Foundation Programme (FP) students at the University of Namibia (UNAM) Oshakati Campus display inadequate academic writing abilities. As their aim is to gain admittance to UNAM main campus science-related courses, it is vital to have effective academic writing skills. This action research (AR) study is a comparison of three writing programmes, the process approach, the modeling approach, and the process genre approach which were implemented separately to three different class groups in 2008 and 2009 to improve the writing skills of students and the teaching practice of the researcher. The effects of the interventions were examined using a combination of the quantitative and qualitative research methods. Data were collected using questionnaires, pre- and post-intervention essays and laboratory reports and interviews. The findings indicate that all three approaches improved the academic writing skills of FP students. The process genre approach had a higher rate of effect than the other two approaches. / English Studies / M. A. (Specialisation TESOL)

Under 2000-talet har det producerats och spridits mängder av betydande forskning som publicerats via databaser. En betydelsefull länk i kunskapsspridningen utgörs av akademin som i dag står för den största andelen av vetenskapliga publikationer. I denna historiografiskt inriktade undersökning kartläggs och undersöks en del av svensk historieforskning och historieskrivning som ägt rum under 2000-talet. Den vetenskapliga disciplin som undersöks inom det humanistiska fältet är historievetenskapen, avgränsat till de resultat av forskning som studenter gjort runtom på de svenska universiteten och högskolorna, i ämnet historia. Källmaterialet består av studentuppsatser som publicerats i databasen Digitala vetenskapliga arkivet, DiVA vilket i dag ses som det nationellt mest använda systemet för publikationsdata, med över 400 tusen publicerade fulltexter varav antal nedladdade uppgår över 53 miljoner gånger. Genom empiriska och teoretiska studier och bruket av både kvantitativa och kvalitativa metoder analyseras metadata, för att ge svar och resultat över frågan om vad studenter i det svenska utbildningssystemet, på universitet och högskolor skriver historia om under 2000-talet. För att få fram svar fungerade bibliometri som kunskapsområde och frågan om vilka nyckelord som dominerar och var de mest frekvent använda i taggningen (definitionerna) av forskningsresultaten ställdes. Delfrågan om hur bruket av nyckelord ser ut över tid användes för att få fram och se trend över resultat. Teoretiskt ramverk i undersökningen och läsning av de kvantitativa resultaten utgick från Kuhns teori om paradigm. Resultat visar att Genus, Historiebruk, Arkeologi, Historiemedvetande, Historiedidaktik, Identitet, Osteologi, Andra världskriget, Diskursanalys, Kalla kriget, Samer, Laborativ arkeologi och Utbildningshistoria utgör några ledande sakområden som studenterna skrivit historia om under 2000-talet. Resultat visar också att det nationella paradigmet är ledande för studenternas historieforskning, även om USA, Sovjetunionen, Jugoslavien, Japan, Finland, Sápmi och Israel förekommer frekvent. Avslutningsvis visade föreliggande undersökning att metadata kan användas som resurs i historieforskning samtidigt som det historiska perspektivet vidgas. / During the 2000s, numerous significant researches have been produced and disseminated through databases. An important link in the dissemination of knowledge consists of the academy, which today accounts for the largest proportion of scientific publications. In this historiographically oriented study, a part of Swedish history research and history writing that took place during the 2000s is mapped and examined. The scientific discipline that is investigated in the humanities field is the science of history, limited to the results of research that students have done around the Swedish universities and colleges, in the subject of history. The source material consists of student essays published in the database Digital Scientific Archive, DiVA, which today is seen as the nationally most used system for publication data, with over 400 thousand published full texts, of which the number downloaded is over 53 million times.  Through empirical and theoretical studies and the use of both quantitative and qualitative methods, metadata is analyzed, to provide answers and results on the question of what students in the Swedish education system, at universities and colleges write history about during the 2000s. To obtain answers, bibliometrics functioned as an area of ​​knowledge and the question of which keywords dominated and were the most frequently used in the tagging (definitions) of the research results was asked. The sub-question about how the use of keywords looks over time was used to bring out and see the trend over results. Theoretical framework in the study and reading of the quantitative results was based on Kuhn's theory of paradigm.  Results indicate that Gender, History Use, Archeology, History Consciousness, History Didactics, Identity, Osteology, World War II, Discourse Analysis, the Cold War, Sami, Laboratory Archeology and Educational History are some leading subject areas that students wrote history about during the 2000s. Results also point out that the national paradigm is leading for students' history research, although the United States, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Japan, Finland, Sápmi and Israel occur frequently. In conclusion, the present study showed that metadata can be used as a resource in history research while broadening the historical perspective.

