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Leftover women in China: a narrative study of the state, family, and gender relations
Get PDFThis thesis provides a qualitative research study conducted through narrative interviews with women in China who are commonly referred to as “leftover women”. The term sheng nü (“leftover women”) was initially coined by the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) in 2007 to categorise single women aged over 27. The thesis highlights the conflicts faced by Chinese women, as many single women have attained career success and accomplishments comparable to those of men during the modernisation period; however, despite these achievements, single women continue to face derogation, discrimination, and social stigma in public discourse due to their unmarried status. Conducting research on “leftover women” under the theoretical framework of individualisation, detraditionalisation, pure love, self-identity, neoliberalism, and gender theory has proven to be a productive approach to gaining a deeper understanding of the concept’s critique and shedding light on the expectations, anxieties, and pressures experienced by women regarding their societal status. This thesis offers an original contribution to these debates by exploring how Chinese single women made life choices and constructed self-identity under the impact of current social policies, parental expectations, Chinese traditional cultures, heterosexual and patriarchal norms. I present my findings from narrative interviews carried out with women aged 27–40 from major cities in China. The data analysis is organised based on three main topics: state, family, and gender relations. This thesis argues that while Chinese single women have achieved greater autonomy and freedom in their public lives, thanks to improved educational and career opportunities, their choice-making and construction of self-identity in their private lives still rely on institutions and traditions, and remain closely intertwined with China’s economic, social, political, and cultural environment
Love, scandal, jealousy, and confession: a thematic examination of the place of letters in Jane Austen’s six published novels
Get PDFThis thesis examines Austen’s use of letters within her six published novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. Letters were an essential part of Regency everyday life, and because they were a daily form of communication, they were inevitably an important part of Jane Austen’s personal life and her fiction. This thesis traces the role of letters within her novels by analysing them according to four main themes: love; scandals and secrets; jealousy and envy; and confession. Through close reading of the letters, and analysis of their contexts, this thesis provides an original approach to Austen’s letters and the integral role they play in her novels. I argue that, although Austen’s novels are not epistolary in form, the letters within these novels underpin their plots and characterisation. Letters both enable the plots of the novels and bring the naturalness and complexity of their writers and readers to life
Surface and framework modification of silica nanoparticle for efficient delivery of antibiotics
Get PDFAntimicrobial resistance is a growing health concern being the cause of higher morbidity and mortality worldwide. Alongside the increased number of resistant bacterial strains identified and the reduced number of new antibiotics in the pipeline, the development of new antimicrobial therapies is crucial. Silica nanoparticles present unique properties for the design of novel drug delivery systems. The chemical versatility of their surface and framework proposes an advantage for the design of innovative antibiotic delivery systems.
Hereby, we present different approaches for the development of novel silica nanoparticles for the efficient delivery of antibiotics against Gram-negative bacteria. Firstly, surface functionalization of silica nanoparticles led to a novel drug delivery system able to deliver an antibiotic inside Gram-negative bacterial cells, that in its free form is not active due to the reduced permeability of Gram-negative bacteria. Furthermore, the simultaneous inclusion of a ruthenium(II) luminescent metal complex alongside an antibiotic allowed the tracking of the therapeutic nanoparticles. Further Fe3+ cation complexation to the ligand attached to the nanoparticle surface is determined to be an excellent approach to enhance the uptake of nanoparticles in bacterial cells driven by nutrient uptake systems expressed in the bacterial membrane. Another studied approach consisted of the modification of silica nanoparticles framework with spiropyran derivatives to achieve photoresponsive particles that displayed light triggered antibiotic release against urinary tract pathogenic bacterial cells.
Finally, two different approaches for the modification of nanoparticle’s framework were investigated by development of polysilesquioxane nanoparticles and micelle-driven encapsulation in order to enhance the loading and release of a model hydrophobic antibiotic resulting in nanoparticles with better antibiotic delivery performance than traditional non-porous and mesoporous silica nanoparticles
Graphs in higher dimensions
Get PDFThe overarching theme of this thesis is exploring exciting results in graph theory and discovering suitable ways to extend them to exciting results in higher dimensions.
The first subtopic of the thesis is extending two-dimensional results about graphs into three dimensions via -complexes. In Chapter 3, we extend the outerplanarity criterion through forbidden minors of Chartrand and Harary, in Chapter 5, we extend the Four Colour Theorem of Appel and Haken and in Chapter 6, we extend Mac Lane's Theorem.
The second subtopic of the thesis is annulus graphs, which serve as extension of both unit distance graphs and unit disc graphs in higher dimensions. The paper in Chapter 4 concerns annulus graphs in the -dimensional spaces for . There, we introduce the relatively unstudied term annulus graph and show that they have a non-trivial structure. We also show that the ratio of the chromatic number to the independence number grows exponentially in the dimension of the underlying -space
Cost-conscious medical professionals: individual responses to multiple institutional logics in a Chinese regional hospital
Get PDFHealthcare expenditure is expensive, and it is anticipated to see continuous growth in the future, driven by a variety of factors relating to social, political, technological and economic conditions. The generation of medical expenses is often attributed to the decisions made by healthcare professionals during their medical practice. As a result, the integration of cost consciousness into the mindset and actions of medical professionals has received significant attention, emerging as a key focal point in healthcare reforms across the globe.
