According to a 2017 study conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, roughly one in four women will have an abortion in their lifetime. Despite how incredibly common of an experience it is, one almost never hears abortion talked about on an individual basis. This study seeks to find out why people who’ve had abortions do or don’t talk about them, and why, as well as what, if anything, can and needs to be done to change the conversational landscape around abortion. I used qualitative methods to conduct seven participant-led interviews with different people who have had abortions. My findings show that people don’t talk about their abortions for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to: fear of stigma, feeling there’s no non-“awkward” way to bring it up in conversation, and simply not really thinking about it that often. My participants also described a variety of ideas for fighting this stigma, primarily through connecting with, talking with, listening to, and being a source of mutual support for other people who have also had abortions. Because I used a participatory-action model of methods, my participants and I worked to put some of their ideas into action after the conclusion of our interviews.

Thesis advisor: Alyssa W. Goldman / Pandemic mutual aid groups are part of a contemporary mutual aid movement which intends to marry the spontaneous suspension of social boundaries of post-disaster collective action with sustained community-building and social justice. This comparative case study examines how two such radical social change organizations navigate the tension between ideology and the need for resources. Specifically, I ask what strategies organizers deployed in pursuit of their dual mandate, under the banner of ‘solidarity not charity.’ Despite virtually identical philosophies, visions, and circumstances, I find that organizers deployed different resource mobilization strategies to access and generate moral, cultural, and human resources. These strategic differences directly influenced organizational outcomes: One group continued to operate more than two years after organizing, while the other was on an indefinite hiatus. The findings depart from what might be predicted by a longstanding focus on material resources in resource mobilization theory, and support the call for more attention to culture and ideology in resource mobilization scholarship. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1986.

This dissertation clarifies a challenge present in Peter Singer's famine-relief argument and offers a new account of our moral duties of rescue. The challenge, in essence, is to differentiate two classes of idealized rescue scenarios where one faces the opportunity to rescue someone from serious peril, and to differentiate them in way that both avoids a shockingly demanding conclusion and effectively counteracts the suspicion that one is maintaining and merely rationalizing a self-serving position. To meet this challenge I provide an account whereby both the extent and the limits of our rescue duties are determined in ways that are plausibly continuous with moral and practical norms more generally. / Philosophy

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1986. / Also available in print.

This paper is a cross-genre pilot study in Anarchist thought experiments. It is not an attempt to produce an encyclopedic review of the emergence or function of anarchism in critical dystopias. My objective is not so ambitious; my aim is to plot the evolution of each rebellion within its own context. In the end, I hope to broaden an understanding of Anarchy and Anarchism: not an understanding that congeals and grows more rigid, but rather an understanding that expands and flows, nearing a point of superfluidity. The primary focal points of analysis are Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed, the graphic novel V for Vendetta, created by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, and the film The Matrix, written and directed by the Wachowski Brothers. These texts and film have been selected for this project because they each present disparate versions of anarchistic rebellions. Drawing from Thomas Hughes' characterization of the evolution of large technological systems, I analyze the responses of the protagonist Anarchists in these works to the oppressive components of their respective technological infrastructures. The aim of this paper is not to conclude definitely what Anarchism is but what it does, how it works within the boundaries of each thought experiment. Ultimately, each of these texts is a performance, an acting out of Anarchistic ideals embodied in each character's response to the demands of their environment. / Master of Arts

Cette thèse cherche à proposer une lecture historicisée, pour le Liban, de la mise en place et l’évolution de la protection sanitaire et sociale en se concentrant sur le rôle et les relations de fait et de droit entre les deux secteurs : public et privé, et l'influence étrangère notamment celle de l’OIT sur la production de la norme libanaise, pendant les trois périodes majeures de l’histoire au Liban : Ottomane, Française et Le Liban indépendant. / This thesis seeks to provide a historicized approach for the Lebanese establishment and development of health and social care by focusing on the role and relationships factual and legal between the two sectors: public and private and the foreign influences including that of the ILO on the production of the Lebanese standard, during the three major periods of history in Lebanon: Ottoman, French and independent Lebanon.

The purpose of this study was to analyze and measure the short-term and long-term impacts of a chronic disease self-management program (CDSP) for individuals living with HIV/AIDS. This study was a follow-up study on an HIV/AIDS Organization in Southern California’s (HAOSC’s) CDSP programs in 2007 and 2008 called “Newly Empowered Women” (NEW), a six (6) week CDSP for women diagnosed with HIV/AIDS which sought to promote self-efficacy through education and self-management skills. A retrospective longitudinal study on the female clients who participated with this program in 2007 and 2008 determined whether clients retained the skills taught in the CDSP and if they attained self-efficacy through improved behavioral changes in better overall self-management that were influenced as a result of their participation. Behavioral changes were examined and measured in the areas of self-rated health, anxiety and stress, social activities, communication with physicians, and the client’s overall self-confidence in managing symptoms related to the disease. The measurement of change in these areas informed the study on the effectiveness and practicality of the skills being taught in the CDSP and their effectiveness in the promotion of self-efficacy. It also highlighted which skills seem to be most helpful and impactful to clients, and if the skills they learned were retained over time. The study measured the short-term impacts from completion of the CDSP to the 6-month follow-up period and also measured the long-term impacts the CDSP had on client health outcomes three (3) and four (4) years after the initial program was implemented to see if there was a correlation between increased self-efficacy and improved health outcomes. Participant CD4 and viral load counts were analyzed, as these are determinant biological markers in measuring the immunological impacts of the disease. Measuring these variables over time for individuals that were in a CDSP gave the study insight into the CDSP’s short-term and long-term effectiveness in the promotion and sustainment of self-efficacy for individuals living with HIV/AIDS and how the effective management of their chronic illness can lead to overall better health outcomes. Additionally, this study sought to better understand the experience of the women who participated in the CDSP through incorporating a mixed methods qualitative approach, by interviewing some of the women who had participated in the CDSP to identify common themes or lessons learned, best practices of the program, and areas for improvement. Although this study was not able to show that changes in behavior and increased self-efficacy impact health outcomes, more complex analysis should be done in this area, as this study highlighted the positive impacts a CDSP can have on increasing self-management skills and promoting self-efficacy over the short-term and long-term for individuals diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.

