VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Country of Origin as a Modifier of the effect of Generation and Length of Residence on the Mental Health Outcomes of Immigrants to Canada

In this thesis I study the mental health trajectory of the children of immigrants and adult immigrants to Canada. I argue for a reorientation of the study of immigrant adaptation to a more systematic recognition of the influence of country of origin in the migration process. I reexamine the study of the adjustment of the children of immigrants over generation and adult immigrants with time in the host county by arguing that the socioeconomic fit between country of origin and country of destination defines and shapes the adaptation process across generations and over time. In Chapter 2, coauthored with Blair Wheaton, we use a sample of children in Toronto, Canada, and demonstrate that generational differences in the mental health of children occur only in families from countries of origin at the lowest levels of economic development. In Chapter 3, I use the same data to examine the mental health trajectory of married immigrant men and women by country of origin. Results show a clear pattern of mental health trajectory, especially, among those from low GNP countries of origin. But unlike the prediction that those from the most distinct origins than the host country would benefit from initially better mental health than the reference group, which dissipates with time in the host country, results show that these immigrants initially experience worse mental health than the native born that follows a J-shape evolution with increase in length of residence (LOR) in Canada. Finally, in Chapter 4, I utilize longitudinal data to examine the mental health trajectory of adults to three metropolitan cities in Canada. Again, results show a clear pattern of mental health change, specifically among one group of immigrants: those from low GNP countries of origin. In this chapter, I find that whereas age at immigration matters in the relationship between LOR and log rate of alcohol consumption in the past week, it does not affect the relationship between LOR and the log rate of depression among adult immigrants to Canada. Each chapter is a free-standing paper that constitutes a contribution to the field of immigration and mental health.

Keywords: Mental Health
Immigration
Gross National Product
GNP
Economic development
Children of immigrants
Family conflict
Length of residence
Generation
Conditional adaptation
School Involvement
Internalizing problems
Externalizing problems
Depression
Alcohol consumption
Conditional coding
Growth curve models
Multiple imputation
Stress process model
Stressors
Mastery
Perceived social support
National population health survey
Advisor: Wheaton, Blair
The Stones of Cumbria

Gosforth, in the English province of Cumbria, is home to a group of tenth-century sculptures that are among the most intricate and best-preserved examples of Anglo-Scandinavian monumental stone carving. These sculptures are essential for appreciating the complex and rich culture that developed in the late first millennium in northern England. This thesis offers a detailed analysis of the Gosforth sculptural group through multiple facets of its construction, design, and location to gain a broader understanding of the role of public sculpture in the unsettled but dynamic regions of Viking England. The complexity of Anglo-Scandinvian sculpture is examined first through an archaeological and material reassessment that reveals the method of the monuments’ construction and further supports the attribution for most of the sculptures to a single artist, whose craftsmanship, composition, and style match works across northern England, several of which were previously unattributed to him. This corpus expands our understanding of at least one professional early medieval artist and enables us to refine the general timeline of sculptural production in England. This artist sculpted in support of a new Anglo-Scandinvian elite, who adopted the local practice of ornamenting carved crosses but consciously adapted the iconography to reflect and reaffirm their otherness. By referencing one another, the sculptures forged and reflected the complex process of mutual acculturation and competition among communities and served as fixed spatial and mental foci in the Viking Age settlement of northern England. This thesis illuminates the Gosforth sculptures as markers of the distinct tenth-century Anglo-Scandinavian culture through a holistic examination of the sculptural group, their historical community, and their broad cultural context, redefining Cumbria as a bastion of the Danelaw where some of the greatest public works of pre-Norman England still stand, thus allowing us more accurately to understand the forces that shaped the English nation.

Keywords: medieval
sculpture
Cumbria
Insular
Viking
Anglo-Saxon
Gosforth
Advisor: Cohen, Adam S
Schooling in the Age of Austerity: Public Education, Youth, and Social Instability in the Neoliberal City

