This paper will examine John Rawls’s views regarding the make up of society and, in particular, it will investigate the question of whether or not Rawls’s theory of justice is dependent upon accepting and endorsing the view that society is, or, at least, resembles an association. The aim of the paper will be to defend the position that Rawls’s theory of justice is in fact dependent upon an associational conception of society, and that it, therefore, relies upon the idea that the individuals in a society share a common interest or purpose. Thus, far from providing a liberal conception of society, this paper will attempt to illustrate that Rawls actually presents a more communitarian outlook of society than many might expect from a purportedly liberal thinker. In order to best prove the essential link to an associational conception of society, I discuss three principles that provided Rawls with reasons for preferring the difference principle to other modes of justice, and suggest that these founding principles provide sufficient evidence for connecting Rawls’s theory of justice to an associational conception of society. By advocating such a vision of society, Rawls betrays a fundamental premise of his own political liberalism, namely, the idea that individuals do not necessarily share a common interest or purpose with one another. / Thesis (Master, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-25 19:19:43.637

The Orange Order is a Protestant fraternal order within Northern Ireland that has branches across the former British Empire. Since its formation in 1795, it has been described as a brotherhood, definitively male with a triumphalist parade culture maintaining Protestant `civil and religious liberties' by celebrating the victory of King William III at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. My dissertation explores the role of gender within Orangeism. Notions of `brotherhood', `sisterhood', and `family' in the lodges are explored, as are the roles of women within Orangeism. In particular, the `family' nature of Orangeism has played a major role in the inclusion of women and children in Orange demonstrations and parades. Evangelical beliefs in women's moral superiority and the necessity of her influence over her family and community provided women with a public presence via Orange processions and female lodges. Men were forced to accept their utility as political mothers who could inculcate Orange values in children and in the wider community through their influence and philanthropic work. In short, Orangeism was never simply a brotherhood; the familial metaphor enabled women to gain influence as `sisters' and to perform various politicized (and sometimes militarized) domestic roles within the public space provided by the order. Orangeism gave them a political base from which to petition, challenge governmental policies they deemed unfair, and to threaten or commit violence when peaceful methods failed.

Once regarded as a nation central to the development of civil society, associational activity in contemporary Britain is perceived by some authors as fragile. Whereas the urban leadership provided by the middle classes was crucial to the trajectory and character of towns and cities all over Britain in the nineteenth century, it has been claimed that their relocation to suburbia has become synonymous with detachment, disinterest and the decline of the associational sphere. Depicted in literary and historical accounts, as well as in the popular media, as pursuing a suburban lifestyle that was both monotonous and disengaged, the middle classes of the twentieth century were assumed to have relinquished the management of a multitude of municipal and voluntary functions that defined an urban place. Yet such accounts stereotyped middle-class lifestyles, oversimplifying their relationship with the city, and prompting a ‘new wave’ of suburban research in America that has offered a revisionism that stresses diversity and challenges prevailing assumptions regarding middle-class behaviour. Assumptions of suburban detachment are contested in the research that underpins this study. The thesis ‘Semi-Detached Britain? Social networks in the suburban fringe of Leicester and Loughborough, 1950-2005’ provides a detailed analysis of social and cultural networks and reviews the consequences of relocation on civic engagement since 1950. Geographically the middle classes may have distanced their home lives from the urban centre, but through an examination of their participation in the associational sphere of clubs and societies it is evident that suburban living was not synonymous with disinterest and detachment. Furthermore, analysis of cultural changes post 1950, including the issue of conservation, the shifting nature of gender relations, and the process of racial assimilation, reveal how voluntary organisations, and their middle-class membership, continued to shape the physical, spatial and cultural landscape of modern Britain. Through the intricate networks of power developed in local clubs and societies, the middle-classes found a continuing utility in the transference of knowledge and expertise, often working as mediator between the citizen and the state. Far from being disconnected, the new ‘suburbans’ were ‘semi-detached’, demonstrating a vigorous and ongoing commitment to the public sphere that contributed to the stock of social and civic capital in both town and city. In this regard the thesis provides a revisionism concerning the middle classes, suburbanisation, and the construction of civil society in the modern era.

