This phenomenological hermeneutic research explores the author’s lived experience of painting a Sacred Mandala over the course of 15 months while focusing on child-loss by adoption. In this dissertation, the structure, process, and mindful practice of Sacred Mandala Inquiry are presented—incorporating methodological considerations, related theories, and illuminated through personal examples. Although the focus in the paper is on an individual Sacred Mandala practice, it is with the understanding that the individual is embedded within a community and world in a web of relationships. Impetus for research often arises from personal lifeworld experience. The Sacred Mandala provides structure and containment for inquiry, for those who are attracted to the form, assisting in bracketing that which has previously been accepted while simultaneously becoming a sacred boundary for the unknown to emerge, protected and witnessed. The practice and process may be taken up by inquirers in the social sciences, humanities, arts and within the community of adult learners. The mindful and embodied painting and journaling practices necessitate the inclusion of processes occurring outside of awareness—hosted in emerging images, dialogues, stories, synchronistic events, myths, metaphors, and poetry; inviting the unconscious forward. Opening both eyes—the rational and imaginal—provides a depth perspective. Both are needed, each is as real as the other, one illuminating the inner world, one illuminating the outer world, in wholeness. Importantly, the meanings embedded within the work continue to resonate, unfold, and inform over time. / Graduate / 2020-08-27

This thesis intends to investigate the ways in which the changing perceptions of landscape during the nineteenth century play out in Kipling’s treatment of Kim’s phenomenological and epistemological questions of identity by examining the indelible influence of space— geopolitical, narrative, and imaginative—on Kim’s identity. By interrogating the extent to which maps encode certain ideological assumptions, I will assess the problematic issues of Kim’s multi-faceted identity through an exploration of both geographical and narrative landscapes and the various chronotopes—Bakhtin’s term for coexisting frameworks of time and space—that ultimately provide a new reading of identity-formation in Kim.

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Today's complex design projects require teams of designers to work collaboratively by sharing their respective expertise in order to produce effective design solutions. Due to the increasing need for exchanging knowledge, modern design projects are more structured to work with distributed virtual teams that collaborate over computer networks to achieve overall optimization in design. Nevertheless, in a collaborative design process, the integration of multidisciplinary virtual teams - involving exchange and sharing of knowledge and expertise - frequently and inevitably generates conflicting situations. Different experts' viewpoints and perspectives, in addition to several ways of communicating and collaborating at the knowledge level, make all this process very hard to manage. In order to achieve an optimal scenario, some problems must first be solved, such as requirement specification and formalization, ontology integration, and conflict detection and resolution. Specifying and formalizing the knowledge demands a great effort towards obtaining representation patterns that aggregate several disjoint knowledge areas. Each expert should express himself so that the others can understand his information correctly. It is necessary, therefore, to use a flexible and sufficiently extensive data representation model to accomplish such a task. Some current models fall short of providing an effective solution to effective knowledge sharing and collaboration on design projects, because they fail to combine the geographical, temporal, and functional design aspects with a flexible and generic knowledge representation model. This work proposes an information model-driven collaborative design architecture that supports synchronous, generic, service-oriented, agent-based, and ontology-based teamwork. Particular representation models are transformed into ontology instances and merged together in order to accomplish the final product design. It is a synchronous approach because the concurrent processes are undertaken at the same time that the interactions among designers take place. It is generic because it provides the users with two approaches for ontology integration: the use of a predefined generic ontology and the harmonization process. Our proposal focuses on collaborative design conflict resolution by using Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Web Services, the former as a tool for knowledge representation and the latter as a technological support for communication.

This thesis studies Peter Shaffer&rsquo / s use of time as a technique for creating alienation effect. In order to provide the audience with a questioning role, Shaffer primarily employs historical and mythical past as elements of pastness in the Brechtian sense. Shaffer also innovatively contributes to the formation of alienation effect with spatial time achieved through the coexistence of past and present. Distancing the audience in time, the playwright leads them to adopt a critical viewpoint so that they can question and reflect upon the psychological and metaphysical themes such as search for worship, existential disintegration and the eternal conflict between reason and instinct in his plays The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Yonadab, and The Gift of the Gorgon.

