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Cumulative effects, anthropogenic changes, and modern life paths in sub-Arctic contexts. Envisioning the future in Northeastern British Columbia: the case of the Doig and Blueberry River First Nations
Get PDFThis work is an attempt to describe what is happening in North-eastern British Columbia, in an area where extractivism intertwined with the market-driven economy had been generating changes not always foreseen, understood, and mitigated. Drawing on my year of fieldwork (July 2019 - August 2020), I explore how the traditional lifestyle and socio-economic organization of the Doig and Blueberry River First Nations have been changed by the cumulative effects of industrial development. At first glance, resource extraction may be perceived as a solution to tackle the many problems of scattered and isolated Indigenous communities (i.e. unemployment, lack of opportunities for socio-cultural and economic continuity in the area). However, enjoying the benefits extractivism produces comes at a high price. It impacts Indigenous cosmovision and cultural heritage while shaping how community members envision the future and the kind of future(s) they perceive as possible.
The timeliness of this ethnographic work is also confirmed by the litigation BRFN v. BC (2015-2021). For the first time in Canadian legal history, a trial on cumulative effects intertwined with Treaty 8 infringements and the recognition of Constitutional rights was initiated by a First Nation Band in an attempt to stop development projects to which the Band did not give its consent. The litigation came to an end in June 2021, with a ground-breaking verdict in which it was judged that the BC province could not continue to authorize activities that breach Treaty 8 and its unwritten promises. As a result, on 7th October 2021, a preliminary agreement between BRFN and the BC Government was reached. The province has agreed to allocate a total amount of C$ 65 million to the BRFN for land restoration activities and cultural practices revitalization.
To explain the complex reality community members (and Fort St. John residents) meet in their everyday lives while facing extractivism, I introduce the concept of ‘atemporal modernity’ as an (a)temporal status in continuous becoming. I argue that people are trapped in such a status, perpetually waiting for a better future yet to come, which can only be achieved through extractivism. By letting people talk, I try to describe their everyday challenges while exploring which kind of future(s) community members envision to keep living off the land as long as ‘the sun shines, the rivers flow, and the grass grows’
Assessing options for the measurement of movement behaviours of pre-school children at scale
Get PDFA recent paradigm shift suggests that the components of movement behaviour (physical activity, sedentary behaviour, and sleep) of pre-school children, which are important for child health, should be examined collectively rather than in isolation. Furthermore, there is evidence of inequalities of these behaviours, which in turn impacts on inequalities in child health. The validity, reliability, and feasibility of existing measurement tools for assessing movement behaviour in pre-school children is unclear. The aim of this doctoral research was to develop a measurement tool for public health purposes (thus a proxy reported tool) which assesses the movement behaviours of pre-school aged children.
Critical reviews of the existing literature found that there are currently no valid, reliable, and feasible measurement tools to assess movement behaviours in pre-school children. These reviews highlighted the need to address this gap in knowledge by developing a novel proxy reported measurement tool that is feasible and acceptable, as well as valid and reliable, for assessing movement behaviours of pre-school aged children.
Focus groups with parents and carers of pre-school children from deprived areas in the UK provided qualitative insights on the acceptability and feasibility of existing measurement tools, including their views on the presentation of proxy reported tools (e.g. age appropriate activities, preference for real-time recording over recall). These parents and carers also co-developed a novel measurement tool ‘Movement Measurement in the Early Years’ (MoveMEY), alongside input from topic expert researchers.
Working with a different group of pre-school children and their parents and carers, MoveMEY was pilot tested to determine the content validity of the tool. The tool was found to comprise of relevant items, be comprehensive of children’s movement behaviours, and understandable to parents.
MoveMEY is a promising tool for the measurement of all components of movement behaviours in pre-school children and is ready for further validation
Family, school and jobs: intergenerational social mobility in Next Steps
Get PDFYoung people’s higher education (HE) participation, and early access to labour markets, in the UK and other developed countries, are stratified according to their socio-economic origins and prior educational attainment. Such background factors are difficult to change in an individual’s lifetime, they are presumably not the only determinants of stratified outcomes, and anyway they could be mediated by peer influence and the issue of who goes to school with whom. This new study examines the relationships between a wide range of such social and economic factors relating to birth characteristics, family background, secondary schooling characteristics, and post-16 destinations, and it explores the possible reasons behind their links to HE and labour market outcomes.
