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This dissertation provides an in-depth historical analysis of the motivations and actions surrounding Iran's foreign policy toward Afghanistan in the modern era. The need for this research stems from a significant gap in Western scholarship on the Iranian-Afghan relationship that accounts for any period of the countries' interactions in detail. It is argued here that despite rhetoric to the contrary, successive Iranian governments consistently pursued policies of political, military, and economic interference in Afghanistan as an integral part of Iran's desire to achieve a dominant position of leadership in its region. This persistent approach has been grounded in both the historical experience and the mythology surrounding Iran's once-great status as an empire, which was destroyed by the Afghans and the great powers during the colonial period, and the resultant Iranian irredentism toward Afghanistan that followed. In analysing the course of Iran's policy toward Afghanistan, a defining feature is that it has never been divorced from Iran's competition against the great powers that have continuously been involved in Afghanistan and the region. This work first provides a long-view historical context of the Iranian-Afghan relationship, which demonstrates that since Afghanistan separated from the Persian Empire in 1747, Afghanistan held an important place of relevance in the perpetuation of myths that underpin the persistent ideology of Iranian nationalism, which manifest in an Iranian foreign policy of interventionism toward Afghanistan. This, combined with the continued strategic importance of Afghanistan to the great powers and their encroachment on Iran and Afghanistan, heavily influenced Iran's foreign policy toward Afghanistan. During the Cold War, Iran used the power gained from aligning with the United States to develop political, economic, and military dominance over Afghanistan and leveraged that to successfully attain regional leadership separate from the United States and in competition with the Soviet Union. When the Islamic Republic was created in 1979, despite its ideological and structural differences from previous Iranian regimes, the policy toward Afghanistan and its importance to Iran's wider foreign policy aims, were consistent with previous regimes' motivations. This regime's 'export' of Iran's Islamic revolutionary influence to different Afghan polities during the Soviet occupation was a religious manifestation of the same Iranian nationalist ideology that was primarily concerned with advancing Iran's regional position in competition with the Soviet Union and the United States.

It is acknowledged that some microbes have interrupted distributions, yet these distributions have rarely been correlated with environmental variables. The wild biogeography of the fermenting yeasts Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Saccharomyces paradoxus are explored in this study, considering multiple environmental variables as potential effectors of each species' geographical distributions. I demonstrate that summer temperatures predict maximum species distribution limits for both S. paradoxus and S. cerevisiae on oak bark, and that S. paradoxus is more likely to be isolated from larger, older trees. Modelling these data predicts a generally denser southern European population of S. paradoxus, with S. cerevisiae being scarce on oak bark throughout Europe. It was not possible to recover ancient Saccharomyces DNA sequences from samples of sub-fossilized oaks, from Greco-Roman and North African amphora residues, or from North African 6th-14th Century pottery residues, which may be a consequence of the low concentration of these species in comparable modern environmental samples. Even from air dried breads and recent wines, Saccharomyces aDNA was not recovered as part of this study, although ancient DNA sequences from plants and other yeasts were identified in other samples via the same methods. Any future recovery of ancient Saccharomyces sequences may therefore be challenging. Novel plant sequences possibly belonging to the Musaceae family and Pinus genus were identified from 6th-14th century AD North African pottery; as well as a Vicia-like DNA sequence from a 13th-12th century BC North African amphora.

