Lesbians, Gays and the Struggle for Equality Rights: Reversing the Progressive Hypothesis

The tale often told of Canadian law\u27s advancement in the field of sexual orientation rights is simple but sublime: law has moved, however ploddingly and not without substantial prodding, out of an epoch of almost total repression, into an evermore enlightened era. Castigated by criminal law, pushed to the perimeter by administrative law, and ignored by human rights law, the homosexual \u27 had once been law\u27s quintessential other. In recent years, however, legislatures and courts have increasingly been willing to recognize homosexuals as a constituency too long held down by the heavy hand of legal control. Most penal prohibitions against exercises of same-sex sexuality have been lifted, several bureaucratic marginalizations have been corrected, and the omissions of civil rights legislation are at long last on the brink of being universally condemned. The story enjoys special currency in the human rights arena. Here law has been cast as awakening to the justice of acknowledging homosexuals as a category of persons no less deserving of legal equality than other socalled minorities, and lawmakers are finally authorizing the enumeration of sexual orientation as a prohibited ground of discrimination in Canada\u27s wide range of civil rights instruments. This narrative, astoundingly enough, has circulated across divergent schools of legal thought: more or less the same story makes its appearance in the essentialized tropes of liberal reformers and in the anti-essentialist terms of poststructuralist radicals. One might refer to this chronicle of law\u27s inexorable evolution as the progressive hypothesis

A comparison of the fluency of oral, written and multiple-choice recall after silent reading of five grade levels

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Potential for Cell-Transplant Therapy with Human Neuronal Precursors to Treat Neuropathic Pain in Models of PNS and CNS Injury: Comparison of hNT2.17 and hNT2.19 Cell Lines

Effective treatment of sensory neuropathies in peripheral neuropathies and spinal cord injury (SCI) is one of the most difficult problems in modern clinical practice. Cell therapy to release antinociceptive agents near the injured spinal cord is a logical next step in the development of treatment modalities. But few clinical trials, especially for chronic pain, have tested the potential of transplant of cells to treat chronic pain. Cell lines derived from the human neuronal NT2 cell line parentage, the hNT2.17 and hNT2.19 lines, which synthesize and release the neurotransmitters gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and serotonin (5HT), respectively, have been used to evaluate the potential of cell-based release of antinociceptive agents near the lumbar dorsal (horn) spinal sensory cell centers to relieve neuropathic pain after PNS (partial nerve and diabetes-related injury) and CNS (spinal cord injury) damage in rat models. Both cell lines transplants potently and permanently reverse behavioral hypersensitivity without inducing tumors or other complications after grafting. Functioning as cellular minipumps for antinociception, human neuronal precursors, like these NT2-derived cell lines, would likely provide a useful adjuvant or replacement for current pharmacological treatments for neuropathic pain

Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Imaging of the Spatial Distribution of Free Radicals in PMR-15 Polyimide Resins

Prior studies have shown that free radicals generated by heating polyimides above 300 C are stable at room temperature and are involved in thermo-oxidative degradation in the presence of oxygen gas. Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Imaging (EPRI) is a technique to determine the spatial distribution of free radicals. X-band (9.5 GHz) EPR images of PMR-15 polyimide were obtained with a spatial resolution of about 0.18 mm along a 2 mm dimension of the sample. In a polyimide sample that was not thermocycled, the radical distribution was uniform along the 2 mm dimension of the sample. For a polyimide sample that was exposed to thermocycling in air for 300 one-hour cycles at 335 C, one-dimensional EPRI showed a higher concentration of free radicals in the surface layers than in the bulk sample. A spectral-spatial two-dimensional image showed that the EPR lineshape of the surface layer remained the same as that of the bulk. These EPRI results suggest that the thermo-oxidative degradation of PMR-15 resin involves free radicals present in the oxygen-rich surface layer

