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In this thesis, I analyze the Minions from Universal Pictures' Despicable Me franchise (2010-2020), Olaf from Disney's Frozen franchise (2013-2019), and Ducky and Bunny from Pixar's Toy Story 4 (2019). Although these characters are not intended to represent human beings but are fictional nonhuman species, examining them through the lens of racialization defamiliarizes them and reveals how children's media not only perpetuates specific caricatures of people of color but subtly naturalizes what race is as an assemblage of visual, verbal, performative, and affective components. While scholars studying racial representations in children's animated films often focus on how animated characters speak in non-white dialects, engage in stereotypes, and reproduce visual aspects of race, this interpretive framework does not address the ways in which race goes beyond the surface, nor does it address complex interactions between race, gender, and sexuality. Rather than asserting that nonhuman animated characters are certain races, my term "submerged racialization" suggests that animated characters are not direct representations of "real" non-white bodies but are aggregates of what it is to be racialized in historically specific ways that are co-constitutive with gender and sexuality. These features dwell beneath the surface like a skeleton, overdetermining how the characters perform without necessarily influencing their outward appearance in easily recognizable ways. In the first chapter, I analyze how the Minions enact a multi-layered submerged racialization as Black, Asian American, and indigenous beings. The second chapter discusses how Olaf's racialization shifts across different objects in the Frozen franchise, addressing his relationship to Blackness and Hawaiianness in the first film, the featurette, "pull apart" plush toys, and Hula Olaf figures. Finally, in my third chapter, I show how Ducky and Bunny fulfil roles as Black comedic sidekicks and demonstrate how Black men have been constructed as aggressive, hypersexual threats. By uncovering the submerged racialization underlying today's most popular children's franchises, I stress that race is reproduced and reinvented in the seemingly innocent intimate spaces around us. / Master of Arts / What race are the Minions? While this may seem a strange question, scholars of children's animated films have often described the race of nonhuman animated characters based on whether they speak in non-white dialects, engage in stereotypes, and reproduce certain visual characteristics, such as black skin. However, I argue that the Minions from Universal Pictures' Despicable Me franchise (2010-2020), Olaf from Disney's Frozen franchise (2013-2019), and Ducky and Bunny from Pixar's Toy Story 4 (2019) are "submerged racialized figures" and not direct representations of "real" non-white bodies. These characters demonstrate what it means to be racialized in historically specific ways that intersect with their gender and sexuality. Their racial features dwell beneath the surface like a skeleton, affecting their representation without necessarily influencing their outward appearance in easily recognizable ways. In the first chapter, I analyze how the Minions demonstrate a multi-layered submerged racialization throughout the franchise as Black, Asian American, and indigenous beings. The second chapter discusses how Olaf's racialization shifts across different objects in the Frozen franchise, changing his relationship to Blackness and Hawaiianness in the first film, the featurette, "pull apart" plush toys, and Hula Olaf figures. Finally, in my third chapter, I show how Ducky and Bunny fulfil roles as Black comedic sidekicks and demonstrate how Black men have been constructed as aggressive, hypersexual threats. By uncovering the submerged racialization within today's most popular children's franchises, I demonstrate how race is reproduced and reinvented in the seemingly innocent intimate spaces around us.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-27T13:49:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 MARIA OLIVEIRA PAULO.pdf: 2082679 bytes, checksum: 7b51f313211dd727a40bc12c6c1e3d78 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-02-26 / The objectives of this study was the investigation of texts from the New Testament that concern the women s diakonia. We intend to investigate Lc 10,38-42 and Rm16,1-2, emphasizing Marta and Febe at the deacon minister. The reason was to recover the history of women s deacon in the socio-politics context of the first century, around the year 30 B.C., as Marta at the Jesus movement. The dissertation was subdivided in four chapters. We discuss Febe and the deacon minister around the years 56-57, date of the letter to the Jewish- Christian in Rome. We believe that these women played the same deacon activities in diverse time at the original Christianity. Febe did not follow, served Jesus and has not been healed by Him, because Jesus acted around the year 30 B.C. However, Febe was a deacon at the Paulinas Communities. We hope that the subject under study may bring new perspectives for future researches. / Nesta pesquisa temos como objetivo investigar textos do Novo Testamento que abordam a diaconia de mulheres. Pretendemos investigar Lc 10,38-42 e Rm 16,1-2 destacando Mar ta e Febe no ministério diaconal. O intuito é resgatar a história da diaconia de mulheres no contexto sóciopolítico do século primeiro, por volta do ano 30 d.C.; como é o caso de Marta no movimento de Jesus. Dividimos a dissertação em quatro capítulos. Abarcamos Febe e o ministério diaconal, por volta dos anos 56-57, data da carta à comunidade judaico-cristã em Roma. Acreditamos que essas mulheres exerceram a mesma atividade diaconal em épocas diversas nos cristianismos originários. Febe não seguiu, nem serviu a Jesus e nem mesmo foi curada por Ele, pois Jesus atuou por volta do ano 30 d.C.; enquanto Febe foi diácona das comunidades paulinas. Esperamos que o assunto pesquisado possa abrir novas perspectivas para futuras investigações.

