Despite the ‘post-media condition’ of contemporary practice, some materials continue to be more equal than others. Cloth has a problematic history in Western art, frequently dismissed for its perceived inability to convey meaning beyond its own materiality, or a narrow idea of identity. The following thesis reconsiders this perspective and argues that it arose from the concurrence of heterogeneous post-war groups such as Post-Minimalism, and Fiber and Tapestry Movements, and the plethora of textile-based work they created. I review the accompanying critical responses to demonstrate how they sought to differentiate the use of fabric within these movements through the entrenchment of boundaries between valourised ‘art’ and denigrated ‘craft’. The thesis analyses how these categories were further complicated by mismatched lexicons of textile terminology. While fibre movements referred overtly and directly to fabric, the coinciding art theory primarily described its functions and affectations. We talk about the ‘softness’ of Oldenburg’s sculptures, not the cloth that makes them. This research argues that while there has been increasing scholarship surrounding these suppressed ‘craft’ textile practices, there is little exploration of the parallel and distinct material history of fabric within Western canonical Fine Art. The project addresses this asymmetry by focusing on the unspoken instances of cloth in mainstream twentieth century sculptural work and identifying the particular ways that artists have used this material. Artists have long employed the quotidian and shifting nature of textiles to convey ideas of instability, an impulse that can be traced back to Marcel Duchamp's 1913 work 3 Standard Stoppages. In order to critically interrogate the existing histories of textiles in twentieth century sculptural practices, the historical narratives presented in a number of exhibitions and catalogues are investigated. These accounts are considered in relation to three case studies that examine instances of structural, spatial and temporal instability in which cloth disrupts and untethers notions of fixed forms and static spaces. Investigating these narratives highlights historical cloth omissions, allowing for an understanding of how amnesiatic textile gaps affect practitioners today. My own cloth-based sculptural practice gives me a material authority and alternative perspective with which to question these received art historical narratives, and that in turn allows me to re-contextualise my decision to consistently work with this medium. My research-led practice centres on fabric objects that reference architectural forms; pieces that explore and exploit the unstable nature of cloth through their unfixed nature, and that I constantly reposition, resisting a final placement. By documenting these movements through photography and video, different temporalities are suggested, and a series of works that fluctuate between stasis and fluidity, order and chaos, are created. Accompanying these works are passages in the dissertation that reflectively a ddress the process of making and contending with the legacy of cloth. This project argues that fabric has been under-recognised but widely used in sculptural practices for over a century. Through explicitly articulating this narrative, a richer historical context for works that use fabric can be ascertained, and the insufficient complement of textile language in contemporary artistic discourse can be redressed.

This practice-led PhD aims to answer the question: how can processual/improvisation, spatial and plurilingual poetics be used to adapt text from other sources in order to create new effective forms? T=Y=W=Y=S=O=G=I=O=N is a discursive long sequence that aims to answer this question through variously translating, transforming, appropriating and adapting text drawn from the Welsh medieval cycle of stories the Mabinogi. In addition, this thesis uses specifically the Oxford Jesus College MS. 111, (The Red Book of Hergest) as its source. The creative work is broken into three sections which deal with these separate motifs. ‘The Red Book of Hergest Ward’ uses spatial and multilingual motifs to explore the word Hergest. ‘Cych’ explores spatial and improvisatory motifs. Finally, ‘Branwen’ deals with improvisation and adaptation. While the creative work seeks to explore the three critical strands of the thesis it also obeys its own aesthetic logic, and in so doing omits and includes different thematic motifs beyond the remit of the three critical chapters. The critical part of the thesis explores the individual thematic strands separately, answering more specific questions that address aspects of the creative work. The foundation of these chapters are close-read examples of authors who use the relevant approaches in their work. Finally, I discuss writers who show hybridity in their work incorporating more than one of these (critical) strands in their writing, David Jones as an example of a writer who uses all three strands. Comparisons with my own work are drawn throughout this thesis. Audio recordings of performed work from the creative portfolio accompanies this thesis, recorded by and with improvised accompaniment from Dario Lozano-Thornton.