Le but de cette recherche est de rendre compte de quelques dominantes de l’espace intellectuel roumain lors du passage du socialisme d’État à la démocratie représentative et des effets dans différentes sphères d’activité intellectuelle dus aux changements dans l’ordre social tenant de l’installation des du marché et de la disparition progressive d’une économie régie par l’État. Le terrain de la recherche est constitué par un groupement d'intellectuels mis en place les derniers jours de décembre 1989, au moment même des transformations politiques déclenchées par la chute du régime communiste en Roumaine. Le Groupe pour le Dialogue Social (GDS) fut le premier et resta le plus influent et stable groupement de la période postcommuniste ayant dans sa composition des auteurs ayant acquis leur reconnaissance sous le communisme, ainsi que de jeunes scientifiques formés également avant 1989. L’une des raisons de cette réussite consiste dans l’autorité culturelle accumulée par sa publication, l’hebdomadaire 22, qui se distingua parmi les publications intellectuelles et contribua de façon paradigmatique à la redéfinition de cet espace marqué après 1989 par l’intérêt accru pour des questions politiques et le monde politique. La nouveauté et la singularité du Groupe consistèrent en la durabilité du cumul des notoriétés : prestige obtenu par la majorité des membres comme auteurs de la période communiste, notoriété acquise par d'autres en tant que dissidents, mais aussi reconnaissance gagnée par certains autres à partir de 1990. Ces types de notoriété mis ensemble se sont manifestés par des engagements, collectifs et individuels, dont les formes furent multiples et diverses, consécutives et simultanées : textes publiés dans l'hebdomadaire du Groupe, interventions à l’occasion des rencontres avec des politiques, lettres ouvertes, expertise fournie aux organisations civiques ou à des structures politiques, articles publiés dans la presse spécialisée, essais et études politiques, participation à des associations civiques, enrôlement dans des partis politiques. La notoriété obtenue par bon nombre d’intellectuels du GDS, la durabilité du Groupe, sa tribune, 22, des investissements successifs dans la politique, du Groupe mais aussi individuellement, donnent du pouvoir à ses (re)présentations lorsque l’espace politique se structure autour du refus du communisme, l’« anticommunisme », et des anciens « communistes », membres de la nomenklatura surtout. Le GDS inclut des représentants des professions littéraires qui ont acquis leur reconnaissance et sont même devenus des figures notoires avant 1989, mais le GDS n’hésitera pas à intégrer aussi bien des journalistes que des juristes qui n’ont pas acquis leur reconnaissance comme auteurs, ne sont ni artistes ni scientifiques. L’hétérogénéité qui le caractérise, à travers une analyse de leurs trajectoires sociales et professionnelles et de leurs liens avec d’autres intellectuels et des politiques, permet d’esquisser des idées sur la situation et la place des intellectuels dans l’espace social pendant la période communiste mais surtout après 1989, et non seulement de ceux qui sont des membres de ce groupement. Ce travail traite des pratiques proprement intellectuelles, mais surtout discursives, dans une analyse des textes à visée scientifiques et des textes journalistiques, regardant du côté des modes et des moyens d’occuper l’espace public formé par ces discours et ceux qu’ils suscitaient. Empruntant une approche socio-historique et s’inscrivant dans une approche relationnelle, ce travail porte sur les diverses formes que prend la politisation au sein des champs spécifiques – militantisme, entrée en politique, mobilisation politique et démobilisation des intellectuels – et sur les professions intellectuelles à l’aube et à l’épreuve de la démocratie et au service du processus de démocratisation. / The purpose of this research is to account for some of the dominant features of the Romanian intellectual space in connection with the regime change that followed the collapse of state socialism. Transition to pluralism and representative democracy effected in different on the spheres of intellectual life, which echoed the transfiguration of the social order from a centralized and planned economy to new economic relations governed by the market. This research is focused on a group of intellectuals set up during the last days of December 1989 at the time of the political transformations triggered by the fall of the communist regime in Romania, and which avowed goal was to make sense of this dramatic change.The Group for Social Dialogue (GDS) has been the first such association to be established and remains the most influential and stable group of its kind. The group typically includes authors that acquired public recognition under the communist regime as well as young scientists that completed their academic and intellectual training in the last decade of state socialism. One of the reasons for their success was the cultural authority capitalized by the group’s weekly publication, 22, widely regarded as the most prominent intellectual outlets of