Horses for Discourses: a critical examination of the horse in Australian culture

The cultural significance of the horse functions as one of the cornerstone narratives in the production and performance of Australian national identity. From Phar Lap's preserved remains to the Opening Ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games; from 'Banjo' Paterson's poem "The Man from Snowy River" to the 2018 Wild Horse Heritage Bill (NSW), the notion that the horse is meaningful to Australians continues to be perpetuated. Nonetheless, the exact nature of this significance remains nebulous and imprecise, and the topic has drawn little critical attention from Australian Studies or Cultural Studies scholars. In view of this academic silence, this thesis interrogates the key narratives associated with the Australian 'horse discourse', and asks, broadly, what is the nature of the horse's significance in Australia, and what does this reveal about Australian identity? Drawing on a mixed-methods approach - including a nation-wide survey of collecting institutions, stakeholder interviews, and the analysis of literature from a diversity of fields - this research seeks to explore the foundational assumptions upon which the equine significance narrative is constructed. The thesis addresses representations of the horse from several key perspectives - as an imported cultural trope; as historically important; within the museum context; and when framed as heritage, particularly with respect to the recent brumby debates. Through these multiple entry-points, the thesis offers a considered analysis of constructions of this animal as an identity narrative. Building on anthropologist James Wertsch's notion of schematic narrative templates, I identify an Australian iteration, which I name the Underdog narrative template. The thesis argues that tales from the equine significance discourse, when underpinned by the Underdog schematic narrative template, are reinforced, becoming potent sites for the expression of nationalism. Combining this understanding with an Animal Studies framing, I argue that the significance of the horse in Australia is largely instrumental, predicated upon an inherently anthropocentric and utilitarian approach. This in turn allows it to be deployed as a symbolic construct, revealing the cultural work the horse is tasked with - in particular in mediating anxieties of belonging among white, Anglo-European Australians

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: A critical analysis of its impact on a sample of teachers and curricula within and beyond Europe

The situation facing European countries after World War II provided the social and political context in which the Council of Europe began its deliberations on language and culture, deliberations that eventually led (in 2001) to the release of the current version of The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (CEFR). Since then, the influence of the CEFR has increased steadily both within and outside of Europe. Following an introduction to the research and the rationale for it (Chapter 1), an outline of the CEFR and the political and social context out of which it emerged (Chapter 2) and a critical review of selected critiques of the CEFR (Chapter 3), this thesis reports on a questionnaire-based survey of responses to the CEFR of a sample of language teachers (Chapter 4) and an analysis of the impact of the CEFR in the area of curriculum design in two different contexts (Chapters 5 and 6), ending with and an overview of the research findings (Chapter 7). Of the 164 participants (from France, the UK, Taiwan, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia) who were involved in the questionnaire-based survey, only just over 20% claimed to have read the CEFR (26% in the case of those working in Europe). Over half claimed never to have heard of it (34%), to know of it by name only (5%) or to have only a vague idea of its content (19%). Of those with a view on the subject, only 31 agreed that it is becoming impossible to avoid the CEFR in the field of language teaching / learning (as opposed to 42 who did not). Asked to evaluate the overall impact of the CEFR in the countries where they worked on a six point scale (from 1 (very positive) to 6 (very negative)), 105 participants responded, with 57 (54%) selecting ‘I don’t know’. Among the remaining 47, the average rating was 3.23. Asked to evaluate the usefulness of the CEFR in the countries where they worked in a number of areas (on a six point scale - from 1 (very useful) to 6 (not useful at all)), just over 100 participants responded in each case, with just under half selecting ‘I don’t know’. For the remainder, the overall average rating was 3. These findings suggest there is little interest in, or enthusiasm for the CEFR among those frontline professionals who will ultimately determine whether it has any real impact on the teaching and learning of languages. Curriculum design was rated second in terms of usefulness in the survey (with a rating of 3.08). In order to determine how useful the CEFR actually is in this area, two different CEFR-influenced national, school-based language curriculum projects were analysed (one within Europe; the other outside of Europe). That analysis revealed a number of significant problems, particularly in relation to the articulation of achievement objectives and the association between achievement objectives and language-specific realizations. It was therefore concluded that the CEFR promises considerably more in the area of language curriculum design than it is capable of delivering

Dating Victorians: an experimental approach to stylochronometry

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ofthe University of LutonThe writing style of a number of authors writing in English was empirically investigated for the purpose of detecting stylistic patterns in relation to advancing age. The aim was to identify the type of stylistic markers among lexical, syntactical, phonemic, entropic, character-based, and content ones that would be most able to discriminate between early, middle, and late works of the selected authors, and the best classification or prediction algorithm most suited for this task. Two pilot studies were initially conducted. The first one concentrated on Christina Georgina Rossetti and Edgar Allan Poe from whom personal letters and poetry were selected as the genres of study, along with a limited selection of variables. Results suggested that authors and genre vary inconsistently. The second pilot study was based on Shakespeare's plays using a wider selection of variables to assess their discriminating power in relation to a past study. It was observed that the selected variables were of satisfactory predictive power, hence judged suitable for the task. Subsequently, four experiments were conducted using the variables tested in the second pilot study and personal correspondence and poetry from two additional authors, Edna St Vincent Millay and William Butler Yeats. Stepwise multiple linear regression and regression trees were selected to deal with the first two prediction experiments, and ordinal logistic regression and artificial neural networks for two classification experiments. The first experiment revealed inconsistency in accuracy of prediction and total number of variables in the final models affected by differences in authorship and genre. The second experiment revealed inconsistencies for the same factors in terms of accuracy only. The third experiment showed total number of variables in the model and error in the final model to be affected in various degrees by authorship, genre, different variable types and order in which the variables had been calculated. The last experiment had all measurements affected by the four factors. Examination of whether differences in method within each task play an important part revealed significant influences of method, authorship, and genre for the prediction problems, whereas all factors including method and various interactions dominated in the classification problems. Given the current data and methods used, as well as the results obtained, generalizable conclusions for the wider author population have been avoided

