9,556 research outputs found
The place where curses are manufactured : four poets of the Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was unique among American wars. To pinpoint its uniqueness, it was necessary to look for a non-American voice that would enable me to articulate its distinctiveness and explore the American character as observed by an Asian. Takeshi Kaiko proved to be most helpful. From his novel, Into a Black Sun, I was able to establish a working pair of 'bookends' from which to approach the poetry of Walter McDonald, Bruce Weigl, Basil T. Paquet and Steve Mason. Chapter One is devoted to those seemingly mismatched 'bookends,' Walt Whitman and General William C. Westmoreland, and their respective anthropocentric and technocentric visions of progress and the peculiarly American concept of the "open road" as they manifest themselves in Vietnam. In Chapter, Two, I analyze the war poems of Walter McDonald. As a pilot, writing primarily about flying, his poetry manifests General Westmoreland's technocentric vision of the 'road' as determined by and manifest through technology. Chapter Three focuses on the poems of Bruce Weigl. The poems analyzed portray the literal and metaphorical descent from the technocentric, 'numbed' distance of aerial warfare to the world of ground warfare, and the initiation of a 'fucking new guy,' who discovers the contours of the self's interior through a set of experiences that lead from from aerial insertion into the jungle to the degradation of burning human
feces. Chapter Four, devoted to the thirteen poems of Basil T. Paquet, focuses on the continuation of the descent begun in Chapter Two. In his capacity as a medic, Paquet's entire body of poems details his quotidian tasks which entail tending the maimed, the mortally wounded and the dead. The final chapter deals with Steve Mason's JohnnY's Song, and his depiction of the plight of Vietnam veterans back in "The World" who are still trapped inside the interior landscape of their individual "ghettoes" of the soul created by their war-time experiences
Animating potential for intensities and becoming in writing: challenging discursively constructed structures and writing conventions in academia through the use of storying and other post qualitative inquiries
Written for everyone ever denied the opportunity of fulfilling their academic potential, this is ‘Chloe’s story’. Using composite selves, a phrase chosen to indicate multiplicities and movement, to story both the initial event leading to ‘Chloe’s’ immediate withdrawal from a Further Education college and an imaginary second chance to support her whilst at university, this Deleuzo-Guattarian (2015a) ‘assemblage’ of post qualitative inquiries offers challenge to discursively constructed structures and writing conventions in academia. Adopting a posthuman approach to theorising to shift attention towards affects and intensities always relationally in action in multiple ‘assemblages’, these inquiries aim to decentre individual ‘lecturer’ and ‘student’ identities. Illuminating movements and moments quivering with potential for change, then, hoping thereby to generate second chances for all, different approaches to writing are exemplified which trouble those academic constraints by fostering inquiry and speculation: moving away from ‘what is’ towards ‘what if’.
With the formatting of this thesis itself also always troubling the rigid Deleuzo-Guattarian (2015a) ‘segmentary lines’ structuring orthodox academic practice, imbricated in these inquiries are attempts to exemplify Manning’s (2015; 2016) ‘artfulness’ through shifts in thinking within and around an emerging PhD thesis. As writing resists organising, the verb thesisising comes into play to describe the processes involved in creating this always-moving thesis. Using ‘landing sites’ (Arakawa and Gins, 2009) as a landscaping device, freely creating emerging ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2015a) so often denied to students forced to adhere to strict academic conventions, this ‘movement-moving’ (Manning, 2014) opens up opportunities for change as in Manning’s (2016) ‘research-creation’. Arguing for a moving away from writing-representing towards writing-inquiring, towards a writing ‘that does’ (Wyatt and Gale, 2018: 127), and toward writing as immanent doing, it is hoped to animate potential for intensities and becoming in writing, offering opportunities and glimmerings of the not-yet-known
Gamification in E-Learning: game factors to strengthen specific English pronunciation features in undergraduate students at UPTC Sogamoso
Appendix A Characterization survey (104), Appendix B. EFL Students’ questionnaire (109), Appendix C. Characterization survey: data treatment question (113), Appendix D. Informed consent letter, English version (114), Appendix E. Carta de consentimiento informado, versión en español (117), Appendix F. Time Schedule (120), Appendix G. Sample Challenges at Moodle (126), Appendix H. Participants’ questionnaire results (128).La gamificación es un término que suele denotar el uso de componentes del juego en situaciones no relacionadas con el juego en sí para crear experiencias de aprendizaje agradables, divertidas y motivadoras para los estudiantes (Werbach y Hunter, 2012). Por lo tanto, el análisis de los factores básicos de los juegos se convierte en algo esencial a la hora de definir y utilizar la gamificación como estrategia de mediación del inglés como lengua extranjera para fortalecer rasgos específicos de pronunciación en los estudiantes de pregrado de la UPTC Sogamoso.
