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Breaking Boundaries: Re-assembling the Refugee Camp through Home-making Practices of the Camp Dwellers. Examining Refugee Agency in Sustainable Processes and Assemblage Formations
Get PDFScholars often study refugee camps as hierarchical structures, with a predominant focus on the authorities in charge of the camps (i.e., Agier, 2010; Ticktin, 2011). However, this approach often overlooks the role of refugees as key co-creators of the camps. This thesis seeks to explore the agency of refugees in the camp development by examining their everyday practices that give camp dwellers a sense of belonging (i.e., home-making practices). Specifically, I seek to shift the analysis of refugee camps by placing refugees at the center of the inquiry. Through three manuscript essays, I explore the following research themes: 1- The range of home-making practices that are mobilized in the refugee camp, 2- The level of agency the refugees have to shape, conceive and imagine their own living spaces and the factors or determinants that influence this agency, 3- Finally, I seek to understand how the camps are spatially and temporally constructed and how this is defined by exchanges, interactions and flows within and beyond their boundaries. Drawing on theories of home-making (Brun & Fabos, 2015; Elmasri, 2020; Dudley, 2011), assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; De Landa, 2006; McFarlane, 2009; Dovey, 2010), and refugee agency (Ramadan, 2012; Abourahmeh, 2015), and utilizing a methodology that blends empirical and archival research, this study examines three Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan: Baqa’a, Al-Husn, and Talbiyeh. The findings demonstrate that refugees exercise agency at both the individual dwelling and camp-wide scale. The evidence reveals that through engaging in different everyday tasks (such as gardening, masonry, textile crafts, etc.) the refugees develop a deep sense of place and identity that transcends the physical space of the camp. However, the ability to do so is conditioned by the resources, social and political networks and geographic attributes of their respective camp space. The ultimate objective of this thesis is to identify new solutions that engage refugees as co-creators in camp assemblage, thereby improving living conditions in refugee camps
Exploring chiral symmetry breaking and chiral amplification in conglomerate crystals
Get PDFConglomerate crystallization, also known as spontaneous resolution, occurs when molecules crystallize in a non-centrosymmetric space group. Both racemic and achiral building blocks can crystalize as conglomerates to form chiral crystals. The chiral outcome (i.e. the distribution of left- versus right-handed crystals) can be stochastic or non-stochastic depending on the environment and crystallization conditions. Herein the influence of primary and secondary nucleation in the conglomerate crystallization of benzil was explored. The results indicate that chiral amplification is favored under conditions that promote secondary nucleation. The complete and controlled chiral amplification of benzil was confirmed via attrition-enhanced deracemization (i.e. Viedma ripening) in under 2 hours, while the Viedma ripening of decacyclene was also demonstrated over a period of ca. 15 days. Viedma ripening provides non-equilibrium conditions that promote secondary nucleation through enantiomer-specific oriented attachment non-classical crystal growth.
Non-stochastic conglomerate crystallization from achiral building blocks is surprisingly common and not well understood. Herein, one of the earliest examples was investigated, where an overwhelming imbalance (134 right-handed crystals, 5 left-handed crystal) was confirmed in the conglomerate crystallization of magnesium sulfate heptahydrate (MgSO4·7H2O), epsomite. In such cases, it is believed that hidden chiral (cryptochiral) environments that influence the primary crystal nucleation are to blame. As such, chiral additives (L- and D-asparagine) were used to influence the mirror symmetry breaking in epsomite crystallization. The chiral distribution resulting from the conglomerate crystallization of achiral molecules is fascinating since it may provide insight regarding polymorphism and the outstanding question of the origin of biological homochirality
Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum of Canadian Digital Literacy Programs
Get PDFThis research project examines the hidden curriculum of current digital media literacy resources in Canadian secondary classrooms and focuses on a recent federally funded program for secondary students CTRL-F (pronounced control-f). Measuring the interventions against criteria for critical intermedia pedagogy, this project addresses three research questions:
(1) What digital media literacy interventions are available to secondary classroom teachers in Canada, and which organisations provide them? The term intervention is used here in a broad sense, covering any pedagogical activity that is designed specifically for digital literacy.
(2) What strategies are modelled or prescribed in the examples?
(3) Examining the content for its hidden curriculum, what ideological messages are presented? Do the interventions reinforce binary notions of credibility and fact that constitute what Michel Foucault calls a “regime of truth”?
