In the post-Soviet country of Georgia is a strong sense of nationalism prevalent in the current process of nation building. The Megrelians, traditionally understood as a sub-ethnic Georgian group, form a majority in western Georgia. Many Megrelians are however displaced due to a civil war in 1992 and live outside their traditional territories. Much research has been done covering the situation of the displaced Megrelians. This study however, examines processes of Megrelian identity negotiations in relation to Megrelian representations, thus contributing to a wider understanding of Megrelians’ self-understanding. A field study was undertaken for two months in Georgia in order to gather information for this topic. From an ethnographic research approach, methods of interviews and observations were used to gather data. The findings from the analysis are discussed in relation to theories of representation, nationalism and identity. The study suggests that Megrelian identity interrelates with representations of politics, regional and national associations, surnames, language and assumed characteristics.

Att beskriva en byggnad som tidlös är bland det finaste en kan säga. Några av världens mest uppskattade byggnader har beskriv- its som just det, tidlösa. Hur kommer det sig att en av den finaste komplimangen och erkännandet en byggnad kan få, egentligen är intetsägande?Tiden går ständigt och det finns ingenting någon kan göra för att ändra det. Människor, djur och även byggnader utvecklas och åldras. I denna uppsats ska jag undersöka hur det kommer sig att arkitekter tenderar att undvika att tiden påverkar arkitektur, både i hur den skapas och i hur den representeras. / One of the greatest compliments a building can receive, is to be described as timeless. Some of the most appreciated buildings in the world has been described just as that, timeless or eternal. How is that, that one of the best compliments and acknowledgementsa building can receive, dosen’t really say anything about the build- ing?Time goes by and there is nothing anyone can do about it. People, animals and even building get old. In this essay, I will ex- amine why architects tends to avoid that time gets to architecture, both by how it is created and in the architectural representations.

The increasing and irregular flow of migrants in Europe had lead to an unprecedented crisis which European and International stakeholders have been struggling to manage in a challenging context of financial insecurity, political instability, fragile foreign relations and controversial steps and policies. This current context questions Europe’s image as a powerful global key-player and a civilized privileged space/entity and also shutters migrants’ dreams and illusions of a promise-land. Inevitably, the migrant crisis has emerged as top news in most old and new media around Europe and extensive coverage of the topic has been informing the audience almost on a daily basis. Of course, cartoonists have been affected and inspired by the situation, as well. In a time period of twelve months, from April 2015 to March 2016, in Greek new media alone, three hundred and seven cartoons were published on the topic. This project set out to examine the cartoons published in new media over the allocated time period in order to find out what were the main foci of the artists’ attention in relation to the migration crisis and how they related to domestic and international political affairs and further international interests by major stakeholders. It also explored the way immigrants have been depicted, the way Europe is depicted as a promise-land, how all involved stakeholders have handled the crisis and the artists’ degree of active judgment or influence. A mixed research method, combining content analysis, which falls into the realm of quantitative research methods, with elements of psychoanalysis and social semiotics, which observe matters, analyse the visual and critically interpret it was employed. Results showed that the migrant crisis was a favorable topic for Greek cartoonists publishing in Greek new media. They explored the topic from various aspects, including politics, values, everyday life, religion, war and art, shifting from mockery and heavy criticism to sympathy, guilt and a sense of worry about the fellow human depending on their personal political orientation and the aspect of the topic they were commenting on. Evidently, the migrant crisis is a strong humanitarian crisis placing a bomb to fundamental and consolidated values, policies and relations among all stakeholders.

This dissertation focuses on the function of human bodies in articulations of the nation in contemporary British multicultural fiction, more specifically in novels by Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi, and Monica Ali. Combining the Andersonean claim that narrative fiction is an especially sensitive medium for imagining the nation with Daniel Punday‘s assertion that the human body is the basic organizing principle of narrative structure, this study examines the ways in which corporeal representations in novels negotiate dominant paradigms of the national imaginary. Each chapter focuses on a key text from which it opens up the discussion to the authors‘ oeuvre. The study establishes the palimpsest as a mode of representation and interpretation of cultural and national identities showcased in Rushdie‘s The Moor‘s Last Sigh. The fragmentation of narrative and human subjectivity via the trope of the palimpsest in this novel is central to conceptualizations of the nation in Rushdie‘s oeuvre as well as in the other texts in this study. Based on the make-up of Rushdie‘s palimpsests, the characters‘ bodies manifest not a mixture of different elements but a conglomerate of often mutually exclusive, yet intrinsically combined alternatives. For V. S. Naipaul, the function of corporeality is the negotiation of the national imaginary via representations of narrative space. In The Enigma of Arrival as in his other novels, Naipaul uses circuitous movement and palimpsestic layering of the kinetic space to complicate agency for his characters, to emphasize the illusory nature of narrative authority, and to call attention to the ambiguous operations of national and postcolonial discourse. Hanif Kureishi‘s The Body among his other novels shows a ground-breaking attitude toward the possibilities of narrativity in the age of transmutable corporeality. His characters‘ diminishing corporeal presence is the source of their agency and their increasingly complex cultural identifications. In Brick Lane, Monica Ali‘s keen attention to kinetic space creates unexpected ripples in the narration and the protagonist‘s cultural identification, which shift the meaning of the novel from an optimistic ethnic/gender emancipation narrative to claiming agency by resisting cultural affiliations. / English

