Yes / Pregnant migrant women held in detention centres in the UK can be particularly vulnerable. They may have poor physical and mental health, which is exacerbated by their incarceration, and are at a disproportionally increased risk of maternal and perinatal mortality. Unpublished studies have found that pregnant migrant women have poor experiences in detention. To explore pregnant migrant women's experiences of living in detention. Method: Four migrant women who had been held in detention while pregnant and two volunteer health professionals were interviewed. Findings: Results suggest that migrant women have very poor experiences in detention. Four key themes emerged: ‘challenges to accessing UK healthcare’, ‘exacerbation of mental health conditions, ‘feeling hungry’ and ‘lack of privacy’. Conclusion: These findings could be used to review maternity care in detention and ensure that detention staff understand the experiences of detained pregnant women so that the needs of this vulnerable group can be met.

Depression is the black plague of the 21st Century, affecting twice as many women as men, and continuing to increase among the younger generations. Little research has been conducted looking at single, young adults with depression. In addition, more research is needed to look at how culture influences the struggle with depression. With both the prevalence of depression in young women increasing and the membership of the LDS Church on the rise, it is crucial that clergy and clinicians alike better understand the experience of young, single, LDS women struggling with depression. This study is a qualitative exploration of six young, single, LDS women's struggle with depression. Six young (24-31 years old), single, white, active LDS women living in the Washington DC metropolitan area participated in 60 to 90 minute long interviews. Using a qualitative method and phenomenological perspective this study describes what an episode of depression is like for, and how it is understood by, young, single, LDS women. Themes identified from the women's interviews included identifying that something was not quite right/ something was going wrong, faith attempts, internalizing and blaming self, awareness of the depression, reaching out, spreading the word, and lessons learned. Several of these themes corroborate with current literature about the experience of depression, while others are unique to these women. In addition to these themes, the poignant role of the LDS culture in these women's experience of struggling with depression is discussed. Acknowledgements / Master of Science

Though research on fathering and fatherhood has grown significantly over the past few decades, a persistent emphasis involves father involvement and its relationship to child outcomes. Far fewer studies have explored the intrapersonal processes of fatherhood, such as what it means to be a father in diverse contexts. Rural contexts, specifically within Appalachia, remain understudied and may present specific challenges or strengths that influence the development of fathering identities. The current study employed interpretive phenomenological analysis to explore the lived experiences of fathers who live and parent in rural Appalachia, an area and identity that is often stereotyped and marginalized, and to highlight these fathers’ strengths despite challenges. Informed by symbolic interactionism, this study sought to examine the social and cultural symbols that shape the meanings Appalachian fathers ascribe to fatherhood and explore how those meanings shape their own perceptions of themselves as fathers. Fathers residing in Appalachia were interviewed to gain insights into the lived experiences, meaning making processes, and strengths of Appalachian fathers. Findings show that Appalachian fathers seek to embody and preserve multigenerational values such as work ethic, community, and providing and protecting, while grappling with tensions between preserving traditions and adapting to change. Appalachian fathers negotiated identities against the backdrop of historical hardship and exploitation, which threatened their internal sense of agency and contributed to their feeling left behind in a changing world. Nonetheless, fathers actively negotiated their sense of self and found creative ways to (re)create Appalachian fathering to fit their unique context and lived experiences. / Master of Science

Yes / Adopting a Service-Dominant Logic lens, recent research within industrial marketing contexts increasingly recognizes the role of operant resources in value co-creation. Incumbent within operant resources is actor competence. Despite this, an investigation into the role of actor competence in value co-creating processes is scant and the competence literature, in general, has tended to concentrate on specialized knowledge and skills based interpretations that potentially restrict our understanding of the construct. To address this gap, this research adopts a phenomenological approach to explore perceived behavioral attributes of competent actors. Findings confirm two broad behaviorally based conceptualizations of competence: 1) extra-role behavior demonstrated through organizational citizenship behavior, and 2) in-role behavior demonstrated through understanding of work, and engagement behavior. To this end, the contribution of this research is twofold. First and from a theoretical perspective, it offers empirical insights into a relational based framework of competency within industrial marketing contexts. Second, and from a pragmatic perspective, this framework may aid managers in developing a broader understanding of actor competence and how such competencies may be enhanced within the workplace to optimize value co-creation.

