The main title of the doctoral thesis - ART/CRIME - CRIME/ART - point to a general investigation of these two phenomenons. This investigation makes up the background of the main theme of the thesis, which is an actual event of the mysterious death of the painter and shepherd K.. At work I spend time with alternative investigations of this death and the goal is an attempt to reconstruct the events and effort of discovering the answers what happened that night and whether or not a killer really existed or not.

The foundational hypothesis to this study is that congregations which have a healthy perception and a greater understanding of conflict will develop more effective responses to conflict that will translate into more effective conflict resolution and reconciliation. The process and sustainability of the development of a missional church, the context of the study, is pregnant with potential conflict. Untamed conflict has the propensity to retard, jeopardise or even destroy the development of a missional church. When conflict arises, it must be understood and dealt with theologically. The inherent problem is that conflict appears to be neither understood nor appreciated sociologically and theologically. This knowledge and praxis vacuum has the potential for conflict to translate into inappropriate or ineffective responses that do not always make for effective resolution and reconciliation. The research focuses mainly on an empirical study based on the four practical theological questions of Osmer (2008). Participants for this study were randomly selected from specific sectors of Methodist congregations in the wider Pretoria area. The research explores congregants’ perceptions, understanding and views of conflict; their responses to conflict; and some felt and observed outcomes of conflict. The presupposition is that the development of the local missional church would be more effective and efficient when the management and process of conflict resolution and reconciliation are well led and well managed. This study confirmed that conflict, despite its normalcy and necessity, carries a negative undertone and is mostly avoided in congregations. This is compounded by the evidence that there is little, if any, theological or scriptural understanding of conflict. There is also no indication that churches intentionally and purposefully educate their members to appreciate and understand conflict. In so doing, churches are harming their innate calling as the glory and manifestation of God’s divine grace through faith communities for the transformation of all peoples. Yet, the church understands the dangers of unhealthy conflict, and on occasion even expects conflict to arise, although deeming it inappropriate. Practical theological discernment is sought as to why this may be so and remedial action is proposed to address the problem of conflict within congregations. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Practical Theology / PhD / Unrestricted

Since the arrival of settlers in the 16th century, the Canadian Government has dispossessed First Nations people of their land and culture through a history of colonialism. This has led to over a century of contentious relationships between First Nations and the Canadian Government in which First Nations have often struggled with the revitalization and reclamation of their culture and land due to oppressive systemic structures. Cartography has been one approach, among many, adopted by First Nations to facilitate self-determination in recent decades. However, the role of cartography has been one focused on western technocratic approaches of drawing territorial boundaries as part of the land claims process. Such approaches may assist First Nations in documenting land use and negotiating territorial rights and as such move them towards self-determination. Conventional western cartography is inherently incapable of representing the rich spatial nature of First Nations’ sense of cultural place. More recently, cybercartography has emerged due to technological advances in software and web-based publishing that has the potential to encapsulate First Nations’ oral history and culture by providing digital multimedia elements (i.e. audio, imagery, and video) within a digital spatial context. The use of cybercartography in this manner is quickly increasing over time, but research is lacking in understanding how new representations of First Nations history and culture through cybercartographic frameworks explicitly facilitate, or prohibit, First Nations ability to attain self-determination. To address this gap, this study evaluates the ways in which contemporary cybercartographic technologies may facilitate the process of self-determination through an application development and interview process with a local First Nation on Vancouver island, BC. The research process throughout the project are evaluated using the Indigenous principles of Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession (OCAP) and uses this as a framework to understand how the experiences of the Nation relate to the broader narrative of self-determination. The results of this study suggest that using a community-engaged approach to cybercartography facilitates community-specific requirements of self-determination, mainly because community engagement can lead to the development of tools that match community objectives and needs. Furthermore, this study demonstrated that the OCAP principles have the potential to be used in future studies for evaluating the efficacy of technologies that are intended to facilitate self-determination in First Nation communities. / Graduate / 2021-04-16

