Dead Mothers, Lonely Daughters : Negotiating Intersubjective Space in Young Adult Fiction

This thesis examines the effect of maternal absence on the ability of three central female characters to develop intersubjective relationships in three novels for young adults. The theoretical framework is Jessica Benjamin\u27s psychoanalytic theory of \u27intersubjectivity\u27 which seeks to transcend split complementarities such as active-passive creating a model that synthesises traditionally opposed terms. Benjamin situates maternal subjectivity as the foundation from which a baby\u27s identity is constructed and attributes women with both active and passive qualities. The relationship between mother and infant consequently acts as a paradigm for understanding the interaction between adult subjects in later life. Chapter One introduces my understanding of Benjamin\u27s work. Here I discuss the origin of the \u27two-subject\u27, intersubjective approach in psychoanalysis. I explain Benjamin\u27s intersubjective theory and foreground her four stages of child development. I suggest the importance of the transitional space of the \u27third term\u27 and finally consider the importance of the mother-child relationship in understanding human interactions. The subsequent chapters consider three novels in light of Benjamin\u27s model of intersubjectivity. Chapter two focuses on Speaking to Miranda by Caroline Macdonald (1990). Here I argue that in the central character\u27s quest to connect with her dead mother\u27s past, she is able to achieve an intersubjective status and assert active agency over her future. Chapter three focuses on Back on Track: Diary of a Street Kid by Margaret Clark (1995). In this novel, the central character\u27s dead mother occupies an object/victim position. I argue that this negative role model from her past casts an uncertain light on the beneficial long-term impacts the central character gains from the intersubjective relationship with her diary. Chapter four considers Letters from the Inside by John Marsden (1991). Here I argue that the ultimate failure of intersubjective relatedness with her pen pal causes the central character to regress to an infantile stage of developmen

Woman's status as developed in the novels of Robert Herrick

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1938. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Gender Trouble in Arcadia or a World of Multigendered Possibility?: Intersubjectivity and Gender in 'The Wind in the Willows'

While Kuznets' and Gaarden's readings offer a valuable entry point for critiquing the role of gender in 'The Wind and the Willows', in this paper I demonstrate an alternative approach using Jessica Benjamin's psychoanalytic feminist theory of intersubjectivity and gender development. First I outline Benjamin's 'postconventional' (1995, p.76) approach to gender, and then follow with an 'intersubjective' reading of 'The Wind in the Willows' that unsettles 'fixed' notions of gender identity, replacing the 'discourse of identity' with the notion of 'plural identifications' (Benjamin 1995, p.75). Integral to this paper is Benjamin's idea that the subject can maintain plural identifications by managing an awareness of both 'sameness' and 'difference' in a intersubjective state of tension, and not as mutually exclusive oppositions conceptualised as 'either/or'

Analysis of Progesterone-regulated Target Genes in Mammary Gland and Uterine Development

Progesterone is an ovarian steroid hormone which plays a very important part in the regulation of pregnancy-related changes. Progesterone functions by binding to its specific nuclear receptor, PR, which regulates defined genes in a ligand dependent manner. The aim of my thesis is to explore and elucidate some of the important mediators of progesterone action with regards to pregnancy-related mammary gland development and also uterine development. Knockout mouse models and comparative wild type mice were used in order to explore the expression patterns of specific genes of interest. Quantitative PCR using cDNA derived from mammary gland tissue was used to analyse the differences in gene expression of progesterone’s downstream target molecules. Established target genes such as RANKL, Wnt4 and Amphiregulin, TGF-β1, Sfrp2 and Mig6 were analysed to determine their mRNA expression levels in the late stages of pregnancy where growth and proliferation is at its most intense. Comparisons were then made between the mammary gland and the uterus, in order to assess the tissue specificity of progesterone function. The results clearly indicate how progesterone is able to mediate both proliferative and anti-proliferative signals to ensure normal structural development within both the mammary gland and the uterus. A novel target gene; BDNF; was shown to be strongly regulated by PR and was also analysed in terms of the proliferative target genes to determine what functional role it may have in the signalling pathways. The findings of this study will help to further understand the intricacies of progesterone dependent signalling in both normal and tumourigenic mammary gland development