In this dissertation, I examine art’s profound connections with temporality, understood as a defining feature of human existence. More specifically, I argue that art can be understood as a technology that experiments with and modifies human temporality through a process that oscillates and mediates between the self immersed in the artwork and the self that reflects upon that immersion. The first step in this argument consists in establishing art’s technological character via a phenomenology of art-experiences, suggested by the “postphenomenology” of Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek, and by Alva Noë’s notion of artworks as “strange tools.” Artists and audiences play with possibilities of human action and perception, embodiment and cognition, precisely insofar as they are predicated on temporality. I clarify the operative sense of ‘temporality’ in this regard by critically appropriating Merleau-Ponty’s account of time and temporal style. In that account, time is a kind of rupture at the base of experience and temporal “style” expresses the fact that we are our time and that our existence consists, with a certain continuity, in both sedimented experiences and a transition between temporal perspectives that is itself perspectival. While acknowledging this account’s merits and its fruitfulness for understanding the experience of art, I argue that it needs emending since it entails an aim for completion that does not do justice to the full experience of time. My next step is to expand and offer some corroboration for my account by examining three works of art: Terrance Malick’s film The Tree of Life (2011), Katsushika Hokusai’s woodprint The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831), and Delmore Schwartz’s poem “Calmly we walk through this April’s day” (1937). In this connection I develop several novel concepts, useful to evaluating art-oriented temporality, including the concept of “temporal layering,” a more sophisticated understanding of the protentional/retentional structure of time, and the concept of “temporal framing,” which articulates how art experiences shape “regional” temporalities. Finally, I investigate how creating art reconfigures temporality. Borrow from Alfred Schütz, László Tengelyi’s, and Toni Morrison, I argue that we can understand creative moments as epiphanic events at the edges of regions of time. / 2026-06-26T00:00:00Z

For centuries, the ontological question of representation has plagued the philosophical tradition: does the mind represent the external world? By taking a critical perspective, I will briefly survey the philosophical literature and analyze the usage of representation in modern philosophical and scientific circles, providing a historical context for the ontological question of representation. After determining that modern philosophy and cognitive science is, counter intuitively, moving away from the representational stance, I then look back on the twentieth century and give an examination of the roots of the anti-representationalist paradigm, focusing on the work of Martin Heidegger, James Gibson, and the proponents of dynamic systems theory. Through the use of Heideggerian phenomenological-ontology, I propose an ontological solution to the problem of mental representation. By taking an ecumenical phenomenological approach, I recast the dichotomy between representationalism and non-representationalism into a derivative continuum, focusing on how the phenomena of mental content, and thus representation, only arises in breakdown cases of our normal ontological familiarity. After having contrasted this conception of our Being with the metaphysics of Descartes, I explain how we can avoid dualism while maintaining the phenomenology of "thinking" which has been typical of the philosophical tradition.

This thesis is about meaning, expression and language in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and their role in the phenomenological project as a whole. For Merleau-Ponty, expression is the taking up of a meaning given either in perception or in already acquired forms of expression, thereby repeating, transforming or congealing meaning into gestures, utterances, artworks, ideas or theories. Contrary to the predominant view in the literature, the relation of expression to meaning, and in particular the problem of expressing new meanings, was of fundamental importance to Merleau-Ponty from the very beginning, in that it was intrinsically related to the overcoming of what he termed “objective thought”. Admittedly, there is an evolution of his philosophy in this respect: from the early stance where the recasting of certain basic categories is taken as pivotal for the development of a new form of thinking, with arguments drawn also from various empirical and social sciences, to what appears to be an effort at an all-pervading reformulation of philosophical language during his last years. But the remoulding of categories was never for Merleau-Ponty a matter simply of finding a few, better adapted concepts, but from the outset an endeavour to think philosophical arguments through to a point where they reveal their inherent inconsistencies. Recasting philosophical expression is thus a risky enterprise, and this is a point I explore further in Essay 1, that focuses especially upon creative expression in painting and to some extent in literature. In Essay 2 I discuss the notion of Gestalt and how it serves this general project, whereas Essay 3 deals with verbal language, on the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Saussure’s linguistics. Essay 4 examines bodily expression from the point of view of feminist phenomenology and in particular Judith Butler’s early reading of Merleau-Ponty, and finally Essay 5 discusses expression in the art of dance. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 4: Accepted. Paper 5: Accepted.</p>

