Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Agency of objects'
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1
Quinn, Thomas James. "Agency : humans, animals and objects." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 2017. http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/273/.
Abstract:
My aim in this thesis is to develop an account of the powers that are fundamental to human agency, by drawing out the similarities between human agency, the agency of non-human animals, and the agency of inanimate objects. Many accounts characterise our actions in terms of mental capacities unique to human agents. But focusing on what human agency has in common with agency of other kinds provides a novel perspective from which we can investigate the features of our agency that receive less attention in the literature. I develop the account by answering two closely related questions, both of which provide the opportunity to draw out the connections between human agency, the agency of non-human animals and the agency of inanimate objects. The first question is: what are the similarities and differences between dispositions and abilities? The second question is: what are the similarities and differences between human agency and agency of other kinds? I argue against the idea that the difference between dispositions and abilities lies in the former powers being necessitated to manifest in certain conditions. Rather, what distinguishes dispositions and abilities is that the exercise of ability involves selfmovement on the part of the agent. In light of this distinction, I argue that all human actions are exercises of bodily abilities of a kind possessed by many nonhuman animals. Possession of these abilities does not require high-level mental capacities, but only that the agent possesses a conscious perspective. There are many ways in which the things that we do require uniquely human mental capacities, but our agency is grounded in powers of a kind held in common with non-human agents.
2
Gilhooly, Jonathan. "Enchanted Objects : Agency in the Magic Act and Contemporary Art Practice." Thesis, University of Kent, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.523528.
3
Gaskin, Richard Maxwell. "Experience, agency and the self." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1988. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0b1f3fc5-bae3-4a88-b819-01dd2c8c246f.
Abstract:
Wilfrid Sellars has made familiar a distinction between manifest and scientific images of man-in-the-world. The manifest image is 'a sophistication and refinement of the image in terms of which man first came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world' ([2], p.18)/ and in its methodology 'limits itself to what correlational techniques can tell us about perceptible and introspectible events' (p.19). The scientific image, on the other hand, 'postulates imperceptible objects and events for the purpose of explaining correlations among perceptibles.' (ib.) This thesis is centred on a consideration of two difficulties facing anyone who takes the manifest image seriously as an autonomous image of man. In chapter 1 I consider the connection between perception and its objects, and argue that there is a disharmony between the manifest and scientific accounts of this connection. But I also suggest that the manifest image, which incorporates a certain Cartesianism or internalism, cannot lightly be dispensed with in our understanding of the nature of experience. Chapter 2 is a companion piece to chapter 1: in it I argue that the manifest view of experience accords a certain metaphysical priority to secondary over primary qualities in the constitution of any world capable of being experienced; I also suggest that the scientific image is dependent on the manifest image/ and so cannot subvert it. In chapter 3 I turn to the other main area of difficulty: freedom. I argue that free will as the incompatibilist contrues it is constitutive of the time-order; but that it carries with it implicit internal contradictions. The conflict here lies within the manifest image; the scientific image discerns no such freedom/ and so incurs no such problems. But if I am right that freedom constitutes time/ it will not be an option for us to disembarrass ourselves of the contradictions. I also argue that there is a relation of mutual dependence between freedom/ incompatibilistically construed/ and internalism. The manifest image as a whole - deeply problematic as it is - is therefore grounded in and entailed by something quite ineluctable/ namely the reality of the time-series. This is the principal conclusion of the thesis. If I succeed here/ I provide support for the claim that our difficulties with the manifest image cannot be solved by abandoning it: the manifest image/ problems and all/ must just be lived with. The remainder of the thesis explores topics related to this main thrust. Chapter 4 is really an appendix to chapter 3; it shows how no parallel difficulties attend the constitution of experiential space/ because space is (unlike time) not transcendental. In chapter 5 I examine the commitments of the notion of the transcendental self/ whose existence was deduced in chapter 3 as a condition of freedom. In particular, I aim to show how that self inherits some of the difficulties of its parent concept of freedom; but also how a distinction between transcendental and empirical components in the self can help us with the problem of privacy.
4
Aly, Safwan Krishnamurti Ramesh. "A framework for interaction and task decomposition for objects emulating agency behavior /." Pittsburgh, Pa. : Carnegie Mellon University, 2000. http://code.arc.cmu.edu/lab/upload/aly%5Fphd%5Fthesis.0.pdf.
5
McMahon, Robert Kieran. "Bureaucratic motivations : an examination of motivations in the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Environment Agency for England and Wales." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1999. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:49d505fd-475f-4064-8591-0052c83d902a.
Abstract:
This thesis examines the motivations of bureaucrats in two government agencies: the Environmental Protection Agency in the US, and the Environment Agency for England and Wales. The model employed in this work is a Trifocal Model which utilises Rational Choice, Institutional and Cultural approaches in answering the thesis question. The aim of this work is two-fold: one aim is to explain motivations in two agencies; the second aim is to suggest why the existing literature in the field of bureaucracy often fails to capture the diversity of bureaucratic motivations. The claim is that the adherence to one particular paradigmatic approach prevents scholars from attaining a comprehensive understanding of motivations. This work focuses on two elements of the Trifocal Approach, namely institutional and cultural explanations. Rational Choice explanations are given a limited explanatory role in this work, in large part because of the restricted usefulness of an approach which takes the preferences of agents as given. This thesis uses a scientific approach to the analysis of qualitative data, allowing other researchers to make use of, and indeed to question, the findings presented below. The argument in this thesis suggests why scholars must pay more attention to what those people within bureaucracies tell us about themselves and their motivations. To take the preferences of agents as givens is to ignore much of what is most important about the study of politics that is, where preferences come from, and how they shape the political behaviour we observe in bureaucracies. This thesis will show that public sector reforms are often flawed, often failing to consider the interplay of cultural and institutional effects, and how these effects have a bearing on the motivations of staff in organisations undergoing reform. Furthermore, cultural and institutional factors must be considered whenever one considers the question what is it that motivates bureaucrats.
6
Rasulova, Saltanat Temirbekovna. "Child agency and economic circumstances : how does family economic status affect child agency in Kyrgyzstan's post-Soviet culture of transition?" Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5d7f49f3-c990-414a-b846-cca3f826998f.
Abstract:
This thesis explores how children’s experiences of childhood in Kyrgyzstan transformed after the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991) and the consequent transition to market economy. In particular it studies the interrelations of culture and economic circumstances and their effects on child agency in times of economic, social, cultural and political change which were not given enough attention in the relevant literature. I sampled 40 children (aged 12 and 16) from a state school in an underprivileged area and a prestigious private school (used as economic dividers) to study the complexity of child agency and structure in their daily lives. An ‘agency’ concept was applied as a theoretical framework conceptualised through the four components as action, freedom, purposiveness and outcome and was formulated as the setting-based ability of children to act in response to cultural and economic structures and relationships at home, school and the neighbourhood. The effects of low and high income on child agency are not straightforward due to the changing traditional culture in the Kyrgyz society, which makes agency not only a social and cultural construct, but one affected by economic conditions. The study demonstrated the nuances of child agency as freedom in high income, its conflicting purposes in low income and differentiated outcomes of short and long term wellbeing between the two groups. Economic circumstances do not only influence the dynamics of agency across settings, age and gender but challenge the very notion of the classic Western concept of agency as an independent ability to act. The findings elaborate on the concepts of the new sociology of childhood (Prout and James, 1997) and the cultural politics of childhood (James and James, 2004), as these theoretical frameworks do not account sufficiently for economic dis/advantages as a structural factor of agency, which emerges as a socially shared process of acting whose nature depends on material circumstances.
7
Munk, James N. "Agency, physicality, space : analytical approaches to contemporary Nordic concertos." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d4c79a2a-0836-4921-b33c-9a3fd2aa0f8a.
Abstract:
The concerto enjoys a position of centrality within the oeuvres of many contemporary Nordic composers: the genre often functions as a vehicle for the exploration of advanced compositional techniques and aesthetic preoccupations, and the resulting works are well-represented on recordings and in the concert hall. Yet this repertory has largely been neglected in scholarship. Through detailed analysis of works by Per Nørgård, Kaija Saariaho, Magnus Lindberg, and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, this thesis develops analytical technologies for a genre which has received less musicological attention than it deserves. Placing a particular emphasis on the theatrical aspects of concerto performance, the project explores the application of three lines of enquiry, each of which has been theorised in some detail: agency (Cone, Maus, Cumming), physicality (Clarke, Cox, Larson), and space (Brower, Williams). Each of these lines of enquiry has been directed at the concerto sporadically, if at all – even though concertos make particularly compelling and potentially enriching case studies for the theoretical models in question. This thesis represents the first sustained attempt to explore the concerto with reference to these bodies of literature. The analytical models developed have wider applicability, to concertos both within and without the Nordic arena. I draw attention at numerous points to ways in which they can illuminate works by Ligeti, Birtwistle, Musgrave, Berio, and Lutosƚawski, among others. The project also has wider implications for our understandings of Nordic identity, virtuosity, and musical modernism at the turn of the twenty-first century.
8
Henricksen, Richard A. "The Flux of Agency: Unsettling Objects in Contemporary Spanish Civil War Novels (1998-2008)." The Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1470585727.
9
Hansbury, Paul. "The agency of smaller powers : Belarus in international relations." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0f9c6793-cfe1-4cbb-bdc4-c1bc6e749c6a.
