To reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, many European countries are focusing on a low-emission transition by electrifying the transport sector, with special emphasis on electric vehicles (EV). However, this transition requires a large amount of lithium and other critical metals. While the current low-emission transition is portrayed as decreasing climate impact, the transition and its need for metals create new forms of socio-environmental impact. An increasing number of studies are critically examining the effects of the low-emission transition, both nationally and internationally. However, most studies are focused on the Global South with fewer focusing on the effects within and impacts caused by Europe and Scandinavia. Hence, the purpose of this study was to explore the narratives surrounding the low-emission transition, with a primary focus on Sweden and a partial focus on the EU. Additionally, the study aimed to trace the origin of the lithium used in Sweden’s lithium-ion battery production to examine the socio-ecological impacts of its extraction. Using critical discourse analysis, a methodology acknowledging language as a social construct and capable of revealing power dynamics within society, the study found that green imaginaries and techno-centric perspectives are common when discussing the low-emission transition. While specific volumes and origins of imported lithium to Sweden were difficult to obtain, a broader literature review of lithium extraction and its supply chain could infer that the current lithium extraction needed for the Swedish EV battery production, most likely, comes with a broad socio-environmental impact, extending from ecosystem degradation, water scarcity, pollution, and possibly discrimination against indigenous rights. To conclude, the Swedish low-emission transition is despite its green portrayal connected to a hidden but potentially large socio-environmental impact.

Yes / Pregnant women seeking asylum in the United Kingdom appear particularly vulnerable, having complex health and social care needs and could benefit from a woman centred approach to midwifery care. This article is the second of three parts and reports on the findings from one objective of a wider doctorate study. It focuses on exploring midwifery students' perceptions of how to approach the care of pregnant women seeking asylum. Although the design of the study is explored in article one, in this context, the data was subject to critical discourse analysis to meet this objective. Key words and phrases were highlighted which appeared to reveal power and ideology implicit in the language used when discussing midwifery care of the pregnant woman seeking asylum. Dominant discourses were identified which appeared to influence the way in which care was approached and the possible sources of these discourses critically analysed. The findings suggest an underpinning ideology around following policies and guidelines to meet the physical needs of the woman at the expense of her other holistic needs. Despite learning to adopt a woman centred approach in theory, once in practice some students appear to be socialised into (re)producing these dominant medical and managerial discourses with “midwifery discourse” being marginalised. In addition, some students appeared to have difficulty understanding how to adopt a woman centred approach and the importance of considering the woman's context and its impact on care. These findings have implications for midwifery educators and this article identifies that the recent Nursing and Midwifery Council requirement for students to undertake a caseloading activity could provide the opportunity for them to adopt a consistent woman centred approach in practice, rejecting dominant medical and managerial discourses. However, these discourses appear to influence midwives caring for women more widely and will be difficult to challenge.

Industrial and Organisational Psychology / (D.Litt. et Phil. (Industrial Psychology))

Couple therapy is a frequently sought domain by couples who experience problems in their relationships. Couple therapy has been researched intensively, but few studies incorporate a holistic account of the therapeutic process. This study aims to explore and integrate the therapist's and the couple's experiences of change in the context of couple therapy. The ecosystemic epistemology and the narrative metaphor forms the foundation from which the therapy and the research is approached. Qualitative research methods are employed from within a naturalistic paradigm which allows for personal and unique meanings to emerge. Rich descriptions of the therapist's and the participant's stories of change are provided. Multiple perspectives are offered in the stories which reveal the reciprocal motions between the therapist's and the couples' change processes. Recurring themes are extracted from the stories which punctuate the pivotal change processes that were experienced by the therapist and the couples during the therapy. / Psychology / M.A. (Clinical Psychology)

