3,340 research outputs found

    ‘Un-boarding’ the window trom faca mi an àird an Iar/ through which I saw the West: Excavating the practices of Anne Campbell, Marnie Keltie, Moira MacLean, Mary Morrison and Ishbel Murray

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    This thesis provides a close examination of artists’ Anne Campbell, Marnie Keltie, Moira MacLean, Mary Morrison and Ishbel Murray’s work and practices from 2000-2022. Prior to this study, the artists in question were unresearched in academia. The paper’s urge to highlight the artists’ practice derives from their timely engagement with decolonisation. To best understand the decolonising processes in the artists’ work, the paper proposes looking at them through a metaphorical lens: comparing the way the artists uncover stories from history to ‘un-boarding’ Sorley MacLean’s boarded house gazing West (as described in MacLean’s poem Hallaig from 1954). Then, the decolonising strategies deployed by each artist are unpacked through a postcolonial, loosely Bhabhanian, lens. The fruitful results of this application show the benefit of applying postcolonial theory to (disputedly) internal colonies and fringe nations. The decolonising themes dealt with include discussions of (re)writing history, establishing the effects of Colonial Alienation, utilising mapping to discuss land issues in relation to Imperial intervention, reasserting the credibility of indigenous methods (both scientific and historical) and regaining indigenous autonomy. This paper looks at how the ‘un-boarding’ artists deconstruct representations of the Gael, representations which had roots in art made amidst the greatest Imperial intervention in the Gàidhealtachd – the Clearances of the 1800s. Critically, the paper also looks at how the artists went on to make radically hybrid, new representations of the Gàidhealtachd and its inhabitants - employing progressive temporal and spatial tools to do so

    Digital Technologies for Teaching English as a Foreign/Second Language: a collective monograph

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    Колективна монографія розкриває різні аспекти використання цифрових технологій у навчанні англійської мови як іноземної/другої мови (цифровий сторітелінг, мобільні застосунки, інтерактивне навчання і онлайн-ігри, тощо) та надає освітянам і дослідникам ресурс для збагачення їхньої професійної діяльності. Окрема увага приділена цифровим інструментам для впровадження соціально-емоційного навчання та інклюзивної освіти на уроках англійської мови. Для вчителів англійської мови, методистів, викладачів вищих закладів освіти, науковців, здобувачів вищої освіти

    2023-2024 Catalog

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    The 2023-2024 Governors State University Undergraduate and Graduate Catalog is a comprehensive listing of current information regarding:Degree RequirementsCourse OfferingsUndergraduate and Graduate Rules and Regulation

    Subjective Excess: Aesthetics, Character, and Non-Normative Perspectives in Serial Television After 2000

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    This dissertation aims to fill gaps in contemporary television scholarship with regards to aesthetics and character subjectivity. By analyzing eight series that have all aired after 2000, there is a marked trend in series that use an excessive visual and aural style to not only differentiate themselves from other programming, but also to explore non-normative perspectives. Now more willing to explore previously taboo topics such as mental health, addiction, illness, and trauma, the shows featured in this dissertation show how a seemingly excessive televisual aesthetic works with television’s seriality to create narrative complexity and generate character development. Chapters are arranged by mode of production with the first chapter focusing on the series Grey’s Anatomy and Hannibal as a means of exploring the production and distribution practices surrounding network TV. The second chapter examines the basic cable series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Legion and posits how the narrowcasting of cable allows for more nuanced character representations through aesthetics. In the third chapter, the impact HBO has had on the television medium is explored through Carnivàle and Euphoria. The final chapter looks at contemporary series The Boys and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt as a way to better understand how the medium’s production and distribution has shifted during the convergence era. Ultimately, this dissertation will argue that in addition to further explorations of aesthetics, television studies is in need of a medium specific vernacular for creating meaningful textual analyses that avoid an overreliance on cinematic terminology

    The Long Lives of Old Lutes: The Cultural and Material History of the Veneration of Old Musical Instruments

