10,410 research outputs found

    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

    An Examination of Ministry Essentials for the 21 Century Post Pandemic African American Urban Church

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    It is the goal of this research to explore the needs of the urban African American church in the post-pandemic era, and the adjustments it can make to remain a thriving, relevant entity within the culture. This body of work is designed to examine and explore how the African American church can pivot on a massive scale in this era. To pivot means to change course and/or direction. It refers to turning the body from one position or orientation to another. The church is referred to as the body of Christ in scripture, a body that may benefit by shifting course. The adjustments suggested herein can affect the church’s ability to continue to be an influential voice within its communities and the society at large, considering the long-term impact of the pandemic as well as societal trends that have affected the strength and position of African American-led houses of worship. There are nuances that affect areas of the United States outside of what is known as the Bible Belt—specifically the Midwest and East Coast—that may possibly make pastoring even more challenging. The primary objective of this dissertation is to create a manual for churches within the African American urban context to provide guidance and suggested best practices in leading their congregations in the post-COVID era. It will explore key essentials that the African American Urban Church may need to address going forward in this age, to not only survive, but also to thrive. While it is not possible to declare with certainty that every church who uses this manual will benefit, it is appropriate to assert that the manual can aid in equipping the church to maneuver in this period

    2023-2024 Boise State University Undergraduate Catalog

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    This catalog is primarily for and directed at students. However, it serves many audiences, such as high school counselors, academic advisors, and the public. In this catalog you will find an overview of Boise State University and information on admission, registration, grades, tuition and fees, financial aid, housing, student services, and other important policies and procedures. However, most of this catalog is devoted to describing the various programs and courses offered at Boise State

    Late-bound code generation

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    Each time a function or method is invoked during the execution of a program, a stream of instructions is issued to some underlying hardware platform. But exactly what underlying hardware, and which instructions, is usually left implicit. However in certain situations it becomes important to control these decisions. For example, particular problems can only be solved in real-time when scheduled on specialised accelerators, such as graphics coprocessors or computing clusters. We introduce a novel operator for hygienically reifying the behaviour of a runtime function instance as a syntactic fragment, in a language which may in general differ from the source function definition. Translation and optimisation are performed by recursively invoked, dynamically dispatched code generators. Side-effecting operations are permitted, and their ordering is preserved. We compare our operator with other techniques for pragmatic control, observing that: the use of our operator supports lifting arbitrary mutable objects, and neither requires rewriting sections of the source program in a multi-level language, nor interferes with the interface to individual software components. Due to its lack of interference at the abstraction level at which software is composed, we believe that our approach poses a significantly lower barrier to practical adoption than current methods. The practical efficacy of our operator is demonstrated by using it to offload the user interface rendering of a smartphone application to an FPGA coprocessor, including both statically and procedurally defined user interface components. The generated pipeline is an application-specific, statically scheduled processor-per-primitive rendering pipeline, suitable for place-and-route style optimisation. To demonstrate the compatibility of our operator with existing languages, we show how it may be defined within the Python programming language. We introduce a transformation for weakening mutable to immutable named bindings, termed let-weakening, to solve the problem of propagating information pertaining to named variables between modular code generating units.Open Acces

    ‘Making Floppy Floppy': Peter Halley's Postmodernist Abstraction (1980-1987):

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    Having completed studies at Yale and The University of New Orleans, in 1980 American artist Peter Halley returned to his hometown in New York City, took a studio in the East Village, and began to paint. Within six years he would become one of the most talked about artists in America. In this thesis I argue that Halley’s paintings of the 1980s constructed new relationships, or chains of meaning, between past abstract art—in particular, though not exclusively, forms of American minimalist abstract painting and sculpture from the 1950s and 1960s—and a range of social forms and urban textures particular to New York City. By suggesting new social interpretations of past abstract art, Halley’s model of ‘postmodernist abstraction’ prompts us to revise our understanding of the historicity and criticality of postmodernist painting. Pushing back against arguments about 1980s postmodernism as historical amnesia (Fredric Jameson), or market-complicit conventionalism (Hal Foster), I read Halley’s ‘Neo-geo’ as one example of how strategies such as pastiche and double-coding—identified by many critics as central tenets of the postmodernist art that emerged in New York in the 1980s—functioned as vehicles for historical orientation during a decade otherwise marked by disorientating economic, social, and cultural change