My results show that current resources lack the necessary critical dimensions to support analytical thinking, while also amplifying the objectivity rhetorics of mainstream journalism
Fine-Grained Source Code Tracking and Visualization in Commit History
Get PDFCodeTracker is the current state-of-the-art program element change history generator with a reported precision and recall of 99.9% in method and variable tracking [1]. In this thesis, we extend the granularity of CodeTracker to support the tracking of control-flow blocks (e.g., for, while, if, try, catch, etc.) with a precision and recall of 98.12% and 97.62% respectively, providing researchers and developers with finer-grained information about the evolution of source code. We accompany this extension with a manually validated oracle, which includes the change histories of 1280 code blocks. These code blocks are contained within 200 methods from 20 open-source Java projects (10 methods from each project) comprising the method change history oracle created by Grund et al. [2]. We also present a code change history visualization and navigation tool for CodeTracker, named CodeTracker Visualizer, that overlays the GitHub user interface with change history information enabling users to track code elements directly from the commit page by simply selecting the desired code element. Finally, we compare CodeTracker’s block tracking precision and recall using two different tools that provide statement mappings, namely RefactoringMiner [3, 4], the current state-of-the-art refactoring detection tool, and GumTree [5], the current state-of-the-art Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) Diff tool. The enhanced version of CodeTracker along with the extended oracle are made publicly available to facilitate reproducibility and future research on code element tracking techniques [6]
Drawing from the Architecting Body
Get PDFThe research-creation inquiry stems from years of experience, practical and pedagogical, and reflection on the role and potential of drawing in the discipline of architecture. In an era of ecological crisis and escalating media frenzy, it hypothesizes how drawing might contribute, on a molecular level, to shifting attitudes and concerns by inducing a greater collective openness, sympathy and awareness, and by infusing sensibility into responsibility, sense-ability into response-ability. Its underlying premise is therefore ethico-aesthetic. It begins by exploring through an ecological performance practice, how drawing might reveal, in-form, and be in-formed by lived spacetimes ecologically or, following Guattari, ecosophically. The practice is the motive force generating, inflecting and sustaining the research and creation throughout the thesis. It operates transversally across drawing and architecture and concurrently across body, architecture and environment, bringing them together and generating openings for rethinking drawing differently.
The thesis is also a transdisciplinary endeavour that advocates experimentation and improvisation to induce novelty. It itself tentatively explores the straddling of multiple domains, modes and media, theories and practices, the micro and macro, as it co-composes transversally across writing, drawing, dancing, sounding, performing, filming, and architecting, its own generic process of (re)emergence. But the force that traverses and conjugates them all is of the movement of drawing. In so doing, drawing in-folds certain operative attributes and transduces them into potential for generating and creatively modulating affect. Drawing ultimately seeks to open itself up to becoming a singular immanent force of architecture, whereby what would continue to resound in architecture is its virtual power, its capacity to reawaken the virtual in the actual, the thinking in movement,with its pathic refrains and trigger affect
Modelling of Ion Activity Coefficients: Extended Specific Ion Theory With Ion Pairing
Get PDFThe ratio of a substance's chemical activity to its molar concentration is known as the activity coefficient in chemistry. The activity coefficient, which is 1 in an ideal solution where each molecule's efficiency is equal to its theoretical effectiveness, is a measure of how much a solution deviates from the ideal state.
Some properties of ions in solution are very non-ideal. Even at a low concentration, the activity coefficient is different from one. In basic chemistry, it is common to use concentration or molality instead of activity to calculate equilibria. As long as concentration is small, the activity coefficient is assumed to be one. However, for ions, it can be observed that even at very low concentration, e.g., 0.01 mol/L or mol/kg the activity coefficient is already very different from one (e.g., 0.903 for NaCl). That is why it is important to calculate activity coefficients for chemical equilibrium calculations with ions. Examples of applications are like hydrometallurgy, solubility of metal compounds, scaling, and any crystallisation process of electrolytes. In these cases, it is important to predict the equilibrium and so activity coefficient prediction is needed.