Abstract:
Smaller powers wield agency in the international system and they do so in many cases independently of institutions. This is problematic not only from the perspective of realism, where 'might is right,' but also from the perspective of liberalism which argues that smaller powers use institutions to obtain policy objectives. This thesis considers this problem in respect of the new states that emerged from the former Soviet Union at the end of 1991, with particular focus on Belarus which is a least-likely case for smaller power agency given its alliance with Russia and few institutional memberships. Through a detailed case study of Belarus's foreign policy, I first argue that smaller power agency has been articulated in a regional context when the smaller power withdraws its consent to the regional order. While Belarus has generally consented to Russia's regional primacy or hegemony since 1991, this consent is not unconditional, and the violation of regional interstate norms by Russia caused Belarus to make efforts to renegotiate the rules underpinning the regional order. My second, related argument is that differentiation from the regional power, Russia, proved crucial for the formulation of independent policy positions by the smaller power's officials, and, in turn, that differentiation of opinions among the smaller power's elite granted flexibility to monitor and adapt its actions (that is, allowed the smaller power to wield agency). It did so without outright provoking the regional power to intervene in the smaller power, and instead kept the regional power engaged. The findings receive tentative support from auxiliary study of other post-Soviet smaller powers, and recapitulate the merits of the neoclassical realist research agenda.
10
Stephens, Louise. "The silence of the lamps : visibility, agency and artistic objects in the play production process." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/8971.
Abstract:
This thesis is a case study which looks at the creation of two theatre productions. Using the literature of Actor-Network Theory as a methodological provocation, it analyses the processes by which networks of actors created these theatre pieces with particular attention to where agency was observed. Through data gathered through observing material interactions, the thesis develops the concept of the (play)text: an object that is an expression of the ideas of the text, but is not the text itself – rather, a bricolage of ‘translations' of a piece of written and rehearsed work bound together by time and combined action. Conceiving of the eventual product – the (play)text in performance – as an example of the ANT concept of an agencement, a network of different people and objects working together to maintain a stable construction, but one which perpetually refines and redefines each of its component parts – this thesis proposes that the (play)text is an example of a dynamic and fractional artistic object, stabilised only briefly in the moments of its performance. Examining the theatre production process in this way contributes to ANT literature by providing specific examples of an artistic object created materially and agentively; it also highlights the limitations of the ways in which theatre has been used as a metaphor within Organisation Studies. Finally, it contributes to work on process change in showing an object which is, though it appears constantly improvisational and changing in its form, stabilised by material interactions.
11
Klein, Elise Jane. "Psychological agency in a neighbourhood on the urban fringe of Bamako." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:de625392-bbc9-4f36-b99f-02681578066c.
Abstract:
This thesis is about psychological constructions underpinning intentional action to improve well-being by people in a neighbourhood on the urban fringe of Bamako, Mali. There is a large deficit in the theorisation of psychological elements of agency and empowerment in the development literature. Instead empowerment is generally defined as a favourable opportunity structure, as choice or as the distribution of power. Further still, the examination of the psychological literature reveals a lack of empirical research related to non-Western contexts and development policy. In view of this, I present the results of an empirical study using the inductive mixed methods to examine the central factors contributing to initiatives people undertake to improve personal and collective well-being. Informants articulated that the psychological concepts of dusu (internal motivation) and ka da I yèrè la (self-efficacy) were most important to their purposeful agency. The empirical analysis is divided into three parts and based primarily on qualitative data, enriched by quantitative analysis. Firstly I will examine the concepts of dusu and ka da I yèrè la, which are characterised as having an instrumental and intrinsic significance to people’s purposeful agency. They were also characterised as important factors in supporting local social development initiatives. Secondly, I will show how these psychological concepts were not related to the agent’s socio-economic characteristics or decision making ability, rendering both variables weak proxies for measuring psychological agency. Instead I found that measures of intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy are more viable for evaluating psychological agency. Thirdly, however, whilst dusu and ka da I yèrè la are important to people’s agency and the social development of the neighbourhood, they cannot be viewed as a silver bullet to social development in Kalabankoro Nerekoro. Specifically, in the examination of collective purposeful agency in group work (associations), the functioning of groups is impacted by the internal dynamics within the group, causing sometimes breakdown of the group. Further still, gender and age norms as well as capability deprivation and conflicting world views all thwart the ability of associations to achieve their goals. I underline that agents cannot always succeed in the pursuit of their well-being goals, even though they demonstrate high levels of psychological agency unless structural inequality at the micro, meso and macro levels of Malian society are addressed. Through this empirical study, this thesis will contribute the closing of the gap between psychological and development literatures as well as work towards developing measures of psychological agency.
12
Han, Yuna Christine. "International criminal justice and the global south : extraversion and state agency." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:86495512-c83a-48e5-b27d-4cdcb1aeefd7.
Abstract:
Why do states of the Global South initiate international criminal justice processes for domestic atrocity crimes? The phenomenon of Southern agency regarding international criminal justice presents an empirical and theoretical puzzle given the Southern states' defence of Westphalian sovereignty, or the juridical equality of states and domestic non-intervention. International criminal justice challenges this notion of sovereignty by directly prosecuting individuals under international law through international courts. This thesis rejects this theoretical notion that international criminal justice curbs sovereignty, and argues that the initiative for international criminal justice processes is a type of short-term political strategy adopted by Southern state actors to strengthen specific aspects of their statehood. In doing so, the thesis challenges the dominant theoretical explanations of Southern state preference that relies on their relative weakness and the power of external factors, such as Great Power interests or transnational activist networks, and reclaims the possibility of agency for Southern state actors. The argument is derived from a theory developed in this thesis, referred to as judicial extraversion, or a counter-structural theory of strategic action that links the politics of statehood in the Global South and the political opportunities inherent in the nature of international criminal justice, namely, the individualisation of responsibility, criminalisation of specific forms of violence, and the privileged status of the state in the international criminal justice system. It develops this theory through the qualitative case studies of Uganda's self-referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC), Cambodia's request for an international criminal tribunal to the UN, and the counterexample of Colombia's special domestic criminal justice process for paramilitary demobilisation. The thesis finds that relative weakness of Southern states is insufficient to explain engagement with international criminal justice, and highlights the possibility of paradoxical agency. Finally, the findings suggest that, under particular circumstances, international criminal justice can be used to entrench the authority of weaker states in the international system.
13
Fisher, Jonathan. "International perceptions and African agency : Uganda and its donors 1986-2010." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:92fb2d83-7c05-4d64-a147-23f40c3a5df4.
Abstract:
This thesis investigates the place of African states in the international system and seeks to understand what space exists for aid-dependent governments to exercise agency in relations with donors. In exploring these issues I focus on the case of Uganda’s NRM regime which has enjoyed very substantial international support despite its increasingly authoritarian nature, destabilising regional policy and questionable human rights record. The two central questions posed are therefore: ‘why has Uganda benefited from such uncritical international support and what role has the NRM regime itself played in bringing about this situation?’ The thesis also compares Uganda’s experience to those of Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda to demonstrate the broader relevance of these questions. I argue that donors have taken a lenient approach to Uganda because they perceive it as valuable as an economic success story, an ally in the ‘War on Terror’ and a guarantor of regional stability. The study stresses, however, that these perceptions are just that: perceptions. They do not necessarily reflect reality nor are they formed without input from Africa, as some inadvertently suggest. Indeed, the principal contention of this thesis is that these three donor perceptions of Uganda have been actively constructed, moulded, managed and bolstered by Kampala itself in an effort to shore-up international support. Using a variety of ‘image management’ strategies the regime has succeeded in convincing its donors to see it as a valuable ally worth supporting. The same is true of the Rwandan and Ethiopian governments, I suggest, but not of the Kenyan. In doing so, the thesis contends, Kampala has carved out a subtle but substantial degree of agency in relations with donors and this raises important questions for scholars and policy-makers.
14
Nilsson, Melinda. "Agents of peace and objects of protection : An investigation into the effects of militarization on the agency of Swedish female peacekeepers in MINUSMA." Thesis, Försvarshögskolan, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:fhs:diva-9679.
Abstract:
In the years following 9/11, research has shown that United Nations peacekeeping has grown increasingly militarized. Meanwhile, there have long been calls for women’s increased participation in peacekeeping, for a myriad of reasons mainly founded on instrumental and essentialist arguments. According to feminist theories, however, militarization would limit the agency of women as they are often placed in marginalized, protected roles when such a militarization occurs. Against this background, this thesis has utilized a visual and textual discourse analysis to investigate memory books published by the Swedish Armed Forces, which detail the presence of the Swedish contingency in MINUSMA in the period 2014-2019, to understand the connection between female peacekeeper’s agency and the increasing militarization of the UN’s most deadly peacekeeping mission. The findings suggest that militarization does not seem to limit the agency of Swedish female peacekeepers, who have seen their roles become more varied and seemingly possess more agency later than earlier on in the mission, despite an increased militarization of the peacekeeping mission. The thesis thus contributes to an underexamined connection between agency and militarization in the context of peacekeepers, while exploring a heretofore unexamined material. In doing so, the thesis opens for further research in both the material itself as well as further comparative studies.
15
Rich, Sylvia. "The moral agency of corporations and its implications for criminal law theory." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7f7531a2-7631-40ad-bbf8-9db688becb70.
Abstract:
This thesis analyses the corporation, a business entity, as a form of group agent and considers its treatment under criminal law. I use group agency theory, drawn from the philosophy of action, to explain how a corporation can be a rational, moral agent with an existence separate from its individual human members' existence. Sceptics about corporate entity often tie moral agency to emotional capacity, something that many theorists, including many who defend the existence of corporate agency, find that the corporation lacks. As against this, I argue that corporations are indeed emotional entities, drawing group-level emotional states from the emotions of various members. Critics of corporations also argue that there are structural reasons why corporations are essentially immoral, or bad moral agents. As against this, I argue that while there are strong reasons why corporations tend to do bad things, they are structurally neutral. In the second half of the thesis, I use the conceptual framework of the corporate moral agent to attempt to bring clarity to various problems within the criminal law as it applies to corporations. While corporations can be brought up on charges of committing acts that require a mens rea element, the law and legal theorists have long struggled with how to locate mens rea within the corporation. I build on collectivist theories of mens rea to explain a form of corporate recklessness, as an instance of corporate mens rea. The applicability of excuses to corporations is also an undertheorized area. I show how, in very limited circumstances, a corporation may be able to make out the excuse of duress, though that excuse relies on the accused acting from the emotion of fear. Finally, I consider the applicability of various theories of punishment to the corporation.