El procedimiento de estudio se basa en la investigación acción mediante la implementación de la estrategia de gamificación para la mediación en la pronunciación del inglés, orientada a treinta estudiantes de diferentes programas de ingeniería, administración y tecnología con niveles heterogéneos de dominio del inglés. Las actividades se centran principalmente en la producción de sonidos, el ritmo, el acento y la entonación, los rasgos de pronunciación segmental y suprasegmental.
Los resultados arrojaron una evidente mejora en las características segméntales y suprasegmentales de la percepción en la pronunciación de los participantes así como la contribución del objetivo de los juegos a la instrucción fonética y fonológica, la sensación en el juego a la motivación para mejorar la pronunciación, el reto establecido en los juegos a la actitud positiva de los participantes, y la sociabilidad a la exposición practica de la pronunciación inglesa.Gamification is a relatively new term that often denotes the use of game components in situations unrelated to the game itself to create enjoyable, fun, and motivating learning experiences for students (Werbach and Hunter, 2012). Therefore, analyzing the games' basic factors becomes essential when defining and using gamification as a strategy for English as Foreign Language mediation to strengthen specific pronunciation features in UPTC Sogamoso undergraduate students.
The study procedure is based on action research by implementing the gamification strategy for mediation in English pronunciation, oriented to thirty students from different engineering, management, and technology programs at heterogeneous levels of English proficiency. The activities mainly focus on sound production, rhythm, stress, and intonation, segmental and suprasegmental pronunciation features.
The results showed an evident improvement in the segmental and suprasegmental features of the participants' pronunciation perception as well as the contribution of game goals to phonetics and phonological instruction, the game sensation to the motivation for pronunciation improvement, the game challenge to the participants' positive attitude, and the sociality to the English pronunciation exposure practice
Towards a sociology of conspiracy theories: An investigation into conspiratorial thinking on Dönmes
This thesis investigates the social and political significance of conspiracy theories, which has been an academically neglected topic despite its historical relevance. The academic literature focuses on the methodology, social significance and political impacts of these theories in a secluded manner and lacks empirical analyses. In response, this research provides a comprehensive theoretical framework for conspiracy theories by considering their methodology, political impacts and social significance in the light of empirical data. Theoretically, the thesis uses Adorno's semi-erudition theory along with Girardian approach. It proposes that conspiracy theories are methodologically semi-erudite narratives, i.e. they are biased in favour of a belief and use reason only to prove it. It suggests that conspiracy theories appear in times of power vacuum and provide semi-erudite cognitive maps that relieve alienation and ontological insecurities of people and groups. In so doing, they enforce social control over their audience due to their essentialist, closed-to-interpretation narratives. In order to verify the theory, the study analyses empirically the social and political significance of conspiracy theories about the Dönme community in Turkey. The analysis comprises interviews with conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theory readers and political parties, alongside a frame analysis of the popular conspiracy theory books on Dönmes. These confirm the theoretical framework by showing that the conspiracy theories are fed by the ontological insecurities of Turkish society. Hence, conspiracy theorists, most readers and some political parties respond to their own ontological insecurities and political frustrations through scapegoating Dönmes. Consequently, this work shows that conspiracy theories are important symptoms of society, which, while relieving ontological insecurities, do not provide politically prolific narratives
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Co-design As Healing: Exploring The Experiences Of Participants Facing Mental Health Problems
This thesis is an exploration of the healing role of co-design in mental health. Although co-design projects conducted within mental health settings are rising, existing literature tends to focus on the object of design and its outcomes while the experiences of participants per se remain largely unexplored. The guiding research question of this study is not how we design things that improve mental health, but how co-designing, as an act, might do so.
The thesis presents two projects that were organized in collaboration with the mental health charity Islington Mind and the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP) in London.
The project at Islington Mind used a structured design process inviting participants to design for wellbeing. A case study analysis provides insights on how participants were impacted, summarizing key challenges and opportunities.
The design at PTP worked towards creating a collective brief in an emergent fashion, finally culminating in a board game. The experiences of participants were explored through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), using semi-structured interview data. The analysis served to identify key themes characterising the experience of co-design such as contributing, connecting, thinking and intentioning. In addition, a mixed-methods analysis of questionnaires and interview data exploring participants' wellbeing, showed that all participants who engaged fairly consistently in the project improved after the project ended, although some participants' scores returned to baseline six months later.
