Thesis (M. L. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes special report study entitled: Boundary : encounter, fustion and transformation. Includes bibliographical references.

The Creating Borderlands using a Multicultural Approach: a reflective ethnography focuses on an exploration into the psychological landscapes of junior-level students, whose minds have been riddled with stereotypes, single-stories, and images of Nazi Germany and of the Jewish people. The research navigates these young minds through a sea of images and preconceptions of the German and Jewish cultures and attempts to break down barriers, and reconstruct a borderland and a geography of renewed/reshaped understanding. The research intends to explore issues of social justice through a multimodal, multi-literacy unit within the context of the Holocaust. Through the qualitative paradigm of ethnography the research uncovers a mosaic of preconceptions and stereotypes, a tapestry of emotions, and a puzzle of renewed cultural awareness. Key terms: Border Crossing, Social Scaffolding, Multimodal Literacy, Reflexive Ethnography, Narrative Inquiry, Cultural Awareness, Polyvocality, Autobiographical Narrative, Qualitative Paradigm, Bricolage, Reflexivity, Multicultural Education

The Creating Borderlands using a Multicultural Approach: a reflective ethnography focuses on an exploration into the psychological landscapes of junior-level students, whose minds have been riddled with stereotypes, single-stories, and images of Nazi Germany and of the Jewish people. The research navigates these young minds through a sea of images and preconceptions of the German and Jewish cultures and attempts to break down barriers, and reconstruct a borderland and a geography of renewed/reshaped understanding. The research intends to explore issues of social justice through a multimodal, multi-literacy unit within the context of the Holocaust. Through the qualitative paradigm of ethnography the research uncovers a mosaic of preconceptions and stereotypes, a tapestry of emotions, and a puzzle of renewed cultural awareness. Key terms: Border Crossing, Social Scaffolding, Multimodal Literacy, Reflexive Ethnography, Narrative Inquiry, Cultural Awareness, Polyvocality, Autobiographical Narrative, Qualitative Paradigm, Bricolage, Reflexivity, Multicultural Education

abstract: This dissertation examines the transformation of China's Yunnan borderlands with mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia, especially during the late 19th and the 20th century, in terms of political, social, economic and cultural changes. It moves beyond the traditional paradigm that stresses the diversity and difference of mainland Southeast Asian polities, and instead, emphasizes the similarities they shared in long-term interactions based on common religions, economic patterns, wars, intra-regional migration, and trade before the area was divided into sub-regions influenced by traditional and new imperial powers. This unique perspective provides a new approach to understanding the deep-rooted social and economic dilemmas and inequities caused by the competition of big powers in the region. Based on a careful examination of China's model, this dissertation calls the scholars' attention to how the indigenous societies evolved in response to different alternatives for modernization provided or enforced by colonial and regional powers. This dissertation addresses a phenomenon that occurred in China's nation building process in which a complicated local history of Yunnan that had a rich historical legacy of contributions from both Chinese migrants and indigenous ethnic minorities was replaced with one that focused only the ethnic minorities in the region, as well as their participation in a reconstructed national history. This simplified and ethicized history supports a multi-ethnic Chinese national identity that avoids the historical, political, social and cultural context of the independence of the indigenous societies, and instead, stresses their submission to Chinese authority and the unification of China. This study also emphasizes the process through which the boundaries between China and other countries in the region are shifting to focus on issues of homeland security and geopolitical interest. Also frequent economic and cultural exchanges from all sides have diluted the previous ideological confrontations in the current era of China-centric globalization. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2015

