This rhetorical analysis of a contemporary and historical social movement, American conservatism, through a prominent intellectual figure, Russell Kirk, begins with a description of the author's work. Ideologies, arguments, and sentiments are considered as implicit rhetoric, where social relations are defined by persuasion, ideas, historical appeal, persona, and various invitations to shared assumptions. First, a descriptive historical context is the foundation to explore the beliefs, communicative strategies, and internal tensions of the conservative movement through the development of various identities and communities during its rise as a formidable political power. Second, an analysis of the author and the author's texts clarifies argumentative and stylistic choices, providing a framework for his communicative choices. The thesis of this discussion is that the discourses implicit and explicit in the author's writing and conduct of life were imaginative and literary products of what he termed "moral imagination." How this imagination developed, and its impact upon his persuasion, was a unique approach not only to an emergent intellectual tradition but also to the disciplines of history, fiction, policy, and audience. This work argues there were two components to Kirk's rhetoric of moral imagination. First, his choosing of historical subjects, in biographical sketch and literary content, was an indication of his own interest in rhetorical efficacy. Second, he attempted to live out the sort of life he claimed to value. I argue he taught observers by an ethos, an endeavor to live a rhetorical demonstration of what he genuinely believed was good. As demonstrated by what many who knew Kirk identified as an inner strength of character and conduct, his rhetorical behavior was motivated by a love for and a curiosity toward wonder and mystery. By an imaginative reading of history, his exemplars of more properly ordered sentiments of a moral order sought to build communities of associational, relational persons that found identity in relation to other persons. His ambition was to explore and communicate what it meant to be human - in limitation, in promise, and in the traditions and customs that provide a framework for "human" in a culture.

<p>Due to the decrease in obtaining driver’s licenses among young people, the main purpose of this study was to acquire a deeper understanding of young people’s attitudes towards driver’s license and towards driver’s education. This is a qualitative study with a theoretical approach, which combines Bourdieu with post modern theories. By using focus groups a wide rage of attitudes among young people have been gathered. Having a driver’s license is still considered a standard among young people even though their attitude mostly depends on their need for one. They are also very positive towards alternative ways of transportation and towards public transport. The young are convinced that it is easy to obtain a driver’s license if they wish to have one. One main point that this study points out is that the driver’s license has lost its status as a transitional event between childhood and adulthood.</p>

This study explores the connections between childhood and children's literature. In this connection there is an inherent tension between writing and reading "real" childhood, as it is being lived by children now, and interacting with an adult-normative, adult-reconstructed childhood that may or may not have existed in the past. The purpose of this study was to address this tension by analyzing fifteen recently published award-winning children's novels, from the United States, The United Kingdom, and Australia, in order to ferret out how present-day childhood is constructed within this text set. Using a hybrid methodology called critical discourse analysis, buttressed by the frameworks of postmodern childhood studies and critical children's literature studies, the novels were analyzed in a hermeneutic, reader-response oriented approach in order to excavate themes that addressed childhood in the narratives. Findings are presented as a meta-plot, wherein the child protagonists leave a failed home, set out on a journey of knowledge and experience gaining a sense of agency, and, at the end of the novel, construct a new home replete with the child protagonists' personal meaning. This meta-plot includes instances of the child protagonist performing parrhesiatic acts (Foucault) as well as developing non-hierarchical relationships as conceptualized by an I/You relationship (Buber). Other findings include the construction of childhood as a time of "becoming" and a time of "is-ness," childhood as a time of resilience, and childhood as a time of difficult decisions. Conclusions of the analysis speak to the idea of the child serving as a Modern bringer of hope, who manages to create moral order from within an adult-created postmodern milieu. Implications relate to the fields of literacy education, replications of the study with an interpretative community of children, and continuing to define the burgeoning methodology of critical content analysis.

