VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Knowing sovereigns: forms of knowledge and the changing practice of sovereign lending

This thesis examines how sovereign lending, i.e. the practice of lending capital to sovereigns, has changed since the early nineteenth century. It tackles this question by investigating how lenders have thought about sovereigns for the past two centuries, focusing on the tools they have used to know and represent them. I argue that there was a critical shift in the early twentieth century in terms of the kinds of knowledge lenders deployed to know sovereigns. This shift differentiates the old sovereign lending from the new. In the old sovereign lending, merchant banking families such as the Rothschilds knew sovereigns through intensely personal relations based on gentility, whereas in the new sovereign lending, joint stock banks, credit rating agencies and international institutions largely came to know sovereigns through statistics. Though difficult to imagine nowadays, the description of sovereigns through quantifiable facts (the original definition of ‘statistics’) was revolutionary for early twentieth century lenders. Despite constituting the origins of sovereign credit ratings, this key shift has been overlooked in all major studies about sovereign debt. The new sovereign lending rose to prominence from the interwar period to the 1970s and now defines our world.
The identification of this crucial shift is based on the development and application of the concept of forms of knowledge. Forms of knowledge refer to enduring ways of knowing and representing the constituent units of the international system used by international practitioners (e.g. diplomats, military strategists, financiers, and international lawyers). Examples of forms of knowledge include, but are not limited to, modern cartography, international treaties, statistics, gentility, and heraldry. The use of this concept is that it leads to a better understanding of how international practitioners and their practices undergo radical changes. In so doing, it provides a firmer empirical grasp on the question of how fundamental discontinuities arise in international relations.

Keywords: Statistics
Gentlemanly capitalism
Bankers
Sovereign debt
International Order
International Relations Theory
Advisor: Keene, E
The actively abjected: a hermenuetics of empowerment in Christian mysticism

This thesis is concerned broadly with purported mystics and how the Roman Catholic Church conceives of them theologically, and treats them in practicality. In exploring the dynamics of power at work when an individual claims to have dialogue with God, I identify a very particular process that occurs, namely active abjection, and illustrate this using examples taken from the writings of various purported mystics. I argue that there is a collection of people—the actively abjected—who occupy a very specific role within the Roman Catholic Church, and that this role has not been recognized. I go on to suggest a way in which they can be understood and respected for the role they play. To do this, I draw upon particular philosophical models of understanding from Hannah Arendt and Julia Kristeva.
I aspire to encourage a deeper and more complicated understanding of the nature of institutionalized oppression, and to offer a reconstructive model for how those who encounter potentially problematic individuals within communities might work and interact with them in a non-oppressive manner. This thesis is a work of Catholic theology in that it offers a theological and philosophical argument for the recognition of a particular role certain individuals play in maintaining the structure and definition of the Catholic Church. But it is also intended as a work of political philosophy. Both Arendt and Kristeva, whose writing I use as a lens to examine a particular phenomenon found in religious communities are theorists in the tradition of political philosophy and my intention is to expand the application of their models.

Keywords: mystical theology
feminist theology
Arendt's action
abject
women mystics
Advisor: Anderson, P
Belief, rationality, and truth

Modern philosophy is often said to privilege rationality over received wisdom, but to some extent this is an ideal which we pursue under a measure of uncertainty. It is not always obvious what rationality requires. Nor is it clear how rationality is to be traded against other ideals. This dissertation seeks to clarify both questions as they pertain to the rationality of belief. The choice of topic is apposite, since many argue that the case of belief illustrates that what is rational and what there is most reason to do is one and the same thing. In particular, so-called evidentialists often argue that to believe what the evidence indicates is both to believe rationally and to believe what one has most reason to believe, since (i) rationality consists in responding to reasons, and (ii) only evidence that p can be a reason to believe that p.

My first objective is to challenge this thesis. I do so by arguing that the class of reasons that rationalise a belief does not coincide with the class of reasons there are to have the belief all things considered. To equate the two classes would be to conflate the psychological issue of how we respond to reasons with the ontological issue of what reasons there are. My case against evidentialism does not depend on pragmatism being true, however. Even if Pascal was wrong to claim that the expected benefit of believing can be a reason to believe, it does not follow that evidentialism is true. Some non-pragmatic form of anti-evidentialism may still be true.