Background: Patient safety is of paramount importance in healthcare delivery. Following the inquiry into the Mid Staffordshire Health Trust (Francis 2013, 2015), there has been an increasing demand for nurses and other healthcare professionals to be open and candid in a transparent culture where harm and error are minimised. Despite this drive for openness, there is evidence that health care professionals remain reluctant to raise concerns and this includes student nurses as well as registrants. There is however paucity in research focusing upon the underlying factors which prevent student nurses from raising concerns about suboptimal practice. In an attempt to contribute to the discussion, this study will focus upon student nurses. Aim: The overall aim of this research is to understand student nurses’ perception of what they believe is a patient safety incident in their practice placements and understand the reasons that influence their willingness or reluctance to raise concerns about patient safety. Findings: Four main themes emerged from analysing the data: the context of patient safety; team culture; hierarchy and fear of retribution. Analysis and discussion of the data revealed that students were driven to raise concerns as they possessed strong moral and ethical beliefs to uphold patient safety. However, they had an overwhelming desire to fit in with their clinical colleagues and feared retribution and failure if they voiced concerns regarding care. This demonstrated that student nurses were subject to a fluctuating moral compass which was determined by psychological and sociological determinants. Conclusion: This research study has provided information which contributes to our understanding of student nurses’ beliefs about patient safety. It also helps us to recognise the factors that influence student nurses’ willingness or reluctance to speak up. This is important because with an increased understanding of their experiences and beliefs, we are better informed to broaden our teaching on this topic and develop effective policies to protect student nurses who raise concerns.

Professionalism can be a complex concept to define (McLachlan et al. 2002; Finn et al. 2009). Within nursing, the majority of studies have explored professionalism within the clinical environment, and very few examine how student nurses construct their talk regarding professionalism while they study at university, highlighting this as a distinct gap in the knowledge and understanding. The aim of this study was to uncover the discourses used by student nurses and lecturers, and offer insight into the influences on student professional language from within and outside of the nursing profession and offer an appreciation of the processes of language (discourse) adoption. The theoretical position adopted was social constructionism, where it is assumed we jointly construct our world on shared assumptions and that language is central to this process (Potter and Wetherell 2009). The methodological approach employed was Discourse and Social Psychology (DASP) (Potter and Wetherell 1987). Seventeen (17) interviews were conducted. Eight (8) of which were one-off interviews with lecturers. Seven (7) students from adult, child and mental health nursing were interviewed multiple times over the three years of their nursing programme. FIGURE 1 presents an overview of the research process. The analysis suggested that participants drew upon a number of interpretative repertoires and memes. These led to the identification of discursive threads, which were proposed as entangled within discursive knots, serving to position students and lecturers within a dynamic process of professional discourse development. The theoretical perspectives of Foucault, Goffman, Bourdieu and Harre informed the interpretation of the talk. Initially, students were positioned in a place of high surveillance through authoritative language used by lecturers. This position informed the discursive know of 'separation' which serves to maintain student nurses as 'different' and ‘special’, and to distance them from other university students. Clinical practice experience was seen as influencing students’ talk when back in University, emphasising differences. The discursive knot of 'maintaining quality and credibility' questions the 'real' place of nursing and the credibility of lecturers, and brings about a positioning of students that influences agency. The final discursive know of 'permission' is located in the talk of lecturers and final-year student nurses only. This knot illustrates students adopting the discourses of the registered nurse, including the surveillance talk used by lecturers to first-year students. This suggests that final-year students 'become' enforcers and protectors of 'difference'. This study highlights the intricacies and complexities of the 'professionalism discourses' woven into the talk of lecturers and nursing students, and their spread via both the overt and hidden curricula. Indeed, the adoption of the 'permission' discourse by third-year students suggests the perpetuation of a discourse via a socialisation process. The discursive 'knots' seem to function to instill, maintain and perpetuate wider discourses. The 'separation' and 'permission' knots may be viewed as serving to 'other' to maintain the 'specialness' of the profession, while the 'maintaining quality and credibility' knot may indicate tensions related to academic and clinical professional sub-groups and sites of knowledge development.

