Magister Administrationis - MAdmin / One of the most pertinent issues currently confronting South Africans and perhaps people around the world is the question of how to bring about social justice for everybody regardless of ‘races’, ‘ethnicities’, cultures, religions and genders. With this in mind, this study evaluates through a critical discourse analysis model the preambles of selected public policy documents in conjunction with the issue of racial classification as prescribed in the Z83 job application form in a post-apartheid South Africa. It draws specifically on Halliday’s (1978, 1989, and 2004) discourse analysis framework to evaluate the field and tenor of public discourse (what happened historically and who was involved in public policy formulations) and finally, the mode of public policy discourse (the part that language plays in the making of a new South African society). Moreover, it uses the education sector as an indicator of transformation to highlight the successes and failures of post-apartheid historical redress. It uses education as an exemplar because it ‘plays’ or has the potential to play a pivotal role in transformation and nation building in a post-apartheid South Africa. The study appraises particularly the impact of the notion of plurality of races as a transformation strategy; that is, its successes and failures in determining educational achievements numerically as well as nation building from 1994 to 2014. It uses close linguistic/discourse analysis to unravel the meaning(s) of ‘united in our diversity’ as well as associated concepts in the preambles of selected public policy documents. The reason for this is to show that the notion of different races is implicated in the concept ‘diversity’ in the preamble of South Africa’s constitution act 108 of 1996 as well as ‘designated groups’ in the preambles of affirmative action and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policies.

This thesis looks at the issue of child marriage and the discourse used by major international NGOs in their program reports and briefs to promote the end of child marriage. Through this thesis, it is argued that there is a need for a more prominent gender analysis that takes into account the current structural conditions which perpetuate gender inequality and reinforce notions of vulnerability and disempowerment of the child forced to marry (girl or boy). Child marriage programming fails to fully address the transformative changes needed to end – or to significantly impact - this global problem and to fully address the denial of human rights arising from child marriage. Using a qualitative content analysis and discourse analysis, this thesis examines 10 publicly-available documents based on a continuum of impacts from essentialism, to gender mainstreaming, to transformative change. The findings shows that there is a prevalence of gender mainstreaming discourse, although still often employed in conjunction with some gender essentialist language. To see real change in the world, there needs to be a switch towards transformative language within the discourse of organizations that are trying to make a change on the ground.

CHARLES UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Institute of Political Studies Department of Security Studies Master thesis 2019 Tetyana Demyanchuk CHARLES UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Institute of Political Studies Department of Security Studies Tetyana Demyanchuk Understanding of hybrid warfare in Ukraine: to what extent this understanding is shaped by its internal experience? Master thesis Prague 2019 Author: Tetyana Demyanchuk Supervisor: Mgr. Tomáš Kučera, Ph.D. Academic year: 2018/2019 Bibliographic note DEMYANCHUK, Tetyana (2019) Understanding of hybrid warfare in Ukraine: to what extent this understanding is shaped by its internal experience? 50 p. Master thesis. Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Security Studies. Mgr. Tomáš Kučera, Ph.D. Abstract Hybrid warfare has achieved notoriety of being a buzzword attempting to explain the changes in the modern warfare that blur the lines between war and peace, conventional and irregular warfare. Despite its definitional shortcomings, it made its way into the official discourse of the politicians commenting on the conflict in Ukraine and Russia's involvement in it, which did not add clarity. This thesis aims to bring a Ukrainian perspective to the discussion, and it attempts to provide a deep interpretation of sufficiently...

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / With several highly publicized police killings during the latter half of 2014, the issue of police violence has been re-ignited in the United States as emotionally charged a topic as ever, dividing Americans politically and socially and racially. From Eric Garner to Nicholas Robertson, the media has been greatly influential on public perception of police killings. Based on 163 digital news articles about cases of police killings from the top ten visited American news sites of 2015, this study analyzes how the American media’s language contributes to readers’ perception of police killings, focusing on patterns of race-related modifiers, passivization, and evaluation. Use of these linguistic features can influence public perception of the role of race, police accountability, and societal expectations. Considering the findings, I advocate for media literacy education as professional development for journalists.

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Some scholars say that Russian syntax has free word order. However, other researchers claim that the basic word order of Russian is Subject, Verb, Object (SVO). Some researchers also assert that the use of different word orders may be influenced by various factors, including positions of discourse topic and focus, and register (spoken, fiction, academic, non-academic). In addition, corpora have been shown to be useful tools in gathering empirical linguistic data, and modern advances in computing have made corpora freely available and their use widespread. The Russian National Corpus is a large corpus of Russian that is widely used and well suited to syntactic research. This thesis aims to answer three research questions: 1) If all six word orders in Russian are possible, what frequencies of each order will I find in a data sample from the Russian National Corpus? 2) Do the positions of discourse topic and focus influence word order variations? 3) Does register (spoken, fiction, academic, non-academic) influence word order variations? A sample of 500 transitive sentences was gathered from the Russian National Corpus and each one was analyzed for its word order, discourse pattern, and register. Results found that a majority of the sentences were SVO. Additionally, a majority of the sample contained the topic before the focus, and most of the sample were from the non-academic register. A chi-square analysis for each research question showed statistically significant results. This indicates that the results were not a product of chance, and that discourse patterns and register influence word order variations. These findings provide evidence that there is a predominant word order in Russian.

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