Using the generative processes developed over two stages of creative development and the performance of The Physics Project at the Loft at the Creative Industries Precinct at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) from 5th – 8th April 2006 as a case study, this exegesis considers how the principles of contemporary physics can be reframed as aesthetic principles in the creation of contemporary performance. The Physics Project is an original performance work that melds live performance, video and web-casting and overlaps an exploration of personal identity with the physics of space, time, light and complementarity. It considers the acts of translation between the language of physics and the language of contemporary performance that occur via process and form. This exegesis also examines the devices in contemporary performance making and contemporary performance that extend the reach of the performance, including the integration of the live and the mediated and the use of metanarratives.

abstract: ABSTRACT This narrative study traces the development of a dance curriculum as it unfolded in an inner city public school. It examines the curriculum emergence through intersecting worlds of artistic practice, improvisation, lived experience and context. These worlds were organized and explored through themes of gender, emotion, longing and intersections and examined through lenses of critical theory, aesthetics and currere. It examines the interior dialogue within one individual educator who is both a dance artist and a teacher and reflects the differing and at times conflicting perspectives within those two positions. The curriculum acquired the name "curriculum by accident" because several highly unexpected events contributed to its development. The students were initially suspicious and hostile and presented significant resistance to classical dance as an artistic form. This resistance was circumvented through creative process and improvisation. The act of improvisation became both a way to approach teaching and curriculum development and as an artistic process. Improvisation courts chance, the unplanned and the accidental through a structure in which the unknown is as valued as the known. The school setting is one full of known subjects; curriculum, settings, procedures, people and expectations. Curriculum by accident was a circumstance in which a known (school) and an unknown (the evolving curriculum) melded. The development of curriculum by accident was a response to an array of intuitive and serendipitous cues. The curriculum seeped through the cracks of school experience and transmuted into a curriculum that was very successful. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2010

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This essay uses interviews to gather information regarding the experience and belief which exists in regards to possession within the Anglican faith. It also uses Jungian psychology to analyse these experiences and beliefs; this is interesting because even in the modern day of science, possession continues to be a phenomenon. It still occurs closer to home than we may think; a modern western country such as England, where Anglicanism is the state religion, have special ministries assigned to deal with this in every diocese. The information was gathered through interviews and literature, to give both a qualitative and a quantitative perspective. This essay presents a possible psychological explanation for the cases of possession as experienced within the Anglican faith, which provides an alternative to the distress these individuals are experiencing rather than assuming it necessarily is of a spiritual nature. It does not, however, seek to prove or disprove the possibility of a spiritual cause behind this phenomenon.

<p>During cognitive tasks, synchronicity of neural activity varies and is correlated with performance. However, there may be an upper limit to normal synchronised activity – specifically, epileptogenic activity is characterized byexcess spiking at high synchronicity. An epileptic seizure has a complicated course of events and I therefore focused on the synchronised activity preceding a seizure (fast ripples). These high frequency oscillations (200–1000 Hz) have been identified as possible signature markers of epileptogenic activity and may be involved in generating seizures. Moreover, a range of ionic currents have been suggested to be involved in distinct aspects of epileptogenesis. Based on pharmacological and genetic studies, potassium currents have been implicated, in particular the transient A–type potassium channel (KA). Our first objective was to investigate if KA could suppress synchronized input while minimally affecting desynchronised input. The second objective was to investigate if KA could suppress fast ripple activity. To study this I use a detailed compartmental model of a hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cell. The ion channels were described by Hodgkin–Huxley dynamics.</p><p>The result showed that KA selectively could suppress highly synchronized input. I further used two models of fast ripple input and both models showed a strong reduction in the cellular spiking activity when KA was present. In an ongoing in vitro brain slice experiment our prediction from the simulations is being tested. Preliminary results show that the cellular response was reduced by 30 % for synchronised input, thus confirming our theoretical predictions. By suppressing fast ripples KA may prevent the highly synchronised spiking activity to spread and thereby preventing the seizure. Many antiepileptic drugs down regulate cell excitability by targeting sodium channels or GABA–receptors. These antiepileptic drugs affect the cell during normal brain activity thereby causing significant side effects. KA mainly suppresses the spiking activity when the cell is exposed to abnormally high synchronised input. An enhancement in the KA current might therefore be beneficial in reducing seizures while not affecting normal brain activity.</p>