The starting point of this thesis was the debate in the General Assembly of Church of Scotland of 1974 which marked the culmination of a six year assessment of the Westminster Confession of Faith in the Church. The presbyteries and kirk sessions of the Church had indicated their overwhelming approval of the proposed changes, but in the end the General Assembly voted for the status quo. What struck me, as one who was present, was that many of the issues raised in the debate were not doctrinal, but legal. It would have been tempting to dismiss this as an example of legalist obstructionism, but my interest was aroused, and I decided to investigate for myself the background to some of the things being said, and in particular to explore the place of creeds and confessions within the Church o f Scotland, and to study the tensions created by their hybrid nature as doctrinal statements and constitutional documents. The question of a Church's relationship to its doctrinal standards is an important one in the field of Practical Theology. This thesis sets the current debate within the Church of Scotland against its historical background, thus enabling us to see that debate as the latest development in the Church's changing attitude towards Confessions of Faith in general and the Westminster Confession of Faith in particular. The Confession has served now as help, now as hindrance; now as guide, now as source of confusion; now as theological statement, now as constitutional document. The whole question of the relationship between law and doctrine in the Church is a large one. In this thesis I have made a special study of one contemporary and important aspect of the question by considering it with particular reference to Confessions of faith. The variety of functions which the Church expects its Confession to serve raises many interesting questions for theologians and for lawyers.

Orra Though It Be is a short story collection which evokes the Northeast of Scotland through its setting, themes and language. In more universal terms, it depicts close-knit communities opening up to the wider world in the age of globalisation and the disenchantment felt by individuals caught up in this process. The collection's introduction outlines the linguistic and aesthetic issues of representing the region to an outside audience. After analysing the available options, my preference for skaz is explained in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin's theories on dialogism and the carnivalesque. The first chapter of the exegesis analyses some of the earliest narratives to mix vernacular with the standard at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Key works by Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott and James Hogg are dissected in light of how each writer's social context affected their presentation of 'subversive' oralities through artifice and unreliability. The second chapter moves onto writers of the Modernist period, contrasting the oral skaz writings of Russia's Nikolai Leskov with the more linear, literary stories of his contemporary Anton Chekhov. The impact of James Joyce's work on Northeast writers is then discussed with an especial focus on Lewis Grassic Gibbon. The third chapter considers the general cultural shift beyond the Enlightenment from communality to individuality alongside the tandem transition of literature from ballad-­‐like objectivity towards modernistic subjectivity. James Kelman's experimentations with these styles are explored in order to show how they have influenced my own work. A larger concern with the expression of emotion in Scottish literature is also assessed. Tying together many of the ideas and methodological issues outlined thus far, the final chapter provides an in-depth reflection on the progression of three stories from first to final drafts and the evolution of the collection as a whole.

This thesis investigates to what degree women developed a politicised gender consciousness and participated in political activity in Dundee in the period 1870 to 1997. It is a gender and political study on Scotland's fourth city which has three key objectives. The first is to examine whether gender was relevant in the city's history of representation and whether it made a difference to political structures, policy and activity. The second charts the advance of women in the city's political elites to determine whether they shared common interests which formed the basis for collective action, which could be characterised as women's politics. The third sets out to further our understanding of why there is a commonly-held and repeated public view that Dundee was a woman's town and that Dundee women were and are in some way radically "different" because of the city's unique industrial circumstances and the intervention of gender into local political activity. The thesis uses several sites to explore whether the women involved made a difference in terms of political outcomes. It examines parliamentary and local government elections. It looks at the emergence of trade unions, elected bodies and autonomous women's organisations. It involves an interdisciplinary exploration of issues and problems in political studies, political history, community politics and the analysis of gender relations. It is an idiographic study of gender and political activity that utilises new evidence to challenge myths associated with the object of analysis. It argues that the distinction between the voluntary welfare associations in which women were involved and political activity was often blurred. Influential women's activity which does not fall within conventional definitions of "political" activity is also highlighted. The study seeks also to place these discourses within the context of theories about representation and equality. Within political science the thesis explores empirical explanations within the context of Dundee, and contends that analysis of the situation in the city during the study period, in particular the role of middle-class women in the 20th century, goes some way to providing a flexible alternative to important feminist approaches on political participation and representation. It is also argued in this thesis that time and place are important factors in charting representation, and that they are factors seldom prominent within feminist theoretical scholarship. Thus, this thesis is as much a first women's political history of a major Scottish city as it is an important analysis of political representation and a framework for establishing new ideas about political activity in Dundee. It provides an original contribution of a historically and socially-specific location and in so doing provides a basis for further comparative work on gender and political activity and in placing tacit assumptions in the research literature in question.

Historical narratives have limited scholarly appreciation of the impact of rhetoric on the development of Roman law in the late Republican period. This thesis challenges these narratives and attempts to re-evaluate the role of rhetoric in Roman law.

No description available.

