VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
“Huế ơi, quê hương của tôi, ta nhớ muôn đời”: Vietnam’s Participation, Processes, and Practices in Sport for Development

Set in Vietnam’s Thừa Thiên Huế province, this dissertation is based on an eleven-month ethnographic project alongside a Norwegian funded and supported Sport for Development (SfD) project, Football for All in Vietnam (FFAV). Applying theoretical concepts from Paulo Freire, Norbert Elias, and Martha Nussbaum, complemented by methodological frameworks of Participatory Action Research, Participatory Evaluation (PE), and Critical Indigenous Methodologies, this dissertation exhibits how SfD research can be done between academics and SfD projects that benefit both parties with local communities in mind. By testing the aforementioned approaches, this dissertation found that collaborative research guided by a PE framework bridges SfD practice and scholarship towards a united goal that is conscious of participants needs. Moreover, conducting participatory research allowed for contextualizing the ways in which local history, culture, and communities of Thừa Thiên Huế act as figurations that influence SfD. Following Elias-ian thought, this dissertation argues that SfD ought to be examined within the specific contexts in which programs occur, while recognizing interwoven social processes of history, culture, and community as influential factors in SDP projects. As a result, recommendations are made for more locale-specific SfD research around the world moving the study of SDP as a global movement towards a more micro-focused field. Lastly, deploying an analysis framed by Nussbaum’s (2011) Capabilities Approach, this dissertation argues that FFAV’s SfD practices are compatible with the concept of central capabilities in ways that underpin the achievement of a meaningful life. In investigating FFAV’s practices using the Capabilities Approach, this research extends conversations about the necessity to comprehend SfD in a more holistic manner. This highlights the benefit of moving away from the notion that sport reduces social ailments, and towards conceptualizing other capabilities formed in SfD that improve the lives of individuals. In the end, this dissertation unpacks SfD in Vietnam with a specific case study of FFAV, thus offering a detailed discussion of novel methods, traditional theory, and research with potential for positive change.

Keywords: capabilities approach
ethnography
figurations
participatory research
sport for development
vietnam
Advisor: Darnell, Simon
The Role of Experiential Learning Internships in Developing Job Ready Graduates in the Field of Public Relations: A Case Study of the Humber College ITAL Bachelor of Public Relations Program

This research study explored the value of experiential learning toward the development of professional employability skills in students in the Baccalaureate Program in Public Relations at Humber College Institute for Technology and Advanced Learning (ITAL) as perceived by the interns, internship employers and faculty. The study focused on the internship component integrated into the program curriculum, to determine from the perspective of students, employers and faculty, the value of internships for all parties involved. More specifically, in this study I explored the perceptions of participants to determine if there was a skills gap in terms of the graduate’s job readiness and whether they have developed the necessary skill sets needed to facilitate success in their chosen profession. The findings identified personal and professional employability skills that students and employers recognized as being met by students to qualify for graduation and/or what is needed to succeed in a career in public relations. The theoretical framework that grounded this study is based on David Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory (Kolb, 1984). My goal was to collect rich informative data through the semi-structured interviews with all the participants. The collection of data consisted of four phases: (1) document analysis, (2) eight student interviews, (3) eight employer interviews and (4) four faculty interviews. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with eight students from the program, eight internship employers, and four faculty members. The identified impact of experiential learning on the professional and personal development of the students during their internship experience was multi-dimensional; however, it was evident that the internships offered students the opportunity to explore the diversity of the public relations field, gain self-confidence, and enable them to take ownership of their learning. The findings in this study suggest that an internship experiential component is both an essential and an effective curricular model for undergraduate public relations students who wish to better assert and position themselves for success in the field of public relations. The results of the internship allowed students not only the benefit of increasing their employment history, but the benefit of being challenged to grow through experience.

Keywords: coop
Education
Experiential Learning
internship
Public Relations
Work Integrated Learning
Advisor: Janzen, Dr. Katharine
The Influence of Visual Features on Scene Perception and Cognition

Humans are especially good at creating meaning from a chaotic visual world. My work is an exploration of how the physical world is processed by the brain, and how that processing influences and informs human cognition. Chapter 2 examines the receptive field properties of scene-selective cortex, revealing that the parahippocampal place area is able to represent various visual features related to scene content. Chapter 3 then explores how a subset of visual features (i.e., length, curvature, and orientation) automatically cue valence and threat information. The particular arrangement of contours within a scene allow for rapid gist perception, in turn influencing whether one will approach or avoid a particular environment. Chapters 4 and 5 pertain to the active scene exploration that occurs once the gist of a scene has been processed and an approach decision has been made. Specifically, Chapter 4 explores how low-level, mid-level, and high-level features, are involved in both bottom-up and top-down attentional guidance, while Chapter 5 explores how active visual exploration is linked to memory for real-world scenes. This entire process relies on the visual features present in the physical world which are interpreted as meaningful units by the brain. This thesis reveals how several of these features are involved in scene perception as it relates to emotion, attention, and memory.

