Many contemporary writers maintain that a prime requisite of poetry is autobiographical sincerity. They would have the poet commit himself to an openness with his audience that is usually reserved for only the most intimate relationships. The thirty-two poems of this thesis were written as a reaction to current confessional trends and postulate that the creation of fictions to live by is an intrinsic part of the human process. Central to the work is the idea that past fictions, traditions, and myths are no longer functional, and no workable fictions have yet been created. The overriding image of the work is that of a dance in a mirrored room where illusion and reflection are difficult to separate from reality and where the dancers move without knowledge of the meaning of their movement.

Since the 1960s, the Petersburg Area Art League (PAAL) has obtained works of art for its permanent collection through purchases, private donations, and through the local art show, the Poplar Lawn Art Festival, later known as Artfest. Recently, however, the organization has decided to become a non-collecting institution in order to focus on its mission to promote the arts in Petersburg through gallery shows for local artists and educational programs. While PAAL’s staff members share a love of art and a dedication to the local community, they have not been trained in professional standards for handling museum collections as outlined by the American Association of Museums (AAM). Consequently, the PAAL collection had not been adequately documented or stored in a manner that protected the works from potential damage or degradation. This museums project was designed to help the Petersburg Area Art League meet AAM standards. During the summer of 2010, the collection of 150 artworks was accessioned; its storage facility was reorganized; a database was created; and a collections management policy that would ensure the continued care of the collection after the completion of this project was written and approved. This paper describes challenges encountered and resolved during the two-month project and provides a reference for those who wish to take on similar projects in the future.

Ce travail de recherche vise à analyser, au moyen de l'enquête ethnographique, le phénomène de qualification des « objets africains » ainsi que les problématiques personnelles et institutionnelles qui justifient leur appropriation et leur appréciation. En se basant sur une enquête de terrain effectuée en France et au Mali, l'étude s'attache à circonscrire le spectre des pratiques individuelles et collectives qui s'organisent avec et autour de ces productions. Européens ou Africains, amateurs du dimanche, collectionneurs aguerris, sculpteurs, touristes ou marchands, une multiplicité d'acteurs individuels, issus de sphères parfois totalement étrangères les unes aux autres, gravitent autour de cette catégorie d'objets et les envisagent selon des perspectives variées. Fondé sur une approche dynamique et une mise en perspective historique visant à dessiner une anthropologie symétrique de ces objets - symétrie Afrique/Occident, objets/personnes, expert/profane -, l'objectif est donc de construire un cadre d'observation qui permette de respecter la diversité des formes d'appropriation de ces productions matérielles. Il s'agit, en d'autres termes, d'analyser les transformations physiques, sémantiques ou conceptuelles auxquelles sont soumis ces objets en vue de leur circulation et du fait de leur circulation entre des espaces géographiques, des cultures nationales et des mondes économiques différents. L'observation des dispositifs socio-techniques sur lesquels s'appuient les goûts, les pratiques et les visions du monde de ces acteurs permet ainsi d'identifier les enjeux qui les unissent ou les opposent. / This research aims to analyze, through ethnographic inquiry, the phenomenon of qualification of the "African objects" as well as the personal and institutional problems that justify their appropriation and appreciation. Based on a field survey conducted in France and Mali, the study seeks to identify the spectrum of individual and collective practices that are organized around and with these productions. Europeans or Africans, amateurs, collectors, carvers, tourists and merchants, a multiplicity of individual actors, sometimes coming from areas totally strangers to each other, revolve around this object class and consider them from various perspectives. Based on a dynamic approach and on a historical viewpoint to draw a symmetrical anthropology of these objects - symmetry Africa/West, objects/people, expert/layperson - the goal is to build an observation framework which allows to respect the diversity of appropriation forms of these material productions. In other words, this work wants to analyze the physical, semantic or conceptual transformations which objects are subject for their circulation and because of their transit between geographical areas, national cultures and different economic worlds. The observation of socio-technical devices on which lean on the tastes, practices and worldviews of these actors allows to identify the stakes that unite them or divide them.

