This study is an educator's interpretation of the transcribed testimony of four Dene witnesses to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry conducted by Justice Thomas Berger in the Canadian north during the mid-1970s. This study uses Calvin Schrag's (1986) notion of communicative praxis to provide a form of critical hermeneutics for the interpretation of text. Communicative praxis offers us a way to understand texts as discourse about something, by someone, and for someone. The world, the self, and the other are all displayed in any particular communicative event and thus it is in the holistic space of communicative praxis where thought, language and action interplay and are contextualized in our everyday lives. The orienting question brought to the reading of each of these texts has been "What is going on in this person's testimony?" In other words, what is this person's experience of being human, and of being Dene, and in what way is that experience disclosed through the language of their text? This piece explores who the four speakers were (the backdrop of historical circumstances as well as social practices and traditions within which the witnesses lived their lives, and in which they gave their testimony to the Inquiry), what they were saying (particularly what the speakers referenced about their lived world, as well as what they signified about the cultural, linguistic and historical tradition in which they stood) and to whom they were speaking and how they were saying it (the rhetorical moment). The speakers employed metaphor, irony, personal stories, as well as more rational forms of persuasion to call into question the morality of white people and those Western social and institutional practices which had dramatically altered the landscape of Dene lives and Dene land, and were continuing to do so. The interpretation elucidates the Dene ideal of respectfulness of "the other," a notion of the other which includes human life, as well as all living beings and the Earth itself; and a call to envision the future in terms of our children and the-yet-to-be-born. The study concludes with a personal elucidation of the pedagogical significance of the text interpretations. / Graduate

Als ich noch darüber grübelte, womit ich aus Sicht der rumänischen Musik zum von Helmut Loos vorgeschlagenen Thema dieses Symposiums beitragen könnte, ging mein erster Gedanke auf den rumänischen Komponisten Wilhelm Georg Berger (1929–1993), obwohl der Weg, der von ihm zu Max Reger führt, nicht unbedingt ein geradliniger ist. Meine Wahl wurde nicht in erster Linie von der deutschen (siebenbürgisch-sächsischen) Abstammung des Komponisten bestimmt (obwohl ich die unterschwellige Wirkung einer gewissen positiven Voreingenommenheit nicht ausschließen kann), sondern vielmehr von seiner Einstellung zum kompositorischen Schaffen: Berger war von Hause aus von einer starken Hinwendung zur Tradition (mit besonderer Vorliebe für die Musik Johann Sebastian Bachs) geprägt, er integrierte in seinen Werken aber durchaus auch Elemente der Moderne. Als ich meine Wahl dann durch historische Nachforschung rechtfertigen und begründen wollte, waren die Ergebnisse eher enttäuschend. Es gibt nichts Konkretes, das ein – wie auch immer – Lehrer-Schüler-Verhältnis zwischen Reger und Berger oder eine direkte Beeinflussung des zweitgenannten Komponisten durch den ersten nahelegen würde. Berger hat zunächst Viola am Bukarester Konservatorium studiert und zählte folglich nicht zu den Schülern des Komponisten Mihail Jora (des bekanntesten rumänischen Schülers Regers) oder der Pianistin Constanta Erbiceanu (einer Bewunderin Regers, von der später noch die Rede sein wird). Berger selbst hat zahlreiche und umfangreiche Bände zur musikalischen Ästhetik und zur Geschichte der sinfonischen Musik und der Kammermusik verfasst, doch nirgendwo bringt er eine ausdrückliche Vorliebe für Regers Musik zum Ausdruck, obwohl er diese selbstverständlich mitberücksichtigt. (Unter welchem Gesichtspunkt sich Berger der Musik Regers annimmt, werden wir später sehen.)