The media impact how people perform their gender, and play an important role in the reproduction of gender binary. Media representations of gender can be described as hegemonic in the sense that, because of their complexity, they contribute to the reproduction of gender norms by otherwise agentic audiences. Media literacy education offers useful strategies for helping audiences question media representations of gender, allowing them to trouble the hegemonic system that keeps inequalities in place. This dissertation answers the question: How do high school students respond to the instruction in a media literacy program informed by gender studies and scholarship on media representations? To answer this question, I used ethnographic methods and the case study approach. My main findings are: (1) Classes that involve analysis of media representations of gender have an agenda-setting effect on students, helping them notice problematic media messages and connect them to social problems and inequalities. (2) Media and gender classes can encourage students to engage in social action, even without the teacher’s prompting. (3) Media and gender classes are not part of a standard curriculum, and teachers choose to include them because they are passionate about gender inequalities. This is why these teachers might lean towards the protectionist approach. (4) Students might embrace teachers’ message about the value of gender equality and diversity, but keep their implicit biases unchecked. Teachers should think of ways to address these biases in the classroom. (5) In order to help students acquire a balanced set of media literacy skills, it is important to work on all competencies of the AACRA model of media literacy education: Access, Analyze, Create, Reflect, and Act. / Media & Communication

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Yes / Physics-based skin deformation methods can greatly improve the realism of character animation, but require non-trivial training, intensive manual intervention, and heavy numerical calculations. Due to these limitations, it is generally time-consuming to implement them, and difficult to achieve a high runtime efficiency. In order to tackle the above limitations caused by numerical calculations of physics-based skin deformation, we propose a simple and efficient analytical approach for physics-based skin deformations. Specifically, we (1) employ Fourier series to convert 3D mesh models into continuous parametric representations through a conversion algorithm, which largely reduces data size and computing time but still keeps high realism, (2) introduce a partial differential equation (PDE)-based skin deformation model and successfully obtain the first analytical solution to physics-based skin deformations which overcomes the limitations of numerical calculations. Our approach is easy to use, highly efficient, and capable to create physically realistic skin deformations. / This research is supported by the PDE-GIR project which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement (No.778035), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.51475394), and Innovate UK (Knowledge Transfer Partnerships KTP.010860). Shaojun Bian is also supported by Chinese Scholar Council. Xiaogang Jin is supported by the Key Research and Development Program of Zhejiang Province (No.2018C01090) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61732015).

This thesis investigates media representations of female ex-combatants in ideologically polarized countries, looking to the case of Colombia. It employs a theoretical framework grounded in gender and framing theory, exploring how the dimensions time perspective, invisibilization, dehumanization, irrationality, victimization, and tone shape portrayals of female ex-combatants. A quantitative content analysis is performed on the three newspapers El Espectador, El Tiempo, and El Nuevo Siglo, to compare the relative frequency of these dimensions across newspapers of different ideological orientations. The results show that left-leaning media is more likely to portray female ex-combatants in an active manner through direct quotes, humanization, and rational portrayals, whereas right-leaning media are more likely to engage in invisibilization and passive portrayals. While these results confirm a tendency to invisibilize female combatants, the limited presence of dehumanization and irrationalization indicate a reduction of explicit negative bias. The findings suggest that in ideologically polarized countries, opposition to gender-sensitive peace processes can diminish gradually, which underscores the importance of sustained efforts for inclusivity.

In this work we set up a general framework for exact computations of the associativity, commutativity and duality morphisms in a quite general class of tortile categories. The source of the categories we study is the work of Gelfand and Kazhdan, Examples of tensor categories, Invent.Mlath. 109 (l992), 595-617. They proved that, associated to the quantized enveloping algebra of any simple Lie group at a primitive prime root of unity, there is a semisimple monoidal braided category with finite number of simple objects. The prime p needs to be greater than the Coxeter number of the corresponding Lie algebra. We show that each of the Gelfand-Kazhdan categories has at least two subcategories which are tortile, and offer algorithms for computing the associativity, commutativity and duality morphisms in any of those categories. A careful choice of the bases of the simple objects and of the product of two such objects rnake the exact computations possible. The algorithms have been implemented in Mathemetica and tested for the categories A₂,p=5, A₃,p=7, A₄.p=7, C₂,p=7, and G₂,p=11. This work was supported by the Center for Mathematical Computations through NSF grant DMS-9207973. / Ph. D.

