7,623 research outputs found
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Ensuring Access to Safe and Nutritious Food for All Through the Transformation of Food Systems
Wooster Magazine: Spring 2023
The spring 2023 issue of Wooster magazine features alumni influencing change in their communities around the world, including John Carwile â81, career member of the U.S. Foreign Service; Rashmi Ekka â08, international development consultant; Samira El-Adawy â13, Special Olympics youth manager in the Middle East and North Africa; Ishtiaq Ghafoor â00, a diplomat with the British Foreign Service; Sarah Haile â03, a biostatistician at University of Zurich; Kurt Russell â94, 2022 National Teacher of the Year; and Lauren Vargo â13, climate change researcher in New Zealand. Also featured are students who have attended the annual Athens Democracy Forum for the past five years and recent international graduates taking advantage of opportunities to gain experience in STEM fields. The issue also includes an interview with Woosterâs incoming 13th president, Dr. Anne McCall.https://openworks.wooster.edu/wooalumnimag_2011-present/1045/thumbnail.jp
Building body identities - exploring the world of female bodybuilders
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
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Co-design As Healing: Exploring The Experiences Of Participants Facing Mental Health Problems
This thesis is an exploration of the healing role of co-design in mental health. Although co-design projects conducted within mental health settings are rising, existing literature tends to focus on the object of design and its outcomes while the experiences of participants per se remain largely unexplored. The guiding research question of this study is not how we design things that improve mental health, but how co-designing, as an act, might do so.
The thesis presents two projects that were organized in collaboration with the mental health charity Islington Mind and the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP) in London.
The project at Islington Mind used a structured design process inviting participants to design for wellbeing. A case study analysis provides insights on how participants were impacted, summarizing key challenges and opportunities.
The design at PTP worked towards creating a collective brief in an emergent fashion, finally culminating in a board game. The experiences of participants were explored through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), using semi-structured interview data. The analysis served to identify key themes characterising the experience of co-design such as contributing, connecting, thinking and intentioning. In addition, a mixed-methods analysis of questionnaires and interview data exploring participants' wellbeing, showed that all participants who engaged fairly consistently in the project improved after the project ended, although some participants' scores returned to baseline six months later.
Reflecting on both projects, an approach to facilitation within mental health is outlined, detailing how the dimensions of weaving and layered participation, nurturing mattering and facilitating attitudes interlace. This contribution raises awareness of tacit dimensions in the practice of facilitation, articulating the nuances of how to encourage and sustain meaningful and ethical engagement and offering insights into a range of tools. It highlights the importance of remaining reflexive in relation to attitudes and emotions and discusses practical methodological and ethical challenges and ways to resolve them which can be of benefit to researchers embarking on a similar journey.
The thesis also offers detailed insights on how methodologies from different fields were integrated into a whole, arguing for transparency and reflexivity about epistemological assumptions, and how underlying paradigms shift in an interdisciplinary context.
Based on the overall findings, the thesis makes a case for considering design as healing (or a designerly way of healing), highlighting implications at a systems, social and individual level. It makes an original contribution to our understanding of design, highlighting its healing character, and proposes a new way to support mental health. The participants in this study not only had increased their own wellbeing through co-designing, but were also empowered and contributed towards healing the world. Hence, the thesis argues for a unique, holistic perspective of design and mental health, recognizing the interconnectedness of the individual, social and systemic dimensions of the healing processes that are ignited
'Exarcheia doesn't exist': Authenticity, Resistance and Archival Politics in Athens
My thesis investigates the ways people, materialities and urban spaces interact to form affective ecologies and produce historicity. It focuses on the neighbourhood of Exarcheia, Athensâ contested political topography par excellence, known for its production of radical politics of discontent and resistance to state oppression and eoliberal capitalism. Embracing Exarcheiaâs controversial status within Greek vernacular, media and state discourses, this thesis aims to unpick the neighbourhoodsâ socio-spatial assemblage imbued with affect and formed through the numerous (mis)understandings and (mis)interpretations rooted in its turbulent political history. Drawing on theory on urban spaces, affect, hauntology and archival politics, I argue for Exarcheia as an unwavering archival space composed of affective chronotopes â (in)tangible loci that defy space and temporality. I posit that the interwoven narratives and materialities emerging in my fieldwork are persistently â and perhaps obsessively â reiterating themselves and remaining imprinted on the neighbourhoodâs landscape as an incessant reminder of violent histories that the state often seeks to erase and forget. Through this analysis, I contribute to understandings of place as a primary ethnographic âobjectâ and the ways in which place forms complex interactions and relationships with social actors, shapes their subjectivities, retains and bestows their memories and senses of historicity
Freelance subtitlers in a subtitle production network in the OTT industry in Thailand: a longitudinal study