In spite of the popularity of technologies that facilitate distance learning, institutions still educate students who gather together in shared physical spaces. But now even these traditional settings for learning are more collaborative and technology-rich environments. Qualitative methods in the sociolinguistic tradition allowed me to attend carefully to the vocal and non-vocal interactions of students engaged in a computer supported collaborative authoring assignment. Three research questions guided my inquiry: 1) In what ways did students negotiate roles and responsibilities?; 2) In what ways did students negotiate access to their assignment?; and 3) what was the nature of discourse in computer supported collaborative authoring? I conducted microanalysis of the communication in online discussions and face-to-face discourse throughout an entire semester of one graduate level course entitled The Psychology of Teachers and Teaching. My data revealed that the online discussion forum, physical proximity to the computer during face-to-face collaboration and instructor influence shaped the students’ roles and responsibilities as well as their entry into the assignment. I propose a model illustrating how students negotiate entry into computer supported collaborative authoring assignments and discuss its implications for teaching and learning. / text

In recent decades, most scholars have understood the Gospel of John and three letters of John as a mirror to the so-called "Johannine community"/"Johannine Christianity", whose existence is usually derived from literary and compositional aspects of Johannine corpus. In the following study I am arguing that in order for the term Johannine Christianity to be relevant and meaningful for the study of early Christianity and New Testament literature, we cannot focus on literary aspects of Johannine corpus but on a comparative work and define the term through the internal structure of religion. To be a historically relevant term, the term Johannine Christianity, therefore has to bear, in the context of the New Testament and early Christianity, distinctive doctrine, ritual practices, and institution. In the first part of this paper, I am dealing with literary and stylistic aspects of the Johannine corpus (authorship of gospel and letters, genre and 21st chapter of John's gospel, the beloved disciple, etc.) and arguing that these aspects are not a definite proof of the existence of so- called Johannine community. In the second part, I am arguing that theology, ritual practices, and institutions we find in Johannine corpus, are typical for mainstream Christianity of 1. and 2. century and therefore terms "Johannine...

This dissertation on “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism” proceeds from the premise that a perspectival shift occurred in the early 2000s that altered the tenor of British climate fiction published in the decade that followed. The release of a third Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, prompted an acute awareness of the present as a post-apocalyptic condition bracketed by catastrophe and extinction. In response, British authors experimented with double-mapping techniques designed to concretize the supranational scope of advanced climate change. An increasing number of British authors projected the historical ruination of remote island communities onto speculative topographies extrapolated from IPCC Assessments to compel contemporary readers to conceive of a climate-changed planet aslant. Given the spate of ruined-island- as-future-Earth novels published at the turn of the millennium, this dissertation intervenes in extant criticism by identifying David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) as noteworthy examples of a metamodernist subgenre that makes a distant future of a “futureless” past to position the reader in a state of imagined obsolescence. This project consequently draws on metamodernist theory as a useful heuristic for articulating the traits that distinguish metamodernist cli-fi from precursory texts, with the aim to connect British post-apocalyptic fiction, climate-fiction, and literary metamodernism in productive ways. As the body chapters of this dissertation demonstrate, metamodernist cli-fi primarily uses the double-mapped island to structurally discredit the present as singular in cataclysmic consequence and, therefore, deserving of an unprecedented technological fix. Ultimately, in attempting to refute the moment of completion that would mark history’s end, metamodernist cli-fi challenges the givenness of an anticipated future through which to anchor the advent of an irreversible tipping point. Given the relative dearth of literary scholarship devoted to metamodernist cli-fi, this project posits that this subgenre warrants greater critical attention because it offers potent means for short-circuiting the type of cynical optimism that insists on envisioning human survival in terms of divine, authoritarian, or techno-escapist interventions. / Graduate / 2021-08-08

