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The Role Of The Trickster Figure And Four Afro-Caribbean Meta-Tropes In The Realization Of Agency By Three Slave Protagonists, David Sebastian Cross

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I aim to demonstrate that the figure of the trickster is a key trope for the achievement of agency by the narrators of the three slave narratives Autobiografia de un esclavo, "Routes in North Africa by Abu Bekr es siddik" [sic], and Biografia de un cimarron. I also intend to show how both the realization of the trickster's role and the achievement of agency to which such a role is oriented are dependent on the use of the four Afro-Caribbean meta-tropes ndoki, nkisi, nganga, and simbi. To demonstrate this, I plan to analyze these four meta-tropes; their …

Putting Place Back Into Displacement: Reevaluating Diaspora In The Contemporary Literature Of Migration, Christiane Brigitte Steckenbiller

Theses and Dissertations

In order to improve the engineering properties of soft soils, materials, such as cement and fiber, can be introduced to the soil mass. Currently, design criterion for a cement-soil mixture requires only the measurement of unconfined compressive strength. This simple measurement may not be adequate to describe the behavior that results from differing field loading conditions. A series of consolidation tests and unconfined compression tests were conducted with special attention being paid to the effects of curing time and vertical curing stress. It is shown that the introduction of cement into soft soils results in decreased compressibility and increased unconfined …

Grammar In Context And Isolated Units: The Impact Of Dichotomized Teaching Methods In A Rural Southern High School, Amy Kae Smith

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to use qualitative research methods to identify which methods a group of language arts teachers from a suburban high school use to teach grammar and why. Specific research questions included:

1. How do teachers who were educated with grammar as an isolated curricular unit perceive the current debate on language instruction? How do their perceptions impact their classroom instructional practice?

2. How do teachers who were educated with grammar as a whole language curricular unit perceive the current debate on language instruction? How do their perceptions impact their classroom instructional practice?

This study examined …

Electron: Greek Etymology And Baltic Mythology, Marianina Demetri Olcott

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of D. Ogden, Drakōn: Dragon Myth And Serpent Cult In The Greek And Roman Worlds, Laura Gawlinski

Classical Studies: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Ogden’s latest book examines the serpents of myth and cult from Homer to hagiography. This is a wide-ranging investigation in which both the monster Typhon and the healing pareias snake of Asklepios find a place, as they and other drakontes are approached through literature, linguistics, and iconography. It is an ambitious project that sometimes falls short of that ambition: the separate threads don’t quite come together, and the nuances of important scholarly arguments are often glossed over in footnotes. It is more encyclopedic than interpretive, in Ogden’s words, a “descriptive handbook” (p. 1). As the first comprehensive work in English …

Discovered By The Process: A Methodology For Twentieth-Century Moral Fiction, Sean Adriaan Labbe

Dissertations

One of the great ironies of the "ethical turn" that literary criticism has taken in the last several decades is that while we as literary critics strive to be ethical or moral, we usually feel embarrassed at actually taking about moral concepts, especially as they are manifested in literary texts. As I am interested in how to discuss moral issues depicted in literary texts without reading them naively and reductively for guidelines to live by or for a social program to implement, my dissertation is designed to model a method of inquiry that approaches literary texts of the twentieth century …

Biases In Children's Cognitive Styles: Investigating Local, Global, And Rule-Based Processing In Autism Spectrum Disorders And Typical Development, Sandra Beatriz Vanegas

Dissertations

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is classified as a pervasive developmental disorder that presents a triad of impairments across communication, social behavior, and restricted interests (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). To date, many attempts have been made to explain the cognitive profiles of children and adults with ASD. Three prominent theories, Weak Central Coherence (Frith, 1989), Systemizing (Baron-Cohen, 2002), and Executive Dysfunction Theory (Pennington & Ozonoff, 1996), may together provide a plausible explanation for the cognitive biases of individuals with ASD.

Weak Central Coherence (WCC) Theory proposes that individuals with ASD have difficulty learning new information due to a fixation towards local …

Effectiveness Of Graduate Training In School Psychology: Perspectives Of Graduate Practitioners, Mary S. Satchwell

Dissertations

While trends in graduate training in school psychology indicate a movement towards an increasing emphasis on consultation and decreasing emphasis on assessment (Anton-LaHart & Rosenfield, 2004), there remains a gap between training and practice for professional school psychologists (Harrison, et al., 2004). The present study provided an examination of practitioner views for graduates of both specialist and doctoral training programs from 2006 through 2011 at a single NASP-approved, NCATE-accredited university setting. The primary purpose of this study was to examine alumni practitioners' perspectives of the effectiveness of their coursework and fieldwork experiences in preparing them for their professional roles as …

The Effects Of Acculturation, Health, Socioeconomic Status, And Perceived Respect On Older Adult Depression: Analysis Of Korean American Older Adults In Chicago, Kyungsoo Sim

Dissertations

This study explored the extent to which acculturation level, health condition and SES influence depressive symptoms mediated or moderated by perceived respect and current geographical background of 121 Korean-American older adults in the Chicago metropolitan and its suburban area.

