‘Mo Rùn am Fearann’ – ‘My Love is the Land’: Gaelic landscapes of the 18th and 19th centuries

The period of the 18th and 19th centuries was one of great change in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Improvement, the Jacobite Rebellions, and the Clearances transformed its communities and landscapes. These events have rightly been a focus of research. However, archaeological approaches have often sought simply to illustrate these processes, rather than create new narratives about life in the past. The resulting picture of the period can over-emphasise economic change whilst failing to reflect the richness and variety of everyday life. This thesis aims to suggest a new approach to the place and period, one which addresses matters often ignored in previous work. Whilst it has an archaeological sensibility, it draws on ideas from outside archaeology, such as landscape theory and on Gaelic oral tradition, an underused resource, to create a novel and broad-based approach to the period. An important part of the method is a synchronic approach that seeks to reconstruct the experience of the landscape at very particular times, engaging fully with the everyday experience of landscape rather than grand historical narratives. Two Hebridean case studies are utilised: Hiort (St Kilda) and Loch Aoineart, South Uist. Thematic discussions drawn from these landscapes are intended as critical assessments of the efficacy of the approach, as well as new narratives about life in the past in themselves. The thesis concludes by comparing the two case studies, reflecting on the merits of the approach, discussing recurrent themes in the work, and considering its wider context and implications. It is concluded that taking a novel approach to the case study landscapes can create narratives that often contrast or expand upon those produced by previous scholars, allow for a more detailed consideration of everyday life in the period, and open up new areas for archaeological enquiry. The extensive and critical use of evidence from Gaelic oral tradition is highlighted as crucial in understanding life and society in the period. The thesis questions the utility of grand historical narratives as a framework for archaeological study of post-medieval Gaeldom and suggests that our understanding of the past is best served by approaching the evidence in ways which allows for many different voices and stories from the past to emerge.

Solidarity, the network and the history of workers' self-management from the Gdańsk Agreement to shock therapy

This PhD thesis is an empirical research project in the field of modern Polish history. The thesis focuses on Solidarity, the Network and the idea of workers’ self-management. In addition, the thesis is based on an in-depth analysis of Solidarity archival material. The Solidarity trade union was born in August 1980 after talks between the communist government and strike leaders at the Gdansk Lenin Shipyards. In 1981 a group called the Network rose up, due to cooperation between Poland’s great industrial factory plants. The Network grew out of Solidarity; it was made up of Solidarity activists, and the group acted as an economic partner to the union. The Network was the base of a grass-roots, nationwide workers’ self-management movement. Solidarity and the self-management movement were crushed by the imposition of Martial Law in December 1981. Solidarity revived itself immediately, and the union created an underground society. The Network also revived in the underground, and it continued to promote self-management activity where this was possible. When Solidarity regained its legal status in April 1989, workers’ self-management no longer had the same importance in the union. Solidarity’s new politico-economic strategy focused on free markets, foreign investment and privatization. This research project ends in July 1990, when the new Solidarity-backed government enacted a privatization law. The government decided to transform the property ownership structure through a centralized privatization process, which was a blow for supporters of workers’ self-management. This PhD thesis provides new insight into the evolution of the Solidarity union from 1980-1990 by analyzing the fate of workers’ self-management. This project also examines the role of the Network throughout the 1980s. There is analysis of the important link between workers’ self-management and the core ideas of Solidarity. In addition, the link between political and economic reform is an important theme in this research project. The Network was aware that authentic workers’ self-management required reforms to the authoritarian political system. Workers’ self-management competed against other politico-economic ideas during the 1980s in Poland. The outcome of this competition between different reform concepts has shaped modern-day Polish politics, economics and society.

