‘The alternatives are worse’ – the message that unites EU referendum campaigners

Naturally the EU referendum campaigns differ greatly in how they target voters. However, the campaign leaflets all seem to be claiming that the “alternatives are worse”. Daniel Belling shows this with a sample analysis consisting of leaflets produced by eight campaigns supporting remain and leave, as well as the disputed leaflet by the UK Government

Going Under and Coming Round: Anesthesia, Narrative, and Trauma

General anesthesia is of course valued for sparing patients the physical pain and psychological trauma of being sensate and conscious during surgery, but it also poses a specific challenge to the narrative continuity often seen as a defining aspect of human identity and of mental health. The patient is (arguably) absented from the scene in which his or her body is (arguably) traumatized, and then returns to awareness to find a body that has been changed. This rupture in continuity presents a challenge to coherent first-person narration. Examining some of the strategies used by writers to represent the gap opened up by anesthesia, I suggest that such accounts illuminate our understanding of the connections between narrative rupture, trauma, and an ethical responsibility to recognize the possibility of sentience, and hence the capacity for suffering, in anaesthetized patients

The history of Yiddish theatre in South Africa from the late nineteenth century to 1960

Includes bibliographical references.This dissertation sets out to investigate the history of Yiddish theatre in South Africa. Yiddish theatre first emerged in Jassy in Rumania in 1876. However with Czarist persecution and the great Jewish migration from Eastern Europe, the 1880s it had spread to Western Europe, the Americas, and South Africa. This dissertation attempts to answer the question as to why of all Eastern Europe's diasporas, Yiddish theatre at no stage put down permanent roots in South Africa. It aims to prove that the survival of Yiddish theatre was entirely dependent on the survival of the Yiddish language. Thus the fate of Yiddish theatre in South Africa was influenced by the early timing of the formative immigration, between 1890 and 1914, the common origins of the immigrants in Lithuania and White Russia, and their educational and cultural poverty. These factors were reinforced by the exclusive adherence of the Anglo-German Jewish establishment and the vast majority of the immigrants, to Zionism and the Hebrew revival. Yiddish was unequivocally rejected, so that it never featured in the construction of South African Jewish identity. Finally the Quota Act of 1930, reinforced by the Alien's Act of 1937, put a total halt to Eastern European Jewish immigration, the lifeblood of Yiddish theatre

Funktionalistische Erklärungen des Wohlfahrtsstaates unter Berücksichtigung der Globalisierung

In der Soziologie wird unter den Phänomenen „Sozialstaat“ je nach theoretischem Blickwinkel etwas anderes verstanden – was auf den ersten Blick so aussieht, als würde durch diese Vielfalt an Definitionen nicht der Kern der Sache getroffen, kann dennoch als eine Stärke der Disziplin gesehen werden. Schließlich ermöglichen unterschiedlichen Erklärungsmuster eine größtmögliche Ausleuchtung des Untersuchungsgegenstandes. Auch im Falle sozialstaatlicher Tätigkeiten kann man die unterschiedliche Herangehensweisen von Mikro- wie Makrosoziologen gut illustrieren: Während eine akteurstheoretische Perspektive die Relationierung sozialer Akteure durch sozialpolitische Rollen- und Positionszuweisungen, sowie die Wandelbarkeit von Sozialpolitik durch den Einfluss verschiedener Trägergruppen erklären möchte, ist das Anliegen einer systemtheoretischen Sichtweise, den Sozialstaat als funktional notwendig für die Erhaltung des gesamtgesellschaftlichen Systems zu begreifen. Dieser zweiten Annäherung geht die vorliegende Arbeit auf den Grund: Wie lässt sich der Sozialstaat funktional aus den Defiziten der Austauschbeziehung zwischen dem sozialen System und dem ökonomischen System ableiten? Hierfür werden im ersten Teil drei Theorieschulen herangezogen: die sozioökonomische Schule, die Modernisierungstheorie sowie der Neomarxismus. Mit dem neuen Jahrtausend wandeln sich die Rahmenbedingungen. Die Auswirkungen der Globalisierung sind auch in der Funktionsweise des Sozialstaates bemerkbar. Kann der Sozialstaat auf die neuen Dynamiken, die besonders im ökonomischen System anzutreffen sind, mit den alten Mechanismen eingehen? Die Frage muss ebenso umgekehrt gestellt werden: Welche funktionalen Auswirkungen (positive wie negative) hat der Sozialstaat auf die (ökonomische) Globalisierung? Im zweiten Teil werden diese Fragen aus einer funktionalistischen Perspektive erörtert, bevor sich das Schlusskapitel der allgemeinen Kritik an solchen Erklärungsansätzen widmet

Playing with fire : Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the rewriting of the Prometheus myth

