In the always connected and fast-paced modern world we live in, questions about who we are, what our values are, and how to act are more pertinent than ever. What better way to reconcile these questions than turning to a seemingly out of touch 19th century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche? Interestingly enough, Nietzsche lamented that his contemporaries would never understand his work; similarly, he thought of his own work as directed towards ‘philosophers of the future.’ As any present moment passes and as history progresses, we, in a sense, run away from ourselves. This projecting of oneself into the future is unavoidable. Could one ever strictly pin down oneself in such a way to eliminate this problem of time? Of course not! This is an absurd question. What we should really be asking is can we at least exist in a way that is at one with the movement of time and the immediacy of modern technology? The purpose of this paper is to illuminate what would be involved in the task of figuring out how to authentically be-alongside-oneself in this way, qua Nietzsche. However, once we, if successful, are able to achieve a mode of being-alongside- ourselves, it is fruitless, in a sense; we are always being thrown into the future and are therefore no longer alongside-ourselves as such. This is why we shall pivot at the end of this paper in order to suggest how it is possible to orient our being- thrown-into-the-future in the most useful and timely way.

The emergence of modern art, and subsequently contemporary art, has brought with it a deep-rooted deliberation of the definition of beauty and its role in the realm of art. Unlike many representational artworks, contemporary art less often contains a beauty that is readily available on the surface of an artwork- an easy beauty. Instead, it often possesses a beauty that requires substantial reasoning and understanding- a difficult beauty. Just as the definition of beauty has and will continue to be culturally and historically changing, so must our methodological and pedagogical practices in regards to beauty and Aesthetics. As Art Educators, I feel it is our responsibility to help students process artworks that may contain these complexities (such as difficult beauty), in search of meaning and understanding. Through understanding is derived fluency in processing the artwork, which, in turn, leads to appreciation, and pleasure. The study conducted in this thesis investigated the relationship between beauty, ugliness, and meaning and explored the reasons behind judgments of beauty. It can be concluded, through the results, that beauty and meaning are closely related, and that meaning can have both positive and negative affects on judgments of beauty. Judgments of beauty are both cognitive and affective and appear to have social and cultural foundations, as well as a relationship to personal experience and meaning. Ultimately, strong personal meaning and experience, both positive and negative, outweighed physical, social, and cultural judgments of beauty. Meaning and experience greatly affect judgments of beauty. As educators, we can take the information gleaned from this study to enhance the ability of students to process artworks which contain complexities and may require understanding. As students become more able to recognize and process beauty in its many forms, the fluency in which they process such artworks will increase, thus promoting more positive aesthetic experiences. The children's book, Terrible the Beautiful Bear, contained in Chapter Six of this thesis, is an example of how to teach this concept to young children. Helping students become aware that beauty exists in curious and difficult places, and prompting them to search for meaning, gives students a greater capacity to take part in its pleasure.

This thesis examined framing practices used by leaders who participated in the Capacity Day 2007 event, which is organized by the World Bank Institute, as part of its Leadership Development Program. The study examined strategic uses of framing as a meaning-making tool. The framing strategies identified in this study were accomplished through the strategic use of language. Furthermore, the study recognized the implied negotiations of frames made by the skilled 'framers' and found that situations are continuously 'reframable'. Unsuccessful framing attempts were correlated with the contradictions between what was said and what was eventually understood. The positive outcomes that followed from successful strategic framing were easily observable. The study also recognized instances of what I describe as manipulative framing and uses different examples to draw a distinction between ethical and unethical manipulation in framing.