A multi-method approach was imported to analyze self-collected quantitative survey data from two groups of 80 participants in Chicago and 41 in the suburbs, qualitative interview data from 4 focus groups, 2 in-depth interviews and GIS (Geographic Information Systems). In the survey, Suinn-Lew Asian Stress-Identity Acculturation Scale, Geriatric Depression Scale-30, Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy-Fatigue, Health Perception Questionnaire-36, 13-item questions …

Introduction: The New Voices Of Muslim Women Theologians, Marcia Hermansen

Theology: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This pioneering volume defines the contours of the emerging engagements of Muslim women scholars from around the world with the authoritative interpretive traditions of Islam, classical and contemporary. Muslima theology, here broadly defined to encompass a range of interpretive strategies and perspectives arising from multiple social locations, interrogates Islamic scripture and other forms of religious discourse to empower Muslim women of faith to speak for themselves in the interests of gender justice. Contributions provide an overview of the field at this juncture-ranging from pioneering Muslim scriptural feminism to detailed analyses of legal and mystical texts by a new international cohort …

The New Normal: Black Psychic Subjectivity In Antwone Fisher, Badia Sahar Ahad

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

The Processing Of Accented Speech, Hester Elizabeth Sarah Duffy

Other Faculty of Science and Engineering Theses

This thesis examines the processing of accented speech in both infants and adults. Accents provide a natural and reasonably consistent form of inter-speaker variation in the speech signal, but it is not yet clear exactly what processes are used to normalise this form of variation, or when and how those processes develop. Two adult studies use ERP data to examine differences between the online processing of regional- and foreign-accented speech as compared to a baseline consisting of the listeners’ home accent. These studies demonstrate that the two types of accents recruit normalisation processes which are qualitatively, and not just quantitatively, …

Networks, News And Communication: Political Elites And Community Relations In Elizabethan Devon, 1588-1603, Ian David Cooper

Other Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Theses

Focusing on the ‘second reign’ of Queen Elizabeth I (1588-1603), this thesis constitutes the first significant socio-political examination of Elizabethan Devon – a geographically peripheral county, yet strategically central in matters pertaining to national defence and security. A complex web of personal associations and informal alliances underpinned politics and governance in Tudor England; but whereas a great deal is now understood about relations between both the political elite and the organs of government at the centre of affairs, many questions still remain unanswered about how networks of political actors functioned at a provincial and neighbourhood level, and how these networks …

Toward A Female Clown Practice: Transgression, Archetype And Myth, Margaret J Irving

Other Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Theses

Women who learn to clown within Western contemporary theatre and performance training lack recognizably female exemplars of this popular art form. This practice-as-research thesis analyses my past and present clowning experiences in order to create an understanding of a woman-centered clown practice which allows for the expression of material bodies and lived experiences. It offers a feminist perspective on Jacques Lecoq’s pedagogy, which revolves around a notion of an ‘inner clown’ and is prevalent in contemporary UK clown training and practice. The thesis draws on both the avant-garde and numerous clown types and archetypes, in order to understand clowning as …

Diffracting Representation: Towards A Situated Aesthetics Of Technospaces, Federica Timeto

Other Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Theses

My research for this thesis focusses on the concepts of representation and space in order to demonstrate their theoretical and practical co-implications. Discussing various theorists of space in the first part and analyzing a number of artists and artworks as case studies in the second part, I elaborate a critique of the representational imaginary in order to articulate an alternative notion of representation by means of which a relational, qualitative and performative spatiality can emerge. I specifically focus on technospaces, which I consider a privileged field for observing the intersections of representation and spatiality; it is a field in which …

An Enactive Approach To Technologically Mediated Learning Through Play, Katina Nathalie Hazelden

Other Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Theses

This thesis investigated the application of enactive principles to the design of classroom technolo- gies for young children’s learning through play. This study identified the attributes of an enactive pedagogy, in order to develop a design framework to accommodate enactive learning processes. From an enactive perspective, the learner is defined as an autonomous agent, capable of adapta- tion via the recursive consumption of self generated meaning within the constraints of a social and material world. Adaptation is the parallel development of mind and body that occurs through inter- action, which renders knowledge contingent on the environment from which it emerged. …

