Throughout film history, the female body has been gazed upon, lusted after, protected, admired, and murdered. A sampling of post-modern films, including Kill Bill; Vol. I, The Swimming Pool, Boys Don’t Cry, Orlando, The Piano, The Ballad of Little Jo and Hedwig and the Angry Inch divulge new and complex views of the female body, including gender transformation. The maternal body, the clothed body, and the psychological and cultural body display the evolving female psyche. The female protagonists in the films, whether rewriting their own stories (Swimming Pool), finding methods to transform their sex within a patriarchy (The Piano), or altering their femininity (Orlando, Boys Don’t cry, The Ballad of little Jo, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch) redefine their gender. In doing so, the postmodern female body surpasses her assigned gender role. / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, Dept. of English. / "May 2006." / Includes bibliographic references (leaves 35-38).

The goal of this study is to develop a robust theory that explains how participation in a Consumer-Run Organization (CRO) can lead to positive individual outcomes. To accomplish this goal, existing theoretical explanations are reviewed. Using the previously unapplied theoretical perspective of symbolic interactionism and more specifically, Stryker’s Identity Theory, these varying theoretical explanations are then integrated to create a model explaining how CROs can contribute to positive outcomes. This theoretical model is then empirically explored through two separate studies. The first uses open-ended short answer questions to understand how CRO members benefit from participation. The second uses participant observation and minimally structured interviews to generate life stories that explore how CRO participation has altered an individual’s life course. The original explanatory model proved helpful but partially inadequate in accounting for the results. This leads to model revisions and the development of a more robust theoretical explanation of how CRO lead to positive outcomes. Discussion focuses on explaining this revised explanatory model, exploring how it does and does not account for the results. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Psychology / "December 2005."

This study used an experimental script awareness task to measure the script recognition and metacognitions of 129 English language learners (ELLs) in Senior Kindergarten from Chinese, Portuguese, or Spanish L1 backgrounds. Items formed two clusters: those involving the Latin alphabet and those involving symbolic script. Based on ability to name letters and read some words, children were divided into “readers” and “prereaders.” There were significant effects of home language and reading group: the Chinese ELLs were better at distinguishing items of symbolic script from the Latin alphabet items, but the Portuguese and Spanish ELLs were better at explaining their metacognitions. When the item was more similar to English, readers were more likely to accept it as English. Differences in script awareness development are discussed in relation to home language, reading ability, nonverbal ability, and vocabulary skills.

This dissertation confronts the rhetorical discipline with the Real of an antagonism illuminated through its encounter with Lacanian psychoanalysis. Rather than eliding the desire of subjects in favor of traditional discursive rhetorical solutions, the pschorhetorical response I will propose locates desire and the subject in the moments where communication fails and seeks to make public the realization of desire. Through the psychoanalytic analysis of three acts of agency that comprise rhetorical failure, I will argue that rhetorical analyses of social change are actually not persuasive enough in their acceptance that social reality is entirely mediated. The cases will show that rhetorical failure is tantamount to psychoanalytic heroism. Utilizing what I call psychorhetoric, I will argue that rhetoric’s investment in social change can be much enhanced by opening to the concept of a nonsymbolizable ethics of the Real.

Thomas Pynchon’s novel, The Crying of Lot 49, details Oedipa Maas’ quest to unearth a possibly centuries-old clandestine mail system, the Trystero. Oedipa is immersed in notions of sociality and she must navigate the social landscape, searching for clues as to the existence of the social system. In her quest she assumes the role of a detective who searches for meaning, as she looks for clues and questions others who might potentially be privy to the secrets of the Trystero. She necessarily performs the process of symbolic exchange with those she encounters in an attempt at ascertaining some greater meaning within the world that she thinks might lie behind the Trystero. In this, the nature of the circulation of meaning is revealed as a cultural construct.