Este trabalho aproxima as contribuições da teoria das representações sociais e dos estudos em memória social para a compreensão do campo religioso, especificamente o Espiritismo, reconhecendo a importância da recordação de personalidades para a dinâmica religiosa. Esta pesquisa objetiva analisar o conteúdo da representação social de perfeição, o conteúdo e estrutura da memória de personalidades do Espiritismo e a relação entre ambos. Trata-se de estudo descritivo, desenvolvido em duas etapas. Participaram 75 participantes auto-declarados espíritas - 38 na primeira etapa e 37 na segunda, sendo entrevistados 24 desses. Os participantes, em média, possuíam 37,3 anos de idade e 16,7 anos como espíritas. Na primeira fase aplicou-se, através da Internet, a técnica de evocações livres com o termo indutor “espíritos superiores”, na qual os participantes respondiam que pessoas se associavam ao termo. Na segunda, prosseguiu-se com as evocações livres e questionário, para caracterização dos participantes. A partir das doze personalidades mais lembradas, realizou-se entrevista semi-estruturada, com questões sobre características, virtudes, lembranças, hierarquia das personalidades, e questões sobre o significado da perfeição e como alcançá-la. Os dados das evocações foram analisados através das técnicas do quadro de quatro casas e construção de árvore máxima de similitude. As entrevistas foram analisadas mediante análise categorial temática. Assim, verificou-se que as personalidades mais recordadas foram: Chico Xavier, Jesus, Allan Kardec, Emmanuel, Bezerra de Menezes, Madre Teresa de Calcutá, Joanna de Ângelis, Gandhi, André Luiz, Francisco de Assis, Maria de Nazaré e Divaldo P. Franco. A representação social de perfeição foi expressa, de modo simplificado, na sentença: um caminho, difícil e longo, em que o ser humano sai da sua condição de inferioridade para a perfeição, através do conhecimento (proveniente do trabalho, do estudo e do auto-conhecimento), livrando-se do seu egoísmo e expressando o amor, tal como demonstrado e vivido por Jesus. Verificou-se, ainda, que essas memórias se organizam, principalmente, em dois modelos de valores complementares no Espiritismo: 1) conhecimento, inteligência, razão, estudo, livro e 2) amor, vivência, fé, trabalho, exemplo. Eles se constituem nas duas condições essenciais para se alcançar essa perfeição. O primeiro modelo está principalmente personificado na figura de Allan Kardec e o segundo, em Jesus. Nesse sentido, o Espiritismo opera na mente dos fiéis, uma síntese entre ambos os modelos, tendo em Chico Xavier a personificação dessa síntese, constituindo-se como tipo ideal de espírita. /// [en] This work resorts to the contributions of both social representations theory and the studies about social memory in order to understand the religious field – Spiritism in particular – considering the importance to remind personalities in religious practices. This survey aims to analyze the contents of social representation of perfection, the contents and structure of Spiritism personalities’ memory as well as their relation. This is a descriptive study carried out in two sessions involving 75 self-declared Spiritism subjects with 38 people in the first session and 37 in the sec ond, being 24 of them interviewed. The participants are, on average, 37.3 years old who have been engaged in Spiritism for 16.7 years. A free-evocation technique with an inducing term “Superior Spirits” was applied in the first session through the Internet as the participants claimed that people were associated with the term. In the second session, we used free evocations and questionnaires in order to characterize the participants. Based on the 12 most reminded personalities, we had a semi-structured interview with questions about characteristics, virtues, memories, personality hierarchy, and questions on the meaning of perfection and how to reach it. The evocation data were analyzed through the four-housed chart techniques along with the EVOC 2003 software and the construction of the maximum similitude tree. Analyzing the interviews through the thematic categorial analysis, we figured out that the most reminded personalities were Chico Xavier, Jesus, Allan Kardec, Emmanuel, Bezerra de Menezes, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Joanna de Ângelis, Mohandas K. Gandhi, André Luiz, Francis of Assisi, Mary (mother of Jesus), and Divaldo P. Franco. The social representation of perfection was simplified and expressed in the sentence: the hard and long way human being follow when leaving his inferiority condition to reach perfection through knowledge (obtained from labor, study, self-knowledge), getting rid of selfishness and expressing love, as demonstrated and experienced by Jesus. We also concluded that these memories are mainly organized into two complementary value patterns in Spiritism: 1) knowledge, intelligence, rationality, study, literature and 2) Love, experience, faith, labor, example. They comprise two basic conditions to reach that perfection. The first pattern is mainly personalized in Allan Kardec’s image, and the second in Jesus. According to this view, we can ascertain that Spiritism operates in the faithfull’s mind, a synthesis between both patterns, being Chico Xavier its personification and thus regarded as the ideal type of spiritist. / CAPES