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Abstract: Background: Maternal overweight and obesity is a widespread problem in Canada that has been linked to many complications during pregnancy. The gut microbiome has been revealed to have origins during infancy, which might be influenced by maternal weight gain during pregnancy. It would be beneficial to study the microbiome as a possible link between maternal and child overweight risk. Objective: To assess the impact of maternal overweight, prior to pregnancy, on the infant gut microbiome and child overweight. Methods: Height and weight measurements of 1021 women, and their children were obtained from the birth chart in the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development [CHILD] study. Information on the infant gut microbiome was acquired from fecal samples in diapers, where DNA was isolated with a commercial kit ‘Qiagen QIAamp DNA stool Mini Kit’, and extracted and amplified from the hypervariable V4 region of the 16S rRNA locus using a Miseq2 machine. Results: Maternal prepregnancy overweight doubled the risk of child overweight at one year, independent of mode of delivery, exclusive breast feeding or formula feeding, and infant antibiotic exposure by three months. Exclusive breastfeeding on the other hand, lowered the risk of child overweight by 33%. Maternal pregnancy overweight is associated with a low relative abundance of Bacteroidaceae in the infant gut microbiome,. Conclusions: Maternal pregnancy overweight doubles the risk of child overweight, and appears to lower the risk of the presence of Bacteroidaceae in the infant gut microbiome. These findings offer further evidence of the necessity of establishing preventive measures in clinical practice to halt the harmful sequelae of overweight and obesity in pregnancy.

This thesis is based on an ethnographic study of the inhabitants of Whiddy Island, and focuses on the change from one form of societal organisation to another on this island. The thesis is not an ethnography proper, but an attempt to link the local perceptions of change and the changes in the islanders' daily lives, to the wider political economy. Throughout the course of the study my original intention of exploring the tension between technology and community was replaced with the wider hypothesis that there is tension between modernity and community. Technology was revealed as both a product and producer of modernity, and modern state capitalist societies as the antonym not the synonym of community. The 40 remaining islanders represent the last of the transient phase in which community disappears and is replaced by society. The changes in the daily lives of the islanders were not total nor revolutionary. Rather the products of modernity - both policies and artefacts, were absorbed into the islanders' daily lives, and once absorbed the products of modernity promoted modernity in the daily lives of those using them. Modernity is thus a circular process, yet it settled on the island in layers. Each layer produced a new set of paradoxes and reformed the old practices and the old ideology to fit the new setting. The settlement of modernity culminated in the replacement of community members with state citizens. By focusing on the interrelationship and dialogue between modernity, the state and the citizen the processes by which modernity settled on this small island are revealed. It settled both as a result of the direct intervention of state policies on education, emigration and employment, and as a result of local decisions to embrace mechanised transport, domestic technologies and the mass media. By accepting the policies and the artefacts of modernity, the islanders were prohibited from resisting their transformation from community members to state citizens. The island citizen, like all citizens to-day, has a direct dialogue with, and relationship to modernity, and an indirect one mediated by the state.

This thesis traces endeavours in the twentieth century to provide the 'intellectual' foundations for general medical practice as an independent, autonomous clinical discipline. The empirical focus of the study is upon the application of psychological and 'person-centred' approaches to general practice; above all, in the work of Michael Balint, and the Royal College of General Practitioners in the post-war period. The thesis is guided by two predominant theoretical concerns. First, to highlight the complex strategies and the wide range of means and resources that have been required to give substance to the claim that general practice is 'by nature' a person-centred endeavour. Second, to consider - and to question certain influential approaches to medical power in general, and to the social consequences of 'emancipator' - person-centred - forms of medicine in particular. Specifically, the 'power/knowledge' approach to medical sociology is contested both with regard to its empirical findings and in relation to its basis in the work of Michel Foucault (of whose writings on clinical medicine an alternative evaluation is offered).