This dissertation considers the incommensurable interests of people, fossil capital, federal energy politics, and place in Northern Canada during the 1970s. By the late 1960s, the insatiable North American appetite for fossil fuels had turned its attention toward the Arctic region. After the discovery of rich deposits in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in 1968, largescale energy projects were proposed to access and exploit these Arctic natural resources. Canada participated in this northern oil rush; an exploration of oil and gas in the Arctic regions was accelerated in the early 1970s. The next challenge involved transporting the oil and gas to southern markets. In 1974, the Canadian federal government initiated the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry to investigate the social, environmental, and economic effects of the pipeline routes proposed by a consortium of American and Canadian oil companies through the Mackenzie River Valley in the Northwest Territories where it would connect with existing pipeline infrastructure in northern Alberta. The Inquiry’s report recommended against immediate construction, encouraging instead a ten-year moratorium. Inquiry commissioner Thomas Berger’s report rationalized the delay to make time for settling Indigenous land claims in the region and for taking conservation measures to protect some key areas in the Mackenzie River Valley. In this dissertation, I examine how the discussion around pipeline construction shaped the meaning of the North, self-determination, and cultural recognition. In this dissertation, I particularly focus on how Indigenous peoples asserted their claims by rejecting state-driven policies and the interests of fossil-fuel capitalism in the North. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Through the close reading of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry hearings, I examine how the discussion around energy development shaped the 1970s’ contentious Canadian politics of nation and North. Central to this debate, I focus on how Indigenous peoples asserted their land claims by challenging and refusing the settler state policies and the interests of fossil-fuel capitalism in the western Northwest Territories in the 1970s. By using the Inquiry process, northern Indigenous peoples challenged the idea that the state had a legitimate authority to decide and control the future or destiny of a territory or peoples in its defined borders.

The author undertook this analysis of the caricatures of the two outstanding artists, Oscar Berger and David Low, to determine the factors which have shaped the style of each artist and the factors which have determined the public appeal of each artist's work.

The purpose of this study is to explore the differences in defectors former religious lives. The literature is rich in references topeople from secular societies being fascinated by religions that are individualistic in nature and hence allowpeople freedom of choice in regards to their beliefs. However, we rarely hear about people who have left this new age belief environment or other religious environments. The study specifically focuses on the defectors, who have left a religious organization or have chosen to leave their religious belief. This study seeks to discover why defectors first came to believe and what got them to leave the religious arena. What happened to their faith, and what caused them to leave their former religion? This is what this study is attempting to shed more light on. The findings indicate that close group-relationships can be vital to one's person and create both positive and negative experiences. The social connections with other people is vital to not create a feeling of alienation and emptiness, leading to loss of meaning in life. Peter L Berger and other sociologists have stressed that religion is meaningful to people, that every society has religion, and that people need religious consolation to face difficult existential questions.

Cette thèse porte sur la trajectoire éditoriale et artistique de la collection Vertigo créée en 1993 par DC Comics, maison d’édition états-unienne spécialisée dans la bande dessinée. Je me propose d’aborder Vertigo à travers l'apport des scénaristes britanniques employés par DC Comics depuis le milieu des années quatre-vingt. Leur rôle est en effet considérable, tant au moment de la fondation de Vertigo par la rédactrice Karen Berger que dans le succès ultérieur dont jouit la collection. La genèse de Vertigo met en lumière l’importance du phénomène appelé l’ « Invasion britannique », c’est-à-dire l’arrivée sur le marché états-unien de nombreux créateurs qui sont nés et travaillent à l’étranger pour DC Comics. Cette « invasion » révélera au public américain des scénaristes de tout premier plan tels Alan Moore, Grant Morrison ou Neil Gaiman, dont la série The Sandman est considérée comme un jalon majeur de l’histoire du média. La critique existante au sujet de Vertigo en général tend d’ailleurs à se focaliser sur la portion du corpus produit par les Britanniques, mais sans nécessairement prendre acte de cette spécificité culturelle. Le travail à mener est donc double ; d'une part, il s'agira de retracer une histoire du label en tant qu'instance productrice d'une culture médiatique particulière, qui s'inscrit dans un contexte socio-historique et repose sur les pratiques et les représentations de l'ensemble des acteurs (producteurs et consommateurs au sens large), eux-mêmes nourris d'une tradition qui préexiste à l'apparition de Vertigo. Il sera dès lors possible de prendre appui sur cette connaissance contextuelle pour interroger la poétique du label, et ainsi identifier les spécificités d’une « école » britannique au sein de cette industrie culturelle. / This thesis deals with the editorial and aesthetic history of the Vertigo imprint, which was created in 1993 by DC Comics, a US-American comics publisher. I shall consider in particular the contribution of British scriptwriters employed by DC and then by Vertigo from the 1980s onwards. Theise creators played a tremendous role, both at the time of Vertigo's founding by editor Karen Berger and at a later date, as the imprint gathered widespread recognition. The genesis of the Vertigo imprint sheds light on the so-called “British Invasion”, that is to say the appearance within the American industry of several UK-based creators working for DC Comics. Spearheaded by Alan Moore, the “invasion” brought to the fore many of the most important scriptwriters of years to come, such as Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman, whose Sandman series has been described as a major landmark in the recognition of the medium. Existing criticism regarding Vertigo tends to focus on the body of work produced by British authors, without necessarily discussing their national specificity. My goal is therefore double; on the one hand, I intend to write a history of the label as the producer of a specific media culture that belongs to a given socio-historical context and is grounded in the practices and representations of the field's actors (producers and consumers in a broad sense). On the other hand, the awareness of the context in which the books are produced shall allow me to interrogate the imprint's poetics, thus identifying the specificity of a “British school of writing” within the comics mainstream industry.