This participatory research journey looked at the lives of adult children of alcoholics, with particular reference to how identity is affected by growing up in a home where one or both parents are struggling with alcohol abuse, and how this struggle with identity carries through into adulthood. A study was made of the particular discourses which impacted negatively upon the child from this home and the manner in which the discourses had a negative impact later on as an adult. Through narrative pastoral conversations the possibilities for healing, as well as the barriers for healing were explored. Through this exploration alternative stories were created. A vital part of the study was focused upon the witnessing of the stories of the participants` lives and the acknowledgement of some of the events from their childhood that formed their identity and contributed to who they are today. / Practical Theology / M.Th. (Practical Theology)

Extra-marital affairs are the main reason for divorce in western society. Pastoral therapists usually operate within a modernistic theology and use their 'expert' knowledge of theological ethics to confront the unfaithful spouse - a pastoral therapeutic approach that neither delivers the desired results, nor honours the client's expertise and freedom. This study endeavoured to socially construct pastoral therapy using the principles of postmodernistic social construction discourse with couples/spouses where one spouse is or was engaged in an extramarital affair. The relation between a modernistic epistemology and a postmodernistic epistemology, and how this relation affects theology, practical theology and pastoral therapy were explored. The propium of pastoral therapy in a postmodemistic paradigm and the implications of a narrative approach in pastoral therapy for theological ethics were reflected upon. A narrative description of extra-marital affairs was constructed and some of the cultural discourses which co-constitute extra-marital affairs were discussed. The pastoral therapist and clients were simultaneously in conversation with ethical discourses and relational, personal and emotional discourses, thus co-constructing new alternatives and possibilities. During these multiple reflexive conversations, some of the cultural discourses (eros; self-fulfilment; extra-marital sex and hedonism) which co-constitute extra-marital affairs were deconstructed. In the light of the usual limitations of the life-span of an extra-marital affair, the pastoral therapist and faithful spouses socially constructed alternatives and possibilities for their lives to enable them to outstay the extra-marital affair of the unfaithful spouse. Multiple reflexive conversations with (un)faithful spouses co-constructed, with relational and ethical discourses, a narrative approach in pastoral therapy. The use of externalisation and ritualisation in a narrative approach in pastoral therapy concerning extra-marital affairs was explored. A sense of guilt and secrets were also themes in multiple reflexive conversations with unfaithful spouses. This prompted reflection on the use of Scripture in a narrative approach in pastoral therapy. The relation between the biological-psychological aspects of extra-marital affairs and narrative therapy are also briefly explored. / Philosophy, Practical & Systematic Theology / D. Th. (Practical Theology)

This research explores the validity and value of ‘solo devising’ as a means for specifying a category of theatre-making that has been little discussed, compared to group devising, in existing literature on devising and postdramatic theatre. Primary source material was obtained through carrying out extended interviews with five experienced British theatre practitioners who have made work that could be described as solo devised performance: Tim Etchells, Bobby Baker, Mike Pearson, Nigel Charnock and Wendy Houstoun. In analysing these interviews, referred to in detail but not reproduced in full, the enquiry draws on a range of writings, including Oddey, Heddon, Harvie, Alexander and George, on devising and making performance and in particular on Melrose’s concept of practitioner-centred expert knowledge, Lehmann’s notion of the postdramatic and Sennett’s specification of expertise in craftsmanship. Chapter One considers solo practice in relation to the idea of a solo devising economy, the interviewees’ professional work and other experimental solo practices within theatre, performance, dance and art. Chapter Two explores how the interviewees create multiple performance personae, doing and undoing notions of individuality and autobiography through strategies of working ‘about’, ‘from’ and ‘beyond’ the self. Chapter Three explores solo devising processes, involving research, generation of material, composition, performance and ‘orchestration’. Chapter Four scrutinises different kinds of collaboration, including ‘audiencing’, as both enabling and productively confounding activities occurring within solo devising. Chapter five specifies some findings about solo devising: that it both involves expert, crafted, individual working, requiring orchestration of a high number of activities and skills, and, simultaneously, practices of negotiated authorship with other artists and audiences, enabling a potentially political reading of its distinctly ambiguous working. An additional finding is that close attention to what expert practitioners say about their work can yield rich information about a specific practice.