The increasingly global environment has spurred the economy in the United States as well as the economies in nearly every other nation. Although the U.S. remains the world leader in the global economy, research shows that the United States is at risk of losing its place as the world leader in science and innovation. Policymakers have recognized the need for research addressing global competitiveness. President Bush signed the America Competes Act, which calls for increased investment in innovation and education to improve U.S. competitiveness and President Barack Obama has named a platform, "Science, Technology and Innovation for a New Generation" which will extend and prioritize the efforts to improve math and science education. K-12 U.S. students are graduating from high school unprepared to pursue degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in college. Without STEM degrees they will be unable to pursue technology jobs after graduation. Statistics show that the U.S. is failing to produce as many graduates in STEM as other countries. In an increasingly global world, without graduates in STEM courses the U.S. is at risk of losing its position as the economic world leader. Government, industry and academia all agree that the U.S. needs to address education on a K-12 level to ensure that U.S. students are equipped with twenty-first century skills to compete in a twenty-first century global economy. Twenty-first century students are different from students of previous generations. Researchers argue that changes in the environment, specifically an increased exposure to technology, have changed the brains of twenty-first century students; twenty-first century students learn differently. However, twenty-first century students are being taught with an instructional curriculum that was designed for a previous generation that did not have the same exposure to technology. This is causing a digital-divide that is hindering the achievement of students. The instructional curriculum needs to be updated to meet the needs of twenty-first century students. This thesis addresses this need from a technical communication perspective by arguing that the instructional design of twenty-first century learning materials should be improved by adhering to guidelines for twenty-first century learning characteristics and twenty-first century technology use. The guidelines support a national goal to improve K-12 achievement in order to increase U.S. STEM graduates and increase the U.S.'s ability to compete in a global economy.

Life in today’s world is characterized by complexity and rapid change. Twenty-first century skills and especially mathematical understanding are supposed to crucially contribute to meeting the demands of our world since mathematics offers strategies to structure or simplify complex problems. An open question is which teaching practices are appropriate to provide all students with such skills and to broaden the participation of underprivileged students. The present article explores these aspects by focusing on complex tasks, a practice that can be considered highly accepted in the context of mathematics education all over the world. We will concentrate on the perspective of the German mathematics education community as the foundation of our considerations. Based on an analytical investigation of mathematical literacy and twenty-first century skills (such as creativity, critical thinking, or problem-solving), we will address central ideas and characteristics of complex mathematical tasks. To complement the analytical approach, we will illustrate their characteristics as well as possible intersections with twenty-first century skills by presenting an elementary school teaching experiment. Finally, we will critically discuss the potentials and pitfalls of complex mathematical tasks from an abstract perspective and conclude by debating practical consequences for organizing mathematical learning-teaching-processes.

This dissertation studies a critical facet of Chinese politics, inspections by higher Chinese government to villages. Principally, it looks at how village economic development determines government inspection decisions and how inspections, once conducted, impact village politics. Specifically, I argue that villages perceived as destabilizing to the Chinese regime, villages with higher levels of economic inequality and villages located at the two extremes of economic development, should see more inspections. In addition, I argue that inspections, in return, drive village politics: they increase village leaders' governing efficacy and raise villagers' political awareness. This theory has received strong support from both field work and quantitative empirical tests using the Chinese Household Income Project (2002) dataset.