Violent dad in child shoes: a moment before : ViDaCS serious game in a multi-dimensional action research promoting awareness about gender-based violence perpetrators

[Italiano]:Il volume descrive obiettivi, strategie e azioni di ViDaCS (Padri nei panni di un figlio/a), il progetto (numero 810449) iscritto nel programma europeo REC (Diritti, Eguaglianza e Cittadinanza 2014-2020). Il sottotitolo, Un momento prima, pone l’attenzione su un protocollo innovativo per il controllo delle emozioni da parte di padri autori di violenza domestica. Esso risponde alla finalità di prevenire e contrastare la violenza di genere attraverso il “trattamento degli autori”, al fine di prevenire tale comportamento e la sua reiterazione. Il volume scaturisce da un'esperienza collettiva, volta a presentare il modello ecologico VidaCS insieme a interventi di formazione e di trattamento degli autori di violenza; è un'esperienza vissuta nei panni del bambino/a che assiste alla violenza del padre, proponendo scene domestiche alternative in cui il padre possa fermarsi un attimo prima di compierla. Peculiarità del volume è proporre all’autore di violenza la autoregolamentazione delle emozioni sottostanti ai suoi comportamenti attraverso un gioco immersivo con tecnologie 4.0 ./[English]: The volume describes the goals, strategies and actions of ViDaCS (Violent Dad in Child’s Shoes), a project framed in the European Programme REC (Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme 2014-2020), namely project grant number 810449.Its subtitle is A Moment Before to focus on developing an innovative multi- agency protocol for the self-assessment of intimate violence by perpetrators; it addresses the EU call purpose of preventing and combating gender-based violence under the main priority of “Treatment of perpetrators”, in order to prevent reoffending.ViDaCS’ book is a collective experience presenting an ecological model explaining gender-based violence, training and intervention issues on this topic; it is an experience, in the shoes of the child witnessing domestic violence, proposing alternative “domestic scenes”where the father decides and assumes “new” behaviours that avoid violent behaviour. Moreover it present and discuss a self-assessment of emotional burden and violent behaviour based on exploratory and 4.0 CTS serious game

The situal self: fashioning identity discourses and loved objects

That we are what we have… is perhaps the most basic and powerful fact of consumer behaviour’ (Belk 1988 p. 139). Women’s individual identity discourses are encoded socially and culturally through relationships with material objects and practices of dress. Relationships with loved objects yield an emotional and intellectual approach that literally unpicks fashion, exposing its operations, its relations to the body whilst at the same time binding feminine structures. This more expansive view of fashion situates the relationship material objects have to the self and how women relate to the material world as a universe of meaning making. The phenomenological inquiry presents a set of methods for practice based research including observations from workshops, in-depth interviews, case studies, films and questionnaires. The research as practice approach includes visual and verbal narratives that portray the essence of the self, interpreting the conceptual complexities that are inherently tentative, temporal and temporary in identity construction. The intimate research portraits are presented as the interplay between image and text; whilst the films portray the silent spaces in research contexts. These visual apparatus speak of expressions of embodiment. It is the articulation of these feminine practices that elucidates the incorporation of the socially constructed body into the corporeal. The situal thus embodies the lived relation as a result of the phenomena experienced in the specific social encounter. The situal, positions the social practices of fashion as a series of intimate identity discourses. Through this collective engagement, heterogeneous forms of knowledge emerge, transforming the act of dressing into a wider view of self and life

Exploring Chinese Men’s Friendship Talk: Discourses, Identities and Masculinities

The past decades have seen the rise of studies on masculinity and language; however, there is very little empirical research given on the topic of men’s talk in contemporary China. With empirical evidence collected from two male friendship groups, this thesis explores how Chinese men construct friendships and gender identities in their spontaneous talk. The findings of this thesis contribute to gender and language studies with ethnography-informed discourse analysis and sociocultural linguistics. The empirical evidence from the participants’ friendship talks offers insights into intersectional identities and masculinities in the Chinese context. The other original contribution to knowledge of this research is closing a gap in the existing study of Chinese masculinity, which does not yet offer extensive conclusions in terms of a linguistic perspective on men’s lived experiences. My study adds to the literature on Chinese masculinity by enhancing two underexplored topics: male homosociality in contemporary China and sexual experiences as a retold narrative practice. This thesis explores both the style and discourse of the narratives, conversational humour and personal talk that frequently emerge from men’s talk. Various emerging social constructs, including locality, social class and age, interact to construct participants’ intersectional identities and masculinities. Chinese men in this research still associate with a dominant masculinist discourse that devalues women and femininity. Further, they align themselves with success- and wealth-based hegemonic masculinity. They use their personal talk to define their understanding of male friendship, which suggests that ‘male friendship as a virtue’ has its contemporary expressions. Even though they show a desire to disclose their feelings, their personal and even emotional talk is still a site to lecture, police and reinforce hegemonic gender norms and expectations