The clinical effectiveness of psychological interventions for bipolar disorder (BD) may be enhanced by having a coherent psychological model of BD, which amalgamates many of the concepts proposed in the existing psychological models of BD and some which are not. This PhD aimed to expand on the Self Regulation Model (SRM; Leventhal et al. , 1984) framework to enhance understanding of mood identification and regulation in BD. The mood management model proposed was tested using three methodologies (namely experience sampling, mood induction and a cross-sectional survey design) to provide insight into mood management processes in daily life, following controlled mood manipulation and in response to self-report questionnaires in a large sample of people with BD from across the North West of England and Nottingham. Demonstrating differences between euthymic bipolar participants and healthy controls regarding the psychological processes that underlie the self-regulation of mood may inform psychological interventions. Compared to healthy controls, people with BD reported more variability in mood, perceived more positive consequences, less personal control, less understanding, a shorter duration of mood and made more internal attributions for hypomanic and depressive experiences. Furthermore, while people with BD reported implementing helpful coping strategies (CS) to manage low mood, the most commonly used CS for mania were related to stimulating behaviours that would likely escalate mood and were rated as unhelpful by participants themselves. The current results support the application of the SRM to BD and the importance of expanding this model to explain mood management in BD. The clinical implications, limitations and avenues for future research are discussed.

Many literary critics have researched and conjectured on the 18 th century poets’ connections to the developing landscape gardens of the time. For example, Francesca Orestano, in “Bust Story: Pope at Stowe, or the Politics and Myths of Landscape Gardening,” discusses at length the presence and creation of Pope’s development of aesthetics at the Stowe landscape gardens. However, most critics have focused solely on the idea of the aesthetic that gardens create and their relationship to the human experience of nature. Markus Poetzsch, in “From Eco­Politics to Apocalypse: The Contentious Rhetoric of Eighteenth­Century Landscape Gardening,” describes the heated political world of landscape creation and critique. Other critics have focused on the politicized nature of gardening during the time period. Orestano discusses the changing political viewpoints of 18 th century poets based on their writings about landscaping styles, while David C. Streatfield, in his article, “Art and Nature in the English Landscape Garden: Design Theory and Practice, 1700­1818,” evaluated Pope’s standards and methods of judging and inventing beauty and aestheticism in a garden. For most of these critics, the aesthetic, rather than the productive, nature of the garden has been their focus. Some critics, such as have written about the prescriptive, not merely the descriptive, nature of poetry regarding gardens at that time, giving the poem the power of change in the developing strictures of what made a “good” landscape garden in the 18 th century. In my research, however, I have not yet found a critic that has explored these poets through a lens of environmental morality. This paper will investigate how poets looked at gardens in the 18 th century and how they create a way of looking at gardens that has snowballed into our modern day obsession with organic gardening. The paper will then investigate the rhetoric of organic gardening and its connection to the writers in question. It will explore the concept of environmental morality as a moral structure that finds its motivation within the relationship between human and nature. In other words, a moral system that is based on the environmental would look at nature and how humans treat and use nature, otherwise known as gardening, as a method by which the virtue of a person can be discovered. These authors, unlike their predecessors, such as Andrew Marvell who used gardens as a scene or object of description in poetry, used poetry as a way to analyze and moralize gardens and the act of gardening. They create a discourse of garden morality that has morphed over time into the discourse surrounding organic gardening today. This eco­critical analysis of the poets Alexander Pope, Stephen Duck, and William Cowper will expound upon this idea and explore the connection between their works, 18th century landscape gardening, and the development of an organic-­based garden morality system that has come to the forefront of our society today

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to identify the perceptions and experiences that instructors in higher education have toward providing collaborative learning activities and opportunities in their online classroom. Through semi-structured interviews, the experiences of four higher education instructors from two universities were collected concerning their provision of collaborative learning opportunities in their online classrooms. A multi-phase coding process was used to analyze the information, including the constant comparative coding method for theme and category development. Three themes emerged from the study: online communication approaches matter, there are challenges and supports for online collaborative learning, and care is at the core of online learner support. The findings are discussed and recommendations are provided for the development and design of meaningful online collaborative learning.

