Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Literature and sociology'

This review of the literature explored the particular risks facing children between the ages of 0-18 with incarcerated mothers who are also involved in the child welfare system, the programs and social support services available to them, and the effectiveness of the existing types of programs in the United States working with child welfare agencies towards the reunification of mothers with their children. This literature review analyzed the content of22 empirically researched articles from the last 15 years. Results of this literature review found that children with incarcerated mothers show higher rates of problem behaviors, including delinquency, psychosocial maladjustment, and school difficulties. Additionally, studies showed that while social support services and programs are available to incarcerated mothers and children, a comprehensive strategy needs to be created between child welfare and criminal justice systems to develop uniform methods for information-sharing and coordination of services that foster family reunification on a national level.

In 1895, French sociologist Gustave Le Bon proclaimed the era of crowds upon us, in his influential work, The Crowd. Le Bon's work was translated into English a year later, inspiring a number of similar works by American sociologists, and almost single-handedly creating the discipline of crowd psychology. Interest in the new masses was not limited to sociologists, however. Due to advances in transportation and communication technologies, and the rise of the city, the problem of “man in the mass” came to pervade the atmosphere of America, at the turn of the twentieth-century.

Thus, American writers also wrestled with the difficulty of representing this catch-all entity “the crowd,” often speculating about what the psychology of the crowd might mean for the future of democracy. But, whereas early crowd theory was overwhelmingly conservative in its depiction of the crowd mind as a site of primitive impulses, irrational emotions, and affective contagion, authors like Frank Norris and Sherwood Anderson, though largely ceding to this description, saw in the crowd the possibility for an entirely new social consistency.

Contrary to sociological prescriptives designed to brace the individual against the imminent threat of crowd contagion, however, Norris and Anderson identify what contemporary theorist Roberto Esposito terms the “immunity regime” as the true difficulty to overcome. For Esposito, the biopolitically engendered immunitary dispositif protects modern individuals from “a risky contiguity with the other, relieving them of every obligation toward the other and enclosing them once again in the shell of their own subjectivity” (Terms 49). It is this hard shell of subjectivity that Norris and Anderson attempt to break down in their works.

In this way, the two authors represent a small segment of a genealogical thread in American fiction—one stretching from Whitman, to Steinbeck, and beyond--that takes a gambit on what Badiou calls the “communist hypothesis.” Perhaps most importantly, though, the texts of Norris and Anderson demonstrate, either deliberately or otherwise, that such a gambit must preclude any recourse to substantialist notions of innate gregariousness, primitive sympathy, or herd instinct. Thus, while refusing to endorse the immunitarian paradigm as the final word on being-together, Norris and Anderson demonstrate how we must work and think through immunity to arrive at an adequate concept of collective life in the modern era.

While other studies of the crowd or the masses often ask what the multitude stands for, in a metonymical or metaphorical register, this one asks how it is formed, how it functions, and what it could mean for the possibility of collective life in modernity. Similarly, whereas other studies often judge a particular representation of the crowd against a preformed model of what constitutes the properly political, the following study attempts to unearth the crowd's immanent possibilities to potentially change those very models.

In many advanced societies today, it is taken for granted that the relatively free circulation of opinion on a minimally regulated print market brings social and political benefits. Such benefits can only be taken for granted if one assumes that markets are capable of regulating themselves and that the clash of opposed opinions in venues of public expression is salutary for the society in which those clashes occur. Early eighteenth-century Britons lacked both of these assumptions, and so for them the deregulation of the print market that resulted from the 1695 lapse of the Licensing Act was a formidable problem, a challenge to the intelligibility of their world that had, somehow, to be confronted. This dissertation seeks to give an account of this confrontation. Specifically, it seeks to understand how key metaphors within British culture were adapted and repurposed as descriptions of what printed writing was, what it was good for, and what rules and norms readers and writers needed to respect in order to serve that good, at an historical moment when such descriptions were lacking but badly needed.