16
Nwokora, Zim G. "Do the candidates matter? : a theory of agency in American Presidential nominations." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2271ba3b-447f-4b1e-bfe2-ec473c87189b.
Abstract:
This thesis develops a candidate-centred conception of American presidential nominations. Candidates' choices in nomination politics remain under-theorised. The literature on nominations has tended either to downplay the role of candidates' independent influence or to suggest that the impact of their choices is too idiosyncratic to theorize about. I reject both of these positions; and instead develop the basic elements of a theory in which candidates are the principal agents of change in nomination contests. I argue that candidates make distinct identity, tactical, and management choices, and I show that this simple frame can be used to connect aspirants' varying goals to their choices and actions. In my theory, candidates' prospects remain relatively stable unless a shift occurs in their competitive setting in response to an unexpected event - for instance, a surprising election result. These shifts, or critical junctures, define a candidate's path to his party's presidential nomination. I argue that the rival candidates' choices dominate the development of these critical junctures and, therefore, that candidates' choices are crucial to nomination outcomes. Structural factors, the actions of non-candidates and the effects of exogenous events, account for a minority of critical junctures. In the empirical chapters of this study, I examine the Democratic and Republican nomination contests in selected years before the McGovern-Fraser reforms (1912, 1924, 1932) and in post-reform cases (1972, 1976, 1980) to demonstrate the pervasive influence of candidates' choices in contrasting institutional settings. These cases confirm my basic claim about the centrality of candidates' choices and also suggest significant ways in which candidates' choices have changed between 1912 and 1980.
17
Mullen, Lisa. "Mid-century gothic : the agency and intimacy of uncanny objects in post-war British literature and culture." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 2016. http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/189/.
Abstract:
This thesis reassesses the years 1945-1955 as a hingepoint in British culture, a moment when literature, film and art responded to the wartime hiatus of consumer capitalism by resisting the turn towards conspicuous consumption and self-commodification. This resistance can be discerned in a gothic impulse in post-war culture, in which uncanny encounters with haunted, recalcitrant or overassertive objects proliferated, and provided a critique of the subject/object relationship on which consumerism was predicated. In the opening chapter, the ubiquity of bombsite rubble is brought into dialogue with mid-century mural painting both in literature and at the Festival of Britain. In the second chapter, Barbara Jones’s Black Eyes and Lemonade exhibition of ephemera is considered alongside the work of the Independent Group. The third chapter examines how the period’s new media and computing hardware further complicated the status of the subject, through an analysis of the work of George Orwell, Alan Turing and William Grey Walter. In the fourth chapter, haunted furniture and domestic ephemera threaten to become rival subjectivities, in works including Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day and Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise Longue. The fifth chapter considers the ways in which mid-century clothes and apparel enabled or restricted the autonomy of their wearers, through a comparative analysis of the Coronation, the British Everest expedition, and Britten’s coronation opera Gloriana. Finally, the onset of atomic anxiety is explored through stories about bombs, prosthetics and bodily penetration including Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room. The thesis concludes that the intimacy and agency of these unruly objects remain as half-submerged cultural signposts offering an alternative understanding of twentieth-century materialism.
18
Malacart, L. "MUVE (Museum of Ventriloquial Objects) : reconfiguring voice agency in the liminality of the verbal and the vocal." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2011. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1333237/.
Abstract:
This project aims at reconfiguring power and agency in voice representation using the metaphor of ventriloquism. The analysis departs from ‘ventriloquial objects’, mostly moving image, housed in a fictional museum, MUVE. The museum’s architecture is metaphoric and reflects a critical approach couched in liminality. A ‘pseudo-fictional’ voice precedes and complements the ‘theoretical’ voice in the main body of work. After the Fiction, an introductory chapter defines the specific role that the trope of ventriloquism is going to fulfill in context. If the voice is already defined by liminality, between inside and outside the body, equally, a liminal trajectory can be found in the functional distinction between the verbal (emphasis on a semantic message) and the vocal (emphasis on sonorous properties) in the utterance. This liminal trajectory is harnessed along three specific moments corresponding to the three main chapters. They also represent the themes that define the museum rooms journeyed by the fictional visitor. Her encounters with the objects provide a context for the analysis and my practice is fully integrated in the analysis with two films (Voicings, Mi Piace). Chapter 1 addresses the chasm between the scripted voice and the utterance using the notion of inner speech, leading into a discussion about the role of the inner voice, not as silent vocalisation but as a fundamental cognitive tool that precedes writing. Chapter 2 discusses hermeneutics in the progressive breakdown of the semantic component in the voice, using translation as the site where politics and economics converge with aesthetics. With performance, the discussion broadens into performativity and the political aspects of agency in speech. With Chapter 3 the analysis shifts towards ventriloquial objects whose vocal component is more prominent than the semantic. Singing is considered from a gender perspective, as well as from the materialistic viewpoint of the recording medium.
19
Rochedo, Aline Lopes. "Do croqui à academia : a biografia cultural de um vestido." reponame:Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFRGS, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10183/131647.
Abstract:
Exploro a biografia cultural de um vestido criado pelo estilista Rui Spohr e comprado por Heloisa Brenner, senhora da aristocracia rural do Rio Grande do Sul. O objeto foi apresentado num desfile de moda realizado em Porto Alegre, em 1971, e acompanhou a proprietária por quatro décadas, sendo escolhido por ela para vesti-la no seu aniversário de 80 anos, em 2011. No ano seguinte, sintetizou quase 60 anos de carreira profissional de Rui numa exposição sobre moda num museu de arte, em São Paulo, tornando-se “obra de arte” aos olhos do criador. A proprietária, por sua vez, exalta seu status longevo para atribuir importância à peça. Trançando as trajetórias dos personagens, percorro tensões e transformações simbólicas. Ao falar sobre o vestido aqui entendido como objeto biográfico, Heloisa e Rui falam sobre si. E a roupa fala sobre o criador e a proprietária. Nesse processo, demonstro como a roupa exerce agência sobre os sujeitos com quem interage, sendo ela própria resultante de intencionalidades.I explore the cultural biography of a dress created by designer Rui Spohr and purchased by Heloisa Brenner, member of the rural aristocracy of Rio Grande do Sul. The object was presented during a fashion show held in Porto Alegre, in 1971, and lived along with its owner for four decades, being chosen to dress her up at her 80th Birthday party, in 2011. One year later, it synthesized almost 60 years of Rui’s professional career in a fashion exhibition at an art museum, in São Paulo, becoming a work of art in the face of the creator. The owner, in turn, exalts her long-lived status atributing importance to the item. Brading the characters’ trajectories, I cover tensions and symbolic transformations. In speaking about the dress understood here as a biographical object, Heloisa and Rui speak about themselves. And the garment speaks about its creator and owner. In this process, I demonstrate how the object exercises agency upon subjects with whom it interacts, being itself a result of intentionality.
20
Wendland, Aaron James. "Freedom as response-ability : agency and artistic creativity in the work of Martin Heidegger." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:833425ce-5a71-4f67-b846-384fe1556e7d.
Abstract:
The origin of this thesis can be traced back to a deceptively simple question that struck me when reading Hegel for the first time: What, if anything, can be made of human freedom when we live in a world that has a profound impact on who we are and what we do? Unhappy with the way existentialist reactions to Hegel characterized freedom as our ability to step out of our world and determine our identity through our own decisions and will, but nevertheless inspired by Heidegger’s depiction of human agents as always already in the world, this thesis answers the aforementioned question by turning the existentialist conception of freedom on its head: that is, instead of characterizing freedom as detached decisionism, I argue that freedom is a function of our ability to recognize and respond to the disparate demands our world places upon us. Specifically, and unlike Heidegger’s existentialist interpreters, I read Heidegger’s account of authenticity as a case of engaged-agency in which we clarify the possibilities others make available and then act accordingly. There is, however, a certain limitation to this interpretation of human agency: namely, that treating freedom as an active response to the wants and needs of others binds the agent to possibilities present in her current situation and therefore fails to capture the kind of freedom we associate with cultural transformation or artistic creativity. Hence, this thesis addresses a second set of questions: What conditions make historical change possible? And how is it that artists are able to alter the world? In response to the first query, I turn to Heidegger’s claim that we are in truth and in untruth as well as his discussion of Gelassenheit to argue that the play between the possibilities present in a particular culture and those that are excluded by it along with a release from our present activities create the conditions for cultural transformation. In reply to the second question, I examine Heidegger’s account of the happening of truth and show how thinkers and artists are able to reveal the possibilities concealed in their culture through the creative use of language. Finally, I contend that the freedom associated with cultural transformation and artistic creativity is also a form of responsibility insofar as the success of a given transformation depends on others recognizing that transformation as valuable and thus worthy of their support.
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Song, Minjeong. "Beginning teachers' identity and agency : a case study of L2 English teachers in South Korea." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:920f7cf5-c02f-4205-90a7-bca08c7095cb.
