VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
An analysis of grass-roots co-operative economic development in Nova Scotia and Caribbean missions (1930-1960) : case studies in the light of Catholic social teaching and social capital theory

In contrast to research studies, which approach Catholic social teaching (CST) as a theoretical complex, abstracted from situations in which it was applied, this thesis deliberately adapts an inductive method. Through this contextual approach attention devoted to specific co-operative projects exemplifies the extent of CST’s influence. Missionary pioneers created new socioeconomic practices and mutual-aid (voluntary) associations; consequently, these democratic, co-operative practices not only enhanced social capital formation from below but also implicitly challenged a top-down formulation of the social teaching. Thus, this thesis not only analyses specific examples of grass-roots development but also intentionally approaches CST via these specific exemplifications rather than vice versa. These co-operative development projects through self-help, communitarian practices within a social capital-social justice nexus privileged the acting person over dominant collective action, offering an alternative for economic development in tension with both nationalist socialism and liberal capitalism.
Five empirical cases, primarily analysing original archival sources, demonstrate an historical interplay between formation of social capital practices and an enactment of CST principles for social justice within co-operative movements. Major findings indicate that social capital, although varied in each case, significantly contributed toward organisational capacities in sustaining grass-roots co-operative practices. Enacting social justice principles, however, proved much more complex in actuality due to divergence, tension, or conflict between multiple government, private and religious-sponsored co-operative sectors.

Keywords: Catholic
Social
Church
Scotia
capital
Sociology
Caribbean
Missions
Nova
Community
development
From J.G. Fichte's "the closed commercial state" to "socialism in one country": intellectual origins of Stalinism and Stalinist utopia 

This thesis examines the intellectual origins of the ideological system underlying the political practices of the Stalinist state. The Stalinist state is understood here as the regime which had superseded the earlier, transitional, Bolshevist state born as a result of the 1917 October revolution. The latter lasted for slightly over ten years. Its successor emerged in the course of a second transitional period which started sometime around late 1927 — early 1928 and came to a close four years later. Each of these two phases of the Soviet project had its own set of distinctive features, and the differences between the two can be observed in all areas of life. While the transition from the Bolshevist to the Stalinist state is well researched, it is, at the same time, insufficiently conceptualized, except in the field of cultural studies, within which this work was done, first and foremost, by Vladimir Paperny and Boris Groys. However, the change was all-embracing and was not limited to matters of culture. It was also sweeping: the revolutionary Marxist ideology, the very ideological foundation of the Bolshevist state, was replaced by something far different. The cornerstone of Stalinist state ideology was the concept of “socialism in one country”, which is known to have been first proposed by the German social democrat Georg von Vollmar in 1870. This thesis argues that this core Stalinist idea goes back to more remote times and originates in the political economy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, as found in his 1800 treatise “The Closed Commercial State”. The thesis traces the route Fichte's ideas travelled through the 19th century: first, from Fichte to Ferdinand Lassalle, then along the perplexed trajectory of the German Social‐Democratic Party’s ideological evolution, to the Second International and finally, to post-revolutionary Russia. It was established in the course of research that, contrary to what was previously thought, Stalin was familiar with the abridged Russian translation of Georg von Vollmar’s 1880 pamphlet on the “Isolated Socialist State”: the copy of this text with numerous marks was found in Stalin’s archive. The copy dates from December 1926, when the concept of “Socialism in one country” was already being widely discussed. However, close reading of Vollmar’s treatise and Lenin’s 1915 article “On the Slogan for a United States of Europe” suggests that while Stalin was drawing upon the sole relevant paragraph from Lenin’s article, this paragraph in turn, originates directly from Vollmar. Moreover, close scrutiny of Stalin’s marks points to the serious possibility that Vollmar’s ideas had a long-term impact on the principles of the Soviet pre-war foreign policy and the relationship between the USSR and the Comintern.