At the core of the study is an innovative combination of the large-scale nationally representative longitudinal Next Steps survey dataset linked to the robust administrative National Pupil Database (NPD) for England. In order to investigate the degree of social justice and equity in education, the study tracks the life course of a cohort of 5,192 state-school-educated young people in England from age 13 to age 25, to build a comprehensive picture of the journeys of these young people entering the labour market in their early adulthood. Analytical methods used include cross-tabulations, effect sizes, correlations and regression models. The main outcomes of interest are HE participation, and labour market outcomes as indicated by employment status and professional occupation status.
The findings show a complex but relatively clear picture, providing some confirmatory and some new evidence on the correlates of intergenerational social mobility in a large cohort of people who are currently in their early 30s. Disadvantaged young people are consistently under-represented in HE participation and the labour market, especially in professional occupations. Bivariate analyses show that HE opportunities and labour market outcomes are systematically unbalanced between different socio-economic groups of young people, suggesting that destinations are strongly stratified by social origins. All of the factors considered in this study are independently associated with post-16 outcomes when analysed separately.
Regression models reveal that, once birth characteristics are controlled for, the most important predictor of HE entry is prior educational attainment. This is followed by parental and pupil aspirations, parental occupation and education, material ownership at home, positive schooling experiences, and geographical location.
In terms of employment status, doing an apprenticeship is the most powerful predictor of being employed at age 25 (although this may be skewed by the small number of young people still in formal education at that age). This is followed by prior educational attainment, material ownership at home, and prior HE entry.
The relationship between the predictors and having a professional occupation status is slightly different. Regression analysis demonstrates that the key predictors of having a professional job are prior educational attainment, HE participation, parental and pupil aspirations, and positive schooling experiences. However, unlike generic employment status, evidence shows that having done an apprenticeship does not contribute to higher chances of landing a professional job.
These findings collectively offer a core message in terms of fair access to life opportunities; the most import barriers to access to HE and professional occupations are stratified prior educational attainment and poverty-related factors at home.
More crucially, the study also makes the first attempt to explore the level of segregation by background characteristics that is experienced at school as a potential factor in intergenerational social mobility. It is, to our knowledge, the only study to date which examines whether and to what extent who goes to school with whom might play a role in these outcomes beyond school. Bivariate analyses show that the clustering of pupils of similarly poorer socio-economic backgrounds at school is consistently linked to lower chances of HE participation and poorer labour market outcomes. Regression analyses further suggest that the level of between-school segregation an individual experiences plays a small role in all post-16 pathways, over and above that which can be explained by individual factors.
In the light of these results, it appears that life destinations are still patterned by background inequality in modern England. However, there are promising signs that policy interventions – including creating a more socially mixed school intake, providing more financial support for low-income families such as travel bursaries, continuing and improving contextualised assessment in both university admissions and recruitment processes, and investing more in public transport in deprived areas – can help to improve fair access to HE and the labour market. These interventions can bring other long-term benefits such as life satisfaction too. Perhaps, instead of advocating or focusing on promoting social mobility, policymakers should devote more energy to and invest more money in tackling social inequality and improving equity in education and life opportunities. If this were to be done effectively, then social mobility could, presumably, look after itself
Nietzsche Contra the Atheists An Analysis of the Popular Reception of Nietzsche’s Atheism in English-Speaking Countries
Get PDFThis analysis of the English-speaking popular reception of Nietzsche from 1895 to the present will follow Nietzsche in bringing history and philosophy together. I will argue that Nietzsche’s philosophy provides explanatory power for understanding the reception of his atheism and that his reception history in turn sheds light on the meaning of his atheism. Chapter One explores how Nietzsche employs form and style to establish the event of God’s death as the chasm of understanding that lies between himself and other atheists. Chapter Two considers the defining features and concerns of Nietzsche’s atheism – nihilism, Dionysianism, asceticism, naturalism, eternal recurrence and the übermensch – in the context of Nietzsche’s soteriological project. Against this backdrop, the remaining chapters will explore the reception of Nietzsche’s atheism that has not been conveyed to a popular audience through the details of his philosophy but rather through the themes and categories that naturally arose between the established poles of debate of the broader culture of the time. Chapters 3–5 demonstrate how Nietzsche’s popular reception has been shaped through debates over Nietzsche’s alleged madness, nationalism, social Darwinism, decadence, warmongering and nazism, while chapter 6 explores why most authors attempting to popularise atheism today either make little mention of Nietzsche or conspicuously do not mention him at all. The question throughout this account of Nietzsche’s reception is not simply ‘How has Nietzsche been received?’ but rather ‘What would Nietzsche make of his own popular reception?’ A Nietzschean evaluation of his own reception history is made feasible by Nietzsche himself who not only predicts that he and the majority of atheists who read him will remain at a vast distance from each other, but having measured the distance that lies between them, he also takes the trouble to explain why that distance exists
Investigations of materials hosting exotic magnetism with spin-density functional theory
Get PDFSpin-density functional theory (spin-DFT) has long been used to study materi- als exhibiting collinear spin textures. Recently it has become more common to apply non-collinear spin-DFT to tackle systems with more exotic magnetism.
