In counselling and psychotherapy, the issue of class is neglected both theoretically and in practice. This thesis aims to address this anomaly by focusing on the class dynamic in the therapeutic relationship. First, the study offers a theoretical exploration of the three major concepts of class. Second, the empirical research aims to highlight how the working class research participants perceive therapists and counselling, and how the counsellor participants perceive class and manage class difference. I argue that class is complex and multidimensional. Therefore, no one theory about class offers a complete account. With this in mind three theoretical concepts are explored demonstrating their potential usefulness to the provision and practice of therapy. The position taken is that two of these concepts, class as a relational phenomenon, and class maintained and reproduced through habitus, capital and dispositions of the therapist and the client provide a means by which the class dynamic can be analysed, with consequences for the therapeutic transference. The empirical inquiry constitutes a theory led, constructionist, thematic focus group analysis, cross referenced to individual counsellor interviews. The data was gathered from six focus groups situated in Sure Start Children Centres across the West Midlands. Each centre was located within the highest percentile of nationally delineated deprivation factors. The research findings suggest that all participants called on latent socio-cultural accounts of class in relationally defining themselves in opposition to others; that the power dynamic in the therapeutic relationship is constructed differently between the working class participants and the counsellors; that therapists symbolise a homogenous middle class to the working class participants; that the cultural capital of the therapist is resisted by the working class client; and that the focus group participants’ constructions of therapy, coupled with the counsellors’ terms of therapeutic engagement when working in Sure Start centres, signal implications for practice. Class, as addressed in this study, indicates it is an issue in primary processing, and confirms its centrality to the therapeutic relationship.

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In this thesis project I explore economically disadvantaged young women's responses to notions of ideal and deviant femininity circulating within contemporary mass media. Specifically, I examine six young women's expressed accounts and critiques of particular forms of femininity in relation to their own experiences of social exclusion. Additionally, and drawing upon an experimental adaptation of Walter Benjamin's montage method, I assess the symbolic links between mass media representations of femininity and exclusion along classed and gendered lines. I use this adaptation of Benjamin's technique to historicize and contextualize dominant notions of ideal (deviant) femininity circulating in the contemporary moment and to engage in a "reflexive" (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) analysis of my own entanglement with the norms and values which proliferate within mass media. The foundational thinking which directs my aims throughout this thesis explores the analytical possibilities of joining the complementary theoretical work of Hannah Arendt and Pierre Bourdieu within an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework.

Melanogrammus aeglefinus, commonly known as haddock, is a commercially important marine fish species closely related to cod. Preliminary investigations into the immune function of this species has revealed several unique and interesting features, including an unusually high number of expressed alleles of Major Histocompatibility (MH) Class I genes. The goal of this project was to examine the sequences of alleles, including the untranslated regions, for potential regulatory mechanisms which may limit the number of alleles expressed to the point of functional molecules. Using a cDNA library from an individual haddock, a total of 22 unique alleles were isolated and sequenced, and three putative mechanisms for limiting expression were revealed. The first mechanism was the inversion of the open reading frame within the transcript. The second mechanism was the linking of the MH Class I transcript with the transcript of another gene. The third mechanism was non-classical substitutions at the nine amino acid residues involved in peptide anchoring. These three mechanisms represent novel ways of limiting expression and effectively reduced the number of alleles which could be expressed into functional classical MH Class I molecules.

My dissertation examines the political and formal aspects of poetry written by working-class women in England and Scotland between 1830 and 1880. I analyse a poetic corpus that I have gathered from existing publications and new archival sources to assess what I call the “literary labour politics” of women whose poetry encounters, represents, and reacts to socio-historic change. The poetry of working-class women sheds light on the multidimensional intersections between poetry about labour and poetry as labour. I show that British working-class women writers were essential in the development of a working-class poetic aesthetic and political agenda by examining how their poetry engaged with European politics, slavery, gender inequality, child labour, education, industrialism, and poverty. The first section surveys the political and formal nature of the poetry written by working-class women immediately before and during the Chartist era to argue that gender complicates the political rubric of the working class during a period of intense social upheaval. I discuss the poetry of women who were published in James Morrison’s The Pioneer, as well as E.H., F. Saunderson, Eliza Cook, “Marie,” and Mary Hutton. I read their poems against those written both by eighteenth-century working-class women writers and male Chartists to illuminate the intervention of nineteenth-century women in these literary and cultural contexts. The second section interrogates the politics of working-class women’s poetry published after the dissolution of the Chartists in 1848 through a discussion of two pseudonymous “factory girl” poets, Fanny Forrester, and Ellen Johnston. I argue that even as working-class women’s poetry increasingly engaged with broad social issues, it also reflected the continuing importance of poetry itself as a means of individual empowerment and worked against the prose tradition to argue for the unique possibilities of poetic expression. The thematic and formal complexity of the poetry of these working-class women allows us to assess the various poetic strategies they developed to respond to the urgent and vexed issues of social reform and personal and national relationships, as they articulated poetic and personal identities as women labouring poets against a society not attuned to their voices. / Appendix B comprises an anthology of the poems discussed in this dissertation.

