Our ability to perceive our environment through prejudge mental attitudes is a necessary capacity in order to survive in a social environment. However, how we utilize this capacity, and whether it promotes equality or inequality, is to a large extent dependant on our perception of ourselves in relation to our surroundings. Through critical social theory, this thesis aims to explore and compare attitudes exhibited by the Swedish educational system, towards the socially constructed phenomenon of adolescent students in upper secondary school, speaking their voice. The production of knowledge is problematized regarding the relationship between theoretical regulatory texts of norms, ideals and requirements, versus active implementation in practice. Through metaphysical questioning of reason and norms, discrepancies of intention, lack of consideration for power relations and pernicious ignorance, is problematized and reflected upon, as possible factors reinforcing attitudes of negative stereotyping, identity prejudice and inequality, evoking questions concerning human and children’s rights. Enactment of fear and silencing through reference to status and authority, rather than data actually sustaining a stand through scientific reason and justified knowledge, positions the adolescent student as the subaltern, and perpetuates adultism through imbalance within the dyadic power relation. Through three case studies, chosen due to their compatibility to the frames of a pre- case study initiating attention to the subject at hand, this study exemplifies identity prejudice and institutionalized hegemony through epistemic violence, marginalizing the student to the status of the subaltern. Thereby suffocating both the development of the student, as well as the institutional system´s own purpose and legitimacy, by jeopardizing the confession to scientific reason and justifiable knowledge. It is thus aspects of our ethical and political epistemic conduct this study addresses, by problematizing the cross-boundary interface of research, politics and practice. Findings indicate negative prejudice credibility deficit administered towards students, through social injustice of epistemic violence, fortified by the educational institutions and their regulatory authorities through obscurantism, by neglect of scientific reason and justified knowledge, when constructivist stands implemented as ontological realities, are questioned through critical thinking.

Evaluative stances are common in narrative and realized at all levels of linguistic structure. In film reviews, evaluation has been recognized as one of the most important stages alongside description (Taboada, 2011). Following Martin & White’s Appraisal Theory of Evaluation, the present comparative study focuses on two sub-systems of Appraisal, namely Appreciation and Engagement. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: a) to compare the way in which film critics use evaluative, axiological adjectives to evaluate two different film types and b) to study how professional film critics use of two types of engagement devices, namely epistemic and opinion devices, to position their own claims towards other potential viewpoints. The study is also influenced by two previous claims: Holbrook’s claim that, in contrast to consumers who seem to prefer American-made, commercial films, expert critics usually appreciate complex cinematography and culturally diverse films; and Carretero’s claim that in professional film reviews opinion devices are an almost absent feature, since these tend to be replaced by epistemic devices. To further explore these claims, this comparative, corpus- based study focuses on the frequency of evaluation adjectives and engagement devices used by expert film critics for the positive or negative evaluation of two different films: the 2020 box office hit “Bad Boys for Life” and the 2018 art film “Cold War”. The study used a mixed-method design, first subjecting the realizations of Appreciation and Engagement to a quantitative analysis and following this with a qualitative discussion of results. The results indicate: a) that in the case of both films positive evaluations clearly surpass negative evaluations; however, individual examples seem to express a mildly deprecatory attitude towards commercial cinematography and b) that although the number of epistemic devices in the reviews clearly surpasses that of opinion devices, the frequencies of opinion devices is greater than that observed by Carretero.

Almost since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sweden has been criticised for doing too little to stop the spread of the virus. No lockdowns have been implemented and schools have stayed open throughout the pandemic. In his book Pandemic Ethics, Ben Bramble argues that lockdowns are necessary and that Swedes may become ”somewhat colder” and ”less able to flourish” as a result of Sweden’s pandemic response. In this essay I discuss whether or not the Swedish people are being failed as moral agents by Swedish authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic. I analyse two senses in which the people could be morally wronged: (1) by having too much moral responsibility placed upon them, and (2) by becoming less virtuous or less able to flourish as a result of actions and words of the authorities. In answering (1), I argue that an individual moral agent has little or no moral responsibility from a utilitarian point of view. From a virtue ethics point of view, the cause behind the action is more important than its consequences, so being handed the responsibility for stopping the spread of coronavirus would not be significantly different from other instances where citizens are free to act in a way that may lead to them causing harm to others. By analysing examples of how citizens can exercise their moral virtues in states with differing responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, I show that citizens becoming more or less virtuous does not follow from the pandemic response of the country they live in, thereby refuting (2). I then briefly discuss two ways in which I believe authorities could fail its citizens as moral agents.

