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Vale, Sam. "Collecting rooms : objects, identities and domestic spaces." Thesis, University of the Arts London, 2014. http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/7782/.
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This practice-based enquiry into United Kingdom based collecting rooms reveals five participants’ motivations, frustrations and satisfactions manifested in the creation of their spaces. Through the examination of theorists and commentators in the distinct but related fields of cultural theory, sociology and art, the thesis proposes that a collector’s past can be witnessed through memories generated by and within the space. The thesis also advances the idea that part of the experience of the space takes place in the present but simultaneously imagines the future. I have constructed spatial portraits using semi-structured interviews, photography and video, which explore the environment of each collector thus gaining insights into individual circumstances and personal situations. Narrative within this enquiry takes three intersecting forms: firstly the account of the construction of each collecting room, which divests objects of their historical origins, replacing these with personal associations or meanings devised by each collector. Secondly, each participants’ re-telling of their narratives and thirdly through the re-presentation of the collectors’ narratives to an audience. The latter brings my agency as an artist into focus. Uniting all three narrative forms, the creative practice intends to produce a metanarrative of each collecting room that further investigates the temporality of the space through the combined use of still photography, video and sound. Constructed from a symbiotic relationship between theory and practice, the research uses a methodology that combines Sensory Ethnography with Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. This methodology explores the idiosyncrasies of each collector, engendering an extensive investigation of the individual collecting spaces. This detailed approach formed and eventually determined the number of participants, resulting in the production of a developmental case study and four original re-presentations that respond to ideas and debates on collecting, material culture and domestic space. These artworks that have been informed by combining existing research methods and constitute my contribution to new knowledge, disclosing ideas and observations which combine narrative and experience not necessarily discernable from theoretical arguments alone.
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Brown, Sandra Lois School of Design UNSW. "Significance, the vessel and the domestic." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Design, 2004. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/20761.
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Throughout history, people have made or acquired vessels from which to sip their favourite beverage. In the contemporary domestic setting, households frequently accumulate multiples of the same type of object in numbers that are considerably greater than is necessary and practical for use alone. Of these many objects there are often individual pieces that have special significance for the owner or user. Some are so valued that they may even be removed and set aside because of their perceived importance. The research was initiated by a previous study of tea drinking vessels coupled with a desire, as an object maker and collector, to find out why people have special items that they designate as personally important. The aim was to identify how significance could be recognised in specific objects and whether the notion that a group of features used to gauge such objects could be conveyed into studio based work. The research outcomes are evidenced in a text-based document (which articulates the theoretical and empirical elements of the enquiry) and a body of creative studio work developed in response to aspects of the investigation. The document encompasses two components of the study. The first references material from the fields of museum and cultural studies, pivotal in focusing the enquiry. This contributed to the compilation of a general and speculative inventory of qualities that might pertain to objects deemed ???significant???. During these early investigations it became evident that a more in depth and contemporary analysis of significant drinking vessels, their owners and/or users was required. A Survey Questionnaire regarding personal use and special drinking vessels preceded a series of Interviews with a selected group of Australia curators, artists, academics and collectors who discussed and analysed their association with a personally significant drinking vessel. Subsequently, the content of these interviews became central to the focus of the research and outcomes. The research isolates a number of attributes that are commonly identified in objects that, whatever their condition, are deemed ???significant???. These describe the maker, usage, ownership, association and historical context. The perceived value or worth of the object for its owner, is recognised as a consequence of significance and declares the object as distinctive. This outcome is clearly validated by the interviews. The studio work develops from the fusion of personal narrative that has been enhanced by findings of the research. In particular, it references the cherished object, most especially those pieces that have been retained despite the ravages of time and use. The resulting work was exhibited as Trace Elements ??? Marking Time: Significance, the Vessel and the Domestic at Kudos Gallery, Paddington in April 2004.
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Chen, Dan (Dan Kun-yi). "Digital pregnancy through domestic objects : creation of debate around the topic of surrogacy through creation of speculative domestic objects." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/106057.
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Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 57-58).
Pregnancy or career - that's a question many women face as they progress with their professional careers. In the high tech industry, driven female professionals often choose to pursue their careers in lieu of having children. For many of them, strategies of surrogacy or freezing eggs are popular options not only because of available technological advancements but also because of shifts in cultural perspective enabled by a new biotechnical regime. The dichotomy that forces an "either-or" divide between motherhood and careership can be seen as a modern form of regulatory control on women. The question of reproduction becomes a matter of our bio-techno-capitalist society as a confine of women's options, voices, and freedom. Companies such as Facebook and Apple have recently offered to pay female employees to freeze their eggs so they can continue with their careers, without interrupting their dreams of having children. In addition, companies in India offer outsourced surrogacy services for U.S. couples who can afford to pay, services that are contingent upon the poverty class that needs additional income. The female employees who are now freezing their eggs in Silicon Valley may very well be choosing this surrogacy option fifteen years down the line. However, there still remains many ethical, social and political dilemmas which exist with surrogacy, questions that must be posed to the public. My thesis intends to inspire those discussions through critical speculative design. Women who choose to delay reproduction to stay in the American capitalistic workforce is an obvious economic advantage for the corporate machine, but are women - both the employees and surrogates - being unethically exploited in this capitalistic arrangement?
by Dan Chen.
S.M.
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Stoner, Jo. "The cultural lives of domestic objects in Late Antiquity." Thesis, University of Kent, 2015. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/50784/.
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This thesis investigates evidence for the cultural lives of domestic objects in Late Antiquity. As such, it focuses on objects as meaningful possessions, rather than their practical, utilitarian functions. In particular, this research seeks to reveal the personal meaning for domestic possessions and their sentimental, as opposed to economic, value. This is something that has either been ignored or mentioned only in passing and without further qualification in existing studies of late antique material culture. This research is underpinned by specific theoretical approaches from the disciplines of archaeology, art history and anthropology. Object biography, or the understanding that events in the lives of objects can affect their meaning and value, is key to this investigation and provides the opportunity to approach the material evidence in a novel way. It allows the direct comparison of previously disparate textual and archaeological sources to better understand the relationships between people and their possessions across a broad social spectrum. It also governs the structure of the thesis, which has chapters on heirlooms, gifts, and souvenirs – all of which are defined by an element of their biography, namely the context of their acquisition. The case study chapter also examines a generally ignored artefact type – the basket – bringing this undervalued example of domestic material culture to the fore. This thesis reveals that personal domestic possessions had the capacity to function as material vehicles for intangible thoughts, memories, and relationships. This function was known and exploited by the people of Late Antiquity in order to create and possess meaningful domestic objects of various types. It provides a new interpretation of domestic material culture that is different to more traditional studies of economic and social status. As such, it allows an understanding of how material culture transformed dwellings into homes during this period.
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Rogers, John Gilbert. "Life-long mapping of objects and places in domestic environments." Diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/47736.
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In the future, robots will expand from industrial and research applications to the home. Domestic service robots will work in the home to perform useful tasks such as object retrieval, cleaning, organization, and security. The tireless support of these systems will not only enable able bodied people to avoid mundane chores; they will also enable the elderly to remain independent from institutional care by providing service, safety, and companionship. Robots will need to understand the relationship between objects and their environments to perform some of these tasks. Structured indoor environments are organized according to architectural guidelines and convenience for their residents. Utilizing this information makes it possible to predict the location of objects. Conversely, one can also predict the function of a room from the detection of a few objects within a given space.
This thesis introduces a framework for combining object permanence and context called the probabilistic cognitive model. This framework combines reasoning about spatial extent of places and the identity of objects and their relationships to one another and to the locations where they appear. This type of reasoning takes into account the context in which objects appear to determine their identity and purpose. The probabilistic cognitive model combines a mapping system called OmniMapper with a conditional random field probabilistic model for context representation. The conditional random field models the dependencies between location and identity in a real-world domestic environment. This model is used by mobile robot systems to predict the effects of their actions during autonomous object search tasks in unknown environments.
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Liddy, Lisa Jane Howarth. "Domestic objects in York c.1400-1600 : consumption, neighbourhood and choice." Thesis, University of York, 2015. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/11614/.
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Focusing on object assemblages as revealed by documentary and archaeological sources, this thesis explores the material culture of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century York households. It examines the range of objects available to York residents while investigating the ways in which they were used and displayed and the values attributed to them. The first chapter introduces the key research questions, concerning the nature of object assemblages, change over time and interdisciplinarity. It discusses the data sets used and contains an overview of the historiography of urban material culture and household archaeology in England. The second chapter explains the methodology adopted, including prosopographical scoping of the individuals whose possessions have informed this work. Using information provided by surviving buildings and probate inventories, the third chapter investigates the size and composition of York houses, focusing on the ways in which object assemblages inform the spaces found within. It argues that rooms were defined by their contents rather than their physical structure or placement, and challenges the definition and timing of “rebuilding” within the city. The fourth and fifth chapters explore various types of value attributed to object assemblages. The fourth chapter concentrates on financial value as assigned in inventories and revealed by discard practices, and advocates consideration of functional value, leading to an examination of specialization of work and organization of production. The fifth chapter focuses on affective value as revealed through testamentary description, proposing an original methodology for applying the history of emotions to material culture. The sixth chapter draws upon findings from previous chapters to present a detailed overview of an individual household at the end of the period: the Starre Inne on Stonegate, c.1580. The thesis concludes by addressing the key research questions, stressing the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach for the study of material culture, leading to a discussion of “neighbourhood”.
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Ford, Rebecca. "Reducing domestic energy consumption through behaviour modification." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ac11b371-82e3-4091-930c-ff0b28b9704e.