Abstract:
Beginning teachers' first years of professional teaching have been extensively researched as a transformative time with a focus on their coping with praxis shock. Whilst the subtext of the literature often positions entrant teachers as in need of support and guidance at large, little research has concerned their agency at work, that is, how they create and recreate their opportunities for learning and development. The present study follows four beginning L2 English teachers' first year of teaching in two public high schools in South Korea and aims to understand how they navigate, make sense of, and act in and on the materialised worlds of teaching. To be specific, the study explores the thesis that beginning teachers' progression from university to work brings about their experiencing of consequential transition (Beach, 1999), that is, reshaping of identity, knowledge and skills. Drawing on Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner and Cain (1998), the study posits one's identity as objectified self-images which organise the person's actions in and on practices, hence a tool of agency, and applies the concept of identity as an analytic tool to examine the dialectic of person and practices. Also, Hedegaard's (2012) model, especially the notions of a social situation of development and an activity setting, is utilised to further delineate the dynamics entailed in beginning teachers' emergent identity and practices. The participants were interviewed prior to and at multiple time points throughout the school year 2013. Classroom observation was used to capture their emergent identity and practices and informed the interviews. The findings revealed some embedded contradictions which fuelled the beginning teachers' ambivalence towards how to objectify themselves as professionals. Their access to the world of teaching was granted based on the cultural logic that to be a teacher is to be proficient in subject matter, whilst their knowledge of pedagogy was almost ignored. In the classroom, however, their linguistic competence, that is, the core of their identity, was almost dismissed as irrelevant, since the virtue of subject teaching was gauged by its utility for test performance and achievement. Such a forceful motive of teaching to the test meant that the novice teachers all had to acquire the new identity of an exam coach. They also had to cope with other institutional demands, for which they had no prior formal training and structured guidance or support on site. They thus had to become self-reliant to improvise the kind of school identity expected of them. Especially, homeroom care duties were experienced as a make-or-break challenge for the new teachers. The findings point to suggestions for how to assist beginning teachers' transition to professional teaching in the South Korean context. First, the nation's initial teacher education (ITE) should expand how teaching and learning to teach are conceptualised in order to enhance the relevance of beginning teachers' initial identity to what happens in school practices. Second, ITE should incorporate more practice-oriented pedagogy to assist student teachers' development of true concepts for resilient initial identity. Finally, schools should promote teachers to engage with relational work (Edwards, 2010a) so that schools could create a culture in which inquiry and collaboration are nurtured for sustained professional dialogue and interaction, where new teachers also are invited and supported to question and clarify what matters in practices and pave their ways to become resilient professionals.
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Fischer, Carolin. "Relations and agency in a transnational context : the Afghan diaspora and its engagements for change in Afghanistan." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:77d0ecf1-5f8d-4ad7-a5fa-1a5378c90940.
Abstract:
This thesis is about the lives and civic engagements of Afghans in Germany and the UK. It shows how Afghans living in these two countries relate to Afghanistan, and to what extent they engage in transnational action aimed at promoting change there. In particular, it explores the emergence of diasporic communities and how members exercise agency as development actors in Afghanistan. The research rests on a qualitative case study conducted among Afghan populations in Germany and the UK. Semi-structured interviews and participant observation were primary methods of data collection. Relational sociology is used to capture emerging social identities, patterns of social organisation and forms of social engagement. A first notable finding is that Afghan populations abroad are fractured and cannot be seen as a united diaspora. People tend to coalesce in narrowly defined subgroups rather than under a shared national identity. Second, Afghanistan remains a crucial reference point, notwithstanding fragmented social organisation. Home country attachments tend to be tied to a desire for change and development in the country. Third, despite these shared concerns, transnational engagements are typically carried out by small groups and directed towards confined social spheres. Although people may take action in the name of an imagined Afghan community or an imaginary Afghanistan, this imagined community does not provide a basis for social mobilisation. Thus Afghans do not act as a cohesive diaspora. Fourth, transnational engagements are often a response to the specificities of the social environments in which people are embedded, notably their host countries. The findings show that a relational approach can specify how different dimensions of people’s social identities drive social action and are shaped in interaction with various elements of their social context. Such an actor-centred perspective helps to improve our understanding of how members of diasporas come to engage with their countries of origin.
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Huang, Pei-Ching Sophia. "Women in their worlds of objects : construction of female agency through things in the novels of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell." Thesis, University of Hull, 2015. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:13224.
Abstract:
This thesis argues that Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell employ textually important objects to explore women’s demeaning status in patriarchal societies and their construction of agency in such circumstances. In their novels, both Austen and Gaskell portray female characters as interacting in various ways with material things: the characters experience objects through their five senses, create them, recycle them, inhabit them, or purchase and possess them. It is true that not every item connected with the novels’ heroines bears the same significance, but those that play a prominent part in the plot or receive unusual descriptive attention convey messages that the novels do not express explicitly. This thesis follows thing theorists’ call for a reading that begins with objects, in particular the paradigm Elaine Freedgood offers of recovering literary objects’ materiality and socio-historical backgrounds before incorporating those veiled meanings into novelistic interpretation. Nevertheless, this work also differs from the thing theory studies by which it is informed in that it is centred upon the perception that the meanings of things are gendered and relies heavily on the narrative framework of a text in its choice of objects for discussion. In my five chapters, I investigate each of the two novelists’ object worlds and focus on things with which their female characters directly engage, mainly domestic interiors and luxuries. My examination follows a rough chronological order, beginning with Austen’s six major works before moving on to Gaskell’s novels. This thesis suggests that Austen and Gaskell, despite the separation of three decades, use objects in their writing to explore an issue that is relevant not only to their female characters but also to women in general: the construction of agency within the existing patriarchal structure.
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Pitidol, Thorn. "The limits of community participation : examining the roles of discourse, institutions, and agency in the promotion of community participation in Thailand." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c6588478-750c-4d54-bc57-7b06ef220f7a.
Abstract:
This thesis is a study of how community participation is understood, enacted, produced and governed in the context of an organization that promotes community participation. The contribution of this thesis is to shed light on the frequently found gap between the expectations and the reality of community participation. In examining how community participation is promoted, the thesis focuses in particular on actors such as community leaders and development workers, and the interactions between them. The thesis applies a multi-disciplinary theoretical framework, which is built through combining theoretical approaches that include discourse analysis, institutional analysis, and the actor-oriented approach. The framework accommodates the examination of the roles of various types of social factors in shaping the workings of community participation. These include the idea of community, social relations in communities, and the agency of actors who are promoting the approach. This thesis conducts a case study of the Council of Community Organisations (CCO) programme in Thailand, which is a large-scale promotion of community participation in development and governance. The case study examines the operation of the programme from national to local level, and explores several localities where the programme is being implemented. The exploration of the CCO programme illuminates pathways through which the approach’s inner mechanisms can constrain it from fulfilling the expectations. The thesis identifies how the idea of community, through its association with the sense of collective identity, tends to distort community participation from achieving empowerment. Moreover, the social relations in communities, generally characterised by inequality and diversity of interests, frequently constrain the approach from achieving effective mobilisation of collective action. Such a constraint is often accentuated by adverse incentives that community leaders face when they become part of development interventions. Finally, it is found that the deficiencies of community participation are likely to persist. This is because the actors who are promoting the approach usually manoeuvre to gain advantages from their roles in ways that reinforce the influence of the aforementioned factors.
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Kyriakides, Yvonne. "Art after Auschwitz : dimensions of ethics and agency in responses to genocide in post World War II art practice." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9eb26a2a-13ed-42d6-80f1-e353c35c9d7f.
Abstract:
Rather than being located in a field of art that addresses genocide through assumptions connected with identity issues or activism, this thesis of an artist’s exploration of artistic response to genocide in post World War II art practice, is informed by the emerging field of genocide scholarship. Seeing a parallelism between the concerns of genocide scholars and artists who respond to genocide, this thesis is an interdisciplinary study of art positioned alongside the field of genocide scholarship, as theorised by scholars such as Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses. In addressing genocide through broader historical trends, periods and structures, it assumes that artists who respond to genocide share with genocide scholars a concern about genocide at a secondary level and share the potential to create illumination in the field. This thesis explores art practices that address genocide conceptually through structure and material. The central claim of this thesis is that recent and contemporary art practices, here discussed, show a concern to respond to genocide as an ethical response, and that they do so by engaging with the complexity of abstract issues such as complicity and agency. The initial analysis of Adorno’s discourse on ethics, as it relates to response in art, sets up a level of complexity for two further investigations that interrogate the discourses of victim representation and lens-based documents of genocide through ethics and agency. Together these provide an analytical framework for the project. Close readings informed by genocide scholarship, of art practices including those of Jimmie Durham and Francis Alÿs, take forward notions in the existing critical field. These readings yield not only the evidence that demonstrates a commitment to creating ethically based art through conceptually informed practice, in artists responding to genocide, but also the value of a cultural critique that is informed by genocide scholarship.
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Spiers, Emily. "'Alpha-Mädchen sind wir alle' (we're all Alpha Girls) : subjectivity and agency in contemporary pop-feminist writing in the US, Britain and Germany." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:21fd8597-82a0-40e7-9a21-fdcd3da27641.
Abstract:
This thesis investigates models of subjectivity and agency in early twenty-first-century pop-feminist fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction accounts of subjectivity (Haaf, Klingner and Streidl, 2008; Valenti, 2007; Moran, 2011 et al.) draw on poststructuralist notions of incoherent, performative identity, yet retain the assumption that there remains a sovereign subject capable of claiming full autonomy. The pop-feminist non-fictions reflect a neoliberal model of entrepreneurial individualism where self-optimisation replaces an ethics of intersubjective relations. In exploring the theoretical blind-spots of pop-feminist claims to female autonomy and agency, this thesis sets out to demonstrate that pop-feminist non-fiction lacks an actual feminist politics. My methodology is comparative and primarily involves the close reading of a corpus of pop-feminist texts from the Anglo-American and German contexts. I utilize my corpus of current essayistic pop-feminist texts as a fixed point of reference, deeming them to be representative of a pervasive kind of contemporary postfeminist thinking. Through the employment of the first-person narrative voice the literary authors explore how subjects are constituted by discourse but also how the subject may shape her choices/actions. Subjectivity becomes a generative capacity characterised by expansive and self-reflexive negotiations between self and other. The fictional portrayal of this process prompts an imaginative and extrapolative process of identification and dis-identification in the reader which opens up a site for the exercise of critique. Through my close readings of the novels (Riley, 2002; Walsh, 2004; Thomas, 2004; Grether, 2006; Roche, 2008; Bronsky, 2008; Baum, 2011; Hegemann, 2010) I develop a model of intersubjective dependency, drawing on Judith Butler’s later work (1994, 1999, and 2005), and identify versions of this model in the 1980s-1990s work of American postmodern feminist writers Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill. My thesis reveals hitherto un-discussed lines of literary and critical influence on the contemporary British and German novelists emanating from Acker and Gaitskill, suggesting that their texts may be viewed as representative of a critical pop-literary interest, spanning approximately three decades and shifting across cultural contexts, in the encounter between female subjectivity and agency in the face of late-capitalist manifestations of social constraint.
