No description available.

xvi, 139 p. : ill. (some col.), col. maps. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This thesis explores the empowerment effects of arts-and-crafts programs targeting women in Johannesburg, South Africa, focusing mainly on one case study: Boitumelo Sewing Project. Interviews with participants, facilitators, and management reveal that empowerment manifests in Boitumelo Project primarily in individual and collective forms, though also on an economic level to a limited degree. While many development projects focus on economic empowerment, this research suggests that other forms of empowerment may be even more important in the long term. Economic empowerment helps people meet short-term responsibilities, but it is through individual and collective empowerment that personal and community forms of healing take place, enabling people to engage more successfully in society overall. In light of this, I argue that development projects should focus on engendering genuine participatory empowerment on both the individual and collective levels in order to increase sustainability and development success in the long term. / Committee in Charge: Dr. Anita M. Weiss, Chair; Dr. Dennis Galvan; Dr. Michael Hibbard

abstract: This study explores how early modern humans used stone tool technology to adapt to changing climates and coastlines in the Middle Stone Age of South Africa. The MSA is associated with the earliest fossil evidence for modern humans and complex cultural behaviors during a time period of dramatic climate change. Human culture allows for the creation, use, and transmission of technological knowledge that can evolve with changing environmental conditions. Understanding the interactions between technology and the environment is essential to illuminating the role of culture during the origin of our species. This study is focused on understanding ancient tool use from the study of lithic edge damage patterns at archaeological assemblages in southern Africa by using image-based quantitative methods for analyzing stone tools. An extensive experimental program using replicated stone tools provides the comparative linkages between the archaeological artifacts and the tasks for which they were used. MSA foragers structured their tool use and discard behaviors on the landscape in several ways – by using and discarding hunting tools more frequently in the field rather than in caves/rockshelters, but similarly in coastal and interior contexts. This study provides evidence that during a significant microlithic technological shift seen in southern Africa at ~75,000 years ago, new technologies were developed alongside rather than replacing existing technologies. These results are compared with aspects of the European archaeological record at this time to identify features of early human technological behavior that may be unique to the evolutionary history of our species. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Anthropology 2016

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

x, 208 p. / In this dissertation "literariness" is defined not merely as a quality of form by which texts are evaluated as literary, but as an immanent and critical sensibility by which reading, writing, speaking, learning, and teaching subjects within the literary humanities engage language in its immediate aesthetic (and thus also historical and ethical) aspect. This reorientation seeks to address the literary academy's overwhelming archival focus, which risks eliding literary endeavor as an embodied undertaking that inevitably reflects the historical contingency of its enactment. Literary endeavor in higher education is thus understood as a performance by which subjects enact not only the effect of literary texts upon themselves but also the contingencies of their socio-economic, national, cultural, and personal contexts. Subjects' responses to literature are seen as implicit identity claims that, inevitably constituted of biases, can be evaluated through the lens of post-positivist realism in terms of their ethical and pragmatic usefulness. Framing this reoriented literariness in terms of its enactment in higher education literature classrooms, this dissertation addresses its pedagogical, methodological, and personal implications. The events of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the literature arising from it serve as a pivotal case study. The TRC Hearings, publically broadcast and pervasive in the national discourse of the time, enacted a scenario in which South Africans confronted the implications for personal and national identities of apartheid's racial abuses. The dissertation demonstrates through close reading and anecdotal evidence how J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull formally reactivate this scenario in the subject in the event of reading, while surveys of critical responses to these texts show how readers often resisted the texts' destabilizing effects. A critical account of the process that resulted in Telling, Eugene - a stage production in which U.S. military veterans tell their stories to their civilian communities - analyzes the idea of literariness in the U.S. and assesses its potential for socially engaged literary praxis. / Committee in charge: Linda Kintz, Chairperson; Suzanne Clark, Member; Michael Hames-Garcia, Member; John Schmor, Outside Member

Cette thèse vise à définir l’espace post-apartheid tel qu’il est représenté dans le cinéma sud-africain. Depuis 1994, l’Afrique du Sud démocratique constitue un nouvel espace géographique et socio-économique, profondément marqué par l’héritage de l’apartheid. Notre thèse vise à conjuguer l’analyse stylistique de films sud-africains et une réflexion civilisationniste, influencée par la géographie et la sociologie, sur ce qui fonde l’espace post-apartheid. Nous étudions le cinéma de fiction qui permet la représentation de l’espace tel qu’il est perçu, voire souhaité par le cinéaste, parfois en contradiction avec les enjeux commerciaux. La refondation du cinéma sud-africain après 1994 a-t-elle donné naissance à une nouvelle représentation de l’espace ?L’espace post-apartheid au cinéma se définit d’abord en rapport avec l’ancien espace, en opposition ou dans la continuité. Notre étude se concentre sur l’héritage de l’apartheid dans les années 2000, dans l’industrie du film et dans la mise en image d’un territoire national clivé et de villes divisées. Nous abordons ensuite la représentation récurrente de trajectoires individuelles en butte à cette géographie héritée, focalisation qui contribue à mettre à distance l’espace prescrit par l’ancien régime. Nous établissons enfin que l’espace cinématographique post-apartheid est défini en rapport avec la construction d’une nouvelle identité depuis 1994. Certaines ambiguïtés en découlent, dans la représentation du township et des étrangers africains ou dans la réception des films, et soulignent la redéfinition complexe de l’espace et de l’identité en Afrique du Sud afin que celle-ci puisse être véritablement « nouvelle ». / This study focuses on the representation of post-apartheid space in indigenous South African fiction films. I work towards a definition of cinematic post-apartheid space, putting forth its ambivalent relations to the apartheid past, between heritage and rejection, on the levels of geographical space, socio-economic space and, mostly, represented space. I situate myself at the intersection of South African cultural studies and reflections on post-apartheid space, and of the study of the new South African cinema. I focus on fiction since it gives most room for filmmakers to represent space as they perceive it, or desire it, to be, and on feature films which carry most of the South African industry’s ambitions in terms of international recognition.I first look at the heritage of apartheid in terms of the South African film industry, the divisions of the national territory and the structure of the South African city. I argue that post-apartheid cinematic space is first and foremost defined in relation to apartheid space, whether in opposition or in terms of heritage. However, recurrent representations of individual trajectories clash with that inherited geography and are a means for filmmakers to distance themselves from the previously prescribed relations between characters and space. I also argue that the definition of a new South African identity is crucial to the characterization of post-apartheid space in films. The ambiguous representations of township space or African foreigners in South African films and the emphasis on the nationality of films in film reception put forth how deeply paradoxical the reinvention of space and identity is in post-apartheid South Africa.

No description available.