A Soft Competition Among Arbitral Institutions: The institutional oligopoly of mixed arbitration.

Arbitral institutions play a vital role beyond merely facilitating international arbitration between private parties and states; they actively shape international legal norms and influence global governance. Despite their strategic and policy-shaping role, scholarship on arbitral institutions remains limited mostly to doctrinal analyses of their procedural functions. Addressing this gap, this thesis presents a comparative case study, exploring the influence of four dominant arbitral institutions and their leading experts on the development and evolution of mixed arbitration. The study combines insider research and work in the archives of inter- and non-governmental organizations, states, and influential individuals. It also draws on numerous leaked diplomatic cables. The thesis finds that the institutional market for treaty-based mixed arbitration constitutes an oligopoly of four institutions. Rather than from free market competition, this oligopoly emerged from a combination of factors, including brokering by international bureaucrats and arbitration experts during critical junctures, followed by subsequent path-dependent developments. This dynamic is historically embedded in the emergence of administered forms of contract-based mixed arbitration, which set the scene for the arrival of ICSID and the proliferation of treaty-based cases. While ICSID’s arrival marks a significant milestone, other institutions thrived in lesser but still vital ways, leveraging factors such as the timing of state accessions to the ICSID Convention, geopolitical dynamics during the Cold War, the introduction of the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules, new treaty provisions offering a forum choice, and lobbying by influential experts who possessed ‘the right visibility at the right time’. The study contributes to several strands of scholarship, including on the political economy of the investment treaty regime, the growing judicialization of international law, and the role of non-state actors in international relations. It also represents the first comparative case study of non-doctrinal aspects of arbitral institutions with a focus on mixed arbitration

More than a Monolith: Podcasting Authentic Self-Concepts and Cultural Expressions in Canada

This dissertation explores how podcasters from different racial and ethnic groups in Canada use podcasting to articulate their own identities and represent themselves and their communities through sound and language. Ten non-public podcasts were compared to ten publicly produced podcasts from the CBC between 2015 and 2020. In total, three episodes from each of the 20 podcasts were listened to for a total of 60 episodes. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used to evaluate how podcasters linguistically self-express. Sound analysis helped examine how podcasters use voice, music, added FX, and archival audio to articulate their cultural identities. Interviews contextualized how podcasters conceived of their production, their motivations, and their podcast goals to represent community and revisit cultural histories in Canada. The findings indicate that “history” and “true crime” podcasters in public and non-public models tend to critique institutionally produced myths about Canadian identity that have shaped colonial understandings of Canada today and the people who are products of its systems. On the other hand, “society and culture” podcasters from public and non-public models tend to support cross-national communication where members of non-hegemonic groups address various communities as heterogeneous collectives rather than monoliths. Findings also indicate that public (CBC) and non-public podcasts both encourage open self-expression and national criticism. Podcasts can promote voices that are difficult to access elsewhere and deepen what people can learn about infrequently taught or underrepresented historical experiences and modern cultural practices. Podcasters in this study often authored their sense of selves using local, multinational, and diasporic labels beyond a “Canadian” label and its cultural connotations. Podcasters explicitly talking about their race or ethnicity often contextualized how it influences, and is influenced by, their professional, political, and social experiences. Sonically, podcasters audibly self-represented using their regular speaking voices that reject standardized broadcasting voices. Overall, this dissertation forwards that podcasts help critique Canadian history while celebrating non-settler histories and experiences that shape what podcasters believe to be their authentic selves exhibited in their vocalized values, attitudes, and beliefs. Thus, podcasts invite us to hear a diversity of peoples, perspectives, and cultures in public and non-public production spaces

The Effect of Circular Vection on the Subjective Postural Horizontal in the Pitch Plane

Postural orientation assessments, including the subjective postural horizontal (SPH) test, has been demonstrated as a great tool for assessing otoliths contributions to postural orientation and balance (Beule et al., 2006). Previous work has shown that dynamic visual stimuli, in the form of circular vection (CV) in the roll plane, significantly affects the body position and horizontal orientation perception of the support surface (Cleworth et al., 2023). However, CV in the pitch plane has been shown to introduce a different form of the visual stimulus and elicit distinct postural strategies compared to the roll plane. Therefore, by altering the support surface and visual information, this study aims to examine the effect of applying pitch CV in VR, on the body response and perception of horizontal orientation of the support surface. Overall, pitch CV significantly affected SPH of the platform and body position. This thesis contributes to our understanding of the complex integration of the visual and vestibular systems during postural orientation tests and offers a potential avenue for testing postural orientation and balance deficits in clinical populations

