Socialist Utopian Communities in the U.S. and Reasons for their Failures

The focus of my research is on why socialist utopian communities could not last in capitalist America. Even though people lived in these isolated communities, they still relied too much on the outside world. Some of the factors that would ultimately lead to the demise of these communities would be problems with leadership and financial difficulties . I researched two utopian socialist communities in nineteenth century New England: The Northampton Association of Education and Industry and Brook Farm. These two communities were both part of the Transcendental Movement and also were the ideas of Charles Fourier, a French philosopher. I will give a background on both of these communities and how they started and also why they ceased to exist today

Fundamental Investigations on the Isomorphism of Commutative Group Algebras in Bulgaria

The isomorphism problem of arbitrary algebraic structures plays always a central role in the study of a given algebraic object. In this paper we give the first investigations and also some basic results on the isomorphism problem of commutative group algebras in Bulgaria

The City Where the Storks Fly: Sustainable Agriculture and Species Reintroduction in Toyooka City, Japan

In 1971, the Oriental White Stork went locally extinct in Toyooka, Japan. Today, around 80 of the birds fly free throughout the city. Toyooka uses the Stork Reintroduction Project and the promotion of “Stork-Friendly” agriculture to help combat the difficulties faced as a rural Japanese municipality including population decline, increased farmland abandonment, and falling rice prices. This thesis investigates how Toyooka City uses a pragmatic approach to achieve holistic sustainability that works within the framework of our current globalized cultural, political, social and economic landscape. By drawing on the fieldwork I conducted in Toyooka as well as the informal and formal conversations I had with farmers, government officials, employees of Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (JA) and others, I illustrate how Toyooka has worked towards building a socially and environmentally sound community with an emphasis on sustainable agricultural practices. Placing Toyooka’s efforts today within the larger context of Japan’s history and the constantly evolving cultural context, I explore the role of environmentalism and sustainable agriculture within today’s Japanese society

Decolonising the South African prison

No abstract

Possessing the secret of black womanhood : reading African women in Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy, The Color Purple, and Warrior Marks

Speaking for or about others has featured consistently in current feminist debates as it is becoming clear that the assumed homogeneity of women within social groups is not realistic. It has become clear that difference can no longer be analysed in terms of race, gender and sexuality alone. Other factors such as history, nationality, and culture demand more attention than they have been previously accorded, which makes many alliances across national boundaries subject to redefinition and reconceptualisation. This thesis looks at the attendant dangers of ignoring the differences within alliances based on race and gender. I analyse Alice Walker's representation of African women and female circumcision in her novels Possessing the Secret of Joy and The Color Purple and her documentary film Warrior Marks and its accompanying book of the same name the text, to argue that when national and cultural differences are sacrificed for sisterhood and solidarity based on a superficial universalisation of racial and gender oppression, the totalising, discursive tendencies that many critics objected to in second wave mainstream feminism are replicated. Walker differentiates between African women as objects of her discourse and the Western women as its audience. In her representation of Africa and Africans, particularly African women, she is not self-reflexive enough to explore the impact of her ideological location in the West on her identity. Thus, she does not create enough distance between her cultural and ideological upbringing to be able to escape the charge of ethnocentrism. Because she reads African women from her location in American culture, her work is best read within the African American literature on Africa and Africans dating back three centuries. That the sisterhood that Walker's work advances between African American and African women is informed by unequal power relations between the West and Third World is made clear by her deployment of her womanist ethic in two of her novels, The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy. A comparison of the two novels shows that Walker overemphasises the differences between Africans and African-Americans in order to assert the superiority of African American identity to African identity. From her politics in both these novels it becomes clear female circumcision provides Walker with an opportunity to air her Africanist/neo-colonialist attitudes. Her texts on African women, in Possessing the Secret of Joy in particular, evinces her indebtedness to the imperialist tradition of writing about Africa as it is a projection rather than a perception. And like most imperialist texts, it tells us more about her pathologies and obsessions as a representing subject than about the Africans she seeks to portray. The position that she creates for herself in the novel is problematic because it is predicated on the essentialist notion of race and gender, and on a slippery identification process that casts her as both subject and object. This thesis does not look at the practice of female circumcision in Africa, but at Walker's representation of the practice. This is mainly because Walker’s representation of Africans is part of a larger discourse on African women: for Walker female circumcision provides vehicle for her to participate in this discourse