This dissertation examines the dynamics of “security” and “insecurity” in U.S. public schooling within the context of neoliberal urbanism and austerity. It argues that the entrenched problems confronting urban public schools today can be attributed largely to systemic failure—a toxic mixture of global economic change and volatility, profiteering and corruption, stunted imagination, and misguided policies, values and priorities. This has contributed to deepening material insecurity and inequality in the urban sphere and the erosion of social commitments to public schools and young people, especially the most disadvantaged and vulnerable. This thesis analyzes these forces through an ethnographic case study in a neighborhood and public high school in Chicago: Ellison Square and Ellison High School (EHS). It asks: What are the pragmatic and imaginative limits of security in urban public schooling in a moment of escalating economic and social dislocation? Through the perspectives of those most affected, namely youth and their teachers, it documents the contradictions and effects of educational privatization, disinvestment, commercialization of curriculum, and the rise of a militarized culture of policing and securitized containment in urban schools and neighborhoods. It argues that these processes represent forms of enclosure that are undermining the democratic and ethical purpose of public schools and thereby making the daily lives and future of young people ever more insecure and precarious. Drawing inspiration from the perspectives of young people and their teachers, the thesis ultimately advocates for an educational vision that locates public schooling not as a commodity valued primarily for its role in shoring-up technical economic and military demands, but as a commons—a site critical to developing human security, economic justice and democratic life.

Keywords: neoliberal schooling
youth
security and securitization
Advisor: Gallagher, Kathleen
In Manuscript and Print: The Fifteenth-century Library of Scheyern Abbey

This dissertation explores the library of Scheyern Abbey through religious, artistic, bibliographical, and historical paths in order to articulate more clearly the history of book production and library growth during the revolutionary “book age” of the fifteenth century. I have reassembled the now scattered fifteenth-century books from the monastery and examined the entire collection to show how one institution adapted to the increasing bibliographic requirements of the period, first through manuscript and then manuscript and print together. Two sets of library shelfmarks from the fifteenth century, unrecorded until now, physically represent attempts at ordering the Scheyern collection and disregard any differentiation between manuscript and print, proving how the books were utilized by their contemporary audience. In the fifteenth century, Scheyern Abbey subscribed to the so-called Melk Reform, a monastic reform movement that emphasized literacy and the care of books as one of its primary elements. The introduction of the Melk Reform inspired Scheyern’s local book production, which shows a diverse system of both highly trained scribes and many anonymous scribes who worked on individual books as part of their round of monastic chores. The connections established between member monasteries of the reform brought Scheyern into contact with commercial Augsburg book producers, especially Hainrich Molitor, who produced several large and lavish manuscripts for the monastery. Importantly, he introduced Scheyern to other book producers in Augsburg, including illuminators, printers, and binders, who continued to have an impact on Scheyern production and the growth of the library through the end of the century. Scheyern was also an epicenter of Bavarian dynastic propaganda, because their foundational history as the original house-cloister of the ruling Wittelsbach dukes was visually marked around the monastery and textually deployed to other monasteries in the region through the Scheyern Fürstentafel. The unification of book historical and art historical concerns herein allows for a clearer and deeper examination of a fifteenth-century library than heretofore attempted, and this examination reveals important characteristics of fifteenth-century library development necessary to fully understand the multivalent contexts of historical book collections.

Keywords: printing
libraries
manuscripts
early modern
Advisor: Cohen, Adam S.
The Positioning and Function of Bazooka Polarity Landmarks

Epithelial sheets line the surfaces of the body and our organs, acting as semi-permeable barriers between the internal and external environment. Epithelial polarity is critical for epithelial function. In Drosophila, epithelial polarity is established at the onset of embryogenesis by a network of polarity, cytoskeletal, and junctional complexes. The scaffold protein Bazooka (Baz; mammalian partitioning-defective (PAR)-3), localizes to the site of adherens junction (AJ) assembly, where it acts as an early polarity landmark to position downstream AJ components. My work addressed how Baz positions AJ components, and how Baz is localized and positioned within the apicolateral region. The focus of my first study was to understand how Baz affects AJ assembly and what precursors were involved. The quantification of Baz and AJ components in combination with a photobleaching analysis suggested that early AJs are subdivided into Baz clusters and cadherin/catenin clusters with independent protein numbers and dynamics. Consistent with this idea, we identified cadherin/catenin clusters forming between apical microvilli. The Baz clusters appear to engage these cadherin-catenin clusters to assemble early AJs. For my second project, I investigated how Baz is recruited to the plasma membrane (PM) during late embryogenesis. I performed a structure-function analysis to determine the importance of each identified Baz interaction domain in regards to its localization and function in the Drosophila embryonic ectoderm. I found that a multifaceted membrane association mechanism localizes Baz to the apical circumference. Although none of the Baz protein domains are essential for cortical localization, I determined that each contributes to cortical anchorage in specific ways. I proposed that the redundancies involved may provide plasticity and robustness to Baz polarity landmarks. For my third project, I identified the coupling of two mechanisms that remove Baz from the basolateral region of the cell. As cells first form during cellularization, basally localized Baz puncta demonstrate basal-to-apical transport. The removal of all three Baz postsynaptic density/discs large/zonula occludens (PDZ) domains inhibits this transport mechanism. However, by the end of cellularization Baz without its PDZ domains becomes correctly localized, suggesting an additional mechanism removes basolateral Baz. Investigation of the basolateral kinase PAR-1 suggests it is responsible for this second mechanism.

