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Thesis--Cologne. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 150-153).

Thesis (D. Phil.(Psychotherapy))--University of Pretoria, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of South Florida, 2003. / Title from PDF of title page. Document formatted into pages; contains 90 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

This study departs from Gállok, an area 40 kilometres northwest of the city Jokkmokk, in northern Sweden. This is a place to which local people and Saami reindeer herders have material interests and emotional bonds. The mining company JIMAB wants to prospect for extracting minerals from this area. In the summer of 2013 local people, Saamis and environmental activists gathered in Gállok in order to protest and make resistance against these plans. Activism was made, debate articles were written, demonstrations were organized and information about what was going on in Gállok was shared through social media. The aim of this study is to examine the cultural processes of the anti-mining movement, in particular the happenings in Gállok in summer 2013. How did this anti-mining movement take form? What kind of strategies and methods were used, in order to mobilize participants? This study focuses on the material and bodily aspects of resistance and activism. What kind of material interests lie behind the involvement? How do they use their bodies as tools to make resistance? Furthermore the current thesis examines some of the reasoning, questions and emotions that circulate in the movement. Around which questions and values do the participants in the anti-mining gather? How do emotions affect people's involvement? One of the main arguments of this study is that social movements can be understood both as political and cultural. Is this also the case with the anti-mining movement in Gállok? This study consists of 5 chapters and a summary. The first chapter presents the theories, methods and materials that have been used in this study. In chapter two the reader is presented to the historical background and context of the anti-mining movement. In the third chapter, we examine some of the main reasonings, questions and emotions that circulate in the movement. The fourth chapter focuses on the happenings that took place in Gállok in the summer of 2013, when activists, locals and Saami people where gathered to protest and make resistance. In the fifth chapter a anti-mining demonstration that took place in Jokkmokk in the winter of 2014 is analyzed. The conclusions are then drawn in the final brief summary.

The western student of the Qur'ān who attempts to interpret this scripture which is held to be sacred and inviolable by millions of pious Muslims throughout the world must constantly re-examine his methods of study and his principles of interpretation, knowing that he will be challenged from two fronts--from the standpoint of critical accuracy and from the standpoint of religious dogma. One objective of the present study is to begin developing a method of Qur'ānic interpretation which is intended to meet this two-fold challenge. This task has been pursued by following the approach called "phenomenology" as it has developed in the general field of History of Religions during the past two generations. Since this approach has not been applied systematically to Qur'ānic studies, an introductory chapter has been devoted to a survey of the main principles of phenomenology, an application of these principles to the study of the Qur'ān, and an outline of a proposed phenomenological method for the exegesis and interpretation of the Qur'ān.

The focus of this research study was to determine the nature of the experiences visitors have at The Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum in Houston, Texas. In order to discover these experiences visitors have in the space I conducted a phenomenological research study by interviewing eleven people at the Chapel and asking them to recount their experiences inside the space. Phenomenology enables the collection of rich description of the visitors’ experiences. To gather the data I used the methodology of narrative inquiry in an effort to accurately depict the participants’ stories about their experiences. The narratives I collected at the Chapel demonstrated that the space is one that provides an evocative learning experience rather than one that is informative. I found that there were a range of experiences in the space that related to the previous experiences or knowledge that visitors brought with them to the Chapel. The motivations for this study came from my own experience with the space before I started my graduate studies. However, during the course of this study it became clear that there is a lack of knowledge about visitors’ responses to The Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum. The results of this study benefit the field of museum education by making a case for recognizing spaces that provide opportunities for evocative learning, rather than viewing them as purely informative. / text

I took an interpretive phenomenological approach to examine what it is like to experience sound while playing educational games. I asked six people to play three educational games, for a total of 18 interview sessions. I analyzed 603 pages of interview transcripts and 22.68 hours of video recording using phenomenological research techniques to derive. I used NVivo to identify and code 1,738 meaning units across the three games studied. I organized these meaning units into related clusters and identified constituents of meaning for each game studied. I derived 27 constituents of meaning for Fate of the World, 22 constituents of meaning for Hush, and 27 constituents of meaning for Salamander Rescue. I wrote textural-structural descriptions to describe participant experiences in each game and performed imaginative variation to further provide a context to describe participant experiences. From these results, I derived essential meanings to situate a discussion about sound in each of the games studied and I discussed eight essential meanings that were shared across the three games studied. According to my analysis of these participants’ responses, sound conveyed a sense of the game’s interface in addition to the environment in which play was situated. Sound also supported the presentation of characters in the game and worked to communicate the game’s narrative to the player. Music in the games studied helped to provoke thought and also conveyed an emotional context for play. Sound supported players’ overall engagement in these games, but the absence of sound removed this engagement. Critically, people noticed when the visuals that they saw did not match the sounds that they heard. I present an applied phenomenological framework for sound in educational games to illustrate these essential meanings and to reflect how participants’ experiences were affected by the ways they used game interfaces, interacted with game characters, experienced game narrative, and described the game’s environment. This framework further illustrates the possibility space for potential experiences of sound in gameplay as determined by the choices players make, the game’s state of play, and the degree of synchresis present between what players hear and what they see as they play. / text

In pop culture, artificial intelligences (AI) are frequently portrayed as worthy of moral personhood, and failing to treat these entities as such is often treated as analogous to racism. The implicit condition for attributing moral personhood to an AI is usually passing some form of the "Turing Test", wherein an entity passes if it could be mistaken for a human. I argue that this is unfounded under any moral theory that uses the capacity for desire as the criteria for moral standing. Though the action-based theory of desire ensures that passing a rigourous enough version of the Turing Test would be sufficient for moral personhood, that theory has unacceptable results when used in moral theory. If a desire-based moral theory is to be made defensible, it must use a phenomenological account of desire, which would make the Turing Test fail to track the relevant property. / October 2015

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