Menas, kaip viena iš pirmaujančių žmogaus veiklos sferų užima bene pagrindinį vaidmenį žmonijos vystymosi raidoje. Šiuolaikinė meno sistema, bendradarbiaudama su švietimo sistema, kuria ateities visuomenės vizijas. Menininkai šioje sistemoje yra vieni iš svarbiausių dalyvių, susijusių su meno gamyba ir platinimu. Maža to, menininko profesija įdomi dar ir tuo, jog dalis jaunosios kartos bodisi bendra nusistovėjusia tvarka, ir būtent šioje terpėje radikaliam menininkui atsiranda galimybė sušvelninti trintį. / Art, as one of leading spheres of human activity, plays the main role in human evolution. A modern art system, while collaborating with education system, creates the visions of future society. Artists are one of the main participants, related with art production and distribution, in aforementioned system. What is more, the profession of artists is interesting because of the fact that a part of young generation has an aversion to general established order, and possibility for radical artist to reduce the friction appears precisely in this medium. Improvement of unsuitable system is often radical, while an artist – a revolutionary player. However, the breakthrough of postmodern radicalism condemns the artist for temporarily novelty, temporarily recognition and temporarily privileges.

The topic of this diploma thesis is ?Physiognomically we have still been passers - by. Travelling as an intercultural experience in the work of Christoph Ransmayr?. This thesis is divided into seven basic parts. The first four chapters describe theoretical background of the thesis which is the Postmodernism, the Philosophy of the Postmodernism, the Interculturality and the Theory of Essays. The next chapter reports about the poetics of the narration and the aim of the last two parts is to analyze the books "Geständnisse eines Touristen" and "Der Weg nach Surabaya". The ambition of this diploma thesis is to research the relationship of Christoph Ransmayr to travelling and search for the influences of the travelling poetics in his two concrete books.

Discussions with members of the Dutch Reformed Church and the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa in Ohrigstad, illustrate the possibilities of ubuntu language in dealing with misunderstanding and distrust. This research utilises a narrative approach, based on a postmodern epistemology and pastoral practical theology that explores ubuntu language as a helpful discourse. It engages the context of these two churches in Ohrigstad and investigates experiences and challenges within the local community. The local experiences are described against the broader history of the Dutch Reformed Church and the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa, which the Ohrigstad churches are imbedded in. Individual narrative research conversations with church members in Ohrigstad display a longstanding relationship with stories of trust and distrust. This culminates into a group discussion that explores the role of ubuntu language - and at times the lack thereof - in the concrete relationship between these two faith communities as an expression of recent South African history. The conversations offer local knowledge which displays both unique outcomes by strengthening identity, unleashing potential, celebrating diversity, awakening solidarity, revealing humanity, bolstering responsibility and enhancing Christianity, and it also deconstructs oppressive discourses including race and otherness, rich and poor, and language. The research offers an approach to deal with distrust and misunderstanding on grass roots level, using insights gained from ubuntu language. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Practical Theology / PhD / Unrestricted

The aim of this study is to analyse and contextualize in aesthetic theory medial phenomena such as intra-, inter- and transmediality, in Jimmy Liao’s picturebook Starry Starry Night. In order to analyse intra-, inter- and transmediality, I use Jørgen Bruhn’s mediality model based on the term heteromediality. In contrast to the term intermediality, heteromediality highlights that blending is a priority condition in all media, and that the blending aspects matter. Therefore, the mediality model focuses both on relations between several media and on relations within a single medium or a single artefact. The theoretical framework in the study is mainly based on intermedial theories and picturebook theories. However, in the analysis and in the aesthetic-theoretical contextualization I also use perspectives and concepts from aesthetic theories such as the term aesthetic and the term radical aesthetic. According to my findings, the medial phenomena in Starry Starry Night can have several functions and effects. Firstly, the medial elements can clarify, contradict, complement and expand the narrative. Secondly, the medial relations can contribute to an intramedial thematization and to a direct and indirect characterization. Thirdly, the medial dialogue can influence the interpretation, produce different interpretations and lead the readers’ reception. Finally, the medial phenomena can explicitly and implicitly challenge, revolt against and deconstruct certain values, power relations and beliefs about the world.