    Fandom, pop music, and reproduction of race–gender inequalities

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    In Fandom, Pop Music and the Reproduction of Race-Gender Inequalities I explore through Critical Discourse Analysis of contemporary entertainment media discourses and interviews with BeyoncĂ© and Rihanna ‘stans’, juxtaposition as a racialized–gendered technique of power used by entertainment media discourses to not only dichotomize BeyoncĂ© and Rihanna, but also reproduce upgraded controlling images of Black women in popular music. The development of the concept of juxtaposition as a critical analysis of gendering/racialization as a major technique of power in this thesis, is an important contribution for the disciplines of Cultural Studies, Postcolonial studies, and Black feminist theory. I explore how celebrity discourses (i.e., entertainment news, gossip) reposition BeyoncĂ© and Rihanna back into service through juxtaposition and the controlling images of Black women (e.g. virgin/whore, controlling images, respectability politics, villain-seductress-perpetrator/victim-in-need-of-rescue). As part of my original contribution to Cultural Studies knowledge I argue that the ‘controlling’ function in controlling images has been deregulated through neoliberal mechanisms, such as resilience discourse (James, 2015). To develop juxtaposition as a concept, I interview BeyoncĂ© and Rihanna fans in elicitation interviews to capture the ways in which fans interpret and reproduce these juxtaposing discourses through their fan labour practices. Juxtaposition is a technique a power that places and organises Black/Brown people (particularly women) side by side with contrasting effects. It is different from Barthes’ ‘binary oppositions’ (1992) in the sense that Barthes' discussion lacks a focused concern with race and racism, whereas in my thesis, I account for the role of enslavement and colonial violence in the technique of juxtaposition. Juxtaposition is a mechanism of white supremacist capitalist patriarchal violence, separation and surveillance of Black and Brown people, particularly Black and Brown women. Fundamentally, juxtaposition is the upgraded colonial structuring of ‘divide and rule’; it is the neoliberal version that looks like deregulated competition and choice but it is in fact a continuation of deep inequality

    Verfassungsblatt: 2023/6

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    Understanding Secularized People of Metro Manila: A Case Study Approach for a Contextualized Urban Ministry Strategy

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    Problem Secularization shapes people\u27s thinking, feeling, and behaving in the cities. Yearly, there is a rise in the number of de-religionized or secularized people in cities of the world who engage in pursuits of materialism and show declining interest in religion. Sociologists and missiologists postulate about the spectrum of secularity and the variety of secularism in different context. Since Metro Manila is one of the world\u27s top highly urbanized and densely populated cities, the Seventh-day Adventist Church encounters challenges in reaching its secularized people. It is a new turf for the church. Pastors trained for rural settings may not understand what attracts and retains the secularized people to the church. Many do not know that the secularized is an emerging people group and that they have some special needs that the traditional Adventist Church does not address. Hence, there is a need for a biblically sound and yet culturally sensitive approach to the secularized people. -- Method This case study looked into the phenomena of evangelizing secularized persons in Metro Manila. It aimed to determine the characteristics of the secularized Manileños and what attracted them to God and the church. In addition, the study also answered the questions of what retains in them in church and what make them leave the church—in an attempt to put together a contextualized strategy for the secularized people. Personal interviews and focus group discussions were conducted among 30 participants comprising of non-Adventists who are secularized (12), secularized Adventists (10), and urban ministry practitioners (8). Document analysis and observation (church visit and online worship) followed the interviews. Coded data analysis provided categories for themes that answered the research questions. The interviews, FGI, document analysis, and observation were triangulated to ensure the reliability and credibility of the research findings. Results The secularized Manileños are found to be at the beginning of the spectrum of the secularization process. They are between the U1-U3 stages in Reiner’s Scale on Receptivity to the Gospel. They also identify with twenty-four characteristics of secularized individuals. Several analysis cycles resulted in nine recurring themes that emerged from the data. These themes are four life encounters with Grace, six relational factors, seven good experiences in the Adventist church, three unique features that are specific to Adventists, three church-related factors impacting retention among secularized individuals, four personal factors influencing their decision-making process when it comes to joining or leaving religious institutions. The study also revealed five barriers hindering efforts to reach out and engage secular audiences, as well as five best qualities of the ministry workers and five approaches for successful ministry toward this group. Conclusions Analyzing these findings and insights resulted in twelve proposed strategies that Adventist organizations and conferences can use as examples in developing effective ministry programs targeting secularized people in Metro Manila. These strategies can also be applied to other cities with diverse population segments, including those currently disconnected from organized religion like the secularized people
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