Keywords: isolationism
Soviet economic policies
socialism in one country
Closed commercial state
foreign trade monopoly
currency exchange monopoly
Stalinism
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Soviet history
German social democracy
Georg von Vollmar
Advisor: Zorin, A
Government is a legal fiction’: performing political power in Zimbabwe’s magistrates’ courts after 2000

This thesis examines the role of law in defining and debating state authority, citizenship, and politics within postcolonial regimes. Drawing on the case of Zimbabwe, I explore this topic by analysing how and why the courts remained productive sites for public contestation over the form and function of the state, and over claims to citizenship in relation to it, between 2000 and 2012. During this period of intense political contestation, the judiciary came under verbal and physical attack while its institutions were used to arrest, detain, and try members of the opposition to the ruling party, ZANU-PF. By focusing on such politically motivated trials, the study engages with scholarly debates on the potential of law to reproduce or transform social and political power relations. First, I examine negotiations over the place of law within Zimbabwe’s history and, more specifically, within judicial institutions after 2000. I argue that the legitimacy of law as it relates to state authority has a long, contested history, in which coercive uses of law sat alongside displays of ‘professional’ conduct aimed at safeguarding ‘substantial justice’ through ethical, rule-bound behaviour. I therefore propose that we examine the political contestations of law within postcolonial states not as expressions of the ‘fetishisation of law’, but rather as the product of competing mobilisations of state consciousness, a concept which combines articulations of legal consciousness with ideas of the state. Secondly, I assess how these debates within state institutions interacted with the ‘legal’ and ‘state’ consciousness citizens, political activists, and human rights lawyers articulated and performed. Contrary to studies which examine appeals to law as acts of resistance by marginalised orders for inclusion in dominant modes of rule, I argue that it was not recognition by but of this formal, rule-bound ordering, and the form of citizenship it stood for, that was at stake in legal engagements. Thirdly, to interrogate how the different uses of law informed debates on state authority and citizenship, I examine the interactions between performance, narrative and history within the courtroom, and beyond, to demonstrate the production of authority during processes of arrest and detention, as well as in the courts. I conclude that situating courtroom performances within their historical and political context is critical to our understanding of the place of law in the construction and contestation of the postcolonial state, and that it reveals a ‘fragmented hegemony’ of law that provides a telling window on struggles over citizenship.

Keywords: Politics
Zimbabwe
Courts
Performance
Law
Advisor: Alexander, J
Titanium layered double hydroxides for photocatalytic applications

This thesis discusses the development of novel titanium-containing layered double hydroxides (Ti-LDHs) as semiconductor photocatalysts for the photo-oxidation of simple organic molecules. LDHs are introduced in Chapter 1 as compositionally flexible anionic clays, whose layered structure and tuneable properties make them highly interesting in a wide range of applications, including environmental purification, drug delivery and photocatalysis. In the latter case, LDHs have been used primarily in the photocatalytic degradation of organic pollutants, photo-reduction of CO2 and photocatalytic water splitting. Only limited research has been done into the controlled organic molecule photo-oxidation, where the oxidation is stopped at an intermediate stage rather than proceeding all the way to degradation products.
Chapter 2 outlines the five different synthetic methods for Ti-LDH preparation and their viability in the synthesis of pure NiTi- and MgAlTi-LDHs with different Ni:Ti and Al:Ti ratios, respectively. The crystallinity, morphology, structure, composition and band gap energies of the Ti-LDHs were analysed, so as to determine the effect of the synthetic conditions and Ti content on their properties. Furthermore, the highly crystalline urea hydrothermal MgAlTi-LDH samples were characterised by high-angle annular dark-field imaging (HAADF) as well as by 1H, 27Al and 47/49Ti solid state NMR spectroscopy.
In Chapter 3, the activity of the Ti-LDHs in the photo-oxidation of diphenylmethanol is studied, and compared to that of anatase TiO2 as a benchmark photocatalyst. The importance of short-wavelength radiation is discussed, especially for control experiments in the absence of a catalyst. The effects of the synthetic method, Ti content, catalyst and reactant loading, and irradiation time were examined for selected Ti-LDHs.
Chapter 4 extends the study of the photocatalytic properties of Ti-LDHs beyond diphenylmethanol photo-oxidation to also include benzyl alcohol, cyclooctanol and benzylamine. This allows the determination of whether Ti-LDHs can be used to photo-oxidise a wider range of functional groups as part of either aromatic or aliphatic systems.
Lastly, Chapter 5 details the synthesis and characterisation of TiO2@Ti-LDH core-shell hybrid materials, and looks at their application in the photo-oxidation of diphenylmethanol. The conversion using the core-shell photocatalysts was compared to that obtained with a mechanical mixture of TiO2 and Ti-LDHs, in order to study any synergistic heterojunction effects.

