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Online voices, offline choices : the role of social media in shaping offline collective action
No full textSocial media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram have transformed activism, enabling individuals to participate in collective actions from their digital devices. While these platforms effectively mobilize support, their role as educational spaces and the transition from online engagement to offline activism remain understudied. This study adopts a public and critical pedagogy perspective to explore how digital activism via Social Media influences individuals' awareness, motivation, and sense of agency in offline activism.
Through semi-structured interviews with 10 young adults aged 18-29, the research examines how Social Media functions as a platform for education and awareness-raising, motivates activism, and impacts individuals' sense of agency and efficacy. Thematic Analysis reveals that while social media is a powerful tool for raising awareness and lowering barriers to participation, it often struggles to sustain the critical engagement necessary for long-term social change. This research bridges gaps in the existing literature by exploring the nuances of how online engagement influences offline participation.Education, Faculty ofCurriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department ofGraduat
Structural and embodied carbon performance optimization for low carbon buildings in early stage - through BIM-based integrated design
No full textThe selection of construction materials is a critical aspect of sustainable building design, balancing environmental impact with structural integrity. Traditional methods, especially within Building Information Modeling (BIM), often involve fragmented processes that impede efficient multi-scenario evaluations. This study introduces the Structural-Carbon Integrated Design (SCID) framework, designed to streamline material selection by enabling simultaneous analysis of structural and environmental performance within a single workflow.
Using the Grasshopper visual programming environment, enhanced with Alpaca4D and Bombyx plugins, SCID assesses the trade-offs in using various material combinations. The framework was applied to five configurations, featuring concrete and timber in different structural roles, for the Brock Commons – UBC Student Housing, a tall hybrid mass timber building. SCID evaluated these combinations to achieve an optimal balance between structural stability and reduced embodied carbon.
Results indicated that hybrid designs using timber for non-primary structural elements, such as flat slabs and columns, with concrete for core walls, achieved substantial reductions in environmental impact without sacrificing stability. These hybrid configurations consistently showed lower embodied carbon than concrete-only structures while meeting the structural demands of high-rise buildings. Conversely, while concrete-only scenarios demonstrated robust structural stability, they carried a high environmental cost due to concrete’s carbon footprint. Timber-only designs, while environmentally advantageous, presented moderate structural performance challenges in high-rise applications.
Validation of SCID against conventional tools like SAP2000 and OpenLCA showed an accuracy within ±5%, confirming its reliability for integrated structural and environmental assessments. This accuracy, combined with streamlined analysis, highlights SCID’s potential as a valuable tool for architects and engineers focused on sustainability and structural requirements, as demonstrated in the Brock Commons case study.
This study contributes to sustainable building design by presenting a unified platform that reduces time and effort in material analysis, offering an adaptable and accurate approach to early-stage design. Future improvements, such as AI-driven material selection, aim to enhance SCID’s capabilities, supporting the industry’s shift toward sustainable practices, especially in mass timber hybrid structures.Forestry, Faculty ofGraduat
Essays in economics of education
No full textEducation policy not only impacts the quality of education in the short term but also has long-term effects on the quality of the labour force, ultimately affecting the productivity of the economy. Through these three essays on the Economics of Education, I study how education policy and reforms shape the quality of education, school segregation, and labour market outcomes of students.
Chapter 2 examines the effects of changes in school attendance boundaries on students' educational and labour market outcomes. Students attending high schools with expanding catchments show improved post-secondary and labour market outcomes, while those in shrinking catchments remain unaffected. These improvements are linked to increased course offerings and specialized elective teachers in expanding schools. The findings suggest that boundary adjustments, despite controversy, may provide long-term benefits.
Chapter 3 investigates how boundary adjustments affect racial segregation. Our findings from the event study demonstrate that adjustments to school attendance boundaries may lead to a decrease in school segregation. To further investigate whether there exist patterns or systematic preferences that guide school districts in adjusting school attendance boundaries, we conduct simulations of alternative school boundary changes based on the past proposed plans. The findings suggest there are no systematic patterns in school districts' decisions for the school attendance boundary adjustment concerning racial segregation.
