6,723 research outputs found

    Urbanised forested landscape: Urbanisation, timber extraction and forest care on the Vișeu Valley, northern Romania

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    By looking at urbanisation processes from the vantage point of the forest, and the ways in which it both constitutes our living space while having been separated from the bounded space of the urban in modern history, the thesis asks: How can we (re)imagine urbanisation beyond the limits of the urban? How can a feminine line of thinking engage with the forest beyond the capitalist-colonial paradigm and its extractive project? and How can we “think with care” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) towards the forest as an inhabitant of our common world, instead of perpetuating the image of the forest as a space outside the delimited boundaries of the city? Through a case study research, introducing the Vișeu Valley in northern Romania as both a site engaged in the circulation of the global timber flow, a part of what Brenner and Schmid (2014) name “planetary urbanisation”, where the extractive logging operations beginning in the late XVIIIth century have constructed it as an extractive landscape, and a more than human landscape inhabited by a multitude of beings (animal, plant, and human) the thesis argues towards the importance of forest care and indigenous knowledge in landscape management understood as a trans-generational transmission of knowledge, that is interdependent with the persistence of the landscape as such. Having a trans-scalar approach, the thesis investigates the ways in which the extractive projects of the capitalist-colonial paradigm have and still are shaping forested landscapes across the globe in order to situate the case as part of a planetary forest landscape and the contemporary debates it is engaged in. By engaging with emerging paradigms within the fields of plant communication, forestry, legal scholarship and landscape urbanism that present trees and forests as intelligent beings, and look at urbanisation as a way of inhabiting the landscape in both indigenous and modern cultures, the thesis argues towards viewing forested landscapes as more than human living spaces. Thinking urbanisation through the case of the Vișeu Valley’s urbanised forested landscape, the thesis aligns with alternate ways of viewing urbanisation as co-habitation with more than human beings, particularly those emerging from interdisciplinary research in the Amazon river basin (Tavares 2017, Heckenberger 2012) and, in light of emerging discourses on the rights of nature, proposes an expanded concept of planetary citizenship, to include non-human personhood

    An American Knightmare: Joker, Fandom, and Malicious Movie Meaning-Making

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    This monograph concerns the long-standing communication problem of how individuals can identify and resist the influence of unethical public speakers. Scholarship on the issue of what Socrates & Plato called the “Evil Lover” – i.e., the ill-intended rhetor – began with the Greek philosophers, but has carried into [post]Modern anxieties. For instance, the study of Nazi propaganda machines, and the rhetoric of Hitler himself, rejuvenated interest in the study of speech and communication in the U.S. and Europe. Whereas unscrupulous sophists used lectures and legal forums, and Hitler used a microphone, contemporary Evil Lovers primarily draw on new, internet-related tools to share their malicious influence. These new tools of influence are both more far-reaching and more subtle than the traditional practices of listening to a designated speaker appearing at an overtly political event. Rhetorician Ashley Hinck has recently noted the ways that popular culture – communication about texts which are commonly accessible and shared – are now significant sites through which citizens learn moral and political values. Accordingly, the talk of internet influencers who interpret popular texts for other fans has the potential to constitute strong persuasive power regarding ethics and civic responsibility. The present work identifies and responds to a particular case example of popular culture text that has been recently, and frequently, leveraged in moral and civic discourses: Todd Phillips’ Joker. Specifically, this study takes a hermeneutic approach to understanding responses, especially those explicitly invoking political ideology, to Joker as a method of examining civic meaning-making. A special emphasis is placed on the online film criticisms of Joker from white nationalist movie fans, who clearly exemplify ways that media responses can be leveraged by unethical speakers (i.e., Evil Lovers) and subtly diffused. The study conveys that these racist movie fans can embed values related to “trolling,” incelism, and xenophobia into otherwise seemingly innocuous talk about film. While the sharing of such speech does not immediately mean its positive reception, this kind of communication yet constitutes a new and understudied attack on democratic values such as justice and equity. The case of white nationalist movie fan film criticism therefore reflects a particular brand of communicative strategy for contemporary Evil Lovers in communicating unethical messages under the covert guise of mundane movie talk

