The purpose of this thesis is to achieve an in-depth understanding of how the Vietnamese people in Poland are involved in mobility within air travel (aero-mobility) for their transnational endeavors. This qualitative study is based on 4 semi-structured face-to-face interviews, 3 text-based interviews with the Vietnamese people living in Poland (VP), and on content analysis of texts and images. Air travel can, surprisingly, play a significant role in migration and ethnic studies. The analysis of this thesis relies on the theoretical frameworks of mobility turn, and transnationalism, focusing on the experiences, customs, and habits of the Vietnamese of Poland engaged in air travel. The analysis also includes how air travel can strengthen the diasporic and transnational links of the Vietnamese of Poland, contributing to ethnic weddings, charity events, and religious activities, securing their cultural identity in Poland. The findings indicate that travel customs and habits, social networks, diasporic activities, movements of goods, and exchange of cultures and ideas can be generated by a combination of mobility, transnationalism, and air travel of the Vietnamese people in Poland.

Using adaptation and queer theory, this essay discusses and analyzes how Henry James’ horror novella The Turn of the Screw has been adapted into a streaming show for Netflix. By showing how The Haunting of Bly Manor removes some of the ambiguity of the original text, this essay claims that the show does not fall victim to the “bury your gays” trope, as it has been accused of. Instead, this essay finds that while the show may not perpetuate this trope, it still maintains the idea that queer stories come with tragic backstories and trauma.

Despite efforts to better understand and address the root causes of conflict, violence continues to affect nations and communities around the world, displacing millions and avoiding resolution. Global institutions, developed to promulgate a more cooperative and peaceful world order, have failed to adequately resolve conflicts, with many spanning multiple decades, regionalising, and involving an increasing number of non- state actors. Through historically situating the roots of liberal peacebuilding and analysing recent UN and AU approaches to peace consolidation and conflict resolution, this dissertation seeks to better understand the ways in which these institutions' pasts have influenced their present approaches. By bringing together historicist and sociological approaches to peace research, and following in a constructivist IR tradition, this dissertation traces norm formation at these institutions and contextualises calls for more "locally-led" approaches. I use historical research to situate the roots of UN and AU approaches and conduct thematic analysis to investigate norm shifts related to state sovereignty, protection of civilians, conflict prevention, gender, development, democracy, peacebuilding, and bottom-up approaches to peace. I find that while norms have shifted significantly in both...

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This thesis examines two French Catholic phenomenologists whose work engages in a serious manner with embodiment and theological phenomena. Michel Henry (1922-2002) and Emmanuel Falque (b. 1963) are both connected with the “theological turn” in French phenomenology. By using the tools of phenomenology, these thinkers take aim at the general phenomena of flesh and body and the religious phenomena of incarnation and resurrection. In this thesis I seek to uncover how their philosophical foundations inform their theological work, how they articulate a phenomenology of the body and the flesh in relation to incarnation and resurrection, and which thinker might provide a better account of these. I begin by providing a succinct overview of phenomenology—as articulated by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger—paying attention to the phenomenological distinction between flesh (Leib) and body (Körper) that is vital to Henry’s and Falque’s analysis of incarnation and resurrection. I then lay out Dominique Janicaud’s critical labelling of the “theological turn” in French phenomenology in 1991, as well as responses by those who continue to knowingly operate under that label. I then critically examine the work of Henry and Falque, first by laying out their philosophical approach and method, and then by working through each of their theological trilogies, showing how the former influences the latter. My analysis reveals that both Henry and Falque have a similar understanding of a phenomenology of resurrection, in that it is a move from body to flesh. What my analysis also shows is that although Falque is critical of Henry’s position on the incarnation for neglecting materiality and completely understanding the human being as flesh, Falque’s critical response to it ironically mirrors it: by turning to material forces and drives to better describe the body in his recent work, Falque recapitulates Henry’s understanding of flesh. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis investigates the existence of the turn-of-the-month (ToM) effect on the Swedish stock market and further examines whether this calendar anomaly is persistent but different during the Covid-19 pandemic. The main purpose of this study is to determine if the ToM effect is significant in the Swedish stock market over twelve years, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. The major finding is that the ToM effect is statistically significant for all indexes except for the large cap. The ToM window for the mid- and all cap indexes is significant for the last four trading days of the month to the first trading day of the next month. It is also significant for the small cap index during the last four trading days of the month to the first two trading days of the next month. The results of a significant ToM effect are similar to those of prior research, except that the Swedish stock market has an earlier ToM window. The Covid-19 pandemic is divided into three windows – before the virus has reached Sweden, before vaccinations, and after vaccinations. The results indicate that the ToM effect is insignificant when Covid-19 had not yet reached Sweden. Additionally, this study discovers a significant ToM pattern in the small cap and mid cap indexes, but not for the large cap or all cap indexes before vaccinations and after vaccinations. Hence, the ToM effect is persistent but different during a time of a major crisis, which in this paper is the time of the Covid-19 pandemic.  The research approach is deductive and quantitative. All data is collected from Nasdaq as observations of the daily adjusted closing prices starting from 1/4/2010 to 4/22/2022, and consists of the indexes: OMXSCAPGI, OMXS30GI, OMXSSCGI, and OMXSMCGI. The daily returns are then regressed on dummy variables for the trading days, by using different ToM windows to find results if these ToM windows are significant or not.

