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Psychosocial Health and Wellbeing in an Environment of Risk: A Mixed Methods Exploration of Urban Congolese Refugee Resilience in Kenya
No full textBackground: The current global refugee crisis requires attention from the public health community to improve the health and wellbeing of forcibly displaced groups. Eighty-six percent of refugees are hosted in developing countries, while 58% migrate to urban centers in search of opportunities. Although there are benefits to urban migration, refugees residing in Nairobi, Kenya are vulnerable to police extortion, arrests, deportations, and social exclusion as a result of anti-refugee policies. Despite threats to psychosocial wellbeing, many refugees successfully cope with acute and cumulative stressors to exhibit positive mental health outcomes in the context of adversity. This dissertation explores the ways urban Congolese refugees in Nairobi negotiate and navigate personal, social, and environmental resources to mitigate stress and promote psychosocial wellbeing. Research Aims: The dissertation included the following three aims: (1) document stressors experienced by urban Congolese refugees in Nairobi; (2) describe the range of coping supports available to Congolese refugees; identify how individuals, families, and groups navigate and negotiate these resources; and (3) explore relationships that exist among stressors, supportive resources, and reported mental health status of urban Congolese refugees. Methods: Mixed-methods exploratory research took place over a 12-month period in Nairobi. Preliminary research was conducted between May and August 2012, and dissertation fieldwork occurred between January and August 2014. Qualitative research included ethnographic participant observation, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and small group discussions with Congolese refugees (n=70). Additional interviews were conducted in Kenya with academics (n=3), intergovernmental employees (n=4), representatives from government agencies (n=2), and refugee service providers (n=18). Quantitative research was comprised of two surveys administered to Congolese refugees (N=244) in 150 households. The Self-Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ-20) assessed mental health functioning, and a survey developed in-field inventoried perceived stressors and supports. Results: The results by aim were: (1) stressors fell within three primary domains: inadequate material resources, political and personal insecurity, and emotional distress; (2) Congolese refugees utilized three salient coping strategies, comprised of reliance on religious communities and faith in God, participation in borrowing networks, and managing memories; and (3) isolation was associated with poor mental health functioning, while perceived support from religious communities enhanced mental health outcomes. Recommendations: Organizations should bolster community-based programs and strengthen partnerships with religious communities to improve the psychosocial wellbeing of urban Congolese refugees. Conclusions: Shifting the paradigm with refugee populations from a deficits-centric to resilience-focused framework recognizes the inherent strengths of individuals, families and communities with refugee status, and has the potential to mold future research and praxis that aims to enhance the wellbeing of displaced populations.Dissertation not available (per author's request)Originally embargoed until 15 August 2020; contacted by author 8 August 2020 to permanently restrict dissertation, Laure
Health-Care Providers' Preparedness for H1N1/09 Influenza Prevention and Treatment in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
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In Tanzania, the first case of H1N1/09 influenza was reported in September 2009. By March 2010, the reported number of cases was 770 with one death. Due to shortage of qualified human resources, essential medicines and laboratory supplies in health facilities, it was not known how well health-care providers in the country were prepared to deal with the pandemic. The study was conducted from December 2009 to May 2010 in public hospitals and private community pharmacies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Fifty-three prescribers and 200 dispensers were interviewed to assess their knowledge on the prevention and treatment of H1N1/09 influenza, and dissemination of correct information to the public regarding the pandemic. Most participants had inadequate knowledge on the transmission, prevention and management of H1N1/09 influenza. The majority of prescribers knew neither the antiviral drugs recommended for the treatment of H1N1 influenza (64%) nor their adverse effects (92.5%). The drug dispensers' knowledge was also inadequate regarding the transmission, prevention and treatment of H1N1/09 influenza. Forty-one (20.5%) salespersons without formal training in pharmaceutical or medical sciences were found dispensing and supervising the pharmacies. Most participants had misconceptions on how H1N1/09 virus was transmitted. The results of the study revealed gaps in the knowledge of the health-care providers on the prevention and treatment of H1N1/09 influenza infection. This indicates the need for strengthening of health-care systems and provision of continuing education and professional development for health-care providers on new and re-emerging diseases in the community.\u
Dry River Run (an opera in 2 acts)
No full textBackground: Dry River Run is a 140 minute opera written for the QCGU Opera School, and uses a new story and libretto from award winning Australian author Rodney Hall.
