Magister Artium - MA / This M.A. mini-thesis seeks to open up the post-apartheid South African biopic as a topic for serious historical scrutiny. While book-length written biographies published in the post-apartheid (and apartheid periods) are the subjects of a now quite extensive historiographical literature, biography on film – including in the form of filmic dramas – has been hitherto entirely ignored. Social history or marginalised lives and not political lives of struggle against apartheid have been the predominant subgenre within this emerging field: with sixteen biopics having been produced in the 2010s. But the field is dominated by white men. This thesis showcases the story-telling gifts of one young coloured film-maker through a meticulously detailed analysis of “visual story-telling” and “visual language” used in his two award-winning gang biopics, Noem My Skollie (2016) and Ellen. Die Stories van Ellen Pakkies (2018). Read in the context of the extended processes of production of these two films in which the central protagonists played a shaping background role, the thesis explores and compares the linear chronological, four-chapter, narrative structure of Noem My Skollie with the architecture of “the parallel narrative” used in the deeply disturbing Ellen. Die Storie van Ellen Pakkies (2018) The thesis is a celebration of the film-making talent of Daryne Joshua.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka hur nationer använder nationsmarknadsföring och narrativitet för att förmedla en särskild bild genom att nyttja Eurovision Song Contest som kommunikationsplattform. Undersökningen görs via en semiotisk analys som granskar utvalda visuella delar från tre nationer som agerat värd för evenemanget mellan åren 2009–2018. Resultatet av analysen visar på att nationerna följer olika narrativa spår som lyfter särskilda saker. I diskussionsavsnittet tas två olika hypoteser upp angående värdländernas nationsmarknadsföringar. Den ena är den kulturella hypotesen, alltså att värdlandets kulturella bakgrund präglar nationsmarknadsföringen. Den andra är den strategiska hypotesen som syftar till att värdlandet strategiskt väljer att använda särskilda narrativ utifrån exempelvis sin politiska situation. Diskussionen poängterar dock att andra faktorer kan ha inverkan på nationsmarknadsföringen, såsom huruvida nationen tidigare varit värdland i evenemanget.

Narration, or storytelling, is an important aspect of language. Narrative skills have practical and social importance; for example, children who tell good stories receive attention and approval from their peers. When children accurately recount events surrounding an injury or dispute, vital information is passed to parents and teachers. Additionally, early childhood narrative skills are moderately correlated with reading comprehension in primary grades. Because narration is socially and academically valued, language interventionists often address it. The research literature on narrative intervention has most often included school-aged participants and those with language or learning difficulties. Only a small number of studies have investigated narrative intervention with preschoolers, and the supporting evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive. Outcomes frequently targeted include narrative story grammar (e.g., character, problem, action, consequence) and general language outcomes (e.g., length of story, mean length of communication unit, and total number of words). Results have been generally positive; however, the methodological quality of studies is poor. Therefore, few firm conclusions can be drawn regarding the efficacy of narrative interventions. Because of its potential and popularity, the effect of narrative intervention on a range of populations needs to be examined systematically through high quality research. This study evaluated the effects of a narrative intervention on story retelling and story generation using a multiple baseline design with five target participants. We delivered narrative intervention in a small group arrangement. Materials, activities, and instructor assistance were adjusted systematically within session to facilitate increasingly independent practice of story retells and personal story generations. Results suggest that narrative intervention improved participants' narrative retell and personal generation performance based on Index of Narrative Complexity (INC) scores. All five target participants made substantial gains in narrative retelling, demonstrated improved pre-intervention to post-intervention INC scores for personal generations, and these improvements maintained when assessed following a 2-week break. In addition, we documented growth in general language measures such as number of communication units, mean length of utterance, number of different words, and total number of words.

Teacher telling is underrepresented in the mathematics education reform literature and deserves additional scrutiny. This case study examined a skilled teacher's telling practices during a university mathematics content course for pre-service elementary teachers. I identified telling practices through discourse analysis, attending to the presence of mathematics and the contribution of new structure or ideas from the teacher. The teacher utilized seven unique types of mathematical telling while supporting collaborative group work on tasks. The study identified subtle telling, implicit telling, and explicit telling. The results suggest that mathematical telling is an integral part of the teacher's role in inquiry-based instruction and should not be overlooked. Researchers can use the telling types to identify and describe telling practices more transparently. Practitioners can more consciously incorporate and discriminate between telling practices.

