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This thesis presents a qualitative account of what affective polarisation looks like at the level of online user-generated discourse. It examines how users of the American right-wing news and opinion website TheBlaze.com articulated partisan oppositions in the site’s below-the-line comment field during and after the 2016 US presidential election. To date, affective polarisation has been studied from a predominantly quantitative perspective that has focused largely on partisanship as a powerful form of social identity. This contributes to a growing recognition of the central role of partisan identity in the evaluation of politics by publics within the American two-party system. However, analyses of partisan identification in the US have also shown how negative affect towards opposing partisans has led some people to dislike the other party more than they like the one with which they identify. This establishes a pivotal relation between affective polarisation and so-called negative partisanship. At the same time, the election of Donald Trump as US president has led to a new interest in the content and articulation of American conservative identity, particularly as this relates to the role of hybrid partisan media in the production and negotiation of group boundaries. Against this backdrop, my thesis concentrates on the construction of self/other distinctions in partisan news commentary. It employs a conceptual framework which integrates constructionist thematic analysis with an articulation approach grounded in the work of Laclau and Mouffe. Articulation is here viewed as the ongoing struggle to “fix” meaning – including the meaning of society and identity – in ways that exclude other meanings. This highlights the essentially political dimensions of articulation as the mechanism via which the social is produced through discursive acts of opposition and exclusion. My analysis reveals how the boundaries of American conservatism are contested through the public performance of antagonism; how characterisations of political difference are performed with reference to the political and economic significance of hybrid partisan media; and how the use of partisan media is rhetorically related to broader historical processes of social, cultural, and political transformation via antagonistic imaginaries of American past, present, and future – processes which are claimed to threaten America’s survival as a manifestation of divine providence encoded in the US Constitution.

In assessing the health risks posed from heavy metals in a contaminated site, it is important to determine when the contamination occurred and when the metals become available to the surrounding biota. Trees and plants growing in the vicinity of a contaminated site may provide such a historic record. There have been few studies on their role as biomarkers to identify metal mobility or bioavailability for continuous monitoring purposes. The aim of the study was to evaluate the role of plants as biomonitors for site characterisation and risk assessment purposes and to see if there was any selectivity between metal uptake in leaves and roots. Tree cores were also collected as metals in soil or ground water and may be drawn up via tree roots and deposited in the growth rings. This was examined using Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LAICPMS) and Proton Induced X-Ray Emission (PIXE). From the plant analysis, the elements present in highest amount were lead, zinc and cooper. The mobility of lead could be monitored by bramble and nettle leaves; that of copper by nettle roots and bramble leaves and that of zinc by nettle roots, bramble and sycamore leaves. Analysis of tree cores by LAICPMS and PIXE showed a contrasting contaminant signature between the sampled trees, as there was inconsistency of metal concentrations within the same segment of growth ring. This variability may offer an insight into labile metal function within the tree physiology. The utility of using the dendrochemical record may best serve as an indicator of macro-environmental perturbations, rather than an indicator of labile metal chronologies, for which only lead showed a reasonably consistent decline through time, across the tree core record.

This thesis describes a study of power and power relations, which is developed through an exploration of the literature and professional discourse in an abductive research strategy The focus is provided by services for people with learning disabilities within one English County and the relationships that are produced within the processes that surround care planning. The study sets out to describe and to provide evidence for the proposition that welfare professionals and the organisations in which they are embedded set out to manufacture trust. This trust has a particular quality as it is impersonal and therefore does not require knowledge of any individual involved. At the same time this trust serves as a commodity within the competitive environment of welfare and it is contested - hence the politics of trust. The study defines trust as the reduction of complexity and the management of expectations. It uses a framework developed from the work of Michel Foucault and his followers’ relating to the relationship between power and discourse and the concept of governmentality. The study describes the local relations of power within which both organisations and the people to whom they provide services become fixed. At the same time it links a developing discourse of citizenship concerning people with learning disabilities with a discourse of trust that is articulated by professionals within organisations. However, organisations tend to promote sets of relationships between the individual and the community, which produce differing forms of citizenship dependent upon the discursive structure of the organisation. The existence of differing discursive structures between organisations is linked with Foucault’s description of the ‘orders of discourse’ that is then used to produce an organisational typology of three broad forms into which the range of organisations involved in the study are be placed. These are described as New Wave, Pragmatists and the Old Radicals and as each provides a different set of outcomes for service users they actively challenge the basis of the trust claimed by the other with the first category, New Wave, proving hegemonic. This implies that an understanding of the discursive structure of an organisation is essential to the understanding of power relations within a particular field of operations such as social welfare.

