Diss. Uppsala : Uppsala universitet, 2007. / Bibliogr. p. 232-244.

Los Angeles has long been identified as a fragmented city, by nature of its cosmology and those constructed perceptions that constitute it in the collective imaginary. In an effort to articulate, interrogate and understand such a place, we have come to rely on its representations to function as mediators of meaning, delivering through their simulation of the city an experience of the real, lived Los Angeles. As a result, the relationships between the real and the representation become skewed, altering the processes by which we engage with the everyday. To better understand the implications of this dialectic, I examine four representations of the city: Disneyland, David Hockney’s “Domestic Scene, Los Angeles,” David Gebhard and Robert Winter’s A Guide to Architecture in Southern California and the BBC “One Pair of Eyes” installment “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles.” By analyzing representations of Los Angeles produced in a range of media, it becomes possible to discern the complex relationships between the real and envisioned Los Angeles, and to recognize the constructive force that emerges out of this discursive space. / text

This dissertation traces the post-Marxist and materialist positions of two leading contemporary European thinkers: Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou. These thinkers, I argue, collectively offer a way between the traditional Hegelian Marxist's overarching meta-narrative of a necessary evolution from worse to better, and the post-modern pessimism of a lack of possibility for such a social evolution. It is this middle path, offered by these two thinkers, that this dissertation seeks to explore and further explain. The focal point of this dissertation is the type of philosophical materialism that is collectively offered by Badiou and Zizek, what I call the "New Materialism." I first explain the origins of this materialist position as it emerges in the thought of Louis Althusser, then I discuss how Badiou and Zizek, each in their own way, seek to correct the remaining problems that exist for the Althusserian position, while refusing to reject its core materialist insights. Finally, I assess the ways in which both Badiou and Zizek attempt to overcome the Althusserian problems, arguing that ultimately Zizek's corrective succeeds in remaining within the materialist paradigm laid out by Althusser, whereas Badiou's method brings him dangerously close to a kind of philosophical idealism that he wishes to avoid.

The subject of this study is gender norms in the preschool and children who oppose those norms. The aim is to investigate how the discourses are linked with the way in which preschool teachers and teaching assistants talk about children’s gender identity. This study is founded in feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis, which was a basis for the interpretation of the results. My research questions are: • How do educators express themselves concerning gender norms? • What do educators need to work with a gender critical agenda? • How do the educators describe their work concerning gender, gender norms and children who oppose those norms? • For educators who have experience with children who do not identify with the gender they was given at birth, how do educators describe their own treatment of said children, and how would they describe the treatment from the other members of the teaching team? The study consists of qualitative interviews with five educators who were asked questions relevant to: norms, gender, gender criticism and how they work with those topics. I found both positive and negative aspects of gender work in preschool. Generally norms are seen as something you have to adapt to. Sometimes there are collisions between the different approaches from younger and older educators gender work, and sometimes this collision takes place between educators and parents. I found that the educators I interviewed generally want to question the heteronorm, only they sometimes dont realise how affected they are by it themselves.

This dissertation examines the early works of the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov and traces the beginning of a linguistic trend in the development of Moscow Conceptualism. Analyzing the drawings and paintings that the artist created between 1962 and 1966, I place Kabakov’s artistic style and ideas in the context of the cultural, theoretical and scientific phenomena that affected Soviet art and society in the early 1960s. Kabakov’s works are shown as evolving in a process that renders the artist’s techniques increasingly polysemantic, dialogic and conceptual. The dissertation then demonstrates that Kabakov’s visual images and linguistic titles participated, indirectly yet actively, in the cultural debates of Moscow’s artistic underground and the Soviet society. The dynamic correspondence between a fervent cultural context, growing interest in linguistic and scientific ideas, increasing conceptualization of visual means of expression and intellectualization of the artistic approach to the image led to the appropriation of language in the works of Moscow underground artists. The dissertation establishes such a development in the early works of Ilya Kabakov, proposing that his earliest “conversational” work Whose Fly is This? was the first conceptual painting to display text in the form of a written dialogue. The colloquial style and conversational character of the depicted discourse are examined as an ironic gesture that takes its genesis from the polyphonic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin and reverses the official non-dialogical imperatives of Soviet newspeak and ideology. The main figural image of the painting—the fly—is seen as articulating the utopias and anti-utopias of avant-garde figures such as Kharms or Malevich and interpreted as alluding to a key contemporaneous scientific discovery—the chromosomes of the drosophila. In the end, the words and the image of Whose Fly is This? form the two mutually exclusive and mutually complementary aspects of a compound conceptual signifier. That is the signifier of the free artistic spirit, evanescent human existence and mundane, yet resilient human nature that ironically survives—against all odds and despite all absurdities—beyond the boundary of the social utopia and the limits of epistemological systems. / text

