Atualmente, presenciamos múltiplos tipos de família, como: famílias nucleares, monoparentais, reconstituídas, com filhos biológicos e/ou adotivos, dentre as quais encontramos famílias homossexuais. Há uma escassez de trabalhos sobre essas famílias e percebe-se a forte presença de preconceito e discriminação nos mais diversos segmentos e contextos sociais, em especial, no que diz respeito às questões homossexuais e de gênero e de como isso influenciaria na educação das crianças. Esse estudo visa compreender como homossexuais entre 20 e 55 anos, vivenciam a paternidade, a maternidade e/ou parentalidade e que significados lhe atribuem. A fenomenologia ancorada à filosofia do diálogo de Buber foi o referencial teórico-metodológico adotado nesta pesquisa para alcançarmos o objetivo proposto. Foram entrevistados seis homens e nove mulheres homossexuais com filho(a)(s) biológicos e/ou adotivos que formaram famílias monoparentais, adotivas, reconstituídas ou nucleares. Os resultados apontam um maior preparo psíquico e socioeconômico para a chegada de uma criança, em especial quando o desejo de ter filhos ocorre após a tomada de consciência da homossexualidade e/ou formação do vínculo conjugal homossexual. As funções parentais são exercidas pelos(a)s colaboradore(a)s os com nuances da relação intersubjetiva EU-TU. Foram relatadas situações de preconceito quanto ao exercício da parentalidade e/ou à expressão da homossexualidade, nas famílias de origem, no trabalho e entre os amigos, os quais puderam ser diminuídos por intermédio da convivência e conhecimento das situações vivenciadas. Alguns do(as)s colaboredore(a)s deixaram entrever uma homofobia internalizada, principalmente em relação à sua própria homossexualidade, que os aproxima das palavras princípio EU-ISSO. O modelo heterocêntrico de família é recorrente nos discursos assim como a falta de referenciais de famílias homossexuais. / At present, we are witnessing multiple family forms such as nuclear families, single parent families, and reconstructed families with biological and/or adopted children. Among these we find homosexual families. There is a shortage of works about those families. We strongly perceive the presence of prejudice and discrimination concerning homosexual questions with respect to more diverse segments and social contexts, especially about the homosexuality issue and how it would influence in the children?s education. Our goal is to understand how homosexuals between 20 and 55 years experience fatherhood, motherhood, and/or kinship and what meanings they attribute to these. The phenomenology anchored in the philosophy of of Buber\'s dialogue was the theoretical-methodology referential referred to and adopted in this research to reach the proposed goal. Six men and nine homosexual women, with biological and/or adopted children, who formed single parent, adopted, rebuilt or nuclear families were interviewed. The results aim towards a greater socio-economic and psychological preparation for the arrival of an infant, especially when the wish to have a child occurs after consciousness of the homosexuality and/or the formation of the conjugal homosexual link. The parental function is exercised by both, with nuances from the intersubjective relationship of ME-YOU. Situations of prejudice, especially as regards the sexual papers examined for this research are also related, as well as the expression of homosexuality, in the families of origin, at work among friends, in which could be decreased through the experience and knowing of the situations experienced. Some of the collaborators showed during the study an internalized homophobia, mainly in relation to his/her own homosexuality, which approach them to the principle ME-IT. The heterocentric model of family appears in the speech as well as the lack of homosexual families references.

TWO WAYS OF BURNING A COTTON FIELD is an ethnographic memoir concerning the narrator’s experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, South America. The plot is structured around a moral crisis in his rural Paraguayan village. The narrator’s neighbor, a man in his late twenties, threatened to kill his partner and her two children. The Paraguayan police were made aware of the situation but did nothing. Peace Corps management also instructed the narrator to do nothing. In TWO WAYS OF BURNING A COTTON FIELD, this moral crisis is explored within the contexts of post-colonial power structures, including economic and ecologic geographies, intersections of community and government, and the colonial-indigenous language continuum of Paraguay (Spanish-Guaraní). Further, these neighbors’ localized trauma is located within historical, colonial trauma. Of particular concern is the role that languages – English, Spanish, and Guaraní – play in constructing power, worldview, and relationships within the village.

I denna studie undersöker jag hur det interreligiösa fredssamarbetet kan se ut mellan muslimer och kristna. Fokus ligger på en kvalitativ studie där tre muslimska och tre kristna interreligiöst aktiva fredsförespråkare i Stockholm förklarar sin syn på fredsskapande. Men det görs även nedslag i engelskspråklig litteratur där exempel från runt om i världen ges. Här nämner författarna sinsemellan vilka svårigheter som kan uppstå. Dessa svårigheter kan bland annat bero på vem som anses ha kunskaperna för att bedriva fredsarbete. Men även vilka roller som externa aktörer tar på sig när de ger sig in och påverkar fredsskapandet. Här ges exempel från Balkan. Vad gäller den kvalitativa studien ser man att det interreligiösa fredssamarbetet kan ta sig olika form. Exempel ges på ett gemensamt bönehus och mötesplats som finns i Fisksätra. Men även studie och föreläsningsprojektet Saalams vänner beskrivs. Den teori som används utgår från Ruth Illmans tolkning av filsofen Martin Buber. Illman söker genom Buber att förklara hur mötet med Den Andre också är ett möte med sig själv. Ett möte som när det är ärligt kan skapa respekt och förståelse trots skillnader. Dessa skillnader blir då sekundära.