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Phakathi, T. T. "Worker responses to work reorganisation in a deep-level gold mining workplace : perspectives from the rock-face." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:dac919be-8499-42b0-b560-8f4ea0dcdd50.
Abstract:
In the early 1990s, South Africa’s re-entry into the competitive global marketplace and the first non-racial elections brought significant changes to an industry previously plagued by the racialisation of the labour process. South Africa’s post-apartheid work order led to the restructuring of the gold mining workplace, with a greatly increased emphasis on efficiency, productivity and equity. This period saw a number of gold mines reorganising work through new forms of working practices aimed at creating new kinds of workers who could identify with the goals of the company by expending rather than withdrawing effort at the point of production. There was a shift in the attitude of worker responses to managerial practices, from coercion to consent in the day-to-day running of the production process. This thesis examines worker responses to the reorganisation of work and their impact on worker and workplace productivity in a deep-level gold mine. At the core of this thesis are the perceptions, views, experiences and reactions displayed by underground work teams to management initiatives. The thesis highlights the significance of worker agency in managerially defined work structures – the capacity of underground gold miners to reshape and adapt management strategies in ways that make sense and enable them to maintain control over production and the effort-bargain. The findings presented in this thesis, particularly the gold miners’ informal or coping strategy of making a plan (planisa), reveal that underground work teams are not merely passive or docile reactors to management initiatives. They find opportunity to manipulate (and where necessary, avoid) new forms of management control in a variety of innovative ways that enable them to reassert their power and autonomy over their working day. Underground gold miners are not simply appendages to nor alienated beings in the production process but are able to take control of the production process, independent of management prescriptions, in ways which may embody resistance, consent or a subtle combination of the two. The thesis calls attention to workers’ subjective orientation, agency and resilience to new work structures – not just as recipients but also as shapers of such new work structures within the politics, limits and contradictions of capitalist production systems.
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Rutherford, Kevin J. "Pack Your Things and Go: Bringing Objects to the Fore in Rhetoric and Composition." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1436295241.
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Kolbel, Andrea. "Youth, aspiration, and mobility : young people debating their potential futures in Nepal." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b3eeb020-7e1a-41ed-b6aa-f4c64c69a373.
Abstract:
This study is centrally concerned with young people's capacity to identify and realise promising educational and occupational pathways. Whilst it is now well established among social scientists that young people have agency, much less is known about what types of agency young people might demonstrate. Based on field research conducted in 2011-2012 with a group of young people studying, working, and living in Nepal's capital city, Kathmandu, the present study scrutinises Western-inspired approaches prevalent in the scholarship on youth which equate agency to resistance and individuality. It does so, by bringing the literature on youth agency into conversation with theoretical work on the concepts of aspiration and mobility. Through an in-depth analysis of young people's time-space-strategies, the thesis contributes to existing literature in three ways: First, it shows that young people may grow in power as they learn to fulfil social obligations and foster stronger relationships with other people. Second, it illustrates that young people's agency may not only take the form of observable practices, but may also reside in young people’s active efforts to think through their options for improving their own and other people's situation. Third, it highlights the importance of young people's spatial mobilities and immobilities in negotiating various social pressures and in developing a sense of themselves as competent, educated, and successful people. The findings of this thesis are, therefore, of relevance to the interdisciplinary field of youth studies as well as to emerging debates in geography about the apparent need to produce 'aspirational citizens' and about the meanings attached to spatial (im)mobility in contemporary societies.
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Shapiro, Nicholas Edward. "Spaces of uneventful disaster : tracking emergency housing and domestic chemical exposures from New Orleans to national crises." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b42720e6-185b-492b-a83b-aea9de773cd7.
Abstract:
In this thesis, I examine the politics, poetics, and logics of uneventful human harm in the United States by tracking the life and afterlife of a chemically contaminated emergency housing unit. In 2005, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) deployed 120,000 trailers to the US Gulf Coast to house those displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Chemical testing, spurred by reports of inhabitant illness, revealed elevated levels of formaldehyde emanating from the plywood walls of the trailers. After being reclaimed by the federal government and beginning in 2010, the FEMA trailers were resold at auction to every corner of the country. Resold trailers gravitated to precarious populations at the poles of rural capital accumulation—from oil patches in North Dakota to reservations in Washington. These trailers serve as an exceptional substrate for an investigation into the anatomy of the uneventful as they once approached the apex of eventfulness as a national controversy and now reside in the shadows of the everyday. This thesis apprehends and theorizes these dispersed and ordinary instruments of domestic harm across multiple registers: epistemological, material, spatial, and affective. I examine how failures of matter and meaning shaped and patterned the lives of those who inhabited the FEMA trailers as their lives became framed by chemical off-gassing, architectural insufficiency, material deterioration, and electrical short-circuiting. Crossing scales and venues, I interrogate the modalities of scientific incomprehension that erode the perception, admittance, or substantiation of mass chemical exposure. These technical processes, along with cultural horizons of eventfulness and the chronicity of disaster, foreclosed avenues of toxic harm accountability. These ‘economies of abandonment’ bring into relief the contemporary biopolitical priorities in which the FEMA trailer—an ostensible protection from harm that fosters illness—becomes possible. FEMA trailer residents attend to the minute, gradual, and ongoing symptoms of exposure to discern the reality and magnitude of residential contamination. The body of the exposed becomes both an epistemic instrument and, across time, the means of making low-level, chronic, and cruddy chemical exposures into eventful instances that drive individuals to action.
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Malone, Christopher David. "The foundations of international political virtue." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0f14f2a6-0d49-4c8d-8ebb-cb5af2cc444d.
Abstract:
This thesis provides the theoretical groundwork for a 'virtue ethical' account of international political conduct. The project begins by investigating the distinct patterns of normative theorising within international scholarship, noting not only that moral philosophical foundations are unpronounced and interchangeable, but that even in this diminished capacity the influence of virtue ethical thought is limited and fragmentary relative to its competitors. Redressing this underrepresentation is thus dually motivated: developing a fresh perspective on important global issues, whilst also subjecting the theory to an atypical angle of scrutiny. Adapting virtue ethics to the international realm requires, most essentially, that we settle the level at which its concepts should be applied. Can the theory’s central focus on character be reconciled with the collective nature of global political interaction? Can we accurately ascribe virtues and vices to governments and states? These questions of group agency form the heart of thesis investigation. Beginning from abstract foundations, the possible justification for such ascriptions is sought in competing theories of joint action and attitude. The 'individualist' accounts of Searle and Bratman are ultimately rejected in favour of Gilbert's non-reductive 'plural subject' theory, and - presenting group-level accounts of intention, motivation, practical wisdom, emotion and disposition around her concept of 'joint commitment' - a general model of collective character is constructed. Allied to additional requirements of moral responsibility, this framework is then used to assess the virtue-capability of actual political bodies, considering the decision-making hierarchy of the United Kingdom as a case study for the modern state. Tracing the route of policy authorisation across cabinet, government and parliament, a sophisticated yet ultimately impermanent picture of group-virtue-ethical agency is established, in tension with the notion of enduring state liability. By shifting focus to the national level, it is argued that this fluctuating footprint of agency can nevertheless be unified, modifying Gilbert’s notion of a 'population joint commitment' to tie institutional virtue and vice to a persisting state identity. This provides a template for international character evaluation.
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Chan, Jessica W. S. "Teachers' understanding of the purposes of group work and their relationship with practice." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:95979f2e-554e-4946-b141-928167392506.
Abstract:
Group work is commonly recommended as a student-centred instructional strategy which may enhance learning. Research in this area has predominantly used controlled interventions focusing on unproductive teacher assistance or specific strategies of doing group work to be applied by teachers. On the other hand, teachers’ own understanding and uses of group work in classrooms have been under-researched. Drawing on cultural-historical theory, this study scrutinises how and why teachers use group work, and how their enacted understanding is related to the broader contexts of teaching. The present study consists of four teachers of English in two secondary schools in Hong Kong to discern their rationales for and implementation of group work. The analysis delves into the dynamics within the activity of teaching, which comprise the interrelations between teachers' biographies, their purposes for group work in classrooms and what was expected from these teachers within the school practices. The Vygotskian perspective taken by this study entailed an inquiry into the teachers' intentional actions in everyday teaching. Each teacher was interviewed at the outset and end of the school-based fieldwork for their learning backgrounds and beliefs about teaching. In between these interviews each of them was observed in 15 lessons involving group work and undertook five to six stimulated recall (SR) interviews. These lesson video-recordings provided the stimuli for the SR interviews for probing the teacher’s pedagogic decisions while orchestrating students in small groups. The data was analysed by deploying concepts from cultural-historical theory, particularly two organising frameworks developed within the approach. One is a pedagogic sequence proposed by Edwards (1995; in press) as a descriptor to categorise the teachers’ purposes for and actions in group work. The other is an adaptation of Hedegaard's (2012) planes of analysis for identifying the various motives and demands in the multi-layered setting of teaching where group work was located. Group work as a pedagogic tool displayed the intra- and interpersonal dynamics in the activity of teaching. The findings indicate that the teachers' historically-constructed identities as learners of English oriented their intentions for group work and beliefs about teaching the subject. How the schools mediated societal expectations on teaching and learning had a considerable bearing on the teachers enacting their understanding. These institutional objectives and demands in practices created sets of opportunities for group work in the classrooms. The analysis thence was sited at the interface between the teachers' personal pedagogies and the multi-faceted social structure reflected in how education policy was mediated differently in different school contexts. The implications for teacher development are discussed.
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Ambe, Aloha May Hufana. "From monitoring to engagement: Co-designing future technologies with older adults." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2020. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/204265/1/Aloha%20May_Ambe_Thesis.pdf.
