"Creating something else to be" : negotiating African American female subjectivities in Toni Morrison's Sula, Beloved, and Jazz : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University

Toni Morrison's novels, Sula, Beloved, and Jazz delineate the struggles of African American women to attain subject positions in a society where blackness and femaleness mark them as 'others,' and where women are objectified in the male pursuit of subjectivity. Negotiation of a variety of psychoanalytic and feminist theories in reading these texts demonstrates the complexities of African American female subjectivities, and the difficulties of achieving representation of them within a patriarchal and racist order. Morrison's themes and narrative techniques foreground the political implications of acts of reading, writing, and representation, and envisage female subjectivities which disrupt dominant narratives of identity, gender and race. These subjectivities cannot be wholly represented within the dominant order without appropriation, but can be glimpsed as mobile and multiple subjectivities which refuse the masculine economy's structures, and break open prevailing narratives to imagine a female subjective space beyond patriarchal culture, and to re-imagine African American female narratives of self

Between heaven and earth: the religious worlds people make and the scholars who study them

Title: Between heaven and earth: the religious worlds people make and the scholars who study them. Author: Orsi, Robert A Between heaven and earth 256 p. Publisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ Pr, 2005

IYV Global Evaluation

This is a report on the global evaluation of the International Year of Volunteers (IYV)

Intellectual Property Education – Thinking outside the Box meets Colouring within the Lines

A basic understanding of intellectual property (IP) is essential for practice as a professional engineer and/or designer to ensure commercial success. Engaging students in a ‘real-life’ scenario or problem is one of the most effective methods of doing this. As they must first understand the problem, then seek knowledge to solve the problem, which ensures they develop their skills along the way. This paper concerns how intellectual property rights education is addressed in the HIGHER education of both lawyers and designers/engineers. It is written jointly, from the perspective of both design/engineering and law education and focuses on the pedagogical issues that are different or shared

UK-wide evaluation of the Millennium Volunteers Programme

The Millennium Volunteers programme is a UK-wide government supported initiative designed to promote sustained volunteering among young people aged 16-24

Letting Down Rapunzel: feminism's effects of fairy tales.

The importance of stories written for young readers is undisputed, and in particular the central place of the fairy story in popular culture is clearly recognized. Whilst most of these stories are centuries old, they have been adapted by the cultures of the tellers to be more compatible with the ideological views of the audience. This article will explore how feminism has influenced two versions of the same story, published by the same publisher for comparable age groups through an exploration of the Ladybird versions of Rapunzel as published in 1968 and 1993. It will show how there are subtle changes in the text which do not affect the overall narrative structure but can offer an insight into the ways in which society has ideologically positioned men and women. Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA) will be used to show how a close linguistic analysis of the text can reveal the impact of feminism on the adaptation of children’s books

The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing

Outsourcing has become increasingly popular to the public since the mid-20th century and has become more controversial in the last decade. The United States economy has been under the microscope for the last 4 years due to an economic recession. Outsourcing has been a subject of interest that has been brought up numerous times by economists. Offshore outsourcing is the main type of outsourcing that is of concern in relation to the United States economy. This topic is highly debated because of the unemployment rate in America

The Experience of International Students With English L2 in a Scottish Further Education College

In the early years of the twenty-first century, Scottish Further Education Colleges experienced a decline in student intake as a result of demographic changes and competition within the tertiary education sector. As a result, one such college actively sought new students from outside its core student base, specifically targeting both international students and migrant workers, most of whom speak English as a second language. Subsequently, these students have often been perceived by the academic staff as not achieving their full academic potential because of issues around English language competence. This thesis takes a case study approach, drawing on sociocultural theory, to examine the experiences of five such students and their lecturers in the college, in order to explore factors contributing to this perceived lack of success. The research used semi-structured interviews, as well as learning centre observations, college marketing and policy documentation and an analysis of statistical data on student academic attainment. The interviews gave five students an opportunity to talk about their experiences of the college as well as allowing eight staff members to relate their perceptions of the students. Staff were also asked about the challenges they faced as professionals in meeting the required learning outcomes of the curriculum, while balancing the needs of students with those of the college. Both thematic and discourse analysis were applied to the data to explore structural themes suggested by the research questions around language competence, language support, educational expectations and both staff/student and student/student relationships. This analysis also exposed specific emergent themes for each group: for the students, conflicting identities as they try to balance the opportunity costs of their investment in their education against other aspects of their life: and, for the lecturers, perceptions of the ‘ideal student’ and their own professional identity