In this thesis, we use spin-DFT both as a predictive tool and as a means of explaining phenomena uncovered by experiment. We use calculations to com- plement muon-spin spectroscopy (μSR) studies of two skyrmion hosting materi- als, Cu2OSeO3 and GaV4S8−ySey, as well as crystallography and magnetometry measurements of [Cu(pyz)0.5(gly)]ClO4. For Cu2OSeO3 we use structural re- laxation to find likely stopping sites for an implanted muon. Our predicted muon sites lead to good agreement with the measured μSR spectra. For the GaV4S8−ySey series, we are able to see how the spin density changes upon sub- stitution, consistent with observations of a spin-glass at high substitution. In a pressure study of [Cu(pyz)0.5(gly)]ClO4, we find that calculated changes to the structure well match X-ray crystallography measurements, capturing the rele- vant changes to the Cu separation. We see dramatic change in the secondary exchange mechanism consistent with structural distortions at high pressure.
Next, in Cr1/3MS2 (M = Nb or Ta), we predict a gap-like feature in the density of states (DoS) which is then confirmed through magnetometry mea- surements. This gap explains the low temperature transport and magnetism in these materials. Extending the study to N1/3NbS2, for N in the first period transition metals, we show that only Cr intercalation results in this gap. We predict the magnetic properties of the series through a band filling mechanism.
Finally, we make use of a recently developed exchange and correlation (xc) functional and implement it in castep. This functional improves the treatment of non-collinear spin which allows us to realise a spin-ice state in Dy2Ti2O7
PAKISTANI FEMALE ACADEMICS’ CAREER PROGRESSION TRAJECTORIES: A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF INFLUENCES OF INSTITUTIONAL PRACTICES AND STRUCTURES
Get PDFThe continuing underrepresentation of women compared to their male colleagues in academic and administrative leadership positions has received considerable attention in the literature, revealing a range of challenges and barriers. Presently, higher education researchers are increasingly focusing on the potentially positive effects of institutional factors on female academics’ career progression across the global academy. However, very little was found in the literature on the lives of professionally successful women (e.g., female professors) in Pakistan. The present qualitative PhD research addresses this gap in the literature by exploring the experiences of institutional practices and structures of a sample of thirty female academics on their routes toward a professorial position in public sector universities of the Punjab province (Pakistan).
A constructivist framework, biographical interviewing, and a qualitative data matrix analysis technique were aligned to design theoretical and analytical tools to conceptualise and operationalise choices and decisions related to the research questions, topics covered in the interview guide, and data analysis methods. Motivated by my personal and professional interests in this topic and drawing on theory and contextual considerations, this thesis explores Pakistani female academics’ understandings of their academic and career choice formations. Furthermore, female professors’ perceptions of the central enablers and hurdles they encountered in their journeys to reach a professorial position were explored. Biographical semi-structured interviews with a sample of thirty female professors produced rich and detailed accounts of the interplay and influence of personal characteristics and circumstances, as well as institutional practices and structures, in their journeys to reach the position of professor in Pakistani higher education organisations. A qualitative data matrix strategy was employed to organise interview data into explanatory themes and relevant categories of study participants’ experiences based on different combinations of illustrative themes. In addition, I created a typology of themes and categories via an abductive coding strategy that involves connecting notions from existing theory with new ones that emerged from the data analysis. Finally, the thematic interpretation of female professors’ career progress/trajectory is presented in chronological order, from the initial framing of their academic and career aspirations and decisions, through to entry into an academic career and early career progression experiences, to promotion tracks towards a professorship.