Abstract:
Monitoring technology solutions for older people's independent living tends to treat them as passive recipients of technology to be observed by others. This thesis investigated older people's perspectives, exploring how they might reimagine these technologies in their life and future, by involving them in co-design and qualitative research. Studies included older adults inventing their own Internet of Things with kits, writing fictional works about life with future technology, and trialling a collaborative "messaging kettle". This thesis proposes a design approach that shifts the emphasis from perceived needs to bring to light the lived values, agency and aspirations of older people.
34
Whicker, John H. "Object-Oriented Writing Theory: Writers, Texts, Ecologies." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1406656088.
35
Prassl, Jeremias Francis Benedict Baruch. "The notion of the employer in multilateral organisational settings." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f9352b07-ce1f-45ab-a591-df4496c1ddb2.
Abstract:
This thesis explores the notion of the employer in English employment law. It seeks to develop a functional reconceptualisation of that notion in the hope of overcoming the theoretical and practical problems resulting from the tensions inherent in the current approach. The first part of the thesis analyses the notion of the employer as counterparty to the contract of employment. Two conflicting strands emerge: the employer is simultaneously identified as a single party to a bilateral contract (the unitary strand) and defined through the exercise of a range of employer functions (the multi-functional strand). As a result of this tension, full employment law coverage is restricted to a narrow paradigm scenario where a single legal entity exercises all employer functions. Modern economic developments, from the rise of employment agencies and service companies to corporate groups and Private Equity investors, have however increasingly led to the joint exercise of such functions across multiple entities. The second part illustrates the practical implications of these developments: regulatory obligations are placed on inappropriate entities, and workers may even find themselves without recourse to any employment law protection. An additional chapter compares this situation with the notion of the employer in German law, where a sophisticated apparatus has been developed in order to address the particular challenges of employment in multi-entity scenarios, in particular in corporate groups. On the basis of these observations the final part of the thesis then proposes a reconceptualised notion. The employer is defined as the entity, or combination of entities, exercising functions regulated in a particular domain of employment law. Each of the two strands of the current notion is addressed in turn to demonstrate how this more openly multi-functional approach addresses the rigidities of the current notion without abandoning an underlying unitary conceptualisation. It is hoped that the resulting notion of the employer will be able to place employment law obligations on the entity, or combination of entities, exercising the relevant employer functions, regardless of the formal legal organisation of the enterprise in question.
36
Jahrmann, Margarete. "Ludics for a Ludic society : the art and politics of play." Thesis, University of Plymouth, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/453.
Abstract:
This dissertation provides an analysis of, and critical commentary on, the practice of playfulness as persistent phenomenon in the arts, technology and theory. Its aim is to introduce political reflections on agency through the study of playful technological artefacts, which were largely ignored in the recent discussions on game and play. Following the critical analysis of historic discourses and actual studies of play under differing auspices, and in order to understand play as inherently political agency, this thesis’ research question addresses the immersive effects of playful agency in symbolic exchange systems and in the material consciousness of the player. This thesis conducts an analysis of material cultures, in order to categorise play as technique of an inherent critique of technological culture. It traces the development of contemporary technological objects and their materiality in relation to the application of the concept of affordance in design theory. The author consequently proposes a new category of ‘play affordances’ in order to describe these new requirements of play found in consumer technologies. The structure of the analysis in the distinct chapters is informed by a stringent historic, theoretical and arts analysis and an alternating arts practice. The convergence of these elements leads to insights on further uses, options and perspectives of the research problems discussed, in particular in relation to the requirements of playful interaction in contemporary technologies, which increasingly radicalises the importance of play. The thesis’ hypothesis states that playful practices in arts and technologies provide models for political agency, like the strategic use of Con-Dividualities (Jahrmann 2000). This term describes the concept of shared identities in society or social media consumer technologies, as discussed in historic case studies and the author’s own arts practice, related to the modification of technologies as methodology of arts research. In this way the arts practice and theory of playfulness informs the emergence of a new methodology of research, intervention and participation in society through the arts of play, which is coined as Ludics, as an original outcome of this thesis.
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Mainwaring, Cetta. "Centring on the margins : migration control in Malta, Cyprus and the European Union." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4666c423-23eb-4ef6-99dc-f85f8c3f391a.
Abstract:
Why does the European Union focus on controlling irregular immigration at the external border? The emphasis presents a paradox as most irregular migrants in the EU arrive through legal channels and subsequently overstay or violate the conditions of their visa. In order to explore this paradox, the thesis examines two case studies, Malta and Cyprus. As small island states on the Union’s southern periphery, the two are ostensibly unable to resist the transfer of migration controls and asylum responsibility to the EU’s external borders. Yet, employing nonmaterial power, namely by highlighting the perceived migration pressures they are under, the two states have successfully attracted significant financial and practical support from other member states. In doing so, they have influenced policymaking within EU migration governance, but have ultimately reinforced the emphasis on controlling irregular immigration at the external border by portraying the phenomenon as a crisis. This thesis not only sheds light on the interaction between the EU and the two states under investigation, but combines three levels of analysis – the regional, national, and local. The crisis narrative detrimentally affects the migrant and refugee populations as it encourages the adoption of restrictive and deterrent measures rather than ensuring access to rights and long-term integration. Nevertheless, this population is not without agency. It is their individual decisions to move across national borders without state authorisation that in the aggregate both compels states into dialogue about the issue and provides the basis for the dynamic between the EU and these two member states.
38
Olabarria, Leire. "Materialising kinship, constructing relatedness : kin group display and commemoration in First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom Egypt (ca 2150-1650 BCE)." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:88320d37-e16b-4364-9b02-3dcff049ef6f.
Abstract:
The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of ancient Egyptian kinship in the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom (ca 2150–1650 BCE) by exploring how forms of relatedness were displayed in the monumental record. Kinship and marriage are contextually driven sociocultural phenomena that should be approached from the actors' perspective; such an approach can achieve some insight into emic notions of kinship, because monuments were integral to society and contributed to perpetuating and sustaining its fabric. The introduction (chapter 1) presents the theoretical background on which the thesis is based, namely the notion of kinship as process, where relationships can be constructed and reconstructed throughout one’s life. In addition, it provides a working definition of 'kin group', an analytical category that is taken as the primary unit of social analysis that can encompass several ways of being related. Chapter 2 offers a discussion of kinship terminology in the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom. The focus is less on basic kinship terms than on the little understood terminology for kin groups and how these were presented in the written record. Chapter 3 treats stelae, which constitute the core corpus of material for the thesis. Stelae present a variety of images of kin groups and, moreover, they should be considered within the larger units of which they were part. Many of these stelae are unprovenanced but have been attributed to Abydos. At this site, memorial chapels have been identified archaeologically, and some stelae have been found in association with them. Thus, the site offers a materialisation of constellations of relationships. Possible reconstructions of such chapels – one from Saqqara and two from Abydos – are presented in chapter 4, and the impact they may have had on the social memory of visitors is assessed. Display, presence, and performance were some of the ways in which the social role of those groups was communicated. Chapter 5 is concerned with how change and time may be represented in apparently static objects. On the basis of the model of the developmental cycle of domestic groups first introduced by Meyer Fortes, the dynamism of the social fabric is explored through three case studies of groups at different stages of their developmental cycle. The strategies of survival can be seen pervasively in the monumental record, allowing for a glimpse into time and change in kin groups. The conclusion (chapter 6) offers a holistic approach to the material presented in the thesis, emphasising the ways in which the different theoretical approaches proposed intertwine with the material.
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Francis, Russell James. "The predicament of the learner in the New Media Age : an investigation into the implications of media change for learning." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0cbd0185-c7ed-4306-b34e-993acd125e96.
Abstract:
This thesis explores the Predicament of the Learner in an age during which an emergent Participatory Culture supported by networked computers is converging or colliding with a top-down Culture Industry model of education associated with centralised control and traditional learning media. Two case studies explore attempts to use advanced E-learning tools, the Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) and Revolution (a multiplayer role-playing game) to mediate learning activities in the digital classroom. Both reveal the shifting locus of agency for managing and regulating learning and identify a need to understand how learners are creatively appropriating a range of digital media to advance self-directed learning agendas. The main study, The Agency of the Learner in the Networked University, develops these insights through a cognitive anthropology, informed by post-Vygotskian theory, focussed on the digitally mediated practices of 16 post-graduate students who enjoyed unrestricted access to the Internet from their study rooms. The findings chapters explore i) learners designing personalised learning environments to support advanced knowledge work; ii) learners creatively appropriating web-based digital tools and resources for course related study and self education; iii) learners cultivating, nurturing and mobilising globally distributed funds of living knowledge; iv) learners breaking away from lifeworld communities and learning with others in online affinity spaces; and v) learners seeking out opportunities to bootstrap themselves towards the actualisation of a projective identity through serious play in virtually figured worlds. In each case, an attempt is made to innovate conceptual tools that can help us to identify and conceptualise the New Media Literacies (conceived of as expert-like digitally mediated practices) required to exploit the full potential of new media as a resource for course related study, independent learning and self-education.
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Smets, Michael. "Doing deals in a global law firm : the reciprocity of institutions and work." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:48185e10-6537-4305-8af3-8ccb27a07ebb.