The main issue of this work concerns the meaning of educational supervisionas a tool for collaborative work-related knowledge formation in preschool. The study is based upon and complements the analysis of the phenomenoneducational supervision in a previous study presented in my previousbook Det mångtydiga mötet – ett försök att förstå komplexiteten i pedagogiskhandledning med yrkesverksamma [The many folded encounter – anattempt to understand the complexity in collaborative educational supervision].Supervision dialogues are in the focus as one of several tools for developingthe content of knowledge in preschool, the knowledgebase of the professionals,and their coping with professional issues within their daily work.These two studies together form my licentiate treatise. For studying the phenomenon,two perspectives have been used: a societal and an inter-subjectiveperspective. Educational supervision, as an epistemic culture, is analysed inrelation to an emerging knowledge society. The implementation of a new curriculum for preschool, with its model forparticipatory goal-steering, has been the basis for the analysis of the supervisionprocess as an activity for knowledge formation. The analysis is relatedto curriculum theory. Issues related to power are crucial in contexts for supervision.These are analysed with regards to the participators in the supervisiondialogue on the one hand, and to institutional actors, e.g. the relationshipbetween university and preschool and between the professionals in a localpreschool and the administrative level of the municipality, on the other. Thefundamental premise of the work has been that supervision is to be conductedon the conditions of those being supervised. The study relies on previous experiences of and reflections on supervisionas well as on consultee-centered case consultation. Further material and methodsused for the study are interviews with supervisors and supervised, andtextual analysis of contemporary educational literature on supervision. Thelatter includes both a close and a distanced re-reading of my above mentionedbook. Educational supervision of professionals seems to have developedinto a specific domain within the field of supervision. As a result of the review,supervision was categorised as three approaches with regards to their respectiveoverarching goal. The potentially positive and negative effects of supervision, as well assome pitfalls, have been identified. The conclusions concern criteria for goodsupervision that contribute to a dialogue for knowledge formation within aninter-subjective perspective. An inter-subjective relation, with an object forsupervision that is negotiated with regards to autonomy as well as reciprocalityis emphasized. A narrative strategy for supervision is seen as a possibilityfor developing a professional language and a domain for further investigations. / <p>With an abstract in English</p>

La notion de système de contraintes (cs – selon l'acronyme anglais) est un concept central aux formalismes de la théorie de la concurrence tels que les algèbres de processus pour la programmation concurrente par contraintes. Les systèmes de contraintes sont souvent représentés par des treillis : ses éléments, appelées contraintes, représentent des informations partiales tandis que l’ordre du treillis correspond à des implications. Récemment, une notion appelée “système de contraintes spatiales à n-agents” a été développée pour représenter l’information dans la programmation concurrente par contraintes où les systèmes sont multi-agents et spatialement distribués.D’un point de vue informatique, un système de contraintes spatiales peut être utilisé pour spécifier l’information partiale contenue dans l'espace d'un certain agent (information locale). D’un point de vue épistémique, un cs spatial peut être utilisé pour représenter l’information qui est considérée vrai pour un certain agent (croyance). Les systèmes de contraintes spatiales, néanmoins, ne fournissent pas de mécanismes pour la spécification de la mobilité de l’information ou des processus d'un espace à un autre. La mobilité de l’information est un aspect fondamental des systèmes concurrents.Dans cette thèse nous avons développé la théorie des systèmes de contraintes spatiales avec des opérateurs pour spécifier le déplacement des informations et processus entre les espaces. Nous étudions les propriétés de cette nouvelle famille de systèmes de contraintes et nous illustrons ses applications.Du point de vue calculatoire, ces nouveaux opérateurs nous apportent de l’extrusion d’informations et/ou des processus, qui est un concept central dans les formalismes pour la communication mobile. Du point de vue épistémique, l’extrusion correspond à une notion que nous avons appelé énonciation ; une information qu’un agent souhaite communiquer à d'autres mais qui peut être inconsistante avec les croyances de l’agent même. Des énonciations peuvent donc être utilisées pour exprimer des notions épistémiques tels que les canulars ou les mensonges qui sont fréquemment utilisés dans les réseaux sociaux.Globalement, les systèmes de contraintes peuvent exprimer des notions épistémiques comme la croyance/énonciation et la connaissance en utilisant respectivement une paire de fonctions espace/extrusion qui représentent l’information locale, et un opérateur spatial dérivé qui représente l’information globale. Par ailleurs, nous montrons qu’en utilisant un type précis de systèmes de contraintes nous pouvons aussi représenter la notion du temps comme une séquence d'instances. / The notion of constraint system (cs) is central to declarative formalisms from concurrency theory such as process calculi for concurrent constraint programming (ccp). Constraint systems are often represented as lattices: their elements, called constraints, represent partial information and their order corresponds to entailment. Recently a notion of n-agent spatial cs was introduced to represent information in concurrent constraint programs for spatially distributed multi-agent systems. From a computational point of view a spatial constraint system can be used to specify partial information holding in a given agent’s space (local information). From an epistemic point of view a spatial cs can be used to specify information that a given agent considers true (beliefs). Spatial constraint systems, however, do not provide a mechanism for specifying the mobility of information/processes from one space to another. Information mobility is a fundamental aspect of concurrent systems.In this thesis we develop the theory of spatial constraint systems with operators to specify information and processes moving between spaces. We investigate the properties of this new family of cs and illustrate their applications. From a computational point of view the new operators provide for process/information extrusion, a central concept in formalisms for mobile communication. From an epistemic point of view extrusion corresponds to what we shall call utterance; information that an agent communicates to others but that may be inconsistent with the agent’s beliefs. Utterances can be used to express instances of epistemic notions such as hoaxes or intentional lies which are common place in social media.On the whole, constraint systems can express the epistemic notions of belief /utterance and knowledge by means of, respectively, a space/extrusion function pair that specifies local information and a derived spatial operator that specifies global information. We shall also show that, by using a specific kind of our constraint systems, we can also encode the notion of time as a sequence of instances.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(理学) / 甲第20159号 / 理博第4244号 / 新制||理||1610(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院理学研究科数学・数理解析専攻 / (主査)准教授 照井 一成, 教授 岡本 久, 教授 長谷川 真人 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Science / Kyoto University / DFAM

