The Doubleness of International Double Degree Programs at Ontario Universities: Challenges and Prospects for Global Citizenship Education

The Doubleness of International Double Degree Programs at Ontario Universities: Challenges and Prospects for Global Citizenship Education This research explores transatlantic partnerships in higher education, specifically the international double degree programs (IDDPs) as strategic venues for fostering global citizenship at Ontario Universities. In fact, the advent of internationalization of higher education has compelled universities to connect with others around the world in the pursuit of world class status to remain competitive in attracting funds, academic talents and international students. IDDPs are partnerships between two or more universities located in different countries that allow for student mobility and academic collaboration. Students registering in these programs are required to spend half of their time in each partnering university to complete their academic requirements. This doctoral research is a hermeneutic phenomenological study on the lived-experiences on current students and graduates of IDDPs at the University of Ottawa and Western University in partnership with universities in France. The character of these programs resides in the ‘doubleness’ engendered in the IDDPs: the geo-cultural experiential learning for students to evaluate and appreciate the intricacies of living in two different countries with the potential for identity hybridization and the cultivation of cosmopolitan virtues in this increasingly interconnected world. Fourteen students and three university administrators were interviewed as stakeholders of the IDDPs. Although findings reveal a positive participant perceptions of these academic programs, there are many challenges for IDDPs that include insufficient curricular and extra-curricular programming to facilitate immersive experience within students’ host communities whilst completing their study-abroad requirements, and linguistic and financial barriers inhibiting prospective growth and expanded access. The findings of this research can inform policy and practice reform in study abroad programming. Keywords: international double degree programs, cotutelle, global citizenship, cosmopolitanism, internationalization, hermeneutic phenomenolog

Cultural Heritage Storytelling, Engagement and Management in the Era of Big Data and the Semantic Web

The current Special Issue launched with the aim of further enlightening important CH areas, inviting researchers to submit original/featured multidisciplinary research works related to heritage crowdsourcing, documentation, management, authoring, storytelling, and dissemination. Audience engagement is considered very important at both sites of the CH production–consumption chain (i.e., push and pull ends). At the same time, sustainability factors are placed at the center of the envisioned analysis. A total of eleven (11) contributions were finally published within this Special Issue, enlightening various aspects of contemporary heritage strategies placed in today’s ubiquitous society. The finally published papers are related but not limited to the following multidisciplinary topics:Digital storytelling for cultural heritage;Audience engagement in cultural heritage;Sustainability impact indicators of cultural heritage;Cultural heritage digitization, organization, and management;Collaborative cultural heritage archiving, dissemination, and management;Cultural heritage communication and education for sustainable development;Semantic services of cultural heritage;Big data of cultural heritage;Smart systems for Historical cities – smart cities;Smart systems for cultural heritage sustainability

Representations of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in British and Spanish Newspapers:A Multimodal Cognitive-linguistic Analysis

With the (European) Refugee Crisis (RC) still ongoing, the dynamics of representation in media coverage of refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants (RASIM) remains a pressing issue. While much has been written about linguistic representations of migration in the media (e.g., Baker et al., 2008), comparatively little has been written about the visual/multimodal depictions of RASIM (cf. Catalano & Musolff, 2019). This is despite a wealth of literature which highlights the role that pictures play in communicating values and thus in creating and sustaining social identities and inequalities more generally (Bednarek & Caple, 2012). In this thesis I (1) critically analyse online newspapers’ patterns of conceptualisations of events within the RC in both language and image; (2) assess the interactions between patterns of conceptualisation across these modes and their potential ideological import; and (3) account for the variation in patterns of conceptualisation across countries and news sources of contrasting ideology. This research develops and operationalises a cognitive-linguistic approach to Critical Discourse Studies (i.e., Hart, 2014). The theoretical-methodological apparatus is designed to critically examine the visual and linguistic enactors of construal operations of schematisation, spatial viewpoint and conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Hart, 2015; Talmy, 2000; Forceville, 2009). This includes examining Language-Image relations from an intersemiotic convergence perspective (Hart & Mármol Queraltó, 2021). Patterns of conceptualisation in three semantic domains were analysed: MOTION, ACTION and FORCE (Hart, 2011a/b). The data for this project comprised 385 news reports extracted and sampled adapting the method in Baker et al. (2008). Four Spanish and British newspapers of contrasting ideological persuasions were examined: El País and The Guardian as ‘liberal’ newspapers, and El Mundo and The Telegraph as ‘conservative’ ii newspapers. Data coding and analysis employed UAM Corpus Tool, also in its version for image analysis. Substantial but subtle variation across countries and newspapers was found in both language and image across all three semantic domains. The national context of newspapers and their ideological inclinations are also relevant. Expanding on previous findings (cf., Moore et al, 2018), Spanish newspapers display more convergent, humanitarian depictions of events during the RC, while British newspapers display a high degree of polarization. Spanish newspapers coincide in primarily representing RASIM as entities arriving to European countries, as passive collectives being acted upon, and as weaker entities being impinged upon by various governmental forces. The Guardian displays relatively similar patterns of conceptualisation, where The Telegraph stands out as the newspaper which depicts RASIM events as inherently negative. Alongside these empirical findings, this thesis makes several theoretical and methodological contributions, including (1) setting out a protocol for text-annotation within a cognitive linguistic paradigm, and (2) advancing our understanding of intersemiotic relations from a critical cognitive linguistic perspective