Keywords: layered double hydroxides
organic molecule oxidation
catalysis
solid state chemistry
inorganic chemistry
photocatalysis
photo-oxidation
Advisor: O'Hare, D
Design and synthesis of fluorogenic oligonucleotide-based systems to target double-stranded DNA

Fluorogenic oligonucleotide-based systems are important tools for sequence-specific DNA targeting. Fluorescence systems use the emission of a photon from an excited molecule (fluorophore) to produce a detectable signal. It is a highly sensitive process and its versatility has expanded its use to DNA targeting probes. The aim of the work herein is to investigate the design and synthesis of fluorogenic oligonucleotide-based systems specifically for targeting double-stranded DNA.
Triplex-forming oligonucleotides can bind in the major groove of dsDNA through Hoogsteen hydrogen bonding to form triplexes (triple helixes). While other methods of dsDNA detection rely on denaturation of the double-stranded target, triplexes do not, and, hence, they provide a versatile approach to DNA recognition. However, the instability of triplexes, especially at neutral pH, limits their applications. The incorporation of a fluorogenic intercalator, thiazole orange, covalently attached to the TFO provides a triplex-stabilising moiety. The stabilising effect of thiazole orange is additive; multiple incorporations can produce triplexes with increased stability of +50 °C even at neutral pH. The extreme stability provided from the modified fluorogenic TFOs allows increased duplex binding affinity and can compensate for the limited target range of TFOs.
CRISPR-Cas is a programmable biological research tool that is invaluable in gene- editing and genomic imaging technologies. The introduction of fluorogenic moieties both on the dCas9 enzyme and in guide RNA is crucial for imaging but often leads to high background fluorescence in biological systems. By modifying the gRNA to contain an ‘on/off’ fluorogenic system, genomic imaging in live cells of repetitive elements is improved and is cross-validated by GFP-tagged dCas9.
The efficient synthesis of long, modified RNA is fundamental, particularly in CRISPR research. The introduction of an azide moiety into RNA to provide a means of ‘clicking’ modified RNA strands together is an important potential approach. However, it is limited by the protecting groups used for RNA and, in turn, this hinders the length of efficient RNA synthesis. The synthesis of a clickable moiety compatible with 2'-O-TC RNA chemistry is investigated as it could provide a simple and cost- effective route to modified guide RNA and could be instrumental in applications such as modified guide RNA library generation.
Overall, the aims of this study were to synthesise and develop fluorogenic oligonucleotide-based systems and investigate their potential applications.

Keywords: Nucleic Acid Chemistry
TOTFO
CRISPR-Cas9
Fluorogenic probes
Advisor: Brown, T
Spatial compartmentalisation of regulatory T cells within intestinal lymphoid tissue