Abstract:
Since the early 1990s, institutional approaches to organizations have increasingly focused on explaining the role of agency in processes of institutional creation and transformation. The paradox of embedded agency, the question of how actors can become motivated and enabled to transform supposedly taken-for-granted practices, structures and norms has become the fundamental puzzle of contemporary institutional theory. Recent attempts to resolve this puzzle under the label of “institutional work” focus on practices aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions, but portray them as planned, discrete episodes that unfold in isolation from everyday organizational or social life. Thereby, the label highlights institutionalists’ current neglect of work in its literal meaning as actors’ everyday occupational tasks and activities. The detachment of institutional work from practical work constitutes a significant blind spot in institutionalists’ understanding of agency and calls for research that examines the reciprocity of institutions and work. Drawing on illuminating constructs from theories of practice, this study extends existing field-level approaches to the paradox of embedded agency. It argues for a practice-based institutionalism that focuses on individual actors and the role of their collective micro-level praxis in constituting macro-level institutions. It re-connects institutional arguments to every-day activity rather than organizational or managerial action, unpacks the micro-practices and micro–politics by which actors negotiate institutional contradictions and demonstrates the reciprocity of institutions and work. The research addresses the detachment of institutional and practical work through a single-case study of a global law firm’s banking group. It explores what banking lawyers do when they ‘do deals’ and how their practical work may attain institutional relevance. Positioned at the intersec-tion of local laws, international financial markets, commercial and professional logics, banking lawyers operate across multiple institutional frameworks. Observations and accounts of their work provide particularly rich insights into the dynamics of institutional persistence and change, because they illustrate empirically how contradictory institutionalized concepts, practices and logics are experienced, negotiated, and constituted at work.
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Disley, Emma Rose. "Challenging the boundaries of criminal justice and social policy : responses to priority offenders." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2e032dec-aad7-4fe1-9833-c128fd66f3c7.
Abstract:
This thesis examines the interaction of criminal justice policy and social policy within the Prolific and Priority Offenders Scheme (PPOS), a government initiative which aims to reduce offending by persistent offenders. The research on which this thesis is based takes an interpretative approach to social inquiry and employs a qualitative methodology. It examines the operation of four PPO Schemes in the Thames Valley through semi-structured interviews with 22 practitioners and 16 offenders, and participant observation of over 45 multi-agency meetings. The interaction between crime and social policy is explored through examination of three aspects of the PPOS: the coercion of offenders within the Schemes; the working practices and roles of the police and probation officers seconded to the Schemes; and the way in which information and intelligence is used and generated within the Schemes. The central argument of this thesis is that the widely-accepted idea that social policy is being ‘criminalised’ provides an inadequate account of the relationship between criminal justice and social policy in the PPOS. Rather, this Scheme evidences a merger of criminal justice and social welfare agendas, which includes elements of the ‘socialisation’ of crime policy in addition to elements of ‘criminalisation’ of social policy. Whilst the ultimate aim of the PPOS is to reduce crime, and whilst social welfare services such as health, housing and benefits are provided in pursuance of this aim, the ways in which these services are provided accords with the ethos and values of social policy. The idea of a merger of criminal justice and social policy has relevance beyond the PPOS, providing a framework for analysis of other contemporary criminal justice policies, and contributing to broader debates in criminology which have for so long been dominated by the ‘criminalisation’ thesis.
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Robson, James. "Teachers' professional identity in the digital world : a digital ethnography of Religious Education teachers' engagement in online social space." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:622a9d6c-0fbf-4eaa-9882-4189f5e99069.
Abstract:
This thesis presents an ethnographic investigation of teachers’ peer-to-peer engagement in online social spaces, using the concept of teachers’ professional identity as a framework to shape and focus the study. Using Religious Education (RE) as a strong example of the wider phenomenon of teachers’ online engagement, three online social spaces (the Times Educational Supplement’s RE Forum, the National Association of Teachers of RE Facebook Page, and the Save RE Facebook Group) were investigated as case studies. A year was spent in these spaces with digital ethnographic research taking place simultaneously in each one. Data gathering primarily took the form of participant observations, in depth analysis of time-based sampled text (three 8-week samples from each space), online and offline narrative based interviews and, to a lesser extent, questionnaires, elite interviews and analysis of grey literature. The study finds that engagement in the online social spaces offered teachers opportunities to perform and construct their professional identities across a variety of topics ranging from local practical concerns to national political issues. In more practical topics the spaces could often be observed as acting as communities of practice in which professional learning took place and identities were constructed, with such online professional development influencing offline classroom practice. However, engaging across this spectrum of topics afforded users a broad conception of what it means to be a teacher, where professional identity was understood as going beyond classroom practice and integrating engagement with subject-wide, political and policy related issues at a national level. Such engagement provided many users with a feeling of belonging to a national community of peers, which, alongside political activism initiated in online interaction and meaning making debates concerning the future and identity of the subject, provided teachers with feelings of empowerment and a sense of ownership of their subject. However, the study found that teachers’ online engagement took place within structures embedded in the online social spaces that influenced and shaped engagement and the ways in which users’ professional identities were performed and constructed. These structures were linked with the design and technical affordances of the spaces, the agendas of the parent organisations that provided the spaces, and the discourses that dominated the spaces. These aspects of the spaces provided a structure that limited engagement, content and available online identity positions while additionally projecting ideal identity positions, distinctive in each space. These ideal identity positions had a constructive influence over many users who aspired to these ideals, often gaining confidence through expressing such socially validated ideals or feeling inadequate when failing to perform such ideal identity positions. Thus, this study finds a complex relationship between agency linked with active online identity performance and the constructive influence of embedded structures that contributed to the shaping of users’ engagement and their understandings of themselves as professionals and their subject.
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Morton, Sarah. "The legacies of the repatriation of human remains from the Royal College of Surgeons of England." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:adba50f9-85b6-421d-b8bc-648c381611bc.
Abstract:
The repatriation of the human remains of Indigenous peoples collected within a colonial context has been the subject of debate within UK museums over the last 30 years, with many museums now having returned human remains to their countries of origin. Although the repatriation of human remains is often characterised as the 'journey home', there has been a lack of consideration of the physical presence and mobility of the remains and the meanings created as they move through different spaces. This study uses the repatriations from The Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS) to Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii as case studies to consider three key areas: (i) the impact of repatriation on museum landscapes; (ii) the journey of the repatriated remains and how this mobility intersects with wider discussions about restitution, sovereignty, identity, relatedness, memory and memorialisation; and (iii) the repatriation archives, how they are thought about by the institutions that hold them and their future potential and meaning within a post-colonial context. Taking a more-than-representational approach and engaging with the materiality, mobility and agency of the repatriated remains and the documentation that relates to them, this study bridges the gap between research considering the approach of museums to repatriation, and ethnographic studies on the meanings of the return of ancestral remains to individual communities. Combining work on museum geographies, deathscapes and absence opens up new ways of theorising and discussing repatriation through understanding the process in terms of the tension between absence and presence, and human remains as being in or out of place. Through engaging with the materiality and agency of the remains and viewing repatriation through a spatial lens, this thesis deals with aspects of the process that have received little attention in previous studies, foregrounding the challenging nature of repatriation for communities, the issues around unprovenanced remains, and discussions about the control, management and meaning of information and data, identifying that a significant legacy of repatriation for RCS is the documentation the museum continues to hold. What the journey of the ancestral remains repatriated by RCS illustrates is the emotive materiality of the remains, and agency that they and the distributed repatriation archive have as actors within social networks. It is therefore proposed that the concept of repatriation as having problematised human remains collections within UK museums is replaced with a nuanced and contextually sensitive understanding that recognises the role of the human remains in social interactions that impact on the emotional geographies of museum practice, and that rather than framing repatriation as post-colonial act that is either political or therapeutic, the return of ancestral remains be understood as part of a process of decolonisation in which there is space for discussion, disagreement and debate amongst all stakeholders.
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SILVA, VIVIANE TORRES DA. "FROM A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR AGENTS AND OBJECTS TO A MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM MODELING LANGUAGE." PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 2004. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=5193@1.
Abstract:
PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIROFUNDAÇÃO PADRE LEONEL FRANCA
Como um novo e poderoso paradigma para modelagem e implementação de sistemas de software, os sistemas multiagentes necessitam de metodologias, linguagens de modelagem, plataformas de desenvolvimento e linguagens de programação que explorem seus benefícios e características particulares. Contudo, diferentes metodologias, linguagens e plataformas para sistemas multiagentes propõem abstrações variadas e com definições muito diferentes. Nesse contexto, é necessário criar frameworks conceituais que definam as abstrações, seus relacionamentos e seus comportamentos. Como em qualquer novo paradigma para engenharia de software, o sucesso e a difusão de sistemas multiagentes requerem, entre outras tecnologias de software baseadas em agentes, linguagens de modelagem que explorem o uso de abstrações relacionadas a agentes e promovam o refinamento dos modelos de design para código. Esta tese contempla a definição de um framework conceitual para sistemas multiagentes chamado TAO e uma linguagem de modelagem para sistemas multiagentes chamada MAS-ML. Os objetivos desta tese são descrever os aspectos estáticos e dinâmicos das abstrações freqüentemente utilizadas em sistemas multiagentes definindo um framework conceitual, propor uma linguagem de modelagem que descreva diagramas estáticos e dinâmicos para modelar esses aspectos e descrever o refinamento dos modelos estáticos para código.
As a powerful and new paradigm for designing and implementing software systems, multi-agent systems require methodologies, modeling languages, development platforms and programming languages that explore their benefits and their peculiar characteristics. However, different methodologies, languages and platforms for multi-agent systems propose very distinct and varied sets of abstraction. In this context, there is a need for creating a conceptual framework that defines the frequently used multi-agent system abstractions, their relationships and their behavior. As it is the case with any new software engineering paradigm, the successful and widespread deployment of multi-agent systems require modeling languages, among other agent-based software technologies, that explore the use of agentrelated abstractions and promote the traceability from the design models to code. This thesis contemplates the definition of a multi-agent system conceptual framework called TAO and of a multi-agent system modeling language called MAS-ML. Our goals are to describe the structural and dynamic aspects of the abstractions commonly used in multi-agent systems by defining a conceptual framework, to propose a modeling language that describes structural and dynamic diagrams to model such aspects and to present the traceability from the structural models into code.
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Zharkevich, Ina. "'Changing times' : war and social transformation in Mid-Western Nepal." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:64d6de22-631c-4bb6-988a-d416eeb897fd.