Hope is meaningful and very important for people – even for people at the last days of their lives. Health professionals can sometimes describe hope in terms of hope for a cure, which may lead to feelings of hopelessness or empty hope for a patient with an incurable disease. In research, there is very little written about hope in the palliative home care context, even more so from the patient’s perspective. The aim of this project was to study how hope changes over time in cancer patients at the palliative phase, and to study the strategies used to cope with these changes. This was studied from the patients’ own perspective and in a home care context, but with the ambition of developing the results into a model or theory. Grounded Theory was the chosen research approach. Two sets of tape-recorded interviews were made with 11 patients in specialized palliative home care – a total of 20 interviews. The patients were also asked to write diaries about changes in their everyday feelings of hope within a 4-week period. Measurements of hope (HHI-S) and symptoms (ESAS) were also made at three occasions. Constant comparison of data was made during the analysis. The results showed that patients’ hope changed over time. Hope was described as a process involving a glimmering core of hope untouched by external circumstances (Study I). Hope was described in different processes, creation of a convinced hope, creation of simulated hope, collection and maintaining moments of hope and gradually extinct hope. The dying patient’s hope can be described as a gradual and successive adaptation process. Strategies for maintaining life were expressed to preserve the meaning in life, to communicate with others about life and death, to involve "fellow travelers" and to change focus. The strategy of preparing for death involved; taking responsibility for the future and seeing possibilities of living on even after death (Study II). The strategies were parallel to, and dependent on each other. It is important that health professionals understand the patient’s own strategies for maintaining life/hope, as well as the patient’s own preparations for death, so that hope is never taken away despite preparations at the end of life. In summary, hope can be interpreted as a changing process over time – a process that can change quickly, but is based on an inviolable core that is not easily moved by external circumstances. It is important that the health care personnel realize that patients simultaneously prepare for their deaths even as they try to maintain hope. Deeper understanding of what hope can mean for a patient can decrease the risk of hope being taken away during one’s final days. / Hopp har stor betydelse för människor, även för människor i livets slutskede. Av vårdpersonal beskrivs ibland hopp som bot, vilket kan leda till att inget hopp alls eller att ett meningslöst hopp förmedlas till en patient med en obotlig sjukdom. Forskningsmässigt förekommer hopp sparsamt beskrivet i den palliativa kontexten, särskilt från patientens perspektiv. Syftet med avhandlingen var att studera hur hopp kan förändras över tid hos patienter med cancer i ett palliativt skede, liksom vilka strategier de använder för att hantera dessa förändringar. Detta har studerats utifrån patientens eget perspektiv i en palliativ hemsjukvårdskontext, men ska sedan utvecklas vidare till en modell/teori. I denna avhandling har Grounded Theory valts som forskningsansats. Bandinspelade intervjuer gjordes vid två tillfällen med elva patienter i specialiserad palliativ hemsjukvård. Det blev totalt 20 intervjuer. Patienterna skrev också dagböcker om de förändringar av deras hopp, som uppstod i vardagen under en period av fyra veckor. Även mätning av hopp (HHIS) och symtom (ESAS) genomfördes vid tre tillfällen. Analysen skedde med den konstant komparativa metoden. Resultatet visade att patientens hopp förändrades över tid och beskrevs i en process med en inre glödande kärna av hopp, som inte påverkades så mycket av yttre omständigheter, men som kunde falna eller flamma upp (studie I). Hopp beskrivs i olika processer som att skapa ett övertygat hopp, ett simultant hopp, som att samla och uppehålla hopp och som ett hopp, som håller på att rinna ut. Den döende patientens hopp kan skildras som en successiv anpassningsprocess. Strategier som upprätthåller liv beskrivs vara att upprätthålla sin egen mening, att samtala om liv och död, att skaffa medresenärer och att byta fokus (studie II). Strategier, som förberedde döden, var att ta ansvar för framtiden och att se möjligheter att leva vidare även efter döden. Dessa tillvägagångssätt var parallella och beroende av varandra. Kunskap hos vårdpersonal om patientens egna strategier att upprätthålla liv/hopp och förbereda död är viktigt, för att inte ta ifrån patienten dennes hopp vid samtidig förberedelse för döden. Sammanfattningsvis ska hopp ses som en föränderlig process över tid och som snabbt kan förändras, men som har en inre glöd, som är mer oantastlig och inte så lätt påverkas av yttre omständigheter. Det är viktigt för vårdpersonal, som arbetar med döende patienter, att känna till att patienter har parallella strategier, som upprätthåller hopp. Ökad kunskap om vad hopp innebär för den enskilde patienten kan minska risken för att hopp fråntas patienten i livets sista tid. / The Glimmering Embers - experiences of hope among cancer patients in palliative home care / Maintaining hope when close to death: insight from cancer patients in palliaitve home care

The purpose of this study was to describe the experiences undergraduate students cite as helping them develop and articulate their purpose in life. Purpose in life, as a construct, is associated with many positive attributes associated with life in general, and the college experience specifically; however, it is also closely related to other concepts such as meaning, spirituality, and vocation. For the purposes of this study, purpose in life was defined as a set of goals or actions, informed by a belief system or set of values, that provides a sense of direction to an individual's life. This study sought to answer the question: What are the experiences of traditional-aged undergraduate students at a large, Midwestern, public university who have an articulated purpose in life? In this way, experiences were defined as a necessary, but not sufficient, building block in developing purpose in life. An orientational qualitative approach was used to answer the question. Participants were identified using maximum variance and theory-based purposeful sampling. Senior students close to graduation were recruited to participate using the Student Developmental Task & Lifestyle Assessment (SDTLA; Winston, Miller, & Cooper, 1999), an online assessment that operationalized Chickering and Reisser's (1993) sixth developmental vector, developing purpose. Twelve students with high scores on that assessment were selected to continue in the study. Face-to-face interviews focused on the experiences and relationships that helped them develop and articulate their purpose in life. The results were organized into three major themes: 1) support systems upon which students relied in developing purpose in life; 2) exemplars who they sought to emulate when living their purpose in life; and 3) the critical importance of experiential learning in developing purpose in life. A discussion of the findings asserted that developing purpose in life is a continual skill-building process, rather than definable end goal or product. Existing theories were connected to developing purpose in life to provide educators ideas for helping affect the lives of students. Research implications were discussed with a call to study how individuals' multiple aspects of identity influence developing purpose in life. Overall, this study contributes to the literature, adding breadth in specifically targeting undergraduate students and their shared experiences developing purpose in life and depth in its confirmation of Chickering and Reisser's twenty-year-old revised theory.