The Camera in conservation: determining photography’s place in the preservation of wildlife

This MA by research study is a reflection of photography’s past, current and future role within wildlife conservation, or whether there is indeed a necessity for it moving forwards. The following investigation and analysis of photography seeks to materialise how in fact the photographic medium can be both beneficial and negatively impactful to the preservation of wildlife, and how best it can be used by photographers in future conservation projects to ensure the preservation of wildlife. Several significant aspects of photography and external influences are engaged with in this study, firstly investigating the importance of empathy within wildlife conservation and how it can be elicited through imagery and photographic methods. Furthermore, I investigate the other side of conservation photography’s success, analysing what negative or neutral impacts it can bring with it, before researching the role that social media does and has the potential to play in conservation, and how photography can adapt to it to maximise its success. Lastly, I explore alternative visual media such as moving image, and how photography can best applicate successful techniques learned from them to reinterpret how conservation photography is perceived. Finally, using information and research from across my thesis, I have produced a ‘guide’ as to how conservation photography can be shaped to achieve its full potential for success, drawing upon previous successes and failures of other conservation attempts and photographers

Sites of value? Discourses of religion and spirituality in the production of a New Zealand film and television series

This interdisciplinary study examines the nature of the discourses of religion and spirituality circulating in and around the production of a feature film, Saving Grace and a television mini-series, The Chosen, made and released in New Zealand during the period 1997-1999. Its interest is in the manner in which discourses of religion and spirituality are enlisted and modified in the process of mediation for public screening. Drawing on various insights derived from post-structuralist theory, and informed by recent work in the sociology of religion, the study operates within a modified tripartite model which balances information about the production context of the projects with text-interpretation, and analysis of media constructions (or reviews) of the text. Initially, a description of the complex socio-historical context in which the texts are situated, both globally and locally, is developed. The manner in which selected members of the production teams for the two projects understood meanings around religion and spirituality is then explored through the discursive analysis of material gained by the process of depth-interviewing. The production of the projects was followed over an extended time-duration, in order to ascertain whether those understandings changed under the many influences constituting the conditions of production. The second aspect of the analysis is interpretation of the texts themselves through an analysis of their narrative and generic structures, as well as their discursive content. Finally, responses and evaluations of the text by, in the case of Saving Grace, a series of 'interim' audiences, and for both projects, by media reviewers, are outlined and analyzed. On the basis of this research it is argued that investigation of the production of these projects provides valuable insights both into the changing nature of constructions of religion and spirituality within New Zealand culture and into the tensions involved in their textual encoding. These insights are to be found not just in the texts themselves, where professional norms of 'good' production, constrained and limited the ways in which discourses of religion and spirituality could be encoded, but also in the 'personal' speech of the research participants, marked both by a strong disapproval of institutional religiosity, and a wide-spread interest in informal varieties of spirituality

Engineering handbook

2006 handbook for the faculty of Engineerin

1977/1978 UCI General Catalogue

General catalogue for the academic year 1977-1978

Cognition at the symbolic threshold: the role of abductive inference in hypothesising the meaning of novel signals

Humans readily infer the meanings of novel symbols in communicative contexts of varying complexity, and several researchers in the field of language evolution have explicitly acknowledged that inference plays a key role in accounting for the evolution of symbolic communication. However, in this field at least, there has been very little investigation into the nature of inference in this regard. That is, evolutionary linguists have yet to address the following questions if we are to have a fuller picture of how humans came to communicate symbolically: 1. What kinds of inference are there? Specifically, i Diachronically, what forms of inference are comparatively simpler in evolutionary terms, and thus shared with a wider range of species? What forms of inference are more complex, and limited to humans or to us and our closest relatives? ii Synchronically, if humans are capable of several kinds of complex inference, how do we know which particular kind of inference is being applied in solving a given problem? 2. How do symbol-learning problems vary? Specifically, i What makes a particular symbol-learning problem more or less complex in terms of the kind of inference needed to solve it? ii How would the communicative context of our pre-linguistic ancestors have been different from that of a human child learning words from its linguistic parent? This dissertation takes a step towards answering these questions by investigating a little-known form of inference called `abduction' (or insightful hypothesis generation), which has thus far been wholly overshadowed in language evolution by a much better understood form called `induction' (or probabilistic hypothesis evaluation). I will argue that abduction and induction are both comparatively complex in the diachronic terms expressed above in 1.i, and while induction is useful in accounting for how modern children learn words from linguistic adults, abduction is more important in situations like those that would have faced our pre-lingistic ancestors as they first began to use symbols. That is, I will argue on both theoretical and empirical grounds that abductive inference was an evolutionary milestone as our ancestors crossed what Deacon (1997) calls the symbolic threshold