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This thesis is a case study of elite women in late medieval Scotland, which contributes to the ongoing re-assessment of women and power in medieval Europe called the 'Beyond Exceptionalism' movement. The debate around women and power has been recurrent within the discipline of women's and gender history since the McNamara-Wemple thesis of 1973, which posited a decline in women's access to power from c.1050. While aspects of their thesis have been dismantled, the paradigm it created has had a lasting effect on the absorption and inclusion of women into master narratives of medieval history. Women that exercised power after the eleventh century continue to be classified as 'exceptional' even if the number of women who ruled within medieval north-western Europe during the subsequent centuries suggests their participation to be regular and routine. However, women's and gender historians have still argued that a decline in women's status did occur, shifting it to the fourteenth-century. Within the field of medieval Scottish history, the analytical prejudice of women's 'exceptionality' can be traced within political narratives of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and systematic study of elite women's activities has yet to be done. Drawing on the scholarship of women's and gender historians, this thesis explores the ways in which women exercised power in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Scotland through a careful analysis of the language of women's charters and seals, as well as other sources that illuminate elite women's authority. The main inquiry of the thesis is divided into three chapters and uses the female life course stages - daughter, wife, and widow - as categories of analysis throughout to assess how women exercised power in Scotland. The first chapter examines women's power through the family with an examination of surviving charter evidence. The evidence presented in this chapter represents the core of the primary source research of this doctoral project. It approaches the evidence through prosopography and micro-history, uncovering that elite Scottish women's use of the categories of 'daughter', 'wife', and 'widow' were politically strategic and earlier relationships were often called upon later in life in their exercise of power. The second chapter examines the visual language of women's seals, and it suggests that women were innovators in sealing convention in Scotland through their use of heraldry to express their oftentimes complex relationships to kinship groups. This counters long-held assumptions about medieval women's seals and heraldry as being essentially formulaic. The third chapter re-examines instances of potential coercion experienced by women as daughters, wives, and widows - through analysis of wardship, land resignations, and imprisonment, which has been used as evidence of elite women's vulnerability. Through analysis of the language of a variety of texts, the chapter suggests that these instances reveal women's importance, and latent or potential power as political actors. This thesis re-interprets the role of elite women in late medieval Scotland from 1296 to 1458. It argues that rather than 'exceptions' to a patriarchal rule, elite women's activities as female lords were wide-ranging and routine. The findings of this thesis suggest that the study of elite women and their exercise of power can provide another way of interpreting how diplomacy was conducted and that historians of Scottish lordship and politics ought to include the aims and ambitions of elite women as full political actors in order to understand power in late medieval Scotland. Importantly, the findings challenge the persistent periodization of women's and gender history that posits a weakening in women's power by the later Middle Ages. This thesis argues that while fourteenth- and fifteenth-century women had to cope with increasingly bureaucratic structures, characteristic decline cannot be mapped onto women's roles in politics. Rather, their actions were comparable with their eleventh-, twelfth-, and thirteenth-century predecessors in Scotland as well as medieval northwest Europe.

Over the years the NHS has made great strides towards engaging patients in their healthcare management. In more recent years, the way in which patients could help to improve patient safety by reducing/preventing rates of medical errors has been highlighted. However, despite growing recognition of the valuable role of the patient in improving patient safety, very little is known about patients’ preferences for taking on an active role. This thesis aims to address the current gap in the evidence base with specific reference to a hospital inpatient cohort. Review work and a series of empirical investigations were undertaken which examined patients’ willingness and ability to participate in a range of safety-related behaviours. In total, empirical data was collected from 580 medical and surgical inpatients, using quantitative and mixed-method approach methodologies. A number of conclusions can be drawn from the research. Patients were more willing to engage in long standing safety recommendations than those practices which are newer or unfamiliar to the patient. Patients were particularly reticent to engage in those behaviours that they perceive as challenging the clinical abilities of healthcare staff. Several strategies appeared to be effective for encouraging patients to participate in safety-related behaviours: namely, patient-focussed leaflets or videos, or by patients being given encouragement from the doctors or nurses involved in the patient’s care. Overall the work in this thesis strongly suggests that while there is much to gain from involving patients in safety-related aspects of their healthcare management, patients need to be educated about how to be involved and where they can access safety-related information resources. In addition, doctors and nurses can have a pivotal role in encouraging patient involvement. Thus, it is paramount that both patients and healthcare professionals support patient participation in this area and healthcare professionals actively encourage the involvement of the patient.

The Indo-Pacific is a key focal point of U.S.-China competition due to its geographical, economic, and military significance. China is using political warfare to achieve its strategic goals in the region, influencing other nations to align with its interests. Economic coercion is a key tool of this warfare. This is evident in the Pacific Islands, among America’s treaty allies, in Southeast Asia, and in South Asia. To prove itself the superior partner, maintain access to key points of land, and keep the Indo-Pacific open for trade, the U.S. must counter China’s activities. This can be achieved via a stronger economic strategy, deeper engagement with allies and partners, exposure of China’s illicit activities, and the development of a true grand strategy.