The structure-function relationships and regulation of luteinizing hormone (LH)/chorionic gonadotropin (CG) receptors in Leydig cells was investigated. Four Leydig cell types were used: two mouse tumour Leydig cells (MA10 and MLTC-1), a rat tumour Leydig cell (R2C) and rat testis Leydig cells. Desensitization, up- and down-regulation of receptors were studied including the role of proteolysis in the mechanism of down-regulation. A new method was developed to study these processes, which generates truncated, but functional receptors using antisense oligodeoxynucleotides. The up-regulation of functional LH/CG receptors was found to occur only in MA10 cells, which continually synthesize their LH/CG receptor, after a 24h incubation. This is a cyclic AMP-dependent mechanism and occurs at low doses of agonists. The increase was inhibited by cycloheximide and actinomycin D. The mechanism for the loss of binding sites in Leydig cells over 2h was found to be different in the rat and mouse Leydig cells. No loss of receptors was observed in rat Leydig cells, but continual proteolysis of LH/CG receptors occurred at the plasma membrane. In mouse Leydig cells LH-induced loss of binding sites was due to a cyclic AMP-dependent mechanism - which occurred at high doses of agonists and resulted in an inhibition of internalization allowing for loss of binding sites at the plasma membrane by proteolytic cleavage. Using antisense coligodeoxynucleotides, truncated but functional receptors in the MA10 cell were generated. Six different antisense oligodeoxynucleotides were used to show that the phosphorylation sites on the intracellular C-terminal tail are required for desensitization. Furthermore the conformation of the 7th transmembrane domain and intracellular C-terminal tail were shown to be important for the mechanism of desensitization. Also, the final 9 amino acids on the intracellular C-terminal tail are essential for LH-induced loss of receptors. MA10 cells secrete high affinity LH/CG binding proteins, which were shown to be coded for by LH/CG receptor mRNA.

This edition of unpublished letters is an attempt to illustrate the life and achievements of W. E. Henley, man of letters, and is the result of the location of over 2300 letters in both public and private hands. More than half are located in the U.S.A. and Canada and were found after extensive inquiries by using the reference sources available in this country and by writing to the main libraries in North America. Advertisements in the press, both at home and abroad, resulted in a few letters and a meeting with Henley's sole surviving niece, Audrey Hunt. A meeting with the daughter of a friend of Henley proved invaluable in expanding this writer's knowledge of Henley and his family. The literary copyright holder was found after a long search by letter and advertising in Canada, and agreed to transfer the copyright to Audrey Hunt who gave permission to publish. No complete edition of Henley's letters has been previously undertaken. The present edition is based on 662 letters, just over a quarter of those found, chosen to give an insight into Henley's personal and professional life and his position in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century world of letters. The selection was difficult and required care to avoid any letters already published. The letters demonstrate Henley's interest in the theatre with his collaboration in drama with Robert Louis Stevenson, his various editorial projects, notably in painting and slang, his support for emerging authors, eg. H. G. Wells and Arthur Morrison, his friendships, especially that with Stevenson, and also his wide literary interests. Henley's editorships of London, The Scots (later) National Observer and The New Review show his influence and strong political views. The extant letters to Charles Whibley, some 560, were not available for this edition and will be included in a projected collected edition of Henley's letters.

The thesis takes Mandeville's medical works at Leiden as a starting point. Translations of his first three works - all originally published in Latin - lay the foundation for a consideration of his approach to medicine, medical discourse and the contemporary seventeenth-century debates on Cartesian thought. From this basis, Mandeville's early English works are examined in detail. His fables are seen to develop the first stages of a complex theory of imitation which is closely related to his medical ideas on digestion. Mandeville elaborated this theory in three major works - The Virgin Unmask'd (1709), A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (1711) and The Fable of the Bees (1714). Each of these works is examined in the context of contemporary texts and ideas. Taken as a trilogy, the works are shown to explore the problems of the individual in a rapidly changing society. The thesis argues that in The Virgin Unmask'd Mandeville considers the nature of seual identity and the various ways in which the new consumer society could operate to determine that identity. In A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, it is shown that Mandeville continues his exploration of the effects of consumerism on the individual. In this text, however, he is concerned with consumption in both its literal and metaphorical dimensions as he fully develops the medical theories on digestion which he had begun to consider as a student in Leiden. Finally, Mandeville's first edition of The Fable of the Bees is examined in the light of his medical works and his interest in the nature of consumerism. Through the readings of each of these texts it is shown how Mandeville uses both the dialogue form and the `Remarks' of The Fable of the Bees to equip the reader with a set of interpretative tools. By using his chosen literary forms to question the notions of `knowledge' and `ignorance', he offers a perspective from which to `anatomize' the structures of power that were beginning to take shape in early eighteenth-century England.