Thesis (M.S. in Community Research and Action)--Vanderbilt University, Dec. 2008. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Asylum claimants regularly arrive in the UK without corroborating evidence to support their request for refugee protection. Consequently, an assessment of the credibility of the applicant’s account of persecution tends to become the focal point of asylum decision-making. In order for an applicant’s asylum claim to be assessed as factual, and therefore, credible it must be prepared in a way that conforms to the narrative models in legal discourse and meets the evidential requirements for showing past persecution and a future well-founded fear of persecution. It is for this reason, in part, that the role of legal practitioners becomes crucial. This thesis explores the ways that asylum solicitors deal with the issue of credibility in their daily working practices. It also examines the structural and procedural constraints which affect the working practices of solicitors when representing asylum clients in this way in asylum appeals. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Glasgow over an eighteen-month period, this thesis considers the ways that asylum solicitors approach credibility when representing asylum clients. This thesis explores the different forms of paid and unpaid labour undertaken by asylum solicitors and analyses how external factors such as legal aid funding arrangements affect the morale and working practices of solicitors who represent asylum claimants. It seeks to argue that a criminalising discourse exists in the asylum and immigration processes in Glasgow. Moreover, it demonstrates that such discourses extend to a cohort of asylum solicitors working in Glasgow and that the culture of disbelief which exists among these solicitors results in them regularly disbelieving their asylum clients’ accounts. Finally, by considering proposed changes to funding arrangements in Scotland, which would bring them in line with those in place in England and Wales, this thesis contends that were these arrangements to be introduced this would result in the underrepresentation of, and limited access to justice for, asylum applicants in Scotland.

This thesis is about the use of the term social exclusion in contemporary Scotland and how it has given rise to the idea of 'excluded spaces' in political and academic commentaries on deprived neighbourhoods. It argues that, despite criticism, the term offers a useful way of re-assessing disadvantaged places, such that space (for example, in the guise of socio-spatial segregation) should be considered not only an outcome but also an input into processes of exclusion. This is illustrated through exploration of the reproduction of the frequently negative place-images surrounding two deprived neighbourhoods in urban Scotland. The thesis explores how such representation may stigmatise residents therein, ultimately resulting in the production of landscapes of exclusion. Use of a range of qualitative methods (though primarily biographical interviews) demonstrates how negative place-images are constructed and remain resilient to change while also revealing the concrete outcomes of such 'imagined' geographies. Overall, the thesis makes three main points. First, that the construction of 'imagined' and 'real' places are fluid and dynamic processes and differences between 'images' and 'realities' of places are neither as clear cut, nor as 'true' or 'inaccurate' as might be assumed. Second, that 'real' and 'imagined' representations of place are reproduced through practices in, and attitudes towards, place. And third, that migration processes are influenced by, and influential to, the construction of social and place identities. Construction of socio-spatial stereotypes reveals space to be both an outcome and input into processes of exclusion while also demonstrating how many of the taken-for-granted assumptions about disadvantaged neighbourhoods might be considered place-myths.

This thesis explores how the people of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland - a rural region of Britain - engaged with the British Empire in a period commonly referred to as the 'Age of High Imperialism'. It does so by exploring civil society activity in the area, and examines how different aspects of domestic life - religion, politics, culture, associational activity - shaped engagement with the Empire or imperial ideas. Scholarship on the place of the Empire back 'home' in Britain has recently stressed the patchwork nature of imperial engagement, with recognition given to the fact that both British society and the Empire itself were never monolithic entities. A 'Four Nations' approach to empire has been one of the most fruitful outcomes of this new focus, and this body of scholarship has explored how each of the four nations of Britain had different relationships with the Empire, and the impact this had on individual national identities. However, both this body of literature and the wider literature on 'imperial Britain' have remained overwhelmingly urban in focus, and have failed to explore whether the models for empire engagement they portray varied outside of Britain's main urban centres. By exploring the place of the Empire in a predominantly rural region, this study therefore breaks new ground, and in 'thinking regionally' about the place of the Empire in British society it provides a clear challenge to much of the conventional literature on the Empire's impact at home in Britain. In particular, by looking at the issue through a regional prism this thesis challenges both the 'Four Nations' and 'British World' models put forward by historians, by showing clearly that local contexts and local factors often mitigated the applicability of these wider ideas. In the former case, Highland contemporaries rarely celebrated the Scottish dimensions of empire, and instead placed to the fore both their local and regional contributions. In the latter case, many individuals rejected the very notion that a Greater Britain existed across the seas, and both class and language emerge clearly as factors separating the region's lower classes from full engagement with this wider idea. Throughout this study it will be shown that local factors were vital to shaping popular engagement with empire, and that often these factors precluded the spread of cultures of empire, or shaped perceptions of empire in highly negative ways.

All populations present the historian with certain questions. Their origins, the date of their arrival, their reason for coming and finally, how they came - all demand explanation. The population of Ulster today, derived mainly from Scotland, far from proving an exception, personifies the problem. So greatly does the population of Ulster differ from the rest of Ireland that barbed wire and road blocks periodically, even now, demark the boundaries between the two. Over three centuries after the Scots arrived, they still maintain their differences from those who Inhabited Ireland before them.