The current study sets out to investigate the level of Pakistani university students’ willingness to communicate (WTC) in English and what affects users’ willingness in a setting where English has been taught, learnt, and used as a foreign language. Pakistan is a linguistically complex society where ethnic diversity and multiple educational systems increasingly makes English language teaching (ELT) daunting and challenging. This thesis, therefore, highlights particularly the linguistic issues users of English face while perceiving their willingness to communicate in English in their day-to-day affairs. I argue that linguists and policy makers, in Pakistan, have largely neglected or failed to address the issues related to users of English ability to communicate in English. Moreover, I argue that studying these users’ willingness to communicate in English has also been essential in a sense to comprehend that how such users perceive their level of willingness to communicate under various conversational contexts with different types of interlocutors. The present study was conducted at Shah Abdul Latif University (SALU), Khairpur, Pakistan. Khairpur is one of the oldest cities of Pakistan with its rich cultural heritage and political history. However, the educational standard is still in its early stages of development due to the rural location and lack of interest from the government. Using mixed-method research measures, the current study recruited N=350 research participants for self-administered questionnaires and N=15 for semi-structured interviews. The findings of the present study suggested that users of English from SALU did not have a high level of WTC and their WTC was affected by a host of factors such as topic, task type, interlocutors, interactional contexts, desire to get good grades, gender, lack of self-confidence and communication anxiety, and some of the background variables. Evidence from self-report questionnaires and semi-structured interviews indicated that familiarity with interlocutors and knowledge of the interactional contexts encouraged L2 learners to be more willing to communicate. Results of the study further revealed that the influence of the combination of variables differed between individuals and interrelationship could be too complex to be predicted. At the end, acknowledging the limitations of the current study, recommendations for future research have been proposed along with possible pedagogical implications.

The following work constitutes an inquiry into the economic, social and political composition of what are commonly known as the cultural or creative industries. My aim is to provide a critique of the discursive origins, political dimensions, economic models and subjective constructions that shape the complex set of practices and discourses that comprise the creative industries. To do so, this work looks into the production of a set of schemes, policies, plans, economic models, modes of labour, regulations and discourses that have been designed in order to transform cultural practices into economic activities. I will contextualize these transformations within a general framework of what has been branded ‘cognitive capitalism’, acknowledging that this process needs to be understood with reference to the neoliberalization of the wider economy through focusing on a set of changes in the nature of labour, value and creativity. I then attempt to understand the ecosystem in which the creative industries are enmeshed. In order to do so, I will discuss the notion of the cultural commons: the pools of collective ideas and knowledge from which these enterprises capture their raw material. Not only will this give an understanding of the nature of the sources of knowledge and ideas that feed the creative industries but will also to provide a good opportunity to understand the communities, objects and relations that shape them. Finally there is a discussion on the tensions, bifurcations and alternatives that escape the hegemonic economic models promoted by policy. This will open up possibilities in which to think of forms of self-organization and commons-based cultural enterprises that might provide new spaces in which the economy and culture can meet.

This thesis is an attempt to think through a number of questions arising from the intense circulation of Japanese brands in East Asia, which I call the East Asian Brandscape, and, in doing so, produces an innovative conceptual framework to understand brands and branding. The ubiquitous presence of American brands has been linked to Americanization, particularly Hollywood film’s global dominance, and is summarized in the phrase ‘trade follows the films’. Similarly, the East Asian brandscape has been linked to Japanization, an intense circulation of Japanese popular culture throughout the region, and may be summarized in the phrase ‘trade follows manga’. This Japanization discourse is based on the unsubstantiated assumption that the globalization of Japanese brands is closely linked to the presence (or the lack) of symbolic appeal of Japanese popular culture in a given market. This thesis investigates the largely understudied processes in which the globalization of Japanese brands is taking place in the context of Japanization through case studies on Japanese luxury cosmetics brands. In the first section, ‘analysis from outside’, the thesis draws out a contour of the East Asian brandscape, which is shaped by large multinational corporations such as L’Oréal, Shiseido, and Estee Lauder. In global capitalism, brands are routinely exchanged across national borders by these corporations in order to manage and thrive on local differences. Drawing on Appadurai, this thesis argues that we need to understand brandscape as the organization of otherwise disjunctive scapes, rather than in the image of the Americanization model. In the second section, ‘analysis from inside’, I explore the ways in which the branding is reformulated as the design and management of consumers’ experience in/through a great number of brand interfaces – material and immaterial – in which semantic and symbolic registers (such as Japan’s symbolic appeal) are engulfed in the overall affective ambience of brand experience. What is at stake in this reconfiguration, it is argued, is the unequal distribution of skills and finance resources across national borders required to global brand management, rather than distribution and consumption of national symbolic power. What emerge through the analysis of both outside and inside is a complex and contradictory relationship between Japanese brands and globalization that is no longer understood in a national framework.