Bibliography: pages xiv-xx.According to Greek myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mortals, either in the form of culture, or by using it to bring to life the clay people he had made. Margaret Homans distinguishes between what she calls literal and figurative creativity (1980:223). The woman who is a mother, creating literally and naturally with her body, and who writes, creating figurative offspring, cultural texts, makes use of the Promethean fire in both of its possible senses. Only the literal, however, is seen by patriarchal culture as her rightful realm. Myth dictates that only men received from Prometheus the fire of figurative creativity, of language. The "woman writer," then, as a kind of contradiction in terms, is forced to suffer the conflict imposed by her choice to create, within the dictates of culture, with both forms of "fire." In the face of this conflict, Alicia Ostriker suggests that the project of women writers should be to rewrite the mythology of patriarchy and, in doing so, take from men their sole possession of the fire of culture, an ownership which empowers them in the same way as it did Zeus, the tyrannical father-god. In her words, women writers should become "thieves of language, female Prometheuses" (1986:211). Women who re-write the Prometheus myth may then be seen as both figuratively revising the theft by re-telling its story, and as literally re-enacting the myth itself by rebelling against the limitations of androcentrism. The "female Prometheus" re-creates the myth, bringing together the definitions of herself as woman and writer in what I argue is a disruptive and positive form of hybridism. Chapter One examines the mythic complex which surrounds the figure of Prometheus, concentrating on the versions by Hesjod, Aeschylus and Ovid, and considers the implications of its appropriation and revision by women writers. Chapters Two and Three analyse the way in which two nineteenth century women, Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, rewrote the myth. Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, presents two Promethean figures - the scientist and the monster - and so embodies the ambivalence of its author. Barrett Browning translated Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound twice, and then wrote Aurora Leigh, a hybrid novel-poem in which the central character is female, a writer and Promethean. I argue that both succeeded, in different ways, in liberating language from the limitations of the patriarchal symbolic, so carrying out a theft of linguistic "fire," the act recognised by Shaftesbury as a ''Breach of Omnipotence.

Recovering the lives of South African Jewish women during the migration years c1880-1939

Includes abstract.This dissertation sets out to demonstrate how a group doubly situated on the margins, as Jewish and female, helped to build the larger community of South African Jewry and contributed to the wider South African society. The investigation is rooted in the transformation wrought in Jewish communities worldwide in the nineteenth and twentieth century through emancipation, assimilation, immigration, acculturation, and Zionism. The discussion is divided into three sections, of which the first two constitute a description of the normative experience of Jewish women, the majority of whom were first and second generation immigrants from eastern Europe. Entitled "Setting up house", the first section opens with their migration, their establishment of immigrant neighbourhoods, and the perpetuation of their close knit communities through bonds of marriage. Entitled "Beyond hearth and home", the second section explores how the period, 1880- 1939, that witnessed dramatic changes in women's status worldwide - through education, the workplace and the attainment of the vote - resonated among South African Jewish women. It will show that while pursuing a career beyond marriage was exceptional, participation on the Jewish communal scene, whether in the welfare societies or in the Zionist movement was normative, and by the end of the period women had wrested control of their organisations from the men. In contrast to the normative experiences described in the first two sections, the third section, "Varieties of integration: case studies of extraordinary women", that is divided between the fields of "Politics" and "Culture", compares and contrasts the lives of women, who by virtue of education, career, lifestyle, political or cultural orientation, did not conform to the norm. These female iconoclasts accentuate what is considered to be normative in the South African Jewish community, whether it be the traditional family, the identification with the English language community, or passive conformity to the existing racial status quo. The dissertation will show that these idealistic and driven women were frequently the most far sighted, and their contributions to the political and cultural life of South Africa in retrospect, take on much greater significance

Assessing Hitting Skill in Baseball using Simulated and Representative Tasks

Previous research has demonstrated that the ability to accurately anticipate the outcome of dynamic and representative situations under standardized conditions is an effective predictor of skill-level in many complex domains, including sport (for a review, see Suss & Ward, 2015). Moreover, skill at anticipating the outcome as early as possible, in addition to making the correct anticipatory decision, and skill at recognizing the play are equally important (e.g., Fadde, 2006; Jones & Miles, 1978; Savelsbergh, Williams, Van Der Kamp, & Ward, 2002). The current research aims to leverage this body of research in developing and evaluating a commercially available software tool designed for the assessment of such sports skills developed by Axon Sports. In this research we use the Axon Sports Baseball Hitting Assessment tool to measure anticipation and recognition skill in an NCAA baseball team. The results provide support that recognition and anticipation accuracy are useful indicators of skill in sport and extend the application of this body of work into a real-world settin

Assessing Decision Making Skill in Complex and Dynamic Environments Using Representative and Simulated Tasks

Traditional decision making research has often focused on one\u27s ability to choose from a set of prefixed options, ignoring the process by which decision makers generate courses of action (i.e., options) in-situ (Klein, 1993). In complex and dynamic domains, this option generation process is particularly critical to understanding how successful decisions are made (Zsambok & Klein, 1997). When generating response options for oneself to pursue (i.e., during the intervention-phase of decision making) previous research has supported quick and intuitive heuristics, such as the Take-The-First heuristic (TTF; Johnson & Raab, 2003). When generating predictive options for others in the environment (i.e., during the assessment-phase of decision making), previous research has supported the situational-model-building process described by Long Term Working Memory theory (LTWM; see Ward, Ericsson, & Williams, 2013). In the first three experiments, the claims of TTF and LTWM are tested during assessment- and intervention-phase tasks in soccer. To test what other environmental constraints may dictate the use of these cognitive mechanisms, the claims of these models are also tested in the presence and absence of time pressure. In addition to understanding the option generation process, it is important that researchers in complex and dynamic domains also develop tools that can be used by `real-world\u27 professionals. For this reason, three more experiments were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a new online assessment of perceptual-cognitive skill in soccer. This test differentiated between skill groups and predicted performance on a previously established test and predicted option generation behavior. The test also outperformed domain-general cognitive tests, but not a domain-specific knowledge test when predicting skill group membership. Implications for theory and training, and future directions for the development of applied tools are discussed