Abstract:
This thesis is an ethnographic account of social change, triggered by the civil war in Nepal (1996-2006). Based on an ethnographic fieldwork in the village of Thabang, the war-time capital of the Maoist base area, this thesis explores the transformative impact of the conflict on people’s everyday lives and on the constitution of key hierarchies structuring Nepali society. Rather than focusing on violence and fear – the commonly researched themes in warzones – the thesis examines people’s everyday social and embodied practices during the war and its aftermath, arguing that these remain central to our understanding of war-time social processes and the ways in which they shape the contours of post-conflict society. By focusing on mundane practices – such as meat-eating and alcohol-drinking, raising livestock and worshipping gods – the thesis demonstrates how change at the micro-level is illustrative of a profound transformation in the social structures constituting Nepali society. Theoretically, the thesis seeks to understand how the situation of war re-orders society: in this case, how people in the Maoist base area interiorized formerly transgressive norms and practices, and how these practices were normalized in the post-conflict environment. The research revealed that much of the change triggered by the conflict came as a result of the ‘exceptional’ times of war and the necessity to follow ‘rules that apply in times of crisis’. Thus, in adopting transgressive practices during the conflict, people were responding to the expediency of war-time rather than following Maoist war-time policies or ‘propaganda’. Furthermore, while adopting hitherto unimaginable practices and making them into habitual action, people transformed the rigid social structures, without necessarily intending to do so. The thesis puts particular stress on the centrality of unintended consequences in social change, the power of embodied practice in making change real, and the ways in which agency and structure are mutually constitutive.
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Crabbe, Kylie. "Luke/Acts and the end of history." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:39126f79-9260-4e58-81ad-292d559e000e.
Abstract:
This thesis investigates how understandings of history in diverse texts of the Graeco-Roman period illuminate Lukan eschatology. Two strands of Lukan scholarship have contributed to an enduring tendency to underestimate the centrality of eschatology to Luke/Acts. Hans Conzelmann's thesis, that Luke focused on history rather than eschatology as a response to the parousia's delay, has dominated Lukan scholarship since the mid-twentieth century, with concomitant assumptions about Luke's politics and understanding of suffering. Recent Lukan scholarship has centred instead on genre and rhetoric, examining Luke/Acts predominantly in relation to ancient texts deemed the same genre while overlooking themes (including those of an eschatological character) that these texts do not share. This thesis offers a fresh approach. It illuminates the inherent connections between Luke's understanding of history and its end, and demonstrates significant ways in which Luke's eschatological consciousness shapes key themes of his account. By extending comparisons to a wider range of texts, this study overcomes two clear methodological shortfalls in current research: limiting comparisons of key themes to texts of similar genre, and separating non-Jewish from Jewish texts. Having established the need for a new examination of Luke's eschatology in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2 I set out the study's method of comparing diverse texts on themes that cut across genres. Chapters 3 to 6 then consider each key text and Luke/Acts in relation to a different aspect of their writers' conceptions of history: the direction and shape of history; determinism and divine guidance; human culpability and freedom; and the present and the end of history. The analysis shows that in every aspect of history examined, Luke/Acts shares significant features of the texts with which, because they do not share its genre, it is not normally compared. Setting Luke/Acts in conversation with a broader range of texts highlights Luke's periodised, teleological view of history and provides a nuanced picture of Luke's understanding of divine and human agency, all of which is affected in fundamental ways by his portrayal of the present time already within the final period of history. As a result, this study not only clarifies Lukan eschatology, but reaffirms the importance of eschatology for Lukan politics and theodicy.
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Rasmus-Vorrath, Jack Kendrick. "The honesty of thinking : reflections on critical thinking in Nietzsche's middle period and the later Heidegger." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:effe66e1-235d-46a9-a570-b42dceb7e92f.
Abstract:
This dissertation engages with contemporary interpretations of Nietzsche and Heidegger on the issue of self-knowing with respect to the notions of honesty and authenticity. Accounting for the two philosophers' developing conceptions of these notions allows a response to interpreters who conceive the activity of self-knowing as a primarily personal problem. The alternative accounts proposed take as a point of departure transitional texts that reveal both thinkers to be engaged in processes of revision. The reading of honesty in Chapters 1 and 2 revolves around Nietzsche's groundwork on prejudice in Morgenröthe (1880-81), where he first problematizes the moral-historical forces entailed in actuating the 'will to truth'. The reading of authenticity in Chapters 3 and 4 revolves around Heidegger's lectures on what motivates one's thinking in Was heißt Denken? (1951-52). The lectures call into question his previous formal suppositions on what calls forth one's 'will-to-have-a-conscience', in an interpretation of Parmenides on the issue of thought's linguistic determination, discussed further in the context of Unterwegs zur Sprache (1950-59). Chapter 5 shows how Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche contributed to his ongoing revisions to the notion of authenticity, and to the attending conceptions of critique and its authority. Particular attention is given to the specific purposes to which distinct Nietzschean foils are put near the confrontation's beginning--in Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche's second Unzeitgemässe Betrachtung (1938), and in the monograph entitled Besinnung (1939) which they prepare--and near its end, in the interpretation of Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-85) presented in the first half of Was heißt Denken? Chapter 6 recapitulates the developments traced from the vantage point of the retrospective texts Die Zollikoner Seminare (1959-72) and the fifth Book of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1887). Closing remarks are made in relation to recent empirical research on the socio-environmental structures involved in determining self-identity.
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Pedersen, Thomas. "Actants and Networks in 'Skagboys' – Thatcher, Crime and Mundane Artifacts as Mediators." Thesis, Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-21757.
Abstract:
While Skagboys portrays the descent into heroin addiction of young, working class Scots during the Thatcher era, shifting the analysis from a strictly human perspective to one focusing on the agency of objects opens up the novel to new readings wherein morality emerges through nonhuman actors. Welsh’s work has traditionally been hailed as Scottish working-class realism that portrays its characters unideologically, to the point that the novels, through the characters, appear without morality. Drawing upon Latour’s notion of Actor-Network Theory, ANT, reveals a Thatcherite materiality permeating the story, prescribing the moral behaviour which the characters of Skagboys repeatedly clash with as their heroin addiction and junk desperation grows. The impacts of the security camera, the smoke detector and the collection tin provide the basis for the analysis. This highlights two types of marginalization for the characters. Firstly, in the characters’ hopeless prospects with regards to employment due to Thatcher’s neoliberal politics, and secondly as objects of detection and control exerting agency in the world which the characters navigate. These objects presuppose and foil crime, effectively becoming extensions of Thatcherite morality, keeping the criminal and unemployed in check.
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GARCIA, ALESSANDRO FABRICIO. "FROM OBJECTS TO AGENTS: AN ASPECT ORIENTED APPROACH." PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 2004. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=5181@1.
Abstract:
CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICOPROGRAMA DE APOIO A NÚCLEOS DE EXCELÊNCIA
Agentes de software incorporam várias propriedades específicas, como autonomia, adaptação, interação, aprendizagem e mobilidade. A inclusão dessas propriedades de agência é uma das maiores fontes de complexidade na construção de sistemas multiagentes. Dificilmente elas são modularizadas com abstrações e mecanismos da engenharia de software orientada a objetos. À medida que a complexidade da arquitetura interna dos agentes aumenta, essas propriedades tendem a se espalhar através dos vários módulos ou objetos do sistema. O espalhamento é observado desde fases preliminares de desenvolvimento, como a fase de definição arquitetural. O uso de abstrações e mecanismos existentes conduz ao projeto e à implementação de sistemas multiagentes que são difíceis de manter e reutilizar. Este trabalho apresenta uma abordagem orientada a aspectos para o desenvolvimento de sistemas baseados em agentes. A abordagem provê suporte para modularização e composição das propriedades de agência por meio de abstrações e mecanismos do paradigma orientado a aspectos. Além disso, tais propriedades são incorporadas de forma transparente à funcionalidade básica do sistema de software, desde a fase de definição arquitetural. A abordagem compreende três componentes: (i) um método arquitetural, (ii) uma linguagem de padrões e (iii) um framework para avaliação quantitativa. O método e a linguagem apresentam um conjunto de soluções orientadas a aspectos para a definição arquitetural, projeto e implementação de agentes de software. O framework define um conjunto de métricas e um modelo de qualidade que permite a avaliação empírica da nossa abordagem em termos de reusabilidade e manutenibilidade. Estudos experimentais qualitativos e quantitativos foram realizados para avaliar nossa proposta em diferentes domínios de aplicação. Os resultados empíricos concluíram que nossa abordagem permite a construção de sistemas baseados em agentes com modularização superior, menor acomplamento, menos linhas de código e menor complexidade interna dos componentes.
Software engineers of Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) are faced with different concerns (properties), such as autonomy, adaptation, interaction, collaboration, learning, and mobility. Many of these agent concerns cannot be modularized based only on object-oriented abstractions. MAS developers however have relied mostly on objectoriented design techniques and on object-oriented programming languages, such as Java. As the agent complexity increases, the agent concerns tend to spread across several system components at the architectural, design and implementation levels. It often leads to a poor separation of agent concerns in the software system, and in turn to the production of MASs that are difficult to maintain and reuse. This thesis presents an innovative aspect-oriented approach for the seamless integration of agents into object-oriented software engineering from the architectural stage to the implementation stage. Aspect is the abstraction used to modularize agent concerns that crosscut several system components. The proposed approach encourages the separate handling of agent properties, and provides a disciplined scheme for their composition. The approach is composed of an architectural method, a pattern language, and an assessment framework. The architectural method and the pattern language provide aspect-oriented solutions for modularizing the agent concerns at different stages of design and implementation. The purpose of the assessment framework is to support the evaluation of the reusability and maintainability of aspect-oriented solutions based on a metrics suite and a quality model. Experimental studies in different application domains have been conducted to assess the proposed approach based on qualitative and quantitative criteria. The use of the aspect-oriented solutions resulted in fewer lines of code, fewer design and implementation components, lower internal complexity of system components, and lower coupling.
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John, Gemma. "Relations that unite and divide : a study of Freedom of Information legislation and transparency in Scotland." Thesis, St Andrews, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/751.