Uppsatsen utgår ifrån Sara Ahmeds bok “Queer Phenomenology – Orientations, Objects, Others”. I uppsatsen diskuteras  hur vi människor upplever världen genom föremålen som omger oss och hur detta orienterar oss på olika sätt. På samma sätt som vissa förmål orienterar oss och gör att vi följer normativa linjer så kan andra föremål, eller föremål i andra situationer bryta dessa linjer och desorintera oss. Konst skulle kunna ses som sådana desorienteringsföremål som låter oss se världen på nya sätt. Uppsatsen innehåller också en diskusion kring induktiva resonemang i realtion till att förstå och navigera sig i välden och hur dessa år både nödvändiga och otillräckliga.

The purpose of the study is to highlight educators' preferences and attitudes towards tablet in preschool by describing the use of this digital tool in the preschool educational activities. The use of tablet in preschool is in the study looked upon as a phenomenon. The description of the phenomenon is built on the analysis and interpretation of educators' statements about it. The research questions focus on the following aspects: educators' attitudes towards the tablet and its use in pre-school educational activities, the tablet's current area of use, the culture surrounding the use of this digital tool and the educators’ statements about advantages and disadvantages of tablet's use in preschool. The survey’s data collection method is qualitative interviews and the analysis is based on the phenomenological approach. The survey results are discussed related to previous research on children's digital skills at an early age as well as recent research on the tablet and its use in pre-school educational activities. In the final description of the phenomenon it is clear that the educators, who participate in this study, have a generally positive attitude towards using the tablet in preschool. However, according to the interviews, the use of this digital tool seems to be both multifaceted and a complex phenomenon.

The central aim of this study was to interpret the psychology of C.G . Jung in the light of existential phenomenology, thereby to lay the foundations for an integrated phenomenological analytical psychology. It was recognised that although Jung introduced a poetic understanding of psychological life he tended to adhere theoretically to a Cartesian and natural scientific epistemology and ontology, in which the knower is separated from the known, and psychological life is encapsulated inside the human subject. Thus the main task, which defined generally the study's scope and limitations, was to undercut the lingering Cartesianism in Jung's thought, thereby to recover the world in which one lives as intrinsically and authentically psychological, and one's psychological life as irreducibly world-related. The ontological guidelines for this endeavour were taken primarily from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but it was consistently argued that this hermeneutic movement towards an existential understanding is given within Jung's work itself. Thus: Jung's method is primarily hermeneutic-phenomenological; the psyche is not "mind" or an inner realm more or less linked to the body, but is the embodied life-world, and Jung's descriptions of it - of its autonomy, spatiality and bodiliness, for instance - achieve ontological clarity when it is articulated as Dasein; the self as the totality of the psyche is interpretated in terms of Dasein, and individuation involves differentiation, personalisation and appropriation within existence itself; the complexes, archetypally grounded, are the vital densities of incarnate life, ambiguously conscious and unconscious, known and lived; the archetypes are the fundamental necessities of psychological life, autonomous imaginal structures within which both body and world are founded. Imaginal autonomy is revealed ontically as the metaphorical reality of things, but since imaginal autonomy has no ground thought about psychological life is ultimately poetic. Where relevant, recent theoretical developments in analytical psychology were discussed, particularly the Developmental and Archetypal movements. A clinical study was presented to illustrate some of the main themes of the thesis. In conclusion, the main themes of an integrated phenomenological analytical psychology were outlined, and the central contributions of analytical psychology and existential phenomenology were highlighted.