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The mid-nineteenth-century genre of sensation fiction is primarily conceived of as articulating modernity through its depiction of sensory experience, especially as such is produced by technologically-generated mobility. Distinctly, this thesis proposes that sensation fiction can be read through an alternative, 'cultural discontinuity' sense of modernity, particularly as this is formulated by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (in Modernity and Ambivalence [1991]), to reveal its engagements with a variety of mid-century contexts heretofore neglected or omitted in criticism; moreover, doing so broadens our ideas about the texts that can be considered to articulate modernity. The thesis evidences this by historicist readings of four sensation novels, acting as a representative series of case studies (a heuristic) for considering the genre as a whole: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Trail of the Serpent (1860); Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Wylder's Hand (1864); Rhoda Broughton's Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867); and Wilkie Collins's Armadale (1866). Expanding from Bauman's ideas about the role of modern culture, I claim that sensation fiction performs crucial ideological work in acclimatizing readers to the discontinuities of modern existence; even, at its height, tracing a nascent postmodern consciousness, in which ambivalence is no longer a cause for concern. Since scholarship has reserved such a polemical potential for realist novels, this thesis broaches a new understanding of the purpose and function of sensation fiction, with implications for the study of other popular genres.

This thesis explores the multiplicity of place in the 'super-diverse' area of Finsbury Park, London. It investigates and maps the meaning and experience of everyday spaces for a range of people. It seeks to understand what this 'multiplicity of place' means for vernacular geographies, for how individuals construct a sense of identity or situated subjectivity, and the implications of this for conviviality; the realities of living together with difference. The thesis draws from wider debates on a critical theorisation of space and power; the production of identity and difference; and the role and potential of mapping. Using a qualitative empirical methodology, including ethnographic, visual and cartographic methods, I traverse themes of power, affect and meaning in everyday spaces. Compositionally the thesis progresses through four analytical chapters, interleaved by visual ethnographic vignettes. The first introduces how vernacular geographies in Finsbury Park are constituted, exploring trans(local) relations of place through the production of boundaries and place-namings. Secondly, I explore what Doreen Massey (2005) famously termed the 'thrown-togetherness' of place through cartographic practice. I argue that mapping as more-than-representation indicates how place is performed and evoked indicating how complex, hybrid and layered it is. Thirdly, I discuss the impact of changing place on iterations of community and social relations, addressing the power-geometries of super-diversity and the ambivalences of regeneration and gentrification. The final empirical chapter encounters convivial relations of urban natures and streetscapes through video ethnography. It focuses on how a multitude of encounters between bodies, materials and 'natures' construct 'super-diverse atmospheres'. In concluding, the thesis draws together key theoretical and methodological trajectories on the role of agency for the production of place and subject through vernacular geographies, the everyday ambivalences of conviviality and the possibility of collectivity through difference, reflecting on how practices of cultural cartography can map this relational multiplicity.

As the Catholic Church continues to expand in Uganda, this thesis offers an ethnographic study of engagement with Catholicism among the laity in a relatively new, rural parish in the Teso Region of eastern Uganda. Founded in the late 1990s, the creation of a new parish in the Sub-County of Buluya has brought people into closer proximity to the Catholic Church, its priests, and its doctrines, throwing into sharp relief some of the tensions between Catholic and local moral and spiritual frameworks. Based on 17 months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, I examine the way in which people negotiate the challenges posed by this change, as they seek to balance the need to use the tools Catholicism offers for getting on in post-colonial Uganda with desires to protect older ways of seeing the world and acting in it. My central argument is that people respond to the Church’s attempts to embed itself as an all-encompassing presence and influence in the lives of its members, by engaging in processes of limiting this presence and influence. By remoulding and realigning some of its central concepts, by resisting wholeheartedly committing to its claims to spiritual knowledge and healing potential, and by isolating its moral and behavioural directives from certain aspects of their lives, the laity in Buluya rein in the Catholic Church’s attempts to permeate and dominate all aspects of their lives. I suggest that these limits go hand in hand with the pervasive religious uncertainty that underpins people’s engagement with the Church, arguing that these limiting practices serve to maintain their religious uncertainty as doors are left open to alternative ways of engaging with their social and spiritual surroundings. In turn, the productive potential of this religious uncertainty encourages these limits to be enacted and maintained. Limiting Catholicism, in essence, enables people in Buluya to commit to it.

This study is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Bor, a copper-processing town in Eastern Serbia. From the perspectives of “ordinary” people, this dissertation explores the process of post-socialist transformation through ethnography of the interconnections between the town (characterised by mono-structural economy) and the industrial company. After a prosperous period during Yugoslav socialism there was an economic, social, and symbolic decline of the copper-processing company followed by decay of the town and industry during the 1990s. This thesis captures the moment of political promise that brought a new horizon of hope for a better life and the promise of economic growth through the revival of the rundown industry. It captures the experiences of people who have had different encounters with existing attempts to revitalise and transform everyday life, in the context of the mutual revival of the company and the town. In this thesis I analyse people’s anticipations of their futures as well as the practices they invested in maintaining and realising their hopes (which I call the “work of hope”). I argue that ambivalence, which consisted of simultaneous coupling of hope with various other competing and conflicting sets of dispositions, such as risk, despair, entrapment, dismay, anxiety, frustration, and so on, was reflected in how people’s futures were imagined, conveyed, and lived towards. The first part of the dissertation focuses on how material objects, such as the renovated sites, the district heating, and pollution, appeared in my interlocutors’ work of hope and in their anticipations of futures. In parallel with this, the second part focuses on how the temporality of waiting and the work of hope played out in relation to gender, age, and generation among the people with whom I spent time. I argue that my interlocutors’ anticipations of futures and their work of hope resulted in reproduction of inequalities (in terms of gender, age, and class). I argue that in their encounter with the omnipresent industrial company that pervaded and constructed everyday lives, and through their work of hope, the state was encountered and reproduced and the social contract between the company, the town and the people was maintained. The analysis of how people in the industrial town of Bor played with and sought to reconcile ambivalence feeds into existing debates about how hope is read through, produced through, and articulated in relation to the material and social landscapes.

This study aims to capture how left-behind children in China experience their life with their parents’ migration and how they exercise agency to negotiate with structural and cultural contexts when living under these circumstances. The fieldwork was conducted in a middle school in a rural region of the inland province Hunan, with the data mainly being obtained from in-depth interviews with 16 focal left-behind children. An integrative theoretical framework is proposed to explain the dynamic process of living with parents’ migration by explicating the interaction between structure, culture, and agency. The research findings indicate that the left-behind children’s experiences can be conceptualised as “ambivalence” in that they incorporate simultaneous existence of opposing emotions towards their parents’ migration. Such experiences are grounded in the structural and cultural contexts associated with migration on the one hand, and on the other, provide the driving impetus for children to reproduce and/or transform their structural and cultural contexts by adopting agentic strategies either more engaged with the present or more directed towards the future. An integrated theoretical framework has been developed to capture a dynamic understanding of left-behind children, wherein ambivalence is proposed to act as a bridging concept to link agency with structure and culture. This framework challenges the univalent orientations in conceptualising agency as rational choice or resistance and emphasises the mutual sustaining relationships between culture and structure, which could contribute to the debates in the sociology of childhood field by advancing theoretical integration so as to transcend the agency/structure dichotomy. By highlighting left-behind children’s ambivalent experiences, this research further contributes to the literature that challenges the image of passive victims attributed to them, and adds to the knowledge on how to address their needs as well as to facilitate their exercising of agency, which can inform related policy and service provision.

This qualitative research follows narrative enquiry principles and explores the implications of studying abroad for overseas doctoral students’ identity evolution. The research argues for the legitimacy of the concept that views identity as a state that evolves over time and across space as it undergoes ambivalence and emancipation (Bhabha 2004; Hall, 1990; Rutherford, 1990). The inquiry was informed by the data collected from in-depth interviews of eight overseas doctoral students from seven nationalities, three academic disciplines, and at different stages in their Ph.D. research. They were individually interviewed four times with an interval of three months in between from 2011 to 2012. The narratives concerning their learning and living experience, interpreted in the light of academic, personal, social, and cultural and national aspects of life, contextualise the participants and reveal their identity evolution and hybrid identities. Findings address dynamics of the Ph.D. journey, supervisory issues, socio-economic factors, national and cultural identities developed overseas, change over time and across space, and impact of being involved in this study. These findings reveal that the overseas doctoral students’ doctoral journey is extraordinary in that it reflects a period of time that is dynamic and destabilizing; it can pose the risk of a loss of cultural identity; it can be transactional; it reveals the family as a strong support system; it illustrates that global awareness is fluid that the social life can undergo ambivalence and emancipation from social codes and cultural norms, and that hybrid identities have various forms. The implications of this study are that there is no linear progression in identity evolution, that being empowering is not always the result of hybrid identities, that a past-present-future dynamic emerges to facilitate identity evolution, and that an overseas doctoral education is part of a personal life spectrum. My study underscores the value of the role of a holistic supervisor that unifies the roles of a mentor and an advisor; indicates that Ph.D. host institution is advised to see overseas doctoral students as more than ‘students’ but as whole persons developing under different circumstances; and, problematises the notion of objectivity in conducting a research study such as this one in which the advantage of empathy outweighs the risks of subjectivity. I distinguished between what I found to be particular to overseas students as compared to observations that I found to be applicable to all doctoral students. While Ph.D. phases, student-Ph.D. relationship, additional requirements and work during the Ph.D. process, supervisor issues, and identity presentation, shifts, and management were indicative of the general doctoral students’ learning and living experiences, writing concerns, socio-economic factors that involved home country situations, friendship sought in a different context, socio-cultural adjustment, and cultural and national identities were signposts of the doctoral student with overseas status. Most importantly, my study suggests that overseas doctoral students are distinct and worth studying and their identities were responsible for a myriad of situations for them to evolve.