Contribution: The complex nature of writing and presenting a new opera brings together many elements and people across several areas of the arts industry and in fact, several departments across the University. The composition time was in excess of 14 months, the rehearsal time began 12 months prior to opening night.
Significance: The compositional process was the most important of my career to date and the size of the creation and the time required to bring it to life, was instrumental in me understanding the true craft of both compositional creativity and the inner workings of my own style and skill level. The process allowed me to fully develop several aspects of my craft including the use of chordal based harmony practice. (the main characters - 5 of them - had a series of chords or orchestration aspects or intervals that always accompanied their appearance in the story) The process also taught me the skill of editing (how to lose some of your favourite moments) and how to rewrite or add music in a hurry. In one case, I had to compose a fully orchestrated interlude to give the stage more time, in just under 48 hours. The result of the opera was four well attended and remarkably well performed shows in the Conservatorium Theatre, that gave students the opportunity to embrace the new and to learn an significant length of opera from memory of which their is no recording available. For me personally, the opera shone a light on my craft as a composer and has helped drive my skill to an entirely new level. The works I have written post 2018 have been a significantly higher standard in terms of structure, style and context.No Full Tex
The Cyclical Representation of the UK Conference Sector's Life Cycle: The Use of Refurbishments as Rejuvenation Triggers
No full textThe Tourism Area Life Cycle (TALC) model (Butler, 1980) is one of the most influential and frequently quoted tourism related lifecycle frameworks. Extensively applied and critiqued, it remains a cornerstone in tourism research. The model classifies the hypothetical temporal development of a destination into a series of stages, these being exploration, involvement, development, consolidation, stagnation and decline and/or rejuvenation, which when aggregated are represented diagrammatically as a S-shaped curve. This paper presents a theoretical extension of the TALC model, based on the decade in which UK conference venues initiated their conference product lifecycle, and the use of refurbishments as state changing triggers to rejuvenate the conference product lifecycle. This theoretical extension is applied to the four conference venue classifications that together constitute the UK conference sector, namely purpose-built venues, hotels, educational establishments and visitor attractions. Each of these venue types initiated its lifecycle at different times, with individual venues progressing through their lifecycle and either stagnating or rejuvenating through the use of refurbishment’s at differing times throughout the last 5 decades. Based on these findings, a linear model can be applied to the development of the UK conference sector. However, undertaking refurbishments, and thus the rejuvenation of the conference venues’ lifecycle, are occurring at differing times, and therefore this paper forwards the view that today a cyclical model is more appropriate to the UK conference sector
Do proton pump inhibitors reduce the incidence of pharyngocutaneous fistulae following total laryngectomy?
No full textIncludes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.Pharyngocutaneous fistula is a common complication of total laryngectomy. We hypothesised that perioperative proton pump inhibitor (PPI) treatment could reduce the incidence of pharyngocutaneous fistulae. This prospective placebo-controlled double-blind randomised controlled trial compared PPI treatment (14 days enteral omeprazole) with a placebo in patients undergoing primary total laryngectomy. The incidence of pharyngocutaneous fistula was recorded
Gesamtkunstwerk as an aesthetic pre-occupation in the novels of Virginia Woolf.