System evolvability is vital to the longevity of large-scale complex engineered systems. The need for evolvability in complex systems is a result of their long service lives, rapid advances to their integrated technologies, unforeseen operating conditions, and emerging system requirements. In recent years, quantifiable metrics have been introduced for measuring the evolvability of complex systems based on the amount of excess capability in the system. These metrics have opened opportunities for optimization of systems with evolvability as an objective. However, there are several aspects of such an optimization that require further consideration. For example, there is a trade-off between the cost of excess capability initially built into complex systems and the benefit that is added to the system for future evolution. This trade-off must be represented in the optimization problem formulation. Additionally, uncertainty in future requirements and parameters of complex systems can result in an inaccurate representation of the design space. This thesis addresses these considerations through multi-objective optimization and uncertainty analysis. The resulting analysis gives insight into the effects of designing for evolvability. We show that there is a limit to the value added by increasing evolvability. We also show that accounting for uncertainty changes the optimal amount of evolvability that should be designed into a system. The developed theories and methods are demonstrated on the design of a military ground vehicle.

Since the 75th anniversary of the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane in 2003, a growing number of journalists and historians writing about the disaster have incorporated Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God as part of the official historical record of the hurricane. These writers often border on depicting Their Eyes as the authentic experience of black migrant workers impacted by the hurricane and subsequent flood. Within the novel itself, however, Hurston theorizes on the potential epistemic violence that occurs when a piece of evidence—a photograph, fallen body, or verbal artifact—is used to judge a person. Without a person's ability to use self-representation to give an "understandin'" (7) to go along with the evidence, snapshots or textual evidence threaten to violently separate people from their prior knowledge of themselves. By offering the historical context of photographs of African Americans in the Post-Reconstruction South, I argue that Janie experiences this epistemic violence as a young girl when seeing a photograph of herself initiates her into the racial hierarchy of the South. A few decades later, while on trial for shooting her husband Tea Cake, Janie again faces epistemic violence when the evidence of Tea Cake's body is used to judge her and her marriage; however, by giving an understandin' to go along with the evidence through self-representation, Janie is able to clarify that which other forms of evidence distort and is able to go free. Modern texts appropriating Their Eyes run the risk of enacting epistemic violence on the victims of the hurricane, the novel, and history itself when they present the novel as the complete or authentic perspective of the migrant workers in the hurricane. By properly situating the novel as a historical text that offers a particular narrative of the hurricane rather than the complete or authentic experience of the victims, modern writers can honor Hurston's literary achievement without robbing the actual victims of the hurricane of their voice.

