13,499 research outputs found
Building body identities - exploring the world of female bodybuilders
This thesis explores how female bodybuilders seek to develop and maintain a viable sense of self despite being stigmatized by the gendered foundations of what Erving Goffman (1983) refers to as the 'interaction order'; the unavoidable presentational context in which identities are forged during the course of social life. Placed in the context of an overview of the historical treatment of women's bodies, and a concern with the development of bodybuilding as a specific form of body modification, the research draws upon a unique two year ethnographic study based in the South of England, complemented by interviews with twenty-six female bodybuilders, all of whom live in the U.K. By mapping these extraordinary women's lives, the research illuminates the pivotal spaces and essential lived experiences that make up the female bodybuilder. Whilst the women appear to be embarking on an 'empowering' radical body project for themselves, the consequences of their activity remains culturally ambivalent. This research exposes the 'Janus-faced' nature of female bodybuilding, exploring the ways in which the women negotiate, accommodate and resist pressures to engage in more orthodox and feminine activities and appearances
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Co-design As Healing: Exploring The Experiences Of Participants Facing Mental Health Problems
This thesis is an exploration of the healing role of co-design in mental health. Although co-design projects conducted within mental health settings are rising, existing literature tends to focus on the object of design and its outcomes while the experiences of participants per se remain largely unexplored. The guiding research question of this study is not how we design things that improve mental health, but how co-designing, as an act, might do so.
The thesis presents two projects that were organized in collaboration with the mental health charity Islington Mind and the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP) in London.
The project at Islington Mind used a structured design process inviting participants to design for wellbeing. A case study analysis provides insights on how participants were impacted, summarizing key challenges and opportunities.
The design at PTP worked towards creating a collective brief in an emergent fashion, finally culminating in a board game. The experiences of participants were explored through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), using semi-structured interview data. The analysis served to identify key themes characterising the experience of co-design such as contributing, connecting, thinking and intentioning. In addition, a mixed-methods analysis of questionnaires and interview data exploring participants' wellbeing, showed that all participants who engaged fairly consistently in the project improved after the project ended, although some participants' scores returned to baseline six months later.
Reflecting on both projects, an approach to facilitation within mental health is outlined, detailing how the dimensions of weaving and layered participation, nurturing mattering and facilitating attitudes interlace. This contribution raises awareness of tacit dimensions in the practice of facilitation, articulating the nuances of how to encourage and sustain meaningful and ethical engagement and offering insights into a range of tools. It highlights the importance of remaining reflexive in relation to attitudes and emotions and discusses practical methodological and ethical challenges and ways to resolve them which can be of benefit to researchers embarking on a similar journey.
The thesis also offers detailed insights on how methodologies from different fields were integrated into a whole, arguing for transparency and reflexivity about epistemological assumptions, and how underlying paradigms shift in an interdisciplinary context.
Based on the overall findings, the thesis makes a case for considering design as healing (or a designerly way of healing), highlighting implications at a systems, social and individual level. It makes an original contribution to our understanding of design, highlighting its healing character, and proposes a new way to support mental health. The participants in this study not only had increased their own wellbeing through co-designing, but were also empowered and contributed towards healing the world. Hence, the thesis argues for a unique, holistic perspective of design and mental health, recognizing the interconnectedness of the individual, social and systemic dimensions of the healing processes that are ignited
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Enhancement Approach: Success Stories of EFL Teachers from Bangladesh and Nepal
The company she keeps : The social and interpersonal construction of girls same sex friendships
This thesis begins a critical analysis of girls' 'private' interpersonal and social relations as they are enacted within two school settings. It is the study of these marginal subordinated worlds productivity of forms of femininity which provides the main narrative of this project. I seek to understand these processes of (best) friendship construction through a feminist multi-disciplinary frame, drawing upon cultural studies, psychoanalysis and accounts of gender politics. I argue that the investments girls bring to their homosocial alliances and boundary drawing narry a psychological compulsion which is complexly connected to their own experiences within the mother/daughter bond as well as reflecting positively an immense social debt to the permissions girls have to be nurturant and ; negatively their own reproduction of oppressive exclusionary practices. Best friendship in particular gives girls therefore, the experience of 'monogamy' continuous of maternal/daughter identification, reminiscent of their positioning inside monopolistic forms of heterosexuality. But these subcultures also represent a subversive discontinuity to the public dominance of boys/teachers/adults in schools and to the ideologies and practices of heterosociality and heterosexuality. By taking seriously their transmission of the values of friendship in their chosen form of notes and diaries for example, I was able to access the means whereby they were able to resist their surveillance and control by those in power over them. I conclude by arguing that it is through a recognition of the valency of these indivisiblly positive and negative aspects to girls cultures that Equal Opportunities practitioners must begin if they are serious about their ambitions. Methods have to be made which enable girls to transfer their 'private' solidarities into the 'public' realm, which unquestionably demands contesting with them the causes and consequences of their implication in the divisions which also contaminate their lives and weaken them
