8 research outputs found

    I Kill, Therefore I Am: The Expressive/Transformative Process of Violence

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    Before the late-Industrial age, a minority of murderers posed their victims’ corpses to convey a message. With the rise of mass media, such offenders also began sending verbal communications to journalists and the authorities. Unsurprisingly, the 21st century has seen alienated killers promote their violent actions and homicidal identities through online communications: from VLOGs to manifestos, even videos depicting murder and corpse mutilation. Though the decentralization of media has provided an easily-accessible platform for violent offenders, such communications also afford law enforcement the opportunity to better understand the make-up of such criminals. To this end, qualitative research was conducted on a sample of 10 such offenders. The results revealed that they suffer from a chronically volatile self-concept with resulting negative-emotionality owing to deficient childhood socialization and strains related to sexuality, gender, and vocation. As the psychologist, Higgins, and sociologist, Mead, have shown that our self-concept arises and is negotiated through communication, these homicidal expressions provide the killer with a tenable identity, temporarily or permanently eliminating their emotional turmoil. Far from mere attention-seeking, these killers are desperately striving for a self. Their malaise is exacerbated by our increasingly anomic and isolating society—the mid-stages of Baudrillard's 'hyperreality'—where the 'real' and 'unreal' are becoming indistinguishable. Together, these observations form the bedrock of the expressive/transformative process of violence (ETV). By highlighting the link between semiotics and psychology in the context of our media-saturated society, ETV provides a methodology for interpreting homicidal communications, allowing law enforcement and mental health professionals to strengthen criminal profiles, link crimes, aid in pre- and post-homicidal risk assessment, and devise clinical treatment strategies

    Like scales from their eyes : visionary experience in Western Europe from Augustine to the eighth century

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    Vision narratives provide important evidence for the social and religious concerns of the society which records them, and are important sources for the mentalité of the period in which they are produced. This thesis provides an historical study of dream and vision narratives from the fourth to eighth centuries, with the hagiographic literature of Gaul and Merovingian Francia as its primary focus. During the period under review, there were important changes in the church's attitude towards the visionary experience. Whereas the fear of heterodoxy led early church Fathers to limit the spiritual authority of visions, by the sixth century in Gaul, dream and vision accounts were an important means by which churchmen could promote monastic and clerical ideals and their spiritual authority. Vision accounts were an important tool in the pastoral concerns of the clergy, enabling them to resolve or perpetuate disputes, smooth the process of Christianization, and provide imaged evidence of Christian doctrine. Dreams and visions confirmed the praesentia of saints at their tombs and at the site of their relics, and confirmed the role of the episcopate as their guardians and representatives. These issues are examined with special reference to the writings of Gregory of Tours in the sixth century. The effectiveness with which visions framed the deeds of the saints and conveyed impressions of spirituality is also examined over a broad sampling of Gallic and Merovingian hagiographic texts. The final chapter offers two case studies: the visionary experiences of St. Radegund of Poitiers, and St. Aldegund of Maubeuge

    Biocapital : the constitution of post-genomic life

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    Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 485-497).(cont.) In the process, this thesis intervenes in social theoretical debates not simply around the nature and production of knowledge and value, but also around the place of larger belief-systems - relating to religion, nation and ethics - in such productive enterprises. It simultaneously intervenes in conceptual debates within cultural anthropology regarding methodological questions that surround the undertaking of comparative ethnographic projects of powerful sites of knowledge production and value generation in a globalized world.This thesis is concerned with tracking and theorizing the co-production of an emergent technoscientific regime - that of biotechnology in the context of drug development - with an emergent political economic regime that sees the increased prevalence of such research in corporate locales, with corporate agendas and practices. Hence biocapital, which asks questions of the implications for life sciences when performed in corporations, and for capitalism, when biotechnology becomes a key source of market value. The methodology followed in this dissertation is multi-sited ethnography. I study a range of actors - including academic and industrial scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and policy makers - in two distinct national environments, the United States and India, as they shape and come to terms with these emergent technologies and emergent political economies. I attempt, through such a study, to theorize biocapital, drawing primarily upon Marxian and Foucauldian understandings of life, labor and value, and upon literature in Science and Technology Studies, that has constantly drawn attention to the constructed, contingent and politically consequent nature of technoscientific activity.by Kaushik Sunder Rajan.Ph.D

    Іншомовна компетентність – платформа професійного розвитку в ХХІ столітті : збірник матеріалів ІV Міжнародної науково-практичної студентської конференції для студентів немовних спеціальностей

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    У збірнику представлені матеріали ІV Міжнародної науково-практичної студентської конференції для студентів немовних спеціальностей, що висвітлюють питання філології, психології, педагогіки, методики викладання іноземних мов, історії, політології, екології, інформатики, менеджменту та економіки. Для студентів вищих навчальних закладів, аспірантів, наукових та педагогічних працівників

    Being and seeming : the shaping of the woman writer in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century print

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    This work explores ways in which early modem women writers were presented in their printed books within the literary landscape of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It consists of a survey of the typographical presentation of title pages and front 'matter in printed texts, identifying rhetorically feminine self-constructions which allow the writers to negotiate their way to publication. This survey also provides a historical context for the close reading of two case studies: Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) and Elizabeth Cary'sThe Tragedie of Mariam, The Faire Queene of Jewry (1613), together with examination of some extant copies. Early modem women writers seem to present themselves as stereotypically ideal and modest in order to be writers who are able to reach readers of the printed word. They are able to use the idea of femininity as a source of strength and as part of a wilful strategy in a fictive self-construction to fulfil readers' expectations of an ideal woman's writings, The survey suggests that the physical presentations of their books are constructed in the full awareness of these strategies

    Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

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    This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed
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