Plato describes a way of reasoning that comprises two complementary operations, collection and division. Collection unifies many into one while division divides one into many. In other words, while collection brings together many parts into a whole, division divides a whole into many parts. While Plato goes into some detail in his observations on collection and division, several questions remain unanswered. More specifically, the means by which collection and division operate, their product, and their relation to deductive and non-deductive reasoning are uncertain. The purpose of this study is to shed light on collection and division by defending the following thesis: collection and division define logical frameworks that underlie both deductive and non-deductive reasoning. Chapter 1 will introduce collection and division by reviewing recent literature, defining key terms, and discussing illustrations of collection and division in the dialogues. Chapter 2 will explain how collection and division define logical frameworks through three operations: seeing, naming, and placing. These operations will be discussed in terms of their relations to reasoning about wholes and parts. Chapter 3 will present four models for interpreting the logical structures that are produced by collection and division. It will present the argument that collection and division define non-hierarchical structures of overlapping parts. Chapter 4 will present the argument that collection and division define whole-part relations that underlie deductive reasoning on the one hand, and the formulation of definitions in dialogues such as the Sophist and the Statesman on the other. Chapter 5 will explore the relation between collection and division and non-deductive reasoning. It will present the argument that Meno’s definition of virtue and Euthyphro’s definition of piety are formulated using collection and division. Chapter 6 will provide a summary of key points from the preceding chapters and discuss unanswered questions and avenues for future research.

Magister Artium - MA / This thesis is concerned with an uprising which occurred during the early morning hours of the 22nd of November 1962 in Paarl- a small agricultural town some 60 kilometres northeast of Cape Town. On this occasion a group of about 250 men, armed with axes, pangas and other home-made weapons, marched from the nearby Mbekweni township to the police station in the town's centre. An event, which lasted no more than three hours, left seven dead and several wounded in its wake. This uprising was a comparatively small event, with comparatively few casualties but it took place against the backdrop of the turn to armed struggle which followed the banning of the African National Congress (hereafter the ANC) and the Pan African Congress (hereafter the PAC). However in the sense that it seemed to directly threaten white civilians, this was an event constructed as most closely resembling the anti-colonialist Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya between 1952 and 1960 during which time press reports focused most often of the brutal killings of white women and children by groups represented as violent "terrorist gangs." Informed by this kind of over-simplified propaganda of the war in Kenya, the events in Paarl, particularly the killing of 17 year old Rentia Vermeulen and 21 year old Frans Richard, as well as the attack on an elderly couple in their bed, by men with "primitive weapons," incited massive latent white anxieties throughout South Africa and intensive repressive measures.

The Intention to Notice: the collection, the tour and ordinary landscapes is concerned with how ordinary landscapes and places are enabled and conserved through making itineraries that are framed around the ephemera encountered by chance, and the practices that make possible the endurance of these material traces. Through observing and then examining the material and temporal aspects of a variety of sites/places, the museum and the expanded garden are identified as spaces where the expression of contemporary political, ecological and social attitudes to cultural landscapes can be realised through a curatorial approach to design, to effect minimal intervention. Three notions are proposed to encourage investigation into contemporary cultural landscapes: To traverse slowly to allow space for speculations framed by the topographies and artefacts encountered; to [re]make/[re]write cultural landscapes as discursive landscapes that provoke the intention to notice; and to reveal and conserve the fabric of everyday places. A series of walking, recording and making projects undertaken across a variety of cultural landscapes in remote South Australia, Melbourne, Sydney, London, Los Angeles, Chandigarh, Padova and Istanbul, investigate how communities of practice are facilitated through the invitation to notice and intervene in ordinary landscapes, informed by the theory and practice of postproduction and the reticent auteur. This community of practice approach draws upon chance encounters and it seeks to encourage creative investigation into places. The Intention to Notice is a practice of facilitating that also leads to recording traces and events; large and small, material and immaterial, that encourages both conjecture and archive. Most importantly, there is an open-ended invitation to commit and exchange through design interaction.

Missing Links explores relationships between objects. It is an empirical exercise in equivalence and divergence, an experiment in the visual nomenclature of enumeration and classification and a dissertation on the materiality of the construction of systems of thought. It is concerned with the manufacture and production of particular histories through the formal analysis of fifty specimens. The specimens, or objects, under investigation are constructed from recycled corrugated cardboard, water-activated brown tape and hot glue. These materials are transformed and renewed through a series of repetitive processes and activities including cutting, slicing, rolling, joining, gluing…The material is receptive and provisional in nature. The specimens exist as a series of models, one made after the other, each made in response to the one before, and as thus present an unfolding of thoughts and material experiences. They represent a genealogy of the imagination ; creating relationships and dialogues within and between external physical manifestations. The study of natural history informs this collection with particular reference to the nineteenth century work of Charles Darwin. In his attempts to understand the temporal arrangement of the natural world in The Origin of the Species, Darwin posited the notion of infinite change. This project is inspired by Darwin's emphasis of the sheer multiplicity of living objects, their complexity and the possibility of a transformational and material history. The objects in Missing Links were produced in response to the prolific nature of the natural world, its endless variations and ability to produce exquisite material adaptations. As a collection, they contain, support and enact a layered history, an archive of process and a document of action. Missing Links also references the procedures of the laboratory - the facilitation of controlled conditions under which experiments, documentary exercises and data collection and collation can take place. It is the merging of these two realms and activities that lies at the heart of the project. The synergy of the artistic world and the scientific activities the project employs highlight similarities and discontinuities between seemingly disparate practices. This is a productive coupling; facilitating interesting juxtapositions between objects and ideas and signalling the potential for the collection to coalesce in a multiplicity of orders in response to the systems of thought that contain and constrain it.

