This essay explores Operation Cobra based on a social constructivist perspective, according to social constructivist Ian Hacking. To do this, I examined newspaper articles from that event. The purpose of this paper was to examine how the border between extortioners and terrorists was constructed during the Swedish 80's and to examine why the perpetrator was constructed as a extortion and not a terrorist. I also examined how a terrorist from the eighties differs from the present-day terrorist. My result shows that the limits of what the perpetrator is being constructed depends on the newspaper articles and how the journalists have described him. He was designed as a terrorist, extortionist, correct, pedant, and also a madman. Operation Cobra took place in Sweden in 1983-1985 and has been described as Sweden's biggest extortion event.

This dissertation examines the aesthetics of Adam Smith. It argues that, despite appearances to the contrary, Smith not only articulated ideas on the subject and was engaged in the aesthetic debates of his time, but that he in many ways innovates on and challenges received opinion—he thus differs significantly from some of his better known contemporaries, including Edmund Burke and David Hume. For this reason, he is not merely a major thinker who happened to dabble in aesthetics; on the contrary, he considered the subject, which appears in nearly all his works, important, and often interrogates its issues in a more studied way. My project thus makes a case for Smith as a significant thinker in the history of aesthetics, one who merits renewed attention. This study does so by investigating the major aesthetic issues of the day, which Smith in fact discusses. It begins by examining Smith’s remarks on taste—the aesthetic issue of the century—which occur largely in Theory of Moral Sentiments. Though seemingly tangential, his discussion of taste is significant as it argues against the predominant eighteenth-century current that maintained the existence of a standard. He also challenges theorists such as Hume who made aesthetic experience classless and, especially via sympathy, disinterested. The study next investigates Smith’s aesthetic normativity and what are for him valid aesthetic judgments, which can be reconciled with his remarks problematizing taste. Here too, Smith appears to argue against the predominant impulse that sought to ground valid aesthetic experience in the immediate; in doing so, Smith demystifies and democratizes aesthetic experience. Finally, the dissertation investigates tragedy, by far the literary genre that most interested Smith, and which also drew attention from better known theorists. The paradox of tragedy—why readers and spectators are attracted to painful representations—was an aesthetic issue that vexed many thinkers of the century, and although Smith appears to ignore the issue, we have in his moral theory a solution to the paradox, one that is unique and more satisfying than those of his contemporaries. The project concludes by examining Smith’s relation to neoclassical dramatic theory. Though superficially appearing complacent in uncritically adopting neoclassical doctrine, Smith, even here, is being original.

This thesis uses insight drawn from fieldwork among people developing a civic parade in Manchester over 2011-12 to analyse what happens in the translation of ideas into entities for display. It argues for creativity as an adaptive process, a responsive, dynamic activity manifested by parade makers, as they sought to realise the imagined event. It traces the roles that underpinned parade production and how people made sense and use of allocated responsibilities, while working within and through organisational boundaries. It situates the parade as an ‘art object’ (Gell 1998), constituted of assemblages at different scales (De Landa 2006), each embedded in a web of relationships to show how: a civic attempt to bring a public into being provides insight on the constituting organisational structures; the operational style of the arts organisation commissioned to produce the parade, led to imagining it into existence; and how two community groups responded to the parade parameters according to their own social dynamics. The thesis builds on ethnographic analyses of collaborative activities to consider how organisational shapes combine and how their constitutions substantially affect evolving entities. Situating creativity as an adaptive process separates creative activities from art practices by emphasising how supporting people to respond productively to changing circumstances encourages them to be creative. This thesis makes an original contribution to anthropology by showing through ethnography how creativity is a process, enacted through purposeful adaptation to circumstances in order to realise something tangible. It also encourages the development of a comparative framework for contemplating the extent to which different cultural contexts enable adaptive endeavours.

Research in word association studies found that children give predominantly syntagmatic responses (responses from different form classes from stimuli). English children were found to undergo a shift to paradigmatic (responses from the same form classes as stimuli) before age ten (referred to as S-P shift) which is the adult norm. On the other hand, Japanese children do not have S-P shift, and Japanese adults' responses are dominantly syntagmatic (Moran 1968). Leicester (1981) collected English word association responses from Japanese beginner and advanced learners of English as a second language and found S-P shift like increase of paradigmatic responses as English ability improves. This study purports to replicate Leicester's study among children. It is because the existence of the S-P shift in English of second-language learners whose first language does not have the shift would mean that second language learning parallels first language acquisition. Two main hypothesis were tested: 1. That Japanese children learning English as a second language will give dominantly syntagmatic responses in Japanese regardless of their grade level. 2. That Japanese children learning English as a second language of higher grade level will give more paradigmatic responses than those of lower grade level. Three subsidiary hypotheses were tested: 3. That Japanese children learning English as a second language will give different proportion of paradigmatic responses in Japanese and English. 4. That Japanese children learning English as a second language will give different pattern of responses in each language. 5. That Japanese children learning English as a second language will give fewer paradigmatic responses in English than monolingual English children of the same grade. Thirty students each of grades one, three, and five from two Japanese supplementary schools in Vancouver and Seattle were used as subjects. The subjects attend regular English classes at public schools, and therefore, their English ability was assumed to parallel their grade level. 27-item word association test was administered in English and Japanese. The ratio of paradigmatic responses was analyzed according to grade level. In agreement with literature, no grade difference was found among Japanese paradigmatic responses. In English, however, grade one subjects performed most paradigmatically, and thereby, no linear correspondence between English ability and English paradigmatic responses was found. Although English responses were close to the English norm, and Japanese responses to the Japanese norm, a significant number of Japanese responses were given in English association by grade five students. Significant difference in paradigmaticity was also found when two schools were compared as well as between two languages. Grade one students outperformed equivalent English monolingual children in English. It was speculated that young children develop L2 vocabulary systems independently and directly from the start resulting in higher rate of paradigmatic responses, whereas older children initially construct a one to one association between LI and L2, resulting in translation responses and low paradigmaticity in the case of English. School difference suggests that there are some other variables affecting word association. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