Keywords: attention
cognition
emotion
memory
perception
scenes
Advisor: Walther, Dirk B
Line and Generator Outage Identification using Synchrophasor Measurements

Identification of outages in power systems is crucial to raise situational awareness and prevent cascading failures. As a result of wide adoption of phasor measurement units (PMUs), synchronized measurements with high temporal resolution provide new opportunities for event detection and identification in electric power systems. This thesis focuses on two types of outages: line and generator outages. For line outages, an identification method based on the ac power flow model and voltage phasor measurements is proposed. The results demonstrate improved accuracy compared to the commonly used dc power flow approach and the significant benefits of having a higher PMU coverage. By using the proposed rejection filtering techniques, the misidentified rate can be further reduced, which is crucial to the operators. The results show relatively high identification accuracy with a small amount of PMUs. For generator outages, three algorithms for outage localization are proposed utilizing (1) frequency and ROCOF measurements, pre-outage generations and inertia constants; (2) line flow measurements and linear sensitivity factors; and (3) voltage measurements, system admittance matrix, generator internal reactances and generator injections prior to the outage events. Unlike in previous works, the frequency-based algorithm has been tested using frequency measurements generated by a realistic PMU model (proposed and tested against an SEL 451 relay). It is shown to be limited in accuracy. In contrast, the LSF-based method is able to correctly localize the origin of outage even when there are cascading generator outages in the external system. However, the existence of (nearly) indistinguishable generators may create numerical problems. A QR decomposition based clustering technique is proposed to group generators based on their impacts on available synchrophasor measurements so that the outage can be localized to the originating cluster with zero misidentification. The measurement selection problem (or PMU placement problem) can also be solved based on the same. Experimental results also demonstrate that the third proposed method, based on post-outage voltage estimation, can successfully exploit additional information (if available) to achieve even better localization. All of the proposed identification algorithms can be implemented for online application in utility control centers.

Keywords: Outage detection
Power systems
Synchrophasor
Advisor: Tate, Joseph E
Learning Experiences and Career Successes of Immigrant Professionals in Canada

Canada, a nation reliant on immigrants for economic growth, has invited millions of professionals to live here, but census and survey data show that a majority of newcomers do not integrate into the Canadian workplace at levels commensurate with their education and experience. The reasons for this are unclear. Many recent immigrant professionals turn to retraining as part of a plan to regain their former professional status, but the results of this strategy have not been fully examined. This qualitative study examined the work search and retraining experiences of recent immigrant professionals in Canada. Twenty-six men and 26 women, economic immigrants to Canada, well-educated professionals in their countries of origin, described the challenges they experienced in semi-structured interviews. The challenges they described included understanding the economy and managing their expectations for initial employment; work search difficulties such as lacking a professional network; the vagaries of chance and opportunity; and planning for retraining, sometimes to obtain an entire Canadian credential in their field. Additionally, support programs offered to newcomers are not always based on a career development theory, nor are all career development theories tested against reality. The present study also uses the experiences described by the study participants to examine the utility of career self-determination theory (Chen, 2017), an emerging career development metatheory grounded in the psychology of motivation. This study found the three basic career needs proposed by Chen – career autonomy, career competence, and career relatedness – plus a fourth motivational career need, career consistency, in the work search and retraining experiences of these immigrant professionals. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed, and suggestions for further research are provided.

Keywords: Canada
career development
immigrants
labour market
retraining
self-determination theory
Advisor: Chen, Charles P
Causal Inference Methodology for Comparisons of Hospital Quality of Care

In a national or provincial health care system, where limited financial resources are available to improve patient care, it is necessary to be able to evaluate the current care practices of hospitals to determine where resources are best spent. Assessment of hospital care quality is achieved by comparing each hospital's performance to some reference level of care, often the average care level in the system, termed standardization. Standardization allows adjustment for differences in patient characteristics between hospitals which would unduly penalize hospitals that treat sicker patients. The quality and quantity of information available to make such adjustments, or lack thereof, can bias estimates of a hospital's performance, resulting in misleading assessments of quality. Further, the goal of profiling care is not just to identify areas in which care disparities exist, but ultimately to intervene on care to improve patient outcomes. In this thesis, I take advantage of the causal nature of such comparisons (i.e. poor care leads to poor outcomes) and propose new statistical methods under a causal inference framework. First, I illustrate the current limitations of a standard hospital comparison analysis using U.S. prostate cancer data. Second, I develop a doubly robust estimator for the standardized mortality ratio (SMR) when the reference is to the system average level of care. I show that this estimator will provide unbiased estimates of the SMR as long as one of the component models is correctly specified. Third, I show that one assumption needed for the above estimator can be relaxed only for this reference comparison. Fourth, I adapt causal mediation analysis methods to derive a decomposition of the hospital effect on patient outcomes that may act through a mediating process, and develop two estimators for this decomposition. This allows quantification of the effect an intervention to improve care may have on patient outcomes so that hospitals can be prioritized in terms of those who would benefit most from government resources. Finally, I illustrate the proposed mediation methods on Ontario kidney cancer data. This thesis provides valuable tools to effectively identify and target hospitals in which care improvement is most needed.