The self in conflict : securing a sense of self in military and civilian contexts

The ex-Services population is estimated to make up between 3.5% to 10% of the prison population according to the Defence Analytic Services Agency (DASA, 2010) .and National Association for Probation Officers (NAPO, 2008). Soldiers are believed to make up the largest occupational group in the prison system, numbering at least 8,500 (NAPO). Many ambiguities exist around how the Services experience may impact upon personnel and potentially on subsequent offending behaviour. In my view there is limited research which addresses the issue directly and discussions have tended to focus on the same constructs, generally considered through quantitative methodologies. Given the high numbers of personnel returning from on- going conflicts in the Middle East it is important that a new perspective be offered to the conversation. In my view this population themselves are best placed to do this. Ten male ex-Services personnel have been interviewed, within a qualitative research design and a grounded theory methodology has been used with the aim of giving a 'voice' to the men themselves. Drawing from a situational interactionist influence a theoretical framework is proposed which addresses. the interaction between these men and their context, situational demands they perceived and the strategies they evolved to meet them. Challenges are addressed and strategies developed in the realms of interpersonal relationships, time and space, military action and emotions which helped them to survive on a number of levels. These are represented by four core categories: Securing the Self, Structuring the Self, Defining the Self and Expressing the Self. I propose that the men evolved these adaptive strategies over time in the Services and to varying degrees carried them into civilian life and in some cases into their offending behaviour. The proposed ideas are discussed with regards to how they complement existing theory and a case study is presented to suggest how they might be applied in clinical practice.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Curriculum, context and identity : an investigation of the curriculum practices of grade 9 teachers in three contrasting socio-economic school contexts.

Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.This study investigates variations in actual curricular practices across three diverse socio-economic status (SES) urban schools in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, at the end of the first decade of democracy. The aim of the study was to derive a theoretically informed understanding of the contribution of curriculum practices to social stratification. An eclectic theoretical approach, with an emphasis on Bernsteinian structural interactionist approach involving the micro situation reflecting macro level power relations, informed the study. A qualitative research design was used. The findings of the study showed that there were significant variations in the internal structuring of pedagogic discourse across the three contrasting socio-economic school contexts. Deep-seated inequalities in access to diverse forms of knowledge and to intellectual enhancement of students were being reproduced across the three schools. The students in the elite, independent SES school, and top stream of the middle SES school, were being inducted into a variety of strongly classified and framed distinct disciplinary-based subjects and weakly classified and framed integrated projects and had far better chances of entry to fields of study in higher education than students at the lower socio-economic status school. Utilitarian ideology, simple everyday and community knowledge discourses, and incoherent pedagogy dominated classroom practices at the lower SES school. The consequence was that students were being positioned in segmental horizontal discourses. At the elite and lower SES schools the variations in knowledge and intellectual skills taught are attributed to teachers' differential grasp of subject content arising from their own stratified educational experiences and to the persisting extreme inequalities in distribution of resources. This situation indicates continuities with apartheid-structured inequalities. The assimilationist approach followed by the middle SES school, a former White school that had become racially and socio-economically diverse, was clearly being challenged by many students, with adverse student outcomes. The different curriculum practices across the three schools have implications for the reproduction of social stratification. The study suggests that South Africa's historical legacy context is an extremely powerful force in influencing and constraining actual outcomes in South African schools. The lack of attention to contextual realities by the 'one size fits all' policy functions to undermine transformative impulses. The non-interventionist policy of the post-Apartheid government with reference to school development and improvement, namely the policy of decentralisation and the devolution of power and governance to local schools, benefited the advantaged schools that possess the necessary economic and social capital to compete and exercise choice and manipulate the system to their advantage. For the disadvantaged school that lacked the material and intellectual resources the policy became the means for the entrenching of inequalities in access to diverse forms of knowledge and thus to the reproduction of social inequalities

Deliberative democracy via cyberspace : A study of online political forums in Taiwan