Following the U.S. annexation of a vast swath of northern Mexico in 1848, a range of English- and Spanish-language authors who lived in the region composed fictions narrating the transformations of government and sovereignty unfolding around them. Contributors to this body of writing include both long-canonized and recently recovered authors from the U.S. and Mexico: John Rollin Ridge, Mark Twain, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Frank Norris, Heriberto Frías, Lauro Aguirre, Teresa Urrea, and others. “The Borderlands Aesthetic” reconstructs this transnational literary history in order to create a revised account of the aesthetics and politics of realist narrative. The realism of these novels and narratives lies in their presentation of changing social and political landscapes in the nineteenth-century borderlands: less concerned with individual psychology than with social relations and institutions, the works I study construct verisimilar and historically specific milieus in which characters experience the incorporation of border regions into the U.S. and Mexican nation-states. My chapters show how these novelistic worlds archive fugitive histories of competing sovereignty claims, porous borders, non-state polities, and bureaucratized dispossessions. My research thus presents a more extended literary history of novelistic narrative in the borderlands than is commonly recognized: while the borderlands novel is often treated as a form of twentieth-century fiction concerned especially with cultural hybridity, I locate the genre’s emergence a century earlier in writing more concerned with institutions than identities. Early borderlands narratives construct the institutional milieus of annexation and its aftermath using discontinuous and interruptive formal structures: jumps between first- and third-person narration, plots that wander away from conclusions, juxtapositions of discrepant temporalities, and shifting levels of fictionality. These persistent aesthetic breaks can seem at odds with conventional realist aesthetics. By the second half of the nineteenth century, proponents of realism like William Dean Howells valued the mode not only for its provision of verisimilar details but also for how it embedded characters in organic and cohesive social wholes via continuously thick description and interconnected plots. Yet I argue that it is the turn away from such narrative techniques that serves as an engine of realism in the borderlands: with their aesthetic breaks and interruptions, these works construct a fabric of social and political relations that is not a single totality but a multi-layered and division-marked assemblage. I contend that the interruptive structures of borderlands narratives are not manifestations of an alternate formation of realism but distillations of an underappreciated tendency within the mode more generally to dramatize social division via formal discontinuity. That tendency is especially apparent in the works I study because the massive social upheaval following the political reorganization of the North American southwest prompted particularly pronounced aesthetic ruptures in borderlands novels and narratives. What the aesthetic breaks of this body of writing make perceptible are varied histories of political institutions beyond the sovereign nation-state, from the flexible male homosocial networks of Silver Rush miners to the railroad monopolies ruling Gilded Age California. These histories are occluded in other forms of social representation—like censuses, travelogues, and police surveillance networks—that construct territories and populations as stable and readily knowable social wholes. This literary archive thus challenges the trend in contemporary scholarship to accuse nineteenth-century realism of reproducing the perspectives and values of dominant institutions; I contend that these borderlands narratives make sensible precisely the institutional arrangements that destabilize U.S. and Mexican state efforts to secure sovereignty. My research thus identifies a new model of novelistic politics: by making sensible the limits of the nation-state’s hold on power and the range of polities existing alongside its institutions, borderlands narratives lay bare the contingency of existing social hierarchies and invite readers to contest them. My chapters develop these lines of argument by analyzing the forms of aesthetic break that circulate through borderlands literary networks at key moments in the region’s history of governance. Chapter one shows how Joaquín Murrieta novels written in English, French, and Spanish feature interpolated scenes of theatrical address that reveal the precariousness of U.S. power in the southwest just following the U.S.-Mexico War. Chapter two focuses on Mark Twain’s writing, especially Roughing It (1872), arguing that his use of digressive narration serves as an effective technique for representing the social institutions and relations of U.S. American and Chinese populations of the Gold and Silver Rush eras. Chapter three argues that the anti-railroad novels of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Frank Norris employ discrepant narrative temporalities to diagnose the techniques quasi-sovereign railroad companies use to rule borderlands populations. Chapter four examines how narratives by Heriberto Frías, Lauro Aguirre, and Teresa Urrea use swings between fiction and non-fiction to bear witness to state violence in the northern Mexico town of Tomóchic. A conclusion reflects on the literary life of the 1915 “Plan de San Diego” in novels by Sutton Griggs and Américo Paredes in order to suggest an endpoint for the study. By demonstrating how formal breaks serve as realist narrative techniques in borderlands fiction of the nineteenth century, my dissertation shows this body of writing to constitute a crucial chapter in the history of the Euro-American novel.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alberta, 2009. / Title from pdf file main screen (viewed Sept. 22, 2009). "A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Dept. of History and Classics". Includes bibliographical references.

This qualitative study uses multiple autobiographical narratives of racialized transgender men to examine the intersecting axes of oppression at work in the borderlands of identity. The research contributes more complex understandings of transgender lives by raising questions about how gender, race, class, and sexuality intersect in the lives of racialized transgender men, and how such identities negotiate their place in the various communities constituted by those particular social locations. In particular I look at the ways that solidarity works in the borderlands, the liminal space composed of intersecting subject positions. I ask what constitutes solidarity, and I discover the contingencies operating in the borderlands that facilitate or pose barriers to full participation and solidarity of racialized transgender men. Findings reveal the complex negotiations racialized transgender men must engage in, both within and outside of queer and feminist communities, and challenge us to think through the meanings of solidarity.

This qualitative study uses multiple autobiographical narratives of racialized transgender men to examine the intersecting axes of oppression at work in the borderlands of identity. The research contributes more complex understandings of transgender lives by raising questions about how gender, race, class, and sexuality intersect in the lives of racialized transgender men, and how such identities negotiate their place in the various communities constituted by those particular social locations. In particular I look at the ways that solidarity works in the borderlands, the liminal space composed of intersecting subject positions. I ask what constitutes solidarity, and I discover the contingencies operating in the borderlands that facilitate or pose barriers to full participation and solidarity of racialized transgender men. Findings reveal the complex negotiations racialized transgender men must engage in, both within and outside of queer and feminist communities, and challenge us to think through the meanings of solidarity.

Through the multi-layered social study on the term “border”, the special relationship between Hong Kong and Shenzhen extract the complex of politics and emotion with the cross-border co-operation. In the past 100 years, the counter relationship between Hong Kong and Shenzhen kept changing with the metamorphoses of political nature borderline. From the completely closed condition to the optional acceptation and further trans-boundary co-operation, the landscape of border zone was critically influenced by the gravitation. For the special geological location, the border zone urbanization in Shenzhen was practically controlled by trans-border economics. But Hong Kong kept its “closed area ordinance” in the border zone until 2016. With the warmer communication of the two cities, the trend for the border zone landscape could be derived to a relatively steady conclusion according to the study of socio-economic on border zone typologies and development. The development of Lok Ma Chau is set as the assumed opportunity for the thesis. According to the requirement of the future development of the border zone for the two cities, a proposal on sustainability of city is framed by the trans-boundary planning project. A resource and environment activating plan which is specialized for the border zone would be the crucial region for the co-operation and developing balance of future would be designed by the project. / published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Landscape Architecture