Interest in transactional sex, or the provision of a sexual relationship in exchange for gifts and/or money, has increased in recent years among researchers, nongovernmental organizations, and law enforcement officials as increasing numbers of women self-identify as hypergamous, indicating their interest in forming heterosexual partnerships with men of higher status. Hypergamous women may identify as sugar babies, spoiled girlfriends, or high-value women. A sugar baby is a woman providing romantic companionship to an older man, known as a sugar daddy, in exchange for money and/or gifts. A spoiled girlfriend is a woman whose partner provides her with money and/or gifts as a condition of the relationship. A high-value woman may best be described as a woman seeking to improve herself and her life circumstances, or “level up,” with the objective of establishing a relationship with a “high-value man,” which has different definitions for different women. This study sought to answer the following research questions: (1) What are the online behaviors of self-identified hypergamous women? (2) What are the similarities and differences among sugar babies, spoiled girlfriends, and high-value women? To answer these questions, I conducted a digital ethnography of sugar babies, spoiled girlfriends, and high-value women on Tumblr and conducted a mixed-methods textual analysis on scraped TikTok posts associated with sugar babies, spoiled girlfriends, and high-value women. Results show that hypergamous communities use social media to share advice, often about relationships and gender performance. Postfeminist sentiment is common among sugar babies, spoiled girlfriends, and high-value women, but there are significant distinctions between the three groups, particularly regarding their theories and praxis related to social class. This research demonstrates trends in intimate relationships that have implications for political and social inequalities.

Veni creator spiritus / Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (Steven Knell, cantor) -- Mass no. 2 in G major, D. 167 / Franz Schubert (Lauren Gibson, soprano ; Ryan Breaux, baritone ; Steven Knell, tenor) -- Drei Quartette, op. 31 / Johannes Brahms -- Three Scottish folksongs / arr. Mack Wilberg.

The expression of grief and mourning process have adapted over time, reflecting the ideals of society. In order to cope with my own grief losing my first love to suicide, I researched the Victorian era, where death was not only more common but there were protocols for the mourning process. I then compared this to mourning and bereavement in modern American society. Through this research, I produced a body of that is a testament to my own grief and the importance of mourning in a society that gives little time to the process.

This thesis investigated how discourses developed in blog's comment threads work to promote the development of a radicalized public sphere. Using Dahlberg's (2007) concept of radicalized public sphere as an alternative to the mainstream, largely media-controlled, Habermasian public sphere, this study investigated how comments from treehugger.com and techcrunch.com worked to promote or inhibit radicalized public sphere development through the use of discursive radicalism and inter-discursive contestation. Ideological criticism, in combination with the constant comparative method, was employed to code each comment and develop a system of identification for each type of comment based on the ideology it presented, and the rhetorical strategy used to convey its ideology. Coded comments were grouped into categories, and those categories grouped into broader categories, until a dominant form of commenting was identified.;The results from this study showed that discourse-promoting comments, which met the definition of discursive radicalism provided by Dahlberg (2007), dominated the comments on both blogs. Furthermore, it was found that normalizing comments were present on the comment threads, but did not dominate the discourse. These results suggest that radicalized public sphere discourse is functioning in the comment threads of the blogs in this investigation. Further studies are necessary, however, to gain a better understanding of the nature of commenting and the development of a radicalized public sphere on the numerous and diverse blog sites that populate the Internet.

Many public health surveys match the race of telephone interviewers to the anticipated race of respondents. This practice may be particularly prevalent when surveying populations with a possible mistrust of health research, such as African Americans. Interviewer race effects have received little scientific evaluation in telephone-administered health surveys with African Americans, and no empirical studies have explored respondents’ preferences for interviewer race or the role of ethnic identity in survey interactions. These dynamics may have important implications for respondents’ experiences with health surveys and, ultimately, survey data. This dissertation reviewed the interviewer effects literature and considered the importance of interviewer-associated measurement error in public health surveys. It also described the results of two empirical studies. The first study explored African American telephone survey respondents’ preferences for interviewer race. This study found that respondents with Afrocentric, Black American, and Cultural Mistrust ethnic identity components preferred to interact with African American interviewers and that interviewer race was less important to respondents with Assimilated, Bicultural, or Multicultural identity components. Respondents’ preferences for being surveyed by an African American interviewer were stronger when a survey contained more racial content. The second study explored the influence of African American telephone interviewers’ ethnic identity types and the use of African American English (AAE) on the survey interaction. Interviewers with a Bicultural ethnic identity component may have been more prone to using AAE features during telephone surveys with African American respondents than interviewers with other identity components. Interviewers used AAE features less when engaged in recruitment tasks and appeared to have used them more when administering nonracial, sensitive survey items. No pattern emerged for use of AAE during racially topical survey sections. Whether interviewers had a Black American ethnic identity component and their use of AAE features had no impact on respondents’ answers to racially topical survey items. The findings from this dissertation suggest that public health professionals should measure and control for interviewer effects on health survey data, be cognizant of the potential role of identity expression during survey interactions, and resist a general policy of matching African American interviewers and respondents by racial characteristics alone.

This thesis is the development of a family life education program: Finding Release to Explore and Experience Dimensions of Me (F.R.E.E.D.O.M). The primary purpose of this program is to encourage sexually abused female adolescents in juvenile detention to develop the self awareness that enables them to learn more effective coping strategies. More specifically, this family life education program recognizes that self defeating behaviors such as drug and alcohol abuse and self mutilation are avoidant coping mechanisms used in response to traumatic experiences and therefore focuses on teaching self-awareness and self-respect to girls in the Clermont County (Ohio) Juvenile Detention Center.