Translated people, translated texts : language and migration in some contemporary African fiction

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 209-215)This thesis examines contemporary migration narratives by four African writers living in the diaspora and writing in English: Leila Aboulela and Jamal Mahjoub from the Sudan, now living in Scotland and Spain respectively and Abdulrazak Gurnah and Moyez G. Vassanji from Tanzania now residing in the UK and Canada. Focusing on how language operates in relation to both culture and identity, this study foregrounds the complexities of migration as cultural translation. Cultural translation is a concept which locates itself in postcolonial literary theory as well as translation studies. The manipulation of English in such a way as to signify translated experience is crucial in this regard. The thesis focuses on a particular angle on cultural translation for each writer under discussion: translation of Islam and the strategic use of nostalgia in Leila Aboulela's texts; translation and the production of scholarly knowledge in Jamal Mahjoub's novels; translation and storytelling in Abdulrazak Gurnah's fiction; and finally translation between the individual and old and new communities in Vassanji's work. The conclusion of the thesis brings all four writer's texts into conversation across these angles. What emerges from this discussion across the chapter boundaries is that cultural translation rests on ongoing complex processes of transformation determined by idiosyncratic factors like individual personality as well as social categories like nationality, race, class and gender. The thesis thus contributes to the understanding of migration as a common condition of the postcolonial world as well as offering a detailed look at particular travellers and their unique journeys

A note on adjoint error estimation for one-dimensional stationary balance laws with shocks

We consider one-dimensional steady-state balance laws with discontinuous solutions. Giles and Pierce realized that a shock leads to a new term in the adjoint error representation for target functionals.This term disappears if and only if the adjoint solution satisfies an internal boundary condition. Curiously, most computer codes implementing adjoint error estimation ignore the new term in the functional, as well as the internal adjoint boundary condition. The purpose of this note is to justify this omission as follows: if one represents the exact forward and adjoint solutions as vanishing viscosity limits of the corresponding viscous problems, then the internal boundary condition is naturally satisfied in the limit

A psychological framework to enable effective cognitive processing in the design of emergency management information systems

Human cognitive processing and decision making are essential aspects in emergency management. Emergency situations imply additional demands to information processing. To meaningfully support decision makers in emergencies, a comprehensive understanding of the human perception and decision making processes and their underlying principles is required in the design of Emergency Management Information Systems (EMIS).This paper presents a psychological framework that models the stages and components of decision making in the context of emergency management. To this end, psychological research on human perception and information processing, knowledge and competence modelling, human judgement and decision making, individual and situational factors, stress, and self-regulation are identified as important compents of the framework. The psychological framework represents a comprehensive model of decision making of emergency managers, for a better understanding of the involved cognitive processes and influencing factors on the person level and on the context level. The paper posits the framework as a guide in the identification of requirements for emergency managers during systems analysis. This comprises systematically describing decision tasks in emergency situations and identifying needs for supporting them. The knowledge on human perception and decision making represented by the framework can also be used to inform the user interface design of the EMIS. It may also inform the evaluation of EMIS as it provides a theoretically founded representation of relevant aspects of human-computer interaction, which facilitates the identification of success indciators to be addressed in user-centred evaluation. The framework furthermore supports the design and implementation of training programmes through the differentiation and modelling of knowledge and competence relevant in emergency decision making. To demonstrate the application of the psychological framework in the design, development, and testing of EMIS a set of concrete design principles as well as exemplary paper prototypes applying these principles are presented

Collaborating With University Faculty and District Partners to Provide Meaningful Field Experiences for Pre-service Teachers

The most effective teacher preparation programs require candidates to spend extensive time in the field practicing skills related to coursework (Darling-Hammond, 2010). When a candidate is provided opportunities to work alongside expert teachers to put coursework into practice, the candidate receives support and guidance along the way making he/she better equipped to problem solve, engage and impact student achievement. Effective teachers are the most influential factor on student achievement; students exposed to an ineffective teacher for three or more years, will never catch up academically (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Madda, Skinner & Schultz, 2012). Teacher candidates need to be exposed to effective teachers in the field in order to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to impact student achievement

Detection and localisation of unilateral hindlimb pathologies in cattle using the cow pedogram.

ISSN:0042-490