    The Diasporic Sublime in the Works of Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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    The doctoral research aims to redefine the theory of the sublime within the transcultural identities through the works of Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. The involvement and elevation of Indian American women in migration has not been emphasised enough in the discussion of indentured labour, globalization and effects of cultural appropriation. Considering the German traditions of aesthetics, specifically Immanuel Kant’s theorization of the sublime in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beauty and the Sublime (1790/2011), the dissertation focuses to challenge the specific Kantian notion of female inability to be the sovereign and elevated (sublime) subject. ‘Diasporic sublime’ hence highlights the journey of Indian immigrant women in the United States of America and facing the conflicts to reach the sublime state of body and mind. The dissertation structures the conceptualisation of the postcolonial fear, power and agency through the changes of body, food and home to evince the manifestation of the sublime. Following the contemporary works of Christina Battersby, Bonnie Mann and Barbara Claire Freeman, the dissertation renegotiates the term sublime as a process to confront the submissive identity, dehumanised socio-economical state of immigrant women

    Religion, Education, and the ‘East’. Addressing Orientalism and Interculturality in Religious Education Through Japanese and East Asian Religions

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    This work addresses the theme of Japanese religions in order to rethink theories and practices pertaining to the field of Religious Education. Through an interdisciplinary framework that combines the study of religions, didactics and intercultural education, this book puts the case study of Religious Education in England in front of two ‘challenges’ in order to reveal hidden spots, tackle unquestioned assumptions and highlight problematic areas. These ‘challenges’, while focusing primarily on Japanese religions, are addressed within the wider contexts of other East Asian traditions and of the modern historical exchanges with the Euro-American societies. As result, a model for teaching Japanese and other East Asian religions is discussed and proposed in order to fruitfully engage issues such as orientalism, occidentalism, interculturality and critical thinking

    The Entrenched Political Limitations of Australian Refugee Policy: A Case Study of the Australian Labor Party (2007-2013)

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    This thesis deconstructs Australia’s asylum and refugee policy trajectory under the Labor government between 2007 and 2013. For a short time after the 2007 election, in accordance with its promise to abolish the LNP’s Pacific Solution, Labor began to unwind certain policy structures of externalisation and deterrence that had been in place since the introduction of mandatory detention in 1992. By 2013 however, the ALP had declared that asylum seekers arriving by boat had no prospect of resettlement in Australia. This thesis analyses the political strategy of the ALP in rhetoric, policy choices and policy justifications to derive lessons from Labor’s mitigated challenge to the deterrence/externalisation paradigm. Critical Discourse Analysis is used to examine the political strategies of lead actors, particularly the ALP and the LNP, and to reconcile these strategies with policy outcomes such as irregular arrivals, detention figures, deaths at sea and compliance with obligations under international law. A central argument of this thesis is that Labor’s attempt to sustainably depart from the dominant externalisation paradigm was impaired, not by a lack of commitment to its stated program of reform, but rather by entrenched political limitations of the Australian context. These limitations include the LNP’s rigid partisanship and lack of policy compromise, the deep-rooted nature of mandatory detention, and the Australian public’s historical and continued support for controlled migration. A precise and detailed analysis of the impact of these limitations on Labor’s proposed reform fills a gap in academic knowledge about the political influences on policy action in Australian asylum and refugee policy. I contend that these limitations must be effectively engaged with in any attempt to reform the Australian asylum and refugee policy space

