Coming dissertations at Uppsala university
-
Being at home in business education : ... with sustainability
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-522390
This inquiry is about business education. At first, the intention was that it would be about sustainability in business education, but the engagement with questions of sustainability left the idea of business with deep wounds that opened up for new questions of how to take care of them.
With post-qualitative inquiry I embark on a journey, along with educators working at Stockholm School of Economics, Copenhagen Business School and Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki. These business schools have committed to be in leadership of sustainability education through PRME (Principles of Responsible Management Education). Subsequently, we together reflect on possible ways to work with business and sustainability, simultaneously, in education.
One critical discovery in this (re)search is that most of the business educators, including myself, were educating students for something we did not want to be part of, once sustainability became a frame of mind. In thinking with sustainability, we got reminded of all the darkness of our common world through exploitation, inequity and inequality. What does it mean to educate others for something you do not what to be part of?
Through reading the work of Hanna Arendt, in particular her notions of evil, thinking and love, I use essayistic writing and poetic inquiry to inspire for ways in which business education can co-exist with sustainability. In other words, to search for possibilities where we can educate into a common world. I argue that active attention towards the practice of thinking will help us connect differently through our education.
This different connection I ally with a homecoming process with business education that requires an ontology of immanence; a one-world-ontology, where we become aware of our earth-bound relational existence and consequently where it becomes impossible to educate as something we fundamentally are not.
This thesis’ aim and its contribution to the field of business studies is to lay bare and consider dangerous questions about business and its response-ability to serious sustainability troubles. Education might be the only place where those questions can thrive without the anxiety of needing to know in advance what the alternative should be.
-
Neuroimaging progesterone receptor modulation in patients with premenstrual dysphoric disorder : Is it just in your head?
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-521716
Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) is a menstrually related mood disorder affecting about 5% of women during their reproductive years. The disorder is cyclic, with the symptomatology namely occurring at the luteal phase of a menstrual cycle, for most ovulatory menstrual cycles and entails a series of mood and physical symptoms. A neural susceptibility to regular hormonal fluctuations is hypothesized as the neuropathophysiological mechanism. While treatment options, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and hormonal interventions, are available, the neural mechanisms underlying symptom relief remain largely unclear. In this series of studies, a multimodal neuroimaging design was approach was used to reveal the neural correlates of three-month, low-dose selective progesterone receptor modulator (SPRM) treatment in comparison to a placebo. This treatment has been demonstrated to be effective in alleviating psychological symptoms associated with PMDD. Thirty-five women with fulfilling the criteria of a PMDD diagnosis were randomized to treatment with SPRM or placebo, with structural and functional MRI scans conducted before and after randomization. Findings indicated enhanced fronto-cingulate activity during a reactive aggression task in the SPRM treatment group compared to placebo, along with a negative association between aggressive responding and brain activity in the placebo group. Resting state functional connectivity was additionally altered after treatment with SPRM in fronto-visual, temporo-insular, and temporo-cerebellar regions. Additionally, a positive correlation was observed between the reduction in cortisol levels and the decrease in temporo-insular connectivity. No treatment effects were observed on brain structure, including grey and white matter volume, as well as cortical surface architecture. Lastly, White matter microstructure integrity did not differ longitudinally but showed cross-sectional differences. In conclusion, the effects of SPRM treatment were primarily observed in brain function, specifically in terms of enhanced cognitive control processing in the context of reactive aggression and resting state functional connectivity in regions relevant to cognitive and sensorimotor processing, with no significant structural alterations noted. Taken together, these findings confirm that the fluctuations rather than absolute levels of ovarian hormones are primary contributing to premenstrual symptomatology, potentially through hormonal-state dependent functional correlates.
-
Animals and Humans : Human-animal interaction in northern Sweden during the late glacial and postglacial time
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-521788
When the last remnant of the Weichsel glacier melted in northern Sweden, around 7000 BC, pioneer settlers entered virgin land, following their prey, which in turn followed the vegetation dispersion. Some of the settlers derived from the east and the northeast and spread from the Russian taiga, through Finland and into northern Sweden, the study area for this thesis. Some of the settlers derived from southwest Europe and spread through Denmark, into south Sweden and northwards. These two main flows of people moved in small groups over large areas, close to the ice margin and shared a lithic technology, but with some differences. These differences can be traced in the debris at archaeological sites, along with calcined animal bones. This thesis focuses on the calcined bones and the seemingly most important prey for the southern and eastern settlers respectively, and the changes that occurred during the time frame of 9000-4000 BC. This has been done by identifying Mesolithic sites with calcined bones, selecting bone samples from the assemblages, determining species and radiocarbon dating the samples. The species in focus are reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), elk (Alces alces), beaver (Castor fiber) and seal (Phoca sp.), mainly ringed seal (Phoca hispida), which are the largest and most common species found at the sites. To support the results, previously radiocarbon-dated calcined-bone samples and charcoal samples, found in connection with species-determined bones, are included. This study shows that the people moving in from the Russian taiga in the east hunted terrestrial mammals (reindeers and elks) in the beginning. They continued doing so, even when they reached the coast of the Baltic Sea, where the ringed seal lived at the time. Not until several thousands of years later were the first seal bones left at Mesolithic sites in northernmost Norrland. The people moving in from the south, on the other hand, hunted both terrestrial mammals and seal. Using an additional set of dates from an expanded area in Sweden, together with southern Norway, it is shown that around the 8.2 k BP cold event (6200 BC), the inland settlers changed their prey from a high-ranked prey to a low-ranked prey owing to population growth and climate change.