The latter half of the dissertation explores this possibility in greater detail. There I argue that there is at least one class of beliefs which is not subject to common evidentiary strictures. When we use practical reasoning to form intentions about what to do in the future, we typically also form beliefs about what we will do. Yet, those beliefs are not based on evidence about what we will do, I argue. Typically, we do not predict what we do based on what we intend to do. Nor should we. When it is up to us whether we will perform an action, our intentions do to not carry enough weight as evidence that we must use them to predict what we will do. In the last part of the dissertation, I use this point to elucidate how we acquire self-knowledge and how belief relates to truth.

Advisor: Hattiangadi, A
Broome, J
The scholar as scientist: Iurii Tynianov and the OPOIaZ

The present work deals with the literary-theoretical work of the Petrograd Formalists - those who participated in the OPOiaZ in the 1910s and early 1920s - with a focus on that oflurii Tynianov. It attempts to unpack the representation of their literary-theoretical work as 'science' [nauka] by exploring how that category was constructed in dialogue with their evolving conception of literature. It is argued in the first chapter that, for the duration of their project, they conceptualized the 'language of nauka' - and their own prose by association - in accordance with the laws of their theory of language. It is argued in the second chapter that, as the Formalists developed a theory of literary history as an endless succession of 'revolutions' in the period 1919- 24, they tried to make their theorization of that process take a correspondingly revolutionary form, one in which the sciences of nature and those of history would become one. It is argued in the third chapter that, as the Formalists came to theorize the connection between literature and life in the period 1924-30, they practised a new 'type' of nauka in the form of the authorial collection of articles, one in which their own work was historicized in a 'literary' manner. It is concluded that, for the OPOiaZ, nauka came into being as a function of its object: as the Formalists transformed their conception of literature, their realization of nauka was correspondingly transformed. The conclusion then problematizes the categorization of Formalism as a purely 'scientific', extra-'literary' movement, since emphasis is placed on their authorship of that categorization, and raises broader questions about the origin of modem 'literary theory'.

Advisor: Zorin, A
Friendship based on race or race based on friendship? The co-evoluation of friendships, negative ties and ethnic perceptions in Hungarian school classes

This thesis focuses on the dynamic interplay between race and social ties. Even though in sociological studies, race is usually treated as a cause of social segregation, we argue that this is a two-way process. Our approach distinguishes between racial self-identifications and racial perceptions. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on the joint effects of these aspects on the prevalence and emergence of social ties in secondary school communities. The second part investigates social effects on racial perceptions. For the analyses, we take a social networks approach, estimating exponential random graph and stochastic actor-oriented models. First, we take a look at the state of racial segregation in friendships and negative ties within communities, and we investigate the dynamic processes that have led to the described state. We also take endogenous network mechanisms into account. We provide evidence that given an initial state of segregation, reciprocity and clustering can maintain the relative infrequency of cross-race friendships in the group, even without (additional) same-race preference. Further, we find that negative ties describe interracial segregation better than friendships: majority students tend to dislike their minority peers, but no such tendencies were found for friendships. Second, we find that minority students tend to overperceive their friends' similarity to themselves in terms of race. Moreover, there is evidence for social influence: classmates tend to accept each other's, especially their friends', opinions about their peer's race. Altogether, both empirical parts of the thesis suggest a hierarchical relationship between the majority and the minority groups: besides majority students' tendency to exclude their minority peers, those who try befriending majorities - but get rejected by them - are more likely to be perceived as minorities. There are also indications of some minority students showing outgroup preference, while others seem to compete against the majority group. This can contribute to the observed emergence of enmity between minority students.

Advisor: Snijders, T
Jonsson, J
Images, objects and imperial power in the Roman and Qin-Han empires

