9,629 research outputs found

    The place where curses are manufactured : four poets of the Vietnam War

    Get PDF
    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

    Strategies for Early Learners

    Get PDF
    Welcome to learning about how to effectively plan curriculum for young children. This textbook will address: ā€¢ Developing curriculum through the planning cycle ā€¢ Theories that inform what we know about how children learn and the best ways for teachers to support learning ā€¢ The three components of developmentally appropriate practice ā€¢ Importance and value of play and intentional teaching ā€¢ Different models of curriculum ā€¢ Process of lesson planning (documenting planned experiences for children) ā€¢ Physical, temporal, and social environments that set the stage for childrenā€™s learning ā€¢ Appropriate guidance techniques to support childrenā€™s behaviors as the self-regulation abilities mature. ā€¢ Planning for preschool-aged children in specific domains including o Physical development o Language and literacy o Math o Science o Creative (the visual and performing arts) o Diversity (social science and history) o Health and safety ā€¢ Making childrenā€™s learning visible through documentation and assessmenthttps://scholar.utc.edu/open-textbooks/1001/thumbnail.jp

    A Media Analysis of Changes in International Human Trafficking Routes from Nepal

    Get PDF
    This study examined the media portrayal of different actors involved in human trafficking from Nepal to understand the reported changes in international routes of human trafficking from Nepal after 2015. The findings of the study are based on content analysis of 480 news articles published in six national newspapers in Nepal in a five-year period from 2016 to 2020, along with existing literature and interviews with newspaper reporters and editors. Most of the alleged perpetrators reported in the media were male while females dominated reportage on ā€˜victimsā€™. An overwhelming majority of the reported victims of sex trafficking were females while the reported victims of labour trafficking were evenly split between males and females. This is in contrast to the actual distribution of male and female migrants from Nepal, where male workers lead female workers on labour permits for overseas employment by a margin of over 80 per cent. Analysis of the news articles showed that India still remains, as it has historically been, the top trafficking destination and transit country. Countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia have emerged as new destinations while Myanmar along with some countries in Europe, Africa, and Latin America have emerged as new transits for human trafficking from Nepal. The study recommends the allocation of resources for investigative journalism and training of reporters on robust reporting including critical gender analysis in order to improve the reporting of human trafficking in Nepali media. Coordination between government agencies and revision of counterproductive policies can contribute to curb human trafficking and encourage safe migration for employment.United States Agency for International Development (USAID)Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (UK Aid

    Building body identities - exploring the world of female bodybuilders

    Get PDF
    This thesis explores how female bodybuilders seek to develop and maintain a viable sense of self despite being stigmatized by the gendered foundations of what Erving Goffman (1983) refers to as the 'interaction order'; the unavoidable presentational context in which identities are forged during the course of social life. Placed in the context of an overview of the historical treatment of women's bodies, and a concern with the development of bodybuilding as a specific form of body modification, the research draws upon a unique two year ethnographic study based in the South of England, complemented by interviews with twenty-six female bodybuilders, all of whom live in the U.K. By mapping these extraordinary women's lives, the research illuminates the pivotal spaces and essential lived experiences that make up the female bodybuilder. Whilst the women appear to be embarking on an 'empowering' radical body project for themselves, the consequences of their activity remains culturally ambivalent. This research exposes the 'Janus-faced' nature of female bodybuilding, exploring the ways in which the women negotiate, accommodate and resist pressures to engage in more orthodox and feminine activities and appearances

    Music as poetry and performance : arranged marriages, past instabilities, and Razak Abdul Azizā€™s musical performance

    Get PDF
    This article examines the intersection of music and literature by taking Malaysian musical performance song cycles as examples. The term, song cycles, is often used in musico-literary studies and is usually associated with Cyrus Hamlin and his definition of it as arrangements and reinterpretations of well-established literary narratives. By incorporating poetry analysis and interviews with Razak Abdul Aziz concerning his musical performance of 10 Pantun Settings, song cycles are recontextualised to incorporate vestiges of cultural identities, specifically, the notion of arranged marriages. As such, the article focuses on Razak Abdul Azizā€™s musical performance of 10 Pantun Settings as he relates his musical experiences across interviews and the consciousness of the song cycle meanings. The article concludes that the fleeting musico-literary works of 10 Pantun Settings as musically composed and performed revealed the pervasiveness of dreariness, displacement, and disappointment across arranged marriages that provides real-life snapshots of loss and, to a certain extent, a vivid description of bereavement and grief from a ā€œdeath of a marriage.ā€ It is argued that through a complex rendering of arranged marriages, 10 Pantun Settings as a song cycle provoked a nostalgic saudade, past instabilities of what it means growing up married in preconfigured environments. Finally, this article references both the interviews and textual analysis of 10 Pantun Settings to the social exchange principles, specifically the consequence of the womanā€™s emotion in the arranged marriage

    Physical phenomena controlling quiescent flame spread in porous wildland fuel beds