Keywords: Development
Cell Polarity
Advisor: Harris, Tony
Canadian Literary Urbanism

This dissertation provides the first sustained theorization of Canada’s urban literature. Critics have lamented the seeming absence of urban writing in Canada. A comprehensive reading of Canadian literature and criticism reveals that there is indeed a substantial body of city writing, and that critics have addressed Canada’s history of urbanization. The critical problem that demands reconciliation regards a pervasive geographical illiteracy. By historicizing and close reading Bertrand Sinclair’s North of Fifty-Three, Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, and Douglas Durkin’s The Magpie, I show that frontier, small town, and country places are effected by urbanization. In doing so, I encourage you to abandon “urban” as a worthwhile generic category and instead consider urbanism as a subject that relates to the building of cities, the amalgamation of populations within dense environments, the imposition of human geometry onto the landscape, and the “citification” of society, culture, and politics. By placing literary studies, geography, and historiography in critical exchange, I demonstrate that the “urban” typically serves as a decoy for a secondary concept. Canonical critics (Lionel Stevenson, Northrop Frye, and Linda Hutcheon) consistently summon a rural/Canadian-urban/American dichotomy to theorize a national identity that resists American imperialism. However, city-set texts are, paradoxically, represented by rural space, hence the urban has not been marginalized but misplaced metaphorically. Similarly, “Canadian literary urbanism” offers the first comprehensive analysis of the supposed “urbanization” of Canadian literature that occurred during the millennial years. By analyzing postmodern-hipster fiction, I argue that writers (Andrew Pyper, Russell Smith, Hal Niedzviecki, Lynn Coady, R.M. Vaughan, and Dionne Brand) have been using urban space to transcend the limits of “official” or “boutique” multiculturalism, and to fictionalize the rise of what Charles Landry dubbed the “creative city.”

Keywords: Urban
Canadian
City
Hipster
Cultural Nationalism
Literature
Advisor: Clarke, George Elliott
Shakespeare in Another Sense: A Study of Physical and Textual Perception in Four Plays

This dissertation investigates how the sensory body informs an audience’s reception, and perception, of Shakespearean drama. Specifically, I question the nature of subject/object relations through a comprehensive study of all five senses in Shakespeare. Positioned as mediators of knowledge between body and mind, the senses provide a means to examine the relationship between self-constituting subjects “in here” and exterior world objects “out there.” I believe that early modern authors, and Shakespeare foremost among them, used the liminality of the physical senses to test newly emergent ideas of inwardness and individual consciousness. My dissertation upends the sensory hierarchy assumed by Western tradition by arguing that smell, taste, and touch are crucial to theatrical experience; indeed, they invite a deeper form of theatrical receptivity through subject/object interpenetration than the senses of hearing or seeing. This is because sights and sounds distance the perceiving-subject from the perceived-object onstage, inviting us instead to reflect upon the theatrical medium that fills the divide. My project places the bodily senses and affective faculties in conversation in order to explore the sensory metaphors that motivate character judgements and plot understandings at a level of felt engagement. Braiding together early modern medical conceptions of the senses with literary analysis and stage history, my dissertation reconstructs bodily experience in the past on historically informed terms. Recognising the inherent diversity of perception, my chapters advance a set of original arguments: that palpation leads to jealous cognition through the skin-web in "Othello," that colonial tastes merge with the pleasures of speech on the double tongue in "Antony and Cleopatra," that the smell of blood harbours the infection of evil in "Macbeth," and that sensory intelligencers subtly couple two media – read script and heard play – in "Hamlet." In sum, by analysing how a modern appreciation of Shakespeare’s drama differs from the embodied perspective of earlier audiences, I hope to provide a new understanding of early modern subjectivity through early modern sensory experience.

