The aim of this paper is to examine the intersection of tourism and memoirs in the United States specifically how specific travel memoirs function as tourist attractions. This investigation employs performer-centered analysis as a method of inquiry in order to gain insight on tourist experience as well as concepts of travel, imagination and embodiment. The paper also employs MacCannell’s Semiotics of Attraction as a framework to illustrate the presence of the following categories: tourist, sight, and marker. The presence and the relationships established between these categories establish Into Thin Air and Almost Somewhere: Twenty-eight Days on the John Muir Trail can both be defined and function as tourist attractions.

In Southeast Asia, many impoverished Indonesian women migrate to Singapore to work as domestic workers in households. Though employers are required to provide domestic workers with food and housing, there have been numerous reports of employers withholding food. This thesis explores the ways in which Indonesian domestic workers navigate towards food security in the context of social relations in their employers’ homes in Singapore. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2016, where I interviewed Indonesian domestic workers and employers. Not only were the majority of domestic workers experiencing food insecurity, food was additionally symbolically used to denigrate them. Drawing on a concept I term markings, which denotes the process of demarcating social roles through symbols and boundaries, I argue that employers control food in order to produce markings that construct and reinforce relations of inequality in households. These relations around food emotionally and physically shape domestic workers in ways that allow them to know their positions in the household. Despite their subordination, domestic workers use strategies to contest and endure their unequal conditions in Singapore in ways that demonstrate their resilience. This research demonstrates the importance of protecting the food security of migrant women, and advocates for the fair treatment of domestic workers. / Graduate / 2018-12-05

Calculus at the university level is taken by thousands of undergraduate students each year. However, a significant number of students struggle with the subject, resulting in poor problem solving, low achievement, and high failure rates in the calculus courses overall (e.g., Kaput, 1994; Szydlik, 2000; Tall, 1985; Tall & Ramos, 2004; White & Mitchelmore, 1996). This is cause for concern as the lack of success in university calculus creates further barriers for students who require the course for their programs of study. This study examines this issue from the perspective of Tall’s Three Worlds of Mathematics (Tall, 2004a, 2004b, 2008), a theory of mathematics and mathematical cognitive development. A fundamental argument of Tall’s theory suggests that connecting between the different mathematical worlds, named the Embodied-Conceptual, Symbolic-Proceptual, and Formal-Axiomatic worlds, is essential for full cognitive development and understanding of mathematical concepts. Working from this perspective, this research examined, through the use of calculus task questions and semi-structured interviews, how fifteen undergraduate calculus students made connections between the different mathematical worlds for the calculus topics of limits and derivatives. The analysis of the findings suggests that how the students make connections can be described by eight different Response Categories. The study also found that how the participants made connections between mathematical worlds might be influenced by the type of questions that are asked and their experience in calculus courses. I infer that these Response Categories have significance for this study and offer potential for further study and educational practice. I conclude by identifying areas of further research in regards to calculus achievement, the Response Categories, and other findings such as a more detailed study of the influence of experience.

Les rapports du corps et de la médecine n'ont cessé de se transformer tout au long de notre histoire. Cette évolution a été marquée de façon radicale par la révolution scientifique figurée par Copernic pour ce qui est de l'univers et Vésale pour ce qui est du corps. Sous l'égide de Descartes le corps - déjà infériorisé par le dualisme de Platon - s'est vu réduit au statut d'objet de science, de mécanique, par la suprématie du dualisme épistémologique. Le but de ce travail est tout d'abord d'essayer de comprendre le cheminement d'une telle réduction, d'en montrer ses origines ainsi que ses dérives passées et actuelles avec leurs conséquences éthiques dès lors qu'il s'agit de penser le corps et, par lui, la médecine. Ensuite il faudra se poser la question de savoir dans quel cadre concevoir ce corps pour lui rendre toute sa place, celle que lui donne l'incarnation qui fait du patient une totalité irréductible à sa maladie. / The relationships of the body and the medicine did not stop being transformed throughout our history. The evolution was marked in a radical way by the scientific revolution inaugurated by Copernic as for the universe and by Vésale as for the body. Under the aegis of Galilee then of Descartes, the body – already underestimated by the dualism of Platoon – saw itself reduced in the status of object of science, mechanics, under the ascendancy of the epistemological dualism. The purpose of this work is first of all to try to understand the progression of such a reduction, to show its origins as well as its past and current drifts, with their ethical consequences, since it is a question of thinking the body and, by it, of the medicine. Then the question arises to know which frame must be conceived to give back the body its entire place that the embodiment gives to it making the patient an inflexible whole which can't be confined to illness.

