1,226 research outputs found

    Conversations on Empathy

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    In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, some in the public and political arena have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy — be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. This interdisciplinary volume asks the crucial questions: How does a better understanding of empathy contribute, if at all, to our understanding of others? How is it implicated in the ways we perceive, understand and constitute others as subjects? Conversations on Empathy examines how empathy might be enacted and experienced either as a way to highlight forms of otherness or, instead, to overcome what might otherwise appear to be irreducible differences. It explores the ways in which empathy enables us to understand, imagine and create sameness and otherness in our everyday intersubjective encounters focusing on a varied range of "radical others" – others who are perceived as being dramatically different from oneself. With a focus on the importance of empathy to understand difference, the book contends that the role of empathy is critical, now more than ever, for thinking about local and global challenges of interconnectedness, care and justice

    The Mogadishu Effect: America\u27s Failure-Driven Foreign Policy

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    The October 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, commonly referred to as “Black Hawk Down,” transformed American foreign policy in its wake. One of the largest special operations missions in recent history, the failures in Somalia left not only the United States government and military in shock, but also the American people. After the nation’s most elite fighting forces suffered a nearly 50 percent casualty rate at the hands of Somali warlords during what many Americans thought was a humanitarian operation, Congress and the American people erupted in anger. Although the United States has continued to be seen as an overbearing global peacekeeping force in the thirty years since Somalia, the Battle of Mogadishu served as the turning point for a generational foreign policy shift that significantly limited future global intervention because of the overt publicization of battle’s aftermath in the media, domestic and international reactions, and a fear of repeating the same mistakes elsewhere. The first major American loss of life after the Cold War, the battle and the reaction that followed, known as the “Mogadishu effect,” forced President Clinton to rethink the United States’ role internationally. Clinton and his administration struggled to convince the American people that involvement overseas, especially global peacekeeping, was vital to international order after becoming the world’s sole superpower. Congressional hearings, presidential correspondence, government documents, poll results, and numerous media releases across Clinton’s presidency mark the distinct shift in American foreign policy that took place after Mogadishu. Although he inherited involvement in the United Nations mission in Somalia from George H.W. Bush, the failures in Somalia transformed Clinton’s humanitarian involvement in Haiti, Bosnia, and Rwanda, tarnishing the remainder of his presidency and shifting expectations of significant American involvement in international peacekeeping after the Cold War

    A War of Words: The Forms and Functions of Voice-Over in the American World War II Film — An Interdisciplinary Analysis

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    Aside from being American World War II films, what else do the following films have in common? The Big Red One; Hacksaw Ridge; Harts War; Mister Roberts; Stalag 17; and The Thin Red Line — all have voice-over in them. These, and hundreds of other war films have voice-overs that are sometimes the thoughts of a fearful soldier; the wry observations of a participant-observer; or the declarations of all-knowing authoritative figures. There are voice-overs blasted out through a ships PA system; as the reading of a heart-breaking letter; or as the words of a dead comrade, heard again in the mind of a haunted soldier. This thesis questions why is voice-over such a recurring phenomenon in these films? Why is it conveyed in so many different forms? What are the terms for those different forms? What are their narrative functions? A core component of this thesis is a new taxonomy of the six distinct forms of voice-over: acousmatic, audioemic, epistolary, objective, omniscient, and subjective. However, the project is more than a structuralist taxonomy that merely serves to identify, and define those forms. It is also a close examination of their narrative functions beyond the unimaginative trope that voice-over in war films is simply a convenient storytelling device. Through interdisciplinarity — combined with a realist framework — I probe the correlations between: the conditions, codification, and suppression of speech within the U.S. military, and the manifestations of that experience through the cinematic device, and genre convention of voice-over. In addition, I present a radically new interpretation of the voice-overs in The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998) as being both a choric meta-memorial to James Jones; and a Greek tragedy — with its replication of the stagecraft of Aeschylus, in its use of the cosmic frame, and the inclusion of a collective character, which I have named ‘The Chorus of Unknown Soldiers’. The overall result is a more logical, and nuanced explanation of the forms, functions, and prevalent use of voice-over in the American World War II film

    Decolonising Higher Education in the Era of Globalisation and Internationalisation

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    Conceived within a context of transdisciplinarity and pluriversalism, and in rigorous response to the Eurocentric, globalising and nationalising structures of power that undergird and inhabit contemporary praxis in higher education – especially in African higher education – this collection of essays brings to the on-going discourse on decolonisation fresh, rich, probing and multilayered perspectives that should accelerate the process of decolonisation, not only in higher education in Africa, but also in the global imaginary. A remarkable, courageous and potentially revolutionary achievement, this book deserves a special place on curricula throughout the world of higher education