No full textPhDThis thesis aims to show that Wagner's theories of Gesamtkunstwerk were a
pre-occupation in Woolf's work throughout her career. The introduction
explores Gesamtkunstwerk theory, tracing its development in theories
concerning the combination of art forms, I go on to show how Woolf uses the
Voyage Out to explore what the modern novel can learn from musical arts, while
Jacob's Room adds painting to music as a significant field of interest for
Woolf Mrs Dalloway adds to the complexity of combination, for I will
demonstrate that in this novel a Nietzschean interpretation of Wagner's ideas
found in The Birth of Tragedy is detectable, allowing Woolf to compare the
motivation of more extreme avant-garde groups. The chapter on To the
Lighthouse will consider Woolf's evaluation of her parents' cultural
background and the influence of Roger Fry on her developing aesthetic theory
of combination. I shall argue that understanding of these areas allows Woolf to
begin to experiment with her own form of Gesamtkunstwerk. It is in The
Waves that the connection with Wagner is most obvious. Here, I believe
Woolf shifts the focus of attention from Wagnerian theories of
Gesamtkunstwerk to the Modernists' development of such ideas,
demonstrating her knowledge of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Looking closely
at the 1915 Raid Scene in The Years, I intend to show that Woolf's thinking on
the concept of combination is equally radical in this novel which is often
considered to be more conventional. I will go on to suggest that Between the
Acts, widely acknowledged to indicate a crisis in Woolf's confidence in
Modernism, marks a turning point in her thinking about the possibilities of
combining the arts to achieve Gesamtkunstwerk. I will argue that in this piece
Woolf provides us with all the elements used to create unity in the previous
works and yet they are never wholly united. Woolf, however, is not suggesting
that Gesamtkunstwerk is an impossibility, she is rather indicating that the
audience lacks the ability to provide the stage for such a piece to exist
The Use of Graduated Scenarios to Facilitate the Learning of Complex and Difficult-to-describe Concepts
Get PDFThere are many complex concepts in higher education learning that are difficult to convey to learners in words. Some examples are reflective learning, critical thinking, clinical reasoning; processes of evaluation (e.g. in art and design subjects) and professional practice (eg teaching itself). These are important concepts that evade straight forward uses of language that might explain how to ‘do’ them and how then to ‘do them better’ or at a ‘deeper level’ and so on.
This paper explores a method that has been developed to facilitate the learning of such concepts - the graduated scenario technique. The paper describes the initial development of the method with respect to the concept of reflective learning. Graduated scenarios are based on two practices – firstly, the use of examples and demonstrations that show learners – in this case - how to write reflectively. Secondly they demonstrate the characteristics of deep reflection as opposed to superficial and descriptive reflection. This demonstration is made explicit at the end of the exercise, in a framework for,– in this case, reflective learning. The assumption is made that better quality learning emanates from deeper reflection (eg Hatton and Smith, 1995).
The paper goes on to discuss the application of the graduated scenario technique to critical thinking. It then moves to a more generic approach, considering why such the technique appears to be helpful - and it provides examples of other areas of learning in which the it could be used
Postwar Englishness in the fiction of Pat Barker, Graham Swift and Adam Thorpe
Get PDFThe widely-recognised crisis of Englishness in the 1980s and 1990s has generally been explained as a response to the end of empire. If the place of memories of the
First and Second World Wars in this crisis has been considered at all, these have generally been assumed to support a nostalgic version of English or British national
identity. Taking three contemporary British novelists-Graham Swift, Pat Barker and Adam Thorpe-as examples, however, this thesis argues that the late-twentiethcentury
memory of these conflicts is strikingly ambivalent, and that the contemporary crisis of Englishness must be understood not only as postcolonial, but also, in a
strong sense, as postwar.
The Introduction sets out the parameters of critical discussion of latetwentieth-century Englishness to date and explains my use of the term 'postwar', as marking the continuing cultural legacy of the world wars, and the process of interrogative re-reading of that legacy undertaken in the contemporary fiction I discuss. It also challenges the assumption that 'nostalgia' and a 'healthy' attitude to the past can necessarily be easily distinguished, through a discussion of postFreudian
psychoanalytic approaches to mourning and melancholia. Chapter One considers three writers of the early to mid-twentieth century, Siegfried Sassoon, J. B.Priestley, and Elizabeth Bowen, in order to suggest the nature of the questions about Englishness, war and violence which re-emerge with the breakdown of Britain's postwar social and political consensus from the mid-1970s onward. Chapter Two
then discusses Graham Swift's early novels, The Sweet Shop Owner, Shuttlecock and Waterland, arguing that critical attention to his metafictional concerns in Waterland