The emergence of the Internet ignited new hope for those aspiring to reinvigorate democracy, especially online political forums whose discursive nature seemingly offers the possibility of deliberative democracy. This thesis aims to explore whether online political forums are capable of contributing to public deliberation in Taiwan's context. Three forums have been chosen in this study, Yahoo Political Forum, Palm BBS and The Presidential Office Forum, respectively sponsored by a commercial website, an academic institution and the government. The complete research project has two branches of inquiry, one focuses on the analysis of the messages published in the forums, and the other aims to comprehend online discussants' motivations, expectations and standpoints concerning online deliberation. Drawing on systematic content analysis and discourse analysis, the results reveal that 1) the discursive qualities are different amongst the three forums The Presidential Office's discussants tend to create their own topics, in contrast to the participants of Yahoo and Palm who rely very much on journalists' reports as sources of discussion topics 2) Current political tensions are amplified, and engender verbal conflict in Yahoo and Palm which thwarts the rationality of discussions 4) Driven by political efficacy, the participants in The Presidential Office prefer to communicate directly with bureaucrats. The analytic results from the in-depth interviews show that the discussants are encouraged and motivated to participate by the forums' anonymous character nevertheless, the lack of positive responses and encouragements gained from the extended environment causes the discussants to reward themselves by pleasing their individual demands. Public deliberation in online forums may be weakened by unequal access, irrational participants/actions and fragmentation of public discourse. In this study, online political forums do not yet constitute a virtual/alternative public sphere. Their deliberative function confronts identity politics and tensions between political groups, therefore, to talk politics online the boundaries and differences of the political diversity in Taiwan must be overcome

The Power of the In-Between

"The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection gathers fourteen individual case studies where intermedial issues—issues concerning that which takes place in between media—are explored in relation to a range of different cultural objects and contexts, different methodological approaches, and different disciplinary perspectives. The cases investigate the intermediality of such manifold objects and phenomena as contemporary installation art, twentieth-century geography books, renaissance sculpture, media theory, and public architecture of the 1970s. They also bring together scholars from the disciplines of art history, comparative literature, theatre studies, musicology, and the history of ideas. Starting out from an inclusive understanding of intermediality as “relations between media conventionally perceived as different,” each author specifies and investigates “intermediality” in their own particular case; that is, each examines how it is inflected by particular objects, methods, and research questions. “Intermediality” thus serves both as a concept employed to cover an inclusive range of cultural objects, cultural contexts, methodological approaches, and so on, and as a concept to be modelled out by the particular cases it is brought to bear on. Rather than merely applying a predefined concept, the objectives are experimental. The authors explore the concept of intermediality as a malleable tool of research. This volume further makes a point of transgressing the divide between media history and semiotically and/or aesthetically oriented intermedial studies. The former concerns the specificity of media technologies and media interrelations in socially, politically, and epistemologically defined space and time, and the latter targets formal considerations of media objects and its various meaning-making elements. These two conventionally separated fields of research are integrated in order to produce a richer understanding of the analytical and historical, as well as the aesthetic and technological, conditions and possibilities of intermedial phenomena.

An analytical perspective on language learning in adult basic education and training programmes

The Directorate of Adult Education and Training of the national Department of Education views Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) not merely as literacy, but as the general conceptual foundation towards lifelong learning and development. This includes knowledge, skills, and attitudes which are needed for social, economic and political participation and transformation. These skills will assist learners in becoming more active participants in their communities, their workplaces and contribute towards the development of South Africa. This study aims to examine whether ABET programmes prepare learners to acquire the language which is needed to achieve this objective. It falls within one of the eight learning areas defined by the National Qualifications Framework (NQF), namely the language, literacy and communication learning area. In order to research the effectiveness of learning within this area, it is important to analyse the interaction which takes place within a classroom; the type of questions both educators and learners ask; the type of errors learners make in the classroom; and how the educators treat these errors. What is also of paramount importance is whether the language skills learnt in the classroom are transferred to outside the classroom. To examme this, various authors' views on classroom interaction; questions; errors; treatment of errors; and evaluating the effectiveness of learning are presented. Instruments were designed to analyse these aspects within an ABET programme, and include: • the framework used to undertake the classroom interaction analysis, • the instrument used to explore the type of questions educators and learners ask in the classroom, • how an error analysis is used to identify typical learners' errors which occur frequently, • the methodology used to uncover how educators treat their learners' errors, and • the various stakeholders' questionnaires which were used to ascertain the effectiveness of learning at an ABET Centre. The research findings are presented and interpreted in order to provide recommendations for the development of language learning and teaching within the ABET field. The findings also gave rise to recommendations for classroom practices for ABET educators, and particularly the need for educator training and development. Recommendations for curriculum designers of ABET materials are also presented.Educational StudiesD. Ed. (Philosophy of Education

The Whitworthian 2009-2010

The Whitworthian student newspaper, September 2009-May 2010.https://digitalcommons.whitworth.edu/whitworthian/1094/thumbnail.jp