This diploma thesis deals with landscape as a way of seeing, its critique and its defense. The thesis will initially focus on the presentation of the critical concept of ways of seeing by English art critic and writer John Berger. On the basis of this, the thesis will move to the exploration of the critical concepts of landscape and landscape painting by British humanistic cultural geographer Denis E. Cosgrove and American visual theorist and philosopher W. J. T. Mitchell. Subsequently, it will also deal with the relationship of these concepts to the concept of landscape by English historian and art historian Simon Schama. Cosgrove and Mitchell both deal in a similar way with the critical reflection of the idea of landscape in terms of postmodern and postcolonial criticism. Both authors are influenced by Berger's concept and claim that our aesthetic perception of landscape is not a natural vision, but an acquired, historically created way of seeing. This way of seeing then raises a number of questions in relation to the traditional conception of landscape aesthetics and can lead to a rethinking of traditional concepts such as aesthetic attitude, psychical distance or the idea of disinterested pleasure. Opposite to it, the thesis intends to present an optimistic concept of landscape by Schama. The...

Forty-nine Cache Valley residents, between the ages of 18 and 45, who volunteered to participate in an assertion training class were assigned to one of seven groups. Subjects were administered pre- and posttests and a two month follow-up evaluation. Measures included Rotter's Internal-External Locus of Control Scale, the Rathus Assertive Scale, and the Berger Self-Acceptance Scale. The results obtained indicate that self-acceptance and assertiveness changed as a result of assertion training and that these changes were maintained at follow-up. No difference between internals and externals was observed as a result of semi-structured assertion training.

<p>Har övergången från det förmoderna samhället till det moderna bara inneburit positiva framsteg? Uppsatsen fokuserar framförallt på sociologiska författare som gör gällande att moderniteten bland annat har resulterat i att individer i större utsträckning än tidigare upplever en meningsförlust. En del av dessa författare anser att bristen på mening indirekt kan relateras till den tilltagande arbetsdelningen. Arbetsdelningen ger nämligen upphov till strukturella såväl som kulturella förändringar, och dessa förändringar ger i sin tur upphov till olika former av upplevd meningsförlust. De områden som påverkas av arbetsdelningen och som behandlas i denna uppsats är rollernas differentiering, gemenskapernas urvattning, kunskapernas fragmentering, samt relativismens och pluralismens effekter på det som tidigare ansetts vara givet och självklart.Roller och gemenskap är strukturella fenomen, medan kunskap och relativism är fenomen på det kulturella planet. I tidigare samhällen har kulturen givit legitimitet åt strukturen. Detta innebar bland annat att religion och tradition tilldelade alla individer en plats och förklarade varför världen ser ut som den gör. Problemet i det moderna samhället tycks vara att den moderna kulturen inte bara misslyckas med att legitimera den nya strukturen, utan att den dessutom bidrar till att underblåsa känslan av meningslöshet.</p>

Har övergången från det förmoderna samhället till det moderna bara inneburit positiva framsteg? Uppsatsen fokuserar framförallt på sociologiska författare som gör gällande att moderniteten bland annat har resulterat i att individer i större utsträckning än tidigare upplever en meningsförlust. En del av dessa författare anser att bristen på mening indirekt kan relateras till den tilltagande arbetsdelningen. Arbetsdelningen ger nämligen upphov till strukturella såväl som kulturella förändringar, och dessa förändringar ger i sin tur upphov till olika former av upplevd meningsförlust. De områden som påverkas av arbetsdelningen och som behandlas i denna uppsats är rollernas differentiering, gemenskapernas urvattning, kunskapernas fragmentering, samt relativismens och pluralismens effekter på det som tidigare ansetts vara givet och självklart.Roller och gemenskap är strukturella fenomen, medan kunskap och relativism är fenomen på det kulturella planet. I tidigare samhällen har kulturen givit legitimitet åt strukturen. Detta innebar bland annat att religion och tradition tilldelade alla individer en plats och förklarade varför världen ser ut som den gör. Problemet i det moderna samhället tycks vara att den moderna kulturen inte bara misslyckas med att legitimera den nya strukturen, utan att den dessutom bidrar till att underblåsa känslan av meningslöshet.