Foundational to almost any Hitchcock film is the idea of the voyeur: the (un)natural inclination to want to look upon the private, obscene, and potentially grizzly instances in other peoples’ lives. Such inclinations are typically satiated in secret and subsequently denied as something we desire. The voyeuristic act may be connected to narcissism in that we are seduced by our own fears and inner hells projected onto the watched ‘other.’ This kind of projection not only perpetuates our sense of denial of what are our own inclinations, but it also precipitates the potential for de-humanization and feelings of emptiness in that we detach from ourselves. The phenomenological paradox to such detachment is that the more we insist we are safe and self-enclosed here while the ‘other’ remains at bay there, the more we are convinced that we know ourselves and are connected to ourselves, when arguably, we couldn’t be more detached from ourselves and our humanity. And by not really knowing ourselves as well as we thought – as we might infer from a kind of ‘doppelganger’ or ‘doubles’ reading of Strangers on a Train, for example – is how fear is born, both in a Hitchcock film and in life generally. How then, might we come to truly know or face our fear if estrangement would seem an inherent quality to our very experience of it?

A sample (N = 428) of university students was introduced to a stranger that fit the public persona of either John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy in a vignette. The meetings between students and strangers in vignettes were similar to those in which serial killers might entrap victims. In addition to varying criminal type (Gacy or Bundy), the race and gender of the strangers were also varied in the 2 x 2 x 2 experiment. Differences among subjects in their ratings of personality traits of the strangers and how subjects expected to behave toward these persons were examined by ANOVA. Focus group discussions provided further insights about how individuals size up and react to "respectable" strangers who fit the public personas of well-known serial killers. Results suggested that young adults in the 1990s are highly vulnerable to victimization by serial murderers. / Department of Sociology

Foundational to almost any Hitchcock film is the idea of the voyeur: the (un)natural inclination to want to look upon the private, obscene, and potentially grizzly instances in other peoples’ lives. Such inclinations are typically satiated in secret and subsequently denied as something we desire. The voyeuristic act may be connected to narcissism in that we are seduced by our own fears and inner hells projected onto the watched ‘other.’ This kind of projection not only perpetuates our sense of denial of what are our own inclinations, but it also precipitates the potential for de-humanization and feelings of emptiness in that we detach from ourselves. The phenomenological paradox to such detachment is that the more we insist we are safe and self-enclosed here while the ‘other’ remains at bay there, the more we are convinced that we know ourselves and are connected to ourselves, when arguably, we couldn’t be more detached from ourselves and our humanity. And by not really knowing ourselves as well as we thought – as we might infer from a kind of ‘doppelganger’ or ‘doubles’ reading of Strangers on a Train, for example – is how fear is born, both in a Hitchcock film and in life generally. How then, might we come to truly know or face our fear if estrangement would seem an inherent quality to our very experience of it?

Thesis (D. Min.)--Emmanuel School of Religion, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 192-200).