Recent decades have seen heightened interest in Charles Brockden Brown and his contribution to American literature. Scholars have worked to reclaim Brown from the margins of literary history, but he remains on the outskirts of literature classrooms and conversations. In an effort to further map Brown's influence and significance in the American literary tradition, I discuss his most famous novel, Wieland, in relation to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Brown has not previously been linked to James or The Turn of the Screw in any significant way, but the similarities between the texts provide plenty of room for discussion. I use current trends in adaptation theory to make the link from Wieland to The Turn of the Screw, with particular emphasis on issues of intertextuality in adaptation rather than fidelity to an origin text. I argue that adaptation study is a way of looking at texts rather than the examination of a certain kind of text. With this foundation, I assert that The Turn of the Screw functions as an adaptation of Wieland insofar as both explore reason, conflict, and psychological haunting in the context of late eighteenth-century Enlightenment and late nineteenth-century almost-Modernist America. The juxtaposition of these texts allows for a new reading of The Turn of the Screw, one that explores the often discussed ambiguity and instability of the text as a symbolic critique of America and, more specifically, of democracy.

[pt] Esta tese propõe uma interpretação da filosofia de Deleuze a partir de questões aportadas pela Virada Especulativa. Argumenta-se que a filosofia de Deleuze pode ser compreendida enquanto uma metafísica especulativa construída a partir da reversão da crítica de Kant. A importância desse movimento, no mundo atual, seria dada pelas suas consequências práticas em termos ético-político. / [en] This thesis proposes an interpretation of Deleuze s Philosophy through problems imposed by the Speculative Turn. We argue that Deleuze s Philosophy may be understood as a speculative metaphysics constructed through a reversal of Kant s critique. The importance of this movement, contemporaneously, is given by its practical consequences in ethical and political terms.

While weaving maneuvers occur on every type of roadway, most studies have focused on freeway maneuvers. Weaving occurring on non-freeway facilities, such as arterial streets, can cause significant operational problems. Arterial streets weaving typically occur when vehicles coming from a side street at an upstream intersection attempt to enter the main street from one side to reach access points on the opposite site at a downstream intersection by crossing one or more lanes. This dissertation investigates the type of problems occurring on arterial streets due to the weaving movements and recommends a new design to alleviate weaving on arterial streets. Firstly, the dissertation examined the different weaving movements occurring between two close-spaced intersections at two sites in Florida and explained the breakdown conditions caused by the weaving movements at the two sites. Secondly, the dissertation proposed a new design, Right Turn Split (RTS), to alleviate the delay caused by the weaving movements. The new design proposed separating the worst weaving movement entering the arterial from the other movements and providing a separate path for this movement. The new method is easy to implement and does not require much right of way. Thirdly, the dissertation compared two microscopic models, SimTraffic and VISSIM, to choose the most suitable model to be used to study the operational benefits of the RTS design. Based on the results of the comparison, it was decided to use SimTraffic for the analysis. Fourthly, the dissertation proposed a new calibration and validation procedure for microscopic simulation models. The procedure was applied on SimTraffic using the traffic data from the two studied sites. The proposed procedure appeared to be properly calibrating and validating the SimTraffic simulation model. Finally, the calibrated and validated model was used to study the operational benefits of the RTS design. Using a wide range of geometric and volume conditions, 729 before and after pairs were created to compare the delay of similar scenarios before and after applying the RTS design. The results were analyzed graphically and statistically. The findings of the analysis showed that the RTS design provided lower delay on the arterial street than the original conditions.