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    This study examines the object biographies of musical instruments and the function of age in the cultural and material history of the lute. It follows the central question of why old instruments were valued more greatly than new ones and what measures had to be executed to adapt the objects to the ever-changing musical style. It traces the lute in its several cultural functions from the 17th to the 19th century: as a musical instrument, as a symbol, as a commodity, and as an object that had to be adapted, repaired, and altered by several generations of lute makers. This interdisciplinary approach uses a broad spectrum of sources from treatises, lute manuals, forewords in printed lute music, and depictions of lutes in literature, poetry, and visual arts to construct a narrative of the appreciation of old musical instruments. It investigates the material changes that were necessary to ensure their continued use by a profound study of more than 100 instruments in public and private collections. The different business models and prices in the trade of lutes are compared and connected to the common knowledge about old instruments and their brand characteristics among lute players. This study employs methods from musicology, organology, material culture studies, acoustics, economics, art history, technology, and digital humanities. This multivalent approach enhances the understanding of the general dynamics of commodities as status symbols, object biographies, and functional objects and connects them to the material and cultural history of objects using the lute as a case study.Die Studie untersucht die Objektbiografien von Musikinstrumenten und die Funktion des Alters für die kulturelle und materielle Geschichte von Lauteninstrumenten. Sie geht der zentralen Frage nach, warum alte Instrumente höher geschätzt wurden als neue und welche Maßnahmen ergriffen werden mussten, um die Objekte an den sich ständig verändernden Musikstil anzupassen. Sie verfolgt die Laute in ihren verschiedenen kulturellen Funktionen vom 17. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert: als Musikinstrument, als Symbol, als Gebrauchsgegenstand und als Objekt, das von mehreren Generationen von Lautenbauern angepasst, repariert und verändert werden musste. Der interdisziplinäre Ansatz nutzt ein breites Spektrum von Quellen wie Traktate, Lautenhandbücher, Vorworte in gedruckter Lautenmusik und Darstellungen von Lauten in Literatur, Poesie und bildender Kunst, um die Geschichte der Wertschätzung alter Musikinstrumente nachzuverfolgen. Anhand einer eingehenden Untersuchung von mehr als 100 Instrumenten in öffentlichen und privaten Sammlungen werden die Eingriffe untersucht, die notwendig waren, um ihre weitere Nutzung zu gewährleisten. Die unterschiedlichen Geschäftsmodelle und Preise im Handel mit Lauten werden verglichen und mit dem Wissensvorrat unter Lautenisten über alte Instrumente und deren Markencharakteristiken in Verbindung gebracht. Die Studie verwendet Methoden aus der Musikwissenschaft, der Organologie, der materiellen Kulturwissenschaft, der Akustik, der Ökonomie, der Kunstgeschichte, der Instrumentenbautechnologie und der Digital Humanities. Der multivalente Ansatz verbessert das Verständnis der allgemeinen Dynamik von Waren als Statussymbole, von Objektbiografien funktionaler Objekte und verbindet sie mit der materiellen und kulturellen Geschichte der Objekte am Beispiel der Laute

    Undergraduate Catalog of Studies, 2022-2023

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    Gratitude in Healthcare an interdisciplinary inquiry

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    The expression and reception of gratitude is a significant dimension of interpersonal communication in care-giving relationships. Although there is a growing body of evidence that practising gratitude has health and wellbeing benefits for the giver and receiver, gratitude as a social emotion made in interaction has received comparatively little research attention. To address this gap, this thesis draws on a portfolio of qualitative methods to explore the ways in which gratitude is constituted in care provision in personal, professional, and public discourse. This research is informed by a discursive psychology approach in which gratitude is analysed, not as a morally virtuous character trait, but as a purposeful, performative social action that is mutually co-constructed in interaction.I investigate gratitude through studies that approach it on a meta, meso, macro, and micro level. Key intellectual traditions that underpin research literature on gratitude in healthcare are explored through a metanarrative review. Six underlying metanarratives were identified: social capital; gifts; care ethics; benefits of gratitude; staff wellbeing; and gratitude as an indicator of quality of care. At the meso (institutional) level, a narrative analysis of an archive of letters between patients treated for tuberculosis and hospital almoners positions gratitude as participating in a Maussian gift-exchange ritual in which communal ties are created and consolidated.At the macro (societal) level, a discursive analysis of tweets of gratitude to the National Health Service at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic shows that attitudes to gratitude were dynamic in response to events, with growing unease about deflecting attention from risk reduction for those working in the health and social care sectors. A follow-up analysis of the clap-for-carers movement implicates gratitude in embodied, symbolic, and imagined performances in debates about care justice. At the micro (interpersonal) level, an analysis of gratitude encounters broadcast in the BBC documentary series, Hospital, uses pragmatics and conversation analysis to argue that gratitude is an emotion made in talk, with the uptake of gratitude opportunities influencing the course of conversational sequencing. The findings challenge the oftenmade distinction between task-oriented and relational conversation in healthcare.Moral economics are paradigmatic in the philosophical conceptualisation of gratitude. My research shows that, although balance-sheet reciprocity characterised the institutional culture of the voluntary hospital, it is hardly ever a feature ofinterpersonal gratitude encounters. Instead, gratitude is accomplished as shared moments of humanity through negotiated encounters infused with affect. Gratitude should never be instrumentalised as compensating for unsafe, inadequatelyrenumerated work. Neither should its potential to enhance healthcare encounters be underestimated. Attention to gratitude can participate in culture change by affirming modes of acting, emoting, relating, expressing, and connecting that intersect with care justice.This thesis speaks to gratitude as a culturally salient indicator of what people express as worthy of appreciation. It calls for these expressions to be more closely attended to, not only as useful feedback that can inform change, but also because gratitude is a resource on which we can draw to enhance and enrich healthcare as a communal, collaborative, cooperative endeavour