Chapter 4 studies an education reform resulting in delayed ability tracking for South Korean students during the 1960s-70s. The reform ended a practice of sorting students into elite and non-elite middle schools via admission exams, postponing ability tracking until the high school level. We find that the reform increased both the incidence of private tutoring as well as hourly wages amongst students from wealthy households. A causal mediation analysis shows that private tutoring is an important pathway for the effect of the reform on university graduation and hourly wage. Our findings suggest that education reforms can interact with household behaviour to yield unintended policy outcomes, especially in countries with well-established private tutoring markets.Arts, Faculty ofVancouver School of EconomicsGraduat
Characterizing genes involved in bacteriophage resistance in Salmonella Enteritidis
No full textThe full abstract for this thesis is available in the body of the thesis, and will be available when the embargo expires.Land and Food Systems, Faculty ofGraduat
Credentialized aspirations : the mobility journeys of Mexican professionals in North America
No full textThis dissertation examines the journeys of Mexican professionals to the United States and Canada, with a specific focus on the cities of Seattle and Vancouver. Drawing from 45 interviews with highly skilled Mexicans and their families conducted during 2021-2022, it explores how participants create projects of international mobility throughout their lifetimes, and how these projects influence their aspirations, understandings of citizenship, and transnational identities. It also investigates the strategies employed by these migrants to establish themselves in multiple locations simultaneously and navigating shifts in both upward and downward mobility in a transnational context.
With an interdisciplinary approach building on geography, sociology and migration and mobility studies, this research uses a mixed-methods approach to explore the daily lives of professional Mexican migrants. It combines comparative immigration policy analysis, census data analysis, and life history interviews.
The research highlights the importance of education as an intangible investment, which, in turn, facilitates highly skilled migration during individuals’ productive years. By analyzing the role of North American migration infrastructures this research shows how skilled migration policies facilitate the transnational transfer of social capital. Lastly, this dissertation yields insights into the challenges faced by professional migrants highlighting in particular the influential role of social class in facilitating what I call “credentialized mobility” in the North American context.Arts, Faculty ofGeography, Department ofGraduat
Statistical inference on structured data : sequences and graphs
No full textIn the era of big data, structured data, such as sequences and graphs, have become central to various scientific and engineering disciplines. This dissertation explores statistical inference techniques tailored to these complex data structures, focusing on the development of novel methodologies that address the challenges posed by sequences and graphs.
The first part of the dissertation addresses the inference of sequences, with a particular focus on the noisy computing problem. We investigate several fundamental computing tasks under an active learning setting, including finding the total ordering or the largest element of a real sequence through noisy pairwise comparisons and determining whether the weight of a binary sequence exceeds a certain threshold based on noisy bit readings. To characterize optimal query complexity, we propose novel query strategies and develop statistical lower bounds, which tighten the existing bounds for all these problems.
The second part of the dissertation studies the inference on graphs, specifically focusing on the graph alignment problem. Graph alignment refers to the task of finding the vertex correspondence between two correlated graphs. We explore a variant of this problem known as attributed graph alignment, where additional attribute information is leveraged to aid the alignment process. We propose new polynomial-time algorithms for this problem and provide a theoretical analysis of their performance. Our results demonstrate that these algorithms can successfully identify the correct vertex correspondence under a weak correlation between the two graphs.Applied Science, Faculty ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, Department ofGraduat
Multi-scale multi-physics compositional study of energy materials
No full textThis thesis presents the development of advanced computational frameworks tailored for rational materials design, with a particular focus on high-entropy alloys (HEAs) and nano-crystalline materials for energy applications. The research is divided into three main components, each addressing critical aspects of material behavior for energy-related applications. The first component introduces a temporal multi-scale multi-physics framework for simulating the long-term diffusion of radiation-induced defects in nano-crystalline materials. By integrating molecular dynamics (MD) simulations with electronic effects and atomistic diffusion models, this framework elucidates the self-healing mechanisms of nano-crystalline materials under radiation, revealing how grain boundaries effectively absorb interstitial atoms and migrate vacancies, thereby reducing defect populations over time. The second component focuses on the inclusion of electronic effects in atomistic simulations of HEAs exposed to radiation. A spatial multi-scale framework, featuring modifications to the ℓ2T-MD method, is developed to accurately model the impact of electronic properties on defect formation. The third component tackles the exploration of HEA configurational space for catalytic applications. A machine learning framework, aiming to correct the estimations of the alchemical perturbation density functional theory (APDFT), is developed to predict binding energies on HEA surfaces with high accuracy and minimal computational cost. This approach enables efficient high-throughput screening of HEAs for catalytic processes, such as carbon dioxide reduction, thereby facilitating the discovery of optimal catalytic materials. Collectively, this thesis contributes to advancement of the field of computational materials science by introducing novel methodologies that enhance predictive capabilities for HEAs and nano-crystalline materials. These contributions are pivotal in optimizing material properties for radiation resistance and catalytic performance, offering significant potential for advancing sustainable energy technologies and addressing pressing environmental challenges.Applied Science, Faculty ofMechanical Engineering, Department ofGraduat