Keywords: Causal inference
Hospital comparisons
Indirect standardization
Provider profiling
Advisor: Saarela, Olli
Lou, Wendy
Living in a World of ‘Riotous Difference’: Canadian Multiculturalism and Christian Hospitality within the Presbyterian Church in Toronto (Tkaronto)

With the secularization of Canadian public institutions, mainline protestant churches in urban centers are witnessing a steady decline in membership in recent decades. Church members are not participating in church activities as they once did, which has motivated some congregations to discuss the influence of immigration and multiculturalism within the church. This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the interethnic relationships and the value of multiculturalism in Presbyterian congregations in the multicultural and multiracial city of Toronto (Tkaronto), Ontario, and more broadly, within the national denomination of the Presbyterian Church of Canada. In recounting the crisis of church precarity, this dissertation considers the contours of church governance that structure racializing practices within congregations. Additionally, this study examines the virtue of hospitality, a central theme among Presbyterian congregations that attends to denominational identity, church-run social programmes, and inclusion of minorities within congregational polity. Based on 25 months of ethnographic research among three congregations, this dissertation focuses on the personal experiences and Christian understandings of racialized and white congregants who are working to develop a meaningful church community, which is fraught with ideological and affective friction. This thesis makes two key arguments. First, the inclusion of different (non-white) bodies is needed to sustain and grow the church, both economically and spiritually, yet different bodies and their subjectivities (vis-à-vis class, racialization, and age) are challenging to congregational unity in terms of Anglo-centric denominational identity. Second, to welcome its racially, ethnically and economically diverse participants, church members express a virtue of openness in welcoming guests and strangers. Christian hospitality, which is distinct from charity, mediates and at times blurs the boundaries between stranger, guest and host, as well as the cleavages arising from modes of inclusion and exclusion. The friction in 'welcoming the stranger', a ubiquitous phrase indexing Christian hospitality, is a theological, ideological and practical conundrum. The friction is revealed in the narratives of congregants and the mundane acts of in/hospitality that highlight the affective, temporal, and spatial ambiguities that arise from the politics and ethics of integration. Throughout, this thesis investigates the linkages and ruptures between Christian hospitality and Canadian state multiculturalism.

Keywords: Canada
Christianity
Ethnicity/Race
Hospitality
Multiculturalism
Advisor: McElhinny, Bonnie
A Multi-angled Approach to Discover and Improve Skeletal Muscle Stem Cell Therapies

Skeletal muscle plays an essential role in locomotion, metabolism, and thermoregulation. An intriguing characteristic of skeletal muscle is its remarkable regenerative capacity: a highly orchestrated cellular process, in which the resident muscle stem cells (MuSCs) play a central role. Upon tissue injury, quiescent MuSCs are activated and give rise to a population of primary myoblasts (pMBs). pMBs undergo several rounds of division and ultimately fuse with one another to form multi-nucleated myofibers and repair the muscle. As observed in a wide range of conditions such as muscular dystrophies and aging, disruptions in the repair process can lend to impaired regeneration and progressive muscle wasting. Strategies to restore strength and function to pathological muscle include cell-based therapies to replace defective myogenic cells, and treatments to restore the endogenous repair process. Despite substantial advances, these treatment options are still in the early stages of clinical translation. The specific goal of this thesis is to improve upon currently available strategies as well as to lay the groundwork for the emergence of new therapeutic entry-points for skeletal muscle treatments. In the area of cell transplantation therapy, challenges remain in producing clinically-relevant numbers of cells that, as a population, possess high regenerative potency to produce skeletal muscle and repopulate the stem cell niche. We demonstrate that by using a bioactive hydrogel (HAMC) as the cell delivery vehicle, it is possible to improve MuSC transplantation outcomes, and thereby reduce the overall number of required MuSCs. Next, we address the issue of producing sufficient numbers of highly regenerative myogenic cells. Using a high-throughput drug screen and in-vivo intramuscular transplantation assay validation, we identify epidermal growth factor receptor (Egfr) and vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 (Vegfr2, Kdr) as new druggable targets, that upon inhibition, produce a population of cultured MuSCs with greater regenerative potency than control treated. Finally, using single-cell RNA sequencing, we shed light on the diversity and intercommunication of cells present in skeletal muscle. This dataset serves as a valuable resource through which new regulators of MuSCs and other cells in skeletal muscle can be evaluated with an eye towards skeletal muscle regenerative medicine applications.

