This dissertation examines the roots of birth control's legitimacy in the United States. Americans were early adopters of fertility control: between 1790 and 1940, the average number of children born into U.S. families fell from seven to around two. During this period there were no major advances in contraceptive technology and very few outspoken advocates for reproductive rights. What changed were Americans' intimate ideas about the place of childrearing in a good life. The study uses letters, press items, and philanthropic field reports from the early twentieth century--when birthrates and birth control first became major civic issues in the U.S.--to uncover that transition, which has long perplexed scholars. Rather than focusing on the role of vocal activists or socioeconomic change, the dissertation emphasizes the changing "moral economy" of childbearing, as perceived by Americans addressing their own views and those of their peers and forebearers. It shows how economic calculations surrounding childbearing were embedded in matrices of morally-mediated ideas about progress, nature, God, and health--and how shifts in those ideas gave rise to a private, grassroots consensus which gradually nullified all attempts to make birth control illegal or taboo. The analysis pays special attention to the role of ideas about time. Birth control gained legitimacy, first, as Americans became progressively less concerned with eternal chains of being and more with the material present; and second, as they reevaluated birth control's place in history, impressionistically reframing a marker of collective decadence as a sign of individual modernity. Seeing the birth control movement through these Americans' eyes--as a quiet, gradual, furtive movement of living women (and men) who were not necessarily outspoken, feminist, or even civically active--helps us understand Americans' reproductive interests as they understood them, and the potential connections of everyday moral action to lasting historical consequence.

This study is a mixed methods approach, consisting of a questionnaire and narrative interviews that opened the opportunity to investigate motivation in KSA by employing a post-positivist stance. This study is specifically aimed at investigating the attitudes and perceptions underpinning the motivation of Saudi students studying English in higher education. This study was limited to male students studying English in a preparatory programme at a private university in the Eastern Provence of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The scope of this study was to identify social, cultural, personal and emotional factors that underpinned the attitudes and perceptions of Saudi students studying English in higher education and thereby this study established a foundation for motivational studies in Saudi Arabia. In addition, this study established a first time approach to employ the Dialogical Self Theory to triangulate data between multiple methods so that the interpretation and analysis of data could lead to expanding the previous definitions of integrative and instrumental orientations of motivated behaviour in motivation and SLA studies. Furthermore, this study established DST's debut in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The advantage of employing DST in this study was to ensure as much as possible that the voices of the research participants were genuinely reflected in the analysis and interpretation of data. In accordance with the literature search during this research, this study marks the first attempt to describe the constructs of a motivational profile of Saudi students studying English in higher education. The data suggested that Saudis demonstrated strong adherences to cultural and social supportive positions associated with or intertwined with high religious values toward constructing their self-identities. However, there are at least two succinct strategies that the students employ to lessen their internal social power struggles between their local selves and their reaching out to the global community that communicates in English with their global selves. The group that was less likely to reach outwards to the global community and feel being a part of it generated strategies around various degrees of strict cultural compliance to achieve feelings of safety within the self's society of the mind. The participants who were more likely to feel global through employing English constructed strategies and plans around hybrid-models within their self-identity to balance their desire to be part of the world community and to be true to their desire of compliance to cultural values. Students who were less likely to feel a belonging to the global community were more influenced by internal factors such as: a fear of assimilation and a fear losing Arab identity, which led to constructing strategies aimed at a greater adherence to cultural compliance. In addition, this study utilized Sullivan's (2010) theory that Vygotsky's (1978) dialectic understanding of juxtaposed positions and Bakhtin's (1984) dialogical understanding of vertically regulated values are not mutually exclusive, rather mutually inclusive. The result was that motivation can be imagined as a dynamic 3-D construction occurring within a certain context with other. This research employed a 29 item motivational questionnaire with a 5-point Likert scale constructed by using formerly employed themes that were shown to have had a greater impact on motivation and language acquisition. This study is unique as it triangulated quantitative data with narrative interviews by allowing common themes formerly associated with motivation and SLA to be expanded by the participants voices, which not only expanded some definitions formerly associated with motivation and SLA, but also subjected them to the refutability. This study concluded that effort and self-confidence were the attributes that most likely underpinned the construction of a hybrid model of the self, which opened opportunities of English acquisition both within the classroom setting and outside of it. Those who were less likely to feel a belonging to the global community that communicates in English were more likely to construct strategies around local Arab traditions and were shown to have to a greater fear of integrating themselves into international scenarios related to English use. Through triangulating multiple data sources, it was possible to assess the values students attached between their internal and external positions at four distinct levels: cultural, social, personal and emotional.

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Proefschrift - Leyden. / Includes bibliographical references.

Inaug.-Diss.--Zürich. "Literaturverzeichnis," p. (143)--145. / Lebenslauf.

Proefschrift - Leyden. / Includes bibliographical references.

Inaug.-Diss.--Zürich. "Literaturverzeichnis," p. [143]-145. / Lebenslauf.

Issued also as Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University. / Includes index. Bibliographical note (p. 327-334).

No description available.

The study explores the work of the English choreographer and Director of the Birmingham Royal Ballet, David Bintley. Particular reference is made to Bintley’s ballet Still Life at the Penguin Café (1988) and the extent to which he has drawn from English Cotswold Morris dance in the Humboldt’s Hog-nosed Skunk Flea section of the ballet. The comparison between Bintley’s selection of movements and their traditional Morris dance counterparts is based on findings from extensive fieldwork conducted with Morris dance teams and in particular the Ravensbourne Morris Men of Keston in Kent, as well as a study of Bintley’s creative practice. The research draws from ethnographic modes of study including participant observation, embodiment and notions of reflexivity. Following an analysis of the results from the creation and performance of a more authentically ‘Morris’ version of Bintley’s dance for eight female dancers, entitled Still Life at the Folk Café, the study offers a series of recommendations for the translation of English Morris into a theatrical setting. The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first explores the methods involved in the development of the analytical model for the study, including those of the Hungarian scholars György Martin and Erno Pesovár during their folk dance research in the Upper-Tisza region of Hungry, and the categorisation of the various aspects of Morris dance using Morris dancer Lionel Bacon's motif catalogue, A handbook of Morris dances. It also reviews the work of folk dance theorists such as John Forrest and Chris Bearman. The second chapter discusses the concept of Englishness to define the importance of the English ballet tradition as advocated from 1926 by the founder of the Royal Ballet, Dame Ninette De Valois. It looks at Bintley's influences, ideological inheritance, creative process and place as a protector of the English ballet tradition. Chapter three focuses on the fieldwork conducted with the Ravensbourne Morris Men, and compares Bintley’s movements in Humboldt’s Hog-nosed Skunk Flea dance with their counterparts from the Cotswold Morris tradition. Chapter four details the practice based element of the research and analyses the findings from a series of Morris dance workshops in which the eight female dancers representing the field of professional dance were introduced to the Morris dance form. It also investigates the results from the creation and performance of Still Life at the Folk Café. Chapter five discusses the benefits of conducting a workshop with the Ravensbourne Morris dance team and some of the dancers involved in the performance process. Finally chapter six explores the conclusions drawn from the research and explains how choreographers or dancers wishing to work with Morris dance should immerse themselves in the source language of its practitioners, and draw from aspects of the tradition in rehearsals and performances in order to extend their choreological and physical vocabulary and attain the stylistic and social qualities associated with the dance form. These aspects include working with live musical accompaniment, using the performance space informally to maintain close interaction with the audience and challenging the dancer’s personal response to their own movement style.