This study investigates the challenges to the legitimacy and authority of scientific research in late modern philosophy of science. The author suggests that the different challenges to the legitimacy of science have led to relativism and amount to a crisis. Keeping in mind the positivist background, he illustrates the legitimacy crisis of science in the period from Popper to the present. In particular his analysis focuses on the "historical school" (Kuhn, Feyerabend etc.) in philosophy of science. The main question of this study is: what are the causes and the nature of the legitimacy crisis emerging in the contemporary philosophical assessment of science? To answer this question, a few specific challenges to the legitimacy of science emerging in particular areas are analysed: for example the difficulties of anchoring scientific certitude to its proper object of study, the loss of objectivity, growing scepticism about the possibility of communication and scientific progress. After substantiating the gradual emergence of relativist and sceptical approaches in the abovementioned areas, this study provides a "diagnosis" aiming at identifying the causes of the crisis. The humanist ground motive of nature and freedom and the choice of anchoring scientific certainty either in the subject or in the object of knowledge are considered the main sources of the crisis. They lead to arbitrary absolutisations of particular aspects of the scientific enterprise and (in the case of subjectivist approaches) to sceptical approaches to the possibility of scientific objectivity, communication and progress. This study also indicates a few possible resources, available in the reformational tradition, to counteract the legitimacy crisis of science. The main resource indicated in this study is the recognition of the structural order for reality, which is accessible to scientific analysis, "constrains" scientific research but also constitutes a common ground for researchers. Other important resources are the recognition of the link between scientific and pre-scientific knowledge and the acknowledgment that universality and individuality are traits of everything that exists. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Philosophy))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

This project contends that hope for ethical communication in a postmodern age lies in the ability to rethink ethics in terms of "existential pathos." To that end, this study locates communicative responsibility in the responsive element of the self-other relation by relying primarily on the work of the twentieth-century Lithuanian-born French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. I maintain that Levinas's disruption of the philosophical tradition informs a communication ethic comprised of dialectical, dialogical, and rhetorical modes of interpersonal interaction that are fundamentally rooted in an existential understanding of human striving. Further, I assert that these dialectical, dialogical and rhetorical components are best appreciated when Levinas is placed in dialogue with Kierkegaard, whose influence on existential phenomenology is undeniable, and whose recognition that pathos marks the essence of the human condition is indispensable to this project. Dialectic, dialogue and rhetoric are viewed here as praxis-oriented concepts that emerge in the context of a Levinas-Kierkegaard interplay that works to frame communicative responsibility as "response-ability." By looking at the ways that Levinas radically re-positions philosophical discourse about ethics, and placing those challenges in conversation with Kierkegaardian themes, this study seeks temporal answers to historically situated questions about the promise of ethical interpersonal interaction in a time of uncertainty. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / Communication and Rhetorical Studies / PhD; / Dissertation;

Magister Artium (Psychology) - MA(Psych) / In April 2016 students from South African universities launched the #Endrapeculture movement to protest their universities’ institutional policies towards sexual assault on campus, which was seen as perpetuating a rape culture. Through the use of social media, students from across South Africa were able to provide instrumental information and mobilise support for the protests. This thesis focused on exploring the rape culture discourse that emerged from the online debates following the #Endrapeculture protests, as well as the potential of social media as an accessible and affordable pedagogical tool to address rape culture on campus. An exploratory qualitative design was used and this was framed within a postmodern feminist framework. To address the aims of the study two methods of data collection were utilised. All ethics principles were adhered to for both forms of data collection. Firstly, natural observation of comment threads of Facebook relating to the April 2016 #Endrapeculture protests was conducted. A total of 590 comments from 8 Facebook posts were collected and analysed using qualitative content analysis. The findings indicate that rape culture discourses were prominent within these comment threads with Perpetuating Victim-blaming emerging as the most significant theme followed by Rape or Rape Culture, Patriarchy, Race and Culture, Sexualisation and Bodily Autonomy, Trivialising Rape Culture and Role of Universities and Law Enforcement. The second part of the data collection involved conducting online, asynchronous focus groups using the Facebook secret chat group application. Participants for the SFFG were recruited on Facebook through a process of snowball sampling. A total of three SFFG were conducted with 16 participants. Thematic decomposition analysis was used to analyse the data. The findings revealed three main themes namely; Defining Rape Culture, Learning about Rape Culture and The Role of Social Media. Based on the observations from the comment threads and the findings from the SFFGs, it is argued that social media can be used as a pedagogical tool to address rape culture on campus in two ways. Firstly, it is beneficial on a macro level by using social media platforms to provide instrumental information about rape culture. Secondly, it can be utilised on a micro level by using applications like the SFFG to provide a safe space where students can engage in small-scale interactive discussions.