Studies of strategic performance management for classical organizations theory & practice
Nowadays, the activities of "Performance Management" have spread very broadly in actually every part of business and management. There are numerous practitioners and researchers from very different disciplines, who are involved in exploring the different contents of performance management. In this thesis, some relevant historic developments in performance management are first reviewed. This includes various theories and frameworks of performance management. Then several management science techniques are developed for assessing performance management, including new methods in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Soft System Methodology (SSM). A theoretical framework for performance management and its practical procedures (five phases) are developed for "classic" organizations using soft system thinking, and the relationship with the existing theories are explored. Eventually these results are applied in three case studies to verify our theoretical development. One of the main contributions of this work is to point out, and to systematically explore the basic idea that the effective forms and structures of performance management for an organization are likely to depend greatly on the organizational configuration, in order to coordinate well with other management activities in the organization, which has seemingly been neglected in the existing literature of performance management research in the sense that there exists little known research that associated particular forms of performance management with the explicit assumptions of organizational configuration. By applying SSM, this thesis logically derives some main functional blocks of performance management in 'classic' organizations and clarifies the relationships between performance management and other management activities. Furthermore, it develops some new tools and procedures, which can hierarchically decompose organizational strategies and produce a practical model of specific implementation steps for "classic" organizations. Our approach integrates popular types of performance management models. Last but not least, this thesis presents findings from three major cases, which are quite different organizations in terms of management styles, ownership, and operating environment, to illustrate the fliexbility of the developed theoretical framework
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Privacy-aware Smart Home Interface Framework
Smart home user interfaces are pervasive and shared by multiple users who occupy the space. Therefore, they pose a risk to interpersonal privacy of occupants because an individual’s sensitive information can be leaked to other co-occupants (information privacy), or they can be disturbed by intrusions into their personal space (physical privacy) when the co-occupant interacts with the smart home user interfaces. This thesis hypothesises that interpersonal privacy violations can be mitigated by adapting the user interface layer and presents insights into how to achieve usable user interface adaptation to mitigate or minimise interpersonal privacy violations in smart homes.
The thesis reports two case studies and two user studies. The first case study identifies the key characteristics needed to model the rich context of interpersonal privacy violations scenarios. Then it presents knowledge representation models that are required to represent the identified characteristics and evaluates them for adequacy in modelling the context information of interpersonal privacy violation scenarios. The second case study presents a software architecture and a set of algorithms that can detect interpersonal privacy violations and generate usable user interface adaptations. Then it evaluates the architecture and the algorithms for adequacy in generating usable privacy-aware user interface adaptations. The first user study (N=15) evaluates the usability of the adaptive user interfaces generated from the framework where storyboards were used as the stimulant. Extending the findings from the usability study and expanding the coverage of example scenarios, the second user study (N=23) evaluates the overall user experience of the adaptive user interfaces, using video prototypes as the stimulant.
The research demonstrates that the characteristics identified, and the respective knowledge representation models adequately captured the context of interpersonal privacy violation scenarios. Furthermore, the software architecture and the algorithms could detect possible interpersonal privacy violations and generate usable user interface adaptations to mitigate them. The two user studies demonstrate that the adaptive user interfaces, when used in appropriate situations, were a suitable solution for addressing interpersonal privacy violations while providing high usability and a positive user experience. The thesis concludes by providing recommendations for developing privacy-aware user interface adaptations and suggesting future work that can extend this research
Vulnerability, decision-making and the protection of prisoners in Scotland and England
Vulnerable and protection prisoners currently make up a sizeable proportion of the prison populations in England and Scotland, and designated physical space to house them, an approach that has developed significantly in both countries since the 1960s, remains under studied. Within research on prisons, vulnerability has been predominantly associated with risks to the self, for example, mental health problems, self-harm and suicide, internal vulnerabilities that prisoners either bring into an establishment or which are a consequence of the stressors of prison life. This literature further tends to focus on certain categories of prisoner, namely those who have committed sexual crimes. This framing of vulnerability in prison means academic research typically studies vulnerability as a settled status, and there has been a move away from exploring meanings, experiences and determinations of vulnerability as these arise and change at different points of a person’s journey through prison. This study addresses these gaps by sharing the perspectives directly from those at risk of victimization in prison as well as from those in charge of deciding who will get protection from risks. The focus is on prisoner and staff decisions to relocate to protective housing (vulnerable prisoner units (VPU) in England and protection halls in Scotland).