Resources are often unevenly distributed through the environment, resulting in a challenging task for insects to locate food, mates and oviposition sites. Consequently, there is an ongoing need to unravel how insects rely on behavioural and sensory traits while searching for resources in heterogeneous environments. In the first part of this thesis, I addressed this issue by studying how neighbouring resources can affect the likelihood of insects finding their preferred host resources. These effects of neighbouring resources are commonly referred to as associational effects, and are expected to result from limitations in the sensory physiology of insects. Such limitations constrain the insect’s ability to correctly evaluate resource quality at the different steps involved in insect search behaviour. Furthermore, I determined whether the physiological state of an insect, and sensory experiences made during larval stages, can affect host search behaviour in heterogeneous environments. By comparing the behaviour of Drosophila melanogaster in environments with single and multiple resources, I found that the presence of neighbouring recourses increased the selection rates for attractive resources, while it decreased the selection rates for less attractive resources. These effects are referred to as associational susceptibility and associational resistance respectively. Furthermore, by studying oviposition behaviour, I found that during these small-scale behavioural decisions, associational effects are mainly governed by gustatory mediated selection and less by olfactory mediated selection. The oviposition assay eliminated potential misinterpretations of resource quality along the different steps of search behaviour, hence the results suggested that associational effects rely on distinctive selection behaviour between resource types rather than on sensory constraints. In the second part of this thesis I determined whether natal experiences can be used by insects as sensory shortcuts to find host resources, and whether this leads to better larval performance on those selected host resources. For this purpose, I studied the interactions between the larval parasitoid Asecodes lucens and the oligophagous leaf beetle Galerucella sagittariae. The results showed that the relationship between oviposition preference and larval performance, of both insect species, depends on an interactive effect between the insects’ natal origin and the quality of the different host resources. Moreover, I found that the natal origin was a better predictor for the adult host preference, rather than for larval performance. This suggests that, aside from the actual quality of the host resources, locating any suitable host might be even more limiting for the female’s fitness. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Accepted. Paper 3: Submitted.</p>

This report describes a paradigm for combining associational and causal reasoning to achieve efficient and robust problem-solving behavior. The Generate, Test and Debug (GTD) paradigm generates initial hypotheses using associational (heuristic) rules. The tester verifies hypotheses, supplying the debugger with causal explanations for bugs found if the test fails. The debugger uses domain-independent causal reasoning techniques to repair hypotheses, analyzing domain models and the causal explanations produced by the tester to determine how to replace faulty assumptions made by the generator. We analyze the strengths and weaknesses of associational and causal reasoning techniques, and present a theory of debugging plans and interpretations. The GTD paradigm has been implemented and tested in the domains of geologic interpretation, the blocks world, and Tower of Hanoi problems.

This study explores the ways in which young people in the neighbourhood of Old Town in Bamenda negotiate the predicament of blocked opportunities and ‘arrested adulthood’ occasioned by the decline in the nation-building project and prolonged socio-economic and moral crisis in Cameroon. I investigate how urban youth in Old Town construct their moral and socio-cultural worlds through involvement in associations. The main finding suggests that faced with growing uncertainty, young people in Bamenda are positioning themselves as important social actors by drawing on local cultural resources such as associations to construct their social worlds that aim to circumvent their exclusion and marginality. In this light, I analyse youth associations as central although not exclusive to negotiating young people’s predicament by focusing on a range of practices through which they seek respectability and claim social adult status. Drawing on the concepts of transition, subjectivities and personhood, I show that young people straddle the worlds of ‘youth’ and social adulthood, statuses that are not only cultural constructions but also the products of differential power relations and social positioning. I contend that the processes of positioning and the production of personhood are largely experienced through involvement in associational life. The study focuses on three associations, namely the Chosen Sisters, the United Sisters and the Ntambag Brothers Association (NBA). Organised on the basis of seniority and gender, I argue that these associations, while negotiating claims to adult status for their members, tend to challenge state-centric notions of citizenship as they simultaneously position themselves as moral actors upon whom society can count on for regeneration. Through a range of social projects, pursued on behalf of and sanctioned by the community, young people in Old Town reaffirm the centrality of interdependence and the situated understanding of social adulthood predicated on the redistribution of one’s success or achievement. This study points to the re-emergent role of associations in negotiating everyday life in the face of crisis. It is a significant contribution towards understanding voluntary and communal associations in general and young people’s modes of transitions into social adulthood.

