“The Self: Towards A Method for Queering death” is an identity testament, a speculative method for designing the space of your own funeral before you die. It is a format to create a fair memorial of a person’s identity that does not feel welcome or fits in the current formats of burial ceremonies we have in Sweden today, usually connected to Christianity or other religious traditions. Even the secular burial traditions of Sweden today have a very clear traditional format and aesthetic that can be intimidating to a lot of members of society. “The Self” is also a method to relegate the power of narrative to whom it belongs.  “The Self “is executed through this thesis, a sacred document, a spatial installation and a film, showing a possible scenario of a burial ceremony as a result of the method of the identity testament. This thesis demonstrates and problematizes the secular burial traditions in Sweden and how the common rituals are still based on the norms of Christianity, heteronormativity and traditional values, and why this is oppressing a lot of individuals in society. It does so by using a speculative method of an identity testament, which gives every human the right to own the narrative about their persona and who they were to the afterlife. It also problematizes the hierarchies and norms in society of what “family” means, and how consanguinity is valued by state and law. The term “queer” or “queering” is used in multiple ways, both as an adjective (being queer, a queer community, a queer sexual identity) but also as a verb or an adverb, as in the method used by the Queer Death Studies Network. The content of this thesis consists of texts, pictures, research in form of written sources and interviews, queer theory, descriptive design methods and descriptions of a sculptural exploration and spatial installation as well as a motion picture. The thesis asks and answers questions such as: How could a new type of burial ceremony - based on our secular beliefs in contemporary Sweden – look, feel and be arranged to be more connected to what we can relate as religion today? Is it possible to create an organized system to collect information about a person´s identity to be used as a formal ground to create a fair burial ceremony after the person’s death? The analysis focuses upon speculative ideas about what could happen if every person had a right to state a will for their intangible possessions and assets as well as their physical ones. The thesis also goes through multiple examples of cases of queer deaths where there have been strong needs to arrange an alternative funeral to feel safe and comfortable. Finally, the thesis reflects upon how this method could be used and if it really could be applied to society, and if so, who would be able to use it?

This thesis studies the feasibility and methodology of applying state-of-the-art computer technology in scientific workflow modelling, within a collaborative environment. The collaborative environment also indicates that the people involved include non-computer scientists or engineers from other disciplines. The objective of this research is to provide a systematic methodology based on a web environment for the purpose of lowering the barriers brought by the heterogeneous features of multi-institutions, multi-platforms and geographically distributed resources which are implied in the collaborative environment of scientific workflow.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-04T21:02:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 11 / Bolsa para curso e programa de Pós Graduação / A presente dissertação investiga a estrutura da linguagem concebida ontologicamente por Hans-Georg Gadamer e suas implicações para o conceito de mundo Welt. Para tanto, é demonstrado como Gadamer restitui a contigencialidade da linguagem a partir de Hegel e Heidegger, mediante a historicidade e, com Platão, garante sua reflexibilidade. A linguagem se estrutura especulativa e dialogicamente. Os elementos mínimos em que ela se apresenta dessa forma são: o fazer da coisa mesma no pensamento e no diálogo, o pensamento em busca da palavra adequada à coisa, o trazer e vir à fala, o implícito e o explícito, a pergunta e a resposta, o falar e o escutar, a palavra e o conceito. As implicações dessa estrutura estão fundadas na ideia de mundo como sentido e linguagem como mundo, tomada de Humboldt. O alcance da presente investigação atinge mundos interativamente complexos e interlinguísticos como a cultura, a imaginação, a política e a educação, e o problema da liberdade. / The present essay investigates the structure of language ontologically conceived by Hans-Georg Gadamer and it implications to the concept of world as Welt. Therefore we demonstrated as he restitute the contingenciality of the language from of Hegel and Heidegger through the historicity, and with Platon pledge its reflexibility. The language it if structure as speculative and dialogue. The least element in witch it show this way are: the doing itself of thing in the think and in the dialogue; the think in search of adequad word at thing; to brink and to came at talk; the implicit and the explicit; the ask an answer; the to talk and the listen; the word and the concept. The implications of this structure are found in idea of world as sense and language as world sense, give to Humboldt. The scope of this investigation reaches worlds interactively complex and interlinguistic, such as culture, imagination, politics and education, and the problem of freedom.

Hick’s pluralist assumption has remained the most knowable model of religious pluralism in the last few decades. Many have, from the perspectives of various major world religions, questioned his notion that the teachings of all religions are derived from the same Absolute Truth and that salvific-end is one, yet little attention has been paid to the traditions that he graded as unauthentic and non-valuable according to his soteriological and ethical criteriology. The purpose of this thesis was to demonstrate the exclusiveness of Hick’s model by describing a tradition called “Chinese Folk Religion” that does not fit into his definition of ‘authentic religion’. As the study suggested, his understanding of the world religious situation is over-generalised and simplified, and his particular criteriology does not treat all traditions fairly or pluralistically. As a response, this thesis proposed a more inclusive theory that also integrates the currently disregarded tradition into the interpretation.