post-communism. The regular contributors to the journal were instrumental in redefining a public space marked after 1989 by an increased interest for the political issues and politics. The distinctiveness and the sustainability of this venture were the cumulative result of the personal prestige abs cultural authority enjoyed by most of the members of the group either as well published and widely read authors of the communist period, or as former dissidents. This prestige and authority was gradually on other members, whose public career started after 1990. These types of notoriety, joined together, took many different forms of engagement, collective and individual, consecutive and simultaneous: texts published in the journal of the Group, public statements during various meetings with politicians, open letters, expertise provided to civic organizations or political structures, papers published in the specialised press, political essays and studies, participation in civic associations, political party enrolment. The personal notoriety gained by a considerable number of intellectuals of the GDS, the resilience of the Group, the circulation of its journal 22, sequential investments in politics, of the Group itself but also individually, conferred a significant amount of clout to its (re)presentations of politics at a time when the political realm was structured around the rejection of communism (the post-communist “anti-communism”), as opposed to the electoral and social influence exercised by former “communists”, especially by those members of the nomenklatura who succeeded to set the tone of post-communist politics. The Group included representatives of literary professions who achieved the recognition and have even become famous before 1989, but the GDS does not hesitate to integrate also journalists and lawyers who did not reach recognition as authors, artists or scientists. The research was by and large devoted to isolate and examine intellectual practices, especially discursive practices, in the analysis of scientific and journalistic texts, looking at ways and means deployed by intellectuals in order to occupy the public space. In a socio-historical approach and in a vision inspired nu the sociology of relations, this research was concerned with various forms taken by the politicisation within specific fields – militancy, entrance into politics, political mobilisation and demobilisation of the intellectuals –, and intellectual professions at the dawn of the democratic regime.

This master thesis is devoted to Jana Stroblova, the Czech poet, novelist and translator from Russian language. The thesis is aimed at several goals: 1) to summarize and unite the known facts about life of this author and try to capture her personality, 2) to describe the relationship of Jana Stroblova to the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, as the vast part of Stroblova's translations is dedicated to her, 3) to establish the similarities between the personalities of Stroblova and Tsvetaeva as well as to find the parallels in their poems, and, afterwards, to clarify the reasons that led Stroblova to decision to translate Tsvetaeva, 4) to summarize the reflections of Stroblova's translations while emphasizing the translations of Tsvetaeva's work and to use these reflections to define Stroblova's translation methodology, 5) to confront the findings of the thesis with opinions of Jana Stroblova during an interview with her. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Whereas contemporary debates in Latin American studies addressing sovereignty often focus on dictatorships and the transitions to democratic governments in Latin America in the late twentieth century, Sovereignties Displaced: Avant-Garde Prose and Authoritarianism in Spain, Chile, and Argentina (1923-1936) adopts a transatlantic framework and directs critical attention to the cultural production of the interwar period. The historical and cultural events preceding and following 1929 are connected to World War I, the political crisis of democratic systems, and the global socioeconomic instability of the period. The three countries studied in the present work would be affected by these conditions, sharing an almost synchronic development of the authoritarian governments of Miguel Primo de Rivera in Spain (1923-1930), of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo in Chile (1927-1931), and José Félix Uriburu in Argentina (1930-1932). Additionally, the rise of authoritarianism and the decay of parliamentary institutions characterizing this epoch condition and inscribe the political essays and avant-garde novels composed by the intellectuals and writers analyzed in this study: from Spain, María Zambrano (1904-1991), Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888-1963), and Benjamín Jarnés (1888-1949); from Chile, Alberto Edwards Vives (1874-1932), Juan Emar (1893-1964), and Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948); and from Argentina, Ramón Doll (1896-1970), Norah Lange (1905-1972), and Roberto Arlt (1900-1942). It should be noted that while considering national circumstances, my