Being treated as a piece of meat has long been an issue around which feminist concerns regarding the representation of women and practices of cultural consumption coalesce. However, as the Humanities undergo a paradigm shift away from intrinsically privileging the human subject, this demands new consideration of how cultural figurations of meat can work to challenge the terms of the species border. This thesis offers close readings of contemporary film, literature, visual art, music and live performance produced between the late 1980s and the present day that stage carnal encounters with meat. I unite these figurations under the term ‘meaty bodies’, exploring how they question the supposedly self-evident line between the flesh that we are and the flesh that we may eat. Situating its theoretical approach within the tension between psychoanalytic and cultural theories of taboo and abjection and emerging ‘new materialist’ conceptualisations of matter, this thesis contributes to the project of disrupting the primacy of ‘the human’ and the workings of the species divide. The thesis begins by examining three cultural productions that humanise meat by using it to speak to themes of vulnerability, trauma and sexual desire respectively. The photographic series Perishables (Yolaçan, 2002–04), the live art performance My New York (Zhang, 2002) and the pornographic novella The Butcher (Reyes, 1988) utilise meat to speak to issues surrounding human embodiment. However, I suggest that this typically decouples meat from the animal body from which it derives. The thesis subsequently turns to four cultural productions that more directly engage with the violence inherent in the naturalisation of meat as animal body. Analysing the experimental text Diary of a Steak (Levy, 1997), the concept album One Pig (Herbert, 2011), the live art performance inthewrongplaceness (O’Reilly, 2004–09) and the feature film Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin, 2012), the thesis positions these cultural productions as a challenge to the species border through their attentiveness to contemporary issues surrounding meat consumption and production, including discussion of ‘meat panics’ such as the 1980s/1990s BSE crisis, the development of tissue-cultured meat and impending food scarcity. These close readings show that what I term a ‘carnal equivalence’ between human and animal flesh can be a powerful means of questioning the terms of the species border. Yet, in rendering their encounters with meat frequently difficult and strained, these cultural productions stage and generate ambivalence as integral to our relations with meat consumption and production in the contemporary moment. The thesis suggests that this uncertainty is indicative of a wider impasse within the Humanities, as the field seeks to decentralise ‘the human’ and the discourses that are invested in the continued dominance of this category, yet is still shaped by attachments and anxieties that render this move more difficult than may otherwise be supposed.

L’appropriation des biotechnologies par les artistes en vue de créer des œuvres de « bioart » a souvent été considérée comme une démarche transgressive par rapport à la frontière qui délimite l’art et la science. Ma recherche vise à analyser un corpus de productions bioartistiques (Que le cheval vive en moi du duo Art orienté objet, Natural History of the Enigma, d’E. Kac et Ear on Arm de Stelarc) afin de mettre en perspective les « paramètres » par lesquels ont juge qu’il y a, notamment, appropriation et transgression, c’est-à-dire qu’il y a « art ». À partir de l’idée que les œuvres de bioart sont celles qui mettent à contribution les biotechnologies pour leur spécificité, c’est-à-dire la capacité à transformer le vivant, une analyse sémiologique met en évidence l’« incarnation » comme principale stratégie plastique du faire art dans les œuvres du corpus. En expérimentant les œuvres, le spectateur expérimente leurs conditions biologiques d’existence, qui sont similaires aux siennes. Il prend alors acte de cette incarnation, ce qu’une analyse phénoménologique met à jour. En comparant les modes de médiation des œuvres du corpus à ceux des icônes byzantines, une analyse médiologique révèle enfin l’équivalence entre incarnation et médiation et la transparence des œuvres de bioart à la technique dont la cybernétique est facteur de totalisation. Il semble qu’en créant des sujets vivants technicisés, les œuvres de bioart posent un jalon à l’évolution des objets techniques, telle qu’elle a été conceptualisée par Simondon : c’est l’intuition sur laquelle se referme cette thèse. / The purpose of my research is to define the aesthetic aims of works of bioart. Its starting point is the need to make an aesthetic analysis of some productions of this movement in order to understand its strategies, for these are wrongly considered as coming from Duchamp’s readymade, since bioartists tend to use biotechnologies to create works of art. This research suggests “bioart” gathers various works which involve biotechnologies inasmuch as they manage to transform the living. In this thesis, three bioartworks are studied: Que le cheval vive en moi, by French artists Art Objet orienté, Natural History of the Enigma, by American artist E. Kac and Ear on Arm by the Australian Stelarc. In order to define the aesthetic aims of these three works of art, an analysis grid inspired by semiology highlights aesthetical mechanisms. This analysis shows that “embodiment” is the main plastic way to art. This embodiment provokes a “sense of presence” in the works of the corpus, which can be identified as their “aura”. The aura allows the viewer to become aware of the biological realm of existence he shares with the artworks themselves. Therefore the aura is the manifestation of the contact between the viewer and the biotechnological meaning of the work. This implies that the works of the corpus embody their messages. The corpus has been compared to the Byzantine icons, which also “embody” their messages, in order to understand to what extent the biotechnological production of the living in art represents such a shift in art theory. By using biotechnologies, the works of the corpus testify about cybernetics, which is one of the main organizing principles of globalization and of the increasing presence of technology in human ways of life. It even appears that with the creation of technical living subjects, they pave the way for the evolution of technical objects, as it was conceptualized by Simondon – this is how the thesis comes to its conclusion.