Martin Buber was an internationally known scholar, teacher, and author whose works covered education, communication, politics, theology, philosophy, counseling, and related fields. The purpose of this study was to discover the implications of Buber's philosophy of education for the student services profession. Previous attempts to relate Martin Buber's philosophy to student services were reviewed and a "Buber Primer" of useful terms for the student services professional was presented. The implications of education of character, dialogue, and educator-student relationship for four central questions for the student services profession were addressed: (1) Who are we as professionals?; (2) What are we supposed to do; (3) How?; and (4) Why? Buber proposes that education is essentially the education of character. Student services professionals should define themselves as educators; persons concerned with the development of the whole student. Buber defines dialogue as a seven step process: a turning of the being, confirmation, a sense of empathy, authenticity, common fruitfulness, silence, and commitment. Professional educators are encouraged to engage students in dialogue. Dialogue is defined as the delivery mechanism for developmentally based student services and for the education of character. Buber's concepts were related to the various activities of student services. Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue and his 'education of character' should enhance the ability of professionals in student services to serve all students more intelligently and effectively. This study concluded that Martin Buber's philosophy belongs both in the vocabulary and the practice of student services. / Graduation date: 1990

Thesis--Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-255).

Intersubjectivity is the acknowledgment that the subject of the self, the I, is in direct relations with the subject of the other. There is an immediate correspondence; in fact, one implies the existence of the other as a necessary state of intersubjective experience. This direct relationship negates a need for any external mediation between the two subjects, including the idea of a separate object between the subject of one individual and that of another. The essay proposes that our confrontation with the other occurs not in physical geometric space, but in liminal space, the space outside of the mean of being, at the threshold of relativity. The essay endorses the idea that liminality is not a space between things, but instead is an introjection, an internalization of the reflected world, and a reciprocal notion of the externalized anomaly of the other within each of us. We meet the surface of the world at the edge of our body but the mind is unencumbered by such limitations and as such subsumes the other as itself. Through symbolic language and myth, the surfaces and edges of things, both animate and inanimate, define the geography of the intersubjective mind. Inside the self the other becomes an object and persists as an abstraction of the original subject. We begin to perceive ourselves as the imagined projections of the other; we begin to perceive ourselves as we believe society perceives us. The process applies to the design of architectural space as a rudimentary vocabulary that is consistent with the language of the landscape. / text

This dissertation rhetorically analyzes the ways in which ineffable moments of awakening are constructed in the context of three religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Zen. Close textual analysis revealed that awakening is constructed differently in all three religions and that ineffability itself assumed different meanings in all cases. The conventional understanding of language as arbitrary and as based on human convention does not apply to Hebrew which takes itself to be a sacred language. Words are understood in this tradition as creative elements that convey more than trivial information and the term ineffability does not occupy much thought in Judaism. Christianity is grounded in a representative model of language and equates words with mortality and temporality. Awakening is constructed ontologically as moments in which textuality and corporality are transcended and one merges with the infinite divine. Zen is cautious about the ways in which language constructs the illusion of distinct identities, but ineffability is not constructed as an ontological concept in this tradition. Awakening is understood as beyond all words. The tropes recognized in the Jewish construction of awakening are metonymy, dialogue, differences, juxtapositions, particularities, haunting, and intertextuality. In Christianity, the dominant tropes are allegory, typology, metaphors, substitution, replacement and abstraction. Awakening is modeled after the resurrection of Jesus and is understood as a dramatic and ineffable event. The dominant rhetorical moves in Zen are suchness, nonsense, and paradoxes. Differences are also found between the construction of subjectivity, the perception of time, aesthetics, the linguistic model and ineffability. Judaism views itself as an architecture of time, but this time is not linear and is instead understood by the qualitative moments of the events. Awakening maintains the reverberations of past events into the present, but present moments are given significant attention. In Christianity, man is understood as grounded in space and progressing on a linear axis of time from birth towards his telos. Ineffability is constructed spatially and the event of awakening divides life into before and after. Zen attempts to deconstruct time and views it as sunyata, or “emptiness”. / text

