This study investigated the participant structure and content of discourse in five high-school science classrooms and their connection to scientifically literate practices for talking, reasoning, and evaluating claims. Through a detailed exploration of the way teachers introduced classes to the topic of evolution, I was able to examine how teachers used language to build a social framework for participation, examined the opportunities and challenges stemming from their various approaches, and explored how the structure and content of classroom talk contributed to framing science. This study used techniques from interactional sociolinguistics and conversational analysis to examine videos of interaction in five secondary biology classrooms on the day teachers introduced their students to lessons focused on the topic of evolution. Implications of this study focus on how teacher's discourse moves could open or close a discussion to student knowledge contributions, and emphasize how open discussions offer both challenges and opportunities to teachers wishing to facilitate scientifically literate discourse practices in their classroom. / text

This qualitative study investigates how the views of student leaders (and some of their staff advisors) illuminate the discussion in the broader literature around issues of student leadership, conflict, diversity and social justice in secondary schools. Eighteen one-hour, semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve student leaders and six teachers from six provinces across Canada. This study contributes to educational research by considering the ways student leaders (rather than adult administrators) can impact social justice. While students envision their leadership role in terms of social justice with the goals of inclusion and societal change in mind, the present schooling structure, established expectations and strategies chosen for initiatives often hinder the realization of such a role. Schools also seem to avoid local controversial issues by encouraging student leaders to focus on international concerns. This study explores opportunities for schools to address equity issues through reconceptualizing student leadership and its goals.

Magistrantūros studijų baigiamojo darbo objektas – tai 2006 – 2013 m. Lietuvos, Jungtinės Karalystės ir Jungtinių Amerikos Valstijų, tiek komercinės, tiek socialinės reklamos, kuriose panaudoti krikščioniškieji simboliai. Tyrime siekiama palyginti kaip šis reiškinys yra išplitęs ir vertinamas, kokie panašumai ir skirtumai atsiskleidžia tiriamų šalių atvejuose. Tyrimo dėmesys sutelkiamas į veiksmo ir atoveiksmio santykį, kuomet, šiuo atveju, reklamos koncepcija paskatina diskusijas viešoje erdvėje. Todėl šiam reiškiniui tirti, taikoma mokslinės literatūros ir šaltinių analizė bei du skirtingi empirinio tyrimo metodai: 1. semiotinė ir vizualinė reklamų, kuriuose panaudoti krikščioniški simboliai, kokybinė turinio analizė; ir 2. internetinės žiniasklaidos pranešimų kiekybinė ir kokybinė turinio analizė. Teorinėje darbo dalyje, analizuojama vartotojiškos visuomenės samprata ir reklamos reikšmė jos kontekste; nagrinėjama krikščioniškųjų simbolių vaizdavimo istorija bei reklamos, kaip viešosios komunikacijos priemonės kontrolės mechanizmai: kaip ir kas reguliuoja jų turinį, kokios interesų grupės formuojasi. Taip pat analizuojama žiniasklaidos reikšmė šiuolaikiniame kontekste. Darbe atliekama atrinktų reklamų semiotinė bei vizualinė analizė. Analizuojama kaip tiriamos reklamos komunikuoja per tekstą ir vaizdą. Darbe taip pat atliekama kiekybinė ir kokybinė internetinės žiniasklaidos pranešimų analizė: atrenkami ir nagrinėjami tekstai, kuriuose išsakomos įvairių socialinių grupių... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / In this masters degree thesis - 'Christian symbols in advertising campaigns and reactions in the societies: period 2006 – 2013, Lithuania, the UK and the USA', the phenomenon of using the Christian symbols in advertising is investigated by comparison of case studies (period 2006 - 2013) of Lithuania, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. The purpose of the study is to determine how this phenomenon is seen, understood and spread in the respective societies. The study is based on research on the relation between cause and effect in the public media, caused by said advertising campaigns. Therefore, theoretical framework and two different empirical methods are employed: (1) advertisement content semiotic and visual analysis; (2) and the quantitative and qualitative content analysis of publications by major internet publishers.

