This study highlights the significance of equal participation of men and women as central to the future health of politics and the democratic process in Wales. Following affirmative action taken by two major Welsh political parties, the National Assembly for Wales has been notable for the high level of female representation among its membership since the legislature was created in 1999. The large number of women in the Assembly is a unique phenomenon both politically and geographically. However, the question that remains unanswered is this: in spite of equal political representation in the Assembly, are men and women now treated equally and fairly by the Welsh press? This research is the first comparative study of press representations of men and women in a political institution that has an almost equal number of male and female representatives. It specifically attempts to examine how 12 Welsh newspapers portrayed female Assembly Members [AMs] during a three-month Welsh national election period as well as during a later three-month routine press coverage period. It draws on content and discourse analyses of the press coverage of over 3000 articles from about 1000 newspaper editions during the two periods studied. It is also based on data generated by in-depth interviews with 28 AMs from the current Assembly. This study shows that when there has been a relative equal participation of women in a political institution over a period, the gender issue initially remains noticeable and “business as usual”. However, over time, more complex media representations of male and female politicians have been observed and gender bias has gradually become less salient and controversial than before, both in colleagues’ perceptions of women politicians and in media representations, because gender parity has become a norm.

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A project was sponsored by the SERC for research into the design of a colour vision system for the detection of print faults in rotary screen printed fabrics. The research was carried out at De Montfort University (formerly named Leicester Polytechnic), which has previous experience with Image Processing in relation to Textiles. The proposed system was required to identify, process and correct the common print faults which can occur during rotary screen printing. These can be divided into two main categories, systematic and random faults. This thesis covers the work undertakeni n the developmento f a laboratory-basedin spection systema ndt he subsequendte velopmenat nd testingo f methodologiesto facilitate factory-based on-line inspection. Initial investigation identified the requirement for colour segmentation algorithmsa ndt he researchin to anda nalysiso f suitablem ethodologiesf or segmentationf orms a fundamental part of this thesis. Important, new colour segmentation algorithms were developed from first principles by the author. These new methods offer improvements (in most cases significant) over the current `state-of-the-art' colour segmentation technology, and are applicable to a wide-range of computer vision tasks. These proposed methodologies have been rigorously tested and the findings of the investigation are presented as part of this thesis.

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A sense of place and time has been the unconscious focus of my adult life. While living in Hawaii I often searched for ancient rock carving sites. These art forms have the ability to convey the mystery, magic and history of previous times. I use human figures, beads and various textiles with similarities to these petroglyphs as a powerful metaphor for my search to find a place that is home

As an artist, I am fascinated by surfaces and the stories they tell. I have observed that places and objects, like people, wear the effects of age in different ways. Their stories are revealed through pealing paint, rusty metal, and surface patina. My photographs are a record of their state of existence at the moment I am present. I have chosen a point in time when each is at rest, with only the aged surface to hint of a life of use. Their stories unfold with observation through the lens of my camera.

The Revolutionary era was a period of radical political change in France which dissolved traditional boundaries of privilege. It was also a time of creative experimentation on the stage, the street, and in print. Performance and theatrical language were an integral part of the French Revolution. This interdisciplinary thesis makes a vital contribution to knowledge of the cultural production of the French Revolution by analysing the theatrical influences in its satirical prints. It argues that printmakers drew from different aspects of Revolutionary performance to create their prints, from street singers and fairground performers to unsanctioned Revolutionary events and topics favoured by the stage, including the representation of Revolutionary characters in hell. These depictions – observed for the first time under thematic banners – provide a new insight into the multiplicity of opinions, beliefs and attitudes during the French Revolution.

Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / This study examines how Irish and American writing from the early twentieth century demonstrates a continued engagement with the formal, thematic and cultural imperatives of the Irish Literary Revival. It brings together writers and intellectuals from across Ireland and the United States - including James Joyce, George William Russell (Æ), Alice Milligan, Lewis Purcell, Lady Gregory, the Fugitive-Agrarian poets, W. B. Yeats, Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Ezra Pound - whose work registers the movement's impact via imitation, homage, adaptation, appropriation, repudiation or some combination of these practices. Individual chapters read Irish and American writing from the period in the little magazines and literary journals where it first appeared, using these publications to give a material form to the larger, cross-national web of ideas and readers that linked distant regions. Until recently, scholars have been disinclined to interpret the Revival in a transnational framework, preferring instead to emphasize the cultural work its literature and drama accomplished on behalf of nationalist politics in Ireland. Yet, as this study demonstrates, the movement was imbricated in a process of cultural exchange extending well beyond Ireland's borders, resulting in a variety of revivalist afterlives that testify to the movement's extra-national influence. I use the term "afterlife" to describe the versions of revivalism produced when the movement's original impulses and strategies were, in W. H. Auden's words, "modified in the guts of the living," in some cases long after the peak of revivalist activity was supposed to have passed. The word confers a spectral quality to the movement, describing the Revival's re-emergence in new locations and at later dates. Writers in both countries engaged with revivalism, re-animating many of the debates over questions of identity, belonging and cultural authenticity that had originally motivated the movement's leaders. In doing so, such writers granted the Revival a vital afterlife, demonstrating the relevance of these debates in other national and historical contexts. The relationship this dynamic describes is one of both cross-cultural affiliation, in which intellectuals and writers are actively inspired by the example of the Irish Revival, and one of reverberation - a kind of textual haunting, where the defining features of revivalism echo in later works. The movement survived, in other words, and multiplied, finding new life in Irish and American modernists' experiments with tradition. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

“A Place ‘Rendered Interesting’: Antebellum Print Culture and the Rise of Middle-Class Tourism” analyzes the frequently overlooked ideological dimensions of antebellum print culture related to tourism. Traveling through the American leisure landscape became a primary means by which writers, poets, artists, and everyday sightseers explored and defined their worlds. Through tourism, authors expressed some of their deepest anxieties about the society they inhabited. Tourism texts are therefore deceptively powerful cultural artifacts; in fact, sometimes their codified and even repetitive nature was a means of emphasizing an author or authors’ deepest fears. In my dissertation, I analyze guidebooks, travelogues, periodicals, gift books, children’s literature, novels, and visual culture to reveal how authors and artists used potentially escapist discourses of leisure travel to engage with the most pressing problems of the antebellum moment. My examination of touristic print culture shows that this archive, long dismissed as superficial, was in fact central to the consolidation of white middle class identity, to the emergence of manifest destiny, and to ongoing debates over of the rise of commercialism and abolition. Chapter one explores how antebellum guidebooks address ideologies of progress and empire. I examine Catskill guidebook authors’ uses of literary sources, particularly short stories by Washington Irving. These authors quoted and cited Irving’s stories to create a white mythology for the Catskills that marginalized non-white people and encouraged their removal. Chapter two situates tourism within the broader context of antebellum class identity. I argue that authors like Catherine Maria Sedgwick and Nathaniel Parker Willis employ tourism discourse to articulate concerns about the threat of upwardly mobile lower classes and their potential impact on supposed middle-class morality. Chapter three frames the tension between Romanticism and capitalism inherent in touristic culture. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sketches and stories of the White Mountains, I argue, can help us understand the emergent antebellum problem of the commodified landscape. In Chapter four, I argue that tourism became a space for heated political debate on slavery. Abolitionists like Lydia Maria Child encouraged readers to consider the possibility of reorganized society – specifically, a society without slaves – through the imaginative possibilities of the cave aesthetic. / 2020-11-27T00:00:00Z