This research utilised qualitative methods, interviewing staff (13) involved in designating or managing vulnerability in prison as well as prisoners (23) who had been identified as needing protective housing. The research was conducted in one prison in England and two prisons in Scotland. It highlights the significant levels of victimization, trauma and fear experienced by prisoner research participants, and in doing so complicates prevailing ideas of vulnerability in prison. The findings chapters show: staff perspectives on what counts as a valid basis of vulnerability and therefore how it is managed and to some extent rationed (Chapter 5); the importance of journeys into and through prisons which shape and intensify experiences of vulnerability (Chapter 6); the perspectives of prisoners housed in a VPU in England which reinforced the idea that vulnerability is fluid and that there are some common factors affecting decisions to relocate from mainstream wings, but ultimately each decision is situated in the personal circumstances of an individual (Chapter 7); the perspectives of prisoners housed in protection halls in Scotland highlighting the factors that influence decisions to seek out or resist protective accommodation where, like England, common factors influenced decisions but were situated in highly individual circumstances (Chapter 8), and how these feelings were managed. The conclusion (Chapter 9) summarises key findings and calls for a sociology of the vulnerable prisoner (building on a conceptualisation of vulnerability in Chapter 3) to understand not only how they navigate risk from others and the prison itself, but how they make sense of their newly acquired yet further stigmatized identity. Finally, it sets out some implications and suggestions for policy based on its new contribution to a sociology of vulnerability
Breaking Ub with Leishmania mexicana: a ubiquitin activating enzyme as a novel therapeutic target for leishmaniasis
Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease, which inflicts a variety of gruesome pathologies on humans. The number of individuals afflicted with leishmaniasis is thought to vary between 0.7 and 1.2 million annually, of whom it is estimated that 20 to 40 thousand die. This problem is exemplary of inequality in healthcare – current leishmaniasis treatments are inadequate due to toxicity, cost, and ineffectiveness, so there is an urgent need for improved chemotherapies.
Ubiquitination is a biochemical pathway that has received attention in cancer research. It is the process of adding the ubiquitin protein as a post-translational modification to substrate proteins, using an enzymatic cascade comprised of enzymes termed E1s, E2s, and E3s. Ubiquitination can lead to degradation of substrate proteins, or otherwise modulate their function. As the name suggests, this modification can be found across eukaryotic cell biology. As such, interfering with ubiquitination may interfere with essential biological processes, which means ubiquitination may present a new therapeutic target for leishmaniasis.
Before ubiquitination inhibitors can be designed, components of the ubiquitination system must be identified. To this end, a bioinformatic screening campaign employed BLASTs and hidden Markov models, using characterised orthologs from model organisms as bait, to screen publicly-available Leishmania mexicana genome sequence databases, searching for genes encoding putative E1s, E2s, and E3s. To confirm some of these identifications on a protein level, activity-based probes, protein pulldowns, and mass spectrometry were used. Using an activity-based probe that emulates the structure of adenylated ubiquitin, E1s were identified, and their relative abundance quantified. A chemical crosslinker extended the reach of this probe, allowing the identification of an E2 (LmxM.33.0900). It is noted that L. mexicana has two E1s – unusual for a single celled organism. Of these E1s, LmxM.34.3060 was considerably more abundant than LmxM.23.0550 in both major life cycle stages of the in vitro Leishmania cultures.
It is important to describe the wider context of these enzymes – what is their interactome, what are their substrates? To study this, CRISPR was used to fuse a proximity-based labelling system, BioID, on genes of interest – LmxM.34.3060 and LmxM.33.0900. The E2 (LmxM.33.0900) was shown to interact with the E1 (LmxM.34.3060), validating the results from the activity-based probe and crosslinker experiments. Due to sequence homology with characterised orthologs, the E2 was hypothesised to function in the endoplasmic reticulum degradation pathway. Immunoprecipitations of a ubiquitin motif, diglycine, were conducted with a view to gathering information on the substrates of ubiquitin. Anti-diglycine peptides included some of those identified by BioID. Experiments examining ubiquitin’s role in the DNA damage response were also initiated, as were improvements to the proximity-based labelling system, however these were not followed to completion due to a lack of time and resources.
To examine the possibility of finding novel drug targets in the ubiquitination cascade, recombinant proteins were expressed. LmxM.34.3060 was expressed in a functional form, while a putative SUMO E2 (LmxM.02.0390) was functional after refolding. Expressed LmxM.33.0900 was not functional and could not be refolded into a functional form. Drug assays were conducted on LmxM.34.3060, which found an inhibitor of the human ortholog, TAK-243, to be 20-fold less effective against the Leishmania enzyme. Additional assays found an inhibitor that was 50-fold more effective at inhibiting the Leishmania enzyme as opposed to its human equivalent - 5'O-sulfamoyl adenosine. Furthermore, a new mechanism of action, inhibiting the E1, for was identified for drugs previously characterised to inhibit protein synthesis. LmxM.34.3060 underwent biophysical characterisation, with structural information obtained using SAXS and protein crystallography. A crystal structure was solved to 3.1 Å, with the in-solution SAXS structure complementary to this. TAK-243 was modelled into the LmxM.34.3060 structure and clashes were predicted, concurring with TAK-243’s reduced efficacy against the Leishmania enzyme in the drug assays.
This project aimed to characterise the potential of an understudied biochemical system to provide novel therapeutic targets for a neglected tropical pathogen. To achieve this aim it presents the identifications of two E1s, an interactome, a structure, and a potent, selective inhibitor of a Leishmania ubiquitin activating enzyme
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