In my DPhil thesis I critique a philosophical ideal of mental organization: that one’s mind ought to be integrated, that is, lack conflicts or ambivalence between mental states, because disintegration is argued to impair one’s agency and undermine one’s well-being. My argument has three parts. In part one, I describe Plato’s maximalist version of the ideal where, if ideally organized, one’s psyche lacks conflicts because one’s rational faculty, aware of what is valuable, harmonises one’s motivational and affective states. I also argue that any dispute about integration is orthogonal to the dispute between value monists and value pluralists. In part two, I contest the integration ideal by criticizing three manifestations of it in contemporary philosophy. I focus on the organization of desire, and on deliberative and affective ambivalence. My arguments have a similar structure. First, I challenge the link between the integrated mind and the purported benefits of unimpaired agency and well-being. On investigation, this apparent connection is largely contingent. Not all conflicts or ambivalence are harmful, and other social or psychological factors are relevant in case where they really are damaging. Secondly, I argue that there are contexts where integration is a form of mental rigidity or harmful impoverishment. Thirdly, I argue that being disintegrated seems morally good in some situations where one manifests fitting states of mind, particularly emotions. In part three, I ask whether integration can be reinterpreted to salvage an alternative ideal. After rejecting a promising candidate found in Kleinian psychoanalytic theory, I offer my own account of integration as a two-part capacity to tolerate difficult mental states (not necessarily bad mental states - excitement can be hard to tolerate), and to avoid being reflectively passive as one’s mental organization changes. This capacity has rational and non-rational elements. Finally, I consider how this reinterpreted capacity relates to the practice of virtue. I conclude that integration is not a virtue, and may be compatible with some viciousness, but it enables one to be virtuous in situations where there are pressures towards being insensitively singleminded.

Unruly and rude customer behavior is on the rise. Estimates indicate that frontline employees experience ten episodes of customer mistreatment daily. Not only is customer mistreatment detrimental for the frontline employee (e.g., higher turnover, lower job satisfaction, lower well-being, and more), but also for customers that witness (e.g., emotional contagion) or engage (e.g., loss of morals) in these deviant interpersonal behaviors. Extending the body of research on customer mistreatment, my dissertation seeks to investigate silver linings or possible functional consequences of customer mistreatment. My dissertation draws from Emotions as Social Information (EASI) theory to investigate the outcomes of mistreatment in addition to moderators that may enhance functional outcomes. I examine the transgressor’s perspective and how frontline employees may nudge customers into engaging in prosocial behaviors. I use multiple methodologies to answer my research questions. First, I conduct a longitudinal survey of frontline employees through Experience Sampling Methodology. Second, I collect a dyadic field survey from the customer and the frontline employee. Finally, I conduct an experiment to understand the transgressor’s perspective. Overall, this dissertation aims to contribute to the nascent literature on the functional outcomes of deviant interpersonal behavior. I hope to provide actionable insights for managers and frontline employees when faced with customer mistreatment. Advisor: Ravipreet Sohi

Elections, and the winner-take-all competition between partisan group it represents, is often captured by common metaphors about politics being similar to a sports competition. In a three article dissertation, I examine how a focus on closeness of political partisan competition affects people's people degree of affective polarization, their tolerance of election cheating, and how it does not affect political engagement.Article 1: In recent political history, most elections have become increasingly non-competitive. Yet even though most elections are non-competitive, the Americans have become increasingly polarized and have even grown to hate or loath their opposing partisan group. If there is so little struggle over partisan control of the U.S. government, then why are Americans so entrenched against their partisan out-group? Using a survey of Americans' perceptions of election competitiveness, I explore what drives people's perceptions of competition and how it influences attitudes. I find people are biased towards perceiving elections as competitive and partisans are bias in vote-share perceptions. Greater perceptions of national partisan competition, but not other levels of office, is a predictor of higher levels of affective polarization. Real levels of partisan competition also affect people's level of affective polarization but in more nuanced ways. Given these findings, I discuss insight on effective methods for reducing partisan competition and thus affective polarization.Article 2: American government supports that highly competitive practices like elections are the best way to represent the will of voters. However, in an era of high partisan animus, it is worth examining the negative effects that this focus has on people's attitudes. Using an original survey experiment, I investigate the effects of salient partisan competition on people's tolerance of election cheating. I find that greater salience of partisan competition increases participants' tolerance of election cheating when their their in-party stands to benefit and decreases participants' tolerance of election cheating when their their out-party stands to benefit. Surprisingly given these findings, I do not find that salience of partisan competition affects people's endorsement of political values of fairness. I discuss these findings in the context of democratic government and the connection to modern partisan animus.Article 3: Existing research about political networks establishes a strong relationship between cross-pressure and political participation though ambivalence as a mediator. I hypothesized the salience of partisan competition is an unstudied mediator in established findings. I examine how well previous findings are replicated in an experimental setting as well as examined the potential for salient partisan competition to be another mediator affecting political participation. With this new method, I found some support for established findings but found no evidence for the role of silent partisan competition as a mediating variable. As I successfully manipulated cross-cutting exposure with a novel treatment, this is evidence that political network diversity can have a heterogeneous effect based on salience rather than only having a homogeneous effect based on network composition/diversity. This has important implications for the methodology of political network research as well as for the era of social media and other digital spaces where politics are discussed.

Weight Loss Surgery (WLS) is a set of surgical procedures designed to help individuals that are obese or overweight lose weight in a shorter period compared to diet and exercise alone (Wolfe et al., 2016). Romantic relationships can be protective in terms of health, as relationships can positively affect health concerns, and in turn, health concerns can affect relationships as well (Kiecolt-Glaser & Wilson, 2017). Attachment often plays a role in understanding relationship dynamics, and the literature supports the use of attachment in terms of understanding the complexities of health-related behavior associated with obesity and WLS (Leung et al., 2019; Shakory et al., 2015; Taube-Schiff et al., 2015). The aim of this study was to understand the associations between relationship and sexual satisfaction, attachment, attachment ambivalence, self esteem, and body image for both individuals and couples where one or both partners have undergone WLS. Results indicated that relationship satisfaction was associated with less body image concerns at the individual level. Attachment avoidance and attachment ambivalence was associated with less relationship satisfaction at both the individual and couple level. Attachment anxiety was associated with more relationship satisfaction and more body image concerns at the individual level. There was no evidence for attachment orientation or relationship variables of one partner influencing the body image of the other partner. Although attachment appears to be an important influence on body image after WLS, these findings suggest that individual attachment appears to be more important on body image outcomes as opposed to their partner’s attachment orientation.

Social evaluations refer to the collective perceptions that stakeholder audiences hold about CEOs. Some of these evaluations capture stakeholders’ emotional experiences and an implicit assumption in this line of work has been that stakeholders can experience either positive or negative emotions towards CEOs, but not both at the same time. On the other hand, research on emotions suggests that the experience of ambivalence is common both at the individual and group levels. In my dissertation, I examine mixed emotions of stakeholder groups towards the CEO and the implications thereof for CEOs and their firms. Specifically, I develop a new construct, CEO emotivity, to capture intense stakeholder emotional ambivalence towards the CEO. I define CEO emotivity as “the simultaneous experience of intense positive and negative emotions towards the CEO among a stakeholder group.” I examine how inconsistency in CEO actions leads to CEO emotivity and the implications that CEO emotivity has for both CEOs and firms. In order to better understand the antecedents of CEO emotivity, I conducted Studies 1 and 2, using archival data and experimental data, respectively. My analysis reveals that while inconsistent actions are associated with the experience of emotional ambivalence, further examination is needed to understand how this experience aggregates to the level of a collective (i.e., stakeholder group). Further, I conducted study 3 using archival data to examine the consequences of CEO emotivity, and contrary to prediction, I find that CEO power and CEO emotivity interact to reduce CEO tenure. Overall, my dissertation advances understanding of stakeholder emotional responses towards CEOs in the face of inconsistent CEO actions.

