17,198 research outputs found
Victims' Access to Justice in Trinidad and Tobago: An exploratory study of experiences and challenges of accessing criminal justice in a post-colonial society
This thesis investigates victims' access to justice in Trinidad and Tobago, using their own narratives. It seeks to capture how their experiences affected their identities as victims and citizens, alongside their perceptions of legitimacy regarding the criminal justice system. While there have been some reforms in the administration of criminal justice in Trinidad and Tobago, such reforms have not focused on victims' accessibility to the justice system. Using grounded theory methodology, qualitative data was collected through 31 in-depth interviews with victims and victim advocates. The analysis found that victims experienced interpersonal, structural, and systemic barriers at varying levels throughout the criminal justice system, which manifested as institutionalized secondary victimization, silencing and inequality. This thesis argues that such experiences not only served to appropriate conflict but demonstrates that access is often given in a very narrow sense. Furthermore, it shows a failure to encompass access to justice as appropriated conflicts are left to stagnate in the system as there is often very little resolution. Adopting a postcolonial lens to analyse victims' experiences, the analysis identified othering practices that served to institutionalize the vulnerability and powerlessness associated with victim identities. Here, it is argued that these othering practices also affected the rights consciousness of victims, delegitimating their identities as citizens. Moreover, as a result of their experiences, victims had mixed perceptions of the justice system. It is argued that while the system is a legitimate authority victims' endorsement of the system is questionable, therefore victims' experiences suggest that there is a reinforcement of the system's legal hegemony. The findings suggest that within the legal system of Trinidad and Tobago, legacies of colonialism shape the postcolonial present as the psychology and inequalities of the past are present in the interactions and processes of justice. These findings are relevant for policymakers in Trinidad and Tobago and other regions. From this study it is recognized that, to improve access to justice for victims, there needs to be a move towards victim empowerment that promotes resilience and enhances social capital. Going forward it is noted that there is a need for further research
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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
Image classification over unknown and anomalous domains
A longstanding goal in computer vision research is to develop methods that are simultaneously applicable to a broad range of prediction problems. In contrast to this, models often perform best when they are specialized to some task or data type. This thesis investigates the challenges of learning models that generalize well over multiple unknown or anomalous modes and domains in data, and presents new solutions for learning robustly in this setting.
Initial investigations focus on normalization for distributions that contain multiple sources (e.g. images in different styles like cartoons or photos). Experiments demonstrate the extent to which existing modules, batch normalization in particular, struggle with such heterogeneous data, and a new solution is proposed that can better handle data from multiple visual modes, using differing sample statistics for each.
While ideas to counter the overspecialization of models have been formulated in sub-disciplines of transfer learning, e.g. multi-domain and multi-task learning, these usually rely on the existence of meta information, such as task or domain labels. Relaxing this assumption gives rise to a new transfer learning setting, called latent domain learning in this thesis, in which training and inference are carried out over data from multiple visual domains, without domain-level annotations. Customized solutions are required for this, as the performance of standard models degrades: a new data augmentation technique that interpolates between latent domains in an unsupervised way is presented, alongside a dedicated module that sparsely accounts for hidden domains in data, without requiring domain labels to do so.
In addition, the thesis studies the problem of classifying previously unseen or anomalous modes in data, a fundamental problem in one-class learning, and anomaly detection in particular. While recent ideas have been focused on developing self-supervised solutions for the one-class setting, in this thesis new methods based on transfer learning are formulated. Extensive experimental evidence demonstrates that a transfer-based perspective benefits new problems that have recently been proposed in anomaly detection literature, in particular challenging semantic detection tasks
The applied psychology of addictive orientations : studies in a 12-step treatment context.
The clinical data for the studies was collected at The PROMIS Recovery Centre, a Minnesota Model treatmentc entre for addictions,w hich encouragesth e membership and use of the 12 step Anonymous Fellowships, and is abstinence based. The area of addiction is contextualised in a review chapter which focuses on research relating to the phenomenon of cross addiction. A study examining the concept of "addictive orientations" in male and female addicts is described, which develops a study conductedb y StephensonM, aggi, Lefever, & Morojele (1995). This presents study found a four factor solution which appeared to be subdivisions of the previously found Hedonism and Nurturance factors. Self orientated nurturance (both food dimensions, shopping and caffeine), Other orientated nurturance (both compulsive helping dimensions and work), Sensation seeking hedonism (Drugs, prescription drugs, nicotine and marginally alcohol), and Power related hedonism (Both relationship dimensions, sex and gambling. This concept of "addictive orientations" is further explored in a non-clinical population, where again a four factor solution was found, very similar to that in the clinical population. This was thought to indicate that in terms of addictive orientation a pattern already exists in this non-clinical population and that consideration should be given to why this is the case. These orientations are examined in terms of gender differences. It is suggested that the differences between genders reflect power-related role relationships between the sexes. In order to further elaborate the significance and meaning behind these orientations, the next two chapters look at the contribution of personality variables and how addictive orientations relate to psychiatric symptomatology. Personality variables were differentially, and to a considerable extent predictably involved with the four factors for both males and females.Conscientiousness as positively associated with "Other orientated Nurturance" and negatively associated with "Sensation seeking hedonism" (particularly for men). Neuroticism had a particularly strong association with the "Self orientated Nurturance" factor in the female population. More than twice the symptomatology variance was explained by the factor scores for females than it was for males. The most important factorial predictors for psychiatric symptomatology were the "Power related hedonism" factor for males, and "Self oriented nurturance" for females. The results are discussed from theoretical and treatment perspectives
Strung pieces: on the aesthetics of television fiction series
