12,831 research outputs found
Consent and the Construction of the Volunteer: Institutional Settings of Experimental Research on Human Beings in Britain during the Cold War
This study challenges the primacy of consent in the history of human experimentation and argues that privileging the cultural frameworks adds nuance to our understanding of the construction of the volunteer in the period 1945 to 1970. Historians and bio-ethicists have argued that medical ethics codes have marked out the parameters of using people as subjects in medical scientific research and that the consent of the subjects was fundamental to their status as volunteers. However, the temporality of the creation of medical ethics codes means that they need to be understood within their historical context. That medical ethics codes arose from a specific historical context rather than a concerted and conscious determination to safeguard the well-being of subjects needs to be acknowledged. The British context of human experimentation is under-researched and there has been even less focus on the cultural frameworks within which experiments took place. This study demonstrates, through a close analysis of the Medical Research Council's Common Cold Research Unit (CCRU) and the government's military research facility, the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment, Porton Down (Porton), that the `volunteer' in human experiments was a subjective entity whose identity was specific to the institution which recruited and made use of the subject. By examining representations of volunteers in the British press, the rhetoric of the government's collectivist agenda becomes evident and this fed into the institutional construction of the volunteer at the CCRU. In contrast, discussions between Porton scientists, staff members, and government officials demonstrate that the use of military personnel in secret chemical warfare experiments was far more complex. Conflicting interests of the military, the government and the scientific imperative affected how the military volunteer was perceived
Elite perceptions of the Victorian and Edwardian past in inter-war England
It is often argued by historians that members of the cultivated Elite after 1918 rejected the pre-war past. or at least subjected it to severe denigration. This thesis sets out to challenge such a view. Above all, it argues that inter-war critics of the Victorian and Edwardian past were unable to reject it even if that was what they felt inclined to do. This was because they were tied to those periods by the affective links of memory, family, and the continually unfolding consequences of the past in the present. Even the severest critics of the pre-war world, such as Lytton Strachey, were less frequently dismissive of history than ambivalent towards it. This ambivalence, it is argued, helped to keep the past alive and often to humanise it. The thesis also explores more positive estimation of Victorian and Edwardian history between the wars. It examines nostalgia for the past, as well as instances of continuity of practice and attitude. It explores the way in which inter-war society drew upon aspects of Victorian and Edwardian history both as illuminating parallels to contemporary affairs and to understand directly why the present was shaped as it was. Again, this testifies to the enduring power of the past after 1918. There are three parts to this thesis. Part One outlines the cultural context in which writers contemplated the Victorian and Edwardian past. Part Two explores some of the ways in which history was written about and used by inter-war society. Part Three examines the ways in which biographical depictions of eminent Victorians after 1918 encouraged emotional negotiation with the pas
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
Implementing Health Impact Assessment as a Required Component of Government Policymaking: A Multi-Level Exploration of the Determinants of Healthy Public Policy
It is widely understood that the public policies of ‘non-health’ government sectors have greater impacts on population health than those of the traditional healthcare realm. Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a decision support tool that identifies and promotes the health benefits of policies while also mitigating their unintended negative consequences. Despite numerous calls to do so, the Ontario government has yet to implement HIA as a required component of policy development. This dissertation therefore sought to identify the contexts and factors that may both enable and impede HIA use at the sub-national (i.e., provincial, territorial, or state) government level.
The three integrated articles of this dissertation provide insights into specific aspects of the policy process as they relate to HIA. Chapter one details a case study of purposive information-seeking among public servants within Ontario’s Ministry of Education (MOE). Situated within Ontario’s Ministry of Health (MOH), chapter two presents a case study of policy collaboration between health and ‘non-health’ ministries. Finally, chapter three details a framework analysis of the political factors supporting health impact tool use in two sub-national jurisdictions – namely, Québec and South Australia.
MOE respondents (N=9) identified four components of policymaking ‘due diligence’, including evidence retrieval, consultation and collaboration, referencing, and risk analysis. As prospective HIA users, they also confirmed that information is not routinely sought to mitigate the potential negative health impacts of education-based policies. MOH respondents (N=8) identified the bureaucratic hierarchy as the brokering mechanism for inter-ministerial policy development. As prospective HIA stewards, they also confirmed that the ministry does not proactively flag the potential negative health impacts of non-health sector policies. Finally, ‘lessons learned’ from case articles specific to Québec (n=12) and South Australia (n=17) identified the political factors supporting tool use at different stages of the policy cycle, including agenda setting (‘policy elites’ and ‘political culture’), implementation (‘jurisdiction’), and sustained implementation (‘institutional power’).