Gut tissue-associated lymphoid structures include a heterogenous spectrum of lymphoid clusters of varying size and maturity, however little is known about their functional relevance. We hypothesise that lymphoid structure may promote gut homeostasis through a number of potential local mechanisms that is currently unclear.
Firstly, signalling and subsequent repair of tissue injury is regulated by the alarmin IL-33, which has been shown to be expressed by non-immune cells within lymphoid structures. IL33 signals through its receptor ST2 which present on a subset of Tregs. Thus, IL-33 signalling to ST2+ Tregs within lymphoid structures may constitute one important pathway that promotes gut health. Secondly, lymphoid structures have been reported to act as regional hubs of immunity. Local priming of commensal-reactive T cells within lymphoid structures could promote the activation and function of T cells, inducing their tolerance towards intestinal microbiota.
Using a combination of multi-parameter flow cytometry and histo-cytometry, we firstly characterised lymphoid structures of the murine gut, and report distinct differences in their architecture and complexity at different anatomical sites. We confirmed the presence of both IL-33-producing cells and ST2+ Tregs at close proximity to each other within lymphoid structures. However, ST2+ Tregs were not found to be spatially closer to IL-33-producing cells compared to the ST2- Treg subset during health and disease, indicating a close interaction may not be strictly necessary for optimal IL-33 cytokine function.
Next, we employed a T cell receptor transgenic mouse model specific to the pathobiont Helicobacter hepaticus, and used advanced in vivo live imaging techniques to study the compartmentalised induction, phenotype and function of commensal-reactive T cells within lymphoid structures as compared to the surrounding lamina propria tissue. Our results show a spatial compartmentalisation of regulatory IL-10 production by Helicobacter hepaticus- specific Tregs in the lamina propria tissue, distinct from lymphoid structures. Unique transcriptional differences in dendritic cells at these distinct spatial sites may drive IL-10 production at some, but not other locations within the tissue microenvironments.
Altogether, we highlight the complex cellular interactions that occur within intestinal tissue-associated lymphoid structures that promote gut health. We use advanced imaging techniques to further our understanding of the behaviour of T cells in response to microbial antigen in vivo and our findings show tissue-associated lymphoid structures and the lamina propria tissue support Treg functions in distinct ways.

Keywords: antigen specificity
Microbiome
Tregs
Helicobacter Hepaticus
T cells
Advisor: Thornton, E
Roberts, D
Powrie, F
Video understanding using multimodal deep learning

Our experience of the world is multimodal, however deep learning networks have been traditionally designed for and trained on unimodal inputs such as images, audio segments or text. In this thesis we develop strategies to exploit multimodal information (in the form of vision, text, speech and non-speech audio) for the automatic understanding of human-centric videos. The key ideas developed in this thesis are (i) Cross-modal Supervision, (ii) Self-supervised Representation Learning, and (iii) Modality Fusion.
In cross-modal supervision, data labels from a supervision-rich modality are used to learn representations in another, supervision-starved target modality, eschewing the need for costly manual annotation in the target modality domain. This effectively exploits the redundant, or overlapping information between modalities. We demonstrate the utility of this technique for three different tasks; First we use face recognition and visual active speaker detection to curate a large scale audio-visual dataset of human speech called VoxCeleb, training on which yields state of the art models for speaker recognition; Second we train a text-based model to predict action labels from transcribed speech alone, and transfer these labels to accompanying videos. Training with these labels allows us to outperform fully supervised action recognition models trained with costly manual supervision; Third, we distill the information from a face model trained for emotion recognition to the speech domain, where manual emotion annotation is expensive.
The second key idea explored in this thesis is the use of modality redundancy for self-supervised representation learning. Here we learn audio-visual representations without any manual supervision in either modality, specifically for human faces and voices. Unlike existing representations, our joint representations enable cross-modal retrieval from audio to vision and vice-versa. We then extend this work to explicitly remove learnt biases, enabling greater generalisation.
Finally, we effectively combine the complementary information in different modalities through the development of new modality fusion architectures. By distilling the information from multiple modalities in a video to a single, compact video representation, we achieve robustness to unimodal inputs which can be missing, corrupted, occluded, or have various levels of background noise. With these models we achieve state of the art results in both action recognition and video-text retrieval.