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This thesis presents the development of techniques which enable appliance recognition in an Advanced Electricity Meter (AEM) to aid individuals reduce their domestic electricity consumption. The key aspect is to provide immediate and disaggregated information, down to appliance level, from a single point of measurement. Three sets of features including the short term time domain, time dependent finite state machine behaviour and time of day are identified by monitoring step changes in the power consumption of the home. Associated with each feature set is a membership which depicts the amount to which that feature set is representative of a particular appliance. These memberships are combined in a novel framework to effectively identify individual appliance state changes and hence appliance energy consumption. An innovative mechanism is developed for generating short term time domain memberships. Hierarchical and nearest neighbour clustering is used to train the AEM by generating appliance prototypes which contain an indication of typical parameters. From these prototypes probabilistic fuzzy memberships and possibilistic fuzzy typicalities are calculated for new data points which correspond to appliance state changes. These values are combined in a weighted geometric mean to produce novel memberships which are determined to be appropriate for the domestic model. A voltage independent feature space in the short term time domain is developed based on a model of the appliance’s electrical interface. The components within that interface are calculated and these, along with an indication of the appropriate model, form a novel feature set which is used to represent appliances. The techniques developed are verified with real data and are 99.8% accurate in a laboratory based classification in the short term time domain. The work presented in this thesis demonstrates the ability of the AEM to accurately track the energy consumption of individual appliances.
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Calderón, Nicole. "Housekeeping." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1321930048.
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Maxson, Brian. "Review of The Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior, 1400-1700: Objects, Spaces, Domesticaries." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2015. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/6192.
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Timar, Szuszy Art College of Fine Arts UNSW. ""Low life" small objects to sit upon: a studio investigation into a rational use of materials for small scale domestic objects." Publisher:University of New South Wales. Art, 2007. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/40670.
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The project undertaken was aimed at extending a current craft based jewellery practice. Related by structure and materiality, the research sought to develop exploratory shapes as low seating objects to exist within small scale living spaces and studio apartments. Signaling an increased conscious way of thinking and working, a reflective process examining each form as series, provided an incremental creative strategy. The availability of discarded materials suggested possibilities for a sustainable cost effective option as a mode of contemporary practice. This combined approach was considered impact negative, diffusing global waste, and impact positive providing valid alternatives through functional and aesthetic objects. At present waste materials exist as products are still designed and made on the basis of planned obsolescence, thus an exploitation and escalation of global resources and resultant hazardous outcomes continues. Citing selected writings by Victor Papanek, (1992), and Edwin Datschefski, (2006) provided an understanding of the misuse high impact advanced technologies imposes on the environment. These notions were discussed during the project and in relation to contemporary models of practice which currently use discarded materials to make objects for living. Based on a survey observing the local homewares and furniture industries within Sydney, Australia, and recent published material, a niche market was discovered for challenging conventions of low seating objects. Initial sketches were transformed into marquettes then developed into full size prototypes of multi functional forms. a series of forms were scaled up, made of discarded materials using simple hand crafted processes and minimal production methods. As a reference influences included architects, sculptors and craft practitioners who were examined particularly for their use of discarded materials or for their construction methods. During experimental studies visual source material drew upon an observation and analysis of architecture, skeletal structures and land formations. In an exhibition originally titled, "Be Seated", these forms made as initial prototypes were exhibited at Kudos Gallery, Sydney, Australia, during May 2007. They were later refined and renamed as "Low Life" for a group exhibition "Contained" held at Kudos Gallery during 2008.
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Darby, Sarah. "Awareness, action and feedback in domestic energy use." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2003. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:144896dd-f8d8-40ef-8122-5aeb3ac1551c.
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The nature of gas and electricity and the methods of distribution, billing and payment all contribute to the 'invisibility' of much domestic energy consumption in industrial and post-industrial societies. For the householder, understanding how to invest and behave in ways that will give affordable comfort with minimum environmental impact involves making sense of a hidden set of processes. This poses a major challenge, one that a range of energy advice programmes is attempting to meet. The main focus to date has been on the actions taken as a result of advice, with little attention paid to teaching and learning processes or to context. This thesis explores formal and informal processes by which householders learn about their energy use in order to develop a theoretical framework. Constructivist learning theory guides the investigation and a variant of the 'conscious competence' model of learning is used as a starting point. The concept of'tacit knowledge' (foundational knowledge, usually acquired informally) is used in tracing the development of energy literacy. Empirical data come from householder surveys and from interviews of householders and advisers in five contrasting locations in the UK. Interpretation of this material demonstrates the construction of meaning through experience and interaction with others, and the potential role of the energy adviser as a trusted and knowledgeable person. The building of tacit knowledge is crucial to the development of energy literacy and the householder's ability to absorb and evaluate new information. Energy advisers need to be able to identify and develop existing knowledge, and to form effective networks with social welfare programmes. The need to build awareness by following up advice wherever possible is stressed. There also needs to be a supportive learning infrastructure that includes easily accessible feedback on consumption, and the availability of accurate information for those who are knowledgeable and confident enough to teach themselves.
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MacDougall, Susan. "Domestic interiors : gender, ethics, and friendship in Jordan." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:958cd23d-3a93-42e4-9e49-1fa54607c9b0.
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This thesis draws on 34 months of participant observation in a working-class neighborhood of Amman, Jordan to ask whether and how gender, specifically femininity, can serve as a framework for ethical self-cultivation. It describes the relationships between morality, progress, and gender in contemporary Jordan, where progress is viewed as important and inevitable but also amoral, and morality is associated with the past, which is the opposite of progress. Women are uniquely affected by these oppositions because they are expected to both preserve the morality of the past and embody progress, defined as maximizing their own self-interest through consumption, education, employment, and participation in public life. In this confounding context, women must be deliberate about how they choose to define and inhabit proper femininity, and the work of defining and inhabiting demands creative and productive engagement on their part. They respond by participating in a bounded public that not everyone can enter, and by making and maintaining a distinct temporality inside their homes that is distinguished from the temporality of urban life outside the home. They observe and work on their bodies in a complex and highly elaborated way, differentiating intuitive knowledge (authentic) from social knowledge (instrumental) and biological (medicalized), and they approach friendship as an arena for establishing boundaries between oneself and others, and for dealing with the social ramifications of the individualized approach to self-cultivation that is available to them.
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Keirstead, James. "Behavioural responses to photovoltaic systems in the UK domestic sector." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f4da2e2c-c118-482f-aa57-44fdd0afbc4f.
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Microgeneration technologies, such as solar photovoltaics (PV), have recently been cited as a potential solution to energy policy challenges such as climate change and security of supply. International evidence suggests that the benefit of a PV installation will depend on both the amount of electricity generated and the technology’s influence on energy consumption behaviour. This study seeks to quantify and explain this ‘double-dividend’ effect by examining photovoltaics in the UK domestic sector. Questionnaire and interview data were collected from owner-occupier PV households, revealing that the installation of PV increased awareness of electricity generation and consumption in the home. Guided by monitoring devices, an overall electricity saving (~8%) and load-shifting behaviours were observed. Although the installation of PV followed a series of other energy-saving measures, respondents showed an ongoing commitment to environmentally responsible behaviour and further reduction of the carbon footprint of household energy consumption. PV household electricity data and interviews with industry and government found that electricity tariffs, metering and other institutional constraints were important determinants of a household’s behavioural response. As these parts of the domestic PV system are largely still evolving, it is recommended that households and industry work together to develop systems that support sustainable electricity use, for both the early adopting households studied here and future adopters.
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Montgomery, Mary Elizabeth. "Hired to be daughters : domestic service among ordinary Moroccans." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:06f23e4f-095b-4136-884c-72a45cc2c363.
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This thesis explores why shaʿbī (roughly, ‘ordinary’) Moroccans so often talk about their domestic workers as daughters, what this means for workers and employers, and how this is changing as community gives way to market. It brings together ethnographic study of urban shaʿbī society, of unmarried rural women who work as domestics, and of the communities from which the latter migrate. Drawing on anthropological discussions of kinship and fosterage, the thesis examines the fading tradition of ‘bringing up’ in which, according to a moral economy, a ‘known’ rural girl could properly be placed in the homes of wealthier Moroccans until marriage. This is giving way to new arrangements in which ‘unknown’ workers are paid a wage and may not stay long, but in which the ethics of charity, religious reward and gratitude still inform expectations from both sides. Geared to play out among neighbours, or at least well-known clients, over a lifetime, these ethics are being disrupted by the easy-come-easy-go of strangers. The thesis contributes to some fundamental concerns of economic anthropology: the atomisation of market exchange, the growing importance of physical marketplaces, and the meanings encoded in a monetary wage versus payment in kind. By putting together perspectives from domestics’ leisure time and life back home, it also questions the relationship between the commodification of labour and individualism. Finally, the thesis discusses a draft law which, if enforced, would mean employing domestics no longer made sense for shaʿbī Moroccans, state intervention respresenting a move away from local forms of empowerment and community. At a broader level, the thesis is concerned with households as internally hierarchical units linked together through exchange to make up society and explores the gendered dimension of household economy in a wider world. This, of course, reaches beyond Morocco, and parallels are suggested with English domestic service.
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Hoyle, Carolyn. "Responding to domestic violence : the roles of police, prosecutors and victims." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1996. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cc7acb32-23c1-4286-911f-3b536d015bae.
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This thesis aimed to understand the factors which shape the police and CPS response to domestic violence in the light of recent policy changes which recommended arrest in such cases. The decisions made by victims, police and prosecutors were charted in over one thousand three hundred reported cases of domestic violence in the Thames Valley during a seven month period in 1993. A random sample of 387 of these incidents were examined in detail. The study sought to understand the needs, desires and expectations of victims and how their choices impacted on the decisions made by police and prosecutors. Having evaluated feminist theories, the thesis argues that police and prosecutors do not randomly exercise their discretion nor can their response be explained by reference to cultural or individual prejudices. Rather, their decisions are best understood in terms of a set of informal 'working rules' developed by police and prosecutors for dealing with these complex and difficult cases. It is shown that whilst evidence of an offence was highly correlated with decisions regarding arrest and prosecution, evidence did not determine police action nor did its absence preclude such action. Rather, evidence facilitated police action where the working rules pointed towards an arrest. One of the strongest working rules related to the willingness of the victim to support a prosecution or not. The majority of victims did not want their partners or ex-partners to be prosecuted even when they had requested that the police arrest the perpetrators. Police and prosecutors believe the criminal justice system to be an extremely clumsy tool in dealing with domestic disputes. They therefore did not pursue independent evidence when victims withdrew their statements and they consequently discontinued these cases or did not initiate prosecution in the first place. Previous research has started from the premise that withdrawal of complaints by victims and the discontinuance of cases represents some kind of failure on the part of the agencies involved and that this would be remedied if the police arrested and prosecuted wherever possible. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that the criminal justice system as it presently operates is capable of responding effectively to the needs of victims of domestic violence. This thesis throws some doubt on the validity of these assumptions.