This exploratory study has two major aims. The first is to investigate heuristically the sources and nature of meaning experienced by residents and staff living and working in an Australian nursing home. The second is to interpret those experiences within the context of wellness.The study utilises heuristic inquiry as the research method from an occupational science perspective. Occupational science is concerned with the ways in which humans realise their sense of meaning through both their daily occupations and their unique way of being in the world.Heuristic inquiry is utilised for both the research design and the analysis of data. The primary source of data was my own experience of working in Australian nursing homes as a nurse, educator, and grief counsellor; and of having supported the six members of my family who have lived and died in Australian nursing homes. In addition multiple other sources of data were accessed: residents and staff from three suburban Australian nursing homes; personal and professional memoirs of life and work in Australian nursing homes; novels depicting characters faced with nursing home life; and research report on the needs of elderly Aboriginal people also faced with nursing home admission.Data were collected using a diverse range of techniques: self dialogue, participant-observation, informal, semi-structured, and group interviews, analysis of staff journal entries, and analysis of the textual material - memoirs, novels, and the research report.The findings indicate that nursing home residents experience a sense of meaning when they are able to maintain a sense of connection with an enduring sense of self. Nursing home staff, on the other hand, experience a sense of meaning in association with their work when they are able to access their personally constructed vision of a professional self identity. Living and working with a sense ++ / of wellness, whilst possible, tends not to be an everyday experience for either residents or staff.This study makes an important contribution to the understanding of the interior experiences of both nursing home residents and staff. It explores the notion of wellness within the nursing home context and puts forward suggestions for promoting wellness in the nursing home. The study also makes a significant contribution to the discipline of occupational science and the application of heuristic inquiry to social research.

This practice-based project explores the photographic phenomenon of ‘moment beyond moment’, which refers to the combined representations of an existing image in an environment, together with the real-life situation at the moment the photograph is taken. I call this photograph an ‘extended photograph’. Employing practical works of extended photographs and focusing on interactions between the moment in real-life and the moment in an existing image, the research explores the transformation of meanings caused by the interactions of these moments in an extended photograph. The research owes its approach to grounded theory, contrary thinking and Chinese Buddhist ‘Sudden Enlightenment’ to further its aim of exploring the unpredictable interaction of these moments, and to disclose the potentials of meaning transformation. My research outcome intends to initiate a discourse with photographic practitioners and theorists on the phenomenon of moment beyond moment in a working environment that is encaged by the excessive existence of displayed images. The thesis is composed as a creative work that consists of a series of photographic images accompanied by an exegesis component. The images represent a nominal 80%, and the exegesis 20% of the final submission.