Keywords: EGFR
KDR
Hydrogels
Muscle regeneration
Muscle stem cells
Single cell RNA sequencing
Skeletal Muscle
Advisor: Gilbert, Penney M.
Identification of Glucosylceramide Flippases in Glycosphingolipid Biosynthesis

Glycosphingolipids (GSLs) participate in cell signaling, adhesion, differentiation, and inflammation. A variety of diseases have aberrant GSL metabolisms including GSL storage diseases, type II diabetes, drug resistant tumors, and Alzheimer’s disease. The major GSL precursor glucosylceramide (GlcCer) is synthesized on the cytosolic Golgi membrane leaflet, however GlcCer must be flipped to the luminal leaflet for subsequent complex GSL anabolism. The mechanism by which GlcCer is translocated is unclear. We have addressed this major 25-year knowledge gap in GSL biosynthesis in order to better understand GSL homeostasis and provide novel therapy targets. We synthesized and characterized photoreactive, biotinylated GlcCer analogue cross-linkers, XLA and XLB (diastereomers) to identify GlcCer interacting proteins. Using XLB and proteomics we identified microsomal GlcCer binding proteins, ABCA3, ABCB4 and ABCB10, which were depleted in DU145 cells by siRNA along with previously suggested GlcCer ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters (ABCA12 and ABCB1). Knockdown of ABC proteins differentially affected GSL biosynthesis, suggesting existence of Golgi and trans-Golgi network (TGN)-selective flippases. Putative flippase/LCS inhibitors 2A-AceGlcCer A/B, and 2A-AdaGlcCer A/B were synthesized. 2A-AdaGlcCer analogues appear to be LCS substrates. 2A-AdaGlcCer B is a LCS and flippase inhibitor whereas the A isomer is an activator of globo-series GSL synthesis. 2A-AceGlcCer analogues increased cellular GSLs. In summary, we demonstrated that ABC flippases facilitate metabolic channeling via formation of separate and overlapping Golgi pools of GlcCer for differential GSL-series biosynthesis, providing potential targets for drug therapy to reduce specific GSL species in GSL dysregulated diseases.

Keywords: ATP-binding cassette (ABC)
flippase
glucosylceramide
glycosphingolipid biosynthesis
Golgi
lipids/chemistry
Advisor: Lingwood, Clifford
Attending to Differential Environmental Exposures Among Racialized Newcomer Women in Canada: Why so Difficult?

This thesis aims to increase understanding of differential environmental exposures and to explore how inequity in environmental health can be viewed and articulated for newcomer and racialized women in Canada. Based on a subpopulation biomonitoring study of heavy metal concentrations among South and East Asian newcomer women in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), entitled “Metals in Newcomer Women (MNW),” this thesis is comprised of three individual papers. The first paper modified selected reflective and transformational questions of an Intersectionality-Based Analysis to frame my examination of the environmental research itself. Through a personal reflexive process, I analyzed the processes by which the research was identified, constructed, developed, and funded to examine assumptions, definitions, and values that contributed to study decisions. Transformational questions provided a framework to think about the problem differently and about potential challenges in doing so. The second paper addresses how adopting elements of community-based research (CBR) in the MNW study increased relevance and reach for our communities of interest. The paper describes how CBR elements included developing meaningful partnerships with public health organizations and actively engaging peer researchers, as well as newcomer women with similar linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The latter bridged the gap with many of our participants and helped to overcome known barriers to participation. As health professionals themselves, with experience interacting in clinical settings, peer researchers provided expertise and familiarity, shared more adequate explanations of relevant topics, and helped participants overcome the reluctance to participate in a scientific study. The third paper uses mixed methods to explore the “exposure experience” of MNW study participants and to understand how individuals may process, interpret and respond to the knowledge of the presence of bodily contaminants. Grounding research in the experiences and perspectives of underrepresented populations provides a deeper and broadened understanding of non-dominant views and definitions of the environment, allowing an examination of intersecting identities and social categories and how these contribute to conceptualizing exposures. The findings of this thesis suggest that challenging dominant conceptual frameworks that underpin environmental health research, through the application of intersectional and critical race perspectives and the use of community-based approaches, can augment and enhance equity-relevant implications of environmental health for racialized newcomer women

Keywords: Environmental exposures
Inequity
Intersectional analysis
Newcomers
Racialized
Women
Advisor: Cole, Donald C