    Writing Facts: Interdisciplinary Discussions of a Key Concept in Modernity

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    "Fact" is one of the most crucial inventions of modern times. Susanne Knaller discusses the functions of this powerful notion in the arts and the sciences, its impact on aesthetic models and systems of knowledge. The practice of writing provides an effective procedure to realize and to understand facts. This concerns preparatory procedures, formal choices, models of argumentation, and narrative patterns. By considering "writing facts" and "writing facts", the volume shows why and how "facts" are a result of knowledge, rules, and norms as well as of description, argumentation, and narration. This approach allows new perspectives on »fact« and its impact on modernity

    RAPHAEL: Text-to-Image Generation via Large Mixture of Diffusion Paths

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    Text-to-image generation has recently witnessed remarkable achievements. We introduce a text-conditional image diffusion model, termed RAPHAEL, to generate highly artistic images, which accurately portray the text prompts, encompassing multiple nouns, adjectives, and verbs. This is achieved by stacking tens of mixture-of-experts (MoEs) layers, i.e., space-MoE and time-MoE layers, enabling billions of diffusion paths (routes) from the network input to the output. Each path intuitively functions as a "painter" for depicting a particular textual concept onto a specified image region at a diffusion timestep. Comprehensive experiments reveal that RAPHAEL outperforms recent cutting-edge models, such as Stable Diffusion, ERNIE-ViLG 2.0, DeepFloyd, and DALL-E 2, in terms of both image quality and aesthetic appeal. Firstly, RAPHAEL exhibits superior performance in switching images across diverse styles, such as Japanese comics, realism, cyberpunk, and ink illustration. Secondly, a single model with three billion parameters, trained on 1,000 A100 GPUs for two months, achieves a state-of-the-art zero-shot FID score of 6.61 on the COCO dataset. Furthermore, RAPHAEL significantly surpasses its counterparts in human evaluation on the ViLG-300 benchmark. We believe that RAPHAEL holds the potential to propel the frontiers of image generation research in both academia and industry, paving the way for future breakthroughs in this rapidly evolving field. More details can be found on a project webpage: https://raphael-painter.github.io/.Comment: Technical Repor

    Experiences of living and dying with Lewy body dementia:A longitudinal narrative study

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    Background Lewy body dementia is a life-limiting condition with multiple, complex symptoms. As the condition progresses much of the caring and nursing duties fall to families. However, little is known about how people with Lewy body dementia and their families are affected by the condition. The overall aim of this thesis was to explore the experiences of people living with Lewy body dementia, and their family carers over time. An integrative systematic review of the literature was conducted. A convergent integrated design was applied to facilitate the synthesis of published research exploring the experiences of people living with Lewy body dementia and family carers. There was scarce qualitative evidence identified on the lived experience, with a predominant biomedical focus and cross-sectional designs. Methodology In order to gain unique insights into people’s experiences of living with Lewy body dementia a narrative methodology was chosen. A social constructionist approach influenced the research conducted, drawing from the psycho-social discipline and experience-centred narrative theory. The underpinning perspective was that knowledge and reality are socially produced, and humans’ understanding, and interpretations of their world occurs through stories. Method A longitudinal narrative study using three sequential interviews and life story work was completed to gain unique insights into five couples’ experiences of living with Lewy body dementia. Participants were recruited from memory clinics and the ‘Join Dementia Research’ database within the east of England. Narrative data were collected using dyadic narrative interviews with each couple over a six-month period (August 2019 – Februrary 2020). The analysis of the stories was conducted using Murray’s levels of narrative analysis in health psychology. Murray’s anaytical framework enabled stories to be analysed at the personal, interpersonal, positional, and societal level. Findings The main finding from this study was that the overarching narrative of ‘social connectedness’ was found to be important, and this continued over time. In this study, social connectedness represents a stepwise description of how a person is actively involved with others and their surroundings, leading to a sense of comfort and wellbeing. Seven stages of social connectedness were identified: maintaining social connections, developing new connections together, social disconnection, support from adult children, marital disconnection, connecting to health and social care, and emotionally separated but living together. Lack of social connectedness leads to social disconnection. Repeated losses over time resulted in difficulty in maintaining social connections giving rise to a reduced sense of agency. Loss of continence, energy, and independence, together with difficulty managing medications, significantly impacted on couples’ quality of life and ability to remain connected through all stages. Conclusion Maintaining a social life and support network was important for both people living with Lewy body dementia and family carers. The findings contribute to the methodological literature that gives voice to those living with dementia over time. They highlight how physical and personality changes, communication challenges, and behavioural difficulties, undermine established social connections. The stepwise diagrammatic representation of social connectedness provides guidance for more targeted healthcare interventions and management of Lewy body dementia
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