Frank confessions: performance in the life-writings of Frank McCourt

This thesis focuses on the work of Frank McCourt, a writer who came to prominence in the 1990s for writing best-selling memoirs that touched upon a wider set of issues in the contemporary cultural debate: namely Ireland itself, the status of the memoir genre, and Irish-American identity. In five distinct chapters, the thesis adopts a postcolonial perspective using the theories of political performance that have been created by Victor Merriman and Joe Cleary to analyse the impact that McCourt’s life-writing and other performances have had upon global impressions of Ireland in the era of the ‘Celtic Tiger’. My thesis combines Merriman’s premise that in performance we can see the basic idea of Irish culture being resistant to modernism and, therefore, Ireland never properly decolonised with Cleary’s notion of disassociation of past and present and his concern with the social and cultural implications of Ireland’s uncritical embrace of a form of capitalist modernisation. Cleary and Merriman’s key ideas are reshaped to uncover the ways in which McCourt creates a version of ‘Irishness’ that is replete with recurrent clichés and stereotypical characters. I make the case that the performative model that McCourt adopts exposes his purpose of creating a national and cultural identity of 1930s and 1940s Ireland in which he reworks and revitalises his impoverished, traumatic childhood, revealing that the identity he expresses is a conscious performance. My analysis reveals how McCourt is engaged in a mode of life-writing that follows his journey from boyhood to manhood in a manner that mirrors the parallel process of Ireland’s journey into independence and economic prosperity when Ireland and ‘Irishness’ became desirable commodities. Throughout, I argue that McCourt utilises performance to market Irish identity successfully to a mass readership since his writing reinforces the connection between his life experience and the narrative of the nation. In turn, the thesis uncovers how McCourt appeals to his Irish and American audiences simultaneously by making use of the dual nationality and fluid identity that being Irish-American affords him, whereby he condemns conditions in Éamon de Valera’s Ireland at the same time that he exhibits a sense of nostalgia for the past. In McCourt’s writing we can recognise many tropes appropriated from films, songs, other memoirs and melodramatic themes, thus providing a meta-textual ‘framework’ by which McCourt’s experiences are organised and given meaning for an audience to understand. As a consequence, each chapter verifies that his deployment of cultural memory and performances of identity function, when ‘read’, to either deconstruct or cement essentialist notions of nationality or ethnicity. In the first chapter, ‘Angela’s Ashes in Performance’, I use Merriman’s idea that theatre and society have the potential to interact and become a space of social transformation and utopian thought, to emphasise the overlooked performative dynamic of McCourt’s best-known text, the memoir Angela’s Ashes. The thesis begins from this structuring principle to prove that a reworking of Angela’s Ashes for performance makes visible the mediation and presentation of ‘Irishness' in the re-written text, and how this forges a relation between the past of the narrative and the present of the performance. The first part of this chapter highlights the little-known musical adaptation of Angela’s Ashes that was staged at Derby Theatre in November 2012. I make the case that this production was strikingly political, and made great efforts to speak to the situation of the Irish diaspora in Derby and to draw attention to the contemporary alienation caused by poverty in that city. The second half of this chapter scrutinises the contrasting example of Alan Parker’s film version of Angela’s Ashes, which was realised by Paramount Pictures in 1999. I argue that, in contrast with the Derby adaptation, the Parker film evaded any localising particularities that might enable a political critique of any particular nation or governmental regime to be constructed. The chapter shows that a process of construction and mediation is identifiable in the theatre text in order to appeal to particular audiences. Overall, then, McCourt is revealed to be a writer who relied upon the playhouse when creating his own memoirs, and whose writing is itself appropriate for re-adaptation back into the realm of the theatrical. Each of the chapters that follow shows the work of construction and mediation in McCourt own texts, demonstrating how ideas about re-presentation and rewriting inform the thesis. The second chapter, ‘I’d Love To Be Irish When It’s Time for a Song’, asesses how and why McCourt’s work displays an extraordinary strong musical influence and how music intervenes when McCourt uses personal memory to return to past events. I argue that music becomes an index of McCourt’s relationship to assorted collectives such as family, community and state, providing him with a means of activating his memory in order to develop the autobiographical nature of the narrative through allusion and reference. The third chapter, ‘Are ye Gangsters or Cowboys? […] Fred Astaire How Are You?’ reveals how McCourt uses ‘fantasy’ figures from the cinema, particularly the matinee heroes John Wayne, James Cagney and Fred Astaire. The Western hero, the ‘hoodlum’ and the dancer are shown to provide a cultural framework for McCourt when he comes to describe and explore the vexed issue of Irish-American masculinities. The two-fold focus of the fourth chapter, ‘Melodramatic Moments’, argues that McCourt’s writing owes a debt to his literary predecessors Dion Boucicault and Seán O’Casey. I make the case that McCourt knew the work of these writers in both textual and performed contexts, and that he relied upon such melodramatic tropes in his own presentation of self, both on the page and in person. The fifth chapter, ‘Frank McCourt’s Performance of Irishness: Joycean and Other Legacies’ broadens out beyond the four walls of the playhouse to analyse how McCourt may be relying on a set of paradigms from Ireland’s best known writer, James Joyce. As I will show, this is not simply a case of McCourt emulating Joyce’s own writings – which of course he does – but also a question of how McCourt navigates a set of expectations about how a post-Joycean Irish writer ought to perform