How and why was imperial power made visually and physically manifest in two similar, contemporaneous megastates – the Roman Principate and Qin-Han China? Framing the Chinese and Roman material within such a question breaks it free from the web of expectations and assumptions in which conventional scholarship almost always situates it. It also builds upon the limited but promising work recently undertaken to study these two empires together in a comparative context. The purpose of this thesis is not to discover similarities and differences for their own sake; but, by discovering similarities and differences, to learn about the nature of imperial authority and prestige in each state. The comparative method compels us to appreciate the contingent – and sometimes frankly curious – nature of visual and artefactual phenomena that have traditionally been taken for granted; and both challenges and empowers us to access higher tier explanations and narratives.
Roman expressions of power in visual terms are more public, more historical- biographical, and more political, while Qin-Han images and objects related to imperial authority are generally more private, generic and ritual in their nature. The Roman material emphasizes the notional complicity of large groups of people – the imperial subjects who viewed, crafted and often commissioned these works – in maintaining and defining the emperor’s power. If the Han emperor's power was the product of complicity, it was the complicity of a small group of family members and courtiers – and of Heaven. These contrasting sets of power relationships connect to a concerted thematic focus, in the case of Rome, on the individual of the princeps; that is, the individual personage and particular achievements – especially military achievements – of the emperor. This focus is almost always taken for granted in Roman studies, but contrasts profoundly with the thematic disposition of Han artefacts of power: these reflect a concentrated disinterest in imperial personality altogether, emphasizing instead the imperial position; that is, both the office of emperor and a cosmic centrality.
While this thesis reveals some arresting contrasts, it also harnesses the dichotomous orientations of Roman and Chinese archaeology to reveal that the conventional understanding of much of this material can be misleading or problematic. Many of the differences in the ways such images are usually interpreted have as much to do with the idiosyncrasies and path dependency of two fields – in short as much to do with the modern viewer – as they do with the images themselves and the traditions that produced them.

Keywords: Rome (Empire)
Imperial studies
Qin shi huang, Emperor of China, 259 B.C.-210 B.C.
Comparative civilisation
Qin Dynasty (China)
Comparative archaeology
Terra-cotta sculpture, Chinese
Art History
Archaeology
Comparative history
Rome
China
Han Dynasty (China)
Advisor: Rawson, J
Smith, R
The atomic structure of pharmaceuticals in solution

Investigations of the structure of indole, cocaine hydrochloride, alprazolam and clonidine hydrochloride in solution were undertaken using a combination of experimental, principally neutron diﬀraction, and computational techniques. This thesis aims to probe the interactions of the hydrophilic and hydrophobic groups of each these molecules with their solvent environment, drawing conclusions about how their interaction with solvent molecules and their conformation in solution are related to their biological function. Cocaine, alprazolam and clonidine are of particular interest because of their ability to cross the blood-brain barrier. Investigation of the solvation of indole, the functional group of the amino acid tryptophan, in methanol/water solutions highlighted the role played by electrostatic interactions between the benzene ring of indole and its environment in dictating the location of tryptophan in the membrane bilayer. By studying the hydration of cocaine in aqueous solution, a possible mechanism explaining the ability of cocaine to cross the blood-brain barrier in its protonated form, which involves shielding of its hydrophilic groups through a water mediated internal hydrogen bond, was proposed. The preferentially solvated regions of the benzodiazepine alprazolam in methanol/water solutions indicated that these regions coincide with the location of bridging water molecules in the crystal structure of alprazolam bound to the BRD4 protein, which regulates transcription of oncogenes. A similar analysis of the solvation of clonidine in methanol/water solutions supported hypotheses relating to the mechanism of action of clonidine occurring via binding to adrenoceptors rather than imidazoline receptors. The work presented in this thesis demonstrates the importance of determining the structure of biomolecules in solution in gaining a comprehensive understanding of their behaviour in vivo.

Advisor: McLain, S
Identifying novel substrates of salt-inducible kinase 2

Salt-inducible kinase 2 (SIK2) has previously been identified as a potential therapeutic target in high-grade serous ovarian cancer. Depletion of SIK2 sensitises ovarian cancers to paclitaxel treatment both in vitro and in xenograft models. In patients, increased tumour SIK2 expression is associated with paclitaxel resistance and correlates with increased risk of cancer progression following paclitaxel treatment. Although high-grade serous tumours are highly chemosensitive, 80 - 90% of patients with advanced stage disease eventually relapse due to recurrent chemotherapy-resistant disease, so there is a pressing need for novel therapeutic targets. Inhibition of SIK2 is a plausible strategy to augment existing chemotherapy in ovarian cancer, but signalling downstream of SIK2 has not been well studied.
Here, I present the optimisation and results of a chemical genetic screen to identify novel SIK2 substrates to facilitate its development as a therapeutic target. The screen used a SIK2 gatekeeper mutant engineered to utilise a 'bulky' A&ast;TPγS analogue to specifically label its substrates in lysates from an ovarian cancer cell line. A covalent capture approach was then used to isolate labelled peptides for identification by tandem mass spectrometry. Between four independent screen experiments, 73 putative substrate proteins were identified, 18 of which were present in multiple replicates.
SIK2 was found to phosphorylate the p85α regulatory subunit of PI3 kinase at S154, resulting in activation of the PI3K/AKT signalling pathway. Furthermore, PI3K/AKT signalling was stimulated in ovarian cancer cells upon incubation with primary adipocytes extracted from the omentum, a key site of ovarian cancer metastasis, in a SIK2 dependent manner. Finally, overexpression of wild-type SIK2, but not a kinase-inactive mutant, in ovarian cancer cell lines promoted tumour growth and metastasis in a xenograft model. Together, this evidence suggests that in addition to its role in chemotherapy resistance, SIK2 also promotes the establishment of omental metastases in ovarian cancer.

