The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires local education agencies to include parents as equal team members in the cultivation of their child’s individual education plan (IEP). Despite law, studies have shown that parents experience barriers to being included in the process. Barriers such as a lack of information, lack of understanding of the law, and feelings of unequal status or power as compared to school district team members have been noted. The aim of this study was to explore the perceptions, feelings, and understanding of the initial IEP process as experienced by parents new to the world of special education. This study took the form of two research articles, each with a set of three research questions. Through the utilization of narrative inquiry, I was able to listen to the stories of parents as they tried to navigate their way through the initial IEP experiences, hear who supported their understanding along the way, learn how parents perceived their role during their journey, feel the emotions that parents shared feeling during their experiences, and find out if parents knew their procedural safeguard rights. The most impactful barriers for parents new to special education was the lack of adherence to legal timelines. Parent requests for special education assessment took up to two years for some parents. Lack of information and understanding of the IEP process and law was another major hurdle for participants. Without adequate information and understanding parents felt a power imbalance and feeling of being taken advantage of. Parents described a disconnect regarding how they viewed their parent role and how the school district viewed their role. A copious amount of praise was given to family resource centers for their support and trainings offered to parents.

This dissertation traces the recovery of the landscape idea during the middle decades of the 20th century by a group of public intellectuals, scholars and designers responding to the everyday realities of the modern American built environment. That recovery served as a corrective to modernism's construction of landscape as either abstract utopian space or retrogressive historical tableau. The primary catalyst for this renewed interest in landscape as a representation of human cultures and their complex relationship with the natural world was the essayist and critic John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909-1996) and his magazine Landscape. During the years of Jackson's editorship (1951-1968), the magazine became a locus for intellectual exchange, a gathering place for a community of scholars from different disciplines who were drawn to Jackson's unique voice. Jackson's essays in the magazine used the term landscape in a way that was not common outside of the field of human geography. Here landscape did not describe a picturesque or painterly scene, nor did it describe a process of beautification. Jackson wrote of landscapes that seemed somewhat prosaic: the everyday, ordinary environments of city streets, rural farms, individual dwellings, highways and the commercial strip. He insisted that understanding how to read these places for their social, cultural and ecological content was a necessary--though too rarely employed--prelude to imagining new prototypes for the design and management of human environments. The mid-century intellectual milieu fostered by J.B. Jackson ultimately nurtured a contemporary (and still evolving) understanding of landscape as a conceptual medium composed of a diversity of cultures, layers of visible history and hidden narratives and an interdependent human ecology that continues to shape landscape theory and practice today.

Front-end activities prior to the product and process development have been pointed out by studies to be an essential part in development of new products and processes. Here selecting ideas is found to be route cause of success and failures of the new product and process development outcomes. The existing studies concentrate on larger companies, where tools and processes often are not fitting into the SME which have different needs and settings and lack attention regarding effective and sustainable processes in the front-end. This thesis addresses the need for a more detailed view of the most important factors that influence selecting innovative ideas in SME, with a purpose to address these factors and improve them in the front end process of these companies.  For this, by means of extensive literature study on SME, front-End and idea selection theories, a theoretical model for critical success factors for idea selection is developed, containing 21 factors. These factors are divided in main aspects of Shared vision, Innovation strategy, Leadership and management, Appropriate, structure and organization, Key individuals. Subsequently this model is tested in a case study of Bioteria Technologies AB in which the company’s idea selection process is analysed with the model.  The empirical analysis and discussions resulted in learning about the status of the company against the factors from which propositions follow.  The outcome of the study is a model that can be used for addressing what the challenges and opportunities are for the SME related to improving or adopting an idea selection phase.

In the recent literature, there is some debate over Reid’s theory of perception. Commentators are divided on whether or not Reid’s theory is consistent with an acquaintance model of perception. I will show that Reid’s views are not consistent with an acquaintance model, but that he nevertheless had good reasons to subscribe to this model. There is, therefore, an interesting tension in Reid’s theory of perception. I then develop a modified Reidian acquaintance model of perception as a way of resolving these tensions in light of an argument contained in Reid’s Philosophical Orations, and defuse recent objections to the acquaintance interpretation in the process. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / In this dissertation I examine an ongoing debate in the contemporary literature on Thomas Reid over the nature of his account of perception. I argue that one interpretation of Reid’s theory of perception that has been entertained fails, and that this does not, for various reasons, bode well for the viability of his account. I argue that Reid had available a straightforward way to revise his theory in order to avoid this difficulty, and I explicate this simple revision.

