One of the most critical issues of our time is sustainability. Simultaneously, techno optimism is prevailing in public discourse suggesting that technology will create a sustainable future without requiring drastic changes. Despite the connection that is often drawn between technology and sustainability and the presence of technologies in organisations, research combining the two concepts remains limited and does not account for the interplay of social values and technological artefacts. To overcome this incomplete picture of technology, this thesis employs sociomateriality to investigate how sustainability and technology are understood in relation to each other by young sustainability practitioners in for-profit organisations. Following the social constructivist philosophy, nine semi-structured interviews were conducted which show that practitioners recognise the environmental and social limits to development and use the triple bottom line (TBL), consisting of economic, environmental and social dimensions to translate sustainability into organisations. However, TBL implementation varies between organisations showing the difficulty of unifying organisational sustainability in one concept. Furthermore, young sustainability practitioners understand technology as sociomaterial, describing the interplay between an artefact’s affordances and restraints, and the practitioner’s configuration work that co-create outcomes. Moreover, the interviewees are optimists not because they rely on technology, but they believe in human’s ability to change which differs from techno optimism. It can be concluded that practitioners are critical about relying on technology for sustainability and believe that sustainability is created through an interplay of humans with technology, transferring responsibility to humans. When it comes to creating a sustainable future, they first struggled to envision an alternative future beyond technological developments but started imagining when given space to reflect. One outcome of the research is that young sustainability practitioners must be given room to reflect on their understanding of sustainability, technology and their relationship as the first step to taking actions to create the future.

The purpose of this study was to examine various aspects of Millennials' attitudes related to their beliefs about the United States and in the context of their personal, career, and family goals and ethnic identity. Another purpose of this study was to determine if selected personality variables would predict attitudes toward the United States. It was found that Millennials who held positive attitudes toward the United States in terms of being a viable country for them also had relatively clear and developed personal, career, and family goals. Moreover, three personality variables—resiliency, optimism, and (inversely) cynicism significantly contributed to Millennials' views of the United States. Last, ethnic identity—strong feelings of attachment and loyalty to one's ethnicity—correlated in various ways with both attitudes toward the United States and the belief that the United States is oppressive toward minorities. Those observed correlations varied depending on the specific ethnicity (non-Hispanic Whites who strongly identified with their ethnicity were less likely to consider the United States a discriminatory country toward minorities, whereas Hispanics, African Americans, and Asian Americans who identified strongly with their ethnicity were more likely to view the United States as oppressive toward minorities. More research is recommended to clarify and elucidate some of the obtained findings in this study.

In her 1929 essay "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf famously asserts that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (4). This concept places an immediate importance on the role of the Modernist female subject as an artist and as an architect, constructing the places and spaces that she exists within. With Woolf's argument as its point of departure, this thesis investigates the theme of female space in two Modernist texts: Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963). The respective protagonists of Quicksand and The Bell Jar, Helga Crane and Esther Greenwood, each undertake journeys to obtain spaces that are purely their own. However, this thesis positions each space that Helga and Esther occupy as both male-constructed and male-dominated in order to address the inherent gendering of space and its impact on the development of feminine identities. This thesis focuses specifically on the roles of the mother, the muse, and the female mentor, tracking the spaces in which Helga and Esther begin to adhere to these roles. Expanding on Lauren Berlant's theory of cruel optimism, this thesis will use the term "cruel femininity" to support its intervening claim that the respective relationships that Helga and Esther each have with their own feminine identities begin to turn cruel as they internalize the male-dominated spatial structures surrounding them. Overall, this thesis argues that there is no space in existence where Helga and Esther can realize their full potential as human beings, as long as the spatial structures within their communities continue to be controlled by hegemonic, patriarchal beliefs.

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