    Tourism and heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone

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    Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) uses an ethnographic lens to explore the dissonances associated with the commodification of Chornobyl's heritage. The book considers the role of the guides as experience brokers, focusing on the synergy between tourists and guides in the performance of heritage interpretation. Banaszkiewicz proposes to perceive tour guides as important actors in the bottom-up construction of heritage discourse contributing to more inclusive and participatory approach to heritage management. Demonstrating that the CEZ has been going through a dynamic transformation into a mass tourism attraction, the book offers a critical reflection on heritagisation as a meaning-making process in which the resources of the past are interpreted, negotiated, and recognised as a valuable legacy. Applying the concepts of dissonant heritage to describe the heterogeneous character of the CEZ, the book broadens the interpretative scope of dark tourism which takes on a new dimension in the context of the war in Ukraine. Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone argues that post-disaster sites such as Chornobyl can teach us a great deal about the importance of preserving cultural and natural heritage for future generations. The book will be of interest to academics and students who are engaged in the study of heritage, tourism, memory, disasters and Eastern Europe

    Copular clauses in Malay: synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives

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    This thesis examines the copulas ialah and adalah in Malay on different levels of linguistic analysis, in different periods in time, and against different genetically related languages. Addressing the scarcity of research on copular clauses in Malay in all three areas, namely synchrony, diachrony, and typology, this thesis aims to serve as a point of reference for future study on nonverbal predication in Malay and beyond. The synchronic portion of the thesis begins with a demonstration of the monomorphemic nature of the two copulas, which no longer exhibit the morphosyntax, semantics, and information structure of the morphemes that they appear to comprise, viz. 3rd person ia, existential verb ada, and focus marker lah. Following that, several syntactic and semantic phenomena, including extraction from copular clauses, copular inversion, and overt vs. zero encoding of the copula, are investigated. Lastly, the derivation of clefts in Malay is examined, which I reveal to be a type of copular construction despite the absence of an overt copula. I then show that the derivation of a cleft feeds the further derivation of a pseudocleft via remnant movement. In the history of Malay, ialah and adalah are shown to have emerged relatively recently, that is towards the end of the Classical Malay era, circa the 18th to 19th century. Ialah grammaticalised from the combination of 3rd person pronoun ia and comment marker lah in a topical construction that involved left dislocation. Specifically, the topic was reanalysed as the canonical subject, which subsequently forced the resumptive pronoun to undergo Spec-to-Head reanalysis, resulting in ialah grammaticalising into a copula heading TP. Meanwhile, adalah grammaticalised from semantically vacuous support auxiliary ada, also in combination with comment marker lah. Both copulas originally developed from the need to provide a host for the comment marker as a way of avoiding a violation of the stray affix filter.   The typological survey of copular clauses in Austronesian reveals that syntactic alignment and word order play a central role in the emergence of copulas in a language. Of the 40 languages examined, all the 19 languages that have overt copulas are accusatively aligned, except the ergatively aligned Formosan language Puyuma, which entails that ergative-absolutive and split ergative languages within Austronesian are statistically very unlikely to have overt copulas. In addition to that, 20 of the 25 accusatively aligned languages have SVO word order, whilst all of the 9 ergatively aligned languages have VSO word order. The word order of the language is relevant as all but two of the 19 languages with overt copulas have SVO word order. In consideration of these findings, I argue that the correlation among the three factors is such that change from ergative to accusative alignment triggers change in word order from verb-initial order to verb-medial order, and that this is conducive to the emergence of overt copulas. Furthermore, word order plays a crucial role in the emergence of overt copulas as they may develop in topical constructions following reanalysis of the left-dislocated topic as the canonical subject, as argued in the diachronic portion of the thesis. Given this path of development, I argue that pronominal copulas have not been able to develop in the ergatively aligned Philippine-type languages due to the lack of the notion of subject and the absence of the canonical subject position, which prevents reanalysis of left-dislocated topics as canonical subjects and subsequently resumptive pronouns as copulas, as undergone by the Malay copula ialah. In addition to that, verbal copulas cannot develop from posture verbs in the Philippine-type languages because of the clash between the unergative nature of posture verbs and the unaccusative nature of the copula, which presents a problem in the Philippine-type languages due to the encoding of the agent argument on the verb in the actor voice. Besides, the strict intransitive nature of the copular clause is incompatible with other voice alternations such as the benefactive and the locative, as the trigger in these voice alternations is encoded as an applied argument, making the clause transitive. Verbs of becoming also cannot copularise in the Philippine-type languages via semantic bleaching of the inchoative aspect, due to the robust morphological marking of aspect on the verb