The research subject comprises the structuralistic ideas that found the meaning in contemporary architectural design and realized projects of Lithuania. The research subject provides more comprehensive disclosure of artistic results in architecture and identifies their place within the context of different scientific and artistic disciplines, as well as contemporary architecture on the whole. The main objective of the research is to establish basic artistic principles and conceptions of structuralistic architecture in Lithuania, their geographic and interdisciplinary links, genesis and forms of expression. To this end, the following tasks have been raised: to establish philosophical-ideological background of structuralistic architecture and its links to the social being in the second half of the 20th century Lithuania; analyze the geographical and interdisciplinary context of structuralistic ideas; explore the social-cultural formants of artistic principles in Lithuanian architecture of the 1960-ies–80-ies; prepare theoretical pattern for valuation of structuralistic ideas in Lithuanian architecture; identify the most significant pieces of structuralistic architecture in Lithuania and their influence on general architecture development in the country. In making the research, the following results innovative on the field of architectural science have been obtained: significant phenomenon in Lithuanian architecture, although poorly analyzed before – Structuralism – has been... [to full text] / Tyrime atskleidžiami struktūralistinės architektūros kūrybiniai rezultatai, nusakoma jų vietą skirtingų mokslo ir meno disciplinų bei šiuolaikinės architektūros kontekste. Tyrimo objektas yra šiuolaikinės Lietuvos architektūros projektuose bei įgyvendintuose objektuose įprasmintos struktūralistinės idėjos. Tyrimu siekiama nustatyti pagrindines Lietuvos struktūralistinės architektūros kūrybines nuostatas ir konceptus, jų geografines ir tarpdalykines sąsajas, genezę bei raiškos formas. Darbe sprendžiami šie uždaviniai: nustatomi struktūralistinės architektūros filosofiniai-ideologiniai pagrindai ir jų sąsajos su XX a. antroje pusėje Lietuvoje vykusiais procesais; nagrinėjami struktūralizmo idėjų geografinis ir tarpdalykinis kontekstai; tiriami XX a. 7-ojo–9-ojo dešimtmečių Lietuvos architektūrą formavę sociokultūriniai veiksniai; formuluojamas struktūralistinių idėjų raiškos Lietuvos architektūroje teorinis vertinimo modelis, identifikuojami svarbiausi Lietuvos struktūralistinės architektūros kūriniai ir jų įtaką šalies architektūros raidai. Rengiant disertaciją buvo gauti šie architektūrologijai nauji rezultatai: ištirtas menkai atskleistas, bet labai svarbus kūrybinis reiškinys Lietuvos architektūroje – struktūralizmas; parengtas struktūralistinių idėjų raiškos Lietuvos architektūroje vertinimo teorinis modelis; identifikuoti pagrindiniai šalies struktūralistinės architektūros kūriniai; tyrimas apima ne tik formos ir kontekstų studijas, bet taip pat struktūralistinės... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Den här uppsatsen har till syfte att belysa hur heteronormativitet kan ta sig uttryck i förskolan, och vad några femåringar säger om hur de ser på familjebildning och kärleksrelationer. Undersökningen bygger på intervjuer om familjeformer med åtta femåringar. Intervjuerna genomfördes med utgångspunkt i ett antal bilder föreställande människor i olika familjekonstellationer. Den teoretiska utgångspunkten för uppsatsen är en normkritisk pedagogik, med rötter i feministisk poststrukturalism och queerteori. Resultatet av undersökningen visar att barnen i studien hade ett starkt heteronormativt sätt att prata om familjebildning. I ljuset av den tidigare forskning som redovisas i uppsatsen, blir det tydligt att förskolans sätt att arbeta med frågor om sexuell läggning inte lever upp till de krav som läroplanen ställer.

This master thesis deals with the gender perception in leaderships positions. Starting from our awareness of a gendered leadership gap, this thesis aims to show our development towards our understanding of reality as socially constructed. We apply the Discourse in order to see how oppression works on women. In the course of our master thesis, we came across poststructuralists, like Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, philosopher and psychoanalysts, like Freud, Beauvoir, Irigaray, Kristeva and Butler, as well as sociolinguists, like Cameron, Miller, Baxter and Tannen. Their ideas have enriched our gendered Discourses. Furthermore, by dealing with their ideas, we were able to understand how powerful words can be. Words have the power to create identities, our reality and oppress certain groups of people. The group of people we have focussed on are women. Although the category “women” is fragmented and gender is one of many features of persons, there is something that all women share – oppression through language. Thus, women are less likely to move in the corporate ladder and lead. In two Discourse Analysis based on job advertisements for leadership positions offered in Germany and Italy, we see how language-in-use may cause a reason for a gendered leadership gap. The Discourses available to us influence how we understand the reality around us, construct our identities and negotiate our roles. With this thesis, we hope contribute to today’s Discourses and raise people’s awareness of how our language keeps women from entering leadership positions.

Russell’s claim that only structural knowledge of the world is possible was influentially criticized by Newman as rendering scientific discoveries trivial. I show that a version of this criticism also applies to the “structural realism” more recently advocated by Worrall, which requires continuity of formal structure between predecessor and successor scientific theories. The problem is that structure, in its common set-theoretical construal, is radically underdetermined by the entities and relations over which it is defined, rendering intertheoretic continuity intolerably cheap. I show that this problem may be overcome by supplementing the purely formal relation of intertheoretic isomorphism with the semiformal “Ontological Reductive Links” developed by Moulines and others of the German “structuralist” approach to the philosophy of science.