Sexual ambivalence is defined as having both favorable and unfavorable thoughts toward sexual activity in any given sexual situation (Muehlenhard & Rodgers, 1998). Most sexually active people will experience feelings of ambivalence at some point in their lives and ultimately decide to engage in sexual activity (Muehlenhard & Peterson, 2005; Peterson & Muehlenhard, 2007). Based on previous research and guided by sexual script theory Simon & Gagnon, 1986), we hypothesized that gender, hostile, and benevolent sexism would moderate the association of prior experience with a partner/activity and engaging in sexual activity despite ambivalence. A total of 457 heterosexual college students answered questions about their ambivalent experiences and attitudes toward gender roles. Prior experience with a partner and sexual activity was associated with a greater likelihood of engaging in sexual activity while feeling ambivalent; however, gender was not a significant predictor in our models. Exploratory analyses indicated that hostile and benevolent sexism may predict engagement in sex while ambivalent above and beyond the effect of gender. The lack of support for most of our hypotheses may be attributed to the absence of a measurement of relationship status and assessing hostile and benevolent beliefs separately. Future studies may expand on these findings by assessing relationships on a deeper level and using an overall measurement of ambivalent sexism.

Smart technology, such as the internet of things, artificial intelligence, and big data, provides consumers with a new level of convenience through various smart-connected products (SCPs). Although many experts have increasingly warned about the privacy vulnerability issues of various SCPs, consumers often underestimate privacy risks when adopting smart technology. Accordingly, this dissertation presents a literature review and three empirical studies that examine the privacy problems and suggest new concepts and models for a deeper understanding of the privacy suspension phenomenon. The first chapter reviews the literature related to the privacy suspension phenomenon by integrating the antecedents of consumers' privacy concerns. New concepts of privacy concerns, such as active and inactive privacy concerns, are suggested along with multiple propositions for the proposed privacy suspension theory, which extends the dimension of ambivalence toward trust and distrust regarding smart technology. The second chapter presents the proposed privacy–common good trade-off model and three assumptions related to privacy trade- offs, privacy reduction, and anchoring effects in the sustainable smart-connected car context. This study also discusses the relationships between governments, companies, and consumers regarding the effects of the common good of sustainability and government subsidies. The third chapter evaluates the mediation effects between sustainability, trust, privacy concerns, disclosure intentions, and purchase intentions when purchasing sustainable smart-connected cars based on the proposed sustainability–trust–behavior model. Finally, the fourth chapter provides a practical solution to resolve privacy suspension issues using the design science research approach. This study proposes privacy information type characteristics to evaluate SCPs' tailored data collection capabilities, visualizing them through a spider diagram design method with nudges.

This study responds to a question that cohabitating couples generally ponder: Should I be married or stay single? To better understand attitudes about cohabitation, selected young adults were invited into a dialogue. Storytelling, brief counseling, biblical topics, and social interaction were coordinated to encourage group participation and self- learning. At the conclusion ofthe study, cohabitating couples revealed their decisions to marry or not to marry. Conclusively, the foundational thesis question for this project is: What kind of dialogue can be developed to help impact cohabitating couples to make well informed social, economic, and moral decisions about their future whether it involves marriage or not? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This dissertation examines how trans vocalists in popular music use performative and digital vocal techniques to reconfigure ideas of authenticity that circumscribe trans subjectivities. Calls for trans individuals to “find their voices” encourage agential vocal self-expression while framing the voice as a sign of trans selfhood and gendered interiority. However, while ostensibly affirming all trans voices in their individual differences, this discourse is organized around ideas of vocal intelligibility that end up reinscribing normative values regarding gender, race, class, and respectability. Trans vocal practices in popular music offer insight into how discourses of trans vocal authenticity discipline and enable sonic expressivity and meaning, and how trans individuals use music, bodily techniques, and digital technologies to navigate these norms. This project studies trans artists whose vocal performances reconfigure ideas of authenticity, arguing that they perform an “ambivalent authenticity” that makes audible the contradictions and multiplicities surrounding trans voices and subjectivities. Trans vocal ambivalence demonstrates how both voice and transness are paradoxically framed as categories of reification and rupture. I work with an unruly archive of artists who use voice and sound to work within and against ideas of legibility and audibility: SOPHIE’s digitally processed hyperpop voices, rapper Mykki Blanco’s vocal shapeshifting, the queer hip-hop vocal parodies of Athens Boys Choir, and trans masculine self-duets by YouTube artists Romeo Ryu Reyes, Charlie Peck, and Jaimie Wilson. Through analyses of musical performance, audiovisual strategies, and popular reception, I demonstrate how trans vocality is a site of ontological, epistemological, and temporal contradiction.

Background: Young, first-time blood donors are crucial to the sufficiency of the national blood supply. Ambivalence about donating blood has received little empirical attention, but it may represent a significant impediment to the retention of this donor group. The primary goals of the present study were to: 1) assess the effect of a motivational interview on ambivalence, the Theory of Planned Behavior constructs (i.e., donation intention, attitude, self-efficacy, and subjective norms), and autonomous motivation to donate blood, 2) determine if individual differences in ambivalence moderate interview outcomes and the relationship between attitude and donation intention, and 3) test a model of donation intention informed by the Trans-Contextual Model. Methods: Donors aged 16 to 24 years (N = 259) were randomly assigned to a motivational interview or a treatment-as-usual control group. Measures of ambivalence, donation intention, attitude, self-efficacy, subjective norms, and autonomous motivation were administered at baseline and follow-up. Results: An ANOVA revealed a significant effect of study group on donation attitude, reflecting greater baseline to follow-up change among donors in the motivational interview group compared to donors in the control group (p = 0.01). There was no significant effect of group on donation intention, self-efficacy, subjective norms, ambivalence, or autonomous motivation. Linear regression analyses indicated that ambivalence moderated the relationship between change in attitude and change in donation intention such that higher levels of ambivalence were associated with stronger attitude – intention relations (p < 0.01). Path analyses revealed that increases in autonomous motivation were associated with increases in attitude and subjective norms, and that increases in self-efficacy and attitude were associated with increases in donation intention. Conclusions: A brief motivational interview enhances positive donation attitudes. Autonomous motivation, self-efficacy, attitude, and subjective norms are significant contributors to the prediction of donation intention. Future work should aim to clarify the effect of ambivalence on the relationship between attitude and donation intention.

Understating how individuals form, reinforce, or change attitudes has a long history in political science research. This study seeks to contribute to the existing literature by bridging the gap between the ambivalence and digital political communications literature by examining the relationship between digital political information consumption and ambivalent political attitudes. Using the American National Election Studies 2016 Time Series Study, I examine the role of digital political information consumption as a moderator of value conflict and ambivalent political attitudes. The findings suggest that increased levels of information gather significantly reduce group ambivalence, candidate ambivalence, and value ambivalence.

Through an inductive, qualitative study of individuals developing new artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, this dissertation builds theory on how creative workers manage the emotions that arise from forecasting the outcomes of implementing their creations. I find that, in a context that illuminates the danger of implementing certain types of creative ideas, creative workers forecast both positive and negative outcomes arising from implementing their work, which elicits ambivalence. My work indicates that how creative workers respond to this ambivalence affects whether they impose constraints on their work as it unfolds. First, some individuals may proceed without constraints because they have resolved their ambivalence by amplifying their positive thoughts and feelings toward their work. Informants who exhibited this pattern created psychological distance (Lewin, 1951; Trope & Liberman, 2003) from the potential negative effects of their work by anchoring on the present moment and/or emphasizing potential positive outcomes. However, the majority of informants exhibited a novel “redistribution” response to ambivalence, whereby they committed to their work (Brickman et al., 1987; Pratt & Rosa, 2003; Pratt & Pradies, 2011) and shifted from a strengthening of negative thoughts and feelings toward a strengthening of positive thoughts and feelings through the use of self-imposed constraints. My work suggests that, although self-imposed constraints do not eliminate negative thoughts and feelings altogether, applying these self-determined boundaries enables individuals to reduce ambivalence and engage (Harter, Schmidt, & Hayes, 2002) more fully in their work. In addition to inducing a process model that encompasses these dynamics, I present the categories and types of self-imposed constraints that I have induced. These self-imposed constraints are not mutually exclusive, and each serves one of three broader purposes: developing a sense that one’s creation will have a positive moral valence, that one will be able to control his or her creation, or that one may trust in the quality of his or her creation. This dissertation extends theory on the role of prospective thought processes in creative work and shows how constraints, though often seen as impediments to creativity, can be used proactively by creative workers to manage the darker emotions and thought processes that have largely been overlooked in prior research. This work also contributes a novel response to ambivalence, redistribution, which entails approaching potentially harmful creative work in a heedful manner.

