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"The Dancing Women Move Forward":Embodied Agency and Black Feminist Solidarity in Tsitsi Dangarembga's This Mournable Body
Get PDFA thematic analysis of the factors that influence feelings of value:perspectives from employees working in special needs education
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Ritual Interdependencies and Posthuman Intimacy: Consumer Engagements with AI Companions
Get PDFRelational artificial intelligence (AI) systems—such as AI companions, chatbots, and affective interfaces—are increasingly woven into everyday consumer life, yet their symbolic, emotional, and cultural significance remains poorly understood. This thesis investigates how intimacy is cultivated, maintained, and experienced in relationships between consumers and AI companions, situating these emerging practices within Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) and posthumanist perspectives. Drawing on a multi-method qualitative design combining observational netnography, longitudinal engagement with AI platforms, and abductive thematic analysis, the research examines how users construct meaningful bonds with non-sentient agents through ritualised practices.The findings reveal that intimacy with AI companions does not arise from technological sophistication alone but is generated through ritual interdependence—a dynamic system of interconnected symbolic acts that sustain emotional realism across time. Three relational mechanisms underpin this process: mutualistic co-habitation, attunement, and metamorphic bonding. These mechanisms illuminate how users actively curate, maintain, and protect the illusion of relational depth, even as they remain aware of the AI’s ontological limits.The thesis makes three contributions. First, it reconfigures ritual theory for a digital, posthuman era by introducing the concept of ritual interdependence, showing that rituals in AI companionship are recursive, distributed, and co-performed across human–technology assemblages. Second, it advances understandings of posthuman intimacy by demonstrating how emotional connection can emerge without sentience, grounded instead in symbolic labour, algorithmic care, and affective infrastructures that script the conditions of attachment. Third, it extends consumer identity theory by conceptualising relational selfhood as it forms through sustained engagement with AI companions, where identity is negotiated via emotional feedback loops, performative presence, and the continuity offered by AI memory systems.Overall, this thesis provides a culturally grounded account of how consumers create emotionally meaningful relationships with AI companions, offering new theoretical pathways for understanding intimacy, identity, and ritual in an increasingly algorithmic consumer landscape
Framing and Reframing Cyber Security: A view from Colombia
Get PDFAcademic literature on cyber security in Latin America is generally scarce, with most research focusing on the major cyber powers. The few studies that do exist compare regional counterparts or more technologically advanced states, and little attention is paid to how cyber security intersects with historical, political, economic, cultural, and security contexts. By using Colombia as a case study, this research interrogates how a developing and post-conflict country has negotiated its cyber security approaches and priorities. The thesis questions Colombia’s approach to national cyber security “policy framing” since 2011, and in doing so, highlights how contested meanings and practices have been negotiated among different stakeholders. The research involved conducting semi-structured interviews with stakeholders from government, defence, civil society, academia, and the private sector. This was accompanied by an interrogation of primary sources such as policy documents, expert commentary, conference proceedings, and social media posts. Policy framing was found to have played an important role in narrowing the scope of actions outlined in policy documents, enabling and sustaining particular narratives about cyber security in the public debate, and contributing to the way Colombia positioned itself regionally. The research also revealed how cyber security and security policy have been decoupled at the strategic level, challenging existing understandings of how the country’s conflict legacies have permeated security policy. This signals that Colombia is seeking to counter prevailing security dynamics, leading to policymakers being more open to integrating digital rights with cyber policy. Finally, the research also identified four key factors that have driven the post-2011 development of cyber security policy in Colombia: institutional and structural realities, international organisations and Colombia’s positioning on the global stage, the role of civil society, and the role of domestic politics. The thesis concludes by exposing how these rationales shape and frame policy decisions and anticipate factors that are likely to shape cyber security policy in Colombia and analogous mid-income states.<br/
Climate change as fake news.:Positive attribute framing as a tactic against corporate reputation damage from the evaluations of sceptical, right-wing audiences
Get PDFPurposeThe paper aims to examine whether CSR communication about a company’s support for climate change created using different content framing categories (positive vs negative) can lead climate change-sceptical audiences to positively influence their evaluations of the credibility of CSR communication, of a company and its actions, and lead to higher purchase intentions.Design/methodology/approachThe paper used an experimental design. About 266 respondents recruited via the Prolific platform were invited to participate in an online study. A between-subject design was used, and data was analysed using the bootstrapping technique, allowing to identify moderators of the relationship between CSR communication framing and different evaluations of a company.FindingsThe paper provides empirical support for the role of political preferences and climate change beliefs in predicting the preference for positive attribute framing among climate change sceptical audiences. It is argued that climate change sceptics are still in the process of deliberation about whether climate change is occurring.Research limitations/implicationsThe research findings may not be generalizable to countries where support for climate change is low, and a technique like attribute framing may not lead to noticeable differences in message reception.Practical implicationsThe paper underscores the impact of the type of attribute framing in CSR communication on different aspects of company evaluations depending on beliefs in climate change. Commercial communicators should additionally invest in climate change education to address the climate change challenge.Social implicationsAddressing climate change effectively requires support from companies to communicate their CSR efforts purposefully and to address climate change sceptical audiences.Originality/valueThe paper identifies beliefs in climate change as an important moderator of CSR communication attribute framing effectiveness
The critical group of a combinatorial map
Get PDFMotivated by the appearance of embeddings in the theory of chip-firing and the critical group of a graph, we introduce a version of the critical group (or sandpile group) for combinatorial maps, that is, for graphs embedded in orientable surfaces. We provide several definitions of our critical group, by approaching it through analogues of the cycle--cocycle matrix, the Laplacian matrix, and as the group of critical states of a chip-firing game (or sandpile model) on the edges of a map.Our group can be regarded as a perturbation of the classical critical group of its underlying graph by topological information, and it agrees with the classical critical group in the plane case. Its cardinality is equal to the number of spanning quasi-trees in a connected map, just as the cardinality of the classical critical group is equal to the number of spanning trees of a connected graph.Our approach exploits the properties of principally unimodular matrices and the methods of delta-matroid theory
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