这是一个关于人的成长和转变的叙事研究。本研究的问题意识是：一方面，1990 年代以来，伴随着中国社会的进一步市场化，青年文化呈现出去政治化、物质主义、“小时代”的窄化的走向。越来越多的青年人希望进入“体制”，以求得社会认可、物质有保障之生活。但另一方面，1990 年代以来亦是中国民间非政府组织（NGO）迅速发展的时期，一小部分青年人选择在NGO 工作。然而，NGO 长期以来面临着公众的不理解、政府一定程度的漠视甚至猜测以及物质上的低回报。本研究正是希望进入NGO 工作者的生命故事，理解他们为何逆社会窄化的价值之流、选择在NGO 工作，形成了怎样的文化以及如何形成这一文化。另一方面，本研究亦希望向组织内部回观以批判性地分析NGO 携带的意识形态、操演等如何对工作者的价值观和行为产生不经意的影响，以期改造其身处之社会脉络。 因此，本研究试图回答的研究问题是：在1980 年代以来的社会脉络之下，“80 后”NGO 工作者如何与发展主义和“小时代”的青年文化、以及NGO 内部的文化与操作进行协商？形成了怎样的价值观和行为方式？ 本研究通过叙事研究方法，深入理解10 位NGO 工作者的生命故事和日常实践。采取Dorothy Holland 等(1998)的形意世界(figured worlds)理论视角，本研究认为：一方面，NGO 工作者在参与NGO 的过程中增进了自我认识和成长，对社会发展有更深的理解和反思，并且形成一定的介入社会和公共生活的行动。另一方面，NGO 的操作中，可能带有缩窄批判思考和开放的学习多种思想资源的空间，缺乏对社会问题成因和解决方案的深入分析与公开论述，习惯性地以“主流”/“另类”二元简化的分析视角，这无益于NGO 工作者的成长，也可能阻碍NGO 对于社会和人的改造的工作。

This dissertation explores the universality of trauma-storing in the body and the need for contextualization when it comes to treatment. Of the two central themes addressed, the first is war-related trauma and the intersection of expressive arts therapy and South (East) Asia (Nepal and Hong Kong in particular) with its specific imagery, art, and culture, and to see how both feed into each another and can transform as a result. The question is how to locally sensitize expressive arts therapy, which has its roots in Europe and the United States, to the Hong Kong setting; more specifically, to working with Nepali women who try to make Hong Kong their new home. The dissertation suggests a holistic, locally, and culturally sensitive approach to expressive arts therapy. This means adjusting the expressive arts framework and practices to the local and cultural setting, as well as looking at the resources (myths, dance forms, breathing practices, rituals, etc.) present in the local culture and including them in the anthropological approach to trauma transformation. The second theme addressed is the importance of critically reflecting on power within therapeutic relationships, especially in trauma treatment, and recognizing the ontological underpinnings underlying therapy as well as our ‘human self-concept’, which leads to the acknowledgement of only a certain type of human experience, that of conscious, self-aware subjects in control of their acts. The latter leaves little room for understanding traumatic experiences, in which trauma victims seem to be unable to remember or shape the traumatic event. In Walter Benjamin’s dissertation, any kind of representation of our personal and collective identities is seen as a curation. When approaching history as a ‘collection’ of memories, it creates room for traumatic experiences to exist. Benjamin’s dissertation is applied to understanding trauma in such a way where it is precisely the discontinuity, the disparities, the ruptures of history and memory that make trauma visible; these are the gifts handed to the next generation. It is the piecing together of fragments and uncertainties that transforms trauma into a space of insight, creating meaning from what is known and unknown, bridging the stories and images of history present in our implicit and explicit memory. In the critical reflection on traumatology, a Foucauldian approach is taken regarding the therapist-client relationship. Foucault speaks of a top-down apparatus with policies that act under the guise of ‘protect and serve’, and language that frames the clients as a helpless victim in need of ‘betterment’ by the therapist. The only way for therapists to tackle the problem of trauma and psychotherapy, and to admit its social/cultural construction and the role of power, is to read themselves into the problem, to go beyond one-way mirroring, to analyze their pathology, and attempt to change patterns of communication that reproduce the psy-complex apparatus. In this thesis the latter is done by including the creative and analytic reflections of expressive arts therapists and of the author herself.

