man” or the consolidation of large imperial bureaucratic systems, the scalar scope of this project considers what lies in between. While the Bildungsroman and the love-plot dominate accounts of nineteenth-century narrative trajectories, small group narratives structure the shape of key genres concerned with empire-building or empire-breaking. The groups I analyze include the castaways of the Robinsonade adventure in Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes (1852); the schoolboy tribes in the school fiction of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Tom Brown at Oxford (1861) and the stories comprising Rudyard Kipling’s The Complete Stalky Co. (1897-1929); the quadrangle of lovers and friends in Charlotte Brontë’s historical romance Shirley (1849); and the revolutionary circles of Joseph Conrad’s spy novel Under Western Eyes (1911). The small group lends itself to a narrative form in which the character of imperial culture is debated and renegotiated. The interlocking metaphors of kinship and friendship in small-group narratives emphasize the inextricability of individuals from the social. I show how the representations of social interactions within groups are used to challenge racial hierarchies, ideals of national character, and individual agency. Rather than hierarchical patterns of imperial cultural transmission, my readings find that, even in pro-imperial texts, the small group establishes private codes of conduct that run alongside or even against the rules of larger social organizations. The narrative representation of a group’s ability to create networks with other groups models the process of creating cultural change (or, in some cases, maintaining cultural stasis). My analyses demonstrate that the small group form articulates the complexities of governance within imperial space.

Keywords: character
empire
kinship
networks
small social groups
Advisor: Schmitt, Cannon
Melancholy Utopia: Loss and Fantasy in Contemporary American Literature and Film

My project examines sites of social and psychic resistance to forfeiting loss in contemporary literature, film, and philosophy. I call these textual, cinematic, and performative spaces of resistance melancholy utopia. Working at the intersection of affect theory, queer studies, and psychoanalysis, I argue for the utopian potential in the protracted grieving of melancholia. The pathologization of grief in contemporary Western culture proceeds from the incessant demand for productivity inherent to late-stage capitalism: extended mourning is unproductive and economically inefficient, an emotional nuisance. Therefore, I focus on the violence that is intrinsic to the temporal demands made on mourning and argue that there is an innate counterhegemonic impulse in the melancholic’s steadfast grief. The melancholic subject resists the violent injunction to “move on” from her sorrow and creates instead an affective utopia that allows him or her to experience his or her pain and new forms of thinking. By focusing on post-1945 literature and film, I chart the “ugly” affect of melancholia and the contemporary salience of utopian dreaming. Although the authors and directors through whose work I develop the concept of melancholy utopia are otherwise diverse, they share a preoccupation with the relationship between loss and fantasy. My first chapter interrogates critical analyses of grief (Jacques Derrida), failure and lack (Judith Halberstam; Jacques Lacan), queer futurity (Lee Edelman), and utopia (José Muñoz). My next three chapters chart melancholy utopia and the alternative kinship relations it fosters in the kitchens of the American South (Carson McCullers; Harmony Korine), in the literary archive (David Foster Wallace), and in New Queer Cinema (Jennie Livingston; Sean Baker). Each chapter illustrates melancholy utopia as the nexus of pain and hope in modern grief. My project thus has broader implications for rethinking the discursive limits of kinship, love, and ethical fidelity in our contemporary moment.

Keywords: Grief
Melancholia
Queer Theory
Utopia
Advisor: Ruti, Mari
Salih, Sara
The Construction and Transformation of Socialist Space in the Planned Cities of Stalinstadt and Sztรกlinvรกros

This dissertation explores and compares the social history of two towns named for Joseph Stalin during the 1950s in Eastern Europe. Stalinstadt in the German Democratic Republic and Sztálinváros in Hungary were new towns built along similar principles in the vicinity of large iron combines. As representational spaces of state socialism and “Stalinism” these towns presented, beside many similarities, a number of distinct features which are the result of different understandings and implementations of socialism throughout the region. Histories of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have acknowledged such distinctions and dismissed the idea of a uniform Soviet bloc as early as the 1970s. However, a comparative social history of these two “socialist cities” named for Joseph Stalin has not yet been written. The study consists of two parts. While the first chapter delves into the official, public and private memory of these two towns, the subsequent four chapters discuss the social history of Stalinstadt (1953 to 1961) and Sztálinváros (1951 to 1961) and explore four major spheres of everyday life under state socialism: the public sphere, the sphere of work, the sphere of leisure and the private sphere. These spheres have acquired new meanings under state socialism: hybrid spheres like public or secret privacy or private(ized) publicity render the public-private dichotomy used to describe Western societies problematic; a heavily politicized sphere of work and an equally ideology-laden sphere of leisure render a reconsideration of the meaning of work and free time under state socialism necessary. This comparative social history of Eisenhüttenstadt and Dunaújváros, as the two towns are named today, is thus also intended to contribute to the further developing of methodological tools used in the analysis of Eastern European socialist societies during the second half of the 20th century.