This project interrogates how religious performance, either authentic or contrived, aids in the quest for freedom for oppressed peoples; how the rhetoric of the Enlightenment era pervades literatures delivered or written by Native Americans and African Americans; and how religious modes, such as evoking scripture, performing sacrifices, or relying upon providence, assist oppressed populations in their roles as early American authors and speakers. Even though the African American and Native American populations of early America before the eighteenth century were denied access to rights and freedom, they learned to manipulate these imposed constraints--renouncing the expectation that they should be subordinate and silent--to assert their independent bodies, voices, and spiritual identities through the use of literary expression. These performative strategies, such as self-fashioning, commanding language, destabilizing republican rhetoric, or revising narrative forms, become the tools used to present three significant strands of identity: the individual person, the racialized person, and the spiritual person. As each author resists the imposed restrictions of early American ideology and the resulting expectation of inferior behavior, he/she displays abilities within literature (oral and written forms) denied him/her by the political systems of the early republican and early national eras. Specifically, they each represent themselves in three ways: first, as a unique individual with differentiated abilities, exceptionalities, and personality; second, as a person with distinct value, regardless of skin color, cultural difference, or gender; and third, as a sanctified and redeemed Christian, guaranteed agency and inheritance through the family of God. Furthermore, the use of religion and spirituality allows these authors the opportunity to function as active agents who were adapting specific verbal and physical methods of self-fashioning through particular literary strategies. Doing so demonstrates that they were not the unrefined and unfeeling individuals that early American political and social restrictions had made them--that instead they were intellectually and morally capable of making both physical and spiritual contributions to society while reciprocally deserving to possess the liberties and freedoms denied them.

The purpose of this research study was to determine whether the use of science reform instructional methods had an effect on student participation in and attitudes towards science education. The participants in this 12 week study were third grade students. Data were collected using a pre and post attitudinal survey, student journals, a participation log, and a researcher reflection journal. Several conclusions were made. The use of science reform instructional methods did affect student participation and attitudes towards science. Student journals indicated that students enjoyed the use of technology, hands-on science equipment, working in pairs or small groups and the opportunity to share their ideas and learn from their classmates. This study does lend itself to additional research. Due to the small sample size, the shortened time for research, and the population, these research questions should be investigated with another group of students in order to make more definitive decisions regarding the methods to use in their classroom. If the research is conducted again using a different group of students, a larger population will be needed, as well as a lengthened period for research.

Calanoid copepods exhibit rapid escape behavior in response to hydrodynamic stimuli generated by their predators. Currents and turbulence in nature may cause copepods to become less responsive to these stimuli or may otherwise interfere with the detection of predators. Structurally complex environments, such as coral reefs, disrupt water flow and present a range of flow microhabitats varying in both mean and turbulence characteristics. The heterogeneous distribution of flow over the reef may play an important role in the interactions between copepods and planktivorous fish through effects on copepod escape behavior. The escape response and capture rates of the copepod Acartia tonsa were examined in flumes that created both unidirectional and oscillatory flow conditions similar to those found on coral reefs. Copepods were tested in unidirectional flow velocities up to 34.4 cm s-1, which mimicked water currents, and also in oscillatory flow which simulated wave periods of 2.1 seconds. Two turbulent regimes were produced in each flume: "smooth" flow was formed using a grid collimator and "rough" flow was generated by placing a branched coral skeleton upstream of the flume's working section. A predator flow field was simulated by a fixed siphon. Using video analysis, copepod detection of the siphon "predator" was measured as the distance from the siphon tip to where an escape response was initiated. This reactive distance remained the same in low flow conditions as in still water but was reduced 25% in flow speeds of 11.1 cm s-1, indicating a decline in copepods' ability to detect velocity gradients formed by the siphon. Rough turbulence regimes in moderate flow conditions intensified the effect of current speeds by decreasing copepod reactive distance an additional 27%. Capture rates of copepods increased with current speed, wave motion and in rough flow, while the capture rates of non-evasive prey, Artemia nauplii, did not vary with flume conditions. The differences in capture rates between evasive and non-evasive prey suggest that behavioral shifts in copepod escape thresholds may account for increases in predation by reef-dwelling fishes observed in hydrodynamically complex coral environments.