Thesis (MA (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: During the past century, for a variety of reasons, more people have been crossing national and cultural borders than ever before. This, along with constantly developing communication technology, has seen to it that clear-cut distinctions, divisions and borders are no longer as easily definable as they once were. This process, now commonly referred to as ‘globalisation,’ has led to a rising trend of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘cultural hybridity,’ terms often connected with celebratory views of our postmodern, postcolonial world as a colourful melting pot of cultures. However, what these celebratory views conveniently avoid recognising, is that the increasing occurrence of hybridity places a growing number of people in a painful space inbetween identities where they are “neither just this/nor just that” (Dayal 47), “neither the One… nor the Other… but something else besides” (Bhabha Commitment 41). Perhaps in an effort to combat this ignorance, a new breed of authors – who have experienced the rigours of migration first-hand – are giving voice to this pain-infused space on the periphery of cultures and identities through a developing genre of transcultural literature. This literature typically deals with issues of identity closely related to globalisation and multiculturalism. In my thesis I will be looking at three such novels: Jamal Mahjoub’s The Drift Latitudes, Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, and Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore. These authors move away from an idealistic, celebratory view of hybridity as the effortless blending of cultures to a somewhat disenchanted approach to hybridity as a complex negotiation of split subjectivity in an ever-fracturing world. All three novels lend themselves to a psychoanalytic reading, with subjects who imagine themselves to be unitary, but end up having to face their repressed fractured subjectivity in a moment of crisis. The psychoanalytic model of the split between the conscious and the unconscious, then, resonates well with the postcolonial model of the intrinsically fractured hybrid identity. However, while psychoanalysis focuses on internal processes, postcolonialism focuses on external processes. Therefore, I will be making use of a blend of psychoanalytic and postcolonial concepts to analyse and access discursive meanings in the texts. More specifically, I will use Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘hybridity’, Freud’s concept of the ‘uncanny’, and Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of ‘the stranger’ as distinctive, yet interconnected conceptual lenses through which to view all three of these transcultural novels. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In die afgelope eeu het meer mense as ooit vantevore, om ‘n verskeidenheid redes, lands- en kultuurgrense oorgesteek. Tesame met die voortdurende vooruitgang van kommunikasietegnologie, het dit tot gevolg dat afgebakende grense, skeidings en verskille nie meer so maklik definieerbaar is as wat hulle eens was nie. Hierdie proses, waarna in die algemeen verwys word as ‘globalisering’, het gelei tot die groeiende neiging van ‘multikulturalisme’ en ‘kulturele hibriditeit’. Dit is terminologie wat dikwels in verband gebring word met feestelike beskouings van ons postmoderne, post-koloniale wêreld as ‘n kleurryke smeltkroes van kulture. Wat hierdie feestelike beskouings egter gerieflikheidshalwe verkies om te ignoreer, is die feit dat die toenemende voorkoms van hibriditeit ‘n groeiende aantal mense in ‘n pynlike posisie tussen identiteite plaas waar hulle nòg vis nòg vlees (“neither just this/nor just that” [Dayal 47]), nòg die Een… nòg die Ander is… maar eerder iets anders buiten.. (“neither the One… nor the Other… but something else besides” [Bhabha Commitment 41]). Miskien in ‘n poging om hierdie onkunde die hoof te bied, is ‘n nuwe geslag skrywers – wat die eise van migrasie eerstehands ervaar het – besig om met ‘n ontwikkelende genre van transkulturele literatuur ‘n stem te gee aan hierdie pynlike ‘plek’ op die periferie van kulture en identiteite. Hierdie literatuur handel tipies oor die kwessies van identiteit wat nou verwant is aan globalisering en multikulturalisme. In my tesis kyk ek na drie sulke romans: Jamal Mahjoub se The Drift Latitudes, Kiran Desai se Inheritance os Loss en Caryl Phillips se A Distant Shore. Hierdie skrywers beweeg weg van die idealistiese, feestelike beskouing van hibriditeit as die moeitelose vermenging van kulture na ‘n meer realistiese uitbeelding van hibriditeit as ‘n ingewikkelde vergestalting van verdeelde subjektiwiteite in ‘n verbrokkelende wêreld. Al drie romans leen hulle tot die lees daarvan uit ‘n psigo-analitiese oogpunt, met karakters wat hulself as eenvormig beskou, maar uiteindelik in ‘n krisis-oomblik te staan kom voor die werklikheid van hul onderdrukte verbrokkelde subjektiwiteit. Die psigo-analitiese model van die breuk tussen die bewuste en die onbewuste weerklink welluidend in die post-koloniale model van die intrinsiek verbrokkelde hibriede identiteit. Terwyl psigo-analise egter op interne prosesse toegespits is, fokus post-kolonialisme op eksterne prosesse. Derhalwe gebruik ek ‘n vermenging van psigo-analitiese en post-koloniale konsepte om uiteenlopende betekenisse in die onderskeie tekste te analiseer en hulle toeganklik te maak. Meer spesifiek gebruik ek Homi Bhabha se konsep van hibriditeit, Freud se konsep van die ‘geheimsinnige / onheilspellende’ en Zygmunt Bauman se konsep van ‘die vreemdeling’ as kenmerkende, maar steeds onderling verwante konseptuele lense waardeur aldrie transkulturele romans beskou word.