Keywords: Socialism
socialist cities
social planning
Stalinstadt
Sztรกlinvรกros
urban space
Advisor: Lahusen, Thomas
New Woman Sympathies: The Affective Innovations of Fin-de-SiĂ¨cle Feminist Fiction

This dissertation argues that the late-Victorian construct of the “New Woman” was integral to the development of a previously unrecognized literary and historical form of sympathy. Examining contemporaneous discussions of evolution, art, and affect alongside New Woman fiction, I explore how fin-de-siècle feminist authors uncoupled sympathy from essentialist understandings of femininity in order to align their heroines with more expansive forms of selfhood. This new sympathetic subjectivity was flexible rather than biologically fixed, socially directed rather than limited to the home, and imaginative and unorthodox rather than defaulting to normative familial allegiances. My first chapter reads Hester, the New Woman heroine of Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage, in relation to Edward Carpenter’s theory of the gender malleability and sympathetic elasticity of the intermediate sex. I argue that Hester’s fluctuation between “masculine” and “feminine” dispositions redirects her sympathies from circumscribed domesticity to wider possibilities of aesthetic and social commitment. Chapter two situates Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins alongside Vernon Lee’s concept of aesthetic empathy, which builds on William James’s embodied theory of emotion, to assert that corporeal responses to art can extend one’s sympathies. I suggest that when Grand’s Angelica cross-dresses as a boy, her newfound physical mobility and aesthetic invigoration lead to vitalizing sympathies antithetical to the imperative of feminine self-denial. Tracking another relationship between sympathy and art, chapter three shows how Mabel E. Wotton’s “The Fifth Edition” undermines the Victorian conflation of a supposedly imitative female sympathy with forms of literary derivation such as plagiarism. Instead, Wotton casts the transpersonal feelings of her female author figure as a creative force. The final chapter examines how Mona Caird’s Daughters of Danaus draws on post-Darwinian concepts such as atavism and ancestral memory to uphold inter-temporal sympathies, which enable its New Woman, Hadria, to transcend narrowly biological notions of sympathetic descent. Repurposing Victorian theories of the evolutionary diffusion of sympathy, these authors position their New Woman heroines as the harbingers of a more capacious affective age. This project thus illuminates how New Woman authors supplanted the fundamentally “feminine” feeling that constrained nineteenth-century women, reconfiguring sympathy as gender hybridic, socially expansive, and ultimately transformative.

Keywords: Mabel E. Wotton
Mary Cholmondeley
Mona Caird
New Woman
Sarah Grand
sympathy
Advisor: Seitler, Dana
The New Medical Model: Chronic Disease and Evidence-based Medicine

In the traditional medical model, physicians cure acute diseases using knowledge from the basic biomedical sciences. With the rise of chronic disease and evidence-based medicine (EBM) in the second half of the Twentieth Century, ‘the new medical model’ emerged. In the new medical model, physicians prevent or manage chronic diseases using the principles of EBM. Chronic diseases and EBM have created a host of daunting problems for modern medicine. In this thesis dissertation, my Central Aim is a philosophical analysis of chronic disease and of EBM, especially concerning treatment and prevention. I also maintain a Central Thesis: many practical problems in chronic disease care and in EBM are intimately connected to conceptual, metaphysical and epistemic problems. The practical problems include: reductionism; fractured care; multifactorialism; the growing burden of chronic diseases; treatment effect heterogeneity, treatment futility and treatment harm; cookbook medicine; the tyranny of aggregate outcomes; RCT worship; unrepresentative trials; and multimorbidity. The philosophical problems I explore are the following. In Chapter 2, I examine the nature of chronic diseases and advance a metaphysical account in which chronic diseases are bodily properties. In Chapter 3, I re-examine existing models of disease classification and argue for a new descriptive model (the ‘constitutive model’) as well as a new guiding principle for disease prevention (‘the monomechanism ideal’). In Chapter 4, I develop a general account of why mechanistic models often fail to predict the results of medical interventions. In Chapter 5, I reconstruct the standard model of prediction in medicine, the ‘Risk Generalization-Particularization (Risk GP) Model’. In Chapter 6, I develop a theory of causal inference in comparative group studies that illuminates the roles of randomization, confounders and causes. Finally, in Chapter 7 I show why EBM’s preferred approach to generalizing trial results, ‘simple extrapolation’, is a deeply problematic solution to the problem of extrapolation. Throughout the ongoing discussion, we indeed find that many practical problems in modern medicine are tangled up with philosophical problems. It will require both medical and philosophical wisdom to unravel them.