The focus of the thesis is set on the controversial issues connected with a legal institute of Czech criminal law called "self-defence", and how these controversial issues were dealt with within judicial practice. The first chapter serves as an introduction to the whole topic. The second chapter describes the concept of self-defence, as well as its prerequisites. The self- defence was classed into the system of criminal law. The goal of the third chapter is to define preconditions which are necessary in connection with application of the self-defence institute. The main parts of this chapter describe firstly attacking, first of all and secondly defence. Subsections of this chapter analyse the term of attacking itself, the attacker and his characteristics, the term of harmfulness of such attacks towards society. As for the second part of the third chapter it focuses on the defence itself, its proportionality etc. The fourth chapter is about the role of judicial practice within the context of Czech legal system. This chapter serves as a relevant contribution to the main part of the thesis, which is chapter five. Chapter five introduces specific cases, especially those which were at some point controversial. The specific case is briefly described and the controversial issue is named and further...

This study aims to demonstrate how different country and industry-level variables affect the value-creating abilities of CSR initiatives. It contributes to the growing body of literature about CSR as it directly compares the moderating effects of the quality of country-level institutions with the moderating effects of the respective industry sector. The study amongst 3,670 firms in a sample period from 2006-2014 shows that CSR initiatives have a superior value-creating ability in environments with weak capital markets and country governance standards. Firms in controversial industry sectors have a superior ability to create value through CSR because they display a higher potential for reputational gains through CSR due to the nature of their business. The results of the study suggest a supremacy of country-level determinants over industry-level determinants of the CSR-firm value relationship.

Sweden is a multicultural society which means that there is a lot of pupils in Swedish schools with a background as refugees and with experiences from potentially traumatic and horrible events in their home countries. This study works with two different theories, trigger warning and pragmatism. Trigger warning explains why it could be necessary to hide or protect student from some specific topics or material and pragmatism says that it is educationally successful to use the pupils experiences in the classroom. Contemporary global conflicts, such as the ones that the pupils are coming from, could be a useful subject to teach about in social studies according to the Swedish curriculum. Given this circumstances, this study seeks to examine if it would be educationally and morally appropriate to use this potentially traumatic and sensitive experiences as a method of teaching. According to pragmatism, it would be. However, according to trigger warning, it could be relevant to protect the pupils from this kinds of subjects in school and in the classroom. Therefore, this study contains a tug of war between the two different theories and I interviewed pupils who has moved or has a family who has moved from warzones as refugees about this matter. A core in this study is to take the pupils perspective and examine what good, or bad, that comes out if a teacher in social studies wants to teach about the conflicts that the pupils has a connection to. The result shows that it in fact would be educationally successful even if these subjects are special and a teacher should always think about the circumstances and the methods they are using. In the theoretical tug of war pragmatism comes out as a winner, by trigger warnings could be relevant in some cases.

The commencement of the Victorian period in the 1830s coincided with the abolition of chattel slavery in the British colonies. Consequently, modern readers have tended to focus on how the Victorians identified themselves with slavery’s abolition and either denied their past involvement with slavery or imagined that slave past as insurmountably distant. “Willing Slaves: The Victorian Novel and the Afterlife of British Slavery” argues, however, that colonial slavery survived in the Victorian novel in a paradoxical form that I term “willing slavery.” A wide range of Victorian novelists grappled with memories of Britain’s slave past in ways difficult for modern readers to recognize because their fiction represented slaves as figures whose bondage might seem, counterintuitively, self-willed. Nineteenth-century Britons produced fictions of “willing slavery” to work through the contradictions inherent to nineteenth-century individualism. As a fictional subject imagined to take pleasure in her own subjection, the willing slave represented a paradoxical figure whose most willful act was to give up her individuality in order to maintain cherished emotional bonds. This figure should strike modern readers as a contradiction in terms, at odds with the violence and dehumanization of chattel slavery. But for many significant Victorian writers, willing slavery was a way of bypassing contradictions still familiar to us today: the Victorian individualist was meant to be atomistic yet sympathetic, possessive yet sheltered from market exchange, a monad most at home within the collective unit of the family. By contrast, writers as diverse as John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot located willing slavery in a pre-Victorian history where social life revolved, they imagined, around obligation and familial attachments rather than individual freedom. Rooted in this fictive past, the willing slave had no individual autonomy or self-possession, but was defined instead by a different set of contradictions: a radical dependency and helpless emotional bondage that could nonetheless appear willing and willful, turning this fictional enslavement itself into an expression of the will. For Dickens, willing slavery provided an image of social interdependency that might heal the ills of the modern world by offering what one All the Year Round author described as “a better slavery than loveless freedom.” For novelists such as Brontë and Eliot who were no less critical of Victorian individualism, however, fantasies of willing slavery became the very fiction that their work aimed to dissolve. Chapter One argues that Frances Trollope’s groundbreaking antislavery fiction mirrors West Indian slave narratives in describing the slave plantation as coldly mechanical, and then extends this vision to portray early industrial England as an emotionally deprived social world similarly in need of repair. In the second chapter, I argue that Dickens responds to that emotional deprivation, and the replacement of traditional family bonds with what he describes as the “social contract of matrimony,” by producing a nostalgic account of willing slavery’s dependencies that draws on discourses of slavery found in British case law, where attorneys could exhort the slaveholder to “attach [slaves] to himself by the ties of affection.” The last two chapters argue that Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda ironize this earlier nostalgia through female characters who grapple with the archetype of the willing slave. As their characters adopt and then discard the theatrical pose of willing subjection embodied by melodramatic heroines such as Dion Boucicault’s “octoroon” Zoe, Brontë and Eliot draw attention to the contradictions inherent to willing slavery, reframing it as a fantasy enjoyed exclusively by white Britons intent on shoring up the familial intimacies that helped preserve their social and economic dominance. These ironic reframings reveal a final paradox: though willing slavery helped create an analogy between African chattel slaves and British family members in fiction, this trope ultimately highlights the differences between the chattel slavery of Africans abroad, where the disruption of kinship bonds was a crucial method for exploitation and domination, and the imagined household subjection of English characters, rooted in the putatively binding qualities of family feeling.