It will be argued that, in order to understand particular exchanges between social workers and clients, it is essential to go beyond the view that sees them simply in terms of interaction between unique persons, and locate them within the wider discursive settings within which they occur. Most of the talk which takes place in these interviews concerns problematic issues within family life, particularly in terms of the relationships between parents and children. Behind these apparently mundane conversations lie agendas of social work issues which have been constructed historically with the rise of the caring professions. The early part of the thesis is concerned with uncovering the historically constructed norms of acceptable motherhood which underpin social work strategies with families and which help set the agendas of interviews. Then the analysis focuses on how general norms and objectives are translated into operational, professional techniques. This theme is carried forward through a focus on the social settings in which interviews take place, the building up of subject positions within interviews, for social worker and client, and the implications of translating from a predominantly oral to a literate based, professional mode of discourse. Finally, the analysis is concerned with the tentative attempts, marked by ambiguity and resistance, to go beyond the mere monitoring of the life of the client, and draw her/him into a form of discourse which is openly committed to social work aims, where the client seems to want to present his or her life problems in terms which are intelligible to, and manageable within, the strategies open to the social worker.

Advocates of divorce conciliation argue that it is preferable to the legal resolution of disputes over children because it gives parents joint responsibility for decision-making which leads to more suitable settlements and ones more likely to be implemented. This thesis seeks to gain an understanding of the conciliation process and thereby test the assumptions implicit in such statements. It is based upon the examination of interview and observation material from clients and conciliators of one out-of-court Conciliation Service and includes a statistical description of the Service. It also discusses the question of responsibility for attendance at, and participation in, conciliation; concluding that many parents interviewed had not taken such responsibility. The major part of the thesis, based on a detailed examination of transcripts of tape recordings or conciliation appointments, argues that the construction of the problem is vital to the conciliation process and analyses the way conciliator interventions narrow the area in which the problem can be located and focus on feelings and relationship difficulties. It further argues that the process includes and depends on the construction of a particular concept of parental responsibility. This prioritises communication, co-operation and joint decision-making and becomes the rationale for a range of sometimes conflicting solutions constructed as a result ot conciliator initiatives. The later part of the thesis examines the ways in which conciliators seek to motivate parents to agree, relating this to the current conciliation/therapy debate, and to the use of expert knowledge. Finally this thesis investigates the influences on parents which are external to conciliation. This reveals complexities which may affect the outcome of the process of conciliation. It is concluded that much of the present debate is conducted on the basis of inadequate empirical knowledge and conceptual frameworks which produce a blindness to such complexities.

Psychosynthesis is a transpersonal psychotherapy. It was founded by Dr Roberto Assagioli, an Italian psychiatrist who lived from 1888 to 1974. He was involved in some of the early psychodynamic activity early in the twentieth century, but split from Freud at about the same time as Jung. Psychosynthesis was developed between 1910 and the 1950s in Florence and Rome, but in the 1960s became more internationally known with centres opening round the world. This study is an investigation of the ideas lying behind psychosynthesis: these ideas spring partly from scientific study of the unconscious, but they also originate in the long mystical tradition of both the Eastern and the Western world. In tracing back these ideas to their sources, the nature of the knowledge underlying a modern spiritual, or transpersonal, psychotherapy is inevitably discussed. Roots of such a discipline lie in a split tradition within the Western world - psychology aspires to be scientific, religion or mystical knowledge is studied within the discipline of theology, and the two are very little related in our present conception of knowledge. Roberto Assagioli's framework is thus a 'synthesis' in several senses: in the attempt to relate the soul and theology to the personality and psychology: in the attempt to perceive personal developmental patterns as a microcosm of larger social and historical patterns: and in the particular characteristics of his therapy with the individual. The meaning of these syntheses is examined within the context of the knowledge on which he explicitly and implicitly drew. Psychosynthesis is a product of the twentieth century. It originated at the turn of the century when many new ideas were questioning the old certainties of nineteenth century thought. It began to flourish at the time in the 60s when once again criticism was being levelled at the direction of Western development. An examination of its origin and development throws light on many aspects of our present values.