Keywords: chronic disease
epistemology
evidence-based medicine
metaphysics
philosophy of medicine
Advisor: Upshur, Ross E.G.
Infrastructures of Critique: Art and Visual Culture in Contemporary Beijing (1978-2012)

This dissertation is a story about relationships between artists, their work, and the physical infrastructure of Beijing. I argue that infrastructure’s utilitarianism has relegated it to a category of nothing to see, and that this tautology effectively shrouds other possible interpretations. My findings establish counter-narratives and critiques of Beijing, a city at once an immerging global capital city, and an urban space fraught with competing ways of seeing, those crafted by the state and those of artists. Statecraft in this dissertation is conceptualized as both the art of managing building projects that function to control Beijing’s public spaces, harnessing the thing-power of infrastructure, and the enforcement of everyday rituals that surround Beijinger’s interactions with the city’s infrastructure. From the spectacular architecture built to signify China’s neoliberal approaches to globalized urban spaces, to micro-modifications in how citizens sort their recycling depicted on neighborhood bulletin boards, the visuals of Chinese statecraft saturate the urban landscape of Beijing. I advocate for heterogeneous ways of seeing of infrastructure that releases its from being solely a function of statecraft, to a constitutive part of the artistic practices of: Song Dong (宋冬b. 1966), Cao Fei (曹斐b. 1978), Lu Hao (卢昊b. 1969) and Ning Ying (宁瀛b. 1959) where it is reconfigured as a space of critique. Structured around four typologies, I begin with roads and Ning’s films where the outdated roads refuse to keep pace with the rise in private car ownership. From traffic, I move to Song’s trash based works that make visible the contemporary buying habits of Beijingers in contrast to earlier state policies of frugality and recycling. Then, I consider the migrant workers whose labour is building the city, whose multitudes the state strives to conceal, and whose bodies artists exploit as a medium. Lastly, from embodied practices and spaces, I excavate the buried fiber optic networks that produce the immateriality of the Internet to discuss how Cao’s online practice parodies China’s rapacious urbanization predicated on the real estate market. Iconic buildings of contemporary China colonize her works, but instead of being aesthetically pleasing monuments to the global contemporary, they are a critical commentary on state policies that monetize collectively owned land.

Keywords: Beijing
Contemporary Art
Urban Studies
Advisor: Yue, Meng
Finite Difference Methods in Imaging and Inverse Problems

This thesis establishes a mathematical toolbox for numerical difference (ND) approximation that can be applied in numerous imaging problems such as restoration and feature detection. The proposed framework is based on integrating the interpolating power polynomials with maximally-linear-flat design methods to regulate the desired ND transfer functions in Fourier domain. Variety of filters are extracted that are capable of addressing different orders of differentiation, accuracies, and cut-off frequency parametrization. The numerical stability of the designed coefficients are highly robust through different filter orders. The second phase of this thesis studies a wide range of imaging applications that utilize the proposed ND filters to avoid unnecessary complexities in practical designs. One of the main applications is studied over the total variation (TV) regularization, which employs functional derivatives to regulate problems in image restoration. We propose to approximate the TV norm space by means of the latter ND filters. Proper mathematical foundations are presented to understand the performance of the TV models in different signal transitions. In particular, we focus on de-noising and compressed video sensing applications and illustrate with a number of experiments to study the impact of alternative ND methods. A proper convex minimization algorithm is proposed to utilize the latter filters to recover images from their degraded measurements. Furthermore, the problem of optical flow in computer vision is considered in this thesis. A comparative study is represented over the well-known taxonomy that links lowpass ND design to the gradient constancy constraints and avoid pre-processing steps for image smoothing. Curvature estimation and edge detection problems in imaging are also studied to modify the pertinent feature estimation from noisy sampling. The experimental evaluations on selected imaging problems outperform the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Keywords: feature detection
FIR filter design
image processing
inverse problems
numerical differentiation
total variation
Advisor: Plataniotis, Konstantinos N.
Three Essays on the Penalty Doctrine

The penalty doctrineâ that rule of contract law that a clause requiring payment of a penalty in case of breach will not be enforcedâ is a riddle of contract theory. It seems to up-end the primacy of freedom of contract over judicial imposition. In three essays, I consider three ways to understand the doctrine: as proscribing unconscionability, as requiring good faith, and as enforcing the courts' policy on remedies. Each approach fails, and I connect these failures to contract law's structure. In order to understand the way the penalty doctrine straddles the border between freedom and regulation of contract, we must take a step backward into a theoretical stance that encompasses both. A relational theory of the self offers such a stance. This thesis ends with the suggestion that relational theory is able to synthesize the dualisms and boundaries that the penalty doctrine defines.

