Police officers‟ perceptions of gender-motivated violence against women have been overlooked in hate crime research. In an attempt to fill a gap in the hate crime, violence against women, and policing hate crime literature, I examine how nine police officers understand gender-motivated violence in Canada using vignettes, sentence-competition tasks, and an interview guide. Here, participants are asked about their perceptions of and experience with hate crime and gender-motivated hate crime against women. Results indicate that the majority of participants do not perceive hypothetical instance of violence against women as hate crime, all of which is a product of: victim-perpetrator relationships, ambiguous motives and alternative motives, and definitional constraints with legal terms. Equally, factors and conditions that influence police officers‟ perceptions relate to: the typical victims of hate notion, police routine and experience with hate crime and gender-motivated violence, hate crime legislation, hate crime policies and procedures for police, and hate crime training for police. / UOIT

As one of the first scholarly studies of Ulf Miehe’s Ich hab noch einen Toten in Berlin, this thesis undertakes a close reading of the novel, thereby providing a basis for further research. According to Linda Hutcheon's typology of metafiction as outlined in her book titled Narcisstic Narrative Miehe's novel displays the characteristics that fall under her category of overt metafiction, as opposed to covert metafiction. Overt metafiction self-consciously thematizes narrative, stating outright that a parallel theme to the narrative is the discussion of the narrative. Following mainly Hutcheon's defining characteristics of overt metafiction, I have separated my narrative analysis of Miehe's novel into three sections: pastiche, intertextuality, and narrative layering. The first two sections are concerned namely with how the novel engages with the discourses of the hard-boiled genre and the theoretical and social considerations of the artist, while the last section explores how the form and content expresses this self-conscious disruption of the narrative. The argument unfolds by first discussing Fredric Jameson's concept of pastiche in place of Linda Hutcheon's parody, as indicative of a shift from modernism to post-modernism. Benjamin's narrative (the main character) as a performance projects his pastiche of the hard-boiled genre onto Berlin, recording the gap between the world he experiences and the image he projects onto the world, indicating that it is to be read as imitation. Benjamin documents the inauthenticity of the hard-boiled genre's realism through his projection and indicates the possibility of many versions through Anna's countering version. In the second section, intertextuality is discussed through Hutcheon's link to T. S. Eliot's concept of tradition in literature. Miehe's intertextual references engage with the artistic, theoretical and social considerations of the tradition, including realism of the hard-boiled genre, influence anxiety, originality, inspiration, and race relations. When Miehe includes references to the hard-boiled genre in literature and film, and to himself, his novel questions the necessity and accuracy of the hard-boiled genre's claim to realism, but also expresses part of that questioning to be a comparison and search for inspiration for original work. This involves the recognition of the past texts as not the one and only authentic version or form, but that innovation requires a recreating of past texts. The last and third section concerns narrative layering as a means to thematize narrative within a narrative. Through the devices of mise en abyme, storytelling, narrative thematizing, and narrative framing, the text shows itself to be self-aware of its function as narrative, while creating that narrative. These devices attempt to engage the reader as an active participant as the text questions its own conceptualization of reality, the diegetic world, hopefully leading the reader to question the perception of reality presented in all texts. The occurrences of metafictional devices in Miehe's novel develop the text as what Patricia Waugh describes as the site of communication between the reader and the writer. The writer has dismantled the codes that would usually cause a passive reader. Instead, the reader is encouraged to recreate the narrative through disruptive clues. In this active role, detecting the authentic text becomes the investigation of the many texts.

This thesis provides an ethical discussion about the merits of rehabilitation as well as retributivism within the modern American penal system.  By utilizing arguments by philosophers Ronald Dworkin and Immanuel Kant I conclude that under certain circumstances the seemingly dissimilar approaches of the rehabilitationist and the retributivist can co-exist.

As one of the first scholarly studies of Ulf Miehe’s Ich hab noch einen Toten in Berlin, this thesis undertakes a close reading of the novel, thereby providing a basis for further research. According to Linda Hutcheon's typology of metafiction as outlined in her book titled Narcisstic Narrative Miehe's novel displays the characteristics that fall under her category of overt metafiction, as opposed to covert metafiction. Overt metafiction self-consciously thematizes narrative, stating outright that a parallel theme to the narrative is the discussion of the narrative. Following mainly Hutcheon's defining characteristics of overt metafiction, I have separated my narrative analysis of Miehe's novel into three sections: pastiche, intertextuality, and narrative layering. The first two sections are concerned namely with how the novel engages with the discourses of the hard-boiled genre and the theoretical and social considerations of the artist, while the last section explores how the form and content expresses this self-conscious disruption of the narrative. The argument unfolds by first discussing Fredric Jameson's concept of pastiche in place of Linda Hutcheon's parody, as indicative of a shift from modernism to post-modernism. Benjamin's narrative (the main character) as a performance projects his pastiche of the hard-boiled genre onto Berlin, recording the gap between the world he experiences and the image he projects onto the world, indicating that it is to be read as imitation. Benjamin documents the inauthenticity of the hard-boiled genre's realism through his projection and indicates the possibility of many versions through Anna's countering version. In the second section, intertextuality is discussed through Hutcheon's link to T. S. Eliot's concept of tradition in literature. Miehe's intertextual references engage with the artistic, theoretical and social considerations of the tradition, including realism of the hard-boiled genre, influence anxiety, originality, inspiration, and race relations. When Miehe includes references to the hard-boiled genre in literature and film, and to himself, his novel questions the necessity and accuracy of the hard-boiled genre's claim to realism, but also expresses part of that questioning to be a comparison and search for inspiration for original work. This involves the recognition of the past texts as not the one and only authentic version or form, but that innovation requires a recreating of past texts. The last and third section concerns narrative layering as a means to thematize narrative within a narrative. Through the devices of mise en abyme, storytelling, narrative thematizing, and narrative framing, the text shows itself to be self-aware of its function as narrative, while creating that narrative. These devices attempt to engage the reader as an active participant as the text questions its own conceptualization of reality, the diegetic world, hopefully leading the reader to question the perception of reality presented in all texts. The occurrences of metafictional devices in Miehe's novel develop the text as what Patricia Waugh describes as the site of communication between the reader and the writer. The writer has dismantled the codes that would usually cause a passive reader. Instead, the reader is encouraged to recreate the narrative through disruptive clues. In this active role, detecting the authentic text becomes the investigation of the many texts.

In the literature researchers don't agree whether news content in China in an era of media commercialization still functions to promote the dominant ideology of the ruling Communist Party. The thesis is a theoretical discussion of ideology, ideological hegemony and its evolving nature, with the consideration of Chinese situations. The theoretical discussion concludes that the dominant ideology in China is changing with the demands of a changing world, and so is media's representation of ideology. With some explorative data of crime news on three domestic and non-domestic news web sites to illustrate the theoretical discussion, the author of the thesis finds that in an era of media commercialization the ideological influence still plays a bigger role than the commercial influence in shaping crime news content of domestic media. Moreover, ideological messages are distributed through crime news in such subtle and indirect forms as the selection of official news sources, the frequent indication of the death penalty, the positive presentation of the police, and the attribution of individual causes to crime.

Diss.--Frankfurt am Main--Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, 2004. / Bibliogr. p. 119-126.

Dissertation--Juristische Fakultät--Freiburg--Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, 2007. / Bibliogr. p. 289-302.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of South Florida, 2002. / Includes vita. Title from PDF of title page. Document formatted into pages; contains 47 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2009. / Adviser: Jay Corzine. Includes bibliographical references (p. 209-224).

Thesis--Hamburg. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-102).