Web page classification is the process of assigning predefined categories to web pages. Empirical evaluations of classifiers such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs), k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), and Naïve Bayes (NB), have shown that these algorithms are effective in classifying small segments of web directories. The effectiveness of these algorithms, however, has not been thoroughly investigated on large-scale web page classification of such popular web directories as Yahoo! and LookSmart. Such web directories have hundreds of thousands of categories, deep hierarchies, spindle category and document distributions over the hierarchies, and skewed category distribution over the documents. These statistical properties indicate class imbalance and rarity within the dataset. In hierarchical datasets similar to web directories, expanding the content of each category using the web pages of the child categories helps to decrease the degree of rarity. This process, however, results in the localized overabundance of positive instances especially in the upper level categories of the hierarchy. The class imbalance, rarity and the localized overabundance of positive instances make applying classification algorithms to web directories very difficult and the problem has not been thoroughly studied. To our knowledge, the maximum number of categories ever previously classified on web taxonomies is 246,279 categories of Yahoo! directory using hierarchical SVMs leading to a Macro-F1 of 12% only. We designed a unified framework for the content based classification of imbalanced hierarchical datasets. The complete Yahoo! web directory of 639,671 categories and 4,140,629 web pages is used to setup the experiments. In a hierarchical dataset, the prior probability distribution of the subcategories indicates the presence or absence of class imbalance, rarity and the overabundance of positive instances within the dataset. Based on the prior probability distribution and associated machine learning issues, we partitioned the subcategories of Yahoo! web directory into five mutually exclusive groups. The effectiveness of different data level, algorithmic and architectural solutions to the associated machine learning issues is explored. Later, the best performing classification technologies for a particular prior probability distribution have been identified and integrated into the Yahoo! Web directory classification model. The methodology is evaluated using a DMOZ subset of 17,217 categories and 130,594 web pages and we statistically proved that the methodology of this research works equally well on large and small dataset. The average classifier performance in terms of macro-averaged F1-Measure achieved in this research for Yahoo! web directory and DMOZ subset is 81.02% and 84.85% respectively.

The 1880s were turbulent years in the Dominion. Under the auspices of the National Policy, Canada was in the midst of a social and political ‘transformation.’ The social and cultural aspects of this transformation became a source of public debate as the ‘Labour Question’ and the relations between labour and capital reached a high mark of political and economic significance. Waves of strikes and the emergence of large international labour organizations challenged many liberal Victorian ideas about a strictly limited state. Many looked upon the federal government as responsible not only for economic growth, but also for protection from the more pressing problems of industrial life. The Royal Commission on the Relations of Capital and Labour is a testament to not only the turbulent economic relations in late-Victorian Canada, but the emergence of the Canadian state’s active role in social relations. Its very title envisioned a dual role for the Canadian state: to “promote the material, social, intellectual and moral prosperity” of labouring men and women, and to improve and develop “the productive industries of the Dominion so as to advance and improve the trade and commerce of Canada.” However, this thesis argues that the Labour Commission was more subtly designed to enhance the prestige of the Canadian state and install Ottawa as an authority on, and mediator of, industrial relations in Canada. Attention to the formation, activities, and impact of the Labour Commission suggests that, rather than an exercise in addressing a mounting social polarization between “labour” and “capital,” the Commission lends insight into the emergence of a Canadian middle class. It was a carefully-constructed exercise in the assertion of middle-class cultural hegemony whereby such values and understandings as respectability, morality, manliness, worth and expertise were naturalized. In the process, the tension between labour and capital was diminished and in its place were developed visions of social reciprocity and mutual interest. It is in this way that the Labour Commission was an exercise in ‘commissioning consent:’ it placed oppositional voices and wrenching exposés about industrial life in a framework that worked to quell rather than stimulate far-reaching critiques of the established order. The Commission’s formation, methodology and language functioned like an industrial exhibition rather than a pointed social investigation. The evidence presents a thriving economy that had grown exponentially under a wise and paternal government. It also presented a vision of the Dominion whereby the disturbances that occurred between labour and capital could be handled within a conventional language of liberal politics. In addition, social and intellectual elites were fully ensconced in the formation and legitimization of these social and moral understandings. Because it was up to the state to select who would speak for labour and capital, the Commission’s message was not one of class polarization. Thus, exploring who became ‘labour’ and who ‘capital,’ and what sorts of things they said to each other, sheds light on to the emergent strategies of the Canadian state as it sought to understand and influence civil society. The Commission is an indication, even anticipation, of a more activist and energetic state. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2007-12-17 14:59:08.581