Keywords: Contract Law
Feminist Legal Theory
Good Faith
Relational Theory
Remedies
Unconscionability
Advisor: Valcke, Catherine
Mapping the Assembly of Muslim Exceptionality and Exceptional Muslims in Colonial Modernity. Ismaili Muslim Encounters through Discourses, Bodies and Space in the Canadian Colonial Nation

What is produced through the encounters with specific “modern Muslims” in the Canadian colonial nation state? In the last decade in Canada there have been efforts to engage in a demarcation between Muslims and other racialized groups in order to define some bodies as part of the nation whilst others outside of the national imaginary. This is particularly important in the nation-building project of Canada in retaining a tolerant, liberal and multiculturally celebrated society. This critical feminist ethnography makes visible the encounters and present economies of sociopolitical currents in which the Ismailis, as a Muslim community and gendered ethnicized bodies, move and animate in Canada as a settler colonial race formation as well as in a broader geography of Muslim social and cultural politics. It is in the constitutions and movements of their collective subjectivities as a religious community and in their ethnicized gender, race, and class difference that they locate and engage in interlocking systems of power rooted in nation, empire, colonialism, modernity, and religion. This thesis aims to show that in order to make sense of Ismaili encounters it is necessary to map multiple pasts and multiple presents, which they are part of and that shape them. Different from most studies on the Ismailis in Canada, I also place Ismailis’ entrance and settlement in Canada within a broader dynamic of colonial power and management of racialized peoples and within current shaping of Muslims as racial constructs. This thesis argues that Ismailis are becoming Muslims of “exceptionality.” First, through their high level public encounter with the colonial settler Canadian nation state; second through their intersecting encounters with other Muslims and non-Muslims in Canada; and third in their encounters with each other as Afghan, Pakistani, and Indian Ismailis. These three encounters intervene the discourse of pluralism of which the Ismailis are becoming advocates and Canada its global exemplar. It is through seeing what is produced between these “bodies” in specific moments of their meeting in Canada that, bodily, spatial and discursive practices of social relationship making emerge. These show the paradoxical outcomes of embodying modern coloniality and Muslim exceptionality.

Keywords: Muslims
Canada
Multiculturalism
Ethnicity/Race
Gender
Pluralism
Modernity
Exceptionality
Advisor: Ruben, Gaztambide-Fernandez Dr.
Equity and Community Art Education in the University: The Challenges, Possibilities, Implications of Learning in A Littoral Zone (A Critical Arts-informed Case Study)

This critical, arts-informed case study examines how issues of equity emerge in the case of a community-arts certificate offered at a large urban Canadian university. A combination of arts-informed (poetry, micro-narratives, still/moving photography) and conventional qualitative methods of data collection, analysis, and representation is used with a focus on case study as storytelling for social justice. Community art has emerged as a relatively new credentialized field for teaching, practice, and research within the university/art school in Canadian contexts. Community arts courses in post-secondary settings often attempt to integrate collaborative grassroots and/or activist arts practices and initiatives for social justice into the context of the academy. In response, social justice arts practitioners outside the academic context have voiced concerns about access and credentialism within community-engaged art, and fine arts educators within the academy have raised questions about the artistic quality, rigor, and evaluation of practices that resist traditional disciplines, canons, and conceptions of art. This study explores how one particular community art certificate contributes to debates about legitimacy and equity in the fine arts and arts education: “What is art and who makes it? Where and why does art happen? How should art be cultivated?” The metaphor of a littoral zone is used throughout to examine the certificate as a liminal space that oscillates between different disciplinary paradigms, pedagogical approaches, and ways of knowing, being and doing. The research examines how issues of equity emerge in this case and how strategies that support equity are embraced (possibilities) or resisted (challenges) within the certificate and within the University’s cultures, practices and structures. A selection of the sites of learning (university, classroom, practica), relationships (interdisciplinary, institutional/organizational, interpersonal) and experiences (students) that the certificate embodies is examined. The research provides insight into how this particular story might address and intervene in the dominant conventions and relations of fine arts practice in Canada as well as contributing to discussions and movements for equity in Canadian post-secondary fine arts education and community-engaged arts practices.

Keywords: Art Education
Arts Research
Community Engagement
Equity
Social Justice
Storytelling
Advisor: Gagne, Antoinette