Healthcare reforms have seen numerous endeavours aimed at instilling a sense of cost-consciousness among doctors, such as the incorporation of cost-control techniques into medical practice. This study focuses on the efforts made by a developing context of China in this regard, primarily addressing the question of how doctors perceive the relationship between cost control and healthcare activities by employing the institutional logics as the theoretical perspective. The study conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with medical professionals in two types of departments at a large Chinese provincial hospital: the lab department and clinical departments, and collected documentaries as a supplement to the interviews. Thematic analysis was employed to elaborate on medical professionals’ perceptions toward cost control, methods developed to control costs and their reasons for controlling medical expenditures. The study shows that medical professionals displayed a context-based perception of cost control, and their reasons for cost control were derived from medical, and cultural considerations.
This study has identified two institutional logics in the case hospital, namely commercial logic and medical logic. Medical professionals exhibited different perceptions regarding the relationship between these two logics in clinical departments and the lab department. Specifically, there was a perceived conflict between cost control and healthcare activities in clinical departments, whereas such conflict was not experienced in the laboratory department. The divergent perceptions of healthcare professionals regarding these two logics also influenced their approach towards handling the multiple logics context. When perceiving conflicting situations, medical professionals adopted three methods, namely combination, avoidance, and defiance to manage the institutional requirements from these logics. Conversely, when doctors perceived a non-conflicting situation, they utilized the acquisition approach to manage the two logics. This study additionally demonstrates that, influenced by cultural factors, the identities of medical professionals could undergo a transformation into hybrid professionals. Cultural factors also enabled doctors to strike a balance between the demands of cost control and maintaining medical quality. Through an examination of doctors' perceptions of various institutional logics in medical practice, this study suggests that the existence or absence of logic conflicts is primarily a contextual artifact, significantly influenced by the nature of medical practice. Moreover, individuals exhibit considerable agency in managing demands stemming from multiple institutional logics, developing diverse responses to these logics
Regulating abortion information in Ireland: censorship, provision and resistance
Get PDFThis thesis is an analysis of how and why anti-abortion information controls were created and sustained through Irish law and later challenged and overturned. In the first part of the thesis, I address why information restrictions were created. Two dominant factors influenced the establishment and endurance of censorship and information controls. The first was a belief that abortion endangered vulnerable foetal life and pregnant people. As such information that challenged the hegemonic anti-abortion views or that facilitated abortion was constructed by the Irish state and anti-abortion proponents as similarly endangering these vulnerable subjects. To protect these subjects, such pro-choice or assistive information required legal suppression. The second reason involved the belief that the law should reflect the community’s principles, beliefs or morals. Suppressing information that was counter to such views was necessary to affirm those views and to inoculate them from challenge. The methods chosen by the State to curtail the creation and dissemination of pro-choice or non- directive information involved prohibiting certain publications and advertisements through the Indecent Advertisements Act 1889 and Censorship of Publications Acts 1929 and 1946. The law also criminalised some referrals and abortion facilitation through the Offences Against the Persons Act 1861 and the Regulation of Information (Services Outside State for Termination of Pregnancies) Act 1995. The Eighth Amendment was also used by anti-abortion actors to curtail non-directive counselling provision through the Open Door and Grogan cases. The Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 repealed many anti-abortion restrictions. However, the legacies of paternalistic information controls remain through its failure to decriminalise abortion and the mandatory three-day waiting period. In the second part of the thesis, I address mechanisms involved in undermining anti-abortion information controls. The first was that censorship is difficult to enforce, so the infrastructure ends up undermining its own purposes. This occurs through censorship generating publicity for the information sources that it wishes to suppress. Furthermore, censorship is a resource-heavy initiative that can never remove all instances of contested or criminalised information. Therefore, opportunity remains for those opposed to controls, to undermine or subvert them. The second is that by justifying censorship as needed to protect vulnerable subjects, anti-information control advocates could attack the foundations of the system by demonstrating that it causes harm to those subjects instead. This undermines popular support for controls and increases pressure on legislators to disavow and dismantle censorship frameworks
Exchange rate management in a resource-dependent economy
Get PDFThis thesis investigates issues relating to the predominant culture of fixing the exchange rate in resource-rich economies. The fixed or pegged exchange rate regimes are based on substantial foreign exchange reserve liquidity, accrued almost entirely from natural-resource export earnings. The durability of this policy design, precisely in the context of perpetual recurrence of external shocks, disruptive technological innovations in the global value chain, as well as the potential depletion of natural-resource endowments, forms a central focus of this thesis. The thesis comprises a total of five related chapters, centered around the broad theme of exchange rate regime change, and a concluding sixth chapter, that summarizes the thesis. We explore whether or not there are any countries currently operating pegged regimes amongst the community of resource-dependent economies, with reasonable prospects of transitioning to a floating exchange rate regime in a smooth and orderly manner. A suite of analytical models are employed to this end, and the overarching finding is that the level of foreign exchange market development and financial sector depth, accessibility and efficiency in most of these countries, do not currently augur well for smooth and orderly transitions. By implication therefore, a large pool of resource-dependent economies would most likely face dire macroeconomic consequences if they were to exit their pegs today. Policymakers should thus, fast-track efforts to develop fundamental supportive elements for operating alternative exchange rate regimes, to minimize the risk of crashing-out of the pegs
