89 research outputs found
Exploring the potential of games design for policymaking: review and applications
No full textPolicymaking processes for sustainable development are often complex and require stakeholders to think in systems. Since games can be considered as playful systems, this chapter aims at providing a systematised review of games design as a policymaking method and approach to help stakeholders think in complex situations. We first provide a comprehensive literature review in the field, by merging both games design models and psychological factors crucial for policymakers. We utilise this conceptual model to undertake a content analysis of six (n = 6) existing games designed for policymaking and sustainable development. Our findings show that in general, these games provide a common space for diverse players to learn from each other via co-production. We have also found that the games provide an opportunity for players to empathise with different characters and that player choice has a more substantial role in gameplay. The contributions of this chapter are twofold. First, we have conducted a literature review that informed a conceptual framework that combined game design principles with psychological factors in co-production and policymaking. Second, we have applied this model via the analysis of existing games to illustrate specific strategies behind games design. We expect that this chapter can become a starting point for researchers, designers and practitioners interested in utilising games in policymaking for sustainable futures
Data on humanitarian aid to Gaza and military aid to Israel: Justice-Oriented Counter-Stories
No full textDataset on humanitarian aid to Palestine and military aid to Israel, used by the Just Data Research Group at the University of Southampton.
We present a narrative where the net aid to Palestine is weakened by the contributions of the same countries to Israel's military capacity.</span
Grace Aguilar’s historical romances
No full textPhDMy dissertation looks critically at Grace Aguilar’s historical romance novels and short
stories, and investigates English writers’ uses of history in early- to mid-nineteenth century
fiction. Shifting the current critical emphasis on Aguilar’s Jewish texts, I
have analyzed the ways in which Aguilar revises the genres of the national tale, the
gothic romance, and the medieval romance in order to demonstrate her participation
in the construction of nineteenth-century domestic values.
In Chapter One, I introduce to critical debate Aguilar’s juvenilia, relying on
unpublished manuscripts and novels published only in the twentieth century to
establish the origins of Aguilar’s interest in history and historical writing. Locating
Aguilar’s narrative style in the early nineteenth-century national tale, I show that as a
child Aguilar envisioned the English and Scottish nations as a family, making
domesticity both a private and a public—a female and a male—value.
Chapter Two focuses on Aguilar’s use of history to express nineteenth-century
domestic ideals in her version of the gothic romance. Deploying the setting of the
Catholic Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, Aguilar writes gothic tales that unite
Jewish and Protestant gender values. She makes heroic the Jewish female martyr to
suggest not only that nineteenth-century Protestants and Jews share similar domestic
principles, but also that Jewish women could be seen as ideal models for Protestant
women.
Finally, in Chapter Three I explore Aguilar’s participation in the nineteenth-century
medievalist tradition by reflecting on her revision of nineteenth-century literary
idealizations of the Middle Ages. In these short stories, Aguilar fictionalizes the
sixteenth-century European chivalric ethos, looking critically at the role of women in
court society at the end of the Middle Ages. Deploying the tropes prevalent in
popular nineteenth-century anti-medievalist fiction, Aguilar debunks celebrations of
the Middle Ages by showing how chivalry is antagonistic to nineteenth-century
domesticity
Open destinies : modern American women and the short story cycle
No full textThis thesis examines the juncture between the short story cycle form and gender politics. It explores how twentieth-century women from the United States have been using the form to represent and question gender identity. The introduction outlines commentaries on the story cycle and considers definitions of the form. It includes case studies of earlier twentieth-century cycles by American women: cycles such as Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps that have been passed over by critics of the form.
Chapter One presents Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples as a cycle paradigm, examining conventions such as the form's metafictional dimension and its preoccupation with communal identity. Chapter Two argues that Grace Paley's scattered Faith narratives set a standard for more dispersed versions of the form. Chapter Three considers how Joyce Carol Oates uses the sequential cycle to represent gender identity as a social construct. Chapters Four and Five examine the macrocosmic cycles of Gloria Naylor and Louise Erdrich and consider changes in their form and gender politics. The final 'composite' chapters explore postmodern versions of the form such as Susan Minot's Monkeys. The prose works of Sandra Cisneros stretch across the story cycle continuum, whilst Toni Morrison's Paradise is universally regarded as a novel. Readings of contemporary cycles by Melissa Bank, Elissa Schappell and Emily Carter demonstrate that American women are re-invigorating the form to facilitate the plural identity of the postmodern heroine
Jews and gender in British literature 1815-1865.
No full textPhDThis thesis examines the variety of relationships between Jews and gender in early
to mid-nineteenth century British literature, focussing particularly on representations
of and by Jewish women. It reconstructs the social, political and literary context in
which writers produced images and narratives about Jews, and considers to what
extent stereotypes were reproduced, appropriated, or challenged. In particular it
examines the ways in which questions of gender were linked to ideas about religious
or racial difference in the Victorian period.
The study situates literary representations of Jews within the context of
contemporary debates about the participation of the Jews in the life of the modern
state. It also investigates the ways in which these political debates were gendered,
looking in particular at the relationship between the cultural construction of
femininity and English national identity.
It first considers Victorian culture's obsession with Rebecca, the Jewess created in
Walter Scott's influential novel Ivanhoe (1819). It examines Rebecca's refusal to
convert to Christianity in the context of Scott's discussion of racial separatism and
modern national unity.
Evangelical writers like Annie Webb, Amelia Bristow and Mrs Brendlah were
prolific literary producers, and preoccupied with converting Jewish women.