As layered and long works, television fiction series have aesthetic properties that are built over time, bit by bit. This thesis develops a group of concepts that enable the study of these properties, It argues that a series is made of strung pieces, a system of related elements. The text begins by considering this sequential form within the fields of film and television. This opening chapter defines the object and methodology of research, arguing for a non-essentialist distinction between cinema and television and against the adequacy of textual and contextual analyses as approaches to the aesthetics of these shows. It proposes instead that these programmes should be described as televisual works that can be scrutinised through aesthetic analysis. The next chapters propose a sequence of interrelated concepts. The second chapter contends that series are composed of building blocks that can be either units into which series are divided or motifs that unify series and are dispersed across their pans. These blocks are patterned according to four kinds of relations or principles of composition. Repetition and variation are treated in tandem in the third chapter because of their close connection, given that variation emerges from established repetition. Exception and progression are also discussed together in the fourth chapter since they both require a long view of these serial works. The former, in order to be recognised as a deviation from the patterns of repetition and variation. The latter, In order to be understood in Its many dimensions as the series advances. Each of these concepts is further detailed with additional distinctions between types of units, motifs, repetitions, variations, and exceptions, using illustrative examples from numerous shows. In contrast, the section on progression uses a single series as case study, Carnivà le (2003-05), because this is the overarching principle that encompasses all the others. The conclusion considers the findings of the research and suggests avenues for their application
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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
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A Flexible Memristor Model with Electronic Resistive Switching Memory Behavior and its Application in Spiking Neural Network
National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant U1909201, Grant 62001149; Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province under Grant LQ21F010009
Tales of two houses : a comparative study between some Arab and British feminist novels
This thesis is a comparative study of some of the English feminist novels by Michele Roberts and Sara Maitland on the one hand, and some of the Arab feminist novels by Hanan AlShaykh and Ahdaf Soueif on the other. It consists of a general introduction and six chapters. The "General Introduction" deals mainly with the theoretical and methodological issues which have both informed and manifested in the analyses. It also includes some background information about the intellectual strands within a feminist discourse and a purview of the major issues as tackled by specifically feminist critics. Some of the basic objectives that the study attends to are also pinpointed.
Chapter one is entitled "Feminism: An Historical Context". It attempts to expose the complex relationship between an Arab feminist discourse as informed by historical relations with the West in colonial and postcolonial eras. A particular emphasis is placed on the emergence of feminism within an Arab-Islamic context. A socio-cultural and political interpretation of such relations is provided to promote a method of reading the novels as necessarily contextualised activities. Since genuine and constructive visions of transformation as pertaining to women's issues need be inherently embedded in certain political and historical realities, the second and third chapters are basically devoted to unfolding the entwining dynamics as informing the realities of both the Western and Arab "houses". How authentic both the Arab and British writers are in depicting their own distinctive realities in the different feminist novels arehighlighted and assessed. Also examined is the extent to which feminist political concerns could be seen as pursued at the expense of the aesthetic aspects of the novels. Chapter Four is devoted to analysing images of men in the feminist novels at hand. It also unravels how these images can be integrated into a comprehensive vision of change. The 111 relation between reductionist and stereotypical representations of men and the tenability of transformative visions are also discussed. Chapter Five, "Absences and Presences: Religious Icons and Ephemeral Images", is concerned with analysing the politics of certain exclusions and inclusions in the feminist novels especially in connection with some religious and other cultural forces pertaining to specific realities. Relating that politics to wider socio-cultural contexts helps in accounting for the convergences and divergences between the Arab feminist novel and its English counterpart and works to expose the nature of the intricate relationship between the two. Chapter Six, "Conclusion", underscores the most important findings of the study. The tenability of visions of change that would affect the lives of women and their societies at large as disseminated by the feminist novelists are assessed against various socio-cultural and political givens. I-low the profundity and comprehensibility of these visions are inherently linked to the novels' aesthetic value is also discussed
Living with dying children: the suffering of parents
Although the relief of suffering and emotional support are fundamental to children's palliative care, their empirical study has been limited. The research questions for this study address three areas: the lived experience of parents of dying children; how other people's responses shape the parents' lived experience; and the place of emotion and suffering in the parents' lived experience. Implementing a qualitative strategy, a collective case study was undertaken in a children's hospice in England, with fieldwork completed between March 2008 and September 2009. Data was collected with nine parents using a range of tools including a focus group, participant observation, documentary observation and individual interviews. Within-case and cross-case modified grounded theory analysis facilitated clarification of emerging themes whilst preserving individual parent voices. The findings show that parents of dying children had existential issues put at stake through the emotional experience of parenting a dying child; these included their identity, place in society, time, and relationships. Such losses could constitute suffering, but in addition they limited the parents' interaction with society so that over time both the 'quantity' and 'quality' of intersubjectivity reduced. The parents perceived that other people tended not to legitimate their lived experience. Emotion was an important influence in this process. The parents of dying children managed their emotions, particularly those of a negative nature, in everyday life and when using hospice services. As a result they expressed somewhat inauthentic accounts of their felt experience, reframed according to perceived feeling rules. This also reduced intersubjectivity and supported the delegitimation of the parental experience. In conclusion, delegitimation of the parental experience stems from feeling rules which are derived from day to day interactions and contemporary social policy. Suffering may be prevented if individual experience is legitimated through improved intersubjectivity. A key factor for this is effective communication through which observers engage with the felt emotion of the suffering individual
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