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Armstrong, Peter Michael. "Enhancing the energy storage capability of electric domestic hot water tanks." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:af140a2c-aab4-4fc9-8709-6f9474079cd5.
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Electric hot water tanks play a pivotal role as demand response assets within the UK's energy system by storing heat when energy is inexpensive and delivering domestic hot water when it is required. This role will become increasingly important if non-dispatchable renewable energy sources are to play a bigger part in the energy mix. Historically, the design standards relating to hot water tanks have focused primarily on minimising heat losses. However, in addition to preserving energy, a hot water tank should preserve the availability of heat above a useful temperature for as long as possible to avoid energy usage during peak times when it is costly or carbon intensive. To do this, thermal stratification within hot water tanks must be promoted. Unfortunately, thermal stratification leads to conditions that are conducive to bacterial growth due to the hospitable temperatures that arise during operation. For this reason, question marks have arisen over the extent to which more flexible control strategies, designed to allow for increasing penetrations of intermittent renewable energy sources, might lead to the growth of pathogenic bacteria within hot water tanks. The objective of the work discussed in this thesis was to understand the extent to which there is a conflict between thermal stratification and bacterial growth in practice, whether this conflict can be resolved and the potential implications for electric hot water tanks operating on a time of use tariff. A small field study demonstrated that there is prolific bacterial growth within conventional electric cylinders and that this can be attributed to thermal stratification with a confidence of (P<0.01). Fitting a de-stratification pump, to enhance sanitary performance, resulted in a 19% decrease in the recovery of useable hot water above 43°C. Given that the tanks tested during the field study were made of copper, the consequences of alternative material choices on thermal performance were explored. It was found that the rate of useable hot water loss, due to de-stratification associated with thermal diffusion across the thermocline, could be reduced by a factor of 2.7 by making the tank liner wall from stainless steel instead of copper. Further numerical work indicated that this improvement in stratifying performance was most significant for small tanks with high aspect ratios. In addition to de-stratification that arises due to vertical conduction, de-stratification due to inlet mixing was reduced by up to 30% by installing a spiral diffuser into the base of a test cylinder. In addition, by lowering the immersion heating element to ensure there is sufficient heat transfer to the base of the cylinder, sterilising temperatures could be attained throughout the stored volume of water in the tank during heating. This showed that the conflict between thermal and sanitary performance within electric tanks could potentially be resolved. A bespoke tank, made from stainless steel and fitted with a diffuser, was built and subjected to typical draw cycles that reflect real world operation. These tests showed that more useable hot water could be delivered in comparison to a commercial off the shelf copper tank and consequently the utilisation of the Economy 7 time of use tariff would be enhanced.
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Allen, Katherine June. "Manuscript recipe collections and elite domestic medicine in eighteenth century England." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7c96c4db-2d18-4cff-bedc-f80558d57322.
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Collecting recipes was an established tradition that continued in elite English households throughout the eighteenth century. This thesis is on medical recipes and advice, and it addresses the evolution of recipe collecting from the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. It investigates elite domestic medicine within a cultural history of medicine framework and uses social and material history approaches to reveal why elites continued to collect medical recipes, given the commercialisation of medicine. This thesis contends that the meaning of domestic medicine must be understood within a wider context of elite healthcare in order to appreciate how the recipe collecting tradition evolved alongside cultural shifts, and shifts within the medical economy. My re-appraisal of the meaning of domestic medicine gives elite healthcare a clearer role within the narrative of the social history of medicine. Elite healthcare was about choice. Wealthy individuals had economic agency in consumerism, and recipe compilers interacted with new sources of information and products; recipe books are evidence of this consumer engagement. In addition to being household objects, recipe books had cultural significance as heirlooms, and as objects of literacy, authority, and creativity. A crucial reason for the continuation of the recipe collecting tradition was due to its continued engagement with cultural attitudes towards social obligation, knowledge exchange, taste, and sociability as an intellectual pursuit. Positioning the household as an important space of creativity, experiment, and innovation, this thesis reinforces domestic medicine as an important part of the interconnected histories of science and medicine. This thesis moreover contributes to the social history of eighteenth-century England by demonstrating the central role domestic medicine had in elite healthcare, and reveals the elite reception of the commercialisation of medicine from a consumer perspective through an investigation of personal records of intellectual pastimes and patient experiences.
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Hepburn, Sacha. "A social history of domestic service in post-colonial Zambia, c.1964-2014." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:dfd7ee2e-81f6-458f-8ba9-467be0857040.
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This thesis examines the history of domestic service in Zambia from the 1960s to the present day. Domestic service was one of the largest sectors of urban employment throughout this period and involved large numbers of men, women and children selling and buying labour in a variety of working arrangements. The sector has, however, received little scholarly or official attention, reflecting a broader historiographical neglect of informal sector employment and the female workers who predominate in this area of the economy. The lack of attention paid to domestic service by academics and policy-makers has considerably limited the questions that have been asked about who workers are and how processes of reproduction and production have been organized at a household and societal level in Zambia, both historically and in the present. Most immediately, in order to work outside of the home, earn money and access crucial resources, thousands of Zambians needed to find someone else to take care of their homes and children. Drawing on a wide range of source material, this study demonstrates the importance of domestic service to social and economic relations in post-colonial Zambia. The study centres on domestic service arrangements in black households in the capital city of Lusaka. It examines how and why men, women and children found work in service, how and why employers sought help with domestic and care labour, and the relationships that developed between these parties. The study illustrates the diversity of the sector, with working arrangements varying from seemingly-informal kinship-based labour relations at one end of the spectrum to formalised, contractual employment at the other. The study also explains the gendered and generational shifts that have reshaped domestic service over the last fifty years, drawing attention to the increased significance of women and female children's labour. Overall this thesis provides new insights into class formation, rural-urban dependencies, gender relations, and the nature of inequality in a post-colonial African city.
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Pasholok, Maria. "Imaginary interiors : representing domestic spaces in 1910s and 1920s Russian film and literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c9d47ca1-6164-48fb-99f1-67ef37c77c4a.
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This thesis is an exploration of the ways in which a number of important Russian writers and filmmakers of the 1910s and 1920s appropriated domestic interiors as structural, visual and literary metaphors. My focus is on the artistic articulation of the closed space of the Russian domestic interior, in particular as it surfaced in the narratives of the modernist literature and cinema of the time and became an essential metaphor of its age. In my discussion I take issue with two standard ways of understanding domestic space in existing literature. I argue that representations of home spaces in early twentiethcentury Russian culture mount a challenge to the conventional view of the home as a place of safety and stability. I also argue that, at this point, the traditional approach to the room and the domestic space as a fixed closed structure is assailed by representations that see domestic space as kinetic. The importance of the 'room in motion' means that I address cinematic as well as literary representations of domestic space, and show that even literary representation borrow cinematic techniques. My different chapters constitute case studies of various separate, but complementary, aspects of the representation of home space. The first chapter shows how domestic space in reflected in the poetical language of Anna Akhmatova. The second chapter focuses on the parallel exploration of rooms and a child's consciousness in Kotik Letaev by Andrei Belyi. The third chapter discovers the philosophy of a room built by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii in his short stories of the 1920s. The next three chapters focus on interiors of three different cinematic genres. The fourth chapter looks closely at films created by Evgenii Bauer, showing the director's innovative techniques of framing and set-design. The fifth chapter explores the film Tret'ia Meshchanskaia by Abram Room, focusing on the director's employment of the room as a structural device of the film. The last chapter analyses two lyrical comedies by Boris Barnet to show the comic effect produced by the empty room and domestic objects in his films, and also focuses on the image of staircase. In conclusion, I speculate that the representation of interior spaces in the period in question goes beyond genre, medium, and narrative structure and becomes an important and culturally dynamic motif of the time.
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Rajan, Hamsa. "Beyond the perpetrator : tackling the varied underpinnings of domestic violence on the Tibetan plateau." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d1d00a72-c242-41db-95d7-f1585d4f62fe.
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This thesis explores domestic violence (DV) on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, in Qinghai province of the People's Republic of China (PRC). (See Appendix 1 for maps of the study region.) It is based on fifteen months of fieldwork conducted in 2012 and 2013, and upon interviews with 100 women and men, participant observation, and a reading of local proverbs, song, and popular literature. As this is a thesis by publications, three stand-alone articles dealing with selected aspects of domestic violence (DV) in the study region, plus two articles dealing with social phenomena closely related to DV, are included.
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Abbas, Syed Mohammad Ali. "From foreign aid to domestic debt : essays on government financing in developing economies." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:95219b5a-4e24-4190-b5e3-95fb3d0b2425.