This thesis comprises of a series of personal essays exploring intersections and parallels between my life and D.H. Lawrence’s classic novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The essays discuss, among other things, Lawrence and tuberculosis, gamekeeping, mining in 20th century England, love, education, and youth. Thus, the collection creates a literary memoir.

This thesis examines the life and career of Bret Easton Ellis, and the influences of his work on the author's development as a writer. Part one encapsulates a novel written specifically for this thesis. 'Call waiting' is a harsh look at modern friendships, the role of work in these relationships and the proliferation of shallow communication through the advent of email. A critical reflection follows, examining the process that led to the novel's creation. Three specific areas are focussed on: the direct influence of Ellis' novel 'The rules of attraction' on the overall themes of 'Call waiting', the realisation of the project and the various editing changes and narrative developments that arose during the writing of the novel, and an examination of the inspiration behind the novel's creation. Part two considers Ellis' role in the literary world of the 1980s, his own complicity in the creation of a career as a celebrity author, and the carefully manufactured persona Ellis presents to the world. In Part three the thesis is concluded with a close analysis of the publication of Ellis' controversial novel 'American psycho'. This chapter explores the negative publicity the novel attracted and the possible causes of the ensuing backlash against the author. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Not many children report relationships with friends that are both close and conflictual. There is a paucity of research examining the trajectory of children's relationship closeness and conflict together over time. This is unfortunate because contentious relationships are related to cardiovascular problems, at least in young adults and because the trajectories of these two aspects of children's relationship quality over time is not understood. Therefore, two longitudinal data sets with younger (mean age 7.5 years at Time 1; four data points over 2 years) and older (mean age 9.9 years at Time 1; two data points over 1 year) children were studied. In both cohorts, measures of friendship quality and peer nominations of liking/disliking as well as overt and relational (older cohort) aggression were completed. Children who reported relationships high in both closeness and conflict were generally satisfied with their friendships; they were not more likely to end their friendships than were children who reported different levels of closeness and conflict (younger cohort). Both boys' and girls' relationship closeness increased over time according to growth curve analyses. The relationships of girls who remained in the same friendship, and who therefore provided ratings on the same friend at each time point, tended to increase in closeness at a different rate over time than the relationships of girls who provided ratings on different friends (younger cohort). Children who reported relationships high in closeness and in conflict were not more aggressive over time than were children who reported different levels of relationship closeness and conflict. However, girls' closeness and overt aggression tracked each other (increased) over time (younger cohort). Girls who reported low social support and negative interactions in their friendships increased the most in overt aggression over time (older cohort). Aggressive and nonaggressive children generally reported similar friendship quality (both cohorts), but the friendship closeness of chronically aggressive boys decreased over time (younger cohort). There were negligible friendship quality differences amongst the sociometric groups. The discussion centers on friendship quality changes in children's continuing friendships, the potential dire effects of turbulent friendships and the friendships of aggressive as well as controversial children.