Electroweak Multiboson Interactions in Zγjj
Get PDFTwo measurements of Standard Model processes sensitive to electroweak multiboson interactions are presented in the Z(→ll)γjj final state. These measurements are performed using proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The data, recorded by the ATLAS experiment, correspond to an integrated luminosity of 139 /fb. Electroweak production of the Zγjj system in a phase space sensitive to vector-boson scattering production of Zγ is measured with a significance of 10 standard deviations, and consistent with the Standard Model prediction. This represents the first observation of this process by the ATLAS experiment. Additionally, the signal strength for the semileptonic decay of the VZγ triboson production process is measured and a 95% confidence level upper limit on the rate of this process is set at 3.5 times the rate predicted by the Standard Model. Projections are given for measuring this process with the addition of the in-progress Run-3 dataset
Microwave filters based on advanced manufacture techniques towards high-power applications
Get PDFThis PhD thesis focuses on the application of advanced manufacturing techniques in high-power microwave filters. Additive manufacturing (AM) technology and novel materials are combined to address the issue of thermally-induced frequency detuning among high-power microwave components. Several innovative resonator structures and filter topologies are proposed. The main contributions of the thesis are: (1) A narrowband 3D-printed Invar spherical dual-mode channel filter with enhanced thermal stability is demonstrated. An alternative end-to-end fabrication route for all-Invar high-power microwave components is established to overcome the complex manufacturability issues associated with Invar alloy. (2) 3D printing technology is combined with several novel materials to expand design possibilities for high-power microwave components in terms of RF, mechanical, and thermal properties. Multiphysics analysis and detailed evaluations of high-power behaviour are conducted for the designed microwave filters. (3) A 3D-printed monolithic wideband waveguide filter based on a novel pole-generating resonant iris structure is proposed. The flexibility of AM processes is leveraged to manufacture the resonant iris structure, enabling a more compact filter configuration and wider bandwidth. (4) A spherical high-Q resonator is demonstrated, for the first time, based on carbon-fibre-reinforced silicon carbide ceramic composite (HB-Cesic®). The resonator achieves a quality factor of over 10,000 at X-band, and the measured thermal stability is comparable to that of all-Invar components, while its weight is similar to common aluminum components. (5) A 3D-printed monolithic dielectric waveguide filter is presented. The lithography-based ceramic manufacturing (LCM) technique is employed to facilitate the fabrication of the monolithic dielectric filter. Compared to conventional fabrication methods, the need for special moulds is eliminated, and higher design freedom is achieved. Detailed manufacturing parameters and post-processing methods are introduced
Post-secularism and parabolic enquiry in the primary religious education classroom: developing an appropriate hermeneutic
Get PDFIn this doctoral research, I propose that post-secularism calls the religious education (RE) community to look afresh at textual enquiry in the primary school (Reception to Year Six, ages four to eleven) in a way which brings rich hermeneutical possibilities and questions to the fore. The parables of Jesus are often presented within RE lessons as having a single meaning, often one which is secular-ethical rather than theological. As a consequence, pupils have sparse opportunities to consider a) that different people interpret a parable differently, and b) why variant readings exist. Despite increasing calls that students should understand the internal diversity of living religious traditions, it remains that few practical exemplifications exist to assist primary teachers in structuring such enquiries.
In an attempt to redress this state of play, this research trials a sequence of learning activities with Upper Key Stage Two pupils in three schools (n: 85 students). My research journey towards these trials involves proffering of a conception of post-secular RE, one informed by critical literature reviews into post-secularism and pupil agency. Using Biesta’s (2015; 2017) domains of education as a purposeful frame, this envisioning presents an innovative direction for the subject, one which takes post-secular (non-) religiosity, epistemic ability (Habermas, 2006), pupil agency and a post-secular perception of the child seriously. This conception inspires a theory-informed post-secular enquiry into the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), which draws upon rich hermeneutical discussions sitting at the heart of parabolic scholarship. These enquiries were created to see if pupils can become more hermeneutically aware, developing reasoned responses to the question, ‘Why might people interpret the Parable of the Good Samaritan differently?’.
This research is significant. It demonstrates that, contrary to wide and deeply-entrenched views, primary-aged pupils can ably engage in rich hermeneutical reasoning pertaining to why a parable is interpreted differently by different people. Through agentively encountering a myriad of perspectives and interpretive questions constellating around this parabolic narrative, pupils’ efficaciously developed their understanding of self and others. This research makes a much-needed contribution towards our understanding of how epistemic ability and religious literacy could be developed in the crucible of the classroom through a more hermeneutically-informed RE offer. In so doing, the conceptualising and enacting of this post-secular RE can contribute substantially to pupils’ substantive, disciplinary and personal knowledge (Ofsted, 2021b)
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