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The first essay [“Twin Deficits and Free Lunches: Macroeconomic Outcomes In Anticipation of Foreign Aid”] concerns itself with situations in which private agents anticipate a future windfall (free lunch) that will help service the debt resulting from a present fiscal expansion (implemented via a temporary tax cut). Such expectations of a windfall can arise in the context of natural resource discoveries or, more interestingly, due to perceptions by agents in “too important to fail” countries that will be bailed out through higher foreign aid or debt relief. We employ an overlapping generations model featuring credit constraints to study the real effects of such free lunch expectations in a small open economy, drawing contrasts with the standard tax and money finance closure rules. The model is solved analytically and shows that anticipated aid is equivalent to current aid when agents have perfect foresight, so that a temporary tax cut is seen as permanent. Accordingly, agents raise their consumption and indebtedness (at the expense of future generations) by an amount that is an increasing function of their “impatience” (subjective rates of time preference plus probability of death). A worsening of the current account obtains (twin deficits) across a range of plausible closure rules, including those featuring money finance. The introduction of credit constrained households (we study the variant where myopic agents spend their current disposable incomes) does not alter the basic result in the case of full aid finance, but does matter for mixed tax-aid regimes, in more complex settings where agent expectations and donor promises on aid diverge, and when governments face borrowing constraints so that the timing of aid delivery matters. The second essay [“The Role of Domestic Debt in Economic Growth: An Empirical Investigation For Developing Economies”] focuses on the remaining source of government financing, i.e. domestic debt, and the role it can play in mobilizing private savings, facilitating credit intermediation in higher risk settings (i.e. serving a “collateral” function on bank balance sheets), developing financial markets and supporting economic growth in general. To investigate this question empirically, we set up a new domestic debt database covering about 100 developing economies, going back three decades to 1975; explore Granger causality links between domestic debt and key macroeconomic and institutional variables; and estimate the growth impact of domestic debt using panel regressions, allowing for non-linear effects. Domestic debt, as a share of GDP is found to exert a significant positive impact on economic growth, with potential channels including domestic savings mobilization, provision of risk-insurance on banks’ balance sheets; and greater institutional accountability of the state to its citizens. Although this result countervails more established arguments against domestic debt (i.e. that it leads to crowding out and banks to become lazy), there is some evidence that above a ratio of 35 percent of bank deposits, domestic debt does begin to undermine economic growth. The growth payoff also depends on debt quality, with higher payoffs observed for positive interest-rate bearing marketable debt issued to nonbank sectors. The third and final essay [“Why Do Banks in Developing Economies Hold Domestic Government Securities?”] explores demand-side determinants of domestic debt, by focusing on commercial bank holdings of government paper, discriminating carefully between voluntary factors (such as mean-variance portfolio optimization) and statutory ones (cash reserve and capital adequacy requirements). The analysis is made possible by the construction of a dataset on government and private returns (real and nominal) for almost 600 banks from 70 emerging and low-income economies, spanning the (pre-Basel II) period 1995-2005. A battery of structural cross-section regressions indicates that banks’ portfolio decisions are at least as significantly influenced by mean-variance considerations as regulatory factors: the actual portfolio share of government securities (λ) responds intuitively, and sizably, to variations in the moments of the distributions for government and private returns as well as in the minimum-variance portfolio share (λ*). Higher cash reserve requirements tilt portfolios away from government securities toward riskier private lending, while higher capital adequacy requirements work the other way. The association between actual portfolios and the identified determinants is noticeably weaker at lower ends of the λ distribution, suggesting the domination of non-CAPM factors in those contexts.
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Kortkamp, Marco [Verfasser]. "Detecting domestic objects with ensembles of view-tuned support vector machine cascades trained on Web images / Marco Kortkamp." Bielefeld : Universitätsbibliothek Bielefeld, 2011. http://d-nb.info/1030015236/34.
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Kravets, Nadiya. "Domestic sources of Ukraine's foreign policy : examining key cases of policy towards Russia, 1991-2009." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:65602e5c-0a42-4ff4-95d2-14b58e763187.
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Ukraine’s foreign policy has puzzled observers since the dissolution of the Soviet Union due to its unusual inconsistency. This inconsistency exhibited itself in contradictory decisions by the Ukrainian executive carried out within a short period of time, which signalled either greater cooperation with Russia and relative cooling of relations with the West, or integration into Western institutions and worsening of the relations with Moscow. This study aims to explain the inconsistency by examining the sources of Ukraine’s foreign policy through process-tracing in four policy cases: Ukraine’s renouncement of nuclear weapons (1991-1994), the status of the Black Sea Fleet (1991-1997), the Odesa-Brody pipeline (2002-2004), and the 2006-2009 gas disputes. Contrary to dominant interpretations of Ukraine’s foreign policy vacillation that emphasise the role of external influences, especially that of Russia and the West, this study concludes that Ukraine’s inconsistent foreign policy decisions are best explained by domestic factors – intra-executive divisions and the influence of vested interests on policy-making. The work relies on the use of primary sources including archival research, elite interviews, and Ukrainian and Russian newspaper reports.
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Shapiro, Nicholas Edward. "Spaces of uneventful disaster : tracking emergency housing and domestic chemical exposures from New Orleans to national crises." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b42720e6-185b-492b-a83b-aea9de773cd7.
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In this thesis, I examine the politics, poetics, and logics of uneventful human harm in the United States by tracking the life and afterlife of a chemically contaminated emergency housing unit. In 2005, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) deployed 120,000 trailers to the US Gulf Coast to house those displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Chemical testing, spurred by reports of inhabitant illness, revealed elevated levels of formaldehyde emanating from the plywood walls of the trailers. After being reclaimed by the federal government and beginning in 2010, the FEMA trailers were resold at auction to every corner of the country. Resold trailers gravitated to precarious populations at the poles of rural capital accumulation—from oil patches in North Dakota to reservations in Washington. These trailers serve as an exceptional substrate for an investigation into the anatomy of the uneventful as they once approached the apex of eventfulness as a national controversy and now reside in the shadows of the everyday. This thesis apprehends and theorizes these dispersed and ordinary instruments of domestic harm across multiple registers: epistemological, material, spatial, and affective. I examine how failures of matter and meaning shaped and patterned the lives of those who inhabited the FEMA trailers as their lives became framed by chemical off-gassing, architectural insufficiency, material deterioration, and electrical short-circuiting. Crossing scales and venues, I interrogate the modalities of scientific incomprehension that erode the perception, admittance, or substantiation of mass chemical exposure. These technical processes, along with cultural horizons of eventfulness and the chronicity of disaster, foreclosed avenues of toxic harm accountability. These ‘economies of abandonment’ bring into relief the contemporary biopolitical priorities in which the FEMA trailer—an ostensible protection from harm that fosters illness—becomes possible. FEMA trailer residents attend to the minute, gradual, and ongoing symptoms of exposure to discern the reality and magnitude of residential contamination. The body of the exposed becomes both an epistemic instrument and, across time, the means of making low-level, chronic, and cruddy chemical exposures into eventful instances that drive individuals to action.
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Delman, Rachel Marie. "Elite female constructions of power and space in England, 1444-1541." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4a55f39b-e422-4b4c-9d8f-40ce6c4351d9.
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This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to five residences that were commissioned and headed by noblewomen in England between the years 1444 and 1541. By focusing on the design, layout and use of domestic space, it explores how female authority was articulated through the material, spatial and social environment of the late medieval great household and its wider landscape. The five noblewomen and sites considered in this study are as follows: Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk (c.1404-75) and Ewelme Manor House (Oxfordshire); Margaret of Anjou, queen of England (1430-82) and Greenwich Palace (Kent); Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond and Derby (1443-1509) and Collyweston Palace (Northamptonshire); Katherine Courtenay, countess of Devon (1479-1527) and Tiverton Castle (Devon); and Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury (1473-1541) and Warblington Castle (Hampshire). By taking a comparative approach to the principal houses of these five women, this thesis makes a new and significant contribution to scholarly discussions of gender, power and space in pre-modern England, which have until now neglected to consider the great household as a site of female authority. Chapter one introduces the sites, and explores the geographical and social factors governing the women's choices of those locations. Chapters two and three focus on the arrangement of outdoor and indoor space respectively, to consider whether there was a discernible gender difference in the ways in which male and female heads of household ordered space for the projection of their authority. Chapter four focuses on the representations of male and female bodies through large-scale visual media such as tapestries and wall paintings, and considers how their representation and placement within the domestic complex articulated female authority. The fifth and final chapter explores the women's performances of their authority as household figureheads. Overall, the thesis argues that female displays of domestic authority relied on a complex interplay of masculine and feminine elements, thus challenging a prevailing notion that authoritative women in pre-modern England were merely honorary men or exceptional women, and revealing a far more nuanced reality.
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Van, der Merwe Catrina (Nini). "Recollections of home : a study of the use of domestic objects and needlework in contemporary jewellery and my art practice." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/80023.
