“Calling Bullshit on the Whole Thing”: Women, Health, Agency and Maternity in the Popular Film, What to Expect When You’re Expecting

Popular culture is a significant site of discourse on maternity, in the maintenance of hegemonic ideologies and practices relating to maternity, and in the silencing of alternatives to commonly accepted norms of maternity. This essay examines the social and political issues of pregnancy and birth as presented in What to Expect When You’re Expecting (Jones) and engages in a critical feminist analysis of the film in terms of maternity and the Women’s Health Movement (whm). Gender-based oppression, authoritative medicine, and individualized and essentialized reproduction are discussed as they appear in the film and in women’s health discourse. This essay argues that the film supports dominant ideologies of maternity and even manipulates the terms of feminist health care to create the appearance of support for more alternative or even oppositional representations; thus, allowing the film to limit the progress of the whm while simultaneously appearing to support it. As the whm aims to reclaim women’s subjectivity, their agency, and their epistemic power, cultural studies can be employed to foster oppositional decodings of the film, encouraging viewers to question the content of the film and its support of hegemonic value

Translating macroscale concepts to microfluidic devices

Electrokinetics represents an extremely versatile family of techniques that can be used to manipulate particles and fluid in microfluidic devices. This dissertation focused on taking techniques commonly used on a macroscale and developing microscale equivalents utilizing electrokinetics to effectively manipulate and separate microparticles. This analysis focuses on chromatography and separation trains as macroscale techniques translated to microfluidic insulator-based electrokinetic devices. The geometries of insulating post arrays embedded in microchannels were optimized using a combination of mathematical simulations and experimentally derived correction factors. Two particle separations were experimentally demonstrated: a separation based on differences in particle size and a separation based on differences in particle charge. The introduction of nonlinear electrophoresis into the electrokinetics paradigm prompted the creation of an empirical electrokinetic equilibrium condition, an experimentally derived, geometry independent value unique to different particles. This term takes into account particle-particle interactions and the presence of an electric field gradient to help simulate the impact of nonlinear electrophoresis on particle motion and provide an estimate trapping voltages for particles using similar suspending media. Finally, a cascade device design was presented as a type of separation train, built to filter larger contaminants from complex particle suspensions. Sample purification for a scheme involving manual device transferring of sample versus the cascade device, which required no manual transfer, demonstrated a notably lower sample loss in the cascade device. Bacteriophages were effectively enriched using the cascade scheme, demonstrating the potential use of this technique for purifying valuable biological samples

Understanding Obstetric Violence as Violence against Mothers through the Lens of Matricentric Feminism

Obstetric violence—that is, the mistreatment or abuse of pregnant, birthing, or postpartum individuals by their maternity care providers, institutions, or systems—is a topic of growing concern around the globe among healthcare organizations, healthcare providers, birthing people, and advocates. As research and advocacy work has begun to denormalize and problematize obstetric violence, it has been framed as a distinct type of institutionalized gendered violence that violates the rights of women. This article approaches the topic of obstetric violence through the lens of matricentric feminism and theorizes how it constitutes not only violence against women (typically) but also violence against mothers. Using examples from my personal experience and recent project, I employ matricentric feminism to emphasize the unique discourses of good and bad motherhood that birthing people engage with and suggest that in the context of obstetric violence, motherhood can be weaponized to perpetuate the invisibility of and silence around this issue. I discuss the implications for an understanding of obstetric violence as violence against mothers, including how these implications may impact efforts to recognize and prevent obstetric violence

The role of spatial consistency in dual-task detection: Implications for automatic and controlled search.