The present dissertation deals with the establishment of Campus Sundsvall, MidSweden University, and discusses how the architecture visualizes visions and ideas of the participants involved, the city of Sundsvall, the university and the proprietor, Akademiska Hus. The purpose is to investigate the process where the symbolic values are formulated and materialized – the interaction between architecture, language and visual material. The first chapter discusses the American tradition of campus planning and how the idea has been transformed in Sweden to represent an area, often located in the city, gathering one or more buildings used by a university. The second chapter deals with the architectural competition of Campus Sundsvall and analyzes the program, the solutions presented by the participants and eventually how Campus Sundsvall turned out in the late 1990s. The third chapter investigates the sources of the concepts of the architecture and the planning model and discusses why the city of Sundsvall was attracted by these ideas. The planning history of Sundsvall and especially Stenstaden, the city centre of Sundsvall, are central in interpreting the question of identity as a symbolic value. In the last chapter, discussing the campus as a creative space, the present increase of IT supported distance courses questions the importance of the university campus.

Det övergripande syftet med föreliggande uppsats har varit att bidra till en djupare förståelse om självhjälp på Internet genom att belysa individens medvetande och interaktion med andra. Studiens forskningsobjekt har utgjorts av sju individers livsberättelser som återfinns på ett diskussionsforum på Internet och har genomförts enligt en narrativ forskningsmetod och hermeneutiskt ansats. Studien är av kvalitativ art och individens handlande och självupplevda verklighet har stått i fokus. Teorin som applicerats i studien är det pragmatiska mikroperspektivet, symbolisk interaktionism, med följande teoretiska utgångspunkter: symboler, bortträngning, identitetsberövande och ömsesidigt stöd. Analysen är tematiserad enligt studiens tre frågeställningar. I det första temat framgår att bortträngning och identitetsberövande utgjorde två centrala teman i livsberättelserna. Det andra temat behandlade betydelsen av grupptillhörighet, där det tydligt framkommer att diskussionsforumet betyder mycket för stärkandet av informanternas personliga identitet. Det tredje temat visade att förändringar i levnadssätt och levnadsvanor har visat sig i både psykiska och fysiska avseenden. Slutligen diskuteras huruvida en kombination av professionell hjälp som exempelvis terapi och diskussionsgruppen som komplement vore ett bra förfarringssätt att nå den känslomässiga separation, som ännu inte uppnåtts efter den rumsliga separationen som många informanter gjort från sina föräldrar. / The overall aim of this essay has been to contribute to a deeper understanding of self-help on the Internet by illuminating the individual's awareness and interaction with others. The study's subject of research has been seven individual life stories found on a newsgroup on the Internet and was implemented with a narrative research method and a hermeneutic approach. The study is qualitative in its nature and the individual's behavior and self-perceived reality has been the main focus. The theory that has been applied in the study is the pragmatic micro perspective symbolic interactionism with the following theoretical starting points: symbols, displacement, deprived of identity and mutual aid. The thematic structure of the analysis has been based on the study’s three research questions of which the first theme highlighted displacement and deprived of identity as the two main themes in the life stories. The second theme dealt with the importance of group membership, which clearly showed that the newsgroup means a great deal for strengthening their personal identity. The third theme revealed that the changes in lifestyle and habits have been both psychological and physical. Whether or not the spatial separation many informants made ​​from their parents can measure up to an emotional separation that they have not yet reached were discussed and lastly an implication that a combination of professional help such as therapy and newsgroup as a supplement may be a good method to reach the emotional separation.

This thesis is an ethnography of drug dealers. Working from a Chicago School Symbolic Interactionist approach (Mead, 1934; Blumer, 1969), nineteen interviews were conducted with current and former drug dealers. I inquired into their careers (initial involvements, continuities, disinvolvements, reinvolvements) of participation in selling drugs. The data analysis is primarily located in three chapters – Chapters Five, Six, and Seven. Chapter Five considers people’s involvements in selling drugs as well as dealers’ interpersonal exchanges with their customers. In particular three processes are considered in Chapter Five: initial involvements in drug sales,expanding the customer base, and making sales. Chapter Six discusses dealers’ relationships with suppliers as well as dealers who become involved in supplying activities. This chapter discusses the matters of: making contacts with suppliers, working with suppliers, and becoming suppliers. Chapter Seven examines some of the identity allures and problematics of being a drug dealer as well as instances of disinvolvement and reinvolvement in drug dealing. This includes considerations of: striving for respectability, encountering regulatory agencies, and the problematics of disentanglement.