This study explores the ways in which young people in the neighbourhood of Old Town in Bamenda negotiate the predicament of blocked opportunities and ‘arrested adulthood’ occasioned by the decline in the nation-building project and prolonged socio-economic and moral crisis in Cameroon. I investigate how urban youth in Old Town construct their moral and socio-cultural worlds through involvement in associations. The main finding suggests that faced with growing uncertainty, young people in Bamenda are positioning themselves as important social actors by drawing on local cultural resources such as associations to construct their social worlds that aim to circumvent their exclusion and marginality. In this light, I analyse youth associations as central although not exclusive to negotiating young people’s predicament by focusing on a range of practices through which they seek respectability and claim social adult status. Drawing on the concepts of transition, subjectivities and personhood, I show that young people straddle the worlds of ‘youth’ and social adulthood, statuses that are not only cultural constructions but also the products of differential power relations and social positioning. I contend that the processes of positioning and the production of personhood are largely experienced through involvement in associational life. The study focuses on three associations, namely the Chosen Sisters, the United Sisters and the Ntambag Brothers Association (NBA). Organised on the basis of seniority and gender, I argue that these associations, while negotiating claims to adult status for their members, tend to challenge state-centric notions of citizenship as they simultaneously position themselves as moral actors upon whom society can count on for regeneration. Through a range of social projects, pursued on behalf of and sanctioned by the community, young people in Old Town reaffirm the centrality of interdependence and the situated understanding of social adulthood predicated on the redistribution of one’s success or achievement. This study points to the re-emergent role of associations in negotiating everyday life in the face of crisis. It is a significant contribution towards understanding voluntary and communal associations in general and young people’s modes of transitions into social adulthood.

This rhetorical analysis of a contemporary and historical social movement, American conservatism, through a prominent intellectual figure, Russell Kirk, begins with a description of the author's work. Ideologies, arguments, and sentiments are considered as implicit rhetoric, where social relations are defined by persuasion, ideas, historical appeal, persona, and various invitations to shared assumptions. First, a descriptive historical context is the foundation to explore the beliefs, communicative strategies, and internal tensions of the conservative movement through the development of various identities and communities during its rise as a formidable political power. Second, an analysis of the author and the author's texts clarifies argumentative and stylistic choices, providing a framework for his communicative choices. The thesis of this discussion is that the discourses implicit and explicit in the author's writing and conduct of life were imaginative and literary products of what he termed "moral imagination." How this imagination developed, and its impact upon his persuasion, was a unique approach not only to an emergent intellectual tradition but also to the disciplines of history, fiction, policy, and audience. This work argues there were two components to Kirk's rhetoric of moral imagination. First, his choosing of historical subjects, in biographical sketch and literary content, was an indication of his own interest in rhetorical efficacy. Second, he attempted to live out the sort of life he claimed to value. I argue he taught observers by an ethos, an endeavor to live a rhetorical demonstration of what he genuinely believed was good. As demonstrated by what many who knew Kirk identified as an inner strength of character and conduct, his rhetorical behavior was motivated by a love for and a curiosity toward wonder and mystery. By an imaginative reading of history, his exemplars of more properly ordered sentiments of a moral order sought to build communities of associational, relational persons that found identity in relation to other persons. His ambition was to explore and communicate what it meant to be human - in limitation, in promise, and in the traditions and customs that provide a framework for "human" in a culture.

