Latin American film comedies, from the early sound period until the beginnings of the aesthetic and political New Cinemas (1930-1960), mediated modernity in diverse national contexts through affective and aesthetic tactics that shifted the spectator position in the narrative. These film comedies functioned in a mode of "critical realism" that produced historical self-awareness and foregrounded the geopolitical extension and uneven development of modernity. The comedian comedies of Mario "Cantinflas" Moreno (Mexico), Niní Marshall and Luis Sandrini (Argentina), and Oscarito and Grande Otelo (Brazil) demonstrate not only what kind of "peripheral humor" operated within - and traveled beyond - the national context, but also what this kind of humorous social critique reveals about the capacity of film to move viewers, by means of affect, into positions of critical opposition in the public sphere. By examining the linguistic play of these comedians, this study demonstrates four aspects of Latin American comedy that operate via embodiment and spatio-temporal location. First, Cantinflismo had as its basis not merely word play and non-sense, but misdirection, an evasive spatial practice which positioned the viewer to resist social hierarchies within and beyond the nation. Second, Marshall's multiple radio and film characters and her vocal stardom constituted an auditory map of Buenos Aires that created a different spatial intelligibility for her auditors. Third, Sandrini's stutter produced multiple temporalities that, in turn, positioned the audience itself to do a double take regarding its relation to the film text and its location within the standardized time of modernity. Fourth, the palimpsestic parody of the Brazilian chanchanda by Oscarito and Grande Otelo produced an awareness of historicity in a critically realist vein. Taken together, these four parallel examples of comedic practice demonstrate how Latin American film comedies produced a critically proximate spectator capable of perceiving and organizing space and time differently. Affirming that the study of popular film genres should be seen neither as derivate of foreign models nor as defensive authentic cultural expression, the thesis argues that articulating Miriam Hansen's concept of vernacular modernism to Angel Rama's concept of transculturation yields an understanding of popular cinema as a cultural practice of embodiment that foregrounds the differentiated responses to modernization. Furthermore, by re-reading the theories of realism of Gyorgy Lukács and Siegfried Kracauer and the theories of mimesis and innervation of Walter Benjamin through the critical lenses of Henri Bergson and debates about realism in the Latin American literary boom, this study demonstrates how the humor is contingent on thinking within a particular historical context and becoming part of a located collective body. These film comedies produce a critically proximate humorous spectator moved in laughter to examine his/her relation to the film text and his/her historical and geopolitical location within a cultural landscape marked by economic dependency.

The author makes a conceptualization of the term "cross border region" through eight structural

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This text is the second part of a Bachelor's degree project, dealing with the artistic research and presentation, peripheral dancing, conducted as the first part of the project. The research started from a question: Can one challenge, rethink and explore the peripheries, centres, and orientations of and through one's dancing? The work is perceived through the context of Stockholm University of The Arts, specifically through the lens of the BA in Dance Performance programme. In choosing this context, the essay looks at teachers, classes, authors, and theories encountered in the programme. The different aspects of the research, the physical, sounding, and writing practice, are discussed in dialogue with two main references: Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, a book by British-Australian writer and scholar Sara Ahmed, and We Should All Be Dreaming: Words Make Worlds, a publication by feminist art community UrbanApa. After describing the physical presentation of the research, the essay questions how one can rethink the peripheries and centres of the stage. Furthermore, the work is placed into the context of artists and artworks challenging who and what art is placed in institutions in Sweden and other Nordic countries. The second part of this text offers a toolbox, diving into the physical research of the project, describing scores and materials, as well as references and influences. / <p>Presentation:</p><p>January 17th, 2023</p><p>Stockholms Konstnärliga Högskola, Brinellvägen 58, Stockholm</p>

This dissertation examines the prediction of speech intelligibility and quality using simulated auditory nerve fiber activity. The relationship of neural mean-rate and spike-timing activity to the perceptual salience of the envelope (ENV) and temporal fine-structure (TFS) of speech is indistinct. TFS affects neural temporal coding in two ways. TFS produces phase-locked spike-timing responses and narrowband cochlear filtering of TFS generates recovered ENV. These processes, with direct encoding of ENV to mean-rate responses, are the established transduction processes. We postulate that models based on mean-rate (over a time-window of approx. 6 to 16 ms) and spike-timing cues should produce accurate predictions of subjectively graded speech. Two studies are presented. The first study examined the contribution of mean-rate and spike-timing cues to predicting intelligibility. The relative level of mean-rate and spike-timing cues were manipulated using chimaerically vocoded speech. The Spectro-Temporal Modulation Index (STMI) and Neurogram SIMilarity (NSIM) were used to quantify the mean-rate and spike-timing activity. Linear regression models were developed using the STMI and NSIM. An interpretable model combining the STMI and the fine-timing NSIM demonstrated the most accurate predictions of the graded speech. The second study examined the contribution of mean-rate and spike-timing cues for predicting the quality of enhanced wideband speech. The mean-rate and fine-timing NSIM were used to quantify the mean-rate and spike-timing activity. Linear regression models were developed using the NSIM measures and optimization of the NSIM was investigated. A quality-optimized model with intermediate temporal resolution had the best predictive performance. The modelling approach used here allows for the study of normal and impaired hearing. It supports the design of hearing-aid processing algorithms and furthers the understanding how TFS cues might be applied in cochlear implant stimulation schemes. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation examines how auditory nerve fiber activity can be used to predict speech intelligibility and quality. A model of the cochlea is used to generate simulated auditory nerve fiber responses to speech stimuli and the information conveyed by the corresponding spike-events is quantified using different measures of neural activity. A set of predictive models are constructed in a systematic manner using these neural measures and used to estimate the perceptual scoring of intelligibility and quality of normal-hearing listeners for two speech datasets. The results indicate that a model combining a measure of average neural discharge activity with a measure of instantaneous activity provides the best prediction accuracy. This work contributes to the knowledge of neural coding in the cochlea and higher centers of the brain and facilitates the development of hearing-aid and cochlear implant processing strategies.