    Get PDF
    Despite well-developed solid surface flame spread theories, we still lack a coherent theory to describe flame spread through porous wildland fuel beds. This porosity results in additional complexity, reducing the thermal conductivity of the fuel bed, but allowing in-bed radiative and convective heat transfer to occur. While previous studies have explored the effect of fuel bed structure on the overall fire behaviour, there remains a need for further investigation of the effect of fuel structure on the underlying physical phenomena controlling flame spread. Through an extensive series of laboratory-based experiments, this thesis provides detailed, physics-based insights for quiescent flame spread through natural porous beds, across a range of structural conditions. Measurements are presented for fuel beds representative of natural field conditions within an area of the fire-prone New Jersey Pinelands National Reserve, which compliment a related series of field experiments conducted as part of a wider research project. Additional systematic investigation across a wider range of fuel conditions identified independent effects of fuel loading and bulk density on the spread rate, flame height and heat release rate. However, neither fuel loading nor bulk density alone provided adequate prediction of the resulting fire behaviour. Drawing on existing structural descriptors (for both natural and engineered fuel beds) an alternative parameter Ī±ĻƒĪ“ was proposed. This parameter (incorporating the fuel bed porosity (Ī±), fuel element surface-to-volume ratio (Ļƒ), and the fuel bed height (Ī“)) was strongly correlated with the spread rate. One effect of the fuel bed structure is to influence the heat transfer mechanisms both above and within the porous fuel bed. Existing descriptions of radiation transport through porous fuel beds are often predicated on the assumption of an isotropic fuel bed. However, given their preferential angle of inclination, the pine needle beds in this study may not exhibit isotropic behaviour. Regardless, for the structural conditions investigated, horizontal heat transfer through the fuel bed was identified as the dominant heating mechanism within this quiescent flame spread scenario. However, the significance of heat transfer contributions from the above-bed flame generally increased with increasing Ī±ĻƒĪ“ value of the fuel bed. Using direct measurements of the heat flux magnitude and effective heating distance, close agreement was observed between experimentally observed spread rates and a simple thermal model considering only radiative heat transfer through the fuel bed, particularly at lower values of Ī±ĻƒĪ“. Over-predictions occurred at higher Ī±ĻƒĪ“ values, or where other heat transfer terms were incorporated, which may highlight the need to include additional heat loss terms. A significant effect of fuel structure on the primary flow regimes, both within and above these porous fuel beds, was also observed, with important implications for the heat transfer and oxygen supply within the fuel bed. Independent effects of fuel loading and bulk density on both the buoyant and buoyancy-driven entrainment flow were observed, with a complex feedback cycle occurring between Heat Release Rate (HRR) and combustion behaviour. Generally, increases in fuel loading resulted in increased HRR, and therefore increased buoyant flow velocity, along with an increase in the velocity of flow entrained towards the combustion region. The complex effects of fuel structure in both the flaming and smouldering combustion phases may necessitate modifications to other common modelling approaches. The widely used Rothermel model under-predicted spread rate for higher bulk density and lower Ī±ĻƒĪ“ fuel beds. As previously suggested, an over-sensitivity to fuel bed height was observed, with experimental comparison indicating an under-prediction of reaction intensity at lower fuel heights. These findings have important implications particularly given the continuing widespread use of the Rothermel model, which continues to underpin elements of the BehavePlus fire modelling system and the US National Fire Danger Rating System. The physical insights, and modelling approaches, developed for this low-intensity, quiescent flame spread scenario, are applicable to common prescribed fire activities. It is hoped that this work (alongside complimentary laboratory and field experiments conducted by various authors as part of a wider multi-agency project (SERDP-RC2641)) will contribute to the emerging field of prescribed fire science, and help to address the pressing need for further development of fire prediction and modelling tools

    Theorising Christian Anarchism A Political Commentary on the Gospel

    Get PDF
    This thesis argues that there is a tradition in political theology and in political theory that deserves to be called "Christian anarchism." The various thinkers that contribute to this tradition have never before been considered to be part of a theoretical movement or tradition, and the originality of this thesis is to weave these thinkers together and present a generic theory of Christian anarchism. . Taken together, thinkers like Tolstoy, Ellul, Elliott and Andrews put forward a comprehensive exegesis of Jesus' teaching and example as implying a critique of the state and a vision of a stateless society. Based on this understanding of the Gospel, they accuse both the state and the church of contradicting, betraying and corrupting the essence of Christianity. Some Christian anarchists - Eller in particular - even see Romans 13 and the "render unto Caesar" passage as not discrediting but indeed confirming their interpretation, and although more activist Christian anarchists sometimes disagree on the potential role of civil disobedience, they do all stress that what matters above all is obedience to God Moreover, they all call for the "true" church to lead the Christian anarchist revolution by example, despite the very demanding sacrifices which this involves. They point to numerous examples of similar witness ever since the early church, and themselves strive to emulate such examples in their own lives - the Catholic Worker movement being perhaps the most notable example in this regard Thus, Christian anarchist thinkers' critique of the current order and appeal to follow God's radical commandments echoes the voices of the prophets of old, calling society to return to God's covenant. By weaving their scattered voices together - by theorising Christian anarchism - this thesis provides a political commentary on the Gospel which contributes as much to political theory as it does to political theology
    • ā€¦
    corecore