The present study sets out to investigate a subtitle production network in the over-the-top (OTT) industry in Thailand through the perspective of freelance subtitlers. A qualitative longitudinal research design was adopted to gain insights into (1) the way the work practices of freelance subtitlers are influenced by both human and non-human actors in the network, (2) the evolution of the network, and (3) how the freelance subtitlersâ perception of quality is influenced by changes occurring in the network. Eleven subtitlers were interviewed every six months over a period of two years, contributing to over 60 hours of interview data. The data analysis was informed by selected concepts from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Law 1992, 2009; Latour 1996, 2005; Mol 2010), and complemented by the three-dimensional quality model proposed by Abdallah (2016, 2017). Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2019a, 2020b) was used to generate themes and sub-themes which address the research questions and tell compelling stories about the actor-network. It was found that from July 2017 to September 2019, the subtitle production network, which was sustained by complex interrelationships between actors, underwent a number of changes. The changes affected the work practices of freelance subtitlers in a more negative than positive way, demonstrating their precarious position in an industry that has widely adopted the vendor model (Moorkens 2017). Moreover, as perceived by the research participants, under increasingly undesirable working conditions, it became more challenging to maintain a quality process and to produce quality subtitles. Finally, translation technology and tools, including machine translation, were found to be key non-human actors that catalyse the changes in the network under study
A cosmopolitan international law: the authority of regional inter-governmental organisations to establish international criminal accountability mechanisms
The overall aim of this thesis is to investigate the potential role of regional inter-governmental organisations (RIGOs) in international criminal accountability, specifically through the establishment of criminal accountability mechanisms, and to make a case for RIGOsâ active involvement. The thesis proceeds from the assumption that international criminal justice is a cosmopolitan project that demands that a tenable conception of state sovereignty guarantees humanityâs fundamental values, specifically human dignity. Since cosmopolitanism emphasises the equality and unity of the human family, guaranteeing the dignity and humanity of the human family is therefore a common interest of humanity rather than a parochial endeavour. Accountability for international crimes is one way through which human dignity can be validated and reaffirmed where such dignity has been grossly and systematically assaulted. Therefore, while accountability for international crimes is primarily the obligation of individual sovereign states, this responsibility is ultimately residually one of humanity as a whole, exercisable through collective action. As such, the thesis advances the argument that states as collective representations of humanity have a responsibility to assist in ensuring accountability for international crimes where an individual state is either genuinely unable or unwilling by itself to do so. The thesis therefore addresses the question as to whether RIGOs, as collective representations of states and their peoples, can establish international criminal accountability mechanisms. Relying on cosmopolitanism as a theoretical underpinning, the thesis examines the exercise of what can be considered as elements of sovereign authority by RIGOs in pursuit of the cosmopolitan objective of accountability for international crimes. In so doing, the thesis interrogates whether there is a basis in international law for such engagement, and examines how such engagement can practically be undertaken, using two case studies of the European Union and the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecutorâs Office, and the African Union and the (proposed) Hybrid Court for South Sudan. The thesis concludes that general international law does not preclude RIGOs from exercising elements of sovereign authority necessary for the establishment of international criminal accountability mechanisms, and that specific legal authority to engage in this regard can then be determined by reference to the doctrine of attributed/conferred powers and the doctrine of implied powers in interpreting the legal instruments of RIGOs. Based on this conclusion, the thesis makes a normative case for an active role for RIGOs in the establishment of international criminal accountability mechanisms, and provides a practical step-by-step guide on possible legal approaches for the establishment of such mechanisms by RIGOs, as well as guidance on possible design models for these mechanisms
Chinese Benteng Womenâs Participation in Local Development Affairs in Indonesia: Appropriate means for struggle and a pathway to claim citizenâ right?
It had been more than two decades passing by aftermath the devastating Asiaâs Financial Crisis in 1997, subsequently followed by Suhartoâs step down from his presidential throne which he occupied for more than three decades. The financial turmoil turned to a political disaster furthermore has led to massive looting that severely impacted Indonesians of Chinese descendant, including unresolved mystery of the most atrocious sexual violation against women and covert killings of students and democracy activists in this country. Since then, precisely aftermath May 1998, which publicly known as âReformasiâ1, Indonesia underwent political reform that eventually corresponded positively to its macroeconomic growth. Twenty years later, in 2018, Indonesia captured worldwide attention because it has successfully hosted two internationally renowned events, namely the Asian Games 2018 â the most prestigious sport events in Asia â conducted in Jakarta and Palembang; and the IMF/World Bank Annual Meeting 2018 in Bali. Particularly in the IMF/World Bank Annual Meeting, this event has significantly elevated Indonesiaâs credibility and international prestige in the global economic powerplay as one of the nations with promising growth and openness. However, the narrative about poverty and inequality, including increasing racial tension, religious conservatism, and sexual violation against women are superseded by friendly climate for foreign investment and eventually excessive glorification of the nationâs economic growth. By portraying the image of promising new economic power, as rhetorically promised by President Joko Widodo during his presidential terms, Indonesia has swept the growing inequality in this highly stratified society that historically compounded with religious and racial tension under the carpet of digital economy.Arte y Humanidade
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