While the LGBT equal rights movements in Hong Kong have become increasingly visible and popular in recent years, and lesbians, when compared to homosexual male, seem to enjoy high visibility in the city’s public space and relevant safety from violent discrimination, their presence in the public sphere continue to be low. Writings by local queer activists and scholars such as Mary Kam Pui Wai (2001) and Denise Tang (2011) point out that instead of violent attacks, since the beginning of local LGBT activism, female have been facing systematic silencing and marginalizing within the community, their presence invisible, and their problems often ignored or trivialized. However, lesbians are not imagined to be, and do not perceive themselves as, the most oppressed and disadvantageous members within the larger LGBT community. This study proposes that this seeming apolitical attitude and lack of acknowledgement of their marginalized position are the results of the unique “lesbian learning” taken place in the Hong Kong context that render their positions invisible and their problems unspeakable. I want not only to explore what these young women conceptualize as lesbian identity and sexuality, but through proposing the notion “lesbian learning”, offer a new framework to articulate and examine the formation and construction of the “field of sensible” that conditions their learning about lesbian(ism) in terms of perceptual equipment, information flow, as well as strategies of management and application, to see the meanings attributed to this identity, and the nuanced struggle for and negotiation of their lesbian identity formation, as both gender and sexual identity. The findings of this study shows that their conceptualization of lesbian identity as gender and sexual identity is largely conditioned by how they have learned to be female, with normative gender social expectations having a huge influence on how they perceive their sexual identity and sexuality, and their priority. Through documenting and examining the process of their learning the lesbian identity and ways of managing it, I hope to shed light on the mechanisms behind the social construction of female subjectivity that conditioned the specific configuration of lesbian identity and sexuality in the Hong Kong context, and the close ties between the two. To this end, 26 women between the ages of 20 - 30 were interviewed, additionally I spent 2 years conducting in-depth follow-up interviews and participant observation. With the help of social constructionist accounts of contextualization, interactionist accounts of meaning-making, the theory of sexual scripts, and Foucauldian notions of discourse and discipline, I seek to analyze how the Hong Kong lesbian subject is created, maintained, and regulated, both within different institutions operating at specific sites, namely family, school, and pornography, and by the lesbians themselves. By proposing the notion of “lesbian learning”, this study seeks to offer a new methodological tool of intervention, to examine the network of conditions of intersectional positions, and the negotiated agency of their understanding and imagination of identity, gender, and sexuality in the context of Hong Kong.