Le couple constitue dans notre société une structure favorisant la solidarité. Il trouve une expression sous trois modes de vie reconnus par la loi : le mariage, le Pacs, le concubinage. Tous trois sont ouverts sans condition de différence de sexe. La loi a construit un cadre juridique à cette solidarité (très organisé, impératif, où la volonté contractuelle qui a plus de place aujourd’hui est soumise au contrôle du juge) dans le mariage, puis dans le Pacs où a été laissé une place bien plus grande à la volonté contractuelle. Elle a abandonné à la jurisprudence le soin de remédier aux conséquences que l’absence de texte relatif au concubinage pouvait avoir dès lors que l’équité et la justice le commandaient. Lorsque la loi ne les a pas prévus, c’est la jurisprudence qui a construit les mécanismes juridiques justifiant l’existence d’une solidarité du couple. La solidarité relève donc bien de la nature même du couple. Il existe une unité à la vie de couple parce que celle-ci répond à des caractéristiques, à des nécessités, qui sont identiques quel que soit le mode de vie, qu’il y ait ou non différence de sexe dans le couple. Les différenciations auxquelles aboutit la reconnaissance de plusieurs modes de vie en couple apparaissent aujourd’hui de plus en plus inadéquates. La reconnaissance d’une seule forme officielle de vie en couple constituerait le moyen d’effacer les différences dans la mise en oeuvre de la solidarité et permettrait ainsi de corriger les effets négatifs liés à la solidarité du couple. Ce cadre juridique serait constitué d’un ensemble de règles obligatoires, essentielles à la vie de couple, concernant tant les intérêts extra patrimoniaux que les intérêts patrimoniaux ; une place serait laissée à l’organisation contractuelle de la vie de couple. C’est dans les deux fonctions de la solidarité, que sont l’entraide entre les membres du couple et la garantie vis-à-vis des tiers créanciers du couple, que se construirait ce droit nouveau de la solidarité dans une union civile unique. / The couple constitutes in our company a structure supporting solidarity. It finds an expression under three lifestyles recognized by the law: the marriage, Pacs, the common-law marriage. All three are open without condition of difference in sex. The law built a legal framework with this solidarity (very organized, imperative, where the contractual will which has more room today is subjected to the control of the judge) in the marriage, then in Pacs where a place much larger was left with the contractual will. It gave up with jurisprudence the care to cure the consequences that the absence of relative text to the common-law marriage could have since equity and justice ordered it. When the law did not envisage them, it is the jurisprudence which built the legal mechanisms justifying the existence of solidarity of the couple. Solidarity thus concerns well the nature even of the couple. There exists a unit with the life of couple because this one answers characteristics, with needs, which are identical whatever the lifestyle, that there is or not difference in sex in the couple. Differentiations to which the recognition of several lifestyles in couple leads appear increasingly inadequate today. The recognition of the only one official shape of life in couple would constitute the means of erasing the differences in the implementation of solidarity and would thus make it possible to correct the negative effects related to solidarity of the couple. This legal framework would consist of a set of obligatory rules, essential with the life of couple, concerning as well the patrimonial extra interests as the patrimonial interests; a place would be left with the contractual organization of the life of couple. It is in the two functions of solidarity that are the mutual aid between the members of the couple and the guarantee with respect to the creditor thirds of the couple that would build this new right of solidarity in a single civil union.

My dissertation involves a critique of the concept of life or seimei as it emerged in modern use during the Meiji era (1868-1912). Specifically, I have outlined the conditions of possibility for thinking seimei at particular moments in the development of the modern, market-centered Japanese nation-state in historical and literary terms such that I can begin to use these conditions to think its impossibilities. In short, I argue that a central condition of possibility for thinking life in its modern, historical form is a process of individuation that takes hold of and shapes bodies at an ontological level. By critiquing life and its ontology of individuation, I unearth the traces of an impossible “apriori collectivism” - that is, a collectivism not merely reducible to a congregation of individuals, but originally collective – buried under the calls for individual freedom, self-help, and industrialization that were at the heart of the Meiji era’s modernization project. I track this apriori collectivism in a lineage relating (through non-relation) the mutual aid societies or mujin-kô of the Edo period to the life insurance industry of the Meiji 10s and 20s. I then use this material history of life as backdrop to my study of the literary trends in the latter decades of the Meiji era, and end with a consideration of the political and aesthetic implications seimei has for thought by taking up a study of Iwano Hômei’s Shinpiteki hanjûshugi (Mystical Demi-animalism).