This study has assessed the self-help group approach and its contribution to women empowerment in the Debremarkos district of the Amhara region of Ethiopia. SHG is an approach that strives to empower poor women through organising them in groups to solve their problem through mutual help. This study employed a mixed method using both the qualitative and quantitative techniques. The findings suggest that the SHG approach has brought social and economic empowerment for the poor women in Debremarkos district who participated in SHG. The findings suggest that the selfhelp approach is important, particularly by creating access for the poor to financial resources with low interest rates, which is a key for the success of the businesses of the poor. The SHG approach has also significant contribution for social empowerment by building the confidence of women and facilitating their participation in their community. / Development Studies / M.A. (Development Studies)

The thesis studies gender inequality in interpreting studies. In specific, gender imbalances in European interpreting institutions such as the Institute of Translatology of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. At the Institute of Translatology, it investigates the gender ratios among master's and doctoral graduates and the gender ratios in individual language programs from 1989 to the present. Through a survey, it traces the opinions of lecturers and students at the institute regarding gender issues and ascertains their views on the causes and consequences of the high proportion of women in the interpreting studies program.

In this study, an examination of the everyday experiences of the contract migrant Filipina domestic helpers exposes a culture of indifference which pervades the Hong Kong society on all levels--individual, community, and judiciary. At the centre of the abuses inflicted upon the Helpers is the employment contract with extraordinarily restrictive terms which promotes abuse by many employers. This study also looks at the transnational informal social infrastructure which has been organized by the Filipino community to mediate the hostile working environment engendered by the indifference of the global economic and political climate upon their lives. Faced with the task of implementing new policies for controlling labour migration into Hong Kong, the legislators have focused on the end result and finding the means with which to accomplish their goal. Embedded within this process are unexamined cultural mores and practices. Although the starting point is to benefit the community, by providing domestic helpers to serve the middle and upper class households, too often the abusive consequences to individual migrants are ignored as the women become the means to an end. Migration has often been viewed as an aberration to the notion of the sedentary community. Treated as an anomaly, it is the migrant who problematizes simple theoretical positions of social organization and structure. The migrant is always treated as the one who does not conform to the ideal community and is conveniently merged into existing social categories, such as the lower status of women in Hong Kong, and the lower status of domestic workers -- relegated thereby to the periphery of the society's consciousness.

For most writers who deal with displacement, rewriting themselves, articulating and communicating their sense of estrangment is their lifetime work. For displacement forces one to leave behind the familiar and embrace the unknown. In this process of deconstruction, the concepts of home, belonging and identity are renegotiated and questioned constantly. Le Grand Voyage – the working title for the draft of a novel that is presented in conjunction with this exegesis – is a fictional work that is produced out of the implications of displacement, which inscribes itself in a series of explorations I started in 2001, cumulating with two video works Frammento in 2003 and Footnotes in 2004. Le Grand Voyage investigates further the concept of home by questioning the home/mother relationship. The exegesis aims to contextualise the making of Le Grand Voyage by using another woman’s narrative as the main point of reference: Linda Olsson’s Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs (2005). Olsson’s work – like mine – is conceived out of the effects of displacement, and the literary form and structure display symptoms that are characteristics to narratives of displacement. By putting the home/mother/daughter in context, the narrative displays home as a patriarchal construct showing how the idealisation of home/place is predicated on a gendering of home, whereby, as McDermott notes, ‘home is constructed as a maternal, static and past, to which the (male) subjects longs to return’ (2003: 265). The narrative’s point of view is that of daughters but also that of mothers as daughters, and enables not only a feminist discussion of the notion of home but also of motherhood. Therefore, the theoretical approach for this work has encompassed feminists’ writings that have particularly focused their research on space, place and gender. In challenging the dominant form of gender constructions and relations, the first and second wave feminism have empowered many women to leave home in order to shape their own version of identity. I believe it is within the perspective of displacement, of being out of place, that many women continue to find the necessary distance to contest a particular reading of woman and home that still prevails in academic literature and fiction. Thus, an important part of this exegesis concentrates on the critic of home. I want to argue in a feminist way that our ideas of home and belonging still reflect gendered assumptions and are therefore contestable. That displacement as a catalyst for loss, emotional grief and mourning becomes an enabling way for women to rethink home in terms of what was at play rather than in place and to do the ‘memory work’ that feminists ask women to do: to remember in order not to forget because ‘forgetting is a major obstacle to change’ (Greene, 1991: 298). Their attacks on the feminisation of place have opened up for me possibilities to think of home outside the parameters of sameness. They have also enabled me to understand the paradoxical position a displaced person is faced with: if displacement is favored and privileged why then do longings for home still persist for some? – a fact that is well illustrated in the actual resurgence of the preoccupation to belong. The gain in displacement also involves the fact that distance forces one to look at the longing and nostalgia for what they really conceal. In the case of a woman and, motherless daughters, distance, as this exegesis demonstrates, enables the writer to unveil the longings as subversive and fraudulent, tricking women into thinking there was nothing better than the past: home sweet home, the safe, bounded nest where women could be women: could be the mother. With the ‘memory work’ they both learn to think away from the parameters of sameness and the past, outside the nostalgic stances of singularity, safety, boundaries and internalised histories, therefore outside of the maternal, the home/mother relationship. ‘What is home?’ is a difficult question to negotiate for a woman. The exegesis and the first draft of the novel show what is at stake when one asks the question and the responsibility of women when writing about home.