L’image de l’ « Europe » comme un continent doté de limites inflexibles et indiscutables est largement partagée dans l’opinion publique des pays traditionnellement considérés comme européens. Dans le milieu des années 2000, les débats liés aux référendums sur le Traité Constitutionnel (2004-2005) conduisent pourtant un certain nombre d’acteurs politiques de premier plan à proposer des définitions de ce qu'elle serait ou ne serait pas. Mais plutôt que d'interroger le contenu de cette « Europe au sens large » convoquée dans ces différents discours, la controverse dont se saisissent les politologues et tout un ensemble de chercheurs a souvent l’objectif plus spécifique d’évaluer le caractère européen d’un pays en particulier : la Turquie, alors depuis peu reconnue candidate officielle à l’Union Européenne (UE – 1999). Bien que candidate, celle-ci se trouve tour à tour intégrée puis mise au ban de l’« Europe », du fait d’un supposé déficit d’européanité, pour être renvoyée du côté d’autres catégories régionales comme l' « Asie », le « Moyen Orient » ou le « Monde Musulman ». Cette thèse se saisit alors du paradoxe turc avec l’ambition de décrypter le sens du mot « Europe » dans une perspective géographique. Pour se faire, elle propose une investigation basée sur l’analyse de représentations turques du Monde, d’étudiants du premier cycle universitaire (Licence). Une première analyse de géographie régionale relativement classique, qui permet de fournir quelques éléments de contextes aux représentations analysées, cherche à identifier une région européenne homogène basée sur des indicateurs socio-économiques ou l’analyse de la trajectoire du pays par rapport à cette région sur le temps long. Cette première démarche, néanmoins, ne permet pas d'aboutir à une identification claire de ce qu’est l’« Europe » et suggère que le problème est sans doute profondément ancré du côté des représentations de l'objet qu'elle constitue voire, plus généralement, du Monde. Une deuxième investigation consiste alors à faire émerger le contenu, à la fois sémantique et spatial de l’« Europe », propre à la population d’étude et ce tant au niveau individuel qu'agrégé. De là, s'ensuit une troisième analyse visant cette fois à évaluer la place relative de l’« Europe » dans le Monde et l’éventualité de son déclin en considérant les préférences résidentielles de ladite population. Pour se faire, cette thèse propose une perspective décentrée, construite sur un matériau empirique issu de deux enquêtes de terrain et différentes méthodes de traitements, croisant méthodes d’analyses interprétatives et empiriques. Ainsi, à travers une analyse systémique de différentes formes de représentations, elle devient susceptible de mettre en évidence la singularité d’un regard turc sur le Monde. / The narrative according to which « Europe » is a continent with inflexible and irrefutable limits is a mainstream belief in states traditionally considered as European. However, circa 2004-2005, the debates owed to the European Treaty have seen the introduction of strong statements about what it would or wouldn't be. Though, instead of exploring the issue of a “large scale Europe” from a geographical dimension; the controversy most political scientists and other researchers took hold of was driven by an attempt to decide on the place of Turkey in that region which recently had been recognized an official candidate to EU (1999). As a matter of fact, despite its candidacy, Turkey would remain both part and apart of the region, because of a supposed “europeaness” deficit. Rather it would be expected to be part of other regional categories such as « Asia », the « Middle East » or the « Muslim world ». Thenceforward, through the unique and paradoxical example that is Turkey - focusing on representations of Turkish undergraduate students -, this thesis proposes to decrypt differently what stands for “Europe”, in a geographical perspective. First, this study proposes a classical regional analysis to set up the frame through which we will examine Turkish representations and geographic imaginaries. Yet it also aims to define a homogenous European region based on different classical factors in order to sketch the study's background. Then a long-term analysis of the contemporary Turkish international relations underlines its strong anchorage into European politics and the limits of attempting to define « Europe » through that lens. On the contrary, it leads to consider that the image of a strongly bordered « Europe » may come from people’s representations. Thus, in a second time, the study focuses on the emerging representations - both individual and collective - of a spatial and conceptual definition of « Europe ». Third, it interrogates the attractiveness of European countries relatively to the rest of the World, with the ambition to evaluate its potential “decline”. In a non-Eurocentric perspective, this thesis examines some Turkish way to look at « Europe » by developing two original survey materials built on a mix of interpretative and explicative methods, and a systemic analysis of its results.

Delirium is an acute change in cognition accompanied by inattention, which affects up to 88% of adult critical care patients. Delirium causes increased hospital complications, longer lengths of hospital stay, functional disability, cognitive impairment, and increased mortality. The purpose of this evidence-based quality-improvement project was to implement and evaluate a delirium screening process in adult intensive care units at a large medical center. This included education of nurses, implementation of a structured, validated tool, and review of tool use documentation. The implementation of this project was guided by an evidence-based practice model, Disciplined Clinical Inquiry-© and Lewin's change theory. Evaluation of this quality-improvement project used audits of the electronic medical record. The audits included the presence and accuracy of delirium screening documentation in the patients' medical records. Results of 3 sequential documentation audits revealed a gradual adoption of this practice change by nurse clinicians. The percentage of charts with missing, incomplete, or inaccurate data decreased from 50% on the first week to 27.9% and 25.0% on the 2nd and 3rd weeks, respectively. These findings were an indication of practice change by validating the requirement for delirium screening on the units. In the first 3 weeks alone, 17 patient audits were positive for delirium, indicating the potential for poor short-term and long-term patient outcomes if not addressed promptly. Implementation of delirium screening ensures the dignity and worth of adult critical care patients by decreasing the poor outcomes associated with the diagnosis, which is an important contribution to positive social change.

Historically, traditional music in Africa was attributed to the collective society and not to individual musicians. Given the changing socioeconomic, cultural and political environments prevalent in most African societies, collective ethos are increasingly problematic to the very survival of expressive cultures like music. Individual musicians cannot effectively live off the traditional music they make without offending their traditional societies. Without meaningful incomes from traditional music, musicians cannot contribute to traditional music because it is difficult in a collectivist environment to exploit the opportunities of the global intellectual property regimes. This situation is likely to undermine the future of traditional expressive cultures. Given the problematic nature of the collective ownership of music, this study examined the perspectives of traditional musicians towards ownership of traditional music in Uganda in light of the changing socioeconomic, cultural and political environments. The study framed the collective approach to ownership of traditional music as problematic to musicians. Three central questions were examined: What are the traditional musician’s life experiences and work environments in Uganda’s current socioeconomic and cultural environment? What are the perceptions of Uganda’s traditional musicians towards ownership of creative works or expressions? How do musicians’ life experiences and work environments shape their perceptions and construction of ownership of creative expressions? The study employed a critical cultural analytical and theoretical framework to question the value of collectivism that requires musicians to live by an increasingly misplaced cultural practice. Qualitative data was collected using a phenomenological tools and procedures to capture musicians‘ life experiences and impact of those experiences on their views on ownership of traditional music. Nine individual and two group interviews were collected over a period of one month in two regions in Uganda, Busoga and Buganda. It was established that the current socioeconomic environment calls for a break from, or flexibility in, certain traditional views and approaches to traditional music. Specific legal remedies were recommended to enable musicians live off traditional music at the same time attempting to preserve the cultural elements in the music. That entails striking a balance between economic interests of individual musicians and the cultural values of their societies.

