The Pull to fusion: an exploration of observed links between autism and hoarding

This study is a contribution to using a psychoanalytic understanding to elucidate hoarding behaviours. My thesis explores whether ideas relevant to autism can be used to explain extreme hoarding. The existing psychoanalytic understandings of the autistic manoeuvres are applied to data from a TV program on hoarding. This thesis has mainly used Tustin’s approach to autism based on Kleinian theories of primary envy, of the infant’s most primitive anxieties and of the symbolisation process. It is here argued that the very early trauma, understood by psychoanalytic writers to be linked to unbearable experiences of separateness, appears to also reside at the core of hoarding behaviours. The extreme hoarding observed would denote the existence of an ‘autistic retreat’ or ‘cyst’ (as described by Key writers such as Sydney Klein and Judith Mitrani), protecting the individual from unbearable fears of pain and disintegration (as described by key writers such as Sydney Klein and Mitrani). Clinical features of autism, were operationalised and used to examine the data from the TV program for these features. This was a single case study, my approach being largely subjective, exploring how a clinical eye could be used to bring insight and meaning to the phenomena observed. Each of the two processes, autism and hoarding shed light on each other. This furthers our understanding of traumatic experiences of loss and of the symbolisation process

DEVELOPING AND USING A LOGIC MODEL FOR EVALUATION AND ASSESSMENT OF UNIVERSITY STUDENT AFFAIRS PROGRAMMING: A CASE STUDY

This dissertation addresses theory and practice of evaluation and assessment in university student affairs, by applying logic modeling / program theory to a case study. I intend to add knowledge to ongoing dialogue among evaluation scholars and practitioners on student affairs program planning and improvement as integral considerations that serve mission and vision at the contemporary university. Insights on the following research questions can help determine theoretical justifications and forge an inventory of effective evaluation and assessment techniques in student affairs. 1.How can logic modeling be used to analyze evaluations of student affairs programs and an overall assessment campaign?2.How might evaluators and planners have enlisted a logic model such as the one developed in this study to enhance the effectiveness of the assessment campaign at the profiled university student affairs unit? These questions involve general principles and particular applications of my arguments in favor of using a logic model to analyze a comprehensive assessment campaign, as conducted by a designated student affairs assessment team. Although sets of workable techniques at one university may not generalize to another campus culture, findings will reveal how one institution of higher education (IHE) has behaved and responded to new challenges and inputs - in this case, greater emphasis on evaluation and assessment to address issues of accountability and credibility for student affairs. Using logic modeling as the primary heuristic, this study analyzes what the university system depicted in case study has accomplished and might have accomplished. I also invite readers to join my speculation how using and perhaps customizing this logic model could guide the unit's next steps in ongoing assessment. If a logic model works retrospectively, then perhaps it might function proactively. My hope is that readers find descriptions and lessons to compare and contrast to their own evaluative practices, adding to the knowledge base and possible consensus about current practices for university student affairs assessment campaigns

Caring Against the Carceral: How Families Mediate the Social Death of Incarceration

Incarceration, especially in the United States, is deeply related to issues of racism, poverty, and citizenship. These particular experiences are the result of a history of biopolitical control affecting Black and brown communities and have a quintessential origin in enslavement. Those who are incarcerated are isolated, dishonored, and powerless as a result of the criminalization of race and poverty. These observations led to questions surrounding the particular impact families may have on the experiences of those who are incarcerated. Families of Incarcerated Loved ones, or FOILs, mediate incarceration through intentional socialization which has the potential to counteract the realities of social death. Through virtual fieldwork and community engagement, it was found that FOILs have the potential to counteract social isolation and alienation. Their ability to fully participate is impacted, however, by their own financial circumstances and the residual effects of carceral adjacency. FOILs, then, must work first to ensure their own socialization, honor, and power prior to committing significant portions of their time and energy to resisting their loved one’s social isolation

The Problematic of Privacy in the Namespace

In the twenty-first century, the issue of privacy--particularly the privacy of individuals with regard to their personal information and effects--has become highly contested terrain, producing a crisis that affects both national and global social formations. This crisis, or problematic, characterizes a particular historical conjuncture I term the namespace. Using cultural studies and the theory of articulation, I map the emergent ways that the namespace articulates economic, juridical, political, cultural, and technological forces, materials, practices and protocols. The cohesive articulation of the namespace requires that privacy be reframed in ways that make its diminution seem natural and inevitable. In the popular media, privacy is often depicted as the price we pay as citizens and consumers for security and convenience, respectively. This discursive ideological shift supports and underwrites the interests of state and corporate actors who leverage the ubiquitous network of digitally connected devices to engender a new regime of informational surveillance, or dataveillance. The widespread practice of dataveillance represents a strengthening of the hegemonic relations between these actors--each shares an interest in promoting an emerging surveillance society, a burgeoning security politics, and a growing information economy--that further empowers them to capture and store the personal information of citizens/consumers. In characterizing these shifts and the resulting crisis, I also identify points of articulation vulnerable to rearticulation and suggest strategies for transforming the namespace in ways that might empower stronger protections for privacy and related civil rights

Story understanding in Genesis : exploring automatic plot construction through commonsense reasoning