argumentation is divided into sections organized not by country, but rather by subject matter: a methodological and theoretical introduction, three analytical chapters, and concluding remarks. Established critical assessments of the avant-gardes, as offered by experts like Renato Poggioli (1907-1963), have underscored that democratic forms of government would provide the initial conditions of possibility of the historical avant-gardes. Other scholars, however, have recognized the interdependency of early twentieth century artistic discourses, revolutionary ideas, and authoritarianism. Informed by the theorization of sovereignty and democracy of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), and the concept of community of Roberto Esposito (1950-), my research examines, in political essays and vanguard novels, the opposition of individual vis-à-vis collective forms of rule. The texts of my corpus manifest a recurrent concern relating to the tension between self-rule and collective-rule, a dynamic which organizes and destabilizes avant-garde formations themselves. Consequently, I analyze the philosophical and political ramifications of these authors’ defense, negation, or destabilization of the individual-collective opposition in the context of the deterioration of parliamentarism. In my first chapter, I examine the following essays that represent a range of political positions from the interwar years: Horizonte del liberalismo (1930) by María Zambrano, Liberalismo en la literatura y la política (Con una segunda edición de: “Democracia mal menor”) (1934, n/d) by Ramón Doll, and La fronda aristocrática en Chile (1928) by Alberto Edwards Vives. Framed by the sociological assessments of José Ortega y Gasset in La rebelión de las masas (1930), this chapter considers these essayists’ observations regarding mass politics and the role of political and economic elites. I foreground the ethical problems relating to these authors’ conceptions of the human subject and their concomitant formulations of governance, deriving from various ideological orientations. The essayists’ comparable anxieties regarding the limits of democratic politics reveal the complexities of the period and serve as a springboard for the subsequent chapters that study the politics of avant-garde novels. In my second chapter, shifting from essayistic discourse to vanguard fiction, I analyze philosophical oppositions central to the configuration of sovereignty, and to the theory and practice of democracy. These tensions organize various components of the following novels: Un año (1935) by Juan Emar (pseudonym of Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi), 45 días y 30 marineros (1933) by Norah Lange, and El caballero del hongo gris (1928) by Ramón Gómez de la Serna. I demonstrate that, although these narratives do not contain explicit references to the emergence of authoritarianism and the erosion of parliamentarism of the period, these narratives are structured by problems that have implications for a thinking of issues relating to sovereignty and democracy. These novels similarly present how individuals interact with groups, such that it becomes imperative to consider the political consequences of these relations in order to critique, for example, fraternalistic and nationalistic notions of political filiation. My final chapter studies the narrative presentations of radical political projects that aim to restructure society in Los siete locos (1929) by Roberto Arlt, La próxima (1934) by Vicente Huidobro, and Lo rojo y lo azul (1932) by Benjamín Jarnés. In contrast to the narratives included in the second chapter, these avant-garde novels establish an explicit dialogue with the conditions of crisis of the interwar years. From insurrections and utopian settlements, to revolutionary military revolts, these narrations depict small vanguard groups that propose various plots that seek to radically reshape the social order. Even though poetry is often positioned as the paradigmatic form of vanguard literary expression, my research theorizes the understudied phenomenon of Hispanic avant-garde prose. In particular, I account for the variation among avant-garde novels of the period, by sustaining that there are gradations of vanguard narrative depending on different factors that range from the transparency or opacity of linguistic expression, to the organization of the narrative material. In this sense, some novels considered vanguardist, while approaching a certain radicality in terms of language and form, may incorporate elements of the realist-naturalist novelistic tradition. Likewise, I assert the importance of attending to the varied uses of meta-reflexive procedures in Hispanic vanguard prose. Given their implicit and explicit interaction with contemporary historical conditions and political and artistic discourses of the 1920s and 1930s, I contend that the essays and avant-garde novels analyzed offer a fertile ground to examine the nature of sovereignty, while also presenting, in some crucial instances, potential images of what a democracy worthy of this name could look like. / Spanish