This work provides important insights into ‘real life’ policymaking. By highlighting existing facilitators of and barriers to HIA use, the findings offer a useful starting point from which proponents may tailor context-specific strategies to sustainably implement HIA at the sub-national government level
Gamification in E-Learning: game factors to strengthen specific English pronunciation features in undergraduate students at UPTC Sogamoso
Appendix A Characterization survey (104), Appendix B. EFL Students’ questionnaire (109), Appendix C. Characterization survey: data treatment question (113), Appendix D. Informed consent letter, English version (114), Appendix E. Carta de consentimiento informado, versión en español (117), Appendix F. Time Schedule (120), Appendix G. Sample Challenges at Moodle (126), Appendix H. Participants’ questionnaire results (128).La gamificación es un término que suele denotar el uso de componentes del juego en situaciones no relacionadas con el juego en sí para crear experiencias de aprendizaje agradables, divertidas y motivadoras para los estudiantes (Werbach y Hunter, 2012). Por lo tanto, el análisis de los factores básicos de los juegos se convierte en algo esencial a la hora de definir y utilizar la gamificación como estrategia de mediación del inglés como lengua extranjera para fortalecer rasgos específicos de pronunciación en los estudiantes de pregrado de la UPTC Sogamoso.
El procedimiento de estudio se basa en la investigación acción mediante la implementación de la estrategia de gamificación para la mediación en la pronunciación del inglés, orientada a treinta estudiantes de diferentes programas de ingeniería, administración y tecnología con niveles heterogéneos de dominio del inglés. Las actividades se centran principalmente en la producción de sonidos, el ritmo, el acento y la entonación, los rasgos de pronunciación segmental y suprasegmental.
Los resultados arrojaron una evidente mejora en las características segméntales y suprasegmentales de la percepción en la pronunciación de los participantes así como la contribución del objetivo de los juegos a la instrucción fonética y fonológica, la sensación en el juego a la motivación para mejorar la pronunciación, el reto establecido en los juegos a la actitud positiva de los participantes, y la sociabilidad a la exposición practica de la pronunciación inglesa.Gamification is a relatively new term that often denotes the use of game components in situations unrelated to the game itself to create enjoyable, fun, and motivating learning experiences for students (Werbach and Hunter, 2012). Therefore, analyzing the games' basic factors becomes essential when defining and using gamification as a strategy for English as Foreign Language mediation to strengthen specific pronunciation features in UPTC Sogamoso undergraduate students.
The study procedure is based on action research by implementing the gamification strategy for mediation in English pronunciation, oriented to thirty students from different engineering, management, and technology programs at heterogeneous levels of English proficiency. The activities mainly focus on sound production, rhythm, stress, and intonation, segmental and suprasegmental pronunciation features.
The results showed an evident improvement in the segmental and suprasegmental features of the participants' pronunciation perception as well as the contribution of game goals to phonetics and phonological instruction, the game sensation to the motivation for pronunciation improvement, the game challenge to the participants' positive attitude, and the sociality to the English pronunciation exposure practice
The Professional Identity of Doctors who Provide Abortions: A Sociological Investigation
Abortion is a medicalised problem in England and Wales, where the law places doctors at the centre of legal provision and puts doctors in control of who has an abortion. However, the sex-selection abortion scandal of 2012 presented a very real threat to 'abortion doctors', when the medical profession's values and practices were questioned in the media, society and by Members of Parliament. Doctors found themselves at the centre of a series of claims that stated doctors were acting both illegally and unethically, driven by profit rather than patient needs. Yet, the perspectives of those doctors who provide abortions has been under-researched; this thesis aims to fill that gap by examining the beliefs and values of this group of doctors. Early chapters highlight the ambiguous position of the abortion provider in Britain, where doctors are seen as a collective group of professionals motivated by medical dominance and medical autonomy. They outline how this position is then questioned and contested, with doctors being presented as unethical. By studying abortion at the macro-, meso- and micro-levels, this thesis seeks to better understand the values of the 'abortion doctor', and how these levels shape the work and experiences of abortion providers in England and Wales. This thesis thus addresses the question: 'What do abortion doctors' accounts of their professional work suggest about the contemporary dynamics of the medicalisation of abortion in Britain?'. It investigates the research question using a qualitative methodological approach: face-to-face and telephone interviews were conducted with 47 doctors who provide abortions in England and Wales. The findings from this empirical study show how doctors' values are linked to how they view the 'normalisation of abortion'. At the macro-level doctors, openly resisted the medicalisation of abortion through the position ascribed to them by the legal framework, yet at the meso-level doctors construct an identity where normalising abortion is based on further medicalising services. Finally, at the micro-level, the ambiguous position of the abortion provider is further identified in terms of being both a proud provider and a stigmatised individual. This thesis shows that while the existing medicalisation literature has some utility, it has limited explanatory power when investigating the problem of abortion. The thesis thus provides some innovative insights into the relevance and value of medicalisation through a comprehensive study on doctors' values, beliefs and practices