This dissertation examines the processes by which multiple positioned actors in Participatory Action Research or Community-Based Participatory Research (PAR/CBPR) understand, reproduce, and contest systems of power and oppression in the context of their relationships and collaborations to support community-driven change efforts. The first chapter serves as a preface by reviewing relevant literature on participatory action research and power. The rest of the dissertation consists of three empirical papers. The first of these papers examined the extent to which scholars interrogate systems of power and oppression in (PAR/CBPR) to advance social justice. Scoping review methodology was employed to systematically review scholarly literature written in English and published between 2010 and 2020 across 5 databases. Thematic analysis and data charting yielded six scholarly articles using critical self-reflexive qualitative methodologies to explore manifestations of power within the partnership. Articles describe researchers employing individual critical reflections to confront individual assumptions, modify individual collaboration practices, and identify multilevel structures restraining participatory action approaches to research. The second paper explored the perceptions of researchers and community stakeholders regarding key processes questioning and addressing power issues within the (PAR/CBPR) collaborations. Individual in-depth semi-structured interviews (n=23) were conducted with social work researchers (n=13) and community stakeholders (n=10) with current or prior experience engaging in (PAR/CBPR) to examine the ways they define, negotiate, and address power differentials and oppression within their collaborations. Key emerging themes and discourses merged into a conceptual model illustrated with a metaphor of a river to highlight key social sites, paradigms of knowledge production, and the degree to which it aligns with the pursuit of social justice. Downstream strategies that sustain colonial forms of knowledge production included othering, disembodiment, and extraction. Conversely, upstream approaches underscored the centrality of redefining social relationships and ethical commitments within PAR/CBPR collaborations through the cultivation of unsettling counterspaces, counternarratives, and dialogical brave spaces. Finally, the third paper explored researchers and community stakeholders’ conceptualization and understanding of social justice as well as recommendations for social work research, practice, and policy to contest power and oppression in the context of PAR/CBPR. A second wave of individual in-depth semi-structured interviews with social work researchers (n=11) and community stakeholders (n=11) with current or prior experience engaging in PAR/CBPR were conducted and analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings illustrated converging and diverging understandings of social justice, in particular, community stakeholders emphasized an understanding of social justice interdependent of systemic transformations through dialogical processes among stakeholders, researchers, and social institutions. PAR/CBPR was described as a facilitating factor of social justice by fostering counterspaces and counternarratives. Additionally, PAR/CBPR was defined as a factor limiting the pursuit of social justice and deeply entrenched with tenure-track promotion and funding mechanisms perpetuating top-down configurations of power. Together and independently these papers further our understanding of the ways in which structural oppression and power in (PAR/CBPR) can be addressed. Research findings from all three studies highlighted participatory action research is not exempt from power hierarchies, and that multilevel strategies promoting counterspaces, counternarratives, and institutional changes are essential when redressing, negotiating, and contesting power and oppression. Findings inform best practices for the development of PAR/CBPR collaborations embodying ethical relationality across social work research, practice, education, and policy. Future studies should consider the use of longitudinal and critically in-depth dialogical approaches between multiple positioned actors in PAR/CBPR when defining social justice, PAR/CBPR, and power. / 2028-04-30

The political economic pressures of development contribute to unsustainable environmental practices in developing countries, and marginalize civil society participation. This dissertation looks at the following countries where policymakers are faced with strong incentives to foster rapid economic growth. In Jamaica, the bauxite industry demands mining rights in sensitive mountainous ecosystems. In Mexico, the tourist industry demands access to construct in vulnerable coastal environments in the southeast. In inland Mexico, unregulated agriculture threatens ecosystems in the Yucatán Peninsula. Finally, tourist and energy industries in Egypt demand access for infrastructure in sensitive ecosystems in the Red Sea region. In all of the cases, the preferences of these sectors threaten to displace local communities, while creating unsustainable pressures on the environment. At the same time, the projected revenues from these sectors justify continued environmental exploitation. In response, transnational networks of environmental advocates and epistemic communities mobilized throughout the 1990s, lobbying the Global Environment Facility for conservationist projects in each country, and then lobbying governments to effectively implement the projects. This research finds that three conditions were necessary for transnational networks to influence policies associated with project implementation. First, networks must generate an internal scientific agreement on the dimensions of the environmental problem. By doing so, they can delegitimate competing arguments, strengthening their own claims. Second, networks must build social ties with policymakers in powerful agencies. Social ties increase the likelihood that policymakers will adopt the norms of the network. Third, networks must reframe the discourse on environmental management. At present, policymakers and industry argue that environmental management should be assessed by its contribution to economic development, validating only those policies that lead to sustained revenue generation. By reframing environmental management as an issue impacting the well-being of domestic populations, networks can argue for the greater participation of actors marginalized by the dominance of privileged productive sectors in resource management. Moreover, by linking sustainable resource use to the interests of domestic populations, networks can generate political capital to oppose the most unsustainable environmental practices. This research thus builds on the epistemic communities approach by highlighting the importance of democracy in knowledge building and environmental governance.