    Counter Narratives: A Phenomenological Study of Inner-City Catholic School Teachers

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    Educational experiences of children can have positive or negative impacts on their future. This study used a method, counter-narratives, identified by Critical Race theorists to document the shared experiences of inner-city Catholic school educators during one of the most important time periods of education in our country, post Brown v Board of Education (1954). Using a qualitative and phenomenological approach, the researcher interviewed educators from an inner-city Catholic school to investigate their experiences during the post-restructuring phase, which essentially segregated a select group of schools from the larger archdiocese school system. These targeted schools were renamed, provided an alternate governing body, and more importantly, primarily served students of color. Subsequently, the phenomenon under study was systemic race. The semi-structured interviews were structured around these three questions: 1) What did teachers perceive as the reason for restructuring within the archdiocese? 2) What was the impact of restructuring on the experiences of teachers? 3) During the post-restructuring phase, how did the archdiocese leaders address the educational needs within the inner-city schools? Themes emerged and created a narrative that represented the educators who experienced the phenomenon. The findings of this study were aligned with urban and religious school research. Based on the results of the thematic analysis, the researcher concluded that there were benefits in employing and retaining teachers of color for all students and segregation marginalized educational outcomes for students of color. Subsequently, researchers should aim to include marginalized groups for increased validity. This study also added to the body of research on Critical Race theory and urban schools

    The Role of Musical Participation and Improvisation in Social Change

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    Many disciplines of musicology are dedicated to unravelling the connections between music and society. However, we lack a thorough understanding of music’s role in actively changing society. This thesis contributes to remedying that with a focus on musical participation and improvisation. It specifically aims to (1) understand how music contributes to social change in general; (2) discover what kinds of social changes tend to be effectively animated by musical participation and improvisation; and (3) explain why such participatory and improvisatory musics are effective. This occurs across the theoretical, empirical, and practical domains. The first half of the thesis synthesises existing literature and original empirical findings to produce a framework explaining what social change is, how musical participation and improvisation can contribute to it, and through which mechanisms this occurs. It proposes four themes that participation and improvisation afford, namely uniting heterogeneity, direct experience, enhanced agency, and novelty and adaptation. I then use this framework to analyse the cacerolazo protests during the 2001-2002 Argentine financial crisis to understand this participatory and improvisatory music’s capacity for large-scale change. Finally, these findings are applied practically in a highly participatory and improvisatory musical created in collaboration with local First Nations musicians entitled Togetherness Through Music. The intention of this event was to positively transform the meta-conflict between First Nations and settler Australians, and Chapter Five's evaluation of this event furthers our understanding of how participation and improvisation might effectively do this. Together, this work will enhance our understanding of musical participation and improvisation’s role in social change at various levels of society. It will also demonstrate the best practices for changemakers that intend to use them to better the world

    #FOODHERSTORY: Food and American Women's Political Resistance from Suffrage to the Digital Age

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    Throughout the American experience, women have activated food as a feminist expression of resistance, inverting histories of oppression to empowerment as they campaigned for enfranchisement at the turn of the nineteenth century and used social media feeds as platforms in twenty-first century political protest movements. This dissertation investigates the role of food-related resistance in the long women’s movement in the United States by critically analyzing how women used material culture and technologies to build networks of empowerment and community. Relying on a diverse set of evidence from food-informed material culture to archival research, ethnography, oral history, and social media analysis, this work is grounded in feminist scholarship, food studies, American studies, and the digital humanities. Thinking about American women’s history not in waves, but as an additive national recipe in which ingredients, flavors, and methodologies change throughout time reflects both the successes and failures of American women’s political work overtime. Building on my concurrent work in the food media industry, I utilize first-person participant observation methods (autoethnography) to unpack the largely white-centered legacy of America’s women’s movements, their complicated relationship with food and food production, the sexism, racism, and classism that remain in the fields of food and digital media, and incessant examples of food-related appropriation, exploitation, and profit. Through the analysis of analog food-related literature, including cookbooks, zines, and recipes, this research examines how publication technologies from printing to distribution, amplified women’s voices across the nation. Investigation of the current food-related women’s movements on social media underscores the importance of community building and “born-digital” technologies. Focusing on several case studies of women food entrepreneurs and activists from suffrage to the second feminist movement and the post-Roe v. Wade protest of today, reveals a complex landscape of women’s food-related resistance. The boundaries shaped by privilege and access between virtual/digital technologies and physical, tangible spaces of labor and protest lead to critical discussions regarding American women’s food-related work particularly working class and working poor women of color in a post-pandemic, politically fractured, economically fraught America.Doctor of Philosoph
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