"Ordinary people only": knowledge, representativeness and the publics of public participation in healthcare

Public involvement in healthcare is a prominent policy in countries across the economically developed world. A growing body of academic literature has focused on public participation, often presenting dichotomies between good and bad practice: between initiatives that offer empowerment and those constrained by consumerism, or between those which rely for recruitment on self-selecting members of the public, and those including a more broad-based, statistically representative group. In this paper I discuss the apparent tensions between differing rationales for participation, relating recent discussions about the nature of representation in public involvement to parallel writings about the contribution of laypeople’s expertise and experience. In the academic literature, there is, I suggest, a thin line between democratic justifications for involvement, suggesting a representative role for involved publics, and technocratic ideas about the potential ‘expert’ contributions of particular subgroups of the public. Analysing recent policy documents on participation in healthcare in England, I seek moreover to show how contemporary policy transcends both categories, demanding complex roles of involved publics which invoke various qualities seen as important in governing the interface between state and society. I relate this to social-theoretical perspectives on the relationship between governmental authority and citizens in late-modern society.

Theory and language of climate change communication

Climate change communication has become a salient topic in science and society. It has grown to be something like a booming industry alongside more established ‘communication enterprises’, such as health communication, risk communication, and science communication. This article situates the theory of climate change communication within theoretical developments in the field of science communication. It discusses the importance and difficulties inherent in talking about climate change to different types of publics using various types of communication tools and strategies. It engages with the difficult issue of the relationship between climate change communication and behavior change, and it focuses, in particular, on the role of language (metaphors, words, strategies, frames, and narratives) in conveying climate change issues to stakeholders. In the process, it attempts to provide an overview of emerging theories of climate change communication, theories that recently have begun to proliferate quite dramatically. In some cases, we can, therefore only provide signposts to the most relevant research that is being carried out with regard to climate change communication without being able to engage with all its aspects. We end with an assessment of how communication could be improved in light of the theories and practices discussed in this article.

Beyond the human genome: microbes, metaphors and what it means to be human in an interconnected post-genomic world

Four years after the completion of the Human Genome Project, the US National Institutes for Health launched the Human Microbiome Project on 19 December 2007. Using metaphor analysis, this article investigates reporting in English-language newspapers on advances in microbiomics from 2003 onwards, when the word “microbiome” was first used. This research was said to open up a “new frontier” and was conceived as a “second human genome project”, this time focusing on the genomes of microbes that inhabit and populate humans rather than focusing on the human genome itself. The language used by scientists and by the journalists who reported on their research employed a type of metaphorical framing that was very different from the hyperbole surrounding the decipherment of the “book of life”. Whereas during the HGP genomic successes had been mainly framed as being based on a unidirectional process of reading off information from a passive genetic or genomic entity, the language employed to discuss advances in microbiomics frames genes, genomes and life in much more active and dynamic ways.

Association of kinase insert domain-containing receptor (KDR) gene polymorphism/ haplotypes with recurrent spontaneous abortion and genetic structure

Background: Recurrent spontaneous abortion is one of the diseases that can lead to physical, psychological, and, economical problems for both individuals and society. Recently a few numbers of genetic polymorphisms in kinase insert domain-containing receptor (KDR) gene are examined that can endanger the life of the fetus in pregnant women. Objective: The risk of KDR gene polymorphisms was investigated in Iranian women with idiopathic recurrent spontaneous abortion (RSA). Materials and Methods: A case controlled study was performed. One hundred idiopathic recurrent spontaneous abortion patients with at least two consecutive pregnancy losses before 20 weeks of gestational age with normal karyotypes were included in the study. Also, 100 healthy women with at least one natural pregnancy were studied as control group. Two functional SNPs located in KDR gene; rs1870377 (Q472H), and rs2305948 (V297I) as well as one tag SNP in the intron region (rs6838752) were genotyped by using PCR based restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) technique. Haplotype frequency was determined for these three SNPs’ genotypes. Analysis of genetic STRUCTURE and K means clustering were performed to study genetic variation. Results: Functional SNP (rs1870377) was highly linked to tag SNP (rs6838752) (D´ value=0. 214; χ2 = 16.44, p<0. 001). K means clustering showed that k = 8 as the best fit for the optimal number of genetic subgroups in our studied materials. This result was in agreement with Neighbor Joining cluster analysis. Conclusion: In our study, the allele and genotype frequencies were not associated with RSA between patient and control individuals. Inconsistent results in different populations with different allele frequencies among RSA patients and controls may be due to ethnic variation and used sample size.