Reflecting on both projects, an approach to facilitation within mental health is outlined, detailing how the dimensions of weaving and layered participation, nurturing mattering and facilitating attitudes interlace. This contribution raises awareness of tacit dimensions in the practice of facilitation, articulating the nuances of how to encourage and sustain meaningful and ethical engagement and offering insights into a range of tools. It highlights the importance of remaining reflexive in relation to attitudes and emotions and discusses practical methodological and ethical challenges and ways to resolve them which can be of benefit to researchers embarking on a similar journey.
The thesis also offers detailed insights on how methodologies from different fields were integrated into a whole, arguing for transparency and reflexivity about epistemological assumptions, and how underlying paradigms shift in an interdisciplinary context.
Based on the overall findings, the thesis makes a case for considering design as healing (or a designerly way of healing), highlighting implications at a systems, social and individual level. It makes an original contribution to our understanding of design, highlighting its healing character, and proposes a new way to support mental health. The participants in this study not only had increased their own wellbeing through co-designing, but were also empowered and contributed towards healing the world. Hence, the thesis argues for a unique, holistic perspective of design and mental health, recognizing the interconnectedness of the individual, social and systemic dimensions of the healing processes that are ignited
Supernatural crossing in Republican Chinese fiction, 1920s–1940s
This dissertation studies supernatural narratives in Chinese fiction from the mid-1920s to the 1940s. The literary works present phenomena or elements that are or appear to be supernatural, many of which remain marginal or overlooked in Sinophone and Anglophone academia. These sources are situated in the May Fourth/New Culture ideological context, where supernatural narratives had to make way for the progressive intellectuals’ literary realism and their allegorical application of supernatural motifs. In the face of realism, supernatural narratives paled, dismissed as impractical fantasies that distract one from facing and tackling real life.
Nevertheless, I argue that the supernatural narratives do not probe into another mystical dimension that might co-exist alongside the empirical world. Rather, they imagine various cases of the characters’ crossing to voice their discontent with contemporary society or to reflect on the notion of reality. “Crossing” relates to characters’ acts or processes of trespassing the boundary that separates the supernatural from the conventional natural world, thus entailing encounters and interaction between the natural and the supernatural. The dissertation examines how crossing, as a narrative device, disturbs accustomed and mundane situations, releases hidden tensions, and discloses repressed truths in Republican fiction.
There are five types of crossing in the supernatural narratives.
Type 1 is the crossing into “haunted” houses. This includes (intangible) human agency crossing into domestic spaces and revealing secrets and truths concealed by the scary, feigned ‘haunting’, thus exposing the hidden evil and the other house occupiers’ silenced, suffocated state.
Type 2 is men crossing into female ghosts’ apparitional residences. The female ghosts allude to heart-breaking, traumatic experiences in socio-historical reality, evoking sympathetic concern for suffering individuals who are caught in social upheavals.
Type 3 is the crossing from reality into the characters’ delusional/hallucinatory realities. While they physically remain in the empirical world, the characters’ abnormal perceptions lead them to exclusive, delirious, and quasi-supernatural experiences of reality. Their crossings blur the concrete boundaries between the real and the unreal on the mental level: their abnormal perceptions construct a significant, meaningful reality for them, which may be as real as the commonly regarded objective reality.
Type 4 is the crossing into the netherworld modelled on the real world in the authors’ observation and bears a spectrum of satirised objects of the Republican society.
The last type is immortal visitors crossing into the human world. This type satirises humanity’s vices and destructive potential.
The primary sources demonstrate their writers’ witty passion to play with super--natural notions and imagery (such as ghosts, demons, and immortals) and stitch them into vivid, engaging scenes using techniques such as the gothic, the grotesque, and the satirical, in order to evoke sentiments such as terror, horror, disgust, dis--orientation, or awe, all in service of their insights into realist issues. The works also creatively tailor traditional Chinese modes and motifs, which exemplifies the revival of Republican interest in traditional cultural heritage. The supernatural narratives may amaze or disturb the reader at first, but what is more shocking, unpleasantly nudging, or thought-provoking is the problematic society and people’s lives that the supernatural (misunderstandings) eventually reveals. They present a more compre--hensive treatment of reality than Republican literature with its revolutionary consciousness surrounding class struggle. The critical perspectives of the supernatural narratives include domestic space, unacknowledged history and marginal individuals, abnormal mentality, and pervasive weaknesses in humanity.
The crossing and supernatural narratives function as a means of better understanding the lived reality.