The Sampling Of Bodily Sound In Contemporary Composition: Towards An Embodied Analysis, Stacey Sewell

Other Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Theses

The listener’s experience as an embodied subject is at the centre of this work. Embodied experience forms the basis for analyses of three contemporary compositions that sample bodily sound, in order to question how such works represent and mediate the body. The possible applications of this embodied methodology are illustrated through three case studies: Crackers by Christof Migone (2001), A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure by Matmos (2001) and Ground Techniques (2009) by Neil Luck. The findings of each analysis are placed within discussion of critical and theoretical concerns related to the (re)presentation, mediation and manipulation of …

Borders And Objects: Representing The Geopolitical In New World Art Histories, 1990-2010, Fang-Lin Hou

Other Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Theses

Several contemporary art historians have been interested in exploring how their discipline could respond to the increasing globalisation of knowledge and information by encompassing global perspectives into the methodologies that underpin their approaches to art historiography. This dissertation aims to explore how, in developing their new approaches to world art history, they have drawn on a range of natural and social sciences, thus enabling their work to be placed in a wider social, political and indeed global context. While their individual approaches are many and varied it is important to identify commonalities between them so as to highlight unifying approaches …

Collecting En Route: An Exploration Of The Ethnographic Collection Of Gertrude Emily Benham, Catherine Cummings

Other Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Theses

In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century the collecting of objects from colonized countries and their subsequent display in western museums was widespread throughout Western Europe. How and why these collections were made, the processes of collection, and by whom, has only recently begun to be addressed. This thesis is an exploration of the ethnographic collection of Gertrude Emily Benham (1867-1938) who made eight voyages independently around the world from 1904 until 1938, during which time she amassed a collection of approximately eight hundred objects, which she donated to Plymouth City …

A Comparative Analysis Of How The Rights Of Children As Set Out In The United Nations Convention On The Rights Of The Child Are Made Effective Through Their Implementation In Kurdistan/Iraq And The United Kingdom, Nishitiman Mohammed

Other Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Theses

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was unanimously adopted in 1989. It was hoped that the Convention would have a positive impact on all children however, despite a country ratifying the Convention and proclaiming to have laws in the interests of children it is still possible for that country to fail in the attempt to implement children’s rights effectively. This can clearly be seen in Kurdistan, Iraq where implementation of children’s rights remains limited. With the continuing violence in Iraq, children’s rights have been somewhat neglected and as with many such situations children are the innocent …

Lexical/Semantic Organisation In Bilingual And Monolingual Infants, Rafalla Farag

Other Faculty of Science and Engineering Theses

Abstract Previous studies show that bilingual infants are slower in developing phonology and tend to experience some difficulties in acquiring some grammatical rules. Furthermore, as compared to their monolingual peers, bilingual infants tend to have less vocabulary. This thesis set out to explore how bilingual infants organise the lexical information in their two languages. Specifically, we examined the lexical-semantic relationships between words within and across languages using a word-to-word priming paradigm. The thesis sought also to uncover any relationship between semantic priming effects and the size of vocabulary. Vocabulary measures such as the BPVS II, the SETK, and the Oxford …

Bodies, Emotions And Tourism: A Study Of Costa Cruises Commercials, Mariangela Albano, Gaetano Sabato

Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice

Nowadays, tourism industry proposes different opportunities to live a vacation where the body is the main interest and the central focus of experience. Each form of tourism shows a particular universe of representation of the body and a corresponding emotional language. In this context, where bodies and spaces are associated and reciprocally constructed as symbolic languages for the benefit of the tourist’s extraordinary experience, cruise tourism is an interesting case in point to analyze above all because on cruises, people use the space of the ship in different ways and, at the same time, following general corporeal and spatial schemes. …

Motivated Reasoning And Response Bias: A Signal Detection Approach, Dries Trippas

Other Faculty of Science and Engineering Theses

The aim of this dissertation was to address a theoretical debate on belief bias. Belief bias is the tendency for people to be influenced by their prior beliefs when engaged in deductive reasoning. Deduction is the act of drawing necessary conclusions from premises which are meant to be assumed as true. Given that the logical validity of an argument is independent of its content, being influenced by your prior beliefs in such content is considered a bias. Traditional theories posit there are two belief bias components. Motivated reasoning is the tendency to reason better for arguments with unbelievable conclusions relative …