For most writers who deal with displacement, rewriting themselves, articulating and communicating their sense of estrangment is their lifetime work. For displacement forces one to leave behind the familiar and embrace the unknown. In this process of deconstruction, the concepts of home, belonging and identity are renegotiated and questioned constantly. Le Grand Voyage – the working title for the draft of a novel that is presented in conjunction with this exegesis – is a fictional work that is produced out of the implications of displacement, which inscribes itself in a series of explorations I started in 2001, cumulating with two video works Frammento in 2003 and Footnotes in 2004. Le Grand Voyage investigates further the concept of home by questioning the home/mother relationship. The exegesis aims to contextualise the making of Le Grand Voyage by using another woman’s narrative as the main point of reference: Linda Olsson’s Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs (2005). Olsson’s work – like mine – is conceived out of the effects of displacement, and the literary form and structure display symptoms that are characteristics to narratives of displacement. By putting the home/mother/daughter in context, the narrative displays home as a patriarchal construct showing how the idealisation of home/place is predicated on a gendering of home, whereby, as McDermott notes, ‘home is constructed as a maternal, static and past, to which the (male) subjects longs to return’ (2003: 265). The narrative’s point of view is that of daughters but also that of mothers as daughters, and enables not only a feminist discussion of the notion of home but also of motherhood. Therefore, the theoretical approach for this work has encompassed feminists’ writings that have particularly focused their research on space, place and gender. In challenging the dominant form of gender constructions and relations, the first and second wave feminism have empowered many women to leave home in order to shape their own version of identity. I believe it is within the perspective of displacement, of being out of place, that many women continue to find the necessary distance to contest a particular reading of woman and home that still prevails in academic literature and fiction. Thus, an important part of this exegesis concentrates on the critic of home. I want to argue in a feminist way that our ideas of home and belonging still reflect gendered assumptions and are therefore contestable. That displacement as a catalyst for loss, emotional grief and mourning becomes an enabling way for women to rethink home in terms of what was at play rather than in place and to do the ‘memory work’ that feminists ask women to do: to remember in order not to forget because ‘forgetting is a major obstacle to change’ (Greene, 1991: 298). Their attacks on the feminisation of place have opened up for me possibilities to think of home outside the parameters of sameness. They have also enabled me to understand the paradoxical position a displaced person is faced with: if displacement is favored and privileged why then do longings for home still persist for some? – a fact that is well illustrated in the actual resurgence of the preoccupation to belong. The gain in displacement also involves the fact that distance forces one to look at the longing and nostalgia for what they really conceal. In the case of a woman and, motherless daughters, distance, as this exegesis demonstrates, enables the writer to unveil the longings as subversive and fraudulent, tricking women into thinking there was nothing better than the past: home sweet home, the safe, bounded nest where women could be women: could be the mother. With the ‘memory work’ they both learn to think away from the parameters of sameness and the past, outside the nostalgic stances of singularity, safety, boundaries and internalised histories, therefore outside of the maternal, the home/mother relationship. ‘What is home?’ is a difficult question to negotiate for a woman. The exegesis and the first draft of the novel show what is at stake when one asks the question and the responsibility of women when writing about home.

