The fine arts can be described as in a state of crisis, manifest in the tendency for style to fragment and pluralism in art criticism - the view that the work of art is a document and that there are no privileged criteria of artistic value. Following the example of the anti-art avant-garde, recent art critical and sociological theory has rejected the notion of artistic 'specialness', and undermined the category of aesthetic experience. In this context, it has been suggested that art is finished, that a new era of Post-modernity has begun. This thesis confronts these claims by raising the question of the nature of art. This thesis argues that:;- Theorisation about the nature of art can be located within a structural framework, itself a response to the existential reality of the socially mediated categories of art and aesthetic experience.;- The fine art tradition was historically constituted as a social category, with the theorisation of the special relationship between artist, art object and aesthetic object.;-Theorisation took two forms within the Classical tradition, each developing into distinct aesthetics in the Modernist period, the form of the aesthetic being related to the art style and its social conditions of production and consumption.;- The form of the aesthetic can be shown to be structurally related to the consciousness of freedom/oppression in society, providing an important component in the dynamics of style.;- Contemporary art remains Modernist. Claims concerning the end of art and Postmodernism have wrongly delimited Modernism, often narrowly confined to avant-gardism.;Nonetheless, since 1945, artists have pushed art to the limits of the structural framework that defines it as a special social practice, all but abandoning art's aesthetic core, but not erasing its public's expectation of 'meaning'. In this context, a more evaluative response to art is called for from a critical sociological discourse.

Due to the fact that emergency situations can lead to substantial losses, both financial and in terms of human lives, it is essential that texts used in a crisis situation be clearly understandable. This thesis is concerned with the study of the complexity of the crisis management sub-language and with methods to produce new, clear texts and to rewrite pre-existing crisis management documents which are too complex to be understood. By doing this, this interdisciplinary study makes several contributions to the crisis management field. First, it contributes to the knowledge of the complexity of the texts used in the domain, by analysing the presence of a set of written language complexity issues derived from the psycholinguistic literature in a novel corpus of crisis management documents. Second, since the text complexity analysis shows that crisis management documents indeed exhibit high numbers of text complexity issues, the thesis adapts to the English language controlled language writing guidelines which, when applied to the crisis management language, reduce its complexity and ambiguity, leading to clear text documents. Third, since low quality of communication can have fatal consequences in emergency situations, the proposed controlled language guidelines and a set of texts which were re-written according to them are evaluated from multiple points of view. In order to achieve that, the thesis both applies existing evaluation approaches and develops new methods which are more appropriate for the task. These are used in two evaluation experiments – evaluation on extrinsic tasks and evaluation of users’ acceptability. The evaluations on extrinsic tasks (evaluating the impact of the controlled language on text complexity, reading comprehension under stress, manual translation, and machine translation tasks) Text Complexity and Text Simplification in the Crisis Management domain 4 show a positive impact of the controlled language on simplified documents and thus ensure the quality of the resource. The evaluation of users’ acceptability contributes additional findings about manual simplification and helps to determine directions for future implementation. The thesis also gives insight into reading comprehension, machine translation, and cross-language adaptability, and provides original contributions to machine translation, controlled languages, and natural language generation evaluation techniques, which make it valuable for several scientific fields, including Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and a number of different sub-fields of NLP.

published_or_final_version / Chinese Language and Literature / Master / Master of Arts

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This thesis examines the current process of refugee integration in Germany. It aims at finding out, how it will be possible for Germany to successfully integrate the high number of asylum seekers, particularly from the Middle East, that have arrived here since Angela Merkel’s decision of suspending the Dublin Regulations and opening Germany’s borders to refugees in late summer of 2015. In order to do so, this thesis first seeks to develop a better understanding of the concept of integration through presenting Hartmut Esser’s sociological integration theory. While previous research offers a range of theoretical works within migration and integration research, there is a lack of adequate literature analyzing the present integration process in Germany, due to the topicality of the subject. As the integration of refugees will significantly shape Germany’s sociopolitical future during the upcoming years, it is hoped that this paper can contribute to bridging this gap by creating a first evaluation of the current circumstances. For this, a content analysis of the existing sources has been combined with the results of a small-scale field study, in which ten Germans have been interviewed, conveying their expectations and worries with regard to the integration of refugees. The findings of this research have given insight into the obstacles that Germany faces with regard to efficiently integrating the newly arrived refugees. It is, first and foremost, the lengthy bureaucratic procedures and the lack of an adequate integrative infrastructure that presently impede integration processes. An increasing dissatisfaction with the government’s unstructured plan of action has further given way to a tense atmosphere among the German population. Moreover, Germany’s perception of nationhood is, up until today, largely based on an ethnic concept. Together with the country’s past reluctancy to accept its status as an immigration country, these factors constitute a hampering environment for the ongoing integration of refugees. Yet, the analysis of the interviews has displayed a partly shared understanding of the concept of integration among the German population, in which especially tolerance and mutual efforts are valued most. In view of the fact that Germans have previously shown great willingness to receive refugees, these results give reason for hope. In the near future, it will become of crucial importance that the German government creates a thorough strategy, in which measures to strengthen integration are clearly described. It is only through fast and concrete actions, which allow room for flexibility, that infrastructural omissions can be compensated and the population’s trust in a successful outcome can be renewed. Finally, it will be necessary that future research takes into account the voices of refugees themselves in order to generate a more complex understanding of how successful integration can look like in Germany.

Ethiopia, being one of the force-contributing countries to the East African Standby Brigade (EASBRIG) and given its, resources, strategic location, and its military's long history, will have a significant role to play in creating a stable environment in the sub-region. This thesis analyzes the Organization of African Union/African Union (OAU/AU) efforts after the Cold War to restore security and ensure stability in the region and outlines the process of creating African Standby Forces (ASF) as sub-regional arrangements to bring stability and peace by preventing crises or responding to crises whenever they arise in the region. To fulfill such missions East African states have agreed to form the EASBRIG with each state contributing forces. This thesis also analyzes Ethiopia's past and current participation in peace operations (from 1951 in Korea to ongoing missions in Liberia and Burundi) and argues that though Ethiopia's participation in peace operations is commendable, many things could yet be improved and corrective measures need to be taken to better prepare for mission execution in regional and sub-regional crisis response efforts. There is work yet to be done on peacekeeping and peace enforcement in particular. How to better organize Ethiopia's Peace Force and increase their efficiency and effectiveness for future peace operations is a main goal of this thesis.

Approved for public release, distribution unlimited / Homeland Security Presidential Directive #8 led to the establishment of the National Exercise Program and the Top Officials exercise series to test and evaluate first response agency integration and effectiveness. The last TOPOFF exercise cost $16M and involved over 10,000 people, but did not effectively leverage simulation techniques to make efficient use of resources. This research adapts an existing organizational learning process, integrating low- and high resolution simulation to provide decision support. This process led to the development of a multi-agent simulation methodology for emergency first response, specifically applied to analyze a notional vehicle bomb attack during a festival in the Baltimore Inner Harbor. This simulation demonstrates the potential benefits of low resolution simulation, using efficient experimental design and high-performance computing. Combined, these two ideas result in examining a 48-dimensional response surface and using over 156 CPU centuries of computer time. All experiments were completed in less than three weeks. The analysis of this data set provided insight into several areas, including the importance of standing operating procedures in the early moments of a crisis. Analysis showed that effective procedures may even be more important than the effectiveness of communications devices early in a first response operation. / Outstanding Thesis / US Army (USA) author.