This project explores how literary authors used religious discourses in the sociointellectual climates of late nineteenth-century Catholic cultures. It takes its premise from a tacit paradox of Western European modernization: unlike other Western European nations, nations such as France and Spain modernized without adopting Protestantism or doctrines of anti-Catholicism or anticlericalism--and, thus, without a strict break into national secular discourses. Addressing how various religious discourses were used in modernizing France and Spain (respectively, from 1848 and from 1868 to the early twentieth century), I take a cultural-historical approach to representative religiously themed novels and short fiction of the periods. I contend that non-institutionalized traditional Catholic culture (a culture's “religious imaginary” or “Catholic imaginary”) offered authors a plural and, thus, strategic source for making cultural critiques. These critiques would have resonated widely with contemporaneous readerships, and often without overt confrontations (as anticlericalism has historically done). I point to the presence of such critiques specifically in canonical authors’ religious works--works often considered to be aberrational or “too Catholic” to be valued as modern vis-à-vis the landmarks of Western literature. Taking as my key example a novel by the “father of the modern Spanish novel,” Benito Pérez Galdós’s Misericordia or Compassion (1897), I unfold progressive readings of this text based on discourses borrowing historical, thematic, and stylistic elements from the archives of a Catholic imaginary. Thereafter, I broaden my argument by considering how comparable, but distinct, discourses inform social-critical readings of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables or The Underclass (1862), Gustave Flaubert’s “Un Coeur simple” or “A Simple Heart” (1877), and Emilia Pardo Bazán’s “Un destripador de antaño” or “The Heart Lover” (1900). Overall, the project challenges a critical status quo that has chosen to identify canonical literature in reference to a secular aesthetic program, without allowing for the possibility that cultural-religious discourses might also carry weight for cultures that were modernizing. Additionally, it re-characterizes the modernizing intellectual, seen typically as spiritually cynical or atheist, as one acknowledging the populist force of the religious imaginary freed from church limits. / text

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze how a Breitbart News Network text represented Muslim and Syrian refugees in the weeks leading up to the 2016 United States presidential election. Using a methodological framework based on Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis, the analysis seeks to reveal the linguistic semiotic choices made by the text producer in the representation of Muslim and Syrian refugees and to explain how these semiotic choices were used to achieve their effect. By revealing these linguistic semiotic choices, the beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies that are present in the text─ but not necessarily easily seen─ can be brought out into the open. Once out in the open, they can be critically questioned, contested,  and they can be examined to find out how their beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies can be understood to have destructive consequences on the audience and the groups of people they represent.

This thesis is analysing the abortion debate in Bolivia and questions a supposed contradiction of being simultaneouslyfeminist and Catholicregarding opinions on abortion. By analysing texts from three important actors in the abortion debate in Bolivia, the studyshows on what arguments and discourses that are used within the debate, as well asconsideringthe interesting role of Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir (CDD -Catholics for the Right to Decide),that isa feminist organisation fighting for a complete decriminalisation of abortion in Bolivia, but are also Catholics. The two other actors analysed are Colectivo Rebeldía as a representative of the feminist movement, and the Catholic Church asthe greatest abortion opponent. The thesis has a feminist perspective and use a critical discourse analysis in orderto provide different perspectives on the abortion debate in Bolivia. The results indicate that the rights discourse is frequently used by all three actors, although promoting different rights.Whereas the Church promotes the foetus’ right to life, the twofeminist organisations speak of rights in terms of a woman’s right to decide.The Church is using a conservative traditional language and aims to maintain status quo, whereas the feminist organisations use a variety of discourses with the objective of social transformation. Moreover, the fact that the organisation CDD is both feminist and Catholic, might not seem that contradictive when explainedwith the help of feminist theology.