has meant that his interest in suburban English life as encrypting memories of war has been overlooked. Chapter Three proceeds to Pat Barker's The Regeneration Trilogy, charting a two-way process of haunting through which contemporary concerns with violence are read back into the historical and literary record of the First World War, and simultaneously seem to re-emerge in the present as the return of the violence underpinning a melancholic cultural attachment to the very English narrative of 'doomed youth'. My discussion in Chapter Four of Adam Thorpe's novels Ulverton, Still and Pieces of Light emphasises their exploration of the violence at the heart of the 'deep England' evoked in heritage representations of Englishness. I suggest, however, that Thorpe's attempts to find appropriate fictional forms for ambivalence and melancholia are at times closer to paralysed repetitions than to interrogations of Englishness. My argument concludes with a reading of Swift's Last Orders, which I contend enacts the beginnings of a movement beyond the wartime end of a certain England and Englishness. Its misreading by critics as parochial and nostalgic, I suggest, indicates the extent of critical misunderstanding of the troubled memory of the world wars in contemporary Britain. It also testifies to
the difficulty and the necessity of the creative and critical work on postwar Englishness undertaken by the writers considered in this study
Effects of phosphatidic acid supplementation on muscle thickness and strength in resistance-trained men
Get PDFThe purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of phosphatidic acid (PA) supplementation on muscle thickness and strength following an 8-week supervised resistance-training program. Fifteen resistance trained men (22.8±3.5 y; 80.6±8.7 kg; 178.1±5.6 cm; 14.6±8.8% body fat) were randomly assigned to a group that either consumed 750 mg of PA or a placebo (PL). Testing was carried out before (PRE) and after (POST) training/supplementation for muscle thickness and strength. Muscle thickness of the rectus femoris (RF), vastus lateralis (VL), biceps brachii (BB), and triceps brachii (TB) muscles were measured via ultrasonography along with one repetition maximum (1RM) of squat, deadlift, and bench press. Analysis of covariance, using PRE values as the covariate, did not reveal any group differences for measures of muscle thickness in the RF (PA: 3.6±5.2%; PL: 3.2±4.2%, p=0.97), VL (PA: 23.4±18.1%, PL: 12.5±15.4%, p=0.37), BB (PA: 3.7±6.4%, PL: 9.6±12.4%, p=0.86), or TB (PA: 15.1±17.9%, PL: 10.7±19.3%, p=0.79). Likewise, no group differences were observed in changes in squat (PA: 8.4±4.1%, PL: 8.1±4.2%, p=0.79), deadlift (PA: 10.1±10.1%, PL: 8.9±9.5%, p=0.66), or bench press (PA: 5.7±5.5%, PL: 5.1±3.0%, p=0.76) exercises. Collectively, however, all participants experienced significant (pThe accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author
The Ophelia versions : representations of a dramatic type, 1600-1633
No full text‘The Ophelia Versions: Representations of a Dramatic Type from 1600-1633’ interrogates early modern drama’s use of the Ophelia type, which is defined in reference to Hamlet’s Ophelia and the behavioural patterns she exhibits: abandonment, derangement and suicide.
Chapter one investigates Shakespeare’s Ophelia in Hamlet, finding that Ophelia is strongly identified with the ballad corpus. I argue that the popular ballad medium that Shakespeare imports into the play via Ophelia is a subversive force that contends with and destabilizes the linear trajectory of Hamlet’s revenge tragedy narrative. The alternative space of Ophelia’s ballad narrative is, however, shut down by her suicide which, I argue, is influenced by the models of classical theatre. This ending conspires with the repressive legal and social restrictions placed upon early modern unmarried women and sets up a dangerous precedent by killing off the unassimilated abandoned woman.
Chapter two argues that Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen amplifies Ophelia’s folk and ballad associations in their portrayal of the Jailer’s Daughter. Her comedic marital ending is enabled by a collaborative, communal, folk-cure. The play nevertheless registers a proto-feminist awareness of the peculiar losses suffered by early modern women in marriage and this knowledge deeply troubles the Jailer’s Daughter’s happy ending.
Chapter three explores the role of Lucibella in The Tragedy of Hoffman arguing that the play is a direct response to Hamlet’s treatment of revenge and that Lucibella is caught up in an authorial project of disambiguation which attempts to return the revenge plot to its morality roots. Chapters four and five explore the narratives of Aspatia in The Maid’s Tragedy and Penthea in The Broken Heart, finding in their very conformism to the behaviours prescribed for them, both by the Ophelia type itself and by early modern society in general, a radical protest against the limitations and repressions of those roles.
This thesis is consistently invested in the competing dialectics and authorities of oral and textual mediums in these plays. The Ophelia type, perhaps because of Hamlet’s Ophelia’s identification with the ballad corpus, proves an interesting gauge of each play’s engagement with emergent notions of textual authority in the early modern period
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