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Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2013.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study is motivated by my own art practice, which exhibits a keen interest in objects and activities historically associated with the domestic, specifically with relation to needlework, in the making or producing of contemporary jewellery. Visual analysis of the work of other contemporary jewellers resulted in my realisation that the use of domestic objects and needlework in contemporary jewellery can refer to the idea of “home” through the use of phenomenological devices such as memory and nostalgia. My own art practice makes specific use of memory and nostalgia, and references trauma as experienced in the home. I investigate these themes specifically as they are depicted in contemporary jewellery. I begin my study by discussing how humans go about forming relationships with the objects with which they surround themselves. I discuss Martin Heidegger’s theory of hermeneutic phenomenology, regarding human interaction with objects and our relationship to them with regard to their specific functionality. I argue that taking the domestic objects out of their context, and in so doing ‘removing’ their functionality, allows the subject (maker, viewer, wearer) to suggest a new ‘background or horizon’ (Thomas 2006: 47) against which the object can now be read and understood. I discuss how jewellery can function as a mnemonic device, and how the domestic objects used in the specific jewellery pieces that I discuss add to this reading, identifying memory and nostalgia as the main devices facilitating a discussion of these themes. From here I work towards a definition of the domestic. By tracing the ways in which the domestic has come to denote a “space” traditionally gendered female, I look at the material culture represented within this “space” and how it relates to women. I draw on Svetlana Boym and Susan Stewart’s thoughts regarding nostalgia and its appearance in contemporary culture. Trauma and how it manifests in individual identities is then discussed with the aid of Michael S. Roth and his discussion surrounding Memory, Trauma, and History (2012). I discuss specific contemporary jewellery projects by Manon van Kouswijk (Lepidoptera Domestica, 2007); Gesine Hackenberg (Ceramic Jewellery, 2006-2011); Esther Knobel (My Grandmother is Knitting too, 2000-2002); and Iris Eichenberg (Heimat,2004). In my final chapter I discuss my own work, and highlight the ways in which I use domestic objects and needlework to reference memory, nostalgia and trauma thematically with relation to my own recollections of home.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie is gemotiveer deur my eie kunspraktyk, wat my belangstelling toon in voorwerpe en aktiwiteite wat histories verband hou met die huis, spesifiek met betrekking tot naaldwerk, in die vervaardiging van kontemporêre juweliersware. Visuele analise van die werk van ander kontemporêre juweliers het gelei tot die besef dat die gebruik van huishoudelike voorwerpe en naaldwerk in kontemporêre juweliersware kan verwys na die idee van "huis" deur die gebruik van fenomenologiese idees soos herinneringe en nostalgie. My kunspraktyk maak spesifiek gebruik van herinneringe en nostalgie, en verwys na trauma soos in die huis ervaar. Ek ondersoek hierdie temas spesifiek soos hulle uitgebeeld word in kontemporêre juweliersware. Ek begin my studie deur die wyses te bespreek waarop mense te werk gaan in die vorming van verhoudings met die voorwerpe waarmee hulle hulself omring. Ek verwys na Martin Heidegger se teorie van hermeneutiese fenomenologie, ten opsigte van menslike interaksie met voorwerpe en die verhouding wat met hulle gevorm word met betrekking tot hul spesifieke funksies. Ek argumenteer dat deur die huishoudelike voorwerpe uit hulle oorspronklike konteks te neem, en sodoende hul funksie te ‘verwyder’, kan die subjek (maker, kyker, draer) 'n nuwe “agtergrond of horison" (Thomas 2006: 47) voor stel waarteen die voorwerp gelees en verstaan kan word. Ek bespreek hoe juweliersware kan funksioneer as 'n mnemoniese toestel, en hoe die huishoudelike voorwerpe wat gebruik word in die spesifieke juweliersware wat ek in hierdie studie bespreek kan toevoeg tot hierdie bespreking, deur die identifisering van herinneringe en nostalgie as die hoof toestelle. Van hier het ek gewerk aan 'n definisie van wat die huishoudelike behels. Deur ondersoek in te stel na die manier waarop die huishoudelike as 'n tradisioneel vroulike "ruimte" geïdentifiseer is, kyk ek na die materiële kultuur verteenwoordig binne hierdie "ruimte" en hoe dit verband hou met vroue. Ek verwys na Svetlana Boym en Susan Stewart se idees rakende nostalgie en die voorkoms daarvan in hedendaagse kultuur. Trauma en die maniere waarop dit in individuele identiteite manifesteer word vervolgens bespreek met die hulp van Michael S. Roth en sy bespreking van “Memory, Trauma, and History” (2012). Ek analiseer spesifieke kontemporêre juwelierswareprojekte deur Manon van Kouswijk (Lepidoptera Domestica, 2007), Gesine Hackenberg (Ceramic Jewellery, 2006-2011), Ester Knobel (My Grandmother is Knitting too, 2000-2002), en Iris Eichenberg (Heimat, 2004). In my laaste hoofstuk bespreek ek my eie werk, en verwys veral die maniere waarop ek huishoudelike voorwerpe en naaldwerk gebruik om tematies na geheue, nostalgie en trauma met betrekking tot my eie herinneringe van die huis te verwys.
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Heirman, Jonas Leo. "The impact of international actors on domestic agricultural policy : a comparison of cocoa and rice in Ghana." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:980ac41f-a591-4e23-ab16-deb6df121573.
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The global financial and food crisis of 2007 and 2008 was followed by a surge in foreign interest and investment in African agriculture. Renewed global interest in African agriculture was also accompanied by an increase in international efforts to influence domestic agricultural policies, including in Ghana. In the context of an increasingly globalised food regime and integrated commodity markets, this thesis answers the question: to what extent do international actors impact domestic agricultural policies in Ghana? Policy 'impact' is understood as the marked influence that international actors have on policy goals and the resources, institutions, and knowledge used for achieving them. This thesis compares case studies of cocoa and rice policy over two different periods in Ghana's recent history (1983-1995 and 2003-2012) to understand how international actors use their power and resources to impact agricultural policies. The comparison of cocoa and rice policy is used to address two gaps in existing literature by examining how the impact of international actors relates to: 1) the political economy for a specific crop; and 2) the interaction between actors at international, national and local levels. Findings from the comparative analysis are then used to test existing theories for how international actors influence government policy in Africa more generally. In particular, findings provide new insights into how the impact of international actors on African agricultural policies is strongly associated with the effect of policy decisions on the longer-term political economy for a particular crop.
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Campbell, Carolyn. "The impact of association with the EU on domestic industrial policy making : the case of Poland 1990-1995." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1999. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:51fa56c3-5e4c-4cfc-ad8e-f0073dd8063d.
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This thesis is a case study of the effects of association with the EU on domestic industrial policy making in Poland during 1990-1995 from a liberal intergovernmentalist perspective, showing how association affected the industrial policy-making autonomy of the Government in relation to other domestic actors in two ways. First, because domestic interests were weak and divided in transition-era Poland, the EU provided political leaders with a sharper focus and allowed them to consolidate domestic support for government industrial policy initiatives. Second, where domestic opposition arose, association helped political leaders to overcome it by giving industrial policy initiatives greater legitimacy and allowing them to be portrayed as "mandatory" for EU membership. The manner in which the Government handled domestic pressure for intervention from state enterprises seeking to avoid painful adjustments and restructuring during the transition offers a prime test of the effects of EU association on industrial policy-making autonomy. In most areas, the pro-market, pro-competition policies mandated by EU association were incompatible with the nature and level of governmental involvement in industry under socialism, requiring an end to state subsidies and other forms of discretionary support enjoyed by state enterprises for nearly four decades. Incorporating case studies of the steel and textiles sectors, this thesis illustrates how in the context of transition, the Government's commitment to EU association was stronger than for other recent EU members and ensured that the Government would deviate from the course charted in the Association Agreement only in cases of intense domestic pressure, and even then only temporarily. Accordingly, in a new twist to liberal intergovernmentalism, Poland's transitional domestic situation coupled with the country's enduring commitment to eventual EU membership ensured that the effects of association on policy-making autonomy were more pronounced in Poland than in existing member states.
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Topouzi, Marina. "Occupants' interaction with low-carbon retrofitted homes and its impact on energy use." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ac363b69-c414-4ef8-875a-ada6a9867f8f.
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Current regulatory and other policy trends in housing refurbishment relating to low-carbon performance standards tend to involve complex technologies and systems as well as innovative solutions to achieve 80% emissions reduction in line with the UK national target for 2050. Indicators of domestic energy performance tend to assume ideal performance of materials, complex systems and services, and that they are installed to high standards and under specific conditions, as well as rational occupant behaviour and interactions. Previous studies exploring the influence of socio-technical factors on the UK's domestic energy use highlight that one of the main reasons for under-performance of individual projects is the lack of understanding of how people interact with domestic technology. Considering this, and given that there is still little evidence on deep refurbishments that implement low-carbon 'whole house' approaches in the UK, this research explored occupants' interaction with heating and ventilation measures as these were designed, installed and operated. The main concern was to identify the type of interactions that occur between occupants (social housing tenants) and building systems (mainly low-carbon heating and ventilation systems), and how that influences actual energy use. Using a sample of 26 social housing properties involved in the Retrofit for the Future competition in the UK, the study employed an socio-technical mixed methods approach, in which qualitative and quantitative empirical data were explored together, cross-checking occupants' 'doings' and 'sayings'. A combination of theories was used to analyse the complex interrelated factors involved in users' interaction with building systems. The analysis identifies key factors that affect significantly occupants' everyday practices and their interactions with the new measures: thermal comfort and pastexperiences with measures and controls; knowledge and skills (of both occupants and those involved in the project); design of the technical interventions (systems/measures) and quality of their installation. The findings from this research showed that active measures (such as intelligent and conventional heating controls, MVHR boosters, etc.) fostered direct interaction with active users when there were no design or installation faults. On the contrary, low-carbon measures that are designed and installed to be passive (such as MVHR systems operation) tend, in practice, to involve indirect interactions with active users. The research findings provide an insight into the 'in-use' factors, demonstrating to policy makers and implementers of mass refurbishment programmes the need for a framework where critical combinations of different measures and design solutions are targeted on specific house types, locations and households, in order to achieve maximum savings. Higher standards in installation of the new measures and improved quality control are also found to be a key part of refurbishment policies.
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Kozak, Ladislav. "British cohabitation and the household division of labour." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2018. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a0011a5d-3df8-4ad1-9ba9-790fc5b07c9e.
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The structure of the family unit in the United Kingdom has undergone monumental changes in recent decades. The legal definition of a family has evolved substantially to include a wider range of family forms, most recently same-sex marriage, which became legal in the United Kingdom (excluding Northern Ireland) in 2014. Legal changes in the family accompany a range of social changes - among the most common of these is an expansion in the number of different-sex non-marital co-residential unions (concisely called "cohabitation") (Ermisch and Francesconi, 2000; Beaujouan and Bhrolcháin, 2011). Since the 1970s, these types of relationships have become widely accepted (Coast, 2009) and increasingly common (Office for National Statistics, 2012a). However, despite its prevalence, cohabitation in the United Kingdom is seldom studied independently of marriage. My dissertation strives to fill this gap in the literature. Specifically, my dissertation adds to the understanding of the household division of labour during cohabitation. Instead of merely examining cohabitation as one homogenous relationship type, Chapter 2 profiles three groups of cohabitants: 1) pre-marital cohabitants; 2) non-marital short-term cohabitants; 3) long-term cohabitants who reside together for five years or longer. Subsequent chapters examine how each of these groups, in turn, addresses the household division of labour - pre-marital and early couple formation cohabitation in Chapter 3, couples transitioning from cohabitation to marriage in Chapter 4, and during long-term cohabitation in Chapter 5. This dissertation is a significant contribution to the field of economic sociology because the household division of labour has not yet been explored during cohabitation in this way.
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Hsu, Yungtai Alexander. "From the cradle to the craze : a study on China's indigenous automobile industry, 1953-2007." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:08fd9bc0-380d-4e8b-b510-6e7919a879c5.