This thesis is a study of the gender/sexuality construction in the Winnipeg Beach resort area in the period between 1900 and 1965. I argue that the resort functioned as a venue for the conduct of heterosexual relations in the 20th century and saw the transition between three distinctive systems of courtship during that period. These systems of courtship shaped the social and physical space of the resort area creating three distinctive periods at Winnipeg Beach: the first period lasted from 1900 to approximately 1915; the second from 1915 to the mid 1950s; and the third from the 1950s on. I also argue that the Canadian Pacific Railway company played a distinctive role in the Winnipeg Beach environment by actively promoting the area as a heterosexual contact point. This thesis relies heavily on oral interviews to illustrate how people constructed the Winnipeg Beach environment during the 20th century.

This dissertation contributes to our understanding of the ‘class’ and gender dimensions of educational inequality. In doing this, it uses a “structure-disposition-practice” model that is rooted in Bourdieu’s theory of cultural and social reproduction but also draws from the theoretical formulations of subsequent sociologists to elaborate on the core concept, habitus, and make it more amenable to quantitative analyses. Habitus is a socialized set of dispositions that shapes how individuals orient to the social world, including their perception of their life chances and corresponding styles of thought and behaviour. The model posits that students’ habitus is a formative influence on how they react to their educational environments and affects their academic achievement. Furthermore, students’ habitus is affected by both their social ‘class’ and their gender, and these ‘class’ and gender differences help explain ‘class’ and gender disparities in educational achievement. Working with multilevel Canadian data from the linked PISA-YITS surveys, this study uses structural modeling to examine the relationships between family socioeconomic status, sex, habitus, academic practices, and academic achievement. As well, school contextual effects are included. A number of the findings were consistent with hypotheses. Most notably, the results provide some evidence that students’ family SES significantly affects their habitus and that their habitus significantly affects their academic achievement. For the most part gender differences in the model were modest, but a few differences were evident: the boys outscore the girls in math and science while the girls excel in reading, students’ SES has a relatively stronger effect on the girls’ academic achievement than on the boys’ achievement, while students’ habitus affects the boys’ academic achievement more strongly than the girls’ achievement. Finally, the average SES of the schools students attend affects both the boys’ and the girls’ academic achievement, but this effect is stronger for the boys, and the effect of the boys’ habitus on their academic achievement diminishes slightly as the average SES of the schools they attend increases; no such contextual interaction was evident for the girls. Overall, the results of this study give qualified support to Bourdieu’s framework and the potential of habitus and the “structure-disposition-practice” model to help us understand ‘class’ and gender differences in academic achievement.

Engelfors Trilogy is a three-part fantasy novel consisting of Circle, Fire and The key, written by Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgrens. Circle was nominated for the August Prize award 2011, which is a literary prize awarded each year. The book has also been translated into 25 different languages. Fire came out in August 2013 and is the part of the novel that I will concentrate on in these theses. What I will do in this paper is a queer feminist analysis of the novel's main characters in the book Fire. A similar analysis has been done of the first novel Circle, with few differences, by Anna Bergengren 2012. The purpose of this analysis is to with the help of the major analytical concepts of queer as sexuality, gender, class and ethnicity find standards and standard beliefs in the text that creates the various personalities. By means of the close reading and main character portraits find current standards. The results show a wide range of standards creation in terms of sexuality, gender, class and ethnicity, but also standard changes. These creations of standards express themselves clearly and emphasize gender stereotypes. For example of how a normal woman should be and behave in order to be considered feminine, such as that a woman should dress feminine and wear make-up. A sexual standard in the form of heterosexuality is the only acceptable sexual norm, and different standards depictions in the form of class and ethnicity for the sake of the advantages and disadvantages in society. These standards beliefs are clearly depicted in the story while they criticized and thereby changing.