This study explores the connections between childhood and children's literature. In this connection there is an inherent tension between writing and reading "real" childhood, as it is being lived by children now, and interacting with an adult-normative, adult-reconstructed childhood that may or may not have existed in the past. The purpose of this study was to address this tension by analyzing fifteen recently published award-winning children's novels, from the United States, The United Kingdom, and Australia, in order to ferret out how present-day childhood is constructed within this text set. Using a hybrid methodology called critical discourse analysis, buttressed by the frameworks of postmodern childhood studies and critical children's literature studies, the novels were analyzed in a hermeneutic, reader-response oriented approach in order to excavate themes that addressed childhood in the narratives. Findings are presented as a meta-plot, wherein the child protagonists leave a failed home, set out on a journey of knowledge and experience gaining a sense of agency, and, at the end of the novel, construct a new home replete with the child protagonists' personal meaning. This meta-plot includes instances of the child protagonist performing parrhesiatic acts (Foucault) as well as developing non-hierarchical relationships as conceptualized by an I/You relationship (Buber). Other findings include the construction of childhood as a time of "becoming" and a time of "is-ness," childhood as a time of resilience, and childhood as a time of difficult decisions. Conclusions of the analysis speak to the idea of the child serving as a Modern bringer of hope, who manages to create moral order from within an adult-created postmodern milieu. Implications relate to the fields of literacy education, replications of the study with an interpretative community of children, and continuing to define the burgeoning methodology of critical content analysis.

Sara Lidman’s first novel, Tjärdalen (The Tar Pit, 1953), addresses ethical issues in a remote village in the north of Sweden. This essay discusses the novel’s narrative technique and the ethical aspects implied by the narration and aesthetic design. The approach is based on Adam Zachary Newton’s narrative ethics, which links narrative theory and method with an ethical perspective. Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory and Gérhard Genette’s concept of focalization are starting points for the analysis. The ethical framework is drawn both from Bakhtin and from philosophers Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. This means that responsibility is a more important concept than the collective and individual guilt that has been the focus of some interpretations of the novel. Furthermore, in the essay, the concept of dialogue is both a narrative technique and an ethical position, thus knitting together the different parts of the essay: how ideas, voices, faces and eyes meet and how the village interacts with the outside world. Tjärdalen’s design opens to a polyphonic analysis and the essay examines how the text’s ethical and intersubjective emphasis grows out of the composition – out of the arrangement of scenes and viewpoints. The dialogue between multiple voices continues in the representation of the characters’ inner life. Petrus’ character is constructed as open and questioning, inviting discussion, persuading and arguing rather than dictating. In the essay this way of life is defined as dialogic, as opposed to the monologic positions of characters like Blom and Albert. The essay finds, however, that the strong position of the narrator dilutes the polyphonic pattern. The examination of the narrator explores both her loyalties and the attitudes and worldviews that she rejects. Particular emphasis is placed on the analysis of Jonas’ character, as the plot starts and ends with his eyes. The symbolism of the eyes and of the face forms a parallel structure in the text, giving the ethical discussion a depth not achieved by rational dialogue and reflection. In the essay, this level is interpreted by Levinas’ ethics, where the face and the eyes represent a call to responsibility. At the end of Tjärdalen, the ethical questions are transferred to the wider society outside the village. The analysis explores two lines in this shift: One is how the spatial organisation of the narrative and the unchanging quality of the village life leads to a circular composition. The other is how the text brings social criticism back to its origin in interpersonal relationships: to meetings face to face and to the responsibility for the “other” that, according to Levinas, Buber and Bakhtin, is the basis of these encounters.

Martin Buber's diagnosis of modern politics points to the disengagement of citizens from direct and personal encounters as a central contributing factor to the increasing politicization afflicting human life. Buber sees meaning situated in actual life with the world, with others, and with God. The living reality is encounter; living truth, hence, cannot be possessed, only actualized in mutual encounter. The importance of Buber's work to political problems lies in his ability to negotiate paradoxes in three cases: between being and becoming, between individualism and collectivism, between personal relationships and the real demands of an existent condition. In the first case, a radical openness to relation exposes human interlocutors to the surprising mutuality of genuine dialogue, hence allowing them to be changed by the encounter. Existential being is made present through encounter, but in doing so, interlocutors set towards a path to human becoming in dialogue. Social education, the embrace of social spontaneity through mutual encounter, resists the grip of propaganda over interhuman life by challenging and testing the "ready-made truths" often peddled in modern politics. In the second case, he contends that actual life cannot be found in the individual simply as individual, or the individual who surrenders himself to a collective. Human life,for Buber, is actualized in partnership. Hence, there is no presentness for the individual or the collective. This alienation leads to a situation where political illusion dominates - where real conflicts that invariably do arise between groups of people are obscured by "political surplus conflicts", conflicts that are exaggerated and possibly fabricated for the sake of politics. In the third case, people work towards transforming a shared existent condition by providing honest and direct address to persons - to confront the world in its presentness, rather than continuing to live under political illusions. Buber provides us a rebellious spirit who knows he cannot act alone. Buber's rebellious spirit understands that the most effective form action is immediate human togetherness, when genuine address is responded in kind. It is in the direct and immediate encounter, the genuine word between persons, that interhuman trust can weaken the presumed vice grip of distrust on human existence. Once people can dare to trust, they can once again renew actual life - a life of partnership.