Keywords: deep learning
multisensory
multimodal
neural networks
cross-modal
Advisor: Zisserman, A
Boom and bust diplomacy: the financial crisis of 1873 and U.S. foreign relations

This thesis explains the intertwined financial, diplomatic, and global economic roots of the longest depression in U.S. history. Contrary to existing scholarship that tells the story of the Panic of 1873 as a railroad mania, it shows that the crash resulted from the post-war construction, and eventual collapse, of a transatlantic bubble of imperial imagination. A forcefully crafted yet premature and fragile narrative of rapid national consolidation and commercial expansion guided the rise and fall of investor confidence. Ideas of a reunified country with control over vast amounts of land and resources—and a capacious continental marketplace with growing ties to global trade—offered seemingly unbounded opportunities for financial returns.
An instance of capitalist exceptionalism, this convenient projection justified how anticipated profits could defy previous capitalist norms. When investors bought railroad securities with questionable promises, they also bought into a corporatizing sales narrative of the future United States. Nursed by financial and diplomatic elites, this ‘nation brand’ imagined American empire in the vernacular of the market, emphasizing its civilisational worth and financial profitability. The brand manipulated investor confidence, altered risk perceptions, and fuelled the boom. Its collapse, amidst a series of embarrassments that undermined the performance of American creditworthiness and credibility, and attested to the challenges of nation-building, led directly to the bust.
The thesis ties the economic phenomenon of a bubble to the grand narratives and quotidian practice of transatlantic brand salesmanship (or ‘boom diplomacy’). In recasting an overly structural view of financial crises, Boom and Bust Diplomacy looks for the ways in which racialised and gendered narratives, elite sociability, and diplomatic credibility created financial knowledge and changed the credit cycle. The social, cultural, and political performance of creditworthiness in the post-Civil War era thus produced the conditions for the spectacular crash of 1873.
More broadly, the ongoing financialisation of manifest destiny—as a public-private process of market-making, nation-building, and empire creation—also forged lasting links between the worlds of international investment and U.S. foreign affairs. The ‘brokering’ of transatlantic relations by border-crossing financiers, merchants, consuls, and diplomats not only explains the transition from U.S. debtor to dollar diplomacy in the late-nineteenth century. It ultimately also suggests that between Civil War and World War, both the boom and bust cycle of the U.S. economy and American foreign relations were rooted in the same transnational and transimperial money networks.

Keywords: bonds
capital movements
western expansion
continental empire
international investment
consular and diplomatic service
financial crises
transatlantic networks
railroads
national debt
Advisor: Tuffnell, S
Veterans of the Great War in interbellum Czechoslovakia

In 1918, Czechoslovakia emerged in the final moments of the Great War as one of the successors to the Habsburgs. The conflict left the new republic with a complex legacy; its future citizens had fought during the war both on the side of the Central Powers and that of the Triple Entente. This thesis explores the interwar world of Czechoslovak veterans to understand how Czechoslovakia and its society dealt with the complicated memory and legacy of the Great War.
The thesis explores the tension between the official state narrative, which celebrated a relatively small number of soldiers who had fought in the Allied units and became known in the republic as the legionaries, and the Austro-Hungarian past of the vast majority of the Czechoslovak veterans. Through several different topics, it analyses how the ex-servicemen perceived and portrayed their wartime service, how the state approached and treated them, and how these men participated in Czechoslovak society. In particular, the thesis focuses on disabled veterans, who, unlike their able-bodied counterparts, left behind a relatively large number of historical sources.
The thesis shows the complicated and contested position of the Great War and its veterans in Czechoslovak society. After the end of the conflict, these men produced various narratives with which they explained their past military service. The Czechoslovak state and society did not treat all veterans equally; various factors influenced how they were perceived. During the interwar period, disabled ex-servicemen participated in numerous efforts and projects, both to support the Czechoslovak state and promote peace. Most of their organisations became politicised, but they largely avoided radicalisation. Amongst themselves, different groups of veterans gradually developed a degree of cooperation. Much of this quickly changed in 1938, however, as the new world war was about to begin.

Keywords: history
veterans
interwar Czechoslovakia
Great War
Advisor: Evans, R