Review of the History and Current Status of Cell-Transplant Approaches for the Management of Neuropathic Pain

Treatment of sensory neuropathies, whether inherited or caused by trauma, the progress of diabetes, or other disease states, are among the most difficult problems in modern clinical practice. Cell therapy to release antinociceptive agents near the injured spinal cord would be the logical next step in the development of treatment modalities. But few clinical trials, especially for chronic pain, have tested the transplant of cells or a cell line to treat human disease. The history of the research and development of useful cell-transplant-based approaches offers an understanding of the advantages and problems associated with these technologies, but as an adjuvant or replacement for current pharmacological treatments, cell therapy is a likely near future clinical tool for improved health care

Frank confessions: performance in the life-writings of Frank McCourt

This thesis focuses on the work of Frank McCourt, a writer who came to prominence in the 1990s for writing best-selling memoirs that touched upon a wider set of issues in the contemporary cultural debate: namely Ireland itself, the status of the memoir genre, and Irish-American identity. In five distinct chapters, the thesis adopts a postcolonial perspective using the theories of political performance that have been created by Victor Merriman and Joe Cleary to analyse the impact that McCourt’s life-writing and other performances have had upon global impressions of Ireland in the era of the ‘Celtic Tiger’. My thesis combines Merriman’s premise that in performance we can see the basic idea of Irish culture being resistant to modernism and, therefore, Ireland never properly decolonised with Cleary’s notion of disassociation of past and present and his concern with the social and cultural implications of Ireland’s uncritical embrace of a form of capitalist modernisation. Cleary and Merriman’s key ideas are reshaped to uncover the ways in which McCourt creates a version of ‘Irishness’ that is replete with recurrent clichés and stereotypical characters. I make the case that the performative model that McCourt adopts exposes his purpose of creating a national and cultural identity of 1930s and 1940s Ireland in which he reworks and revitalises his impoverished, traumatic childhood, revealing that the identity he expresses is a conscious performance. My analysis reveals how McCourt is engaged in a mode of life-writing that follows his journey from boyhood to manhood in a manner that mirrors the parallel process of Ireland’s journey into independence and economic prosperity when Ireland and ‘Irishness’ became desirable commodities. Throughout, I argue that McCourt utilises performance to market Irish identity successfully to a mass readership since his writing reinforces the connection between his life experience and the narrative of the nation. In turn, the thesis uncovers how McCourt appeals to his Irish and American audiences simultaneously by making use of the dual nationality and fluid identity that being Irish-American affords him, whereby he condemns conditions in Éamon de Valera’s Ireland at the same time that he exhibits a sense of nostalgia for the past. In McCourt’s writing we can recognise many tropes appropriated from films, songs, other memoirs and melodramatic themes, thus providing a meta-textual ‘framework’ by which McCourt’s experiences are organised and given meaning for an audience to understand. As a consequence, each chapter verifies that his deployment of cultural memory and performances of identity function, when ‘read’, to either deconstruct or cement essentialist notions of nationality or ethnicity. In the first chapter, ‘Angela’s Ashes in Performance’, I use Merriman’s idea that theatre and society have the potential to interact and become a space of social transformation and utopian thought, to emphasise the overlooked performative dynamic of McCourt’s best-known text, the memoir Angela’s Ashes. The thesis begins from this structuring principle to prove that a reworking of Angela’s Ashes for performance makes visible the mediation and presentation of ‘Irishness' in the re-written text, and how this forges a relation between the past of the narrative and the present of the performance. The first part of this chapter highlights the little-known musical adaptation of Angela’s Ashes that was staged at Derby Theatre in November 2012. I make the case that this production was strikingly political, and made great efforts to speak to the situation of the Irish diaspora in Derby and to draw attention to the contemporary alienation caused by poverty in that city. The second half of this chapter scrutinises the contrasting example of Alan Parker’s film version of Angela’s Ashes, which was realised by Paramount Pictures in 1999. I argue that, in contrast with the Derby adaptation, the Parker film evaded any localising particularities that might enable a political critique of any particular nation or governmental regime to be constructed. The chapter shows that a process of construction and mediation is identifiable in the theatre text in order to appeal to particular audiences. Overall, then, McCourt is revealed to be a writer who relied upon the playhouse when creating his own memoirs, and whose writing is itself appropriate for re-adaptation back into the realm of the theatrical. Each of the chapters that follow shows the work of construction and mediation in McCourt own texts, demonstrating how ideas about re-presentation and rewriting inform the thesis. The second chapter, ‘I’d Love To Be Irish When It’s Time for a Song’, asesses how and why McCourt’s work displays an extraordinary strong musical influence and how music intervenes when McCourt uses personal memory to return to past events. I argue that music becomes an index of McCourt’s relationship to assorted collectives such as family, community and state, providing him with a means of activating his memory in order to develop the autobiographical nature of the narrative through allusion and reference. The third chapter, ‘Are ye Gangsters or Cowboys? […] Fred Astaire How Are You?’ reveals how McCourt uses ‘fantasy’ figures from the cinema, particularly the matinee heroes John Wayne, James Cagney and Fred Astaire. The Western hero, the ‘hoodlum’ and the dancer are shown to provide a cultural framework for McCourt when he comes to describe and explore the vexed issue of Irish-American masculinities. The two-fold focus of the fourth chapter, ‘Melodramatic Moments’, argues that McCourt’s writing owes a debt to his literary predecessors Dion Boucicault and Seán O’Casey. I make the case that McCourt knew the work of these writers in both textual and performed contexts, and that he relied upon such melodramatic tropes in his own presentation of self, both on the page and in person. The fifth chapter, ‘Frank McCourt’s Performance of Irishness: Joycean and Other Legacies’ broadens out beyond the four walls of the playhouse to analyse how McCourt may be relying on a set of paradigms from Ireland’s best known writer, James Joyce. As I will show, this is not simply a case of McCourt emulating Joyce’s own writings – which of course he does – but also a question of how McCourt navigates a set of expectations about how a post-Joycean Irish writer ought to perform