Mathematical modelling of opioid use disorder and treatment in BC
No full textThe toxic drug overdose crisis has continued to be a major problem in British Columbia, with approximately 6− 7 people dying each day, on average, because of drug overdoses. We formulated several mathematical models to gain a quantitative understanding of the experiences of people who use opioids in British Columbia. These models include compartmental ODE models
and age-structured PDE models. The models that we developed allowed us to answer questions at an individual level, such as the average number of overdoses experienced by a person over time. We studied how the average number of overdoses depends on the parameters of the compartmental ODE models. We determined a mathematical relationship between the relapse
rate, treatment rate, and the average number of overdoses in a person in their lifetime. At the population level, we used numerical simulations to investigate the effects of different relapse and treatment rates on the number of people who use opioids over time. We generated stochastic simulations using the Gillespie algorithm to discretize the death and overdose events, and the transitions between compartments from the ODE models. With the age-structured PDE models, we studied the impact of mandatory treatment on population dynamics and the average number of overdoses experienced by a person over time. Our findings indicate that the implementation of
mandatory treatment is correlated with a decrease in the average number of overdoses experienced by a person over time. In the future, individual-based data on the times spent by people in treatment or the time before relapse can be incorporated into our age-structured models to model the relapse rate more realistically.Science, Faculty ofMathematics, Department ofGraduat
Visual signals of self-motion in the pretectum of a flying zebra finch
No full textMany animals including birds and humans depend on global visual motion, commonly termed optic flow, to guide movement through natural environments. In all tetrapods, the pretectal nucleus lentiformis mesencephali (LM, which is homologous to the mammalian pretectal nucleus of the optic tract) contains retina-recipient neurons that respond to optic flow stimuli and demonstrate tuning with respect to direction, speed, and in the spatiotemporal domain. Neural inactivation experiments and electrophysiology paired with eye tracking demonstrate that LM is implicated in image stabilizing eye movements such as the optokinetic response. Given the physiology and connectivity of LM, it is expected to also play a role in the analysis of optic flow during locomotion and other gaze stabilizing behaviours such as the optomotor responses. However, LM function has never been investigated in unrestrained, behaving animals. The motivating hypothesis for this research is that the activity of LM neurons is modulated by optic flow during natural locomotion. Because subcortical optic flow pathways to the cerebellum are well-defined in birds and thought to serve an important role in flight, zebra finches and their flight behaviours were investigated. Extracellular electrophysiology paired with high-throughput motion tracking was developed to record spiking activity of LM neurons in freely flying zebra finches. Analyses compare the responses of LM neurons to flight-induced optic flow and exogenous large-field motion stimuli presented to head-fixed subjects. Most neurons responded during flight in accordance with their tuning properties determined during head- fixation. Neurons that preferred forward motion were typically inhibited by flight-induced backward motion, but some could be excited by exogenous forward motion, suggesting a portion of LM neurons faithfully report visually driven signals during flight. Neurons that responded to exogenous optic flow in the frontal visual field were highly active during flight, suggesting they may respond to flight-induced visual expansion. These findings suggest LM participates in visuomotor transformations during locomotion, extending its role beyond oculomotor behaviours.Science, Faculty ofZoology, Department ofGraduat
Iskotew : fire-keeping the fire lit Indigenous Iskotwew (women) leading in decolonizing education systems
No full textIndigenous leadership is still an emerging field of study within educational leadership, where Indigenous women’s voices and experiences are largely unaccounted for, especially in the K-12 educational system. This study explored Indigenous women’s wholistic leadership perspectives where they were often “the only one” or the sole leaders in their districts. This qualitative study utilized a purposeful sampling of seven Knowledge Holders. By using an Indigenous approach to research, this study employed storywork as a means to capture the finer details of the Knowledge Holders’ perspectives and lived experiences of leading. Specifically, seven Indigenous women shared their conversations using the Conversational Method and Sharing Circles, responding to the main research question: “How do Indigenous women leaders leading within large urban educational organizations retain their ‘inner fire’?” What is their lived experience leading in decolonizing education systems? Are they surviving, surthriving, or not? Data was collected through conversations via Zoom and field notes. The conversations were transcribed and analyzed using multi-level coding and thematic analysis. The key finding of the research is that Indigenous women struggle to keep their Indigeneity intact while navigating their leadership in decolonizing educational systems. They are often the sole Indigenous leaders in a system, who lean in to their cultural teachings, families, and mentors to help keep their inner fire stoked and burning brightly. This research contributed to the current emerging research in the field of study on Indigenous women’s leadership. There will continue to be a significant absence of Indigenous women leaders in leadership positions in educational organizations if changes are not made to the culture of these organizations. Further research is needed to expand and include the voices of those who identify as Black, People of Colour (POC), and LGBTQIA2S+ who are similarly leading in the K-12 and post-secondary education system.Education, Faculty ofEducational Studies (EDST), Department ofGraduat