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The revival of private renting was a defining, if largely unexpected, development during the post-1998 period. Many households, priced out of ownership or faced with growing social housing waiting lists, were channelled towards an ultra-low residential security model which privileged the property rights of landlords above most, if not all, other policies. This exposed many to insecurity in the form of, so called, no fault evictions, unaffordable rents, relatively poorer housing conditions, and increased risk of homelessness. As the revival of private renting took hold, powerful forces of political separation were unlocked by a process of devolution in the UK. This allowed the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly to follow the lead of Dáil Éireann, in the Republic of Ireland, and reform residential security regimes to extend protections for private tenants. Yet despite these changes, there is a strong degree of continuity in the underlying housing politics driving reform and, in particular, how policy makers have continued to conceptualise private renting, and indeed, private renters in much the same highly commodified terms. How can this inherent tension between change and continuity be resolved? This thesis aims to demonstrate the development of a common residential security regime in the private sector in the UK and the Republic of Ireland through an analysis of the historical development of housing law and policy at critical junctures. This common residential security regime survived the political separation of Northern Ireland and, what would become, the Republic of Ireland, and endured to the end of the 20th century, thus setting the basis for post-1998 developments. Although the historical development of this residential security regime is considered, the primary focus is on how this regime has been impacted by the forces of political separation during the post-1998 period. The central thesis is that while tenant protections against eviction and rent increases have been extended during this period, the strong degree of continuity in housing politics behind these reforms has led to the setting of regulatory red lines which have limited the development of substantial legal difference. The conclusion is that although there are positive features to the various post-1998 reforms, they do not signal a fundamental rejection of the ultra-low residential security model. Rather, key features of that regime have been carried forward into the various reforms. As the revival of private renting solidifies, many of the social problems associated with that model are likely to grow in stature. The normative argument is made that a meaningful break with the ultra-low residential security model can be achieved through a fundamental change in approach to residential security that prioritises the use value of housing as a home. One such alternative approach may be based on the human right to housing in international law. This offers valuable normative content to re-organise security of tenure and rent regulation in a way that places the individual, and their dignity, at the centre of residential security.

France and Britain are European neighbors and have distinct policing styles and traditions which are evident in their approaches to public order policing. Using an updated version of David Waddington's 'Flashpoints' model this thesis examines and compares the policing of public order in these two countries. It focuses on the institutional and operational dimensions within their historical, social and political contexts indicating the main areas of convergence and divergence. This research argues that a further review and adaptation of the 'flashpoints' model could effectively operationalise it as a tool for police community threat assessment. It also identifies a number of policy implications for both countries that should be accepted as further good practice guidance. There is a strong case for modification and convergence of approach on both sides of the channel. Neither country has achieved the necessary balance between state responsibility and civic rights required by the social contract. Police community relations in France need to be addressed at a fundamental level and public order policing in Britain requires additional research and review of its operational capability, for it is on the ground that disorder situations are dealt with and it is here that public confidence is won and lost.

A number of recent studies have described new rapid biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) methods. However, most have not maintained the features that make the 5-day standard BOD assay particularly relevant to wastewater management – a high level of substrate bio-oxidation and use of wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) sludge as the biocatalyst. In a critical breakthrough, return activated sludge (RAS) from Coombabah WWTP, southeast Queensland, was successfully incorporated as the biocatalyst in a ferricyanide mediated-BOD (FM-BOD) bioassay. The bioassay was initially optimized for the measurement of highly variable and complex wastewaters, particularly trade wastes, by maximizing the analytical working range (10 – 170 mg BOD5 L-1) and extent of substrate degradation (96 ± 23% of measured BOD5 oxidation). A highly significant correlation (n = 35; slope = 1.07; R = 0.95; incubation time = 6 h) was found between this RAS FM-BOD and standard BOD5 assays using a range of real trade waste samples. The activated sludge FM-BOD bioassay was re-examined with the goal of measuring low–mid range wastewaters (i.e. treated effluents and WWTP influents) that comprise the bulk of all BOD samples analyzed worldwide. All experimental parameters were re-optimized, primarily to improve the detection limit of the FM-BOD assay to approximate that of the standard BOD5 assay (i.e. ≈2 mg BOD5 L-1). Primary influent sludge (PIS) from Coombabah WWTP was the most favorable sludge trialed, with the new bioassay having an analytical range of 2 – 40 mg BOD5 L-1. A highly significant correlation (n = 33; slope = 0.94; R = 0.96; incubation time = 3 – 4 h) was observed between the PIS FM-BOD and standard BOD5 assays using a range of treated effluent, influent and grey water samples.