This practice-based thesis investigates how contemporary artists are using generic artistic strategies and ambivalent affect to inhabit post-digital conditions. It proposes that artists reproducing and re-performing generic post-digital aesthetics both engender and are enveloped by ambivalent affect, and that these strategies are immanently political rather than overtly critical. I argue that ambivalent artworks secede from requirements for newness and innovation, and the exploitation of creative labour that are a feature of post-digital environments. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s affect theory and Paolo Virno’s post-Fordist thinking, I summarise contemporary conditions for creativity as a ‘general intellect of the post-digital’; proposing that artists’ and workers’ relations with this mode of production are necessarily ambivalent. Throughout this research I produced several performance and video works that exemplify this ambivalence. These works reproduce standardised electronic music, stock imagery and PowerPoint presentations, alongside re-performances of digital labour such as online shopping, image searches, and paying rent online. Through these examples I develop concepts for discussing generic aesthetics, framing them as vital to understanding post-digital conditions. I address works by other artists including Amalia Ulman’s Excellences and Perfections (2014), which I argue is neither critical nor complicit with generic post-digital routines, but rather signals affective ambivalence and a desire to secede from social media performance. I also discuss works by Cory Arcangel and others to develop the ‘preset’ as a tool for understanding the generic. These works indicate ambivalent affective relations with generic digital tools, and I argue they perform an immanent critique of newness and innovation as cultural values. Lastly, I argue that software-mediated tasks and gestures also produce ambivalent affect, and draw on my curatorial practice alongside Alexander Galloway’s concept of the ‘interface effect’ to read Emile Zile and Kiah Reading’s works as re-performing the ambivalent affect immanent to office software. Overall, this research addresses a gap in art-scholarship around generic post-digital aesthetics, identifying strategies in contemporary art that increasingly speak to questions of standardisation. It analyses and enacts artists’ reproduction and re-performance of generic post-digital aesthetics as indicative of an ambivalent affective engagement that gestures towards secession from contradictions immanent to post-digital aesthetic production.

In 2015, nearly 30% of individuals aged 50 and older had two or more marriages compared to 19% in 1980, indicating that a growing share of older adults either divorced or were widowed during early or midlife and later remarried. Although widowhood remains a common exit from marriage in later life, divorce to people over 50 is also on the rise. Despite increasingly complex marital biographies of older adults, few researchers have examined differences between disruption pathways (i.e., one divorce, one widowhood, or multiple disruptions) and whether remarriage is associated with fewer costs of marital disruption. It is also unclear whether duration remarried or unmarried relates to better or worse health after different disruption pathways. Using the 1992-2014 Health and Retirement Study, I investigate the associations of different disruption pathways, subsequent remarriage relative to being unmarried, and duration remarried or unmarried with older adults’ mental and physical health, contact with children, and ambivalence toward children. I also account for gender differences as the health and parent-child ties of men and women often differ in later life. This dissertation underscores the need to pay attention to older people with multiple disruptions, as they are often disadvantaged in health and parent-child relationships relative to older adults with one divorce or widowhood. The findings regarding the role of remarriage for each well-being outcome are mixed. Remarriage is beneficial for the mental health of men relative to being unmarried after any type of disruption, and for the physical health of divorced women. Although remarriage relates to more frequent parent-child contact for divorced men, remarriage relates to less contact among women after one widowhood or multiple disruptions. Remarriage also links to greater ambivalence among men after multiple disruptions. Duration also matters, but not uniformly across outcomes. Remarried men after multiple disruptions have worse mental health with more years remarried men after one divorce, indicating that duration remarried after multiple disruptions links to poorer mental health than duration remarried after one divorce. Although men with multiple disruptions have less contact with children than widowed men, additional years remarried yield more contact for men with multiple disruptions than for men with one widowhood. Moreover, women who remarry after widowhood have less contact with children than their unmarried counterparts, but each year remarried after widowhood is associated with more contact, suggesting these remarried women rebuild ties with children over time. In sum, my dissertation highlights the utility of employing different disruption pathways, subsequent remarriage, and duration remarried or unmarried to capture increasing complexity of marital biographies among older adults and to clarify its association with multiple dimensions of well-being.

This dissertation follows a 3 article format. First, I implement strategies for combining the three surveys and evaluating the individual unique measures of fertility intentions status to a combined survey latent class analysis. I found that the best fitting solution, based upon theories, qualitative research, and prior research with each survey alone, included four latent classes of first birth intentions: intended, unintended, and two categories of ambivalent: okay either way and conflicted. Second, using fertility intentions classes identified in the second chapter, I use three theories (Theory of Planned Behavior, Traits-Desires-Intentions-Behaviors and Theory of Conjunctural Action) to extend research on the predictors of pregnancy intention status. I evaluate the three theories of pregnancy intentions using multinomial logistic regression models. In the fourth chapter, I use Stress Process Theory to test whether pregnancy intentions, more specifically ambivalent intentions, matter for psychological well-being. This dissertation contributes to sociology by expanding applications of data combination and cross-survey multiple imputation using a hybrid bridging model. Furthermore, I identified four categories of intendedness, and distinguished between two categories of ambivalence: conflicted and okay either way. Conflictedwomen were more likely to report using birth control prior to conception, and women who were okay either wanted a pregnancy more than they tried to get pregnant. Future research should examine whether trying means the same thing to all women. Women from higher socioeconomic status were more likely to have an intended first birth. Exposure to socioeconomic stressors post-birth explains variation in psychological wellbeing by first birth intentions. Advisor: Julia McQuillan

This essay examines the German artist Sigmar Polke’s series of photographs known as the “Goya” series, or Goya (Die Alten), that was made between 1982 and 1984. The subject of the series is Francisco Goya’s allegory of vanitas, Time (1812). Polke’s work is often recognized by its ironic, witty and experimental maneuvers. Not as well-known, however, is Polke’s interest in making works of art that transform over time, blur the distinction between photography and painting, and raise questions about the agency of art. The “Goya” series is emblematic of these overarching concerns. This essay compares the themes and techniques found in the “Goya” series with other works made by Polke spanning his career. The ambivalent nature of Polke’s art calls for a continued reassessment of his practice across formal and chronological divisions.

Research in the last twenty years has characterized the life course stage of emerging adulthood as a time of unparalleled freedom and an abundance of choice. Few researchers, however, have addressed the darker side to emerging adulthood, including the effects an abundance of choice might have on emerging adults’ mental health. I drew from existing theory to examine how ambivalence associated with too much choice within the markers of adulthood influenced anxiety. Using data from the fifth interview of The Toledo Adolescent Relationship Study (TARS), I used ordinary least squares regression to examine whether the markers of adulthood, and the choices associated with the markers of adulthood including full-time employment, education completion, sustaining an intimate relationship, and living independently from parents influenced anxiety. Additionally, I examined whether social psychological processes of ambivalence, perceived control, and subjective adulthood mediated the relationship between markers of adulthood and anxiety. The only marker of adulthood found to be significantly and positively associated with anxiety in all models was relationship churning, suggesting that wavering in markers of adulthood is more important in terms of anxiety than actually completing or not completing the markers. Ambivalence sustained a significant and positive relationship with anxiety. Likewise, perceived control, and subjective adulthood remained significantly and negatively associated with anxiety. Ambivalence was found to be moderately high in the sample, and in the initial model which added ambivalence, was found to account for the positive relationship of mother’s education being more than high school and anxiety.

This qualitative thesis examines how mid-life gay and lesbian married individuals navigate the institution of marriage. Using data from 30 couples in Massachusetts collected in 2013, 9 years after marriage equality was legalized in that state, this thesis seeks to complicate previous research which overwhelmingly focuses on the positive aspects of same-sex marriage for lesbian and gay individuals, relationships, and families. The central themes that emerge in the analysis are: 1) the symbolic power of the institution of marriage, 2) the pragmatic power of the institution of marriage, 3) the rejection of the power of the institution of marriage, and 4) ambivalence with marriage. These findings contribute to understanding not only the positive but also the negative and ambivalent effects of marriage access for lesbian and gay individuals. Additionally, this research provides new insight towards the larger goal of family studies that aims at exploring the multiple meanings of and experiences of this powerful institution.

Using a sample of 174 mothers of adult children with serious mental illness, the present study examined the psychometric properties of a newly developed measure of parental involvement. In addition, the present research investigated the role of individual parent and child characteristics, illness severity and parent-child relationship characteristics as they related to mothers’ reports of parental involvement and individual wellbeing. Findings suggested that parent reports of closeness with their adult child is the strongest predictor of parental involvement in the lives of adult children with serious mental illness, when controlling for parent and child demographics and illness severity. Findings in the present research study suggested that mothers’ perceptions of the consequences of their involvement for their child and their relationship is the strongest predictor of parental wellbeing. Specifically, these effects emerged when controlling for parent and child demographic characteristics, illness severity and parental involvement. Narrative accounts, including advice for other parents, were also described. Implications of study findings for research and clinical practice are discussed.

