A post-structuralist analysis of Irish youth crime prevention policy with specific emphasis on the Garda youth diversion projects

Garda Youth Diversion Projects (GYDPs) have since their beginnings in the early 1990s gained an increasingly important role and now constitute a central feature of Irish youth justice provision. Managed by the Irish Youth Justice Service and implemented by the Gardai and a variety of youth work organisations as well as independent community organisations, GYDPs are located at the crossroads of welfarist and corporatist approaches to youth justice, combining diversionary and preventative aspects in their work. To date, these projects have been subjected to very little systematic analysis and they have thus largely escaped critical scrutiny. To address this gap, this thesis locates the analysis of GYDP policy and practice within a post-structuralist theoretical framework and deploys discourse analysis primarily based on the work of Michel Foucault. It makes visible the official youth crime prevention and GYDP policy discourses and identifies how official discourses relating to youth crime prevention, young people and their offending behaviour, are drawn upon, negotiated, rejected or re-contextualised by project workers and JLOs. It also lays bare how project workers and JLOs draw upon a variety of other discourses, resulting in multi-layered, complex and sometimes contradictory constructions of young people, their offending behaviour and corresponding interventions. At a time when the projects are undergoing significant changes in terms of their repositioning to operate as the support infrastructure underpinning the statutory Garda Youth Diversion Programme, the thesis traces the discursive shifts and the implications for practice that are occurring as the projects move away from a youth work orientation towards a youth justice orientation. A key contribution of this thesis is the insight it provides into how young people and their families are being constituted in individualising and sometimes pathologising ways in GYDP discourses and practices. It reveals the part played by the GYDP intervention in favouring individual and narrow familial causes of offending behaviour while broader societal contexts are sidelined. By explicating the very assumptions upon which contemporary youth crime prevention policy, as well as GYDP policy and practice are based, this thesis offers a counterpoint to the prevailing evidence-based agenda of much research in the field of Irish youth justice theory and youth studies more generally. Rather, it encourages the reader to take a step back and examine some of the most fundamental and unquestioned assumptions about the construction of young people, their offending behaviour and ways of addressing this, in contemporary Irish youth crime prevention policy and practice.

Azione destabilizzante e impegno politico. Le figure femminili tra il giallo e il nero Italiani dal 1980 a oggi

My thesis analyses female figures in Italian crime fiction since 1980, from narratological, sociological and gender-studies perspectives. It considers the narrative structure of the giallo and the noir, taking into account the difficulties, particularly in Italy, of establishing what noir fiction is and if/how it is possible to frame it in a specific narrative scheme. This discourse connects to the extraordinary success of Italian giallo and noir fiction over the past fifteen-twenty years. In this scenario, I examine the place of female writers in relation to this phenomenon, especially since the 1980s: in terms of the level of visibility/acceptance of their work, in a narrative space traditionally considered as a male territory, and with regard to their writings, which introduce different narrative perspectives. Specifically, I consider selected texts by leading female Italian writers, in which female elements (writers/characters) become destabilizing factor both on the narrative level, by undermining the schemes of ‘formulaic’ fiction, and on the political one, through their implicit potential (as women) for disrupting the rigid models inherited from processes of social conditioning and from political structures. In terms of gender identities, such texts offer scope to question conventional social constructions of the subject: by empowering the female narrative voice and by embodying it in characters (investigators/killers) traditionally personified by male figures. These texts offer themselves as a critical space where, potentially, readers can rethink static gendered relationships and stereotypical symbolical categories.

Human intestinal microbiota and metabolites they produce in relation to host health

The aim of this thesis was to identify selected potential probiotic characteristics of Bifidobacterium longum strains isolated from human sources, and to examine these characteristics in detail using genomic and phenotypic techniques. One strain in particular Bifidobacterium longum DPC 6315 was the main focus of the thesis and this strain was used in both the manufacture of yoghurt and an animal study. In total, 38 B. longum strains, obtained from infants and adults, were assessed in vitro for the selected probiotic traits using a combined phenotypic and molecular approach. Differentiation of the 38 strains using amplified ribosomal DNA restriction analysis (ARDRA) into subspecies indicated that of the 38 bifidobacterial strains tested, 34 were designated B. longum subsp. longum and four B. longum subsp. infantis.