Brave new world: Myth and migration in recent Asian-Australian picture books

From Exodus to the American Dream, from Terra Nullius to the Yellow Peril to multicultural harmony, migration has provided a rich source of myth throughout human history. It engenders dreams, fears and memories in both migrant and resident populations; giving rise to hope for a new start and a bright future, feelings of exile and alienation, nostalgia for lost homelands, dreams of belonging and entitlement, fears of invasion, dispossession and cultural extinction. It has inspired artists and writers from the time of the Ancient Testament to the contemporary age of globalisation and mass migration and it has exercised the minds of politicians from Greek and Roman times to our era of detention centres and temporary visas. This reading of Asian-Australian picture books will focus on immigrants’ perception of the ‘new worlds’ of America and Australia. The Peasant Prince, a picture-book version of Li Cunxin’s best-selling autobiography Mao’s Last Dancer, sets up tensions between individual ambition and belonging, illustrated by contrasts between the Chinese story ‘The Frog in the Well’ and the Western fairy-tale of Cinderella, to which Li Cunxin’s own trajectory from poor peasant boy in a Chinese village to international ballet star is explicitly related. Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing and The Arrival trace the journey from alienation to belonging by means of fantasy worlds encompassing both utopic and dystopic visions. By way of a conclusion, the paper considers the nature of myth as evoked and dramatised in these texts, contrasting the idea of myth as eternal truth with Roland Barthes’ insistence that myth is a mechanism which transforms history into nature

A disgraceful journey into nothingness: criticism and interpretation – South Africa in literature – culture of violence and post-apartheid theid through “Disgrace” from J. M. Coetzee

Set in post-apartheid and post-Truth-and-Reconciliation South Africa, Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) is a disturbing novel illustrating the difficulty of erasing a culture of violence. Its central character, David Lurie undergoes the crisis of the white middle-class male intellectual living a time in history when so many minorities and oppressed groups are speaking for themselves and thus eroding the hegemony of the white knowing subject. An incarnation of the pilgrim, his journey into the new South Africa proves to be most tortuous and pushes through an unexpected territory, bearing resemblance to a rite de passage. Although David Lurie may be seen as exiting from a model and offering himself the possibility of making his own history, like the Byronic Don Juan he is rather slipping into a distorted history. Transcending textuality andhumanity then sinking into nothingness, Disgrace’s world is a wrong(ed) history.Enraizado na África do Sul dos anos pós-apartheid e Pós-Comissão-Verdade-e-Reconciliação, o romance Disgrace (1999) de J. M. Coetzee ilustra a dificuldade de desfazer uma cultura da violência. O personagem central, David Lurie, passa por uma crise do intelectual branco da classe média experimentando uma época histórica em que minorias e gruposoprimidos começam a falar por si mesmos, portanto corroendo a hegemonia do sujeito branco detentor do saber. Sendo uma encarnação do peregrino, sua jornada através da nova África do Sul torna-se extremamente tortuosa. Abrindo caminho através de um território inopinado, ela se semelha a um rito de passagem. Embora David Lurie possa ser visto como abandonando um modelo e oferecendo-se a possibilidade de elaborar sua própria história, tal o byronico Don Juan, ele segue ao encontro de uma história distorcida. Transcendendo textualidade e humanidade, chegando à não-existência, o mundo de Disgrace revela uma história inapropriada

Childhood in a multicultural society? Globalization, childhood and cultural diversity in Norwegian children's literature