This thesis describes a laboratory investigation of in-situ treatment of synthetic leachate representative of that generated by a municipal solid waste (MSW) landfill. The overall objective is to evaluate alternative designs and operating procedures for effective leachate collection in conjunction with efforts to accelerate waste stabilization (i.e. leachate recirculation). In the investigation five 15 cm (6) diameter PVC columns were packed with pea gravel and concrete of different sizes; geotextiles were also placed between the packed sections as filter-separators and promoters of bacterial growth. Synthetic leachate was continuously input to the top of the columns and circulated at rates representative of operating field conditions. For each column, effluent was discharged to a nitrification reactor before recirculation. The tests were conducted under anaerobic and unsaturated conditions in the columns. Results indicate about a 97% decrease in COD from the synthetic leachate concentration entering the top of the column, and about 98 % conversion of the ammonia to nitrogen gas. COD depletion and methane production were not significantly inhibited by the denitrification process. Optimum Hydraulic Retention Time (HRT) for the nitrification-denitrification system makes it economically viable for its development at a landfill site. Gas production shows low CO2 values, decreasing the potential of clogging in the Leachate Collection System (LCS) and extending the Landfill Gas (LFG) networks life service by generating a less corrosive environment. The use of concrete as an alternative to the most commonly used natural gravel as leachate collection drains may not be a good option. During the experiment, the leachate that permeated the columns packed with crushed concrete, presented a higher pH than the leachate that permeated the natural stone. At the conclusion of the experiment noticeable weathering was observed when the columns where dismantled. Further studies are recommended until more conclusive evidence as to concrete performance is found. The overall results obtained from the experiment show that in situ passive treatment at landfills is viable.

Waste is anything which is considered to be no longer useful to anyone. In reality, it actually possesses the ability to be the raw material for several other processes and applications. Improper handling of wastes could result in several environmental hazards such as air pollution, soil erosion, methane emissions, low birth rate and others. In developing countries, proper handling of wastes is one of the important topics to be focussed from an environmental perspective. This thesis aims to propose an improved waste collection system in Gaborone through investigating the current waste management practices in Gaborone from different perspectives. Several stakeholders were interviewed for gathering information related to the present waste legislations, waste collection, treatment, and disposal methods. A composition study was also conducted along with the other research teams in order to support the objective of this thesis. The results shows that the current waste management practices has certain flaws which the management has to overcome in order to avoid the environmental impacts caused by the waste generation in Gaborone. Basic Recycling and treatment facilities are absent in Gaborone. The local government do not have any updated plans for the proper handling of wastes. The obtained results are critically analysed to showcase the existing flaws in the waste management practices, and using the state of the art knowledge in waste management the research team suggests an improved waste collection system for Gaborone considering the economic and environmental conditions.

This thesis describes a laboratory investigation of in-situ treatment of synthetic leachate representative of that generated by a municipal solid waste (MSW) landfill. The overall objective is to evaluate alternative designs and operating procedures for effective leachate collection in conjunction with efforts to accelerate waste stabilization (i.e. leachate recirculation). In the investigation five 15 cm (6) diameter PVC columns were packed with pea gravel and concrete of different sizes; geotextiles were also placed between the packed sections as filter-separators and promoters of bacterial growth. Synthetic leachate was continuously input to the top of the columns and circulated at rates representative of operating field conditions. For each column, effluent was discharged to a nitrification reactor before recirculation. The tests were conducted under anaerobic and unsaturated conditions in the columns. Results indicate about a 97% decrease in COD from the synthetic leachate concentration entering the top of the column, and about 98 % conversion of the ammonia to nitrogen gas. COD depletion and methane production were not significantly inhibited by the denitrification process. Optimum Hydraulic Retention Time (HRT) for the nitrification-denitrification system makes it economically viable for its development at a landfill site. Gas production shows low CO2 values, decreasing the potential of clogging in the Leachate Collection System (LCS) and extending the Landfill Gas (LFG) networks life service by generating a less corrosive environment. The use of concrete as an alternative to the most commonly used natural gravel as leachate collection drains may not be a good option. During the experiment, the leachate that permeated the columns packed with crushed concrete, presented a higher pH than the leachate that permeated the natural stone. At the conclusion of the experiment noticeable weathering was observed when the columns where dismantled. Further studies are recommended until more conclusive evidence as to concrete performance is found. The overall results obtained from the experiment show that in situ passive treatment at landfills is viable.