The first two chapters argue that the early decades of the eighteenth century were characterized by an intense struggle, conducted across an array of printed genres, over which descriptions would be prove authoritative in this new environment of reading and writing. In this contest, two key metaphors—one was "debate," the other "conversation"—emerged as particularly strong candidates as ways of figuring print and mediating it for its users. These two candidates were called upon to do similar work: to provide the procedural and ethical norms needed to turn the unruly production and consumption of printed matter into an orderly and beneficial cultural routine. Because these two metaphors were substantively different, however, they produced divergent understandings of the meaning of print. Indeed, a main claim of these chapters is that the two metaphors struggled for authority in the early decades of the century, with conversation emerging as the dominant (though certainly not exclusive) metadiscourse. These chapters give an account of how metadiscursive struggle was conducted and offer some claims about why it took the precise form that it did. Along the way, they complicate existing scholarly histories of eighteenth-century British print that locate the major metadiscursive innovations of the century in the legal realm. By contrast, I emphasize the extent to which writers, in trying to make of print an ordered and rule-bound totality, drew on their existent discursive culture and its metaphors as resources for figuring print. The resulting cultural process was a complex and dynamic one, whereby the application of these metaphors to print changed both the meaning and force of the metaphors and the practices of reading and writing.

The first two chapters contribute to the history of how British culture helped to mediate print technology for eighteenth-century Britons. The third and fourth chapters are somewhat narrower in scope; they work to identify a particular formal category, crafted by Hogarth and Sterne, and then to demonstrate that this category came to be used, by writers like Burke, to represent British society to itself. In Burke's hands, this politico-aesthetic category, which I call "the eccentric," represented the British social and political order as the intricate result of historical time rather than the work of purposive human agency. Through it, Burke forged a rhetoric designed move his fellow Britons to understand their "country" as an intricate totality whose very existence was threatened by Jacobin "political metaphysics." In adapting this formal category as a vehicle for political and historical thinking and argumentation, Burke invented a style of public address in which whole social and political orders could be revealed as precious, fragile things in need of the protection that a reading public might provide simply by feeling grateful for them and concerned about them.

As a whole, the dissertation seeks to identify and theorize forms of "thin mediation"—that is, forms of mediation that have discernable formal and affective features but few necessary ideological entailments. The metadiscourses analyzed in the first half of the dissertation and "the eccentric" analyzed in the second are "thin" in this sense: they are able to disconnect themselves from robustly articulated ideologies, to circulate widely, and to give strangers a sense of their social order as a totality and of their place within that totality. If, as I suspect, such thin forms of mediation are indispensable to "liberal governmentality," this dissertation may contribute in its modest way to the on-going genealogy of liberalism.

“Heartbreak and Precipitation” confronts an affective position that in its articulation and representation defeats and defines the limits of its possibility. Performing a theoretical ethnographic position, voice, and imagination, the work/labour of the project is trying to navigate itself successfully (ethically) through the affective, class, and aesthetic registers it crosses in the cities its finds itself in as it makes sense of them as spaces and has them come to be as objects of knowledge. As cartographic method, it tries to find itself from the inside by marking out a range of texts – from Benjamin’s “The Arcades Project”, Marx’s “Capital”, to C. W. Mills “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” – these knotted up with fields of artifacts such as Red Wing boots, Dial liquid hand soap, non-dairy coffee creamer, and a roomful of palm trees; together a speculative mapping of affective territories with well contained limits of potential and possibility.

A systematic review of the literature was conducted to identify interventions for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), their typically developing siblings (TDS), and parents. The literature was assessed for demonstration of evidence-based practice (EBP). A comprehensive search of the literature between 1998 and 2014 generated 87 studies; 54 articles were excluded, and 33 were included in the systematic review. Behavioral and psychosocial interventions for children with ASD most commonly demonstrated EBP in achieving optimal outcomes. Support groups, counseling, and parent-as-therapist interventions suggested EBP for increasing quality of life, but support groups for TDS did not. Parent-as-therapist interventions demonstrated EBP in achieving optimal outcomes for children with ASD, and improvements in quality of life and empowerment for parents. Interventions should therefore be created and studied for EBP most often in order to improve the quality of life for the whole family.