An alligator named Johannes Jensen works as an executive officer at the Oslo tax office. He feels different, but doesn't know why. Maybe it is because he wears a bow tie while his colleagues wear ties? Johannes Jensen tries to go to work dressed with a tie, but he still feels different. In the verbal text he wonders about why he feels different. It is the Oscar-winning illustrator Torill Kove's humorous pictures which suggest an answer to the reader. The pictures show that the bow tie is not the main reason that makes Johannes Jensen stand out, but the fact that he is an alligator, while all the others are human beings. In this way the different modalities of the text are interdependent on one another for the creation of meaning. The interplay between picture and verbal text in the picture book, or what Hallberg (1982) calls the "ikonotekst," creates a tension between Johannes Jensen's experience of reality and reality seen through the eyes of the reader. Johannes Jensen føler seg annerledes [Johannes Jensen feels different] (2003) is a complementary picture book, where words and pictures fill in each other's gaps (Nikolajeva and Scott 2001, 12). An example that demonstrates this is seen when Johannes Jensen is having his breakfast. Even when Johannes Jensen sits alone, eating his breakfast, he feels different, the verbal [End Page 31] text tells us. Not strange, really, as we can see pictures of humans both on the cereal box and in the newspaper. Johannes Jensen føler seg annerledes focuses on the theme of being and feeling different and representing a minority, in this case an alligator in a society dominated by human beings. The problem at hand, Johannes Jensen's existential search for identity and interdependence, is common to all mankind. Both children and adults can easily identify with Johannes Jensen. The book is written just as much for adult readers as for child readers, marketed as all-ages-literature1, and published in two different formats: a big edition for children and a mini edition for adult

Editorial

Building cultural citizenship: Multiculturalism and children’s literature In his influential book White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (1998), Ghassan Hage compares different versions of multiculturalism using an example from a children’s book, The Stew that Grew by Michael and rhonda Gray. the book presents an allegory of Australian cultural diversity: the ‘eureka stew’ which features ingredients brought by all the ethnic groups that make up the Australian nation. According to Hage, it is an allegory fraught with ideological paradox: ‘far from celebrating cultural diversity – or rather, in the process of so doing,’ the book actually embodies ‘a White nation fantasy in which White Australians...enact...their capacity to manage this diversity.’ (p.119) He explains that although the stew is presented as the palatable blend of all the cultural influences which went into its making, it is not a mix where all cultures are equal: the Anglo character Blue is in charge of the cooking throughout; the ‘ethnics’ are reduced to the function of adding flavour

The “dark side” of projectification: The impact of project work on the employees’ well-being : A quantitative study of the impact of project work exposure on employees’ work-related well-being.

Master's thesis Business Administration BE501 - University of Agder 2018Although project-based work is said to create dynamic environments for innovation and learning, it can also make the employees vulnerable, exhausted and reduce their personal worthiness. Some have even stated that it can be destructive to the employees’ well-being. Employees’ well-being impacts not only the individual itself, but also the organizations they work in and the society as a whole. Existing studies have explored how work in general impact employees’ well-being, but few have assessed the impact of project-based work on employees’ well-being. As the use of project-based work is constantly increasing it is highly relevant and interesting to explore its impact on individuals. By using the Job Demand- Control-Support model as the starting point of our study, we aim to explore the research gap of how project work exposure impact employees’ well-being using a quantitative approach. While the main hypothesis considers the impact of project demand on employees’ workrelated well-being, the direct and potential moderating effects of project control and coworker support are also included. In addition, project complexity is considered as a moderating variable. We have conducted a quantitative analysis, based on primary data collected through a webbased questionnaire. The questionnaire was distributed by three leading project management associations in Scandinavia and answered by 136 respondents. The main data analysis was done applying PLS-SEM. Our findings demonstrate that all of the independent variables had a significant impact on employees’ work-related well-being, while the moderating variables did not have any significant impact. Nevertheless, the results contribute to a better understanding of the linkage between project work exposure and employees’ well-being

Merete Geert Andersen: Katalog over AM Accessoria 7: De latinske fragmenter

Fragments from medieval manuscripts have survived in large numbers and are significant sources to medieval manuscript culture. However, fragment collections often have not been given the attention that they deserve. They are cumbersome to deal with and a disproportional lot of work has to be put into compiling a catalogue which might only be used by a few people. Often they never get finished and end up as preliminary inventories which are only available locally. It is all the more admirable when the compiler of such an inventory gets around to revising the work and making it more easily available through having it published, as has been the case with the present publication