This dissertation concerns an empirical research focused on observing the case law of the Appellate Court of Justice of Minas Gerais, Brazil, about sanctioning young offenders. I identify socially available ideas, senses, and thoughts that become incorporated as standard-settings to the discourse of State Appellate judges. The online empirical data (www.tjmg.jus.br). covers a period from 03.08.2010 until 01.12.2016, composed of approximately one thousand decisions. Keywords connected to the juridical language routinely employed in young offenders' records guided the further process of gathering seventy-seven sampling dossiers. The decisions herein studied typically contain summaries of main reasons and judicially assessed evidence to prove the accusation; and also rationales, reasoning patterns, beliefs, and other motives the judges consider to ruling the concrete case. Therefore, the research places particular emphasis on describing, characterizing, and understanding the influences of many idea systems and, in addition, of the current way of thinking the Adult Criminal Law Justice in the Juvenile Criminal Justice decisions. So, the research question is: "How have Appellate judges mobilized socio-legal semantics and idea systems to make sense of criminal sanctions imposed on young offenders?" This research adopted the theory of Modern Penal Rationality to characterize one of the idea systems identified in this investigation and construct some elements of its knowledge problem that address the epistemological obstacles to the evolution of the juvenile criminal justice subsystem in criminal matters. Due to my professional background and empirical observations of some dossiers, I contend that at least three idea systems influence the Appellate judges' decisions, in the social context of the Juvenile Criminal Law subsystem, as follows: 1) "Modern Penal Rationality" (as described by Pires and conceived for adults in the criminal justice system); 2) "Doctrine of Irregular Situation" (as provided by the revoked Brazilian "Code of Minors"); and 3) "Doctrine of Integral Protection" (as established in the 1988 Brazilian Constitution and in the 1990 Child and Adolescent Statute). Thus, the analysis shows how the decision-making process by the Court of Appeal - trying to proceed with an accommodation account of presumably conflicting values - selects idea systems linked to old theories of punishment to shape the logical structure of juvenile sanctions. I demonstrate that "common legal sense" and "taken for granted" statements apply to induce "severe" sanctions imposed without considering the specificity of the case by the rules of Juvenile Criminal Justice. As a result, I reveal that punitive reasoning prevails in juvenile delinquency judgments rather than child and youth protection, and I also describe the social-legal practice of the language of Juvenile Criminal Law in the Court of Appeal's environment.

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Denna studie berör områdena participatory design, speldesign samt idégenerering och syftar till att undersöka hur spelföretag interagerar med sina slutanvändare vid speldesign samt om participatory design kan användas i speldesign för att främja känslor av delaktighet och ägandeskap.Studien har genomförts med intervjuer och undersökningar i form av en analys av fyra svenska spelföretags hemsidor och sociala medier för att se på deras interaktion med sina slutanvändare vid speldesign, samt en participatory designworkshop.Resultaten från litteraturstudien och workshopen visar på att participatory design kan användas för att främja känslor av delaktighet och ägandeskap hos deltagarna. Vidare visar undersökningen av de svenska spelföretagen att interaktionen med sina slutanvändare över lag är låg.De slutsatser som studien visar på är att genom att erbjuda sina användare möjligheten att bli delaktiga och att interagera med spelföretaget så får man en aktiv och stimulerande miljö vilken gynnar både spelföretaget och deras slutanvändare. Vad gäller participatory design så visar studien att det är ett förhållningssätt som går att använda inom speldesign. Vidare så visar det också sig att, om behovet för att välja ut mellan flera olika metoder och tekniker inom participatory design uppstår, så är ett ramverk ett mycket användbart och hjälpsamt verktyg. / This study encorporates the areas participatory design, game design and idea generation and serves to investigate how game developers interact with their end-users on game design. It also investigates if participatory design can be used in game design to promote feelings of participation and ownership.The study is based on interviews and research in the form of an analysis of four Swedish game developers' websites and social media profiles. This is done to see how and if they interact with their end-users in game design. Also, a workshop in participatory design and game design was carried out to see if the participants felt participation and ownership.The results of the workshops evaluation show that participatory design can be used to promote feelings participation and ownership with the participants. The results also show that the interaction between the Swedish game developers and their end-users were overall low but not nonexistent.The conclusions that can be shown in this study are firstly that by offering the end-users the option to involve and interact with the game developers one can receive an active and stimulating environment which is beneficial to the game developers themselves as well as their end-users. Secondly, the study shows participatory design is an approach that is applicable to game design. Further, it is also shown that if the need to choose between different methods and tools in participatory design should arise, then the use of aframework is proven to be a useful and helpful tool.