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The Chinese automotive industry has evolved substantially over the last 55 years, in spite of multiple historical and economic hurdles. The change in the governmental policy during 1980s regarding ownership of private automobiles, from prohibition to encouragement, initiated rapid growth in the Chinese automobile industry. In the last two decades, China progressed from being nearly a truck-only producer to becoming a major producer of passenger and commercial cars. Economists consider the time between 2001 and 2007 to be a period of ‘blowout’ in the Chinese automobile industry. To date, little is known regarding this emerging automobile industry: What are the features of Chinese automobile industry? Has the Chinese automobile industry become a global player in its industry and reached economy of scale? How is the indigenous automobile sector different from international joint ventures in China? Have Chinese companies gained full transfer of technology and come to possess the capacity to develop their own designs? The subject is complicated, with many contradictory facts and interpretations. This thesis intends to address these questions by focusing on the Chinese indigenous automobile sector, through its three stages of development, using it as a model to examine the validity of various interpretations. I hope the historical appraisal of the industry’s initial development, its difficulty in transition and the internal-external factors affecting the later growth will help us understand the industrial and technological development of China’s emerging economy.
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Rodrigues, Vieira Vinícius Guilherme. "Players in the fields : national identity and the politics of domestic preferences of Brazil and India in the Doha Development Round (2001-2008)." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0157e2e9-68bd-4e2a-9f62-9fe10a8576b4.
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I argue that a country’s preferences in an international trade negotiation ultimately reflect the domestic distribution of power across economic sectors not only in the field of the market, but also in the field of society. Fields correspond to arenas of power. Whereas in the market societal actors have economic capital (EC), their position in society determines their identity capital (IC). The more a sector is associated to the dominant conception of national identity, the higher is its IC. Both types of capital impact a sector’s political power (PP). IC manifests itself in the phase of ratification either instrumentally, when in dispute in the political field, or structurally, if embedded in state institutions. Hence, when IC is instrumentalised, only if the coalition in government espouses a social paradigm to which a sector is mostly associated it will be able to convert its level of IC into PP. As ratification shadows negotiation, constraints in this latter phase tend to be false positives in explaining the formation of the national interest. The hypothesis on the role of IC in shaping the weight of sectors’ preferences in trade negotiations is tested along with a process of theory-building through a multi-method structured-focused comparison. For the comparison, two countries were chosen as their societies are diverse in terms of identity, yet each represents a variety of the effects of IC. Brazil and India have identity-based social cleavages that are expressed in structural and instrumental terms respectively. They are key players in the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) multilateral system of trade, having participated of the Doha Development Round of trade liberalisation. Brazil expressed interest for liberalisation as the mostly racially-diverse sectors had offensive demands. In turn, protectionist demands prevailed in India, as defensive sectors are associated to the dominant secularist paradigm of national identity.
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O'Hea, Margaret Jean. "The conceptual and material transformation of the villa in Aquitanica Prima from the third to seventh centuries A.D." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1989. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9b5b677d-3712-4f30-ad34-3af0bf84a02e.
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After a brief survey of the changing definitions of Aquitanica I itself, the conceptual evolution of the 'villa' will be examined; and since a reliance upon toponymy to locate late Roman and early Merovingian estates is central to the debate surrounding their nature and composition, a detailed analysis of its limitations will follow. In the process, several common generalisations about this period will be tested for eastern Aquitaine: the extent of depopulation, land abandonment, Germanic settlements, and the change from a pattern of dispersed to nucleated settlements, from Roman farmsteads to mediaeval agricultural villages, Finally, a brief summary of the 'archaeology' of the late Roman villa in eastern Aquitaine will be compared with that of its Merovingian counterpart; and the overwhelming conclusion reached, that the problem Is due to past shortcomings in archaeological retrieval rather than the transformation of the villa into village, which is probably a late rather than early Merovingian process, and which certainly cannot be demonstrated for late Roman central Gaul.
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Zaker, Farniyaz. "Allegories of the veil." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1285e8e1-b9bb-4f0e-b17a-962377646957.
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'Allegories of the Veil' analyses the relationship between architecture and clothing as architecture. It expands the meaning of dwelling and of dwelling places (as they have been defined and conceptualised by scholars such as Martin Heidegger and Edward Casey) from architecture to women's dress. People's awareness of space and their interaction with it are crucially mediated by where and how they dwell. Moreover, dwelling greatly influences behaviour. This study interrogates the way in which building belongs to dwelling. It conceptualises specific women's clothing (the traditional dress and the veil [chador in Farsi]) as a dwelling place that influences (limits) women's spatial awareness and movement in space. It argues that once women's clothing has shaped the behaviour and awareness of women (mirroring the organisation of social relations) it becomes like a habitus. In that sense, clothes are not only physical but also generative spaces which can be translated into social space (and vice versa). Last but not least, this study explores how the changing architectural cityscape of Iran has altered the meaning of private and public space in the country. It argues that contemporary domestic architecture in Iran has disturbed the continuity of design and architectural forms, which previously had been an inherent feature of all architectural spaces in the country, including women's clothing. These new forms disrupted the complementary relationship between the chador as an enclosed space and as an extension of the domestic sphere, as well as facilitating the fast encroachment of modernity on traditional architectural places, including the 'chādor'.
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Tycz, Katherine Marie. "Material prayers : the use of text in early modern Italian domestic devotions." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/276240.
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While scholarship often focuses on how early modern Italians used images in their devotions, particularly in the post-Tridentine era, little attention has been placed upon how laypeople engaged with devotional text during times of prayer and in their everyday lives. Studies of early modern devotional texts have explored their literary content, investigated their censorship by the Church, or concentrated upon an elite readership. This thesis, instead, investigates how ordinary devotees interacted with holy words in their material form, which I have termed ‘material prayers’. Since this thesis developed under the aegis of the interdisciplinary research project, Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home, 1400-1600, it focuses primarily on engagement with these material prayers in domestic spaces. Using an interdisciplinary approach drawing from material culture studies, literary history, social and cultural history, and art history, it brings together objects, images and archival sources to illuminate how devotees from across the socio-economic and literacy spectrums accessed and employed devotional text in their prayers and daily life. From holy words, Biblical excerpts, and prayers to textual symbols like the Sacred Monogram of the Name of Jesus, this thesis explores how and why these material prayers were employed for spiritual, apotropaic and intercessory purposes. It analyses material prayers not only in traditional textual formats (printed books and manuscripts), but also those that were printed on single-sheets of paper, inscribed on jewellery, or etched into the structure of the home. To convey how devotees engaged with and relied upon these material prayers, it considers a variety of inscribed objects, including those sanctioned by the Church as well as those which might be questioned or deemed ‘superstitious’ by ecclesiastical authorities. Sermons, Inquisition trial records, and other archival documents have been consulted to further illuminate the material evidence. The first part of the thesis, ‘On the Body’, considers the how devotees came into personal contact with texts by wearing prayers on their bodies. It examines a range of objects including prayers with protective properties, known as brevi, that were meant to be sealed in a pouch and worn around the neck, and more luxurious items of physical adornment inscribed with devotional and apotropaic text, such as necklaces and rings. The second part of the thesis enters the home to explore how the spaces people inhabited and the objects that populated their homes were decorated with material prayers. ‘In the Home’ begins with texts inscribed over the entryways of early modern Italian homes, and then considers how devotees decorated their walls with holy words and how the objects of devotion and household life were imbued with religious significance through the addition of pious inscriptions. By analysing these personal objects and the textual domestic sphere, this thesis argues that these material prayers cut across socio-economic classes, genders, and ages to embody quotidian moments of domestic devotion as well as moments of fear, anxiety and change.
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Alati, Daniel. "Domestic counter-terrorism in a global context : a comparison of legal and political structures and cultures in Canada and the United Kingdom's counter-terrorism policy-making." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2a37e08e-8463-4000-9fdc-389072bc5960.
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Although both Canada and the United Kingdom had experienced terrorism prior to the attacks that occurred in the United States on September 11, 2001, Roach has argued that the events of that day ‘produced a horrible natural experiment that allows us to compare how international institutions and different countries responded’. Arguably, the most significant international response post-9/11 was the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1373, which set a 90-day deadline for states to implement measures in accordance with the Resolution. Despite the fact that both Canada and the United Kingdom already had in place extensive provisions to deal with terrorism, both countries responded swiftly and their legislative responses reflect the histories and legal, political and social cultures of each country. This thesis tests the hypothesis that national security remains a bastion of national sovereignty, despite the force of international legal instruments like UN Security Council Resolution 1373 and, as such, the evolution of counter-terrorism policies in different jurisdictions is best analyzed and understood as a product of local institutional structures and cultures. To test this hypothesis, this thesis engages in comparative analyses of legal and political structures and cultures within Canada and the United Kingdom. It analyses variations in the evolution of counter-terrorism policies in the two jurisdictions and explores the domestic reasons for them. In its analysis of security certificates and bail with recognizance/investigative hearings in Canada, and detention without trial, control orders and TPIMs in the UK, this thesis reveals how domestic structures and cultures, including the legal system, the relative stability of government, local human rights culture, and geopolitical relationships all influence how counter-terrorism measures evolve.
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Dumargne, Anne-Clothilde. "Les chandeliers en bronze, en cuivre et laiton en Europe du XIIIe au XVIIe siècle. Production, diffusion et usages." Thesis, Université Paris-Saclay (ComUE), 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019SACLV016.