Technical advancements allow for embodied virtual agents to not only be increasingly human-like, but also to behave and look like particular individuals. As biases towards self-similarity have been found in human-human studies, it is of interest to explore to what extent this applies to virtual characters (VCs). This work set out to extend on previous research that has investigated the effects of facial self-similarity in VCs, and explore it in the context of empathic emotion. For this aim, a method for creating facially similar virtual characters was developed and a user study conducted where 13 participants were told autobiographical stories by a virtual character that either did or did not resemble them facially and/or in gender category. The participants' first impressions and emotional responses were measured. The results showed that even though similarity was not explicitly perceived, a bias might exist towards more positive impressions of self-similar characters, especially in terms of gender category. Regarding the emotional responses, the results did not allow for discovering any difference between conditions but pointed to some interesting differences in comparison to what was hypothesized. The immense ways in which the appearances of virtual characters can be altered provides possibilities to influence the interaction with them. However, although biases might exist on a general level, it is difficult to predict the human responses in individual cases. Virtual characters might make possible a more human-like interaction with technology, however, it might also mean that our reactions to them are influenced by more parameters and our relations to them become even more like those with other humans: complex. / Den tekniska utvecklingen möjliggör numera att virtuella agenter kan göras inte bara människolika, utan även lika specifika individer i hur de beter sig och ser ut. Då tidigare studier påvisat att människor ofta föredrar personer som i någon mån liknar dem själva, är det intressant att utforska i vilken utsträckning detta även gäller virtuella karaktärer. Detta arbete hade som mål att undersöka effekterna av visuella likheter mellan människor och virtuella karaktärer, med fokus på ansikten och genus och i en kontext där empati är betydande. En metod för att konstruera virtuella karaktärer som hade visuella likheter med specifika användare utvecklades, och en användarstudie med 13 deltagare genomfördes. I det konstruerade scenariot berättade en karaktär, som hade likheter med användaren antingen gällande ansiktets utseende och/eller genus, självbiografiska historier. Intrycket av karaktären och den emotionella responsen mättes. Resultaten visade att den visuella likheten inte uppfattades explicit. Dock fanns tendenser som pekar på att likheter framför allt när det gäller sociala kategorier som genus, kan ha en positiv påverkan på hur virtuella karaktärer uppfattas. Det gick inte att upptäcka några skillnader mellan betingelserna gällande den emotionella responsen, men resultaten påvisade intressanta avvikelser från de förväntade reaktionerna. Möjligheterna att designa och anpassa virtuella karaktärer till olika individer och situationer ökar, vilket kan utnyttjas för att försöka påverka hur människor förhåller sig till och interagerar med dem. Det är dock svårt att förutsäga hur människor kommer att reagera och relatera till en virtuell karaktär utifrån generella tendenser, vilket denna studie visar. Virtuella karaktärer kan möjliggöra en mer människolik interaktion med teknik, men det innebär också att många parametrar är inblandade och att relationerna med tekniken blir liksom relationerna mellan människor: komplexa.

The usage of children’s books is a fundamental aspect within a preschool environment. Even though the content in such books are childlike, they are always written by adult authors who appropriates a child-perspective. This sparked an interest in creating a children’s book with the cooperation of a group of children and producing a story from a children’s perspective. The overall objective of the project was to improve children's participation in preschool and develop their understanding of democratic principles through the creation of their own story book. By using art based research as the method, creative workshops were carried out where the children created their own story through conversation and artwork. The collected data were in the form of transcriptions of films recorded during the workshops and the artwork done by the group of children which was analyzed using concepts such as democracy, participation, child-perspective and children’s perspective. The steps which involved the creative workshops together with the group of children were further examined by the usage of Roger Hart’s Ladder of Participation.  The results of the project showed a high level of participation by the group of children due to possibilities provided for them to exercise democratic principles such as voting and decision making as a group while creating a story and all its essential contents from their perspective. In regards to the Ladder of Participation, genuin participation of different levels were observed from the group of children during the course of this project. The 2 highest levels of the ladder; where an activity is initiated and carried out by children, were unable to be reached since in practical sense, preschool aged children need adult assistance. The storybook created involved a fantasytale titled Superkatterna (The Supercats) which consists of cats, dinosaurs and unicorns in their rainbow world, conflict between the cats and dinosaurs and how the unicorns help them to resolve their issues. Regarding the composition of the 1st draft of the storybook, had there been a wider time frame for this project, the children could have had the opportunity to be further involved and their level of participation during this step would have been able to become higher than what it was during the project.

