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Publication Embargo From Troy to Munster: Edmund Spenser’s Active Imitation of Irish, English, and Classical Sources in The Faerie Queene(University of Galway, 2026-07-08)This thesis broadens our understanding of the kaleidoscopic range of The Faerie Queene’s allegories and allusions by paying attention to the way in which Spenser imitates overlooked or misunderstood English and Gaelic Irish sources. Particular attention is paid to the broader literary and historical contexts of these sources in order to analyse the ways in which Spenser creatively recasts them to serve new purposes. This process uncovers critiques of ancestral figures, condemnations of political enemies, and shrouded geographical references, but it also addresses a contradiction in scholarship. While scholars are quick to endorse Spenser’s creative recasting of English or classical sources for a new purpose, they are just as quick to label Spenser’s reshaping of Gaelic Irish material as an appropriative act that denigrates or disfigures Gaelic Irish lore. This thesis confronts this tension by demonstrating that Spenser’s imitation of Gaelic Irish sources is not so different to his imitation of texts from other literary spheres. On a critical level, therefore, this thesis argues that Spenser’s imitation of Gaelic Irish texts within his intertextual kaleidoscope suggests a degree of authorial respect akin to that typically reserved for classical, continental, or English sources.Publication Embargo The Discourse of Place: An Ethnographic Study in Tai’an, a Non-Metropolitan City in Contemporary China(University of Galway, 2026-06-29)Place constitutes a fundamental physical and psychological connection between individuals and the world and serves as a necessary condition for the formation of identity. However, knowledge about place is never neutral. Embedded in intersecting power relations, such knowledge both reflects and reproduces processes of exclusion. Investigating how knowledge of place is produced and sustained, therefore, not only contributes to understanding the operation of social relations within specific contexts, but also reveals how place functions as a critical site for negotiation, inequality, and the construction of subjectivity. This research examines these issues through an ethnographic case study of Tai’an, a non-metropolitan city in China that nonetheless represents the everyday living environment of a large proportion of the population. Drawing on ethnographic methods and informed by a Foucauldian power–knowledge framework, the study investigates how knowledge of Tai’an is produced and maintained in contemporary China. The findings demonstrate that the discourse of Tai’an is not dominated by a single power holder, but rather emerges from ongoing negotiation and compromise among multiple actors operating under asymmetrical discursive conditions. While local government prioritises bureaucratic and politically defined tasks, and cultural sectors remain structurally dependent on official governance frameworks, residents engage with place through strategies of silence, selective disengagement, and everyday practices that re-appropriate local spaces for lived experience. Together, these dynamics have generated a widespread sense of displacement among residents, as their lived experiences and attachments to place increasingly diverge from official narratives. This research contributes methodologically by illustrating how ethnographic research can be conducted in contemporary China despite increasing constraints on data access, through sustained fieldwork and reflexive analysis. It also contributes theoretically and philosophically by conceptualising place as a dynamic, non-neutral product of power relations and everyday practices, offering insights into the relationship among place, power, and subjectivity.Publication Embargo Assembling Spaces and Networks of Care in Post-Drone Strike Yemen(University of Galway, 2026-06-15)The lethal cocktail of war and technology has always excited popular imagination and curiosity, nowhere is this more apparent than the emergence of the unmanned aerial vehicle or "drone" onto the frontlines of late-modern warfare. This combination of surveillance and strike platform has become the go-to military intervention option to safeguard US geopolitical interests, in an era where the troop surges of the so-called Global War on Terror era have been abandoned, in favour of “over the horizon” counter-terrorism operations. Since 2002 Yemen has been one of the proving grounds for this new way of going war, with drone strikes forming the backbone of a programme of targeted assassinations which have accounted for nearly 1400 deaths over the past two decades. From civilian “collateral damage” to unrelenting behaviour-based surveillance, the level of resentment and human suffering in the regions of Yemen where this technology is being employed, has often been overshadowed by a political debate, couched in terms of the legality of drone strikes under International Law. Far less attention, however, has been placed upon the long-term implications for civilians who are subject to this geographically detached form of warfare, particularly what forms health care interventions