While scholars have argued that modern medical authority over sexuality stands in some relation to earlier religious discourse, modern religion and its new relationship to medicine are absent from these narratives. This dissertation takes up just such a study through narrating the emergence of modern pastoral counseling and its assumptions, categories, and therapeutic techniques, all of which were deeply entangled with modern sciences of the mind. Modern pastoral counseling marks a decisive discontinuity from the long tradition of philosophical and Christian care for the soul in its relation to medicine and in its view of the self. This dissertation argues that mid-century American Protestant understandings of sexuality depended on a modern psychological conception of the self. Through analysis of archival documents, theological texts, and hospital case histories from the early clinical pastoral training movement, this study investigates the shifting pastoral rhetoric used to understand sexual maladjustment, and it traces shifting attempts to rework Christian sexual ethics. While psychiatry was the primary framework for making sense of queer love—at times even for queer people themselves—some fashioned new and imaginative languages for expressing forms of queer love and queer religion. Juxtaposing clinical discourse with these diverse genres not only illuminates the limits of contemporary debates about religion and sexuality, but it also illustrates the importance of studying entanglements of religion, science, and medicine in everyday life and social practice., Religion, Committee on the Study of

Marcella Althaus-Reid sought wherever language or meaning might shift or exceed their possibilities. To do so, she pushed theology from the light into the dark. In the spaces of political, economic, and sexual struggle, she proposed that we encounter the transformative embraces of God’s indecent love. The intimacies of bodies matter in the illicit encounters of dark alleys. Caresses of flesh undress illusions; desires imagine alternatives; and bodies hunger for the unthinkable. Put differently: love and desire disregard boundaries, including the boundaries of knowledge, law, economy, and self. To write of God’s love and our love—to write of God, humanity, and world—we must recognize, refute, and resist the ideological dependencies in dominant modes of doing and communicating theology, because these dependencies constrain the possibilities of bodies in love. We must interrupt academic complacency with (what she called) “Totalitarian” theological languages. We must transform the doing of theology itself. This dissertation offers five studies of theological writing arising from Althaus-Reid’s experiments with indecency. Each considers one of her provocations in conversation with her interlocutors, paying careful attention to both the substance and performance. Study one engages with Paul Ricoeur, Jorge Luis Borges, and Umberto Eco to imagine writing in the shape of a hermeneutical labyrinth. The second questions the temporality of theological writing in conversation with Gustavo Gutiérrez, José María Arguedas, and Michel Foucault. The third examines how Althaus-Reid holds Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of obscenity together with Jean Baudrillard’s idea of reversibility, in order to press against illusions of writing that veil the materiality of lives lived in written pages. The fourth pursues the possibilities of writing bodies with Karl Marx, Jacques Derrida, Kathy Acker, and Lisa Isherwood. The fifth study extends Althaus-Reid’s reading of Pierre Klossowski’s meditation on radical hospitality as imperative for kenotic theological writing. Individually, the studies expand our imagination of what theological writing can or ought to be. Taken together, the studies provide a chronologically ordered view on Althaus-Reid’s complex engagement with liberationist, feminist, and queer theoretical and theological traditions in the context of her ongoing dialogue with continental philosophy.