This dissertation defends an ideal of democratic citizenship inspired by John Dewey’s theory of human flourishing, or “growth.” In its emphasis on the interrelatedness of individual development and social progress, Deweyan growth orients us toward a morally substantive approach to addressing the important question of how diverse citizens can live together well. I argue, however, that Dewey’s understanding of growth as a process by which conflicting interests, beliefs, and values are integrated into a more unified whole—both within the community and within the self—is inadequate to the radical pluralism characteristic of contemporary liberal democratic societies. Given the pragmatist insight into the crucial role of socialization in identity formation, the problem with conceptualizing the ideal self as an integrated unity is that, for many, the complexity and diversity of our social world presents an insuperable obstacle to sustaining a unified (or always unifying) self. Most of us have multiple “selves” forged by the various groups with whom we identify and the often incongruous roles we play in our personal, professional, and/or public lives. Hence I offer a reconstruction of Deweyan growth that accounts for persistent yet positively valued diversity, both within the self and within the community. On the view I urge, which draws on the work of neopragmatist Richard Rorty and Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldua, divisions within the self and between citizens are not merely problems always to be overcome, but potential resources for creating a stronger, more inclusive democracy.

There are critical reviews regarding Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin that discuss many controversial topics in the novel. Of these reviews, most critics limit their arguments to the taboo topics of American school shootings and Eva’s character as an ostensibly ambivalent mother. Unfortunately, there is little academic criticism on Shriver’s most recognized novel and, among such analyses, two of Shriver’s most crucial depictions are overlooked. Firstly, readers must acknowledge the impact that contemporary American society has on females and mothers. This novel shows how much a culture relies on societal “rules” that govern human expectations. Secondly, Shriver’s character of Celia is often overlooked. Without taking Celia into account, Eva cannot be fully analyzed as a mother. Eva’s character can be defined as a conventional and unconventional female. We should also recognize Celia’s importance, as well as the significance of each child’s reaction when identifying Eva’s conventional and unconventional mothering tactics. As I demonstrate, Eva is not an ambivalent mother, even though society labels her as such. Shriver suggests that how a person mothers a particular child is influenced by that individual child’s reaction to that style of mothering. Kevin responds more agreeably to Eva’s unconventional mothering, while Celia flourishes with Eva’s conventional mothering. For Shriver, contemporary society defines and critiques our expectations for gender and motherhood. Since Shriver’s protagonist is both a female and a mother, Shriver suggests that the character of Eva must endure more scrutiny from society. Ultimately, Shriver depicts a society that makes us do, say, and think the absurd, like condemning a mother for her teenager’s murderous acts.

Across six studies we investigate the role of attitude emotionality in both the intra- and interpersonal domains. In the intrapersonal domain, we demonstrate that when individuals have both positive and negative reactions toward an attitude object (i.e., express ambivalence), that the valence associated with greater emotionality tends to dominate when arriving at a summary judgment. Furthermore, individuals are also more consistent in the expression of their univalent summary judgments when they involve greater emotionality. In the interpersonal domain when individuals seek to communicate their positive evaluation to others, we demonstrate that attitude emotionality does not always dominate. Instead, we show that the impact of attitude emotionality depends on the type of object being evaluated. Expressing greater emotionality is more helpful for describing hedonic products (e.g., music and movies), while expressing less attitude emotionality is more helpful for describing utilitarian products (e.g., microwaves and blenders). This research therefore indicates the important role attitude emotionality plays in both judging and communicating. It also points to the intriguing irony that while attitude emotionality is associated with strong effects intrapersonally, it can be detrimental interpersonally.

This dissertation analyzes the rise and fall of Planet Green, Discovery Communications Inc.'s short-lived multiplatform, environmentalism-themed media brand. Launched in 2008, Planet Green billed itself as "the first 24-hour network devoted to the green lifestyle."� It promised to "bring green to the mainstream"� with a full lineup of environmentalist lifestyle and reality television, environmental news and documentaries, and two websites with a wide array of eco-games and quizzes, consumer advice, DIY projects, an open-ended discussion forum, and short-form videos. But despite a huge and successful launch and a significant programming budget, by 2012, Discovery announced that Planet Green would be cancelled and replaced with Destination America, a male-targeted lifestyle network aimed at a "between the coasts crown,"� said Discovery spokespeople. With shows like BBQ Pitmasters, United States of Food, Fast Food Mania, and Epic RV's, the new channel offered a kind of macho celebration of patriotism and consumerist excess that seemed to applaud the very things that Planet Green cautioned viewers against. My dissertation argues that Planet Green's rise and fall must be understood at the place where contemporary branding meets neoliberal governmentality. It was structured by the simultaneous industrial impulses to "govern through television"� on the one hand, and to maximize profits in an increasingly competitive cable TV market on the other. When it came to branding environmentalism in particular, these simultaneous impulses were in deep conflict and generated a great deal of anxiety among industry insiders. I show that Planet Green took shape in a manner designed to ease these anxieties through branding. In the end, however, even with Discovery's extensive resources and professed commitment to the environment, Planet Green was unable to overcome the tensions between profits and planet saving.

Abstract: This thesis is about the suburban imaginary. It is concerned with the way the suburb is imagined and what insights this imaginary might enable. It offers a definition of the suburban imaginary as being a culturally and historically located set of meanings, expectations, images, and ideas about the suburb that is dialectically shared and formed in the popular imagination, particularly through cultural mediation. The suburban imaginary is a social production. Moreover, like all "places", the suburb is a social spatialization—an on-going social production of space. As such, this thesis argues that while the suburb is in part defined and conditioned by its materiality and the way it is enlivened by those who dwell in, traverse through, or otherwise make use of it, it also always-already exceeds and is exceeded by this materiality, embodiment, and enactment. It also consists in such immaterialities as the imaginary. This imaginary can include repressive and conservative ways in which the suburb is imagined as delimited but also includes, or potentially includes, a radical and utopian imaginary—a possibility that the suburb can mean, can be, or can make be something wholly otherwise. The suburb is dialectically produced through the reciprocal interaction of the material and lived elements with the suburban imaginary. This thesis explores the ways the suburban imaginary figures in diverse contemporary cultural mediations. It considers both a variety and a profusion of creative works as cultural evocations of the suburban imaginary. Part One looks at popular culture. In surveying popular cultural representations, a persisting dominant operative imaginary of the suburb is legible. However, this dominant imaginary is rife with many deep ambivalences about whether it is good or bad; whether it can be understood as a spatialization of happiness and the site of the good life; and, whether it is ordinary or strange. Part Two turns to gallery-exhibited visual works of art. Artworks about the suburb help to undo and offer a critique of the obviousness of the dominant suburban imaginary by exposing and playing with key assumptions. An oft-recurring trope legible in this art is that the suburb expresses a categorical, serial separation of spaces, which are imagined to be characterized by different functions, meanings and affective registers. One such defining separation is between interiority and exteriority. The suburban exterior figures as an anaesthetic site of insecurity, asociality, and unwelcome. Complementing this, the suburban interior figures as a guarded site for the creation and maintenance of the private individual, predicated on withdrawal and introversion. In illuminating these tropes, suburban artwork reveal the interior and exterior to be fictions that cannot be maintained. Instead, qualities of interiority and exteriority detach from the spatializations of the interior and the exterior. These disconnected qualities create paradoxical spatializations. Interiorities in exteriors; exteriorities in interiors. Finally, Part Three considers minor forms of popular culture in the form of picture books for both children and for adults (graphic novels). Minor popular creative works can offer alternative ways of reading and imagining the suburb by presenting the suburb as a curious site. They are experimental about what the peculiarities of the suburban landscape or suburban identity makes possible. In doing so, they imbue the suburban imaginary with promise and potency. In some of these works, the suburb promises that desires for the good, happy, well-placed life can be realized not as a deferred dream or ideological aspiration but as fully actualized, non-alienated everyday life. In other works, the suburb is imagined as replete with potential to be open to creative engagements and even radically liberatory intervention, subverting normative suburban imaginaries and thereby re-imagining the suburb as the spatializations of liberatory desire. By moving beyond the dominant suburban imaginary and recognizing the suburb as a place of possibility and unpredictability, these works re-enchant the suburb revealing its strangeness and mysterious potency and offer a meditation on how the suburb might be thought and lived otherwise. Animated in particular by the contradictions, complexities, and paradoxes of the suburban imaginary, this thesis explores the problematics, possibilities, and promises that become imaginable and activated in the opening created by the pause of curious looking.