are available for those who have suffered at the hands of drone strikes. This research project therefore seeks to redress this imbalance by placing an emphasis on investigating what health care options are available to the victims of US drone strikes, and what role both local and international NGOs are playing to facilitate this care in the backdrop of an ongoing civil war. With that in mind, the analytical framework of therapeutic landscapes was employed to unearth what health care provisions are available in post-drone strike Yemen. The rationale for utilising this theoretical lens was to discover if it is possible to provide therapeutic services, in a space where the targeting of health care has rendered the lines between essential medical care and war indiscernible. A particular focus was also placed upon the role of national and international NGOs to create and sustain therapeutic spaces in the absence of a formal state-run apparatus. As well as how their advocacy and awareness efforts could contribute towards the creation and maintenance of wider therapeutic networks and assemblages both in, and beyond the physical confines of the war-ravaged Yemen context.Publication Open Access Crafting resilience: A design-based research journey in fostering academic buoyancy among secondary school students(University of Galway, 2026-06-10)To be buoyant means to be robust and adaptable in the face of adversity, the ability to ‘bounce back’ quickly from difficulties. In everyday life, adolescents are regularly required to deal with an array of setbacks in the formal educational setting, and an ability to cope and recover with such challenges can be reflective of their buoyancy. In Ireland, curricula reform and policies that inform the development of student support strategies place importance on competencies that are related to the concept of academic buoyancy. The most recent curriculum reform at post-primary education introduced a mandatory wellbeing curriculum into the lower second level, for students 12-15 years. However, in terms of supporting buoyancy, a term frequently used interchangeably with resilience and wellbeing, for students who are 16 years and older there is no such curriculum in place. This falls at a point in time where academic success and decision-making can have a significant impact on a student’s pathway into upper second level education and higher education. Consequently, students often find the transition from one academic level to another to be a challenging, sometimes traumatic, experience and this is particularly true when students transition from lower second level to upper second level in a context where high stakes examination predominates. In Ireland, as students approach the transition to upper secondary school, they have the option of taking a year-long elective programme called Transition Year. This programme allows students time to develop life skills, sample various curricular options and to give them time to make more informed decisions regarding their future. This transitional phase presents an opportunity for the introduction of a module to enhance skills that will aid in the students’ academic success. In response to a professional and innate imperative to nurture academic buoyancy in students, this doctoral study sought to explore how a student-informed, pedagogically informed modular intervention for second level students aged 15 to 17 years, can enhance their ability to deal with challenges in school life. Drawing on a social-constructivist perspective where the learner forms an active part of the learning process, Design-Based Research was employed as an overarching research methodology for this study, allowing this work to materialise by a participatory process involving both the researcher and the students. Acknowledging the research environment as complex and informed by literature, a multi-ontological framework was developed that would be robust enough to inform design while at the same time offer the flexibility of real world applied pedagogical construct with students at the heart of its concern. An elective module of intervention was co-designed with students, developed and tested through a multi-cycle process of iterative refinement to assess its effectiveness in developing and enhancing participants levels of academic buoyancy. To advance design and implementation, three theoretical pillars that provide a theoretical framework for the designed intervention were identified: collaboration, engagement and reflection. Collaboration was viewed as central to fostering an environment where students could collectively tackle academic challenges, enhancing their learning experience through shared insights and efforts. Engagement was viewed as critical for the success of the intervention; and reflection was employed to enable students to critically assess their experiences and learning processes. Taken together, these three pillars are conceived as providing the prerequisite conditions required for fostering academic buoyancy. Over the course of the three cycles of iterative refinement carried out over three academic years, triangulated data that included student artefacts, reflective submissions, researcher observations, teacher observations and reflections revealed outcomes