Research has shown that English-speaking adults tend to give response associates of the same grammatical and semantic class as the stimulus word on a word-association test, whereas children typically do not, instead responding syntactically (Thumb and Marbe, 1901; Esper, 1918; Deese, 1962; Fillenbaum and Jones, 1965; Entwisle, 1966). This pattern of responding seems to hold for many languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and German. This shift from syntactic responding to same form-class responding is often referred to as the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift. Moran and Murakawa (1968) and Moran (1973) found that Japanese adults responding in Japanese to word-association stimuli respond syntactically, that is, they seem not to experience the S-P shift. Two main hypotheses were tested. 1. That Japanese adults beginning to learn English would give predominantly syntagmatic responses to nouns, verbs, and adjectives in English, and thus differ significantly from native-English speakers. 2. That advanced Japanese students of English would give fewer syntagmatic responses in English than the beginner group and more closely parallel native-English speakers. Two subsidiary hypotheses tested were: 3. That the absolute count of responses to stimuli would correlate with scores obtained on a test of language proficiency by the Japanese subjects. 4. That the primary responses of the Japanese advanced group would more closely resemble the native-English responses than would those of the Japanese beginners. A timed multiple-response free-word association test comprising eight nouns, eight verbs, and eight adjectives was administered to forty adult native-English university students and forty-seven Japanese ESL students. The Japanese students were also given the University of British Columbia Language Institute Placement test. On the basis of the results of this language test, the top fifteen scorers were assigned to the Japanese advanced group, while the bottom fifteen scorers were assigned to the Japanese beginner group. The scores correlated well with the language instructor's own tests of language ability. The word-association tests were scored by two independent markers, and mean paradigmatic response tables were compiled. Analyses of variance and Pearson's product moment correlations were performed on the appropriate data. Results partially supported the hypothesis that Japanese beginners would respond syntagmatically to nouns, adjectives and verbs. Because this group responded paradigmatically to nouns the conclusion reached was that they were paralleling native-English-speaker development. There was no statistically significant difference in paradigmatic responding between the native-English group and the Japanese advanced group, the conclusion being that the more fluent a foreign student becomes in English, the more paradigmatic responses will be given. The absolute count of responses correlated overall with scores on the language test, but in isolation the Japanese beginner group responses did not correlate with the language-test score. It was thought that the reason for the non-correlation was a sampling error. The total frequency of the three most frequent responses for nouns was identical between the Japanese groups, but for all form-classes the Japanese advanced group was much closer to the native-English group. This convergence of commonality is taken as evidence that idiodynamic sets are constrained by the language being used. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

Föreliggande uppsats handlar om den svenska postmodernismen under 1980-talets senare hälft. I undersökningen analyseras debattinlägg och kritik i svensk dagspress där postmodernismen diskuteras. Syftet med uppsatsen är att belysa hur termen postmodernism konstruerades och brukades i svensk dagspress i den allmänna kulturella diskussionen.                       I undersökningens första del visar jag på hur den mediala diskussionen rörande postmodernism fungerar som en slags konstruerande process där den massmediala bilden av postmodernismen skapas. Kulturella aspekter av begreppet synliggörs där moderniseringsprocesser och teknologiska framsteg blir viktiga för att förstå vilken roll postmodernismen fick i sin samtid. Jag visar hur postmodernismen diskuterades utifrån två skikt, det rörde sig inte enbart som en estetisk kategori utan även om en kulturell förändringsprocess. I den andra delen konkretiseras och kontextualiseras den första delen genom en analys rörande den postmoderna konstdebatten där de kulturella aspekterna av begreppet blir tydligare. Jag argumenterar för att de två skikten av postmodernismen är sammankopplade på en implicit grund, där de kulturella aspekterna av begreppet konstrueras i relation till de estetiska diskussionerna. Jag lanserar därför två begrepp för att åskådliggöra begreppets två skikt, den estetiska postmodernismen och den kulturella postmodernismen. Skikten fungerar som ett åskådliggörande verktyg för att visa på hur begreppets användning bör tolkas som något större än enbart en benämning för ett estetiskt uttryck.

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This thesis aims to study notions of the USA in Aftonbladet and Expressen, the two major Swedish evening papers, during the American presidential elections of 1984 and 1996. This thesis examines how the predominance of Ronald Reagan's neoliberalism in the 1980s, the US victory in the ColdWar and the success of Bill Clinton's New Democrats in the 1990s affected the notions of the USA expressed in the a forementioned Swedish newspapers. In 1984 the notions were widely different between the two newspapers. Aftonbladet (socialdemocratic) had a very negative view of the USA. American politics was described as fundamentally corrupt, while the American society was seen as violent and harsh. Globally the USA was a destabilizing force and was primarily to blame for the escalating tensions with the Soviet Union. Expressen (liberal) had a more positive notion of the USA. American politics was seen as modern but shallow and callous, the last trait made even worse by the politics of Reagan. USA had a tremendous potential to do good in the world, but lacked the progressive leadership needed to do so. By 1996 the notions of the USA were interchangeable between the two papers. Both papers described American politics as shallow, unsympathetic and pandering to the middle-class. Neither corruption nor violence were mentioned. Under the leadership of Bill Clinton the USA was seen as a guardian of peace in the world.

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Come to this session to find out how you can meet demands to introduce coding in the K-2 classroom while still teaching your math standards!