The Management of Distance in Distributed-work

Distributed- work has introduced challenges for both employees and managers alike. Maintaining a form of supervision and discipline remains then necessary as control is the ultimate means for the hierarchy to bridge the issue of distance. With regard to the unprecedented changes generated by the significant development of ICTs in organizations, we expressed the necessity to analyze how control is reconsidered within the managerial breakdown introduced by distributed-work. Our theoretical reasoning finally led us to use the works of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as a basis for a more relevant conceptual framework. Data coming from 49 interviews and 7 days as non-participant observer enabled us to provide evidences for the disruption of management practices due to the reconsideration of control in distributed-work. Both for managers, evolving from a supervisory to a facilitator status, and distributed-workers themselves, whose activities will mainly be directed by the management of their visibility, responsiveness and modulation. Ultimately, this PhD dissertation provides concrete managerial manifestations for Deleuzian societies of control

RACE, DISABILITY AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF RADICAL AGENCY: TOWARD A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF DECOLONIAL CRITICAL HERMENEUTICS IN LATINX DISCRIT

The present dissertation is a non-empirical methodology project grounded in political philosophy. As a practical exercise, it bridges knowledge workers (e.g., educators, action researchers and other engaged scholars) with activists to explore the situated emancipation possibilities of radical agency at the intersection of blindness and Latinidad. It does so in line with DisCrit and other bodies of literature within critical disability studies, works centered on trans-Latinidades and border-crossing, intersectional decoloniality theorizing, critical hermeneutics, critical race theory and blackness/ whiteness studies. It interrogates performative and movement building spaces for teaching and learning that foster radical exteriority trajectories of decolonial solidarity and emancipation-centered reflexivity. The driving questions that articulate the project are tackled metatheoretically and through a hermeneutic method quite common in critical race theory, the method of counter storytelling. This gets enacted in reflexive counter stories distributed throughout each of the five chapters of the dissertation. Some of the emerging practical lessons from the analysis include: (1) a need to fight lovelessness and ossified modes of movement organizing; (2) the realization that trans-Latinidades often have difficulties conciliating their master ideologies and competing utopias; (3) the understanding that in the current context, LatDisCrit is a proto-utopia, one that remains within the power of the unnamed; (4) the conviction that LatDisCrit will only have meaning if it gets traction as a mutually edifying sphere between knowledge workers and activists in the trenches; (5) the need to avoid the framing of decolonial solidarity as a process circumscribed to communities of sameness; (6) the importance of empowering activists as true experts of their sense of situated emancipation and undoing disciplinary layers of hierarchy between knowledge workers and activists; and (7) a practical imperative for LatDisCrit’s alliance building and organizing to flow through multiple trans-Latinx and pandisability relational links, being mindful to work especially along with those collectivities that generate more tension for the comfort zones of blind Latinx

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Visualizing Evaluative Language in Relation to Constructing Identity in English Editorials and Op-Eds

This thesis is concerned with the problem of managing complexity in Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) analyses of language, particularly at the discourse semantics level. To deal with this complexity, the thesis develops AppAnn, a suite of linguistic visualization techniques that are specifically designed to provide both synoptic and dynamic views on discourse semantic patterns in text and corpus. Moreover, AppAnn visualizations are illustrated in a series of explorations of identity in a corpus of editorials and op-eds about the bin Laden killing. The findings suggest that the intriguing intricacies of discourse semantic meanings can be successfully discerned and more readily understood through linguistic visualization. The findings also provide insightful implications for discourse analysis by contributing to our understanding of a number of underdeveloped concepts of SFL, including coupling, commitment, instantiation, affiliation and individuation