The return of the Serbian other: Interpretative repertoires of nationalism and identity politics in online news discourses on Serbia\u27s integration in the European union

After more than a decade of political investment in integration, Serbia is still awaiting full membership into the European Union and thus is kept on the periphery of an imagined European community. In this difficult and uncertain process, Serbs have faced fractured national discourses that are inscribed with new forms of liminality encapsulated in an externally ascribed position of flawed Europeans. This dissertation explores the co-construction of national identities in the context of public debate about the country\u27s integration into the EU on Serbian online news websites. Informed by the theoretical and methodological framework of discursive psychology, this research identified interpretative repertoires activated and constructed in dialogic interaction through news reports and readers\u27 online commentaries on the visa liberalization process between 2009 and 2011. The analysis shows that although discontinuous and asynchronous in character, the employment of particular interpretative repertoires normalizes a limited number of positions of identification through which individuals avow their national belonging. Relying on taken-for-granted claims about current economic hardships, lack of alternatives, and memory of lived collective suffering and unjust expulsion from imagined European community, participants in online dialogues construct a normative category of Serbs as damaged Europeans that challenges state-centered identities ascribed by the news discourse. By appropriating EU\u27s cultural politics and symbolic geography, readers\u27 comments mark territorial migrations of an internal and undesirable Other as moral transgression to advance a preference for fixed, clearly defined, and policed boundaries. Simultaneously, they reinterpret asylum seeking as a normal reaction to abnormal circumstances such as living in a failing Serbian state. Articulated through this form of online communication, these constructs enter the public sphere to equip political elites and Serbian citizens with rational means for everyday nationalism, practical othering, and continued discrimination of already-marginalized groups couched in discourses on state citizenship

Rhetorical memory, synaptic mapping, and ethical grounding

This research applies neuroscience to classical accounts of rhetorical memory, and argues that the physical operations of memory via synaptic activity support causal theories of language, and account for individual agency in systematically considering, creating, and revising our stances toward rhetorical situations. The dissertation explores ways that rhetorical memory grounds the work of the other canons of rhetoric in specific contexts, thereby expanding memory's classical function as "custodian" to the canons. In this approach, rhetorical memory actively orients the canons as interdependent phases of discursive communicative acts, and grounds them in an ethical baseline from which we enter discourse. Finally, the work applies its re-conception of rhetorical memory to various aspects of composition and Living Learning Community educational models via practical and deliberate interpretation and arrangement of our synaptic "maps.

FOAL 2005 Proceedings: Foundations of Aspect-Oriented Languages Workshop at AOSD 2005

Aspect-oriented programming is a paradigm in software engineering and programming languages that promises better support for separation of concerns. The fourth Foundations of Aspect-Oriented Languages (FOAL) workshop was held at the Fourth International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development in Chicago, USA, on March 14, 2005. This workshop was designed to be a forum for research in formal foundations of aspect-oriented programming languages

Developing a computational framework for explanation generation in knowledge-based systems and its application in automated feature recognition

A Knowledge-Based System (KBS) is essentially an intelligent computer system which explicitly or tacitly possesses a knowledge repository that helps the system solve problems. Researches focusing on building KBSs for industrial applications to improve design quality and shorten research cycle are increasingly attracting interests. For the early models, explanability is considered as one of the major benefits of using KBSs since that most of them are generally rule-based systems and the explanation can be generated based on the rule traces of the reasoning behaviors. With the development of KBS, the definition of knowledge base is becoming much more general than just using rules, and the techniques used to solve problems in KBS are far more than just rule-based reasoning. Many Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are introduced, such as neural network, genetic algorithm, etc. The effectiveness and efficiency of KBS are thus improved. However, as a trade-off, the explanability of KBS is weakened. More and more KBSs are conceived as black-box systems that do not run transparently to users, resulting in loss of trusts for the KBSs. Developing an explanation model for modern KBSs has a positive impact on user acceptance of the KBSs and the advices they provided. This thesis proposes a novel computational framework for explanation generation in KBS. Different with existing models which are usually built inside a KBS and generate explanations based on the actual decision making process, the explanation model in our framework stands outside the KBS and attempts to generate explanations through the production of an alternative justification that is unrelated to the actual decision making process used by the system. In this case, the knowledge and reasoning approaches in the explanation model can be optimized specially for explanation generation. The quality of explanation is thus improved. Another contribution in this study is that the system aims to cover three types of explanations (where most of the existing models only focus on the first two): 1) decision explanation, which helps users understand how a KBS reached its conclusion; 2) domain explanation, which provides detailed descriptions of the concepts and relationships within the domain; 3) software diagnostic, which diagnoses user observations of unexpected behaviors of the system or some relevant domain phenomena. The framework is demonstrated with a case of Automated Feature Recognition (AFR). The resulting explanatory system uses Semantic Web languages to implement an individual knowledge base only for explanatory purpose, and integrates a novel reasoning approach for generating explanations. The system is tested with an industrial STEP file, and delivers good quality explanations for user queries about how a certain feature is recognized

Constructing a know-how repository of advices and warnings from procedural texts

In this paper, we show how a domain dependent know-how textual database of advices and warnings can be constructed from procedural texts. We show how arguments of type warnings and advices can be annotated and extracted from procedural texts, and propose a format and a strategy to automatically generate a know-how textual database

Enough Hope to Spare: The Transformative Experience of Birth Parents as Leaders in Child Welfare

This study explores the transformative experience from client and service recipient to collaborative leader and partner in child welfare. Rather than expanding on existing literature that examines the nature and quality of the client experience from a service or customer satisfaction perspective, this study reflects the lived experiences of real, bonafide birth parent leaders in child welfare systems in the State of Kansas, several counties in Washington state, and Contra Costa County, California. The goal of the study is to illuminate the journey from clienthood to leadership as experienced by the nine birth parent leaders in the study through research portraits (Lawrence-Lightfoot Hoffmann Davis, 1997). Findings from the study highlight the dynamic interplay between individual and contextual dimensions that support the initiation of and on-going leadership of birth parents within child welfare systems as active and equal participants. The findings illuminate for us the relational web in which the study\u27s birth parent leader participants have emerged and thrive as collaborative partners and leaders within their local child welfare context. In so doing, the study provides a relational interpretation of resilience and transformation, leadership and change that extends beyond traditional notions of client engagement and consumer involvement in child welfare. The electronic version of this dissertation is at OhioLINK ETD Center, www.etd.ohiolink.edu

Enough Hope to Spare: The Transformative Experience of Birth Parents as Leaders in Child Welfare

This study explores the transformative experience from client and service recipient to collaborative leader and partner in child welfare. Rather than expanding on existing literature that examines the nature and quality of the client experience from a service or customer satisfaction perspective, this study reflects the lived experiences of real, bonafide birth parent leaders in child welfare systems in the State of Kansas, several counties in Washington state, and Contra Costa County, California. The goal of the study is to illuminate the journey from clienthood to leadership as experienced by the nine birth parent leaders in the study through research portraits (Lawrence-Lightfoot Hoffmann Davis, 1997). Findings from the study highlight the dynamic interplay between individual and contextual dimensions that support the initiation of and on-going leadership of birth parents within child welfare systems as active and equal participants. The findings illuminate for us the relational web in which the study\u27s birth parent leader participants have emerged and thrive as collaborative partners and leaders within their local child welfare context. In so doing, the study provides a relational interpretation of resilience and transformation, leadership and change that extends beyond traditional notions of client engagement and consumer involvement in child welfare. The electronic version of this dissertation is at OhioLINK ETD Center, www.etd.ohiolink.edu