Das Problem der Rekonstruktion einer gemeinsamen evolutionären Entwicklung zwischen Wirts- und Parasitenspezies ist in der Forschung weit diskutiert. Dabei wird der Komplexität einer solchen Berechnung besondere Bedeutung beigemessen. In dieser Arbeit wird ein algorithmischer Ansatz vorgestellt, welcher auf Basis dynamischer Programmierung eine Rekonstruktion zweier phylogenetischer Stammbäume und einer gegebenen Abbildung von Parasiten auf zugehörige Wirte erzeugt. Grundlage dieser Berechnung ist ein ereignis-basiertes Modell der Koevolution, bei dem jedem Ereignis ein Kostenwert zugeordnet ist. Gesucht wird nach Rekonstruktionen, welche die Gesamtkosten der aufgetretenen Ereignisse minimieren. Es wird eine Vorgehensweise vorgestellt, mit welcher sich die Kosten der Ereignisse automatisch berechnen lassen. Dazu wurde ein Gütemaß entwickelt, um verschiedene Rekonstruktionen bezüglich der bei ihrer Berechnung verwendeten Ereigniskostenverteilung bewerten zu können. Im Gegensatz zu bisherigen Arbeiten unterstützt der vorgestellte Ansatz zudem die Verwendung von Stammbäumen mit mehrfach verzweigenden Knoten. Die algorithmischen Überlegungen wurden in einem Javaprogramm namens DynamicTreeMap umgesetzt. / The problem of reconstructing the common evolutionary development between host- and parasite species has been strongly discussed in research. Hereby a special meaning has been attributed to the complexity of such a calculation. In this thesis an algorithmic approach based on dynamic programming will be introduced, that creates a reconstruction of two phylogenetic genealogical trees and a given mapping of parasites on appropriate hosts. The foundation of this calaculation is an event-driven model of coevolution where costs are assigned to each event. The algorithm searches for reconstructions, which minimize the total costs of all occurred events. A method will be introduced which calculates the event-costs automatically. Therefore a quality rate has been developed, to evaluate different reconstructions concerning the used event-costs. Unlike present approaches genealogical trees with multiple branching nodes can be considered. The described approach has been implemented in a java program named DynamicTreeMap.

The movement of evangelical multiethnic churches, which occurred in the late-1990s and into the early 2000s, sought racial justice by developing racially diverse congregations as their core distinction of Christian discipleship. These evangelical multiethnic churches are situated in a longer historical narrative of black-led, black-centered ecumenical leadership focused on a theological framework of racial reconciliation, cross-racial interpersonal friendships, and diverse cultural expressions. However, research of these churches reveal they actually perpetuate the very inequalities they seek to dismantle. White hegemony remains intact in these multicultural Christian communities through its maintenance of white dominant structures and cultural norms, even with black-led senior leadership. The problem this project seeks to address through the concept of “white followership” is the lack of experience and skills among white evangelicals particularly in multiethnic churches to yield normative power and institutional culture to another cultural expression and organizational power arrangement. Utilizing Dr. Patsy Baker Blackshear’s definition of an exemplary follower, this project will develop the construct of white followership and the particular behaviors and characteristics white congregants in a minority-led multiethnic congregation can adopt. While this project relies on research of evangelical multiethnic churches across the United States, the focal site in which the construct of white followership will initially be applied is The Sanctuary Covenant Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is where I, a white female pastor, serve as its Associate Pastor. The methodological approach of this project is interdisciplinary, integrating history, anti-racism research, and white racial identity studies to elucidate the problem of white supremacy in the United States and the American church. The project relies heavily on: 1) sociological studies of religion, race, and power to enumerate the problem of white hegemony in evangelical multiethnic congregations, 2) theological and biblical studies to outline the imperative shift of power needed in white-dominated evangelical multiethnic churches; 3) business and leadership studies to introduce the concept of followership and enrich the construction of white followership; and 4) observing resistance among white congregants as change produces shifts in the status quo, adapting Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) and autoethnographic stories to measure change. White followership, in the scope of this project, focuses primarily on a pedagogical approach, institutional strategy, and overall ecumenical culture primarily expressed at The Sanctuary. It does not address more granular aspects of the communal worship experience, external evangelistic service, and community engagement and action, though those are important considerations as the applied work of white followership expands. Overall, the construct of white followership, while not exhaustive for the remedy of white hegemony in evangelical multiethnic churches, provides an innovative, malleable, and promising solution forward for white congregants to employ toward greater racial justice.

Magister Administrationis - MAdmin / For the last seventeen years I have been actively involved in local government management and I have also been schooled in this academic field. I made this milieu my career as I have an intense yearning to stand in service of the general community, - more specifically the rural communities in South Africa. Practical engagement in this field also taught me that democracy goes hand in hand with urbanisation and, if not countered, the pauperisation of rural districts. The result of this is impoverishment and increasing unemployment.

In this paper, we present a method and a corresponding tool called Tarzan for cophylogeny analysis of phylogenetic trees where the nodes are labelled with divergence timing information. The tool can be used for example to infer the common history of hosts and their parasites, of insect-plant relations or symbiotic relationships. Our method does the reconciliation analysis using an event-based concept where each event is assigned a cost and cost minimal solutions are sought. The events that are used by Tarzan are cospeciations, sortings, duplications, and (host) switches. Different from existing tools, Tarzan can handle more complex timing information of the phylogenetic trees for the analysis. This is important because several recent studies of cophylogenetic relationship have shown that timing information can be very important for the correct interpretation of results from cophylogenetic analysis. We present two examples (one host-parasite system and one insect-plant system) that show how divergence timing information can be integrated into reconciliation analysis and how this influences the results.