associated with academically buoyant students such as persistent effort, adaptive learning strategies, high self-efficacy and composure. These improvements were most evident within student reflective pieces and show creative approaches toward students facing challenges together. Results from reflective journals and from validated scales, used to indicate movement and as a further point of triangulation, also evidenced measurable growth in buoyancy levels among participants in all three participating cohorts (n=255) and improving as the iterative refinement process of the study continued, affirming the interventions impact during this critical transitional phase between Junior and Senior Cycle in secondary education. This doctoral study demonstrates the transformative potential of intentional curriculum design in cultivating academic buoyancy. The success of the intervention, evidenced by a collective increase in buoyancy levels of participants, is an indicator of its efficacy. By integrating collaboration, reflection and engagement, the twelve-week module of intervention not only equipped participating students with essential skills but also fostered a resilient and creative learning community potentially aiding in the success of future academic endeavours. The theoretical implications of this module highlight its potential to inform future educational frameworks by providing a model for integrating buoyancy-building creatively into curricula. Furthermore, this designed module is one which can be adapted and adopted to Irish secondary school settings while the robust design of the module makes it transversal to other educational settings, thereby offering a scalable and flexible solution to various educational contexts.Publication Embargo Model development for surrogate fuel components by auto-generation and rate rule optimization(University of Galway, 2026-06-05)This work presents the development of an automated computational framework for chemical kinetic modelling of large surrogate fuel components, with a focus on large alkenes. The MAMOX++ framework is upgraded and extended to enable the automated generation of detailed kinetic models for large alkenes. By incorporating 52 alkene reaction classes, the framework allows systematic construction of sub-models for a wide range of linear and branched alkenes (> C4) with minimal manual intervention. In combination, the Optima++ framework is employed to perform global, data-driven optimization of rate rules within their prior uncertainty bounds. A total of 323 rate rules are optimized against a comprehensive experimental database, including IDTs and species profiles, achieving improved agreement across a wide range of operating conditions. This framework significantly enhances the accuracy and efficiency of kinetic models for complex hydrocarbon fuels. The developed models are applied to investigate structure–reactivity relationships in alkene oxidation. Shifting the double bond from terminal to internal positions is found to reduce fuel reactivity at low and intermediate temperatures due to the suppression of hydroperoxyl alkenyl radical formation, which weakens low-temperature chain-branching pathways. For linear 1-alkenes, reactivity increases with increasing carbon chain length (C5–C12) due to the increasing number of hydrogen abstraction sites, particularly at secondary carbon sites and diminishing effect of the primary carbon and the C=C double bond, thereby approaching a limit at higher carbon numbers of approximately C12. Notably, highly branched alkenes, represented by tetramethyl ethylene (XC6D2), exhibit a distinct behaviour compared to 1-alkenes, showing a monotonic increase in reactivity with temperature and exceeding the reactivity of their alkane counterparts (XC6H14) at intermediate temperatures. This is attributed to the absence of inhibiting β-scission pathways and the lack of negative temperature coefficient (NTC) behaviour. In contrast, 1-alkenes consistently exhibit lower reactivity than their corresponding alkanes. This work further examines interactive oxidation chemistry in surrogate fuel systems. In methane (CH4)/n-decane (nC10H22) mixtures, non-linear reactivity enhancement for CH4 is observed with the addition of nC10H22 due to radical interactions, where early ȮH formation from nC10H22 oxidation promotes methane consumption, while CH3Ȯ2 radicals formed during CH4 oxidation, in turn, accelerate nC10H22 oxidation. Furthermore, through a systematic kinetic modelling approach for the oxygenated fuel (ethyl tert-butyl ether, ETBE), this study elucidates the competitive decomposition pathways of ETBE under high-temperature conditions between alcohol elimination and C–O bond scission pathways, identifying this competition as a key factor governing the prediction of key intermediate species, particularly carbon monoxide (CO), which is essential for understanding the combustion chemistry of sustainable oxygenated fuels. Overall, this work establishes a systematic and extensible framework for automated kinetic model development and optimization of large alkene fuels. The results provide new insights into alkene oxidation chemistry and fuel interactions, contributing to improved surrogate fuel design and more accurate predictive combustion modelling.