In recent years, there has been a push by automotive manufacturers to improve the efficiency of the vehicle development process. This can be accomplished by creating a computationally efficient vehicle model that has the capability of predicting the vehicle behavior in many different situations at a fast pace. This thesis presents a procedure to automatically generate the simulation code of vehicle systems rolling over three-dimensional (3-D) roads given a description of the model as input. The governing equations describing the vehicle can be formulated using either a numerical or symbolical formulation approach. A numerical approach will re-construct numerical matrices that describe the system at each time step. Whereas a symbolic approach will generate the governing equations that describe the system for all time. The latter method offers many advantages to obtaining the equations. They only have to be formulated once and can be simplified using symbolic simplification techniques, thus making the simulations more computationally efficient. The road model is automatically generated in the formulation stage based on the single elevation function (3-D mathematical function) that is used to represent the road. Symbolic algorithms are adopted to construct and optimize the non-linear equations that are required to determine the contact point. A Newton-Raphson iterative scheme is constructed around the optimized non-linear equations, so that they can be solved at each time step. The road is represented in tabular form when it can not be defined by a single elevation function. A simulation code structure was developed to incorporate the tire on a 3-D road in a symbolic computer implementation of vehicle systems. It was created so that the tire forces and moments that appear in the generalized force matrix can be evaluated during simulation and not during formulation. They are evaluated systematically by performing a number of procedure calls. A road model is first used to determine the contact point between the tire and the ground. Its location is used to calculate the tire intermediate variables, such as the camber angle, that are required by a tire model to evaluate the tire forces and moments. The structured simulation code was implemented in the DynaFlexPro software package by creating a linear graph representation of the tire and the road. DynaFlexPro was used to analyze a vehicle system on six different road profiles performing different braking and cornering maneuvers. The analyzes were repeated in MSC.ADAMS for validation purposes and good agreement was achieved between the two software packages. The results confirmed that the symbolic computing approach presented in this thesis is more computationally efficient than the purely numerical approach. Thus, the simulation code structure increases the versatility of vehicle models by permitting them to be analyzed on 3-D trajectories while remaining computationally efficient.

Konkurrens är ett fenomen som vi alla någon gång utsätts för. Vissa träffar på det på arbetsplatsen, vissa gör det inom idrotten och vissa gör det inom det sociala livet med vänner och familj. Troligen får många bekanta sig med konkurrens på alla dessa platser samtidigt. Syftet med denna studie var att synliggöra hur lärande skapas och vad unga idrottare lär sig i en idrottspraktik med hög konkurrens.  Detta undersöktes med hjälp av intervjuer med unga idrottare som utsatts för konkurrens inom idrotten och även observation av en idrottspraktik där hög konkurrens fanns.  Lärandet inom laget vi undersökte byggde på att man provade sig fram. Ungdomarna formulerade teorier och testade sedan dessa teorier i verkligheten. Det man lär sig handlar oftast om att försöka göra saker som man antar att ledarna uppskattar.  Spelarna uppförde sig mycket disciplinerat då de antog att det var det som ledarna uppskattade. De lärde sig att inte ställa frågor, inte uttrycka sina åsikter och inte bry sig om sina medspelare. Konkurrensen kommer även till uttryck genom att spelarna ignorerar det sociala på uttagningarna och endast fokuserar på att göra sitt bästa på planen. Detta gör att spelarna tenderar att umgås med de spelare som de redan känner sedan tidigare.