The journey towards healing and transformation in Africa is a continual process, which calls all sectors of society to continually commit towards creating avenues of healing. Rituals have been identified and introduced as a guiding framework for the study as they are widely accepted as a strategy to provide healing and transformation. The study assumes that these rituals can be used as vehicles to tell our stories in order to recreate a community of hope. As such the study has attempted to establish this relationship and assess if these rituals of atonement can be used creatively by the church to bring healing and transformation. In order to elucidate the inherent similarities between biblical and African concepts of atonement the study used theological and exegetical tools to analyse these concepts. The study established that the rituals of the Day of Atonement described in Leviticus 16 have certain similarities with some African rituals of atonement and reconciliation. The Leviticus rituals of atonement provide deep ethical and theological foundations that can positively inform the work of reconciliation in our social, economic, religious and political scene in Africa. The study then concludes that a constructive use of the Bible and the concept of atonement in the Old Testament will benefit Africa in its endeavour to bring about reconciliation. However, in the background lies the assumption that the relationship between Africa and the Bible is not an innocent one. It is then recommended that our approach towards the Bible embraces and treats with sensitivity the fact that the same Bible has been used previously in Africa to shape ideologies like apartheid and liberation ideologies and as well as demonising some of the traditional African cultures and religious expressions. Nevertheless, both the biblical and African views of life indicate that the primary goal of rituals is a community of peace, friendship, purity and creative harmony. In view of the resemblances between the Day of Atonement rituals and the African rituals that have been explored we can safely use the Bible in order to contribute to the continual work of reconciliation in Southern Africa. / Dissertation (MA (Biblical and Religious Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Biblical and Religious Studies / Unrestricted

This study explores how victims of violent crime construct meaning around crime, justice and reconciliation. It further aims to gain insight into how victims of crime construct expectations of which actions should ensue after the crime and whether their constructions encompass elements of reconciliation and restorative justice. The study is conducted from a social constructionist position and uses a critical discourse analysis framework in analysing the data. In-depth interviews were conducted with nine victims of serious crimes such as armed robbery, hi-jacking, attempted murder and rape. From the analysis it appears that participants have a need to experience justice and have a high demand for vengeance. This however may itself have grown out of a lack of a more positive experience of justice. Participants’ constructions of their experience of being a victim of crime center on notions of power, equality, prejudice and dominance. They draw on socially constructed differences based on race and gender to define both their identity as a victim of crime as well as the identity of their offender. These distinctions, based on categories of identity, serve to create an oppositional construction of “us” against “them” and also serve to dehumanise the offender. The analysis further indicates that participants draw on multiple constructions of restorative justice and despite strong support for punitive beliefs it appears that a discourse of restorative justice is also present in participants’ discussions. A key theme running through the data is the loss of personal power as a result of victimization. Instead of returning a sense of power to participants by allowing them to participate in the justice process, the legal system becomes the holder of the power and compounds the injury against the victim. The study has implications for how victims of crime are positioned in the justice system and how notions of restorative justice can be advanced in South African discourses. Copyright / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Psychology / unrestricted

Inclusion of Indigenous communities and Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK) alongside reconciliation efforts feature in numerous plans and policies for nature and biodiversity conservation. But to what extent do these agreements present an honest attempt to equally share power and responsibility between Indigenous peoples and governance agencies in protected area management? In this thesis, I trace how including Indigenous communities and their TEK entered Canada’s policy discourse on nature conservation. I focus on the designation of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs), which presents Canada’s latest approach towards including Indigenous peoples in protected area management. Through a study of policy documents, I compare changes in Canadian governance agencies’ proposal of and motivations behind Indigenous peoples’ inclusion with insights from Indigenous communities’ documents related to Edéhzíe Protected Area and Thaidene Nëné Indigenous Protected Area. These documents offer insights into Indigenous stewardship practices, emphasize Indigenous self-governance as well as the role of TEK, Western science, and Indigenous languages in IPCA management. Although I conclude that Edéhzíe Protected Area and Thaidene Nëné Indigenous Protected Area present an honest attempt to equally share power and responsibility in IPCA management, I call on governance agencies to further centre Indigenous peoples’ ideas on stewarding biodiversity-rich places, grant rights to self-determination and self-governance, and restore justice.