The qualitative analysis has revealed that progressive family patriarchal figures (fathers, brothers, and husbands) and family beliefs regarding girls’ education and careers were central sources of familial involvement, encouragement and support, enabling women’s academics to participate in public realms of education and professional careers and succeed. In findings, I argue that family networks were supportive rather than oppressive structures – at least in cases where families have progressive family members who facilitate these women to combine childrearing responsibilities alongside the requisites of academic career progress. Furthermore, in relation to exploring what did and did not help female academics’ career progression after joining university employment, biographies shared by women repeatedly emphasised their academic talent and performance (e.g. degrees and published work), academic mentors, and accessible professional development opportunities that enabled them to succeed; or supported them in overcoming hurdles resulting from anticompetitive colleagues’ behaviours or organisational deficiencies.
The overall findings highlight the significance of family background as a source of various enablers/socio-cultural capital(s), as most women in the study were from advantaged family backgrounds. In contrast, a minority of the academic women studied belonged to relatively less well-off families. Yet, still, they experienced parental encouragement and instrumental support for their academic and career achievements even as such values and norms are more common in affluent families than in poorer ones. This research integrates and advances higher education career knowledge by suggesting that women’s career success is influenced by a combination of different socio-cultural capital(s) linked to the privileged family backgrounds or which ensued from workplace networking and professional development opportunities.
In the concluding discussion, I develop an explanatory model to account for the career success of a sample of thirty female professors in this study. This theoretical explanation comprises institutional elements: 1) positive and progressive forms of patriarchy, 2) resourceful family/social networks, and 3) opportunity for reliable family childcare arrangements sourced from family background and its social environment. Finally, the study findings significantly contribute to policy aimed at widening universities’ economic and academic/intellectual capital(s) to enable talented women, even those from less-privileged backgrounds, to perform and progress in male-dominated Pakistani higher education organisations
Directional and multi-band mobile radio channel characteristics utilising a modular antenna array
Get PDFThis thesis presents an analysis of directional and multi-band radio channel characteristics in two key environments for 5th Generation (5G) mobile. From a review of the available literature within this field, three key motivations were identified for the work. The first was to measure multi-band radio channel characteristics in an industrial environment, as there appeared to be a gap in the current data pool surrounding this scenario. An Alpha-Beta-Gamma (ABG) path loss model for line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight has been presented along with delay spread and delay spread vs path loss data for 8 frequency bands ranging from below 1 GHz up to 68 GHz. The second motivation was provided by the part sponsors of this work, Intel, who provided 60 GHz, 128 element Modular Antenna Arrays (MAA) for the duration of the work. These arrays were integrated with the Durham sounder system, calibrated in an anechoic chamber and verified in a real scenario against a horn antenna prior to any further measurements. The MAAs were used to gather rapid directional measurements in industrial and outdoor environments. The use of electronic beam switching to gather directional characteristics has not been observed within the literature and it was commonly noted that speed was a limiting factor for many research groups. The final motivation was to develop an improved method for presenting and deriving directional characteristics. Utilising a variety of sources, a 3D parameter referred to as the Location Spatial Vector (LSV) was proposed and utilised for directional characterisation. This parameter, along with a conversion model, allowed the principal angle of arrival/departure and the angular spread to be derived with only a single data pass
‘The Erasures, the Silences Where There Should Have Been Evidence’: Dismantling Archived History and Dwelling Experience Within the Works of Hilary Mantel
Get PDFThe thesis critically examines Hilary Mantel’s work and its interpretation of the past through literary depictions of dwellings and archives. This thesis explores the concept of the dwelling-as-archive which has the overlapping roles and functions of a domestic dwelling and a historical archive. This thesis investigates this concept as it appears throughout Hilary Mantel’s works. These dwelling-as-archives are also in-between places where memory and historical meaning slip or are hidden. This thesis claims that Mantel’s historical fiction writing is an affective response that questions the ways characters struggle to preserve historical documents in both dwellings and archives. The thesis’ historico-materialist focus on Mantel’s works and dwellings-as-archives argues for a re-historicisation of phenomenology which the thesis defines as a phenomenological approach grounded in historical awareness. Characters attempt to reconstruct an affective experience of the past through domestic objects and archives. The