Mixing Sports and Politics: How Totalitarian Regimes Used Sports to Achieve the Goals of the State

This paper explores how sports were used by totalitarian regimes to achieve the goals of the state. The three case studies involve the totalitarian governments of interwar Europe: Italian Fascism, German Nazism, and Spanish Francoism. Three main trends were identified. Sports were used to improve their nation’s health and fitness for military preparation, construct a national identity, and as a diplomatic tool to improve their international reputation. I also explore what ideological themes lent themselves to construction of these three specific goals

Navigating Cultural Identity in the Classroom

As of 2016, ~25% of children in the United States are the children of immigrants (Nibbs & Brettell). Many of these youths struggle with the feeling that they belong neither to their parents’ cultural community nor to the locality in which they have been raised (Brockett, 2018). Furthermore, little academic research exists wherein these students share their experiences and engage in the processes of meaning making. This knowledge is essential for multicultural scholars and also for the (overwhelmingly white) population of K-6 teachers who help these youth construct personal identities. This project accomplishes the following: 1. I interview second-generation immigrants regarding their personal narratives about establishing and maintaining a bi- or tri-cultural identity. 2. I write a comprehensive literature review on the subject. 3. I combine the above and present a workshop outline (and slides) aimed at helping K-6 teachers become more inclusive of multicultural identities within the classroom

The work of teachers in small primary schools

A review of the literature on small primary schools identified a number of problems: a lack of a definition of 'small', poor quality of evidence, a neglect of some important issues and the general picture of teachers in small schools having different work patterns from other teachers. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that the work of teachers in small schools was distinctively different from those in larger schools. Data were gathered which were used to portray the work of the Key Stage Two teachers in two small Warwickshire primary schools. Of the seven individuals studied, two were headteachers with a dual teaching and management role. Participant observation, time diaries, interviews and systematic observation techniques were employed in order to gain a full picture of their working lives and to allow for triangulation. Analysis of the data suggested that for the case study teachers, their work did not differ markedly from that reported in other studies of teachers in larger schools. This was true both in terms of the length and distribution of their time and the means by which they delivered the curriculum. Differences arose as a result of individual personalities and the proportion of a full-time teaching contract which each held. It was hypothesised that teachers working in small schools may have undergone the most intensification of their work; again, there was little to suggest that this was true for the teachers in this study. Despite limitations in the data collected, evidence of the headteachers' work suggested that again school size was not the main influence upon their work School status and individual personalities were influential in shaping their working patterns and priorities

Being church in Longbridge: practical theology of local churches in a post-industrial community

2005 saw the closure of the car factory that was once economically, socially and culturally central to Longbridge, Birmingham. Following this, this thesis examines how the Church communicates the Gospel there. Employing practical theological methodology, a case study approach exploring the practice of two local churches using ethnographic methods is offered. An account of their practical theologies and their significance for God's mission in Longbridge is given. Data analysis revealed that, over many years, 'post-industrial' Longbridge had lost its heart and sense of place, wrestled with belonging locally and faced future uncertainty. The local Anglican church uses incarnational theology which views locality as the arena for God's purposes, and counter-culturally preserves local identity amidst deconstructive post-industrial forces. The local Methodist church emphasizes the 'social holiness' of Godself, providing multiple ways to belong and reviving relatedness between local residents. This thesis demonstrates the complexities of shaping a practical theology within a rapidly-changing, destabilised environment, whilst claiming the importance of locally-based church practice. Although the churches cannot offer blueprints for ecclesial life, their comparative experiences indicate principles for a practical theology of local churches in post-industrial communities, based upon vulnerability, commitment to presence and a conscious seeking to serve God's mission afresh

The origin of property in land: Paul Vinogradoff and the late XIXth century English historians

One of the problems which has intrigued English historians for over a hundred years is that of the position of the common man in early England. Was he a freeman working land held communally by the village, or was he a serf laboring upon the land of an overlord? Since this question of freedom is inextricably interwoven with landholding concepts the problem may also be stated another way: Did private property in land exist from the earliest times, or is that institution the result of centuries of appropriation by individuals of land originally belonging to the commmunity as a whole? In the late 19th century a group of English historians devoted themselves to the study of this problem. The conclusions they reached varied considerably. The purpose of this essay is to examine some of those conclusions and the suppositions upon which they rest and to attempt to find methodological and ideological differences which may account for the varied results. The study will focus upon Paul Vinogradoff (1854-1925), legal historian and jurisprudential scholar, whose best known works are concerned with this subject. Toward the end of the 18th century there developed in Germany a theory of the beginnings of society, known as the Mark theory, which described those beginnings as an idyllic period when mankind lived together in free communities. English historians found this thesis much to their liking: it fitted well with English ideals of freedom and democracy, and it supported popular belief in a strong Germanic, rather than Roman, influence in the development of English institutions. Beginning with John M. Kemble\u27 s Saxons in England in 1849, English historians almost to a man accepted the theory without critical examination of the authorities upon which it rested. In 1883 however, an amateur historian, Frederic Seebohm, in The English Villa Community challenged the Mark theory and asserted that the English common man was originally a serf laboring on an estate which strongly resembled the Roman villa. Paul Vinogradoff, a talented Russian working in England on early agrarian history, sought new proof to sustain the cause of the common free man. In Villainage in England (1892) he attempted to prove that the early villein was free both legally and economically. He was supported by Frederic Maitland in Domesday Book and Beyond (1897), who found in the Domesday survey proof of vestigial freedom, which he held could only mean that the once free villein had lost much of his liberty during the late Anglo-Saxon period, and that his subjection was completed by the Norman conquerors. William Ashley, in several works, supported Seebohm\u27 s position, but did not always agree with him. All four historians were products of conservative background. There were, however, differences in the more intimate details of their social surroundings, differences of family, education, religion, and in the case of Vinogradoff, of national origin. Vinogradoff and Maitland came from economically secure families, who provided for them the best education available; they were religious agnostics; both were legal historians. Seebohm’s and Ashleys families were not affluent, and the education they obtained came primarily from their own efforts; both were devout members of evangelical faiths; Ashley was an economic historian and Seebohm\u27s best works were in the field of early agrarian history. Each of these men read the sparse evidence available on the subject from a particular point of view. Vinogradoff and Maitland concluded that the early English peasant was free and that his fall from freedom to serfdom during the late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods was due to a large extent to a misinterpretation of his legal status. Seebohm and Ashley held he had been a serf from the time of the Teutonic settlements, and that his legal rights were never as important as his economic position

Decoding Semi-Constrained Brain Activity from fMRI Using Support Vector Machines and Gaussian Processes

Predicting a particular cognitive state from a specific pattern of fMRI voxel values is still a methodological challenge. Decoding brain activity is usually performed in highly controlled experimental paradigms characterized by a series of distinct states induced by a temporally constrained experimental design. In more realistic conditions, the number, sequence and duration of mental states are unpredictably generated by the individual, resulting in complex and imbalanced fMRI data sets. This study tests the classification of brain activity, acquired on 16 volunteers using fMRI, during mental imagery, a condition in which the number and duration of mental events were not externally imposed but self-generated. To deal with these issues, two classification techniques were considered (Support Vector Machines, SVM, and Gaussian Processes, GP), as well as different feature extraction methods (General Linear Model, GLM and SVM). These techniques were combined in order to identify the procedures leading to the highest accuracy measures. Our results showed that 12 data sets out of 16 could be significantly modeled by either SVM or GP. Model accuracies tended to be related to the degree of imbalance between classes and to task performance of the volunteers. We also conclude that the GP technique tends to be more robust than SVM to model unbalanced data sets