Users in social networking sites, such as Facebook, are increasingly receiving friend requests from strangers and accepting strangers as friends. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of the Big Five personality traits and strangers' gender in affecting Facebook users' decisions to accept the stranger's friend request by adopting a 2 (gender of the stranger: male vs. female) x 5 (stranger's personality: Neuroticism vs. Extraversion vs. Openness vs. Conscientiousness vs. Agreeableness) factorial design. Results revealed that participants were more likely to accept the stranger's friend request when the participant's and stranger's personalities matched. This effect was more pronounced when the stranger was a female. Participants accepted female stranger's friend request due to the inflated perception of stereotypical female characteristics, which supported the hyperpersonal effect. Majority of the participants accepted the stranger's friend request based on textual cues that were displayed in the friend request message, which supported social information processing theory, suggesting that impression formation of the stranger was not constrained to the lack of nonverbal cues setting.

Diploma thesis "Woman in Comics: Comparison of Woman Visual Depictions and Her Function and Role in Comics" is internally divided into two parts: a theoretical and a research part. The theoretical part introduces a history of comics, from the beginning of this medium till present and focuses on woman comics characters and their typologies. The analytical part of the diploma work presents own research which deals with visual depiction of women in comics: examines their functions and roles in comics and bindings to the depictions. A part of the research section of this work is also comics codes analysis (genre, modality, visual codes, nonverbal and language codes), summary of quantitative researches of female characters in comics and basic information about analysed comics (author of the comics, category etc.). The researched sample is composed of three comics: Li'l Abner (author: Al Capp), Wonder Woman (author: Charles Moulton), Strangers in Paradise (author: Terry Moore). Outcome of this research is a survey of analysed female and male characters, a summary of the visual analysis and implying results.

The purpose of this study is to explain the process of designing the architecture of StrangeSpaces, an itinerant festival for transcultural performing arts groups or artists which starts from the original idea and terminates with the description of a possible structure. The process of designing StrangeSpaces is based on an investigation on the transcultural performing art’s field and on conversations with experts, which together transformed the original general idea of a festival, into the specific architecture of the StrangeSpaces festival. The investigation resulted in a personal definition of ”transcultural performing arts”, that subsequently led to the identifications of three elements of transculturalism which define the festival’s goals as ”encounter with the other” in multiples and different yet equal levels. Another result of this investigation is the contextualization of StrangeSpaces in the contemporary international cultural politics. In fact, the transcultural encounter and exchange can be viewed as a possible response to the increasing need of sustainable international performing art in local, national and European cultural communities. The conversations with experts in the field of international performing arts complemented the investigation, contributing to the ideological principles of StrangeSpaces, such as anti-racism and anti-colonialism, as well as to a model of democratic and sustainable design, in which multilingualism and cosmopolitan aspects of the society are essential cues. The result of the study is a design of the architecture of three versions of StrangeSpaces, an itinerant transcultural performing arts festival that is born to be a space, a free place where people play, exchange roles, art, experience starting from their own culture, but reaching and reflecting into the other, mirroring a society of sustainable diversity.