Imagine a grocery store that physically helps you to make healthy decisions for you. Your Twinkies, Hoho's, and other processed foods are all available and within sight, but you've got to work for them. In the wake of challenges that Americans face every day, this thesis project is putting a magnifying glass to (hi)stories and the human experience, and promoting change for American suburban and urban grocery stores to be health-fitness machines that we need them to be in order to help those of us on a quest to stay fit and healthy. With the information age pretty much exploding- as we are able to do a search for just about anything on Google, lack of information is not necessarily the problem. While gimmicky short term dieting fads come and go, an architectural model solution can set the foundation and structure to sustain progress. Let's look to the origins of architecture, labyrinths are built of walls, but if we are not careful, we can let them lead us to dead ends. Let's look to the origins of the marketplace, where fresh foods are taken directly from the source. For many of us, the modern American grocery store is the origin of our energy, where we will return again and again. It is our food source. It might be one root of our society's increasing levels of unhealthy weight gain, but also the source of opportunity to challenge the current design of the boxed store. / Master of Architecture

<p>There is an ongoing discussion in Sweden about child perspective and child’s perspective.</p><p>The municipalities’ family law units are required to include these perspectives in their investigations. But how do they affect the outcome of custody investigations? This essay addresses that issue. I have looked at how much say children have and how much they participate in their custody investigations. I have studied fourteen children, from seven custody investigations, what their views are and how children are presented in these investigations.</p><p>I use a social constructionist theory according to which the way children are viewed is constructed through interactions between people. This essay uses the terms “showing” and “telling” to see how children get their say. In a showing text it is the child who tells the story. In a telling text it is the narrator who is telling us about the child.</p><p>Nine of the children give a clear opinion of which parent they want to live with and how much they want to see the other parent. Eight of the investigations use a showing text to describe the children. These children’s opinions have a greater impact on the investigation than the ones described with a telling text.</p>

There is an ongoing discussion in Sweden about child perspective and child’s perspective. The municipalities’ family law units are required to include these perspectives in their investigations. But how do they affect the outcome of custody investigations? This essay addresses that issue. I have looked at how much say children have and how much they participate in their custody investigations. I have studied fourteen children, from seven custody investigations, what their views are and how children are presented in these investigations. I use a social constructionist theory according to which the way children are viewed is constructed through interactions between people. This essay uses the terms “showing” and “telling” to see how children get their say. In a showing text it is the child who tells the story. In a telling text it is the narrator who is telling us about the child. Nine of the children give a clear opinion of which parent they want to live with and how much they want to see the other parent. Eight of the investigations use a showing text to describe the children. These children’s opinions have a greater impact on the investigation than the ones described with a telling text.

This dissertation combines psychology with peace and conflict research in a cross-disciplinary approach to reconciliation processes after intrastate armed conflict. Two overarching contributions are made to the field of reconciliation research. The first is conceptual and methodological. The vague concept of reconciliation is defined and operationalized (Paper I), and a method is proposed for how reconciliation may be studied systematically at the national level (Paper II). By discussing what reconciliation is and how we should measure it, comparative research on reconciliation is facilitated which is imperative if we wish to learn of its promises and pitfalls in post-conflict peacebuilding. The second contribution is empirical. There has been an assumption that truth telling is healing and thereby will lead to reconciliation; healing is the assumed link between truth and reconciliation. This assumption was investigated in two studies in Rwanda in 2006. A multistage, stratified cluster random survey of 1,200 adults was conducted to assess whether witnessing in the gacaca, the Rwandan village tribunals for truth and reconciliation, was beneficial for psychological health; thereby investigating the claim that truth telling is healing (Paper III). The results of the survey are disconcerting. Witnesses in the gacaca suffered from significantly higher levels of depression and posttraumatic stress disorder than non-witnesses also when controlling for important predictors for psychological ill-health such as gender or trauma exposure. To acquire a more comprehensive understanding of the experience of witnessing in the gacaca, in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 women genocide survivors who had witnessed in the gacaca (Paper IV). The results of this study challenge the claim that truth telling is healing, suggesting instead that there are risks for the individuals on whom truth-telling processes depend. Traumatization, ill-health, isolation, and insecurity dominate the lives of the testifying women. Insecurity as a result of the truth-telling process emerged as one of the most crucial issues at stake. This dissertation presents a novel understanding of the complexity of reconciliation in post-conflict peacebuilding, demonstrating that truth and reconciliation processes may entail more risks than were previously known. The results of this dissertation can be used to improve the study and the design of truth and reconciliation processes after civil war and genocide.