Scholars involved in gender research generally advocate the idea that gender subjectivities are based on active social construction and interaction and as such are amenable to change. Notions and values of masculinity therefore are cultural constructs that are reflected and articulated through symbolic systems such as spoken and written language. Fiction narratives in teens’ magazines are one form of textual media content in which these values can be expressed. The purpose of this study was to explore the textual representations of American values of masculinity in 56 contemporary fiction stories of Boys’ Life magazine by conducting a qualitative content analysis. The study used the values of the Scout Law as one definition of masculinity formulated by the Boy Scouts of America, one of the nation’s leading youth organizations and publisher of Boys’ Life magazine. Through close reading and thematic coding, this study revealed, on the one hand, that the values, with two exceptions, are well-reflected in different meanings and contexts and constructed through the use of different literary devices in the narratives. The study also indicated, on the other hand, that the portrayal of these values may lead to a rather narrow definition of a boy’s life and contribute to the limited construction of traditional masculinity. Further, it appeared that social recognition is represented as an important aspect in terms of performing in accordance with the values of the Scout Law. The study discusses implications of these and other findings as well as suggestions for further research.

Thesis (M.Com.)(Informatics)--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes summary. Includes bibliographical references.

Globalization has, within academic, political and business circles alike, become a prominent buzzword of the past decade, conjuring a diversity of associations, connotations and attendant mythologies. The literature devoted to the issue of globalization is both vast in scope and diverse in nature, becoming increasingly prominent not only in academics and politics, but in the popular press, as well. The goal of this dissertation is to provide the reader with a map of themes, narratives, and characterizations related to globalization circulating in the United States in order to demonstrate the potential ways that individual thought on the issue is shaped by public discourse. A secondary goal is to critically examine specific texts to identify areas where their arguments overlap, conflict, or may be misconstrued due to weak or inaccurate evidence. By better understanding the map of rhetorical formations in widely-read texts regarding globalization, it may be possible for people to be better able to understand the concerns and intentions of those voicing various and often competing viewpoints.

Graph decompositions have useful applications in optimization problems that are categorized as NP-Hard. Modular Decomposition of a graph is a technique to decompose the graph into non-overlapping modules. A module M of an undirected graph G = (V, E) is commonly defined as a set of vertices such that any vertex outside of M is either adjacent or non-adjacent to all vertices in M . By the theory of modular decomposition, the modules can be categorized as parallel, series or prime modules. Series modules which are maximal and are also cliques are termed as simple series modules or critical cliques. There are modular decomposition algorithms that can be used to decompose the graph into modules and obtain critical cliques. In this current research, we present a new algorithm to decompose the graph into critical cliques without applying the process of modular decomposition. Given a simple, undirected graph G = (V, E), the runtime complexity of our proposed algorithm is O(|V| + |E|) under certain input constraints. Thus, one of our main contributions is to propose a novel algorithm for decomposing a simple, undirected graph directly into critical cliques. We apply the idea of critical cliques to propose a new way for solving the influence maximization problem in online social networks. Influence maximization in online social networks is the problem of identifying a small, initial set of influential individuals which can influence the maximum number of individuals in the network. In this research, we propose a new model of online social networks based on the notion of critical cliques. We utilize the properties of critical cliques to assign parameters for our proposed model and select an initial set of activation nodes. We then simulate the influence propagation process in the online social network using our proposed model and experimentally compare our approach to the greedy algorithm proposed by Kempe, Kleinberg and Tardos. Our main contribution in the influence maximization research is to propose a new model of online social network taking into account the structural properties of the social network graph and a new, faster algorithm for determining the initial set of influential individuals in the online social network.