Another major endeavor of this thesis concentrates on self-formulations of these queer sf bodies and textualities. My elaboration concerns their delineation of ontological pursuit, multi-hybrid post/non-humanity, and a highly self-aware appropriation of obscene, ambivalent and amoral performatives to constitute deviant cultural strategies which have by far successfully counter-written dominant politics' desire to assimilate dissident voices and recalcitrant sites. / My thesis provides three different approaches to re-read non-realistic, fantasmatic queer gender formations and trans-masculine sexualities. From these positions and perspectives, I will argue for the emergent force of queer transboyhood and gradual recognition given to several non-normative transgender masculine presences, starting from their connections and disagreements with old-guard lesbian feminist agenda and homo-normative les-bi-gay politics. This multitude built by trans-masculine affects not only greatly disturbs hetero-normativity and homo-normative discourses, such charismatic inscriptions which link into marginal territories also have created a persistent intervention to interfere and even convert/pervert canonized texts and representational modes. In these chapters to extrapolate this queer masculine sf heterogenesis, I focus on analyzing three archetypes of trans-masculine personalities and their highly different subjectivities. My aim for these analyses is to theorize how these marginal genders and bodies counterattack, infect, and thus re-write mega-historical narratives by their cultural momentum and anti-human poetics/politics. By performing these "infections", queer masculine subjectivity twists and transforms a seemingly liberal hegemony devoted to excluding the non-normative in the name of single-minded progress and bi-polar gender dichotomy. / This dissertation proposes to closely study writings on queer masculinity in English science fiction and fantasy, forming a trajectory of queer transboy representations from 1930s to the beginning of 21st century. By this project, I embark to articulate multi-layered historical contexts between speculative literature, sub-cultural sites, transgender politics, and constructions on marginal queer-gendered bodies. Through intertextual dynamics embedded within and among theoretical frameworks such as sf study, paraliterary interaction, penumbra sub-subjective tactics, post-human/trans-species writings, I will conduct articulations to generate forms and genealogies of queer masculinity in sf realm, building their continuum and ruptures, agency and subversive power. / 洪泠泠. / Adviser: Natalia Chan. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-03, Section: A, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 296-313). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Hong Lingling.

Traditional historical writing focuses on the cause and effect of human action, assuming that it is the historian's responsibility to recount the ebbs and flows of human progress. In the process of laying hold of the past as a narrative of human action, historical writing has developed the tendency to marginalise nature and undermine its power to influence the historical narrative. My investigation explores the fantastic in historical fantasy as a means of resisting historical writing's anthropocentrism. Historical fantasy uses fantastical elements to create counterfactual and alternative historical realities that have the potential to resist and undermine history's anthropocentric norm. My thesis examines four contemporary young adult historical fantasy trilogies that reimagine key turning points in history such as industrialisation, the American frontier, European imperialism, and World War I. They share the theme of retrieving and subverting anthropocentric discourses in the history of human development and thereby creating space for nature's presence and agency. My study finds that the fantastic is an effective means of subverting historical writing's anthropocentrism. But it also uncovers ambiguities and contradictions in historical fantasy's ecological revisionism, pointing to the idea that despite the fantastic's capacity for subversion, historical representations of nature cannot be separated from considerations of human identity and survival.

Speculative fiction is a genre that is gaining urgency in the contemporary Canadian literary scene as authors and readers become increasingly concerned with what it means to live in a nation implicated in globalization. This genre is useful because with it, authors can extrapolate from the present to explore what some of the long-term effects of globalization might be. This thesis specifically considers the long-term effects of globalization on communities, a theme that speculative fictions return to frequently. The selected speculative fictions engage with current theory on globalization and community in their explorations of how globalization might affect the types of communities that can be enacted. This thesis argues that these texts demonstrate how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of “cooperative autonomy” can be uniquely cultivated in the conditions of globalization – despite the fact that those conditions are characterized by the fragmentation of traditional forms of community (Empire 392).

This thesis examines firm performance through the dot-com bubble through the lens of executive compensation. Hypotheses based on the theoretical literature of Bolton, Scheinkman and Xiong (2006) as well as Bertrand and Mullainathan (2001) in regards to management compensation in a speculative bubble motivate three regression models with differing market-cap-growth based dependent variables and specific compensation variables. Regression analyses test the models using public compensation and security data from S&P's Execucomp and Compustat databases. Synthesizing regression results show that stock option vesting schedules and executives' status on the board of directors may significantly affect firm performance through the dot-com bubble, but more analysis, using more robust data, is necessary to verify either claim.

‘FIELD WORKS’ explores landscape experiences that were once common to the tall grass prairie region of Manitoba. The route through this project winds in and out of urban surfaces to reveal memories embedded in the land. It documents forgotten and dormant prairie events so that they might be woven back into the fabric of the city. The purpose of this project is to transfer explored and speculative experience into a physical route through the urban prairie landscape. It is an effort to expose the layers clinging to physical memories rooted in the prairie. / May 2007

Speculative fiction is a genre that is gaining urgency in the contemporary Canadian literary scene as authors and readers become increasingly concerned with what it means to live in a nation implicated in globalization. This genre is useful because with it, authors can extrapolate from the present to explore what some of the long-term effects of globalization might be. This thesis specifically considers the long-term effects of globalization on communities, a theme that speculative fictions return to frequently. The selected speculative fictions engage with current theory on globalization and community in their explorations of how globalization might affect the types of communities that can be enacted. This thesis argues that these texts demonstrate how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of “cooperative autonomy” can be uniquely cultivated in the conditions of globalization – despite the fact that those conditions are characterized by the fragmentation of traditional forms of community (Empire 392).