Doctor of Philosophy / Many criticisms of the prevalent deflationary theories of truth stem from some misunderstanding. Clarification can be found from considering Quine's reasoning on the disquotational feature of the truth predicate. Quine's disquotationalism and Horwich's minimalism are similar theses with respect to the concept of truth, though the difference between the choices of the primary truth bearers and the divergence in their accounts of meaning and reference are striking. Chapter Two is devoted to making plain Quine's reasoning regarding the disquotational concept of truth, and to constructing a disquotational theory of truth. Also in this chapter, the topic of how to enhance the deductive power of this theory is discussed. The following chapter aims to square Quine's theses of inscrutability of reference and ontological relativity, with an account of the disquotational schema of reference. Whether or not a disquotational schema of reference and all its instances can be seen as providing a genuine reference scheme, as claimed by Horwich and most deflationists, is also discussed. In Chapter Four, after an introduction of Horwich's minimalist conception of truth, there are a number of issues considered, in particular Horwich’s use-theoretic account of meaning and compositionality, along with the divergence between his account of meaning and Quine's. The final chapter, Chapter Five, provides a thorough analysis of three important factors regarding the disquotational theory and the minimal theory of truth. Among them, the first factor discussed is what sort of equivalence relation occurs within each instance of the disquotational schema or each axiom of the equivalence schema. Following this, there is an analysis of in what way the disquotationalist and the minimalist can explain all general facts involving truth. The last factor involves considering the proper ascription of the disquotational or the minimal truth predicate. Along with the analysis of these three factors, the issue regarding which theory of truth is preferable is elaborated.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Abstract This thesis explores the use of the interpersonal resources of English in argumentative/persuasive essays (APEs) constructed by undergraduate international students from East-Asian regions (EAS), in particular, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and also by Australian-born English speakers (ABS). High-graded essays (HGEs) were compared with the low-graded essays (LGEs) in order to identify the relationship between their deployment of interpersonal features and the academic grades given by markers. In addition, the essays constructed by the EAS writers were compared with those written by ABS writers. A major complaint of academic staff about ESL Asian students concerns their lack of analytical, critical voice and formality in their arguments. The linguistic evidence for this explored in this thesis is based mainly on interpersonal systems of interaction and evaluation recently developed within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Iedema et al., 1994; Iedema, 1995, 2003, 2004; Martin, 2000a, 2003c; White, 1998, 2004; Martin and Rose, 2003; Macken-Horarik and Martin, 2003; Martin and White, 2005). Within interaction, the thesis draws on work dealing with the metaphorical realisations of commands in a bureaucratic administration context. Evaluation is based on appraisal theory, which is concerned with the linguistic inflection of the subjective attitudes of writers, and also their evaluative expressions and intersubjective positioning. In order to explore the use of interpersonal resources from a perspective of writer and reader interaction, this study incorporates a social interactive model derived from ‘Interaction in writing’ alongside Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) dialogic literacy. Under this broad interdisciplinary approach, the interpersonal aspects in APEs are examined from three main perspectives: Interactive (schematic structures), Interactional (the metaphorical realisation of commands), and InterPERSONAL meanings (the three main appraisal systems: ATTITUDE, ENGAGEMENT, and GRADUATION). The sample comprised six overseas students and six Australian-born native English speakers. They were all participants in the English for Academic Purposes class in the Modern Language Program offered by a regional university in southern New South Wales. These students were required to write APEs as a part of their course. Discourse analysis was applied to the essays at the genre, discourse semantic and the lexico-grammatical levels. Interviews were undertaken with markers to identify the relationship between text analysis results and markers’ comments on the essays and the grades. The results indicated that students’ use of interpersonal resources is a good indicator for judging quality of APEs. The analysis reveals significant differences in the extent to which HGEs are interactive by showing awareness of audience in argument structure, and making interactional choices focusing on command and interPERSONAL choices of appraisal systems. These differences are reflected in the use both of strategies of involvement by being interactional, and strategies displaying distance by being formal. The differences are also reflected in the presentation of personal opinions by being evaluative and of intersubjective claims supported by evidence. While there were no significant differences between the EAS and ABS writers in terms of the argument structure, ABS texts are more interactional, having a high degree of authority and conviction characterised by a formal tone. ABS writers also display a stronger voice through frequent exploitation of GRADUATION resources of appraisal. Overall, it can be said that while EAS students display problems with raising their own voices in argument, ABS students display problems in supporting persuasion. Educational implications for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing curriculum design include the desirability of enhancing a context-sensitive approach in writing, raising audience awareness of language teachers in relation to the interpersonal use of English, and promoting the dialogic nature of argument by reconciling individual creativity with social voices and community conventions.

Western museums are public institutions, open and accessible to all sectors of the population they serve. Increasingly, they are becoming more accountable to the governments that fund them, and criteria such as visitation figures are being used to assess their viability. In order to ensure their survival in the current climate of economic rationalism, museums need to maintain their audiences and attract an even broader demographic. To do this, they need to ensure that visitors feel comfortable, welcome and secure inside their spaces. They also need to give visitors clear entry points for engaging with and valuing the objects and knowledge on display in exhibitions. This thesis maps a grammar of three-dimensional space with a strong focus on the interpersonal metafunction. Building on the social semiotic tools developed by Halliday (1978, 1985a), Halliday and Hasan (1976), Martin (1992) and Matthiessen (1995), it identifies two interpersonal resources for organising space: Binding and Bonding. Binding is the main focus of the thesis. It theorises the way people�s emotions can be affected by the organisation of three-dimensional space. Essentially, it explores the affectual disposition that exists between a person and the space that person occupies by focussing on how a space can be organised to make an occupant feel secure or insecure. Binding is complemented by Bonding. Bonding is concerned with the way the occupants of a space are positioned interpersonally to create solidarity. In cultural institutions like museums and galleries, Bonding is concerned with making visitors feel welcome and as though they belong, not just to the building and the physical environment, but to a community of like-minded people. Such feelings of belonging are also crucial to the long-term survival of the museum. Finally, in order to present a metafunctionally diversified grammar of space, the thesis moves beyond interpersonal meanings. It concludes by exploring the ways textual and ideational meanings can be organised in three-dimensional space.