The Specific Ion Theory (SIT) model and Pitzer model are the most popular models to predict activity coefficients of ions in solutions. However, neither of these models account for ion pairing. Ion paring is the formation of dissolved molecules from the ions (e.g., MgSO4(aq)). The purpose of this thesis is to build a model that accounts for ion pairing and predict activity coefficient. The SIT model was used as a basis. The model successfully predicted the activity coefficients of most 1-1 and 2-2 electrolytes to about 1 % accuracy. Including ion pairing improved the accuracy of the SIT model, particularly in the case of 2-2 electrolytes (from about 10 % to about 1 %)
Voices in the Field: A Critical Approach to Reusing Archived Oral History Interviews with the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project
Get PDFWhereas there exists a plethora of studies that engage with the ethics, theory, and methodology of oral history interviewing, the same cannot be said about working with existing oral history collections. This study turns to the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History (FAFCM) Project (2010-12), spearheaded by the National Library of Australia. Borne out of advocacy and transitional justice efforts, this collection showcases the life stories of British, Maltese and Australian children who grew up either in institutional “care” or with foster families. As this thesis argues, by reconstructing the ecosystem(s) of large-scale oral history projects – including their conceptual underpinnings, methodological approaches, institutional frameworks, and interview praxis – we can critically and ethically engage with existing oral history collections as oral history. Indeed, it is imperative that we develop frameworks and protocols to this end, given the countless oral history collections that are preserved, if rarely listened to, in local, state, and federal archival repositories. This study explores three principal pathways through which to reconstruct the ecosystems of the FAFCM collection: first, by foregrounding the experiences of curator Dr. Joanna Sassoon, alongside internal project documentation; second, by interviewing the interviewers, who conducted fieldwork across Australia; and third, by offering a close reading of archived oral history interviews with former British child migrants that speak of resilience, trauma, and shared rites of passage. By mobilizing both metadata and local knowledge of interview contexts, researchers working with archived oral histories can honour the intellectual labour invested in the creation of collections, capture interview dynamics in the field, and explore the subjective and intimate knowledge that resides in oral life stories
Let's Do Lunch: Work-related Outcomes of a Food Event
Get PDFWe all had the experience of sharing meals with coworkers and managers at workplace events. But why is food served during those events? This study aims to examine the effects of food on employees during workplace events. This study built on the impression management framework and the mealtime conversation to investigate the effects of organizational food events on employees’ work engagement levels and affective emotions. The interviews with nine female participants in Canada showed that employees did not focus on work during organizational events after the pandemic. However, sharing food with coworkers left favorable emotions in employees, and stronger ties were built during those workplace events. The results pushed us to explore the effects of workplace events on employees’ attentional focus and energy. Building on the attention restoration theory, this study investigated the effects of food and the different types of interactions during workplace events, work-related versus non-work-related interactions, on employees’ attentional focus and their cognitive, emotional, prosocial, and physical energy. The 133 surveys have shown that employees’ soft attentional focus was stimulated during work-related events compared to non-work-related events. The hard attentional focus was linked to higher reports of prosocial energy. Furthermore, the results also showed that food served during workplace events restored employees’ cognitive, emotional, and prosocial energy. Our study contributed to the understanding of the reason behind serving food during workplace events and demonstrated that corporate events provide an opportunity for employees to build stronger relationships with their coworkers and restore their cognitive, emotional, and prosocial energy
From Imposter Fears to Authenticity: A Typology of Women Entrepreneurs
Get PDFResearch has established that entrepreneurship is a masculine domain in which women are likely to experience identity conflict due to the diverging meanings and behavioral expectations of being an entrepreneur versus being a woman. In this study we adopt a social identity perspective to investigate how women entrepreneurs perceive their gender in the face of this potential identity conflict. By analyzing the narratives from 20 in-depth interviews with women entrepreneurs, complemented by three focus groups with 44 further women, we contribute to entrepreneurship literature by offering a typology of women entrepreneurs. Based on their perceived gender-entrepreneurial fit and mindset, we characterize these entrepreneurs as experiencing Imposter Feelings, Acceptance or Authenticity. Through this typology our research illustrates that there is variation in women’s perception of their gender in entrepreneurship, indicating that, while some women entrepreneurs experience imposter feelings from the identity conflict of being both a woman and an entrepreneur, others avoid or overcome such an identity conflict, finding ways to benefit from being different in the face of male dominated views of entrepreneurial success
Top-down trophic interactions related to forest tent caterpillar outbreaks in temperate hardwood and boreal mixed-wood forests in Quebec
Get PDFThis thesis aims to investigate different trophic interactions related to the outbreaking cycles of the forest tent caterpillar (Malacosoma disstria Hübner, Lepidopter:Lasiocampidae), both top-down and bottom-up, in the two types of forests, the boreal and the temperate. Throughout field studies, we determined that forest tent caterpillar early-instar larvae were more susceptible to mortality due to pathogens and maternal effects in years after the outbreak than to predators. These results suggest delayed density dependence and contribute to low endemic levels between outbreak peaks. We also investigated the overwintering mortality of forest tent caterpillars at the egg stage. While larger egg masses tended to promote survival, this factor was not the only significant predictor. Mortality was also related to average winter temperature variation and cold spells. With increasingly unpredictable
climate patterns, both factors could cause high mortality levels during the winter. Finally, with the high amount of organic material released during the outbreaks, we investigated the impact on potential predators, such as ants. We observed a shift in ant communities in the boreal forest but not in temperate forests, suggesting that disturbances caused by the forest tent caterpillar can alter less ecologically complex and redundant ecosystems. Forest tent caterpillars are important disturbance agents and participate in multiple trophic interactions during outbreaks, cementing the importance of a better understanding of their population dynamics