The majority of academic study on the epistle to the Colossians focuses primarily on issues related to Christology, the identification of the heresy that threatened the church, or the ongoing debate surrounding authorship of the epistle. Current research leaves several lacunae in the broader understanding of the writer’s intent with the Colossian epistle. There is very little attention given to the existence of a process by which the Colossian believers can mature in Christ and face any theologically aberrant teachings with a growing faith and solid doctrine. There is also a gap in the research within the field of Christian spirituality regarding the application of specific principles of spirituality to sacred canonical texts and early Christian writings. This thesis seeks to fill these research gaps through the use of socio-rhetorical strategies and principles of Christian spirituality. The primary text for this research is the pericope of Colossians 3.1-17. The research on the epistle examines the pericope for an embedded process of character transformation by which the Colossian believers grow towards Christlikeness. As the Colossians grow in maturity, their lived experience of God changes. There are spiritualities embedded within the text that begin to impact the growth of the believers through the embodiment of the text. The identification of these spiritualities as well as the process of character transformation allows for the filling of research gaps and a richer understanding of the epistle writer’s intent. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / D. Phil. (Theology)

Through qualitative and exploratory research, this thesis project investigates how body stimulation from haptic feedback affects user’s feeling of presence in VR environments. It identifies that in current time,the development of haptic feedback in VR lags severely behind the advancements made in visual and auditory feedback, and that somecompanies disregard its importance. Simultaneously, new companies are emerging which focus entirely on haptics in VR. Since development is still an early stage, this thesis highlights now as a unique opportunity to explore the thoughts professionals have on the topic, as well as try to find out which exact haptics are important for feeling presence to serve as a guide to those developing such systems.Finally, to tackle this issue, it is imperative to understand certain theoretical concepts such as affordances and embodiment, and how they change in the world of VR. This understanding can contribute to Interaction Design knowledge.

This study will examine the representation and embodiment of the body part eye(s), in proverbs. The research is cross-linguistic as the proverbs analysed are in the languages English, Swedish, and Japanese. Information about the origins of proverbs, their expansion across the globe, their use in order to embellish everyday communication in all different types of languages, even those belonging to cultures not similar to the Western norm, will be discussed with references to sources based in the area of Paremiology. The study will also investigate cultural markers found in the proverbs and how the metaphoric interpretations of eye(s) are displayed through our bodily experiences. In order to analyse the representation of eye(s) in the proverbs, through metaphoric concepts, this study will employ Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory. Categories which will accompany the conceptual metaphors are based on one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of ‘eye’. Thereafter, an analysis is conducted regarding eyes(s) in the example proverbs. The results of the analysis showed that there are quite a few similarities in all three languages. However, the western languages differ from the Japanese language in regards to how the proverbs are worded. Further, cultural markers could only be found in one example in the Japanese proverbs.

Raggare is a unique and rather understudied subculture within Scandinavia that emerged in the 1950s and has been vibrant since. They are noted for their affection towards 1950s American aesthetics and, most importantly, American vintage cars. In Sweden, these cars are known as raggarbilar, and I contend these vehicles are central to how social interactions occur between raggare. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how cars create social bonds by looking at raggarbilar through the lens of raggare and in this way investigating how and why the cars fascinate people. I use sensory methodology to examine how cars are approached and embraced by raggare, arguing that sensuous experiences are fundamental to the perception of the materiality of cars. Theoretically, I use materiality and material culture as guidelines for how objects enforce cultural and social significance. More specifically, Alfred Gell’s notion of the technology of enchantment is utilized to understand the effects and social agency of artefacts and I develop this notion further with what I call the sensory enchantment of materiality. During ten weeks of ethnographic fieldwork that took place in different garages in Västernorrland county, along with semi-structured interviews and the usage of visual instruments, I explored the interconnectedness between cars, people, and environment to investigate how cars are objects capable of enchantment and persuasion to raggare. Overall, raggarbilar are multi-sensory objects that are perceived as different from other cars and create certain phenomenological experiences that are shared between raggare, and thus, bring the subculture together.