Particularly during the 18'40s and 1850s, evangelical writing provided an important
forum for the construction and consolidation of women's national identity.
Grace Aguilar's writing was an attempt to understand Jewish identity within the
terms of Victorian domestic ideology. In contrast, Celia and Marion Moss, in their
historical romances, offered narratives of female heroism and national liberation,
drawing on the contemporary debate about slavery.
Benjamin Disraeli's construction of a "tough version of Jewish identity was a
response both to the contemporary stereotype of the feminised Jew and to the debate
about Jewish emancipation. It also drew on the virile ideology of the Young England
movement of the 1840s
The Space Between Ecology and the Object
No full textMy practice interrogates the space between an object and its ecology: the relationship between material practice and complex systems, such as living ecosystems, and the environments in which they are situated. My main interest is our current ecological crisis and the precarious relations which now exist between living species and their contexts largely as a result of human interventions in the natural world. This growing awareness of the fragility of the natural world, its biodiversity, life processes, and interactions among organisms, transforms my view of the world and inspires my imagination. My practice relies on a temporal process of making, sustained through multiple stages of hand production. This approach to making allows me to intervene in and potentially rebuild more holistic and regenerative ecological relations. Exploration of materials related to ceramics and textiles are produced in an effort to create an object that mirrors the transformation of an ecosystem, or at the very least demonstrates the object as dependent on the ecology of the studio
A comparative study of form and theology in the works of Flannery O'Connor and Simone Weil
No full textIn this comparative study of the form and theology of Flannery O'Connor and Simone Weil I interrogate how Weil's philosophical writings and her theology illuminate O'Connor's use of both narrative and non-fictional forms, and her Catholicism. The Introduction analyses how Weil's concept of superposed reading provides a new method of approaching both O'Connor, her writings, and O'Connor
studies, and focuses on how such apparently different women interconnect. Chapter One explores how both Weil and O'Connor attempt to write their theologies on the
souls of their readers yet are each subject to constraints imposed by form. Weil's concept of locating equilibrium between incommensurates is discussed, and her
distinctively philosophical approach to fictions and fictionality is used to investigate O'Connor's notion of prophetic fictions and the writer's role. Chapter Two assesses how both writers revivify Christian paradoxes. Weil's monstrous concept of affiiction, and O'Connor's use of the grotesque genre to jolt secular man into an
awareness of the sacred are scrutinised. Chapter Three studies how both writers consider an encounter between God and man is possible through the action of grace. My Conclusion interrogates how Weil's work can deepen our understanding of O'Connor's writings, and examines how successful O'Connor is at realising a truly
Christian literature. I conclude that despite being a writer of powerful fictions, O'Connor can not be totally successful in her mission as writer-prophet because
ultimately fiction escapes orthodoxy
Identisploitation: Playing with the Politics of Representation
No full textIdentisploitation explores charged representations of identity in pop culture through painted paper figures, video art, and garments. The complicated public images of historical figures, including the iconic Black performer, Josephine Baker, are investigated, pulled apart, and recontextualized as exaggerated, lifesize paper dolls. Grotesque embodiments of evangelical, conservative American femininity are satirized through character performance in video. Historical costumes and unattainable beauty standards are stretched and sewn into unwearable garments. Identisploitation is influenced by the transgressive work of Vaginal Davis, Grace Jones, Bobby Conn and other fearless artists who inhabit the outskirts of the mainstream art world. The concepts of disidentification, the oppositional gaze, camp, and satire provide a critical and (pop) cultural framework, primarily through the texts of bell hooks and José Estéban Muñoz. Identisploitation asks these questions: What do pop cultural representations look like recontextualized through a Black feminist lens? How does a garment critique the cultural establishment? This thesis project explores historical representations of race, gender, and sexuality, and their lasting significance into contemporary visual language and pop culture through my particular point of view as a Black femme visual artist.Black identityPop cultureCampPaper dollHistoryJosephine BakerDragVideoHumorCostum
Religious intellectuals : the poetic gravity of Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti
No full textThis thesis examines the writing of Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti in terms of its
expression of religious culture and belief. It is my argument that Brontë and Rossetti
experienced religion as intellectuals, questioning and exploring doctrine and dogma neither
as sentimental lady Christians nor dismissive, secular critics. I contend that by close
reading their poetry, the genre both women privileged as most appropriate for the
consideration of religious matters, the reader may trace the sermons and theological works
they read. Moreover, their writing, I suggest, evinces their intellectual response to
theological, ecclesiological and ecclesiastical developments that took place in the
nineteenth century. I thus label Brontë and Rossetti 'religious intellectuals,' a phrase
suggestive of their intense understanding of, rather than their mild acquaintance with,
religious debate. Many women writing within the nineteenth century found that religion
granted them a field within which to freely read and research, but were denied the
professional title of 'theologian.' Brontë and Rossetti are thus examples of a wider
phenomenon wherein women encountered religion like scholars, one disregarded by current
criticism unable as it is to categorize a female activity simultaneously religious and
intellectual. I use Brontë and Rossetti as examples of what I call the 'religious intellectual'
because they represent different sides of this classification. Where Brontë struggled away
from her Methodist background, serving as a cultural commentator on its enthusiastic
belief-system, Rossetti forged a scholarly identity as a late member of the High Church
Oxford Movement. Both poets, I contend, wrote about religion in order to signal their
intellectual ability. I conclude that Brontë's interest in Methodism and Rossetti's
fascination with Tractarianism reveals the poets to be both independent of family pressures
and false consciousness, and fully engaged with a subject central to their age
- …