    Affinity-Based Reinforcement Learning : A New Paradigm for Agent Interpretability

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    The steady increase in complexity of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is accompanied by a corresponding increase in opacity that obfuscates insights into their devised strategies. Methods in explainable artificial intelligence seek to mitigate this opacity by either creating transparent algorithms or extracting explanations post hoc. A third category exists that allows the developer to affect what agents learn: constrained RL has been used in safety-critical applications and prohibits agents from visiting certain states; preference-based RL agents have been used in robotics applications and learn state-action preferences instead of traditional reward functions. We propose a new affinity-based RL paradigm in which agents learn strategies that are partially decoupled from reward functions. Unlike entropy regularisation, we regularise the objective function with a distinct action distribution that represents a desired behaviour; we encourage the agent to act according to a prior while learning to maximise rewards. The result is an inherently interpretable agent that solves problems with an intrinsic affinity for certain actions. We demonstrate the utility of our method in a financial application: we learn continuous time-variant compositions of prototypical policies, each interpretable by its action affinities, that are globally interpretable according to customers’ financial personalities. Our method combines advantages from both constrained RL and preferencebased RL: it retains the reward function but generalises the policy to match a defined behaviour, thus avoiding problems such as reward shaping and hacking. Unlike Boolean task composition, our method is a fuzzy superposition of different prototypical strategies to arrive at a more complex, yet interpretable, strategy.publishedVersio

    Reasoning in criminal intelligence analysis through an argumentation theory-based framework

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    This thesis provides an in-depth analysis of criminal intelligence analysts’ analytical reasoning process and offers an argumentation theory-based framework as a means to support that reasoning process in software applications. Researchers have extensively researched specific areas of criminal intelligence analysts’ sensemaking and reasoning processes over the decades. However, the research is fractured across different research studies and those research studies often have high-level descriptions of how criminal intelligence analysts formulate their rationale (argument). This thesis addresses this gap by offering low level descriptions on how the reasoning-formulation process takes place. It is presented as a single framework, with supporting templates, to inform the software implementation process. Knowledge from nine experienced criminal intelligence analysts from West Midlands Police and Belgium’s Local and Federal Police forces were elicited through a semi-structured interview for study 1 and the Critical Decision Method (CDM), as part of the Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) approach, was used for study 2 and study 3. The data analysis for study 1 made use of the Qualitative Conventional Content Analysis approach. The data analysis for study 2 made use of a mixed method approach, consisting out of Qualitative Directed Content Analysis and the Emerging Theme Approach. The data analysis for study 3 made use of the Qualitative Directed Content Analysis approach. The results from the three studies along with the concepts from the existing literature informed the construction of the argumentation theory-based framework. The evaluation study for the framework’s components made use of Paper Prototype Testing as a participatory design method over an electronic medium. The low-fidelity prototype was constructed by turning the frameworks’ components into software widgets that resembled widgets on a software application’s toolbar. Eight experienced criminal intelligence analysts from West Midlands Police and Belgium’s Local and Federal Police forces took part in the evaluation study. Participants had to construct their rationale using the available components as part of a simulated robbery crime scenario, which used real anonymised crime data from West Midlands Police force. The evaluation study made use of a Likert scale questionnaire to capture the participant’s views on how the frameworks’ components aided participants with; understanding what was going on in the analysis, lines-of-enquiry and; the changes in their level of confidence pertaining to their rationale. A non-parametric, one sample z-test was used for reporting the statistical results. The significance is at 5% (α=0.05) against a median of 3 for the z-test, where ÎŒ =3 represents neutral. The participants reported a positive experience with the framework’s components and results show that the framework’s components aided them with formulating their rationale and understanding how confident they were during different phases of constructing their rationale
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