Second Language Learnerhood Among Cross-Cultural Field Workers, Thor Andrew Sawin

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies second language learnerhood (ideologies about why and how to acquire a target language) among American field workers of a multinational, faith-based development organization, "Love the World". This organizational ethnography is longitudinal, tracking how learnerhood changes across the first years of field service. It is also multi-sited, tracing learnerhood across an assemblage of interconnected nodes. Field workers' learnerhoods are shaped by two larger ideologies of language learning which interact across the nodes of and individual trajectories through Love the World. One ideology, rooted in academic tradition, developmental second language acquisition and modernist missiological theory, valorizes the individual learner …

Parents’ Attitudes Toward Their Children’S Heritage Language Maintenance: The Case Of Korean Immigrant Parents In West Michigan, Duckyoung Jung Becker

Masters Theses

Research shows that many immigrant parents in the United States struggle with heritage language maintenance as their children start school in the dominant society. Many studies also reveal that immigrant parents value heritage language maintenance highly and wish their children to maintain home language. Although heritage language research has increased in the recent years, there is still a dearth of research among immigrants who reside outside of large metropolitan cities in the United States. By taking the case study approach, the present study identifies Korean immigrant parents who reside in West Michigan towns and, through interview and observations, explores their …

El Círculo Familiar Bilingüe De Libros / The Bilingual Family Book Club: Creating Translanguaging Spaces With Latin@ Picture Books, Kelli Edenfield Criss

Theses and Dissertations

The study employed a bilingual family book club framework to group parents and children together during bilingual literature discussion and response. Employing a qualitative design and constant comparative analysis, the researcher examined what happened when a bi-monthly bilingual family book club, involving seven emergent bilingual children, their parents, and a researcher/facilitator, was initiated and sustained over a five month period. The study's context was a Florida panhandle elementary school's media center and a public library branch. Through analysis of book club session and interview transcripts, the researcher discovered that students and parents employed their repertoires of linguistic and cultural practices. …

Promoting Early Childhood Development Through Community Health Worker Interventions: Implementation And Measurement Issues In Rural Pakistan, Zaeem Haq

Theses and Dissertations

Appropriate nutrition and psychosocial stimulation during the first three years of life can have long-lasting effects on a child's health and development. However, not all children in the world receive adequate nutrition and psychosocial stimulation during this period. There has been enormous interest in developing the evidence on the most effective ways of implementing and assessing early childhood development (ECD) promotion interventions in resource poor settings. Despite the interest, the integration of ECD interventions into pre-existing public health programs, and assessment of these interventions in extended family, rural household environment have not been addressed.

The dissertation research presented here was …

The Clinical And Social Dimensions Of Prescribing Palliative Home Oxygen For Refractory Dyspnea, Katrina Breaden, Jane Phillips, Meera Agar, Carol Grbich, Amy P. Abernethy, David C. Currow

Nursing Papers and Journal Articles

Background: Chronic breathlessness is a significant problem in palliative care and oxygen is often prescribed in an attempt to ameliorate it. Often, this prescription falls outside the current funding guidelines for long-term home oxygen use. The aim of this qualitative study was to understand the factors that most influence Australian specialist palliative care nurses' initiation of home oxygen for their patients. Methods: A series of focus groups were held across three states in Australia in 2011 involving specialist palliative care nurses. The invitation to the nurses was sent by e-mail through their national association. Recorded and transcribed data were coded …

Thoughts About Research On Mathematical Problem- Solving Instruction, Frank K. Lester Jr.

The Mathematics Enthusiast

In this article, the author, who has written extensively about mathematical problem solving over the past 40 years, discusses some of his current thinking about the nature of problem-solving and its relation to other forms of mathematical activity. He also suggests several proficiencies teachers should acquire in order for them to be successful in helping students become better problem solvers and presents a framework for research on problem-solving instruction. He closes the article with a list of principles about problem-solving instruction that have emerged since the early 1970s.

Problems Of English For Specific Purpose Course For Medical Students In Iran, Alireza Boniadi, Morteza Ghojazadeh, Neda Rahmatvand

Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

It is now widely accepted that the English language has become the language of international communication. The widespread need for English as a second or foreign language puts a great pressure on the educational resources of many countries. ESP courses require specific language and skills that are related to communities of practice and disciplines. Careful examination of the attitudes and perceptions of learners and instructors is seen to be important in determining the problems of ESP courses. This study focuses on an ESP course offered at Tabriz faculty of Medical Sciences in Iran. The instruments used in this study were …