This study gathers diverse primary sources written by Republican writers from various educational and political backgrounds and interprets them from a rare perspective, thus filling a research gap. It promotes a fuller view of supernatural narratives in twentieth-century Chinese literature. In terms of reflecting the social and personal reality of the Republican era, the supernatural narratives supplement the realist fiction of the time
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF EFFORTFUL FUNDRAISING EXPERIENCES: USING INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS IN FUNDRAISING RESEARCH
Physical-activity oriented community fundraising has experienced an exponential growth in popularity over the past 15 years. The aim of this study was to explore the value of effortful fundraising experiences, from the point of view of participants, and explore the impact that these experiences have on people’s lives. This study used an IPA approach to interview 23 individuals, recognising the role of participants as proxy (nonprofessional) fundraisers for charitable organisations, and the unique organisation donor dynamic that this creates. It also bought together relevant psychological theory related to physical activity fundraising experiences (through a narrative literature review) and used primary interview data to substantiate these. Effortful fundraising experiences are examined in detail to understand their significance to participants, and how such experiences influence their connection with a charity or cause. This was done with an idiographic focus at first, before examining convergences and divergences across the sample. This study found that effortful fundraising experiences can have a profound positive impact upon community fundraisers in both the short and the long term. Additionally, it found that these experiences can be opportunities for charitable organisations to create lasting meaningful relationships with participants, and foster mutually beneficial lifetime relationships with them. Further research is needed to test specific psychological theory in this context, including self-esteem theory, self determination theory, and the martyrdom effect (among others)
Post-Millennial Queer Sensibility: Collaborative Authorship as Disidentification in Queer Intertextual Commodities
This dissertation is examining LGBTQ+ audiences and creatives collaborating in the creation of new media texts like web shows, podcasts, and video games. The study focuses on three main objects or media texts: Carmilla (web series), Welcome to Night Vale (podcast), and Undertale (video game). These texts are transmedia objects or intertextual commodities. I argue that by using queer gestures of collaborative authorship that reaches out to the audience for canonical contribution create an emerging queer production culture that disidentifies with capitalism even as it negotiates capitalistic structures. The post-millennial queer sensibility is a constellation of aesthetics, self-representation, alternative financing, and interactivity that prioritizes community, trust, and authenticity using new technologies for co-creation.
Within my study, there are four key tactics or queer gestures being explored: remediation, radical ambiguity and multi-forms as queer aesthetics, audience self-representation, alternative financing like micropatronage & licensed fan-made merchandise, and interactivity as performance. The goal of this project is to better understand the changing conceptions of authorship/ownership, canon/fanon (official text/fan created extensions), and community/capitalism in queer subcultures as an indicator of the potential change in more mainstream cultural attitudes. The project takes into consideration a variety of intersecting identities including gender, race, class, and of course sexual orientation in its analysis. By examining the legal discourse around collaborative authorship, the real-life production practices, and audience-creator interactions and attitudes, this study provides insight into how media creatives work with audiences to co-create self-representative media, the motivations, and rewards for creative, audiences, and owners. This study aims to contribute towards a fuller understanding of queer production cultures and audience reception of these media texts, of which there is relatively little academic information. Specifically, the study mines for insights into the changing attitudes towards authorship, ownership, and collaboration within queer indie media projects, especially as these objects are relying on the self-representation of both audiences and creatives in the formation of the text
The interpretation of Islam and nationalism by the elite through the English language media in Pakistan.
The media is constructed and interpreted through what people 'know'. That knowledge is, forthe most part, created through day to day experiences. In Pakistan, Islam and nationalism aretwo components of this social knowledge which are intrinsically tied to the experiences of thePakistani people. Censorship and selection are means through which this knowledge isarticulated and interpreted.General conceptions of partially shared large scale bodies of knowledge and ideas reinforce,and are reinforced by, general medium of mass communication: the print and electronic media.Focusing on the govermnent, media institutions and Pakistani elites, I describe and analyse thedifferent, sometimes conflicting, interpretations of Islam and Pakistani nationalism manifest inand through media productions presented in Pakistan.The media means many things, not least of which is power. It is the media as a source ofpower that is so frequently controlled, directed and manipulated. The terminology may beslightly different according to the context within which one is talking - propaganda, selection,etc. - but ultimately it comes down to the same thing - censorship. Each of the three groups:government, media institutions and Pakistani elites - have the power to interpret and censormedia content and consideration must be taken of each of the other power holders consequentlyrestricting the power of each group in relation to the other two. The processes of thismanipulation and their consequences form the major themes of this thesis
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