Keywords: Kinase-substrate mapping
Ovarian cancer
Chemical genetics
PIK3R1
p85a
HGSOC
SIK2
Advisor: Ahmed, A
McMichael, A
Ezra Pound's theory of language

This thesis examines Ezra Pound's linguistic theory in relation to literary, philosophical and academic treatments of language in the modernist period. Pound is a central figure in the history of twentieth century literature, and his poetic career marks a sustained engagement with questions of how language can register thought, how it can transmit and communicate images, and, ultimately, how language is able to mediate between artists (or, indeed, language speakers as a whole) and the world. I read Pound's statements on language against the disciplinary history of linguistics, assessing the extent to which his positions are representative of his period, or, conversely, the ways in which they form part of an idiosyncratic worldview. My approach is broadly historical. I begin with Pound's educational background, and move chronologically through his career to the concluding passages of his Cantos. I investigate the extent to which Pound’s critical writing engages with new departures taking place in linguistics in the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century. The scope of my investigation ranges from the legacy of nineteenth century philology to the approaches taken by William Dwight Whitney, Michel Bréal, and Ferdinand de Saussure, to name but a few, in focusing linguistic scholarship on synchronic study of language as function in the early twentieth century, to Franz Boas's and Edward Sapir's studies in the relationship between language and culture between 1910 and 1939. In situating Pound in relation to the history of linguistics as a discipline, I argue that his work asks some of the period’s most apposite questions about language and culture, even if his conclusions differ from the dominant academic positions of the time.

Keywords: Linguistics
Ezra Pound
Language
Advisor: Beasley, R
A mixed methods study of children's social workers' decision-making relating to families headed by parents with intellectual disabilities

People with intellectual disabilities (ID) have faced prejudice throughout history. The evolution of human and civil rights particularly pertaining to individuals with disabilities led to dramatic revision of governmental policy. People with ID are better supported in many areas of their lives. However, as parents, they experience disproportionately high rates of child removal compared to other groups. A three-stage mixed methods approach was used to investigate decision-making by children’s social workers (CSWs) in England relating to cases concerning the children of parents with ID (PWID). The aim was to identify the components of decision-making and formulate an empirically-based theory of how safeguarding concerning the children of PWID is considered and addressed. Data was collected from 33 serious case reviews involving children of PWID, a modified factorial survey with 191 participating CSWs, and a series of focus group discussions with CSWs. Qualitative data was analysed using the Framework Method and the Constant Comparison Method, and the quantitative data was fitted into a generalised ordinal logistic regression model. The findings indicate that a range of factors contribute to decision-making. Families often presented with multiple vulnerabilities rather than ID alone and had complex support needs. Factors featuring to various degrees in decision making include availability of time, specialist resources, and professional expertise; parental engagement and their wider social and familial relationships; and children’s resilience and the presence and readiness of their own support and safeguarding structures. The pertinence of parental ID (PID) to CSW assessment appeared to be relative to the other characteristics of a child safeguarding case. In safeguarding scenarios where PID was accompanied by less risky factors, PID increased the likelihood of CSWs making an assessment of higher risk. Where PID presented alongside more overtly risky factors, it did not contribute significantly to a higher assessment of risk. The study concludes that discriminatory practice by CSWs towards PWID does not appear to be a direct factor in the removal of children.

Keywords: mixed methods
public health
intellectual disability
parenting
Advisor: Kaye, J
Gray, R