dwelling-as-archives are conceptualised as containers of memory. However, their status as in-between places mean archived objects are frequently hidden, slip, or are waiting to be discovered to re-experience the past. The thesis explores Mantel’s poetic dissembling of the borders between absence/presence, belonging/rootlessness, and private/public that helps expose possible lost historical meaning. The various sites of dwelling examined in this thesis are haunted by memory and the dead, with the inhabitants of such dwellings causing the decay of architectural structures and family homelife. This thesis then examines instances of inscription, intertextuality, and historiographic metafiction in a select number of Mantel’s novels to reveal the archive as an unstable product of familial, national, and institutional historical consciousness. The dwelling-as-archive is a hinterland through which Mantel’s imagination can reconstruct the missing gaps she finds in the historical record. This thesis contributes to a growing critical field of studies on Mantel’s works which includes Eileen Pollard and Ginette Carpenter’s Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2018) and Lucy Arnold’s reading of spectrality and intertextuality in Reading Mantel: Haunted Decades (2019). Recent commercial and critical responses to the Wolf Hall Trilogy often do not recognise a literary career spanning twenty-five years from 1985. This thesis then investigates Mantel's specific challenges when (re)interpreting the past through her imagination and research, with the dwelling-as-archive often a background character in her character’s experience of dwelling and history
Unjust Enrichment for Cohabiting Couples: Reassessing the Common Intention Constructive Trust
Get PDFThis thesis considers the use of unjust enrichment in the cohabitation context in England and Wales. The increasing prevalence of unmarried cohabitation combined with continuing Government refusal to reform the law means that there remains a danger of significant vulnerability at the end of cohabiting relationships, particularly where one party has not contributed financially to acquisition of the property. The lack of legislative reform means that development of the law will have to come from the courts. The current law requires parties to use the law of trusts to argue over the beneficial interest of their home. In order to move the law forward and respond to the vulnerability often experienced by the less economically powerful partner, new and creative ways forward are needed. The doctrine of unjust enrichment has been used for disputes between cohabiting couples in Canada and Scotland and has often been the subject of academic attention. This thesis undertakes a sustained, detailed examination of how the doctrine might work in this context in England and Wales, looking at each of the constituent elements of an unjust enrichment claim and using restitutionary scholarship to provide a new perspective on cohabitation disputes. Criticisms of the common intention constructive trust – the current doctrine used in this area – are drawn on to question whether unjust enrichment might provide novel development initiatives for longstanding institutional issues with the trust. This thesis therefore considers the legal valuation of caring and other domestic responsibilities within the home, the nature of intention and the resulting power balance between the parties, and the focus within the current law on questions of ownership. The aim is to question whether unjust enrichment might provide a way forward for the law which corrects some of the problems with the current law and is therefore advantageous for litigants
The Archaeology of Daily Life: A Late Antique House at Kom al-Ahmer, Northwestern Nile Delta
Get PDFThe archaeological investigation and study of houses and domestic contexts is key to grasping how people lived in antiquity; it permits us to enrich and nuance our overall understanding of daily life during specific historical periods and also touches upon urbanism, economy, and social developments and is equally relevant even in areas with a wealth of preserved written evidence, such as in the case of Egypt. This research yielded a snapshot into the everyday life of a non-elite household of the Late Roman period in Egypt by focussing on a single case study house —inhabited between the late 4th and mid-5th century CE— from the site of Kom al-Ahmer, a settlement embedded in the Delta’s countryside, part of Alexandria’s hinterland, and involved in the Mediterranean trade network. The investigation analysed what could be discerned archaeologically about how this building was developed, occupied, and abandoned. This study led to the identification of phases of use corresponding to the inhabitants’ growing agency over the spaces where they carried out their daily activities, from domestic tasks to small-scale workshop crafts that expanded beyond the walls of the house. The Delta location prompted inquiring about the extent to which the geographical and environmental background shaped the house’s architectural design, influencing both planning and construction. The house’s design is also examined in light of the Egyptian architectural development and then cross-compared with a sample of contemporary houses from other regions of the Mediterranean to review if the affiliation to the broader Roman empire influenced the standard house form. The results of this research highlight the contribution of micro-scale investigation to the current macro-scale understanding and demonstrate the potential behind the meticulous study of domestic contexts
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