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Ce travail se concentre sur l’étude des chandeliers en bronze, en cuivre et en laiton en Europe entre le XIIIe et le XVIIe siècle, entreprise dans une perspective interdisciplinaire. Abandonnés depuis la fin du XIXe siècle au champ méprisé des arts mineurs et populaires, les chandeliers n’ont depuis cette époque jamais véritablement été considérés comme une thématique de recherche à part entière. Le caractère anépigraphe de ces objets ordinaires et l’impossibilité de lier facilement les modèles produits à des espaces de productions spécifiques ont jusqu’ici cantonné les problématiques à des questions stylistiques et typologiques.L’objectif de cette étude se fonde sur un principe de déconstruction historiographique afin de dépasser l’approche traditionnellement adoptée qui enlise les recherches dans des considérations aporétiques. La recherche fait appel à plusieurs types de sources – écrites, archéologiques, iconographiques et analytiques - dont l’alliance vise la recontextualisation des chandeliers. Il s’agit de décrire et d’analyser l’itinéraire d’un type d’ustensile dans les sociétés médiévale et moderne dans les deux contextes, profane et religieux, dans lesquels ils ont été utilisés. C'est pourquoi l’historicisation des chandeliers se construit, dans le cadre de cette étude, sur leurs matérialités.La recherche s’intéresse ainsi à la reconstitution des chaînes opératoires de la production métallurgique, à la caractérisation des hommes qui travaillent le cuivre et ses alliages ainsi qu’à celle des matériaux, à la diffusion de l’objet à travers la société et aux usages, pratiques, culturels, symboliques ou dévotionnels, qui lui sont attachés. Les réflexions contribuent également à souligner que l’interrogation croisée des champs disciplinaires permet de comprendre en quoi la typologie des sources, en ce qu’elles concernent différents groupes sociaux, différents contextes, différents protagonistes et différentes réalités lexicales, influence la façon de percevoir ces objetsThis work focuses, from an interdisciplinary perspective, on bronze, copper and brass candlesticks produced in Europe between the 13th and the 17th century. These objects have been neglected since the end of the 19th century and abandoned to the despised field of minor and popular arts. Since that time, they have never been considered as a real research topic. Since these ordinary objects are anepigraphic and because of the impossibility to attribute them to specific workshops, the research have been reduced to stylistic and typological issues.This study aims at overcoming the traditional approach that confines research into aporetic considerations. It mobilized several types of sources – written ones, archaeological ones, iconographic ones and analytical ones – to study candlesticks in context. They contributed to describe and analyze the life course of an ordinary utensil in medieval and modern societies in both secular and religious contexts. This is why the historicization of candlesticks is here built on materiality.This work focuses on metallurgical production, on copper alloys craftsmen, on the composition of alloys, on the diffusion of candlesticks in society and on practical, cultural, symbolic and devotional uses. The discussion also points out that this methodology helps to understand how the different types of sources, because they concern different social groups, different contexts, different protagonists and different lexical realities, influence how these objects were perceived
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Neagu, Mariela. "Young adults' perspectives on their experiences of different types of placement in Romania." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d1fe5a7a-bcbb-4482-b9f1-298904bf776d.
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This study explores the childhood experiences and transitions to adulthood of 39 Romanian care leavers and adoptees, born around 1989 - 1990. In the past, Romania's children in care became known to the world as 'the Romanian orphans' and some of them have been subjects to neurodevelopmental research studies focusing on the setbacks posed by institutionalisation in early life. This research project takes a different angle by: • Using life history approach and therefore capturing the participants' in-depth accounts of how they recall their childhoods and the challenges they encountered in their transition to independent life; • Exploring four different types of placements and how they affect transition to independent life, from a user's perspective. The fact that Romania undertook reform of the child protection system within the timespan of this generation of children provided a research opportunity to collect the users' views on different types of placement that belonged to the unreformed system of the 1990s (large residential care and intercountry adoption) and the new types of placement (small group homes and foster care). For comparison purposes, I also included domestic adoption, a type of placement that was less controversial than the others at the time reforms were being introduced. Thus, the types of placement that are analysed through the research participants' accounts are: • Residential care (institutions and small group homes); • Foster Care; • Domestic Adoption; • Intercountry adoption. The study addressed two research questions: 1. How do Romanian born young people who grew up in care understand and narrate their experiences in different types of placement? 2. What narratives of agency are constructed by Romanian-born adults who grew up in different types of placement when they describe their transition to adulthood? By taking an interpretive stance, this study brings in the academic arena the voices of care leavers and adoptees. By using narrative analysis and focussing on the concept of dignity by employing identity theories, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Capabilities Approach, the study makes an important contribution to knowledge, with implications for further research, policy and practice. While interventions in child protection are influenced in each country by cultural, political and socio-legal factors, understanding the basic needs of children who are not raised by their birth families is important across different child protection systems. Therefore, the relevance of the research findings is not limited to Romania.
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Bjorge, Eirik. "A theory of national application of the European Convention on Human Rights." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:886adfa8-c036-415c-9268-cc1f828792a5.
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This study seeks to flesh out a theory of national application of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). It does so by seeking to provide an answer to the research question, ‘what is the proper role of the domestic courts in the application of the European Convention?’ By relying upon the examples of French, German, and UK law, the study argues that it is not true in descriptive terms, nor desirable in normative terms, that the domestic courts take an approach to the ECHR based upon friction and assertion of sovereignty. This study argues instead that domestic application of the ECHR is built on the attainment of certain aims. These aims are inferred, in the main, from the domestic courts’ jurisprudence, such as it relates to four central ECHR doctrines, and they are: the doctrines of evolutionary interpretation; proportionality; the margin of appreciation; and autonomous concepts. On the basis of an analysis of this jurisprudence, the four aims are identified as being, first, honouring the principle of pacta sunt servanda; secondly, the safeguarding of human rights based upon the insight that human rights are a paramount good to be pursued; thirdly, the aim of positive, as opposed to negative, rights diversity; and, fourthly, the aim that conclusions reached on the domestic level of one state must be capable of being universalized. The approach of the domestic courts to the application of the ECHR can be explained on the basis of the domestic courts’ wish to attain these four aims. The proper role played by the domestic courts, the study argues, is one in which they are willing to give a lead to Strasbourg as well as to be led, in both, to use the wording of the Preamble of the ECHR, ‘the maintenance’ and in the ‘further realisation’ of the Convention rights.
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Hamilton, Julie. "Isotopes in the landscape : carbon and nitrogen isotopes of domestic animals and their application to the archaeology of the Upper and Middle Thames Valley in the Neolithic to Roman periods." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:948287d6-a930-41ad-951b-8fe865e96002.
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This thesis deals with the development of farming landscapes in the Thames Valley from the Neolithic to the Roman period (4000 BCE - 410 CE). The focus is on the major domestic animal species, cattle, sheep and pig, and their roles in the agroecosystem, traced using carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios measured in collagen. The large dataset of faunal isotope values from a limited area, obtained from sites with extensive archaeological and environmental information, allowed a thorough characterisation of variability in isotope values, within and between species, sites, archaeological periods, and landscape regions. Isotope ratios in a flock of modern sheep showed less variability than archaeological assemblages. Linear mixed models were used to analyse variation in isotope values in 1490 archaeological samples from 23 sites. The pattern of change over time differed for cattle, sheep and pig, reflecting both wide-scale environmental change and changes in animal management. d13C values of cattle and pigs reflected the loss of primary closed-canopy woodland. Pig management changed from an emphasis on woodland resources to a closer association with settlement and consumption of anthropogenic waste. Herbivore d15N values probably reflect variations in the intensity of pasture use and association with arable farming. Climatic cooling since the post-glacial thermal maximum cannot explain these varied trajectories of change. Variation between sites in faunal isotope values was related to landscape regions. Faunal isotope values at individual sites were useful in site interpretation in the context of other evidence. The trend in pig and cattle δ13C values with time was widely found in the UK, as expected if it represents forest clearance. In the Neolithic, cattle management was similar to the UK at central and eastern European Neolithic sites, but pig management was different. Patterns of faunal isotope values and their changes over time, analysed in the context of archaeological and environmental information, can contribute to the interpretation of sites, and give a unique perspective on changes in farming practice and their effects on the landscape.
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Shahid, Tahrat Naushaba. "Imaginary lines? : 'Islam', 'secularism', and the politics of family laws in Bangladesh." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5d092800-be1a-42bf-8632-e733889ada15.
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With the world's fourth-largest Muslim population, Bangladesh is an important case study in the exploration of what it means to be a 'secular' country with Islam as a state religion. One important mechanism through which to analyse the relationship between religion and the state is through the country's laws, and family laws are especially significant in that they represent the state's determination of which long-standing social and religious practices find their way into legislation as a representation of societal values. As with many other countries with significant Muslim populations, personal status legislation has remained relatively static in the years following independence, despite attempts at change. Inspired by studies of negotiations between state and civil society actors in bringing about changes in law, this study analyses the evolution of family laws for Muslims in Bangladesh, revealing a range of voices using such laws in their negotiations between competing notions of 'Islam' and 'secularism' and their role in governance. Using parliamentary and Supreme Court records, newspaper archives, expert interviews, and secondary literature, I show that there has been little change in personal status legislation beyond procedural simplification, and that the judiciary and policymakers have had a tendency to support freedom of religious practice except in family laws. This study explores why this is the case, and focuses on the discourse around the National Women Development Policy and its clause on property and inheritance as the greatest point of contention in enhancing women's rights in family laws.
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Filipova, Rumena Valentinova. "The differential Europeanisation of Central and Eastern Europe, 1989-2000 : a constructivist study of the foreign policy identities of Poland, Bulgaria and Russia." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2018. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:430c07fc-8979-4ce0-9340-f20ac9c3c30a.
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The thesis addresses the puzzle of the differential integration of former communist states in the Euro-Atlantic community of nations between 1989 and 2000. Notwithstanding the predominant universalist-rationalist assumption that the adoption of an institutional-administrative blueprint for reform could lead to convergence between East and West, countries such as Poland, Bulgaria and Russia did not converge similarly (or at all) on the West European normative model and framework of international relations. To account for this divergence, the thesis examines the impact of the culturally-historically informed, Polish, Bulgarian and Russian identities and conceptions of 'Europe' (as opposed to the formal-institutional transition from one system to another) on the process of foreign policy transformation. The doctoral research employs Constructivism, Social Psychological insights and an interpretivist methodology, drawing on 75 elite interviews. The main argument states that differential Europeanisation can be understood on the basis of differentiated levels of inclusion and establishment of relations of mutual recognition and belongingness - substantiated by a differentiated extent of ideational affinity (i.e., normative compatibility), which are (re)enacted in the interactive, mutually constitutive process of identification between Self and Other (i.e., between Poland, Bulgaria and Russia and (Western) Europe). Three propositions of 'thick', 'ambivalent' and 'thin' Europeanisation are derived from the argument (whereby the comparative benchmark of Europeanisation is an ideal-typical model of European-ness). Key contributions focus on the development of a refined Constructivist theory and a systematic empirical comparison of Polish, Bulgarian and Russian foreign policy identities. Also, the study's conclusions reinvigorate and reconfirm the importance of the continuity (rather than just constant flux) of culturally-historically shaped patterns of group self-understandings and sub-regional identifications as well as Constructivism's greater plausibility in accounting for the research puzzle than (Neoclassical) Realism through the stipulation of a mutually constitutive relationship between international and domestic factors and between ideational and interest-based considerations.
