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What it takes to march to a different drummer : a study of six English teachers /Kahn, Elizabeth Ann. January 1999 (has links)
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Education, June 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.
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Justifying Interventions: (De)Stabilizing Sovereignty? The Cases of Liberia and Burundi/Justifier des interventions: (Dé)stabiliser la souveraineté? Les cas de Liberia et BurundiWilén, Nina 08 February 2010 (has links)
The thesis poses the question of how one can stabilize a state through external intervention without destabilizing sovereignty. The study critically examines the justifications for international and regional interventions in the cases of Liberia and Burundi through a social constructivist framework. The main objective of the thesis is to enhance the understanding of how sovereignty is interpreted during non-aggressive interventions, both from a theoretical perspective through analysis of official discourses and from a practical perspective through interviews with external and internal actors in the field. The thesis argues that it may be more fruitful for future studies to question the aim of these interventions, rather than ask how to improve them. The study finds that rather than reinforce the sovereignty, these interventions neutralize states subject to external intervention in the sense that they become dependent on external capacity to maintain their stability, thereby maintaining peace and order in the international arena. The conclusion is that these interventions remain both controversial and paradoxical and the stated aim of reinforcing the state's sovereignty is questionable at best.
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A Case for International Socialisation: the Development of the National Role Conceptions of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania in the Baltic Sea Region.Luksaite, Arune January 2003 (has links)
When the Baltic States declared their independence in 1991, they did not become equal members of the international community in one day. Although the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union declared the end to the Cold War, ideas, beliefs, prejudices and discourses were much harder to trigger. The study addresses the issues of newly independent states, establishing themselves in the international community, analysing the processes of learning in the interaction with the other international actors. By combining Role theory and Constructivism the author develops a framework to understand the development and change of Baltic States role conceptions. How have Baltic states perceived their role in the Baltic Sea region during the period 1993-2002? How has the western discourse treated them? What role did the application for the EU membership play in the process? What have been the individual and group features of the Baltic States? The study attempts to answer these and other questions through thediscourse analysis of public speeches.
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Identity and Security in Europe: A Constructivist Study of Germany, Great Britain, Sweden and LithuaniaStasaityte, Edita January 2003 (has links)
This study examines different national constructions of contemporary European identities. The assumption is made that the construction of states'identities and identification of threats is a mutual process. For this reason special attention is paid to the construction of threats, embedded in a specific structure of the securitisation process. The author tries to answer to the questions of how identities are reproduced through the discourse on security and what information the analysis of national identities'constructions of Germany, Great Britain, Sweden andLithuania can provide about the contemporary ideas of a collective European identity using combination of Alexander Wendt's theoretical framework for analysing states'identities and the Copenhagen school's securitisation approach.
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Discourse on Immigration in Swedish Mass MediaBorisenko, Elena January 2005 (has links)
Mass movement of people over national borders constitutes the major feature of the today's world. Immigration and its implications are widely debated, whereby the term 'immigration', whenever appeared in a text, hardly ever refers to some unambigously defined concept. To deal with the question of immigration is, therefore, to be faced with a variety of definitions and connotations. The thesis constitutes an attempt to understand how the phenomenon of immigration is conceptualized in Swedish mass media debate, and explore the dynamics of the discourse over the last decade. To do so, the study develops a theoretical framework that takes a form of classification of different approaches to immigration, as formulated by major paradigms of international relations (liberal communitarianism, realism, idealism) and as developed within modern economic and cultural studies. Social construction of immigration and its implications for the nation-states serves as the organizing principle for the emerging classification, as social constructivism is adopted as the ontological standpoint of the thesis. The thesis then analyzes over 180 articles that deal with immigration and are published in the major Swedish daily newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet in the years 1993 and 2002. The aim is to discover common patterns of the debate and link them to the concepts constituting the theoretical framework. The analysis shows that almost all concepts described in the theoretical section can be identified in the mass media discourse, which allows to conclude that the developed classification has proved appropriate for the analysis of the empirical material. The research concludes that, while concepts pointing towards self-interests as determining factors for formulating immigration policies are present in the studied mass media discourse, which is especially clear in 1993, the debate in general is strongly influenced by adherence to international solidarity and humanistic values as the basis for Swedish traditional foreign policy. Additionally, the study highlights the essential changes occured within the debate over the last decade, among which a shift from connecting immigration exclusively to refugee policies towards a more braod understanding of immigration as a consequence of globalization and as a realization of individual right to free movement can be considered the most central.