Inequality and the Crisis: The Distributional Impact of Tax Increases and Welfare and Public Sector Pay Cuts

The economic crisis impacts directly on the distribution of income via unemployment and private sector wages, but the way policy responds in seeking to control soaring fiscal deficits is also central to its distributional consequences. Having sketched out the background in terms of inequality trends during Ireland’s boom and the channels through which the recession affects different parts of the income distribution, this paper investigates the distributional impact of the government’s policy response with respect to direct tax, social welfare and public sector pay using the SWITCH tax-benefit model. This provides empirical evidence relevant to future policy choices as efforts to reduce the fiscal deficit continue.

New Brutalist Image 1949–55: 'atlas to a new world' or, 'trying to look at things today'

The seminal exhibition ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ (PLLA) which took place at the ICA in London in 1953 continues to capture the attention of art historians and curators through exhibition histories and curatorial studies. The exhibition is a key element in defining “discourse through images (Bilddiskurs),” a longstanding practice that nonetheless experienced significant change when it encountered the image-making properties of cameras and the means for their dissemination in the press (Flusser). This change coincided with a developing awareness of iconography and the work of the Warburg circle within the Independent Group, that equally understood this form of visual analysis in relation to emerging cybernetic theories of communication and information theory. Building on research undertaken for the Tate Britain display ‘New Brutalist Image 1949-55’ (24 Nov 2014 – 20 Sep 2015), the article argues that PLLA demonstrates how photography was put to work discursively in post-war Britain, deploying new conditions of ‘seeing’ to define a visual order brought about by the transformation of image-capture and mass reproduction technologies, by the new ubiquity of photography, and by the lure of consumer society. Accompanying unprecedented technological possibilities was a new visual sensibility – in other words, a new contemporary aesthetic - rooted in the camera’s lens and mediated through printing processes. Together, this media combination encoded a manner of communication meant to challenge the cultural and social primacy of the printed word, invoking an “Esperanto” of images. Anticipating Lawrence Alloway’s conceptualisation of a ‘fine art pop art continuum’, the article argues, that the photographic image, through its mediating and remediating qualities became a sophisticated, nuanced tool of communication across the practices of art, architecture and design. It also highlights Peter Smithson’s proposition that understanding the visual motivations behind PLLA revealed contemporary cultural conditions “like a Rosetta Stone.” The collaborative team of Alison & Peter Smithson, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and Ronald Jenkins behind ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ shared an ambition to release the expanded field of everyday day visual culture into vision and experience across the board, displacing the highly invested and ordered culture of art and architecture, one traditionally governed by elitist ideas of public value and taste. The specificity and importance of photography as both a tool of communication and a medium of visual convergence that synthesised disparate registers, has been neglected in studies of British art, leading to misrecognition and an under-conceptualised reading of the exhibitions produced by IG members, including PLLA. As Reyner Banham, the architecture critic and theorist of New Brutalism noted when reviewing PLLA, “We tend to forget that every photograph is an artifact ... the photograph being an artifact applies its own laws of artefaction to the material it documents, and discovers similarities and parallels between the documentation, even where none exists between the objects and events recorded. Thus photographs make us see connections ...” (Reyner Banham, ‘Photography’ [PLLA review], AR, 1953) For the PLLA team of ‘editors’, a body of photographic images taken by Nigel Henderson (who they mutually identified and awarded the role of photographer to act as their translator, mediator and ‘image-finder’) nonetheless reflects the experiments of the group, documenting their work and recording their visual sensibility. Through our selection and curation of images, the article will demonstrate how photography was exploited as a medium to bring disparate practices, spatial and temporal environments, social and cultural spaces together in the binding matrix of the photographic image