Intersection related crashes form a significant proportion of the crashes occurring on roadways. Many organizations such as the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) are considering intersection safety improvement as one of their top priority areas. This study contributes to the area of safety of signalized intersections by identifying the traffic and geometric characteristics that affect the different types of crashes. The first phase of this thesis was to classify the crashes occurring at signalized intersections into rear-end, angle, turn and sideswipe crash types based on the traffic and geometric properties of the intersections and the conditions at the time of the crashes. This was achieved by using an innovative approach developed in this thesis "Neural Network Trees". The first neural network model built in the Neural Network tree classified the crashes either into rear end and sideswipe or into angle and turn crashes. The next models further classified the crashes into their individual types. Two different neural network methods (MLP and PNN) were used in classification, and the neural network with a better performance was selected for each model. For these models, the significant variables were identified using the forward sequential selection method. Then a large simulation database was built that contained all possible combinations of intersections subjected to various crash conditions. The collision type of crashes was predicted for this simulation database and the output obtained was plotted along with the input variables to obtain a relationship between the input and output variables. For example, the analysis showed that the number of rear end and sideswipe crashes increase relative to the angle and turn crashes when there is an increase in the major and minor roadways' AADT and speed limits, surface conditions, total left turning lanes, channelized right turning lanes for the major roadway and the protected left turning lanes for the minor roadway, but decrease when the light conditions are dark. The next phase in this study was to predict the frequency of different types of crashes at signalized intersections by using the geometric and traffic characteristics of the intersections. A high accuracy in predicting the crash frequencies was obtained by using another innovative method where the intersections were first classified into two different types named the "safe" and "unsafe" intersections based on the total number of lanes at the intersections and then the frequency of crashes was predicted for each type of intersections separately. This method consisted of identifying the best neural network for each step of the analysis, selecting significant variables, using a different simulation database that contained all possible combinations of intersections and then plotting each input variable with the average output to obtain the pattern in which the frequency of crashes will vary based on the changes in the geometric and traffic characteristics of the intersections. The patterns indicated that an increase in the number of lanes of the major roadway, lanes of the minor roadway and the AADT on the major roadway leads to an increased crashes of all types, whereas an increase in protected left turning lanes on the major road increases the rear end and sideswipe crashes but decreases the angle, turning and overall crash frequencies. The analyses performed in this thesis were possible due to a diligent data collection effort. Traffic and geometric characteristics were obtained from multiple sources for 1562 signalized intersections in Brevard, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Seminole and Orange counties and the city of Orlando in Florida. The crash database for these intersections contained 27,044 crashes. This research sheds a light on the characteristics of different types of crashes. The method used in classifying crashes into their respective collision types provides a deeper insight on the characteristics of each type of crash and can be helpful in mitigating a particular type of crash at an intersection. The second analysis carried out has a three fold advantage. First, it identifies if an intersection can be considered safe for different crash types. Second, it accurately predicts the frequencies of total, rear end, angle, sideswipe and turn crashes. Lastly, it identifies the traffic and geometric characteristics of signalized intersections that affect each of these crash types. Thus the models developed in this thesis can be used to identify the specific problems at an intersection, and identify the factors that should be changed to improve its safety