Биолошката разновидност како мотив за привлекување на туристи во бањските центри во Република Македонија

Предмет на оваа статија е улогата која ја имаат природните ресурси, поточно растителниот и животинскиот свет за привлекување на туристи во бањските центри во Република Македонија. Направен е преглед на бањските центри, лековитоста на нивните води како основен мотив за посета од страна на туристите и биолошката разновидност како дополнителен мотив. Презентирани се дел од истражувањата во однос на искористеноста на природните вредности на бањите од страна на посетителите. Разгледани се факторите за загадување на животната средина во бањските центри и мерките за нејзина заштита

Nuns in the Newsroom: The Sisters of Marillac College and U.S. Sisters’ Involvement in Social Justice Reform

Nuns in the Newsroom: The Sisters of Marillac College and U.S. Sisters\u27 Involvement in Social Justice Reform is a senior honors history thesis project.  The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) was guided by the spirit of aggiornamento, or “a bringing up to date” of the Catholic Church.  As a result of Vatican II documents such as Gaudium et Spes, they influenced U.S. sisters to expand their ministry from performing works of mercy to advocating for legal, economic, and social justice in addition to their charitable endeavors.  However, after doing research at the Daughters of Charity Archives in Emmitsburg, Maryland and looking at newspaper articles written by sister students at Marillac College, a Sister Formation college founded by the Daughters of Charity outside of St. Louis, Missouri that served young sisters from over twenty-five different orders, even before Vatican II convened, some religious sisters had already begun criticizing unjust systems and speaking about the need for social and economic justice.  While many secondary sources and oral histories only highlight sisters’ involvement during and after Vatican II, the sister students at Marillac College, were in retrospect, ahead of the times in their engagement with racial injustice, immigrants’ rights, and education, rehabilitation, and housing services for homeless populations. The first chapter of this thesis, “Sisters’ New Focus on Education and Influences on Sisters’ Interest in Social Justice,” will look at the influences of Cardinal Joseph Ritter, archbishop of St. Louis, Sister Bertrande Meyers, the first dean of Marillac College, and the Marillac curriculum, and how they inspired the sister students\u27 writings to shed light on an expansion beyond charitable work to advocacy for systemic change before Vatican II came to a close in 1965. Chapter Two, “Marillac College Students: Their Discussion and Awareness of Current Issues,” will specifically address the articles that the sister students wrote in the Marillac College Forum and how their articles give insight into what the Midwestern sister students were thinking about and discussing with their peers both before and during the time the Second Vatican Council convened with particular focus on the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War crisis.  Finally, the third chapter, “U.S. Sisters on the Frontlines of Social Justice,” will study the oral histories from Carole Rogers’ book, Habits of Change: An Oral History of American Nuns which includes the memoirs of sisters from different orders in the U.S. serving the underserved, and how the spirit of aggiornamento motivated the U.S. sisters to continue to use their special gifts to help the underserved populations. Also, this chapter will include an oral history from an interview with Marillac College alumnae Sister Julie Cutter, D.C., and how the environment at Marillac College and her interest in helping Guatemalan refugees inspired her to leave the classroom and take part in social justice action.  This thesis will highlight the sister students of Marillac College allowing the reader to gain a better understanding of the reform in the sisters’ education during the mid-twentieth century. It will further illustrate how the Marillac curriculum helped to expose them to the outside world.  Finally, the reader will conclude that the sisters were capable of advocating for social and economic change in addition to performing charity work and teaching in a classroom setting

Isomorphism of Commutative Group Algebras of Finite Abelian Groups

Let a commutative ring R be a direct product of indecomposable rings with identity and let G be a finite abelian p-group. In the present paper we give a complete system of invariants of the group algebra RG of G over R when p is an invertible element in R. These investigations extend some classical results of Berman (1953 and 1958), Sehgal (1970) and Karpilovsky (1984) as well as a result of Mollov (1986)