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 72).Whether through anecdotes, folklore, or formal history, humans learn the lessons and expectations of life from stories. If we are to build intelligent programs that learn as humans do, such programs must understand stories as well. Casting narrative text in an information-rich representation affords Al research platforms, such as the Genesis system, the capacity to understand the events of stories individually. To understand a story, however, a program must understand not just events, but also how events cause and motivate one another. In order to understand the relationships between these events, stories must be saturated with implicit details, connecting given events into coherent plot arcs. In my research, my first step was to analyze a range of story summaries in detail. Using nearly 50 rules, applicable to brief summaries of stories taken from international politics, group dynamics, and basic human emotion, I demonstrate how a rendition of Frank Herbert's Dune can be automatically understood so as to produce an interconnected story network of over one hundred events. My second step was to explore the nuances of rule construction, finding which rules are needed to create story networks reflective of proper implicit understanding and how we, as architects, must shape those rules to be understood. In particular, I develop a method that constructs new rules using the rules already embedded in stories, a representation of higher-order thinking that enables us to speak of our ideas as objects.by Harold William Capen Low, IV.M.Eng

SAILORS' WIVES AND HUSBAND ABSENCE

This thesis reports on a study of women married to Royal Navy personnel and resident in the West of England and Wales. The analyses are based on data derived from secondary sources, a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews, the field-work having been conducted between January 1985 and April 1986. Past research has concentrated on the emotional reaction of wives to husband absence, its relationship to anxiety and depression. This thesis is, however, concerned with the social situation of wives intermittently without husbands. It is an exploration of the marital and domestic consequences of husband absence and the implications it has for the wider relationships of wives periodically without husbands. A distinction is drawn between long-term absences of weeks and often months and short-term, weekday absences. - Here the evidence suggests that short but frequent absences are the most disruptive and "weekend marriages" the least satisfactory. Husband absence is seen to impact deeply into the life course experiences of wives; it increases their domestic powers and responsibilities, especially if they are resident in private housing; it alters relationships with children and the contexts of child-rearing; it effect the employment opportunities and experiences of wives; it transforms domestic routines and household timetables; and it influences the social contacts and neighbouring relations of wives, leaving wives without husbands relatively isolated members of the community. The thesis also suggests that although separation and absence have been the foci of past concern, reunion and reintegration are equally problematic. The findings provide case study information on a particular set of marital experiences and relate to wider perspectives on the construction of marriage and wifehood

Overhearing: An Attuning Approach to Noise in Danish Hospitals

Denmark is building new and improved super hospitals, based on a vision of improving overall quality by switching the focus from hospitals for treatment to hospitals for healing, guided by research in the field of evidence-based design and healing architecture. Users mention noise as one of the main stressors and research has discovered that noise levels in hospitals continue to rise. Noise has therefore become a central point of concern, recommending strategies to reduce measurable and perceived noise levels.However, these strategies do not support the need to feel like an integral part of the shared hospital environment, which is also a key element in creating healing environments linked to a reductionist framework underlying the field. This framework regards broad concepts such as noise and silence as objects with quantifiable properties, and assumes that these properties can be understood independently of the perceiver as a bodily and situated subject. The aim of this dissertation is accordingly to develop an alternative framework capable of accommodating the multi-sensory, affective and atmospheric conditions that influence the experience of noise, with a view to complementing the existing approaches in the field.  Consequently, the dissertation develops an ecological framework capable of accommodating these issues, established by viewing sound and listening through the lens of atmospheres. The attuning approach highlights the reciprocal relationship between the way in which atmospheres condition shared rhythms that shape us, but also the way in which we can tune them in different ways. In the context of sound and listening, this creates the potential of ecological overhearing as an atmospheric mode of listening capable of reconfiguring habitual background and foregrounding relationships. Attuning strategies should thus provide opportunities for diverse acoustic situations and possibilities for active choice-making to meet different and shifting needs through an enactive approach in order to enhance empowerment and ecological overhearing. Embedding diverse enactive sound installations and interactive sound technology in hospitals can facilitate such zones of overhearing. These zones become places for ruptures that strengthen the possibilities for engaging in counter-attunements of existing negative atmospheres. In this way, zones of overhearing not only provide continual sense of presence without demanding full attention, but also create ample opportunities for the restoration of  attention.The dissertation takes an experimental practice-based approach through artistic- and constructive design-research and comprises six peer-reviewed papers (Part IV), framed by a general overview article (Parts I-III) that develops the theoretical and methodological foundation for the papers, and provides a synthesis and discussion of their main findings. The practice-based work is founded on a range of experiments, but focuses on two main experiments: Light, Landscape & Voices and KidKit, and the way in which they elicit sensitivities within the topic of investigation. This contribution also concerns the concrete development of installations through the experiments. These installations are in themselves manifestations of and challenges to hypotheses about the topic I aim to address.

Powerful landscapes: squatting, space and religiosity in urban Malaysia

Based on archival, library and ethnographic research, this thesis recasts the notion of "everyday resistance" (as propounded by James Scott) in terms of the landscape and spatiality of an urban Indian squatter settlement in Malaysia.In postcolonial Malaysia, managing different and often competing ethnic and religious identities in a Furnivallian "plural society" presents administrative problems as well as a resource for political legitimation. Arguably, this is most starkly embodied in "squatter colonies", often perceived as potential sites of urban discontent and unrest whilst at the same time providing significant sources of urban labour and important political votebanks.The first part of the thesis examines historically how categories like "squatting", "religion" and "ethnicity" are rendered discursively meaningful. Attention is then shifted to the "ethnographic present" of the fieldwork squatter settlement. I examine varied everyday routines, social practices, and the use of space in juxtaposition to wider cultural and urban processes. Tamil and Telegu Indians comprising two distinct religious groups - Hindu devotees of the goddess Mariyamman and Seventh-Day Adventist Christians - are the main foci of discussion. Descriptions of the celebration of the annual goddess festival (for the former) and the weekly Sabbath services (for the latter) bring out the substantive differences of these two groups in terms of culturally specific spatial idioms, and the theoretical implications they pose for the study of "everyday resistance