Development of a Community-Based Rehabilitation Intervention for People with Schizophrenia in Ethiopia.

BACKGROUND: Community-based rehabilitation (CBR) is a multi-sectoral strategy to improve the functioning and quality of life of people with disabilities. The RISE (Rehabilitation Intervention for people with Schizophrenia in Ethiopia) trial will evaluate the effectiveness of CBR for people with schizophrenia in Ethiopia. Nevertheless, the components of CBR that are both feasible and likely to prove effective in low and middle-income countries such as Ethiopia are unclear. METHODS: In this study intervention development work was undertaken to design a CBR intervention that is acceptable and feasible in the local context. The development work consisted of five phases. 1: Identify potential components of CBR for schizophrenia, 2: Situational analysis, 3: Determine feasibility of CBR (Theory of Change workshops with experts and local stakeholders), 4: Determine acceptability of CBR (16 in-depth interviews and five focus group discussions with people with schizophrenia, caregivers, health workers and community leaders) and 5: Synthesise results to finalise intervention. A Theory of Change map was constructed showing the causal pathway for how we expect CBR to achieve its impact. RESULTS: People with schizophrenia in rural Ethiopia experience family conflict, difficulty participating in work and community life, and stigma. Stakeholders perceived CBR to be acceptable and useful to address these problems. The focus of CBR will be on the individual developing the skills and confidence to perform their previous or desired roles and activities. To ensure feasibility, non-health professionals will be trained to deliver CBR and provide supervision, rather than mental health specialists. Novel components of CBR for schizophrenia included family intervention and dealing with distressing symptoms. Microfinance was excluded due to concerns about stress and exploitation. Community mobilisation was viewed as essential to ensure the effectiveness and sustainability of CBR. CONCLUSION: Extensive formative research using a variety of methods has enabled the design of a culturally appropriate CBR intervention for people with schizophrenia that is acceptable and feasible