Substance use and posttraumatic stress disorder are significant factors in criminal-justice-involved women. While mandated treatment may help engage some in treatment, there remains a significant proportion of offenders who do not respond, relapse, and end up back in the criminal justice system - especially for people who are ambivalent and/or do not recognize a need for treatment. The Transtheoretical Model of Change (TTM) recognizes that people are at different levels of readiness to change behaviors related to substance misuse. Studies have shown that following the stage-based approach leads to greater engagement and retention in treatment ultimately leading to better outcomes overall. If mandated treatment approaches followed the TTM, it is likely offenders at all stages of readiness will be engaged and stay in treatment leading to improved criminal justice outcomes.Methods: This is a secondary data analysis of a sample of 187 incarcerated women who met criteria for at least one substance dependence disorder and were trauma-exposed. Subjects were interviewed while incarcerated to determine SOCRATES scores; PTSD and Cocaine diagnoses; criminal justice; and demographic characteristics. It employed ordinal logistic regression to explore the relationship between demographic, criminal justice, and behavioral health-related factors and the newly-developed SOCRATES variable: Ambivalence in the context of Recognition Findings: Results supported the use of the SOCRATES in this population; offered a framework for examining Ambivalence in the context of Recognition (heretofore missing); and reinforced the contention that factors previously found to be associated with mandated treatment outcomes (and traditionally used to determine criminal justice sanctions) do not adequately predict stage of change readiness. Similarly, trauma-related factors were not significantly associated with Ambivalence in the context of Recognition - perhaps indicating that trauma factors may not inhibit readiness. Implications: Ambivalence in the context of Recognition was not related to any of the factors previously shown to predict success with criminal justice sanctions (e.g. mandated treatment). Policy-makers, those who make recommendations to the courts, as well as treatment providers might consider adding the direct assessment of readiness, ambivalence, and recognition to provide a more complete picture of potential targets and approaches.

Just as technology has influenced nearly every facet of the modern consumer’s life, it is also significantly changing how those consumers shop and how it influences their purchase decisions. Understanding how technology impacts these shoppers within the retail environment is crucial for retail managers who are expected to deploy and manage these sources of continuous change. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the phenomenon of shoppers experiencing technology in the retail environment. Specifically, our primary goal is to understand how shopper-facing technologies impact shoppers’ experiences and behaviors and subsequently affect outcome variables that matter to retailers. To that end, this dissertation includes two studies, an ethnography and survey, each with specific objectives designed to illuminate an increasingly common, yet under-researched phenomenon. The first study is an ethnography of shoppers in an office supply retailer context. In this study we explored emergent themes of shopper-facing technology use and how they affected shopper behaviors, perceptions, and strategies. A service channel decision tree was developed to explain the series of technology use decisions that shoppers made as they negotiated the shopping task and a framework of retail technology experience was created to explain the phenomenon, its consequences, the shopper dispositional traits that impact those consequences, and the strategies that shoppers employ as a result. The second study is a survey of recent shoppers designed to test a model of technology-induced shopper ambivalence. Measures were developed and tested from technology paradox theory to expose how technology engagement and technology readiness are associated with technology-induced shopper ambivalence and how this ambivalence drives surprising changes to hedonic and utilitarian shopping values. Contributions to theory, managerial implications, and future research opportunities are discussed within each study and a convergence of findings provides insights across both studies.

Parents' and children's lives are intrinsically connected throughout the life course. Transitions that occur in the parents' and children's lives, whether normative or non-normative in nature, may be associated with changes in parents' ambivalence toward their adult children. This study used the 2006 and 2010 rounds of the Health and Retirement Study to examine how parents' or children's normative or non-normative status transitions relate to parents' feelings of ambivalence toward children and whose transitions− parents' or children's− matter most when considering ambivalence toward children. This study found that children's non-normative transitions significantly increase parent's ambivalence toward children. The findings from this study also suggest that children's transitions, rather than parents' transitions, are most associated with parents' feelings of ambivalence toward children. Yet as parents today undergo more status transitions than generations past, it may be increasingly important to examine the association that parents' status transitions have with ambivalence toward adult children.

Cette étude entreprend de lire l'œuvre de Michel Tournier au regard d'une poétique de l'ambivalence. Elle tente de dégager le discours moral du roman qui s'élabore autour de la problématique de la rédemption. Afin de rendre compte de cette dimension salvatrice, c'est l'omniprésence de la Bible, de ses récits, de ces personnages, de ses registres et de ses tonalités dans les textes qu'il convient d'analyser. Une telle démarche permet de saisir la nature des rapports établis avec le texte religieux et de dévoiler le traitement que l'auteur lui fait subir dans la fiction. Se manifeste ainsi le désir du roman qui, en subvertissant et en pervertissant, pose les linéaments d'une nouvelle morale qui se fraie une voie dans l'ambiguïté. La première partie se consacre à l'intertexte biblique et cherche à souligner les effets de sens que la convocation de certains récits et fragments bibliques produit dans la fiction. Elle se divise en deux chapitres. Le premier porte d'abord sur la réécriture des récits de l'origine qui permettent à Tournier de construire ses personnages en fonction d'un questionnement sur l'origine, la sexualité, la violence, l'essence et le destin de l'humanité. Il s'agit ensuite de dégager, dans tous les romans, une structure exodique composée des trois étapes essentielles de l'exil, de la marche au désert et de la rencontre au Sinaï afin de rendre compte d'un désir eschatologique de rédemption qui ne cesse de faire retour, comme sous forme d'une nécessité morale à la fois méandreuse et enjouée. Le deuxième chapitre porte l'attention sur l'opération de calque dans Gaspard, Melchior & Balthazar et Éléazar ou la source et le buisson, ainsi que sur l'appropriation de trois légendes. Il tâche surtout d'analyser la stratégie de détournement proprement tournierienne, de comparer les structures narratives des récits, afin de reconstituer, à travers les divergences et les convergences, le discours moral ambivalent du roman. La deuxième partie tente d'éclairer la vocation prophétique de l'œuvre à travers l'étude des registres prophétiques dominants et de leurs mécanismes dans l'énonciation tournierienne. Le premier chapitre propose de se pencher sur l'acte d'énonciation de l'affect et de témoigner, à travers les registres et les tonalités prophétiques, du chancèlement moral des personnages qui apparaît dans l'enchevêtrement des expressions de la souffrance et de la joie. Le deuxième chapitre voit à mettre en correspondance l'apocalypse et le messianisme et tente d'une façon plus particulière d'analyser leurs registres se situant à la base du discours moral rédempteur de l'œuvre. L'important dans cette partie est de montrer comment Tournier intègre ces trois registres et les traite pour servir la fiction et notamment pour accentuer un enjeu moral cultivé par l'ambivalence dans le discours du roman. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Michel Tournier, Intertexte biblique, Prophétisme, Énonciation, Morale, Ambivalence.

Since the beginning of the Global War on Terror, almost three million children, spouses, and adult dependents have been directly affected by the deployment experiences of more than two million service members. This study examined the applicability of the Contextual Model of Family Stress (Boss, 2002) to a reintegrating military family sample (N = 228) by assessing the effects of external, military-related contextual factors (i.e., rank, component, combat exposure, length of time home post-deployment, and cumulative length of deployments) and internal contextual factors of boundary ambiguity and family and deployment-related ambivalence on family functioning. Quantitative data were taken from a national survey of service members from multiple branches of the United States military. A hierarchical regression analysis revealed that, as a whole, the addition of the military-related contextual factors, boundary ambiguity, and the ambivalence variables made a significant contribution to the prediction of family functioning, controlling for all previously entered variables. Service members from lower ranks and those who had been home for longer periods of time reported poorer family functioning. Higher degrees of boundary ambiguity and family ambivalence were also associated with poorer family functioning. The results from this study extend existing theoretical applications of the Contextual Model (Boss, 2002) to military families through the incorporation of boundary ambiguity and ambivalence. Findings will also inform interventions aimed at promoting family resilience in the military population during the post-deployment period.

The resolution of ambivalence is an appealing explanation of how at-risk drinkers make changes in their alcohol consumption; however, limited research about this potential mechanism of change exists due to the lack of a specific measure of ambivalence about drinking less alcohol. An initial item pool measuring ambivalence was assessed in two different samples of at-risk drinkers, undergraduate college students participating in the study for research participation credit (N1 = 129) and participants recruited from online sources (N2 = 128) using an online web survey. Three different methods of measuring ambivalence were tested: a double-barreled items method, a difference score method calculated from the sum of items measuring both motivation to change as well as motivation to maintain the status quo, and an Emotion items method. Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFAs) revealed a single factor structure for all three scales, and internally-consistent scales were formed from a subset of well-performing items based on item-scale and factor analytic results. Convergent and discriminant validity correlations were also examined. This study introduces the Change, Ambivalence, Sustain, and Emotion Scales (CASES) for eventual use in investigating if the resolution of ambivalence is a mechanism of change in at-risk drinkers. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.