The diploma thesis deals with problems connected to the formation of feminine names of occupations in contemporary French. The theoretical part is devoted to the evolution of feminism not only in the French Republic, gender questions, particularly in relation to the language, and the language policies of France. Furthermore, it is aimed at word-formative possibilities of contemporary French for the derivation of names of occupations, functions, degrees and ranks. A part of it deals with the situation in several francophone countries. The objective of the practical part is to assess the relation between the political desiderata of the French Republic and the real language usage on the basis of a corpus analysis effected in the Frantext database and Google Web Search.

Cette thèse sur le changement des normes communicatives en allemand contemporain se positionne dans le paradigme explicatif du changement linguistique par Rudi Keller, connu sous le nom de « théorie de la main invisible ». L’objectif de recherche est de montrer par l’analyse de cinq faits « variants » que le changement des normes communicatives a lieu sous l’impulsion d’un désir des locuteurs germanophones contemporains de plus d’authenticité et de respect de l’autre. Cette mentalité communicative, héritée de la remise en cause sociétale par les mouvements contestataires de la fin des années 1960, conditionne les attentes des locuteurs germanophones dans la réception des discours publics en terme d’ethos et de positionnement éthique. Au corpus sur lequel sont effectuées les analyses linguistiques des cinq faits variants – les « mots à charge négative » (ou « belastete Wörter »), les néologismes euphémistiques, la neutralisation du genre, l’ethos des locuteurs politiques, le tutoiement d’adresse – composé de documents prescriptifs universitaires, de discours politiques, et de supports publicitaires de l’espace public allemand, s’ajoute un corpus de réception relevant du type épilinguistique, composé de métacommentaires de locuteurs non-spécialistes. L’étude révèle la parole des locuteurs ordinaires comme signe annonçant et accompagnant le changement linguistique. / This PhD dissertation focuses upon the change of communicative norms in contemporary German and positions itself on the explanatory paradigm of language change by Rudi Keller,also known as “the theory of the invisible hand”. My research aims at pointing out – through the analysis of five “variant” facts – that the change of communicative norms is driven by the desire of contemporary German native speakers for more authenticity as well as respect for the other. The communicative mentality inherited from the counter-culture movements in the late 1960’s that challenged society order influences German native speakers’ expectations towards the reception of public discourses in terms of ethos and ethical positioning. In addition to the corpus upon which the linguistic analyses of the five variant facts are carriedout – the “negative words” (or “belastete Wörter”), euphemistic neologisms, gender neutralisation, the ethos of politicians, being on first name terms with someone – which consists of prescriptive college documents, political discourses and the advertising supports ofthe German public space – , there is a reception corpus that amounts to epilinguistic type and is composed of metacomments from non-specialist speakers. The study brings the speech ofordinary speakers to the fore as a sign that announces and goes along with language change.

Because women are predominantly responsible for childcare, men are the primary income earners. Having acquired the marital assets, on divorce the husband would retain them in a marriage out of community of property. The wife would be left deskilled, financially dependent, with little likelihood of receiving spousal maintenance and with no marital assets. In 1984 the Matrimonial Property Act and in 1988 the Matrimonial Property Law Amendment Act introduced a judicial discretion to equitably redistribute marital assets in certain marriages out of community. This dissertation argues that the bases for the limitation of the judicial discretion to women married before a certain date are unsound and that the limitation arguably violates the equality clause of the Constitution. / Law / LL.M.

Because women are predominantly responsible for childcare, men are the primary income earners. Having acquired the marital assets, on divorce the husband would retain them in a marriage out of community of property. The wife would be left deskilled, financially dependent, with little likelihood of receiving spousal maintenance and with no marital assets. In 1984 the Matrimonial Property Act and in 1988 the Matrimonial Property Law Amendment Act introduced a judicial discretion to equitably redistribute marital assets in certain marriages out of community. This dissertation argues that the bases for the limitation of the judicial discretion to women married before a certain date are unsound and that the limitation arguably violates the equality clause of the Constitution. / Law / LL.M.

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