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This thesis purports to critically analyze Wallerstien’s world-systems theory, to test its strengths and weaknesses and establish its reliability as a world politics theory, thereby reviving Marxism in general. The study employs a qualitative research method to go deep into the underlying logic of the theory.In an endeavor to tackle the matter at hand, five criteria of analysis are employed to examine the merits and demerits in specific areas of the theory. This involves looking at the structure of the theory, the period of the emergence of capitalism, the unit of analysis, the coherence of the arguments and processes of the theory and the reliability of the world-systems theory in contemporary world politics. The main conclusion of the study is that the world-systems theory is reliable when used to explain three themes in world politics. These are global inequality, dependency and sovereignty.

This paper is about the exploration of how to design an aggregator foronline news that combines editorial credibility, a social media layer anda fluent interaction experience in order to provide overview andaccessibility.The aim of this thesis was to explore the design of the conventionalnewspaper in a digital format using the iPad as medium. Theconventional newspaper is in trouble – more and more readers aremoving to digital news – and we are struggling with which platform touse in the future, what content to fill it with and how this new mediachannel can be used. My ambition for this project was to explore, froma media production perspective, possible design solutions.In the design process two questions were mailed out to individuals toinvestigate important qualities and behaviours from the conventionalnewspaper. There were also situated studies with ten individuals intheir homes, including interviews and questionnaires, to get a deeperinsight into how they read the news and to identify their behaviour andrituals while using the IPad as device.The result of this project was an iPad application designed for thosewho are interested in following the news. There are two key functionsthat have been added to adjust the conventional newspaper to fit as anaggregator providing news online. The first one is editorialresponsibility for social media content and the second that it can beused twenty-four hours a day.In this thesis, I am proposing that the iPad can also be used in a socialcontext and as a device for social experience, besides being apersonal device. The design solution is an application which can beused for in depth-reading or in the periphery, adjustable according towhich situation the person is in.

Trata-se de uma etnografia que visa interpretar a produção cultural da periferia paulistana, a partir do trabalho desenvolvido pela Cooperifa (Cooperação Cultural da Periferia) nos anos de 2001 e 2011. Entre outras atividades, este autodenominado movimento cultural promove saraus literários que operam como encontros comunitários e oportunizam novas opções de lazer, produção e participação político-cultural. Nesse sentido, busco apreender os discursos acerca da periferia, tanto no que se refere ao espaço social quanto à sua cultura peculiar, construído pelos protagonistas deste movimento no cenário contemporâneo. Observa-se, assim, um processo de produção cultural em que não somente os produtos e circuitos de consumo periféricos apresentam-se como soluções criativas ao mercado cultural, mas, também, coloca novamente os moradores da periferia no centro da cena pública, a partir da elaboração de uma agenda comum. / This is an ethnography that aims to interpret the cultural production of the suburbs of São Paulo, from the work done by Cooperifa (Cultural Cooperation in the Periphery) between 2001 and 2011. Among other activities, cultural movement that promotes self-styled literary soirees that operate as community meetings and nurture new leisure facilities, production and participation in political and cultural. In this sense, seeking to understand the speeches about the periphery, both in terms of social space as to its peculiar culture, built by the protagonists of this movement in a contemporary setting. There is thus a process of cultural production that not only the consumer products and peripheral circuits are presented as creative solutions to the cultural market, but also raises again the residents of the periphery in the center of the public stage, from the development of a common agenda.

Este trabalho busca analisar a apropriação recente da expressão \"literatura marginal\" por escritores oriundos da periferia, tomando como ponto de partida o conjunto de autores que publicaram nas três edições especiais Caros Amigos/ Literatura Marginal, nos anos de 2001, 2002 e 2004. A pista deixada por essas publicações era que, mais do que o perfil sociológico dos participantes ou um determinado tipo de literatura, a junção das categorias literatura e marginalidade por tais escritores encobria uma atuação cultural específica, que está relacionada a um conjunto de experiências e elaborações compartilhadas sobre marginalidade e periferia, assim como a um vínculo estabelecido entre criação literária e realidade social. Por isso, além de apresentar empiricamente essa nova geração de escritores marginais, esta pesquisa visou articular a formação interna do grupo e seu significado mais geral, buscando demonstrar como um conjunto de idéias e vivências compartilhadas possibilitou que moradores da periferia, tradicionalmente excluídos como sujeitos do processo simbólico, pudessem entrar em cena para produzir sua própria imagem, dando origem a uma intensa movimentação cultural em bairros da periferia paulistana. / This work intends to analyze the recent appropriation of the expression \"marginal literature\" for deriving writers of the periphery, being taken as starting point the set of authors who had published in three special editions of Caros Amigos/ Literatura Marginal, in the years of 2001, 2002 and 2004. The hint left for these publications was that, more than the sociological profile of the participants or a stricted kind of literature, the junction of the categories literature and marginality for such writers hid a cultural specific performance, which is linked to a set of experiences and elaborations shared on marginality and periphery, as well as a link established between literary creation and social reality. Therefore, besides empirically to present this new generation of writers delinquents, this research aimed at to articulate the internal formation of the group and its meaning more general, searching to demonstrate as a set of ideas and shared experiences made possible that living of the periphery, traditionally excluded as citizens of the symbolic process, they could enter in scene to produce its own image, giving origin to an intense cultural movement in paulistana neighbourhoods of periphery.