Money Matters

Although the financial sustainability of United Nations (UN) support to institutional capacity building in post-conflict contexts may be the least analysed topic on the peacebuilding agenda, understanding the costs of rebuilding and maintaining the security sector should be one of the most important priorities for security sector reform (SSR) practitioners today. Through innovative partnerships between the UN and the World Bank, a new and important practice area in public financial management of the security sector is beginning to take shape. This paper traces the new demands placed on peacekeeping operations to â get more bang for every peacekeeping buckâ , and explores how to match SSR priorities and recurring costs in the security sector with available resources over the long term. In presenting the lessons learned from the security sector public expenditure review conducted by the UN and the World Bank in Liberia in 2012, the first such review jointly undertaken by the two organizations, the paper seeks to illustrate how the discussion on right-sizing of the security sector can go hand in hand with a discussion on right-financing in order to help prioritize key reforms pragmatically in light of the available fiscal space. Specifically, the paper provides SSR practitioners with insights into the challenges often encountered when assisting national authorities to address the political economy of SSR, and how to navigate those dilemmas

Probabilities of conditionals: updating Adams

The problem of probabilities of conditionals is one of the long-standing puzzles in philosophy of language. We defend and update Adams' solution to the puzzle: the probability of an epistemic conditional is not the probability of a proposition, but a probability under a supposition. Close inspection of how a triviality result unfolds in a concrete scenario does not provide counterexamples to the view that probabilities of conditionals are conditional probabilities: instead, it supports the conclusion that probabilities of conditionals violate standard probability theory. This does not call into question probability theory per se;rather, it calls for a more careful understanding of its role: probability theory is a theory of probabilities of propositions;but as conditionals do not express propositions, their probabilities are not subject to the standard laws. We argue that both conditional probabilities and probabilities of conditionals are best understood in terms of the dynamics of supposing, modeled as a restriction operation on a probability space. This version of the suppositionalist view allows us to connect Adams' Thesis to the widely held restrictor view of the semantics of conditionals. We address two common objections to Adams' view: that the relevant probabilities are 'probabilities only in name', and that giving up conditional propositions puts us at a disadvantage when it comes to interpreting compounds. Finally, we argue that some putative counterexamples to Adams' Thesis can be diagnosed as fallacies of probabilistic reasoning: they arise from applying to conditionals laws of standard probability theory which are invalid for them

Caught in the act:phenotypic consequences of a recent shift in feeding strategy of the shark barnacle <i>Anelasma squalicola</i> (Lovén, 1844)

Anelasma squalicola is a barnacle found attached to deep-water lantern sharks of the family Etmopteridae and is the only known cirriped on fish hosts. While A. squalicola is equipped with mouth and thoracic appendages (cirri), which are used for suspension feeding in conventional barnacles, its attachment device (peduncle) appears to have evolved into a feeding device, embedded into the tissue of its host. Here we demonstrate, through comparisons of the feeding apparatuses between A. squalicola and conventional suspension-feeding barnacles, that mouthparts and cirri of A. squalicola are highly reduced, and incapable of suspension-feeding activities. We show that in conventional suspension-feeding barnacles strong symmetries exist within these vital trophic structures. In A. squalicola strong asymmetries are widespread, indicating that those structures have been uncoupled from natural selection. The digestive tract is consistently empty, suggesting that feeding via cirri does not occur in A. squalicola. In addition, comparisons of stable isotope ratios (δ13C and δ15N) between A. squalicola, its shark host, and a conventional suspending feeding barnacle indicate that A. squalicola is taking nutrition directly from its host shark and not from the surrounding water. Our results strongly indicate that this barnacle has abandoned suspension feeding and now solely relies on obtaining nutrition from its host by a de novo evolved feeding mechanism.publishedVersio