Shared understandings of dementia? : An application of the Common Sense Self Regulation Model to a case study

Peer reviewedPostprin

Competing fictions: Eighteenth-century domestic novels, women writers, and the trope of female rivalry

This dissertation focuses on mid to late eighteenth-century domestic fiction by Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Frances Burney, and Maria Edgeworth, arguing that female rivalry in the novel performs a complex double function, both reinscribing domestic ideology and undermining it. I begin with the premise that Richardson\u27s depiction of female rivalry differs significantly from those of the women writers who follow him. My chapter on Richardson\u27s Clarissa examines his depiction of rivalry between Clarissa and all the other women of the novel, arguing that the bad women work to overshadow Lovelace\u27s abuses; in other words, female rivalry effectively displaces a critique of masculine violence inherent in patriarchy. My second chapter turns to Sarah Scott\u27s Millenium Hall, a feminist utopia which calls attention to the ways in which women are culturally constructed to view each other as rivals in a market with limited opportunities for economic advancement. Yet where one expects female rivalry, Scott\u27s text routinely refuses to take that turn, privileging instead female homosocial intimacy. Burney\u27s Cecilia also works to revise the trope of female rivalry. Whereas in Richardson\u27s novel misreading is a marker of an essential female deficiency, in Cecilia Burney implicitly blames domestic ideology and the literary tradition by which it is propagated for women\u27s faulty interpretative skills and, further, contrasts the intensity of female friendship with impotent, inadequate heterosexual alternatives. Maria Edgeworth\u27s novel Belinda also emphasizes the relationships between female characters over the heterosexual narrative, even when those relationships are rivalrous. Like Burney, Edgeworth suggests these rivalries are the products of misreadings for which she faults conventional romantic ideology. In my conclusion, I discuss our inheritance as feminist scholars in academia and the ways in which we tend to replicate rivalries between feminisms and femininities, as well as between mainstream and academic women. I think we can draw connections between the divisionary impulse in the literary and critical history of eighteenth-century women\u27s writing and the tensions today

The United States Guest worker Program: The Need for Reform

Although often marginalized, guestworkers are an integral part of the United States economy. In 2006 alone, the U.S. government certified visas for 18,736 temporary workers. The program expanded in subsequent years and continues to grow each year. Despite its broad scope, huge impact on the labor force, and the extensive existing legislation regarding it, the guestworker program has permitted most employers of guestworkers to eschew the regulations or find loopholes, resulting in a system that is largely exploitative. Abuse of workers begins in their home countries, intensifies during the period of employment, and often continues even after employment terminates. Workers frequently fail to earn enough money to cover their basic needs while in the United States or to repay the debts they incurred in order to travel to the United States. The U.S. guestworker program is structured in a way that promotes abuse, exploitation, and injustice. It needs to be amended. First and foremost, new legislation must enhance guestworkers\u27 access to justice by lifting current restraints on federally funded lawyers and permitting aggrieved workers to remain in the United States long enough to prosecute their claims. Second, the law must hold U.S. employers liable for abuses perpetuated by those acting on their behalf. They cannot hide behind willful blindness and disclaim responsibility for their employees. Third, the Department of Labor (DOL) must begin to adequately enforce the protections in place to prepare employers for legislation enhancing their obligations to their workers. Finally, the legislation must alter the existing balance of power and create a way to ensure that employers fulfill their contractual obligations

The Business of the Girl: Celebrity and the Professionalization of Girlhood in Early Twenty-First Century Media Culture

The achieving “can-do” girl, who thrives in her personal, academic, and aspirational endeavors, emerged in response to self-help crisis literature of the 1990s urging mothers to manage their daughters’ low self-esteem. However, even as media industries have adopted the successful girl subject in popular film, television, and digital marketing campaigns, public conversations of tween and teenage girls still identify rising levels of anxiety and self-doubt that diminish girls’ confidence well into adulthood. Responding to what critics call the “confidence gap,” girl culture of the twenty-first century has organized itself around the affordances of social media and digital celebrity in the creation of a professionalized girl self-brand. This project addresses the media discourses of confidence and anxiety that shape expectations of girlhood achievement and examines the use of celebrity as a tool of professionalization in the reproduction of race and class hierarchies under neoliberal capitalism. This project explores four modes of cultural production that demonstrate what I call “the professional lifestyling of the self” that invoke the practice of celebrity and branding in the construction of the professional girl subjectivity: lifestyle media featuring mothers managing their daughters’ entertainment careers; girl prodigies and performers competing on reality talent shows; girl influencers building their business on YouTube and Instagram; and girl activists negotiating humanitarian agendas in networked microcelebrity spaces. Critical to each mode is how celebrity reinforces confidence, authenticity, and relatability in the creation of a professionalized girl subject who acts as a point of stabilization during uncertain economic times. The chapters survey the progression of girlhood in her professionalization, from her initial appointment as daughter carrying on the mother’s postfeminist legacy, to agent of social change navigating the pressures of promoting her cause in a commodity culture. Along the way, the girl learns to brand personal obstacles, insecurities, and anxieties as part of her authentic journey to professional achievement. I argue that this procession, as it operates within the surveillance framework of media convergence, reveals that attaining confidence is a commercial endeavor rather than a feminist one that promises social and economic independence while maintaining structural inequalities. This dissertation seeks to understand digital celebrity not just as “a pedagogical tool in the discursive production” of the girl, as P. David Marshall has argued, but as a professional aid in the construction of the gendered, racialized, and classed girl who can prosper in the shifting labor economy of the early twenty-first century. Girlhood relies on the technologies of branding and promotion to reimagine, rather than close, the confidence gap by assigning cultural value to traits like low self-worth that were previously blamed for holding girls back. This project ultimately interrogates how the commercial industries conceptualize the girl as a business whose confidence and anxiety are managed and whose work is crucial to the regulation of a capitalist society

LSU Mental Health Service program evaluation

This study includes a program evaluation of LSU Mental Health Services and its impact on the college students receiving services. The study used both an outcome survey (Schwartz Outcome Survey-10) to determine any changes in current life functioning and a satisfaction survey (Client Satisfaction Questionnaire-8) to assess the client’s perceived contentment with services provided. The expectations were that students would demonstrate an improvement in their current functioning after receiving treatment and that their outcome scores would correspond positively to reported client satisfaction scores. Results reveal that the student participants reported significant improvement in their overall functioning. In addition, the participants exhibited a significant positive correlation between functioning and client satisfaction at the 4-week follow-up

Alien Registration- Lane, Elizabeth (Portland, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/21517/thumbnail.jp