Keywords: Shakespeare
Senses
Early Modern
Drama
Perception
Historical Phenomenology
Othello
Antony and Cleopatra
Hamlet
Macbeth
Advisor: Harvey, Elizabeth D.
Taking Love Seriously: Amor and Erotic Elegy in Vergil's 'Italian Iliad'

As the second half of the Aeneid gets under way, Vergil offers a proemial invocation designed to introduce his maius opus, a poetic account of the war fought between the Trojan and Italian forces (A. 7.37-45). Vergil’s Iliadic narrative, despite its explicitly martial focus, features a number of episodes that contain the generic language and motifs of erotic elegy. Through these brief, but significant, elegiac episodes, Vergil articulates the connection between amor and the outbreak of arma, and identifies love as a potent force of genuine destruction. In the opening sequence of Aeneid 7 (A. 7.1-45), Vergil signals the programmatic inclusion of elegy among the generic constituents of his epic, and indicates the thematic importance of amor to the ostensibly martial narrative. Elegiac language and motifs punctuate Vergil’s account of the outbreak of war and underscore the conflicting passions that culminate in martial violence. Vergil employs the sermo amatorius in the erotic encounter between Venus and Vulcan (A. 8.370-406) to emphasize the importance of amor – both erotic and maternal – to the martial narrative, as the goddess wields her amatory power as protective genetrix to procure arma for Aeneas. In the dialogic exchange at the start of Aeneid 12 (A. 12.1-80), elegiac elements underscore the amatory motives of particular characters and reiterate the connection between passion and devastation programmatically established in Aeneid 7. Evidence of Vergil’s innovative redeployment of funerary and amatory motifs in the aetiological myth of Cycnus (A. 10.185-193) suggests the importance of further investigation of Vergilian experimentation with elegy as a sepulchral, as well as erotic, mode.

Keywords: Latin Literature, Latin Epic, Latin Elegy
Vergil, The Aeneid
Advisor: Keith, Alison
The Theory and Practice of Economic Democracy

This dissertation is a political-economic examination of the idea of economic democracy. The motivating impulse is the recognition that a deep asymmetry characterizes contemporary society in the Western world: social relations in the political sphere are organized democratically, meaning that political power is (theoretically at least) accountable to the citizenry. The economy, however, is organized on fundamentally different, and largely undemocratic bases. Workers do not elect their bosses; investment decisions are not generally accountable to the community; bank policy regarding the allocation of finance is not determined by elected representatives. This asymmetry constitutes the puzzle that my dissertation seeks to explore. In this thesis I seek to make the case that certain aspects of our economy are in vital need of democratization, and that such democratization is not only normatively important but also practically feasible. The thesis thus synthesizes normative political theory and empirical political economy investigating the degree to which workplaces, investment institutions, and the market system could or should be democratized.

Keywords: economic democracy
workplace democracy
democratic theory
financial democracy
investment democracy
Advisor: Carens, Joesph
The Strggle of the Struggling: Access to Higher Education for Physically Disabled People in Zimbabwe

Abstract This dissertation examines questions of accessibility in relation to physically disabled high school graduates in Zimbabwe who are seeking to further their education. The work aims at giving voice to those who have been rendered voiceless in society in matters affecting their lives while also attending to how cultural experts and educational officials make sense of the lack of access to education faced by these disabled students. The study builds on previous research on poverty alleviation in Zimbabwe by the author (Manyimo, 2005) that showed that disabled people are among the poorest in the country and that lack of education together with low societal expectations exacerbates their poverty. Employing a qualitative research methodology, one-on-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with thirty-two participants. The interviewees included 12 disabled high school graduates; selected 4 mothers of the graduates; two cultural experts; four senior administrators of universities and colleges; two members of associations of and for disabled people and eight government officials from ministries of education. Findings show that indigenous culture plays a significant role in determining how far disabled people can progress in education in Zimbabwe. The role of indigenous culture was characterized by the interviewees in relation to how they are marginalized by their own families, their own communities and the society. Due to the introduction of other cultures and religions in the country, the population suffers from competing cultural conceptions of disability that manifest themselves through societal attitudes toward disabled people. This dissertation, therefore, demonstrates the need to attend to indigenous knowledges as a framework for engaging and theorizing how students with physical disabilities can better achieve their educational aspirations. The work proposes an alternative model of disability based on indigenous cultural beliefs of the indigenous people in Zimbabwe. A set of recommendations was developed that reflect this need. Thus the dissertation makes significant contributions not only to Zimbabwe, but also to the field of disability studies research especially among societies with strong indigenous belief systems by documenting and attending to the usually unheard voices of students with physical disabilities.

Keywords: Disability
Access
Indiggenous Culture
Advisor: Titchkosky, Tanya