In recent years, we have been able to see and hear in the media how difficult it is to get substitutes into various businesses. Employers promise high salaries and rewards for permanent staff who can find people who can be hired, but there is still a shortage of substitutes. What is the reason for this? Previous research has shown that substitutes tend to keep a certain distance from their workplaces and that they are thus not full-scale members of the working group (Alfonsson 2020, Olofsdotter, 2008). There is also research that shows that satisfaction affects the attitude we have to work (Berglund, 2001, Herzberg 1959). With this study, we want to investigate what may be the reason behind this shortage of substitutes by, with a focus on motivation and attitude to work, seeing if there are differences between hourly employees today and people who were hourly employed 10 - 20 years ago. This qualitative study is based on semi-structured interviews with eight people who are, or have been, hourly employed in Social Care in a medium-sized Swedish municipality. We have divided the respondents into two groups where one group consists of four people who were hourly employed 10 - 20 years ago and the other of four who are hourly employed today. Based on the compilations of each group's responses, we can identify differences and similarities in motivation and attitude to work based on their position as Strangers (Simmel, 1908). This leads to a result showing what motivates the hourly substitutes and what they consider valuable in the work. Finally, we can also see that there has been a change in attitude towards work over time. / De senaste åren har vi kunnat se och höra i media hur svårt det är att få in vikarier i olika verksamheter. Arbetsgivare utlovar höga löner och belöningar för fast personal som kan hitta personer som kan anställas men det är ändå brist på vikarier. Vad beror detta på? Tidigare forskning har visat att vikarier tenderar att hålla en viss distans till sina arbetsplatser och att de på så vis inte är fullskaliga medlemmar i arbetsgruppen (Alfonsson 2020, Olofsdotter, 2008). Det finns också forskning som visar att nöjdhet påverkar vilken attityd vi har till arbetet (Berglund, 2001, Herzberg 1959). Vi vill med denna studie undersöka vad som kan ligga bakom denna brist på vikarier genom att, med fokus på motivation och attityd till arbete, se om det finns skillnader mellan timanställda idag och personer som var timanställda för 10 – 20 år sedan. Denna kvalitativa studie baseras på semistrukturerade intervjuer med åtta personer som är, eller har varit, timanställda inom Social omsorg i en mellanstor svensk kommun. Vi har delat upp respondenterna i två grupper där den ena gruppen består av fyra personer som var timanställda för 10 – 20 år sedan och den andra av fyra som är timanställda idag. Utifrån sammanställningarna av respektive grupps svar kan vi identifiera skillnader och likheter i motivation och attityd till arbete utifrån deras position som Främlingar (Simmel, 1908). Detta leder till ett resultat som visar vad som motiverar timvikarierna och vad de anser är värdefullt i arbetet. Slutligen kan vi också se att det skett en förändring i attityden till arbete över tid.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This research has as its object the relations established among individuals who do not know each other at restaurants in the central area of Uberlândia - MG. It was carried out from the perspective of the study of everyday life as a way to perceive the experiences of the common man in the processes of societal change. We conducted a case study through observations and interviews in which we seek to apprehend the representations of the patrons of establishments that have a particular feature, almost mandatory, that their clients share a table. From the theoretical references which allow considering food as a means for the analysis of social relations; the construction of rules of behavior in society; eating out and the changes of the interactions in public space, we analyze how the definitions of behaviors considered appropriate for the occasion affect relations among strangers in the restaurant area. We could see that the behavior shared by clients have the effect of dismissing the strangers, through rules that guide people\'s attitudes so as not to disrespect others. / A presente pesquisa tem como objeto as relações estabelecidas entre indivíduos que não se conhecem, em restaurantes no centro da cidade de Uberlândia - MG. Foi realizada a partir da perspectiva do estudo do cotidiano como forma de perceber as experiências do homem comum e suas vivências nos processos de mudança social. Por meio de observações e entrevistas, realizamos estudo de caso no qual buscamos apreender as representações dos frequentadores de estabelecimentos que têm por característica particular a quase obrigatoriedade de que seus clientes dividam uma mesa. A partir das referencias teóricas que permitem pensar a alimentação como um meio para a análise de relações sociais, a construção de regras de comportamento em sociedade, o comer fora de casa e as alterações das interações no espaço púbico, analisamos de que maneira as definições dos comportamentos considerados adequados para a ocasião condicionam as relações entre desconhecidos no espaço do restaurante. Pudemos perceber que as condutas partilhadas pelos clientes têm por efeito dispensar os estranhos do contato, por meio de regras que orientam as atitudes das pessoas para que não se desrespeite os outros. / Mestre em Ciências Sociais