The goal of this dissertation is to understand what enables successful dual-task performance when one of the component tasks continuously requires attention. Simultaneously performing two tasks is extremely challenging. When first attempting to dual-task, performance tends to be effortful and error prone even when both tasks have been trained extensively in isolation. Although single-task practice is helpful, dual-task practice is necessary in order to learn how to coordinate, integrate and prioritize component tasks. Dual-tasking is cognitively resource intensive and therefore it is critical to automate as much task related processing as possible. When one of the component tasks continuously requires attention, such as a varied-mapped (VM) task, it presents an additional challenge. Schneider and Fisk (1982a) demonstrated that the attention-consuming VM task must be prioritized throughout training in order for the performer to learn to dual-task without cost. Furthermore, they demonstrated that cost-free dual-tasking is only possible when the attention-consuming VM task is paired with an automatic consistently-mapped (CM) task. Hill and Schneider conducted pilot research demonstrating that participants were unable to prioritize the attention-consuming VM task despite intention and extensive training. The current study is an attempt to understand the source of this failure. Three hypotheses were tested, 1) CM target pop-out enables CM-VM proficient dual-tasking, 2) consistent spatial search across task load enables proficient dual-tasking 3) distractor segregation impedes proficient dual-tasking. Four experiments were conducted in which participants attempted to learn to perform a CM-VM dual-task without cost. All participants were instructed to prioritize the attention-consuming VM task; however some experimental groups incurred greater dual-task interference. The behavioral data suggests that both CM task pop-out and consistent spatial search across task loads enable CM-VM dual-task performance without cost. The result highlights the importance of minimizing confusability and implementing multiple levels of consistency when attempting to train a cognitively intensive high workload skill

Social Functioning Characteristics of a Young Adult with a History of Childhood Apraxia of Speech

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a pediatric speech sound disorder (SSD) that results from a motor planning impairment for volitional speech movements. This underlying impairment causes pervasive errors in speech sound production and often leads to problems with intelligibility, thus inhibiting effective communication. Longitudinal studies have found children with various communication impairments to be less successful in social interactions compared to their typically developing peers, and that this can lead to poor social functioning outcomes (Beitchman et al., 1996; Clegg, Hollis, Mawhood, & Rutter, 2005; Craig, 1993; Durkin & Conti-Ramsden, 2007). Yet, there is no research to date on what the particular effects are for individuals with CAS. This mixed methods single subject case study examined, first, the speech production characteristics of a young adult with a history of CAS, and, second, whether or not her earlier experiences with inefficient communication had long-term effects on her pragmatic skills, self-esteem, friendships, and/or selection of occupation. Speech tasks from the Madison Speech Assessment Protocol (MSAP) – such as nonword and multisyllabic word repetition, lexical stress, and diadochokinesis tasks – were used to assess the participant’s precision and consistency of speech sound production and prosody. Measures of personality, nonverbal intelligence, and language abilities were also taken to further describe the participant and provide a context to interpret the subsequent results. The participant’s pragmatic skills and self-esteem were assessed by triangulating data collected from quantitative measures as well as two separate semi-structured interviews with the participant and her mother. The effects of the participant’s communication impairment on the formation of friendships and her selection of future career were examined through the semi-structured interviews. Quantitative analysis included comparing the participant’s performance to available norms in the research literature, and qualitative analysis was conducted using a grounded theory approach. Overall, the participant’s conversational speech was 100% intelligible with a mild /s/ distortion noted. The participant demonstrated further errors associated with CAS when she attempted the more challenging speech tasks of the MSAP. Results revealed the participant’s overall pragmatic skills to be within normal limits but deficits were expressed in specific social situations. The participant’s self-esteem was scaled on the low end of the average range, and maintaining her self-esteem has been a continuous process that has necessitated outside support at times. Also, the participant’s speech sound disorder hindered her ability to form a high number of friendships, but her few close friendships are of high quality. Lastly, the qualitative results demonstrated how the participant’s past experiences with inefficient communication have driven her to find a career path in which she can advocate for children facing similar challenges

A Grounded Theory of Counselors’ Post-Graduation Development of Disability Counseling Effectiveness

Many persons with disabilities engage in counseling services in a variety of settings. However, the development trajectories of counselors who seek to compensate for the lack of training and advance their post-graduation skillset to work effectively with clients with disabilities has not been explored. This grounded theory study illuminated several dimensions involved in twenty-one Licensed Professional Counselors’ post-graduation development of disability counseling effectiveness. In this study, counseling effectiveness refers to self-perceived improved skillset rather than a benchmark (i.e., competence). The core category, Evolving Commitments, was common to all participants’ trajectories when developing disability counseling effectiveness. The other categories (causal conditions, contextual factors, actions, and intervening conditions) accounted for multiple dimensions in their developmental process. We discuss several implications for counselor training and future research, as well as the limitations of the study