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Minoletti, Paul. "The importance of gender ideology and identity : the shift to factory production and its effect on work and wages in the English textile industries, 1760-1850." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7697b548-d389-4d20-9150-1891ec65c95f.
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Textile manufacture in England had always employed a high proportion of women and this continued to be the case during the period 1760-1850. However, these industries underwent dramatic changes in both the nature and location of production, and women’s employment opportunities altered. Whilst in some cases technological advances reduced the strength required to perform a given process, making women more attractive to employers, this was not always the case. Urbanisation and factory production increased trade union influence, which often acted to the detriment of women’s access to well-paid occupations. The long standardised hours worked away from the home typically required of factory workers made it harder for women to combine textile work with the mothering and domestic responsibilities expected of them. As well as making it harder for women to work throughout their life, this discouraged investment in human capital of females by both themselves and their parents. Ideological resistance to women’s work outside of the home increased as the Industrial Revolution progressed. The more formalised work hierarchy created by factory production meant that resistance to female authority became increasingly important for denying women access to the best paid occupations. Ideology was not merely a response to material factors, but helped determine decisions made by economic actors. This thesis draws on a number of parliamentary reports over the period 1802-67. Not only do these reports provide a wealth of qualitative information, they also contain quantitative information which enables me to track male and female factory earnings over the life-cycle, by region and industry. The information in the parliamentary reports is used in conjunction with business records of various firms, covering both domestic and factory workers, as well as the writings of numerous contemporary observers.
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Ermis, Asli. "Segregation at work, segregation at home : Turkish women, gendered jobs and prestige." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:75012971-763f-4ba9-ba87-be44bc85e1b2.
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This study sets out to understand the position of Turkish women in gendered jobs and jobs with different levels of prestige from the 1980s to the 2000s, and to compare this position to that of women in similar countries where possible. Although Turkish women's enrolment rates in traditionally male subjects in higher education is above the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average and despite the fact that they exceed their male counterparts in their graduation rates in most of the university subjects, this success is not reflected in the labour market. Turkish women are mostly trapped in female occupations with medium level of prestige and are particularly excluded from top-ranked jobs. This study argues that the vicious circle of society's expectations of women in the private sphere and the statistical discrimination based on the fulfilment of these expectations affect women's likelihood to be in these jobs negatively. While increasing educational level strongly improves women's position in male-dominated jobs (within 'professional, scientific and technical jobs' category in particular) and their prestige levels, evidence also shows that there is still a drastic lost potential in respect of highly qualified women's employment considering that still in 2010s, there is a remarkable proportion of highly educated women who are not in paid work. It is observed that in 2012, women expanded their attainment in relatively low-prestige jobs and increased their participation further in professional jobs in accordance with their rising higher educational attainment, yet still only 3% of working women are in managerial jobs (TurkStat, 2012). This implies that the prescribed gender roles that saddle women with the heavy burden in the private sphere, which also affect highly educated women's career trajectories, could even be more persisting than the influence of the traditional social structure on women's work that is expected to cause low qualified women to be represented at low rates in (less prestigious) jobs with non-traditional conditions. Considering that women withdraw from the labour market mostly due to marriage, and the findings show that marriage and having children have a negative impact on women's careers at large, attention should be focused on the private sphere. Looking at Turkish households, it is found that the gender segregation at work is reflected in the private sphere: women undertake the demanding traditionally female housework and while there are more potential sources of support for childcare compared to household chores, women's employment status and level of income also do not make a substantial difference in terms of the former also the unbalanced domestic division of labour unlike it is for the latter. Results demonstrate that Turkish men do not have a particularly traditional gender ideology regarding women's paid work. However, their lack of involvement in female chores creates a barrier for women's careers in a semi-direct pattern. The findings refer to the need for a faster increase in Turkish women's higher educational attainment and a stronger external support system via social policies at work and at home. It is also important to reinforce a more egalitarian gender ideology regarding men's roles as spouses and fathers as well as to promote the importance of women's different roles in private and public spheres, not only as wives and mothers but also as individuals, citizens and employers/employees.
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Lall, Priya. "Susceptibility and vulnerability of Indian women to the impact of HIV/AIDS." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e4da0b05-58f3-4e81-9ae1-80dc89beed87.
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The objective of this thesis is to examine which socio-economic, structural and cultural factors may influence Indian women’s propensity to contract HIV and later their ability to access the relevant healthcare services for their condition. The research draws on two theoretical frameworks, the first being Barnett and Whiteside’s (2002) concept of social structural factors of disease transmission. Second, Anderson and Aday’s (1981) model of access examines how a variety of structural and resource-based factors, e.g. area of residence, can influence usage of healthcare facilities. Two stages of data analysis were undertaken, the first being secondary statistical analysis of the National Family Health Survey III. The survey provided state level estimates on the HIV sero-status of the general population in India and data on demographic and socio-economic determinants for family planning, nutrition, utilization of healthcare and emerging health issues. The second stage of analysis consisted of a set of qualitative interviews conducted in Andhra Pradesh, India. Thirty-three interviews were conducted with female sero-positive patients and ten with HIV-infected women who were providing social services to others with the same condition. Statistical results on social structural determinants of HIV transmission illustrated that Indian women who were formerly married (OR=5.27, CI=3.07-9.04), lived in higher prevalence states (OR=3.48, CI=2.19-5.54), had a low level of education (OR=2.27, CI=1.40-3.68) and were employed (OR=1.45, CI=0.96-2.18) had significantly (<.05) higher odds of being HIV-positive in comparison to those who were not. Findings in the qualitative phase of analysis were similar but participants’ narratives illustrated that their risk of contracting HIV begun before they even had the opportunity to seek a match as they seemed to live in communities with a high level of HIV prevalence. Many of the participants commented that there were factors outside of their sphere of control, e.g. lack of education, which resulted in them having a narrow choice of potential partners. Additionally, statistical results on female participants’ access to healthcare services indicated the vast majority of HIV-positive respondents were almost certainly not aware of their sero-status as they had not undertaken an HIV test prior to the survey. As the sample of female HIV infected respondents was relatively small, it was difficult to ascertain which social factors had an impact on these participants utilisation of HIV testing services. On the other hand, respondents’ narratives from the qualitative stage of research highlighted on social structural factors which could potentially influence WLHA’s continual utilisation of HIV-related healthcare services. It was found that participants experienced the most barriers to accessing healthcare facilities in the initial phases of their treatment. These barriers were mediated by the structure of healthcare services, culturally sanctioned medical practices (e.g. physicians refusal to inform the patient of their sero-status) and quality of services.
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Hughes, Carys Farrell. "Object play in the domestic horse." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.247039.
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Gifford, Amanda Kristyne. "Assessing object recognition memory in the domestic pig." Online access for everyone, 2005. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Thesis/Spring2005/a%5Fgifford%5F012105.pdf.
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Masley, Jennifer Irene. "Transitory Ephemera." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1619444631965175.
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Hall, Sarah Louise. "Object play in the adult domestic cat : Felis silvestris catus." Thesis, University of Southampton, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.263860.
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Brayet, Aurélie. "Des modes d’appropriation des objets techniques de la vie quotidienne : le cas des Arts ménagers culinaires." Thesis, Bourgogne Franche-Comté, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017UBFCA022.
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Négligés par l’histoire des techniques, les objets de la vie domestique et du quotidien sont abordés dans cette thèse sur travaux, par le prisme des Arts ménagers culinaires. L’omniprésence des objets techniques à la maison et particulièrement en cuisine est inversement proportionnelle à l’intérêt accordé à ces objets en histoire des techniques. Témoins et acteurs, les objets culinaires sont en interrelations avec hommes et femmes. Ces objets sont imaginés, construits, achetés, donnés, utilisés, acceptés, rejetés, usés, détournés, modifiés, idéalisés, aimés, transmis, détestés, jetés, conservés, exposés… Autant de rapports et de modes d’appropriation qui révèlent des liens permanents entre les hommes et les femmes, inventeurs, concepteurs, utilisateurs, conservateurs, et des objets qui évoluent et se modifient à leurs contacts. Appropriation scientifique, patrimoniale, muséale, individuelle, sociétale ou encore familiale sont ainsi mises en avant. Ces échanges, confrontations et co-constructions sont interrogés et différents niveaux d’appropriation déclinés, afin de faire ressortir les valeurs heuristiques de ces objets (particulièrement l’autocuiseur et le réfrigérateur). Dans un XXe siècle élargi (1880-1980) en insistant sur l’entre-deux-guerres (objets assimilés à de la science) et les Trente Glorieuses (objets de consommation), l’analyse des cristallisations culturelles, politiques, sociales, techniques et géopolitiques inscrites dans ces objets familiers est abordée dans approche comparative afin de cerner la spécificité d’un mode d’appropriation français des Arts ménagers culinairesOften overlooked in the history of technology, objects of domestic, everyday life will be examined in this thesis through the lens of the culinary « Arts Ménagers » (the household culinary arts). The omnipresence of technical objects at home and especially in the kitchen is inversely proportional to the interest given to these objects in the history of technology. Witnesses, actors, culinary objects are interrelated with men and women. These objects are designed, constructed, bought, donated, used, embraced, discarded, worn out, misused, modified, idealized, loved, passed down, hated, preserved, displayed ... numerous relations and modes of appropriation which reveal permanent connections between men and women, inventors, designers, users, curators, and objects that evolve and change with their interactions. Appropriation by science, heritage, society, museums, families, and individuals, are consequently highlighted. These exchanges, confrontations, and co-constructions are questioned and different levels of appropriation are broken down in order to highlight the heuristic values of these objects (particularly the pressure cooker and the refrigerator). This work covers an expanded twentieth century (1880-1980), placing special emphasis on the interwar period (objects considered as science) and the glorious thirties (objects of consumption). The analysis of the cultural, political, social, technological and geopolitical crystallisations of these familiar items is studied in a comparative approach in order to identify the specificity of the French mode of adoption of the Culinary “Arts ménagers”