This study explores the meanings that older people attach to their participation in group arts activities throughout their lives. Existing literature on arts engagement and ageing is limited, especially in the UK context, and does little to reveal the complex factors that shape people’s participation. Much existing research approaches the subject from an arts and health perspective, meaning that issues for older people who are actively engaged in their communities are largely unexplored, and their voices are absent. Reflecting a narrative approach, and the need to adopt a life-course perspective, this study involves qualitative interviews with 24 participants who have connections with a case-study town in the English Midlands. Participants were recruited through a range of groups, including choirs, dancing, amateur dramatics, and arts and crafts groups. The study’s findings highlight the key roles played by people’s childhood experiences at home, school and church, in shaping arts engagement. There are important gender and class differences in participants’ experiences, and these in turn are significantly influenced by historical context. In challenging a common ‘deficit’ approach to research with older people, this study uses the concept of social capital as a basis for analysis. This emphasises the critical importance of people’s relationships and communities in shaping participation. Findings offer qualitative understandings of the ways in which older people experience and invest social capital through their group arts engagement, and of the dynamics of mutual support and reciprocity that can thus be seen in the lives of older people. The study concludes that social capital and people’s group arts engagement can be linked to the wider concept of ‘resourceful ageing’ which, in turn, contributes to a better understanding of the impact of life-course experiences on later life opportunities and challenges.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Zhongguo ren min da xue, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 276-280).

Terrestrial free-space optical (FSO) communications is an emerging low-cost, licensefree and high-bandwidth access solution for a number of applications including the “last mile” access network. However, for a transmission range from a few meter to longer than 1 km, a number of atmospheric phenomena, such as rain, haze, fog, snow, scintillation and pointing errors become a major performance limiting factors in FSO systems resulting in link deterioration and ultimately complete link failure. Relay-assisted technique is capable of mitigating the signal fading and maintain acceptable performance levels. In this thesis, a two-way relay (TWR) channel technique is adopted to increase system spectral efficiency, which in turn boosts the network throughput. This is achieved by using a physical layer network coding (PNC) technique, where network coding (NC) is applied at the physical layer. It takes advantage of the superimposition of the electromagnetic waves, and embraces the interference, which was typically deemed as harmful, by performing the exclusive-OR mapping of both users’ information at the relay. Therefore, the main contribution of this thesis is to study the design of the TWR-FSO communication system that embraces PNC technique for the full utilization of network resources based on the binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation. Moreover, error control coding (ECC) in conjunction with interleaving can be employed in FSO communications to combat turbulence-induced fading, which can enhance the performance of the proposed TWR-FSO PNC system. A comparative study between convolutional code (CC) and bit-interleave coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) code are carried out. The result shows that the BICM-ID code outperforms the CC for TWR-FSO based PNC over strong turbulence regime by ~10dB of SNR to achieve a BER of 10-4 . However, the number of users that can be simultaneously transmitted to the relay is considered the main constraint in PNC system. Therefore, to overcome this challenge, a new scheme that integrates the iterative multiuser detection (I-MUD) technique with the PNC system over RF and FSO links are introduced as another achievement. The results show that the I-MUD offers improved performance about 8, and 22dB of SNR to get a BER of 10-4 over RF and FSO channels, respectively, for number of simultaneously users equal to 14 with respect to TWR-PNC system.