The invasive cactus moth, Cactoblastis cactorum, poses a threat to opunitoid cacti species of North America. The following work contains four separate studies investigating C. cactorum host plant preference and performance, predation and parastitism of C. cactorum, effects of C. cactorum on local Opuntia populations, and associational effects of host and non-host plants on C. cactorum and native Opuntia-feeding herbivores. We found that, among southwestern and Mexican opuntioid taxa, moths preferred O. engelmannii var. linguiformis and var. engelmannii for oviposition, while Consolea rubescens and O. streptacantha were superior larval hosts. Oviposition was best predicted by number of cladodes and degree of spininess; epidermal toughness was a significant predictor of most larval fitness parameters. In general, oviposition preference was not correlated with larval performance. A lack of co-evolutionary history between C. cactorum and North American opuntioid species may help explain this disconnect. We placed irradiated C. cactorum eggsticks and pupae on Opuntia plants in the field to test for predation. We found evidence of predation, most likely from ants, on ~16% of eggsticks and ~18% of pupae. Predation rates, ant abundance, and cladode growth were higher, and C. cactorum damage lower, on Opuntia located near the extrafloral nectar-producing legume Chamaecrista fasciculata. We attribute these associational effects to the ability of C. fasciculata to attract ants to its extrafloral nectar. Over the course of six years, ~78% of nearly 600 tagged Opuntia were attacked by C. cactorum at least once and ~76% of the plants survived. Two separate studies found that Opuntia stricta was more likely to be attacked by C. cactorum than O. humifusa; we also found that O. stricta was more likely to die following an attack. A plant's odds of survival decreased as C. cactorum attack frequency increased, but plants that did survive had positive growth rates, regardless of attack status. We did not find significant evidence of associational effects for O. humifusa and O. stricta, either for C. cactorum or native Opuntia-feeding herbivores. It could be that present herbivore densities are low enough, and host plants plentiful enough, to avoid mechanisms that usually lead to associational resistance or susceptibility. Overall, our results suggest that the presence and spread of C. cactorum should be taken seriously, especially for rare opuntioids and the Opuntia-rich deserts of North America. However, for more common opuntioid host species, there may be enough resistant or tolerant individuals, and sufficient top down control through ant predation, for populations to persist at current C. cactorum densities. We acknowledge that information on Opuntia reproduction and recruitment rates are needed to confirm this suggestion, and see this as an excellent opportunity for future research

Indirect ecological effects such as associational resistance and resource competition have the potential to affect ecological interactions and influence the structure of ecological communities. Although resource competition is commonly studied, the effects of associational resistance are not as evident if studies are not designed to detect them. Additionally, the relative strengths of different ecological mechanisms ought to be measured in studies, rather than the strength of singular mechanisms. This permits proper attribution of causes and effects in community structure and detection of higher order interactions in a way that naïve reductionism will not. In a series of experiments, I looked at the effects of large-scale addition and removal of Borrichia frutescens on associational resistance of Iva frutescens to the gallformer Asphondylia borrichiae in order to test the mechanism and strength of associational resistance in the system. Additionally, I measured the effects of relative host abundance and interpatch distance of hosts on associational resistance. Finally, I looked at the effect of the presence of stemborers competing with the gall former for host plant resources on parasitism rate and parasitoid guild composition. I found evidence for a strong effect of associational resistance by natural enemies over short distances, although the phenomenon is likely of minor importance in comparison to other factors known to affect gall former population density, such as environmental effects and host plant genotype. Competitors also had a weak effect, reducing mean gall diameter, but not significantly altering total parasitism rate. However, the presence of stemborer competitors did slightly alter the composition of the parasitoid guild. In sum, both associational resistance and competition from stemborers have detectable effects on A. borrichiae, albeit weak ones. Environmental factors, such as soil nitrogen content, are likely much stronger determinants of gall former population size.