THE GENDER IMPACT OF IRISH BUDGETARY POLICY. ESRI SURVEY AND STATISTICAL REPORT SERIES, October 2018

In this report, we make use of the analytical approach previously developed by the ESRI (Keane et al., 2014). We then provide an up-to-date picture of the overall gender impacts of budgetary policy from the start of the recession (2008) to 2018. This period is split into an austerity period, running from 2008 to 2012, and a recovery period, running from 2012 to 2018. This allows us to identify how the gender impact of Irish tax-benefit policy has evolved from austerity to recovery. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we embed this analytical capacity within SWITCH, the ESRI’s tax-benefit model. This ensures that, in future, gender impact assessment of budgets can be routinely undertaken by government departments3 and by ESRI researchers. This can be done both in the development of options prior to the budget, to help gender-proof policy reforms, and in the assessment of the impact of policies actually chosen in the budget. The project, therefore, not only helps to answer questions about the impact of past policy but will also serve to ensure that the need for gender impact assessment of tax and welfare policies – as identified, inter alia, in the Programme for Government (2016) – can be met more readily in future

TAX REFORM: SELECTED ISSUES. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 12 OCTOBER 2009

The report of the Commission on Taxation (2009) documents an agenda for the reform of taxation at a time when the public finances are under very severe pressure. It would undoubtedly be easier to reform taxation at a time when the overall tax take could be reduced, rather than when gains and losses must balance out in a revenue-neutral fashion. It is still more difficult if reforms have to be introduced at a time when, for macroeconomic reasons, the overall tax take must rise.1 But even when facing the task of increasing revenues, there are choices to be made between increasing rates on the existing base, and broadening the base, without an increase in rates. As Poterba (2009) stated in this year’s Geary Lecture, a touchstone result in public finance is that …the distortionary cost of a tax system depends not on the level of tax rates but on the square of tax rates.2 This makes a strong argument for base-broadening rather than rate increases, which informs much of the report of the Commission on Taxation

BUDGET PERSPECTIVES 2019, PAPER 1. LONE-PARENT INCOMES AND WORK INCENTIVES. July 2018

This paper examines how changes to the social welfare system for lone parents, such as the tightening of eligibility criteria for One-Parent Family Payment and the introduction of Jobseeker’s Transitional Payment, affected lone-parent incomes and work incentives. Our main contributions are threefold: we examine the cumulative effect of policy changes on the income of lone parents, and how changes to lone-parent-specific schemes affected income and work incentives, and quantify the extent to which childcare costs act as a labour market barrier for lone parents. Firstly, policy changes do not occur in a vacuum, therefore we assess how all policy from 2011 to 2018 affected lone-parent income. We find that changes to social welfare policy for lone parents resulted in income losses for employed lone parents, but had little effect on non-employed lone parents. All other changes over the period decreased the income of both employed and non-employed lone parents. We examine how these social welfare changes affected the work incentives. The reforms resulted in more lone parents having a greater financial incentive to be out of work, thus weakening the financial incentive to be in work. Finally, informed by an abundant literature regarding childcare costs as an obstacle to female labour supply, we highlight the impact of these costs on the incentive to be in work. We find that on accounting for childcare costs, being out of work becomes much more financially attractive for many lone parents. The availability of subsidies on childcare costs helps to reduce this disincentive, but even so, childcare costs represent a substantial barrier to lone-parent labour market participation

Inside Online Charter Schools

Online charter schools -- also known as virtual charters or cyber charters -- are publicly funded schools of choice that deliver student instruction via telecommunications. Today, about 200 online charter schools are operating in the United States, serving about 200,000 students at the elementary, middle, and high school grade levels. Although online instruction is increasing rapidly, there have been few studies of their operations and effects. In innovative new research funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the National Study of Online Charter Schools offers a rigorous analysis of online charter schools and their effects. Mathematica Policy Research's report provides the first nationwide data and analysis of the operations and instructional approaches of online charter schools, based on data collected in a survey completed by 127 principals of online charter schools across the country and public data from the U.S. Department of Education