The temporality of rhetoric: the spatialization of time in modern criticism
Every conception of criticism conceals a notion of time which informs the manner in which the critic conceives of history, representation and criticism itself. This thesis reveals the philosophies of time inherent in certain key modern critical concepts: allegory, irony and the sublime. Each concept opens a breach in time, a disruption of chronology. In each case this gap or aporia is emphatically closed, elided or denied. Taking the philosophy of time elaborated by Giorgio Agamben as an introductory proposition, my argument turns in Chapter One to the allegorical temporality which Walter Benjamin sees as the time of photography. The second chapter examines the aesthetics of the sublime as melancholic or mournful untimeliness. In Chapter Three, Paul de Man's conception of irony provides an exemplary instance of the denial of this troubling temporal predicament. In opposition to the foreclosure of the disturbing temporalities of criticism, history and representation, the thesis proposes a fundamental rethinking of the philosophy of time as it relates to these categories of reflection. In a reading of an inaugural meditation on the nature of time, and in examining certain key contemporary philosophical and critical texts, I argue for a critical attendance to that which eludes those modes of thought that attempt to map time as a recognizable and essentially spatial field. The Confessions of Augustine provide, in the fourth chapter, a model for thinking through the problems set up earlier: Augustine affords us, precisely, a means of conceiving of the gap or the interim. In the final chapter, this concept is developed with reference to the criticism of Arnold and Eliot, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and the philosophy of cinema derived from Deleuze and Lyotard. In conclusion, the philosophical implications of the thesis are placed in relation to a conception of the untimeliness of death
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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
Queer spies in British Cold War culture: literature, film, theatre and television
This PhD thesis investigates how male homosexuality has been represented in British spy
fiction from the 1950s to the 2010s in multiple media: literature, film, television and
theatre. Due mainly to the betrayal of the Cambridge Spy ring around the middle of the
century, British culture has associated spies with homosexuality, while the wider
Anglophone world was in the grip of a homophobic atmosphere created by McCarthy's
Red Scare. My thesis explores how this history is reflected in the spy genre from the Cold
War to the present, in which male homosexuality and secret agency intersect as “queer”,
in so far as they were both considered to be discreet and criminal, existing outside of the
heteronormative order. By following multiple texts across media and time, I discuss how
some writers, television and film directors and actors update queer identity in spy fiction,
creating a shifting image of queer spies through decades. I refer to the findings of
adaptation studies and queer studies, along with numerous studies on spy fiction.
I conclude that the interrelation of different media has contributed to the re-drawing of queer identity in spy fiction. These developments have enabled the spies'
queer identity to transcend its pejorative history in British culture, towards its more
flexible and pliant sense which is designated by the term's modern usage. I also discuss
that spies’ homosexuality has been represented as a fleeting ghost in most of the texts
examined, hovering on the margins of pages and screen. Although homosexuality is not
“the love that dare not speak its name” anymore, clandestine queer spies have been
preserved as spectral others in the genre for many years. Spy fiction is a cultural
repository retaining the memory of violence inflicted against those who have been called
“queer” in twentieth century Britain, and the spectral nature of queer spies narrates this
history reaching back to the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895, from which point British queer
identity as we know now developed.
This thesis benefits the study of spy fiction by filling a gap in the investigation of
homosexual representation. It also contributes to the field of gender studies of literature,
film, television, and theatre by illustrating queer history in a genre which has not received
a great deal of focus on its representation of homosexuality. Spy fiction occupies a
central position in British popular culture, and by exploring this genre in terms of
homosexuality, this research will identify the role which same-sex desire has historically
played in the British cultural imagination
Embodying entrepreneurship: everyday practices, processes and routines in a technology incubator
The growing interest in the processes and practices of entrepreneurship has
been dominated by a consideration of temporality. Through a thirty-six-month
ethnography of a technology incubator, this thesis contributes to extant
understanding by exploring the effect of space. The first paper explores how
class structures from the surrounding city have appropriated entrepreneurship
within the incubator. The second paper adopts a more explicitly spatial analysis
to reveal how the use of space influences a common understanding of
entrepreneurship. The final paper looks more closely at the entrepreneurs within
the incubator and how they use visual symbols to develop their identity. Taken
together, the three papers reject the notion of entrepreneurship as a primarily
economic endeavour as articulated through commonly understood language and
propose entrepreneuring as an enigmatic attractor that is accessed through the
ambiguity of the non-verbal to develop the ‘new’. The thesis therefore contributes
to the understanding of entrepreneurship and proposes a distinct role for the non-verbal in that understanding
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