In this dissertation, I argue that in eastern Congo, war is not lived as rupture, as a project that, once accomplished, will end. Instead, violence is understood to be an enduring force that is deeply imbricated in social life and political and economic attachment. It follows then that, in the context of a violent history and an uncertain present, life is not that which comes into being after war, when the cessation of spectacular violence allows the resumption of everyday practices, the recommencement of ordinary routines. Instead, where violence is inescapably ordinary, war is experienced as an injurious, constitutive, and ambivalent force. The lives it shapes are neither determined by nor devoid of mourning, but, as elsewhere in the world, characterized by pleasure and pain, intimacy and fear, bitterness and beauty. An ethnographic exploration of a particular experience of war in North Kivu, DRC, this dissertation is an account of these lives.

People tend to report feeling ambivalent in their attitudes toward objects that are associated with both positive and negative reactions. Across three studies, I investigated if people who have both positive and negative reactions to a novel target would feel less ambivalent about their attitudes if they simply expected to process valence-inconsistent information, compared to if they expected consistency or had no explicit expectations. In each study, people received either mixed or consistent behavioral information about a target individual as well as a summary. The summary either was presented before the behavioral information where it could foster an expectation or after where it could not. Study 1 replicated past work on ambivalence when the summary followed the behavioral information but established a new finding when it came first, namely that people who expected valence-inconsistent (versus consistent and negative) information reported less subjective (but not objective) attitudinal ambivalence than people who did not expect valence-inconsistent information. Study 2 replicated and expanded on these findings in comparison to other types of expectations (e.g., no expectations, undermined expectations), and Study 3 generalized these findings in comparison to consistent and positive expectations. Finally, the latter two studies provided mediational evidence that the extent to which people felt that their expectations had been confirmed (versus disconfirmed) accounted for the decreased feelings of ambivalence.

Child exposure to domestic violence (CEDV) is recognized as one of important risk factors for building healthy relationships between parents and their children. Previous studies have focused on various outcomes of children exposed to domestic violence or parenting behaviors of battered mothers and battering fathers. However, little is known about complex relationships among CEDV, parenting behaviors, and children's feelings and perceptions toward their parents suffering from domestic violence. To fill this gap in the current literature, this study aimed to examine: (1) how CEDV influences children's complicated and ambivalent feelings (e.g., love, hatred, empathy, blame) toward each of their battered mothers and battering fathers or partners; (2) how children's perceptions on parenting mediate the effect of CEDV on such ambivalent feelings; and (3) whether there are any differences between female and male children in these relationships. The sample of this study included children aged 10 to 16 who might have been exposed to adult domestic violence. 99 Participants were recruited through domestic violence shelters and community organizations in Twin Cities area. Missing data were imputed using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) multiple imputation and multiple-group path analysis was conducted to explore relationships between CEDV, parenting behaviors, and ambivalent feelings, and to investigate whether these relationships differ between male and female participants. The findings showed that there were significant differences between male and female children in how they feel about their parents in domestic violence. Female children reported a higher level of total CEDV, violence, and exposure to violence at home, and also showed more negative attitudes toward their abusive fathers. Not surprisingly, participants had more positive attitudes toward their abused mothers and perceived mother's parenting as more positive and supportive. Findings indicated that certain types of CEDV were associated with children's ambivalence toward parents, and this relationship was mediated by children's perceptions on parenting. These relationships were found to be different between male and female children. The study findings provide implications for social work researchers and professionals to better understand children exposed to domestic violence and to help them build healthier relationships with their parents living through domestic violence.

The purpose of this research was to study how performance has influenced the Mormon people in contemporary times and throughout history. This study examines various influential moments in the history of the LDS church that had an impact in shaping this group of people culturally. The thesis as a whole studies how the relationship with the media within the religion has become an ambivalent one. The first chapter of the thesis contextualizes the history of the church in order to analyze how performance has played a role in contemporary culture. The second chapter examines specific performances in contemporary Mormon culture. The performances analyzed include the I am a Mormon' campaign that has been the most recent missionary effort to come from the Mormon Church. The third chapter compares these seminal moments in history and contemporary Mormon culture to analyze the differences between the use of the media in the Mormon Church and other Christian religions. Throughout the thesis the idea of identity and ambivalence are further defined in relation to the church.

Abstract: Between fall 2009 and fall 2010 I conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 19 young-adult women and men of mixed race in Edmonton, Alberta. A prominent theme that emerged was being asked the question ‘what are you?’. I position the ‘moment’ of being questioned as a manifestation of the external gaze. People of mixed race are subject to questioning because they do not fit within dominant racial binaries: they exceed the limited horizon of possible narratives of racial discourse and are socially identified as ambivalent (Anzaldua 1987). Within the literature on the ‘racial gaze,’ it is often positioned as something that fixes (Fanon 1967). However, the very ambivalence people of mixed race pose to the gaze allows them to negotiate it. The narratives of my respondents demonstrate that the inability of the social gaze to ‘fix’ them opens up the possibility of making identity through negotiating the gaze in multiple ways.

Scholars across the social sciences (psychology and political science) have recently started to broaden the approach to concept of attitudes. These scholars have focused on the concept of attitudinal ambivalence, which is defined as people holding both positive and negative attitudes toward attitude objects. However, communication scholars have generally ignored this concept. Recently, communication scholars have emphasized the importance of looking at the complementary effects of consuming divergent messages on people’s attitudes and beliefs. Although studies have started to look at the complementary effects of media, it is necessary to examine the relationship between the complexity of a person’s communication environment and the complexity of their attitudes. Therefore, this study begins the process connecting the complexity of people’s communication environment and the complexity of their attitude structures. The major goal of this dissertation is to look at the generation of ambivalence by looking at four important factors: a) the relationship between specific media outlets relative to the generation of potential ambivalence, b) how different individual difference variables moderate the relationship between different media outlets and the generation of ambivalence, c) pinpointing the message variables that may lead people to the generation of ambivalence, and d) how media, ambivalence fit into a larger communication process focused on different political outcome variables. To study this issue, both survey and experimental data from a nationally representative sample focused on the issues of global warming and plastic pollution were collected and analyzed. Results of the survey show a relationship between viewing one-sided conservative and liberal programming and two-sided programming on people’s level of attitudinal ambivalence. These results also show conditional indirect effects of viewing these different programs. Specifically, one-sided conservative programming decreases ambivalence among conservatives and leads them to hold strong policy positions. In contrast, viewing the same programming increases ambivalence among liberals and leads them to hold to weaker policy positions. Additional analyses found similar effects for watching two-sided programming (i.e., network news). Viewing network news was associated with increased ambivalence and weaker policy positions among conservatives and decreased ambivalence and holding stronger policy positions among liberals. Analyses from the experimental data found a three-way interaction for viewing competing messages for individuals high in Need for Cognitive Closure (NFC) when they lacked a crystallized opinion on the issue (plastic pollution). Those high in NFC showed a decreases in ambivalence when presented with two negative stories on an unfamiliar topic. In addition, these same individuals showed an increase in ambivalence when presented with two conflicting stories on a low salience issue. These results indicate that those with a high NFC tend to seize on new information when they lack a crystallized opinion. This dissertation concludes with a summary and discussion of results, and places these findings within the context of extant ambivalence literature. It also proposes future lines of research that apply a communicative lens to the study of attitudinal ambivalence. There are also discussions of the relative strengths and weaknesses of this research effort.

Ambivalence about changing drinking is a theoretically and clinically significant construct in the treatment of alcohol abuse and dependence. The exploration and resolution of ambivalence is embedded in the stages of change model, and the reduction of ambivalence is theorized to be a mechanism of change in motivational interviewing. There has been little quantitative evidence in the literature to demonstrate the theoretical or clinical significance of ambivalence to date, owing to the lack of a quantitative, self-report measure specifically for ambivalence. Two experiments were conducted to aid in the development of a measure of ambivalence. Fifty-one undergraduates concerned about their drinking were administered the initial version of the instrument in Experiment 1. Experiment 1 pilot-tested two methods of measuring ambivalence, and explored the reliability, factor structure, and convergent validity of the measure. The analysis of the difference scores from the Change and Sustain items demonstrated their high reliability, resulted in an interpretable factor structure of cognitive and emotional ambivalence, and a strong relationship between the ambivalence score and the difference between Change and Counter-change talk statements elicited during therapy (r = .41, p < .01). Experiment 2 developed the construct validity of the instrument further by questioning 70 Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers about their perspectives on ambivalence, and their opinions about how well version 2 of the instrument measured ambivalence. The primary benefit of this survey was the improvement of the content validity of the measure by including more items about the emotional experience of ambivalence. Results also suggested additional improvements, insights into the nature of ambivalence and its relationship to other relevant constructs, and the clinical as well as research utility of the instrument.