Influence of a visual landmark shift on memory-guided reaching in the monkey

Reach and gaze data were collected from one female Macaca mulatta monkey (ML) trained to perform a memory-guided reaching task to determine the influence of allocentric cue shifts on reaching responses in the non-human primate. A landmark (4 ‘dots’ spaced 10° apart forming the corners of a virtual square) was presented at 1 of 15 locations on a touch screen. The landmark either reappeared at the same location (stable landmark condition) or shifted by 8° in one of 8 directions (landmark shift condition). ‘No-landmark’ controls were the same, but without the landmark. The presence of a stable landmark increased the accuracy of both gaze and touch responses and the precision of gaze. In the landmark shift condition, reaches shifted partially (mean = 29 %) with the landmark. Overall, these data suggest that the monkey is influenced by visual landmarks when reaching to remembered targets in a similar way as humans

A Two-Eyed Seeing Approach to Evaluating an eIntervention for Inuit Youth Using Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit

Inuit youth have one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Presently, there is no culturally appropriate suicide intervention for this population. This study aimed to evaluate the process of developing the I-SPARX CBT e-Intervention, and its content, using Two-Eyed Seeing. Four data sets from the 2018-2019 I-SPARX project were used in this study from four communities across Nunavut: Iqaluit (n=22), Qamani’tuaq (n=3), and Kinngait (n=4). One focus group was held in Tkaronto (n=5) with youth from Iqaluktuuttiaq. Thematic Analysis explored responses to research questions as grounded in the two frameworks —three Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ) principles and western CBT skills. Results demonstrated that features of the process of collaboratively developing I-SPARX met principles set out in the IQ framework. Aspects of the process of adapting fit with IQ, with Piliriqatigiingniq (Collaborative Relationships) being the most prominent IQ. Features of CBT underlying the I-SPARX game met principles set out in the IQ framework: the most prominent principles reflected in the content were Pilimmaksarniq (Skills and Knowledge Acquisition) and Qanuqtuurunnarniq (Problem Solving). Both the process and content of the I-SPARX project met criteria for a Two-Eyed Seeing evaluation, meshing IQ principles with western CBT applications. Limitations of this study, that engaged a small sample of Inuit youth, are discussed. Recommendations for future research, include incorporating additional IQ principles to expand on Inuit cultural perspectives. Preliminary results suggest that I-SPARX could be efficacious for contributing to Inuit cultural research in development and evaluation of mental health and wellness e-interventions for Inuit youth

The epidemiology of burn injuries in a Canadian population during the COVID-19 pandemic

Purpose: To investigate the changes in the epidemiology of burn injuries in a Canadian population during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information were used to evaluate differences in burn ED visits from before to during the COVID-19 pandemic. Logistic regression models estimated the odds of a severe burn occurrence. Results: During the pandemic, there were significant decreases in ED visits for burns. Distributions of factors associated with burns had little to no change. Period, age, gender, income, month, and daytime were significantly associated with severe burns during the pandemic. Conclusions: The study found large reductions in the number of ED visits during the pandemic, but no evidence of changes in the epidemiology of burns or patterns in the patient populations

My Exhibition on Cute Dogs Wearing Christmas Outfits

My exhibition on cute dogs wearing Christmas outfits

Best Laid Birth Plans: a relational analysis of the legal rights of birthing people in Canada

While it is trite law in Canada that patients have the right to make their own medical decisions, news reports, regulatory complaints, and civil claims indicate that this right is failing to translate to delivery rooms. This thesis examines the gaps between the legal rights of birthing people in Canada as they exist “on the books” and the way those rights are experienced, using the critical theory of Law in Action. Building on feminist critiques of the traditional liberal conception of autonomy, this thesis conceptualizes childbirth as an experience deeply embedded in relations to others and concludes that to close the gaps between legal rights and lived experiences, we must craft law and policy in a manner that accounts for the broader relational context in which childbirth occurs

Getting Out of Debt Poverty

This dissertation advances a novel government program that could remedy inadequate access to credit for unbanked and underbanked individuals – those it defines as the “very poor.” It sets out the socioeconomic circumstances that create singular barriers for the very poor. It analyses the credit needs of the very poor, the unique institutions they interact with to meet these needs, and the ways in which these institutions intertwine extreme poverty, credit, and marginalisation. The dissertation proceeds to examine the role of the state in the provision and regulation of credit, and in the entrenchment of extreme poverty. It provides a sustained historical analysis of the role of the postal service, a public institution, in the provision of banking and credit and discusses a number of analogous programs and proposals that normalise and contextualise its novel government program. The dissertation extends a framework drawn from antitrust law to argue that state intervention in the marketplace is best understood as falling along a spectrum, from the provision of a competing product or service to the monopolisation of an entire industry. This framework elucidates how we justify state intervention with respect to certain essential, “public” products and services. The dissertation closes with a detailed proposal for a government program that would provide credit to the very poor through loans repaid through additional, progressive taxation. Individuals whose income does not reach a certain level would not need to repay the loan, whereas those with a high income would effectively repay a multiple of the loan principal amount. Repayment would depend on income, but only for a limited period of time. The program may have unique potential to alleviate persistently lower social mobility for the very poor