This dissertation seeks to contribute to the understanding of the formation of collective memory of State violence in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. By comparing these three cases, I pursue to discern how citizens can challenge the silence and amnesia that the groups in power want to impose on society after a period of State terrorism. In order to examine the process of formation of collective memory, this dissertation highlights two important figures from which citizens have been able to build counter-hegemonic narratives, that is, los exiliados and los desaparecidos. I will highlight how they become lenses through which citizens can construct the memory of State repression. They become the evidence of the repression that the State wants to conceal, and have the potential of becoming important symbolic figures, and sources of knowledge, from which society can challenge silence and oblivion about State terrorism. The unfolding of the objectives and arguments of this dissertation are based on the analysis of literary texts from Argentina, Chile, and Mexico; and on photography of Argentinian and Mexican photographers. I draw on performance studies, anthropological approaches to ritual, and literary criticism to examine how citizens create counter-hegemonic narratives of State repression, and how they incorporate them in the collective memory of their societies.

Affect (emotion) recognition has many applications, such as human assistive robotics, human computer interaction and empathic agents, virtual tutoring, marketing, surveillance, and counseling. Previous research has focused primarily on unimodal or bimodal affect recognition (facial expressions and speech). This research developed multimodal emotion recognition by using data from facial expressions, head position, hand movement, body posture and speech. A novel hybrid event driven fusion technique was used to combine data from multiple input channels at the feature level and decision level. Position and temporal data from tracked feature points was used for training a support vector machine based classifier. New rule based features in addition to existing geometric, kinetic and 3D features were created. An emotional key word look-up using speech recognition technology was incorporated in the recognition process. The research developed a real time affect estimation system that accurately predicts multiple emotions, intensity of the emotions and maintains the context history of recognized emotions.

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The aim of this study is to examine how teachers view their teaching in civics in vocational programmes. The question formation are: in what extent civic teachers choose to connect the subject with the student’s future profession. Also how the teaching conditions in civics differ between vocational- and pre-university programmes. Lastly the study examines how the teachers experience that their teaching in civics has change since the upper secondary school reform in year 2011. The data was collected through nine interviews with teachers in civic who teach at vocational programmes in Jönköping municipality. The two theories used in the study is the motivational process and Kolbs learning styles. The result show that all the teachers choose to connect their subject with the students’ future profession. But in which extent the teachers choose to do it differs, depending on student’s wishes and the possibility of doing natural connections between the subject and the profession. The terms that differ between vocational- and preuniversity programmes civic lessions are the student’s motivation and how the students learn the best. The biggest change after GY11 is that the teacher’s feel that they have less time but as much material as before. They think it’s harder to do all the different parts of the course because they don’t have enough time. It’s also harder to individualize. The result consistently show that the teaching are most effected by which type of group the students consist of.

In La Communauté desoeuvrée (1983) French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes how a community is creating by bringing its members together under a collective identity. The invention of myths, such as the myth of racial superiority and the mythic revolutionary community, functions to sustain the hegemonic dominance wielded in Haiti by the United States and later by François Duvalier, the Porfiriato and its aftermath in Mexico, and white society in the United States Deep South. These myths often engender policies founded in the inhospitable treatment of those who are deemed lesser or other. Nancys conception of being singular plural posits that our exposure to the other remedies the mythic community, because such a configuration requires the perpetual exposure of the self to others, which maintains the fluidity of interpersonal relations and in turn keeps the community future-oriented. Jacques Derridas De la grammatologie (1967), Force de loi (1990), and Politiques de lamitié (1994) offer a reconceptualization of the political implications of subjectivity, community, and responsibility allows us to identify individual behaviors that can foster the development of a democracy to come and which also align with Nancys re-inscription of community. This project examines how the mythic community is portrayed in René Depestres Le Mât de cocagne and Un arc-en-ciel pour lOccident chrétien, Mariano Azuelas Los de abajo, Carlos Fuentess La región más transparente del aire and Gringo viejo, and Ernest Gainess A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. The authors representations of racial disharmony, marginalization, and violence function as a critique of colonialism, the mythic multicultural American community, and of imperialist capitalist hegemonic patriarchy to paraphrase bell hookss term. This project explores how the reverence for certain myths is linked to a rigid conception of hegemonic masculinity in which manhood is synonymous with domination. Thus, it is necessary to identify the conditions that marginalized men cultivate to achieve masculine subjectivity, and how patriarchal hegemonic masculinity may be challenged by new formulations of masculinities, which may allow such marginalized men to resist totalitarian powers and foster the sort of communal existence founded upon peace and tolerance of the Other.

This dissertation analyzes the role that female ghosts play in recuperating memory and filling the gaps of official history in the following four contemporary novels: Erna Brodbers Louisiana (1994), Zoé Valdéss Te di la vida entera (1996), Sandra Cisneross Caramelo: or, Puro Cuento (2002), and Maryse Condés Victoire, les saveurs et les mots: récit (2006). The ghosts in these novels disrupt a linear temporality and present a matriarchal mode of remembering, leading readers to reconsider the past outside of the dominant historical discourse. In this way, the novels become alternative histories that oppose the monologic historical paradigm and recuperate marginalized voices silenced by History with a capital H. The novels trouble the boundary between truth and fiction, asking the reader to consider the moral value of art. The reader is obliged to relinquish certain assumptions about history and its creation and processes in order to understand how fiction can be an alternative history. My introduction explores the historical paradigm that these novels destabilize, including a Hegelian concept of history that is based on reason. The introduction also sets up the feminist methodology that drives my analysis and presents the geographic scope of my dissertation. Chapter One explores the tradition of the ghost in the literature of the Americas, especially how ghosts confront traumatic pasts and destabilize a linear temporality. In Chapter Two I analyze Brodbers Louisiana, which employs two female ghosts to resist hegemonic historical discourse via spirit possession. In the third chapter I discuss ghosts affective nature in Valdéss Te di la vida entera and Cisneross Caramelo. The spirit narrators in these novels recreate memory via nostalgia and the affective nature of music. Chapter Four explores imaginations role in filling the gaps of history through an analysis of Condés Victoire, whose narrator is haunted by the ghost of her grandmother and compelled to reconstruct her history. My conclusion draws out the specific similarities between the four novels and further explores the way in which these novels not only use the ghost figure to comment on the past, but also employ it to initiate healing within individual relationships between women.

The purpose of this investigation was to provide a method for determining the relative intensities of all gamma rays in a particular spectrum, and thereby determine the relative transition probabilities.

The problem of this study was to investigate through experimentation whether or not there would be any significant improvement of one hundred and fifty girls enrolled in the seventh and eighth grades of Azle Junior High School of Azle, TX, in their performance of the volleyball volley and serve upon the completion of prescribed programs.

The purpose of this thesis is to develop a rationale for a theatre program in the middle school.

The purpose of this study was to compare the activities and achievements in college of a population of three groups of academically able students who participated in a high school honors program. The population consisted of (1) those who completed an honors program, (2) those who dropped out of an honors program, and (3) those who entered an honors program at a time later than the entry of the first two groups. This study was concerned with discovering distinguishing activities and achievements of the male and female members of the three groups through an analysis and comparison of data relative to the groups after their completion of two or more years of college.