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Constructive Systems Science - the Only Remaining Alternative?Kjellman, Arne January 2003 (has links)
The opposition between the realists and the anti-realists isas old as Western science. The question as to whether thefurniture of the worldwe call thethingsis to be considered real or not hasconsistently been at the forefront in the debates about scienceand philosophy. This urgent interest is motivated by the closeconnection to another questionnamely that of scientificobjectivity - an issue that seldom receives proper treatment.Objectivity has rather been taken for granted in thetraditional Newtonian paradigm with its well-known slogan: Thedetached observer is the objective one and the rational mind ofclarity. It was impossible to continue with this dictum, which isresponsible for the cleft between the natural and socialsciences and still presents a ban on human feelings inscientific endeavours, after the findings of quantum mechanicsat the beginning of the 20th century. However the penetratingpower of this important insight has been astonishingly weak andwith the emergence of computer science in the middle of thecentury, Newtonian sciences self-assumed status ofobjectivity has been apprehended as both very doubtful and asevere hindrance in other areas outside the quantum domain ofscientific activity. The efforts of computer modelling andsimulation analysis revealed a pronounced observer-dependencyregarding investigation. For these reasons this thesis will scrutinise the activityof science and the art of modellingproposing the use ofa 2-step model of modelling (metamodel) to clarify andemphasize the involvement of the observer in the process ofobservation. This approach reveals that the object-orientedapproach (OOA), which has been the prevailing one since thedawn of Western science and is one of the basic tenets of theNewtonian paradigm, makes science unable to describe itsobjects of discourse in an observer-independent manner. Such ascience is at risk to be considered inconsistent, incompleteand non-objective and for that reason unfit for consensualscientific use. The main claim of this thesis is that the object-orientedapproach is responsible for the genesis of Cartesian dualismand other inconsistencies, which are met in present dayscience. Such a claim is not novel however, but I will arguethat when science is dressed up as the Subject-orientedApproach to Knowledge (SOA) a long row of embarrassing andbewildering situations encountered in classical humanconceptualisation will vanishin a way that, as far as Iknow, has never been explicitly explained before. This approachalso promises a unification of the different disciplines ofsciences so that e.g. the social sciences can be treated on anequal footing with the natural sciencesand thus thisembarrassing gulf of human knowledge can be removed. This is aprofound shift of paradigm in science and the re-orientation ofhuman thinking required is both considerable andtime-consuming. For this reason this thesis is not a systematic presentationof the SOA, but rather tries, in Part 1, to pave the way for anunderstanding of this approach by an introductory discussionabout the means and scope of science and the essential role ofsymbolic modelling in this endeavourand in particularthe way these activities will be influenced by the anticipatedchange of paradigm. Some historical aspects of this particularSOA are also given as a background and this section iscompleted by a brief survey of the modern trends in scientificmodelling. Part 2 is collection of papers dealing with the principlesof modelling and simulation, and, rather more importantly, asequence of papers reflecting how the ideas of the SOA havedeveloped throughout the years due to the inconsistencies metwith in these and adjacent areas. To my mind they prove -beyond the point of any consensual doubtthat therealists position in science cannot be defended anylonger and that thethings of the worldby thescientific community must be considered merely privateallusions. More important however is the insight that the Newtonianparadigm is unable to produce an observer-independentdescription of this world with its conceived things and theonly way out of this embarrassing dilemma seems to be theacceptance of the SOAwith its hitherto strictly bannedfeature of subjectivity. Using this approach, we claim, sciencecan be given a consensual and consistent foundationandthe price to pay is the loss of scientific ontology. As alreadypointed out this thesis merely hints at the new path to takeinstead concentrating on the reasons for the impendingdemise of scientific realism and need of a constructive systemsscience.
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Cognitive Factors in the Theories of Balance of PowerTsao, Jia-fong 29 August 2007 (has links)
none
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The Nature of my ArtFink, Anastasia 11 August 2011 (has links)
In this arts-based thesis for a Masters degree in art education, I explored the meaning of my artwork through a constructivist investigation. During the process of artist research and making artwork, I was able to push boundaries for my art and myself and I was able to discover what kind of artist I was and what meaning was behind my artwork. This process of research,questioning, reflective documentation, and discovery has provided new tools and styles for teaching my students how to find their own personal voice in their artwork.
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Social Change in World Politics: Secondary Rules and Institutional PoliticsRaymond, Mark 11 January 2012 (has links)
This study fills what has long been recognized as a major gap in the field of International Relations (IR): an account of when and how change occurs in the structure of the international system. Attempts to create social change, to create or to alter intersubjectivity, are relatively common; the crucial question is why some attempts succeed while most fail. I argue that social
change is itself a rule-governed social activity, which I term institutional politics, and that attempts to create social change are more likely to succeed if they are pursued in a manner consistent with what H.L.A. Hart called secondary rules, or rules about rules. This central hypothesis is investigated in three cases: the emergence of great power management following the Napoleonic war, attempts to ban war as an instrument of state policy in the inter-war period,and the period of institutional contestation instigated by the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.
Available evidence in all three cases provides strong overall support for the central hypothesis and for the other core expectations of my theory. In addition to achieving important descriptive and explanatory advances with respect to the dynamics and morphology of the international
system, the study makes significant contributions to the constructivist literature in IR; namely, it suggests a basis on which to improve conceptual consolidation and comparability, and it moves
beyond a primary focus on norm promoters to include explicit theorization of the evaluative acts of their audiences. The most important policy implication of the study is the need for explicit renovation of the contemporary international system’s stock of secondary rules, to counter a decline in their legitimacy among a much more heterogenous set of members.
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Conflictual Foreign Policy of the United States: Between Security and Human RightsLayman, Chelsea K 01 January 2012 (has links)
The United States prioritizes human rights rhetorically but not in practice. As a result, United States policy is disjointed and conflictual between human rights and security. The result is an inconsistency in foreign policy. There have been examples of this throughout United States history such as in El Salvador, Indonesia, and Bahrain.
This thesis explored the three cases in depth by 1) providing background information and a summary of human rights violations in order to provide context for the analysis, 2) listing and explaining the reasons why the United States prioritized security, and 3) analyzing when human rights are absent and present in policy.
Following the analysis of the case studies the final section sought to provide a recommendation in order to reduce the inconsistencies in United States Foreign Policy. The central recommendation focuses on merging human rights considerations within security driven policies.
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