Relatively little is known about the processes that people use when responding to unfolding scale items. In the present study, two types of characteristics (test delivery format and respondent attitude structure) are analyzed to develop an understanding of the processes that induce item unfolding. First, based on the hypothesis that context effects limit unfolding, a scale of attitudes toward workplace drug testing was administered in a computerized item-by-item format (N = 601) and compared to a pencil-and-paper block format administration (N = 566). Second, the structure of participants’ attitudes was investigated in an attempt to link attitudinal strength, ambivalence, and indifference to specific response patterns that either induce or inhibit item unfolding. Results showed that when scale items were presented item-by-item, respondents’ item-to-item differentiation increased slightly, but this did not systematically lead to better item unfolding or information. With regard to attitude structure, ambivalent respondents endorsed more unfolding items than did univalent or indifferent respondents. The implications of this research are discussed.

Pregnancy is a time of heightened stress for husbands and wives undergoing the transition to parenthood for the first time. Working with a sample of 178 married couples, the present research examined how husbands'and wives'use of positive and negative religious coping strategies predicted pregnancy, psychological, and marital related adjustment variables. After controlling for demographic variables and secular coping methods in separate analyses for husbands and wives, hierarchical linear regression revealed that positive religious coping predicted positive outcomes such as increased stress related growth and spiritual emotions, while negative religious coping predicted negative outcomes such as increased depression, anxiety, and ambivalence in marriage for both husbands and wives. Pregnancy stressors moderated the relationship between positive religious coping and love in marriage for wives but not for any other outcomes for either husbands or wives.

This dissertation explores the dramatic experiences of African American soldiers who served in the Philippine-American War (1899--1902+), and traces their complex interactions with diverse Filipinos during the war and through the arc of formal American colonization until World War II. Following their service in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and upon their arrival in the Philippines, African American soldiers already occupied an ambivalent sociopolitical status stemming from their simultaneous ties to the state and their history of oppression in the United States. Seeking to prove their patriotism, manliness, and worthiness for full citizenship rights, black soldiers weighed their goals for racial uplift against their affiliation with a segregated U.S. Army and their role in an expanding U.S. empire in the American West, the Caribbean, and Pacific. I argue that the Philippine-American War forced black soldiers to negotiate their ambivalence about their position as African Americans in the U.S. military, at the same time they confronted the violence of a war defined by its physical brutality on the ground and its racist imperialist mission against Filipinos fighting for independence from colonial rule. The self-sacrifices of war compelled black soldiers to grapple with and act upon their ambivalence, which was intensified by encounters with Filipinos who recognized the possibilities of shifting loyalties. In highly contingent spaces of war and U.S. empire-building, African American soldiers and (later as) veterans tested the legitimacy and effectiveness of imperialist motivations and improvised colonial processes as they fostered intense and changing relations with Filipino revolutionaries and civilians who acted within multiple capacities of resistance, alliance, and negotiation. I foreground the subjectivities of black soldiers and Filipinos in an uneven war on the ground, drawing from multilingual research in the Philippines and the United States. I analyze the intersections between military records, government documents, letters, personal accounts, and newspapers in English, Spanish, and Tagalog. I incorporate oral histories in Tagalog, Ilocano, and English, having conducted over forty interviews with descendants of black-Filipino unions from the Philippine-American War and their contemporaries, mainly in six provinces in Luzon and the Visayas, and also in the San Francisco Bay area.

In this thesis, I analyze how a native scholar was an active agent in constituting colonial discourse on native land rights. Specifically, I examine a doctoral thesis written in the 1920s by Supomo, a young Javanese aristocrat and a colonial judicial officer studying in Leiden University. The thesis examined adat land rights and agrarian reorganization in Surakarta, Central Java. In the 1940s, Supomo contributed to writing Indonesia's 1945 Constitution where his conception of adat and the state was institutionalized. Thus, his influence continues to reverberate in contemporary Indonesia. I propose that an internally fractured and multifaceted colonial discourse, particularly enticing in its civilizing appearance, made Supomo ambivalent in his relationship to colonial knowledge and to his mentor, Cornelis van Vollenhoven. I further suggest that his ambivalence was a form of resistance, manifested in his capacity to both mimic the colonizer's technology of rule yet also challenge some of its underlying premises. In other words, Supomo was a native scholar whose ambivalence expressed a peculiar mode of resistance and engagement with colonial knowledge. I conclude by arguing that in addition to recognizing the epistemological claims of colonial knowledge, we must also recognize the capacity of a native scholar to identify and resist hegemonic arguments that often are concealed in complex colonial discourses.

The decision to become an organ donor involves considering both self-relevant risks and the needs of others. This study applied prospect theory to examine how message frames that focus on the possible survival or death of a potential organ transplant recipient affect participants' willingness to become organ donors. Perceived personal risk and ambivalence were examined as moderating variables. Results indicate that risk, rather than ambivalence, played an instrumental role in participants' decisions to donate. Although no main effects or interactions related to message frame emerged in initial analyses, a supplemental analysis revealed a modest persuasive advantage for the loss-framed message among low-risk participants. Additional analyses revealed that for low-risk participants, perceived benefits of organ donation were higher for the loss frame than the gain frame, whereas the opposite pattern was found for high-risk participants. Findings suggest that decisions about organ donation may be associated with unique responses to message frames.

Contemporary Okinawan anti-base activists have attempted to give moral force to the their arguments supporting removal of large American garrisons on Okinawa Island by portraying Okinawans as repeatedly victimized by Japanese and American militaries, beginning with the Pacific War in 1945 through the American Occupation from 1945 through 1972, and continuing through the present. Activists be contemporary perceptions of victimization to past abuses by American military members and mainland Japanese to demonstrate historical continuity. These claims are heavily invested in maintaining that nothing has changed since the occupation ended over three decades ago in 1972. This dissertation introduces specific activist discourses of victimhood, including former Prefectural Governor Ota Masahide's testimony at the Japanese Supreme Court in 1996, where he maintained that Okinawans are a historically pacifist people victimized by Japan and the United States during the 20th century. I also analyze activist and politician Takazato Suzuyo's perspectives on American military crime before turning to the subject of how local newspapers contribute to victim consciousness through their accounts of U.S. military accidents and incidents. I introduce the pragmatic utility of victimhood discourses deployed by activists and politicians, discussing the emergence of a suffering for subsidies moral economy through which activist claims are redirected by local politicians to bring economic support from mainland Japan. Okinawa's economic dependence on mainland Japanese subsidies is discussed as one of the factors that keep the bases in place despite significant opposition. I consider the possible meanings of a new mall constructed in Chatan Town in the 1990s. The mall, called American Village, was built on former military base land as well as that reclaimed from the sea. I discuss how American Village is an historical outgrowth of Okinawan reappropriation of elements of American culture, and as such, may be viewed as an agentic construction that reverses the gaze on its former occupiers. Finally, I explore the how anti-base activism marginalizes Okinawan women who date or are married with military members. This chapter also discusses the discrimination experienced by Amerasians. I demonstrate that ethnic unity aimed at liberation through victimhood discourse can produce its own victims.

Measuring public opinion on abortion is an ongoing concern for political scientists, mainly because the public does not always exhibit fixed attitudes on such topics. Most citizens express a centrist viewpoint between the pro choice and pro life extremes. These include a small group whose answers to abortion questions are so inconsistent that they give public officials an inaccurate measure of public opinion on this important issue. Inconsistent responses may result from context effects, such as the order in which the questions are asked or the way they are asked. Usually, researchers ask a battery of questions in which respondents say whether they approve of abortion generally and under a variety of circumstances, citing the reasons for which a woman might seek an abortion. This project includes an independent national survey using questions adopted from the General Social Survey. The sample is divided into four experimental groups with different question orders. Based on these findings, the recommended question order would be the one with the general question last and the remaining specific questions in a somewhat random pattern alternating between the so-called “hard” and “easy” individual abortion situations. One of the more surprising findings is that people didn’t recognize themselves as subtracting the specific situations from the general question when it was asked first; hardly any said that was what they were doing when they gave inconsistent answers. Otherwise, about an equal number of respondents admitted answering the questions off the top of their heads as those who showed ambivalence by claiming they were deeply committed to their inconsistent responses. The study found most people who inconsistent on abortion are moderates leaning towards pro choice. Also, politically conservative regular church-goers can be just as inconsistent on abortion as the non-religious, non-political, low-educated non-church goers, especially if they are basically pro choice. Without a full understanding of who is generating inconsistent answers on abortion, some researchers may be tempted to eliminate these respondents from their sample. This research should allow them to understand these respondents better and develop better question wording and question orders to reduce their numbers.