Chinese Men and "Leftover Women" : How do Chinese Men Position Themselves in Relation to the Concept of Labelling Women as "Leftover"?

In recent years there has been a resurgence of gender inequality in China. Today, women are pressured to get married by the state and their social surroundings, as they told if they remain unmarried and have the "three highs"; high age, education and salary, they will become leftovers on the marriage market. Previous research on the concept of labelling women as "leftover" has 4 shown that labelling women as "leftover" can have several different negative impacts. In this thesis, both the theory of masculine hegemony and the theory of symbolic interaction have been used. The concept creates a hegemonic masculinity as it is a normative practice that promotes the subordination of women. However, as the concept is based on the notion that all Chinese men, or at least those of relevant social standing, would find the "three highs" undesirable, it is relevant to see how Chinese men in fact do position themselves in relation to the hegemonic masculinity on an individual level. In symbolic interaction, the concept of gender is created through social construction when people attach special meanings to the sex of a person, a process which is called "doing gender". Therefore symbolic interaction is used to see what special meaning Chinese men attach to women having the "three highs" and masculine hegemony to put their answers into a larger context. If it could be shown that Chinese men do not comply with the hegemonic masculinity, Chinese women would not have to feel obliged to adjust to the hegemonic masculinity and thereby making it easier for them to pursue higher education, high paying jobs and marrying at a later age. However, as this thesis is a qualitative study, and therefore a limited number of data subjects, the generalizability of the result should not be exaggerated. The interviews that were conducted for this thesis showed that the data subjects were familiar with the concept and that they considered it to be natural for there to be women China labelled as "leftover". Nevertheless, in relation to their own marital choices, the data subjects did not attach the negative meaning as set out by the hegemonic masculinity, a result which to some extent was confirmed by the data subjects’ experiences and other control questions. The result is interesting, and enforces Connell and MesserSchmidt’s theory, that even though a hegemonic masculinity is normative, not everyone has to comply with it. As the cornerstone of the concept is that Chinese men find women with the "three highs" undesirable, the result of the study shows that there is a need for the concept to be further examined and questioned.

The Meanings of New Money: Social Constructions of Value in the Rise of Digital Currencies

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-07

In journalism, we are all men: material voices in the production of gender meanings

This study uses qualitative data to examine how male and female professionals in newsrooms experience and vocalize gender both in their lifeworlds and in media production in general. The research was based on semi-structured interviews with 18 Portuguese journalists. The responses were analysed through phenomenological and feminist lenses and indicated the issues men and women considered salient or negligible within our realms of inquiry. The study used the lived experience of the media professionals to identify two clusters of meaning that help explain how material practices and norms in journalism are lived and understood in the newsroom: gender views in journalism and gender differences in day-to-day professional life. Overall, the findings confirm that organizational factors and the traditional gender system play important roles in journalists’ attitudes and perceptions about the role of gender in their work. The results are significant because they show how gender is simultaneously embodied and denied by both female and male journalists in a process of phenomenological “typification” and adoption of a “natural attitude” towards the gender system that may prevent the disclosure of new possibilities and understandings of the objective social world and of our gender relations.

O "espetáculo do cabra macho" : um estudo sobre os vaqueiros nas vaquejada no Rio Grande do Norte

This body of work discusses the gender meanings associated with cowboys while endorsing contemporary rodeos in Rio Grande do Norte as a recreational sport and a form of ludic expression. As a result, this research has focused on rodeo practices, aiming to understand the different aspects emphasizing masculinity: these associations being constructed through relationships, contexts and the competitiveness between participants. These gender meanings hinge on the desire for a wining performance and on the behaviour exhibited among cowboys outside the competitive ring in specific social settings such as parties and recreational time. The latter were the focus of the ethnographic research; direct observation and semistructured interviews with cowboys in rodeo stadiums were also used. Through qualitative analysis of the collected data, it was revealed that historically and socially different trajectories do not immediately cause a gender crisis in cowboys, but the assignment of new significance by the social acts in each historical context. However, the presence of cowboys leads to other models of masculinity configured by expressions and the insertion of new personas, not coming directly from field activities, but imbued by the symbolic elements of the cowboy persona, constructed throughout history

Conceptualising public-private partnerships: a critical appraisal of approaches to meanings and forms

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to survey various meanings attached to a public-private partnership (PPP) and related aspects in Western literature, and identify commonalities and differences between them. Additionally, the article intends to critically assess conflicting and overlapping views on contractual and institutional PPPs, their forms and models, and draw insights for transitional economies. Design/methodology/approach – The article contrasts and compares views on PPP meanings, forms and models within Western PPP literature, and also draws comparisons with understanding of partnership aspects in the Russian language sources. The paper examines theories underpinning PPPs, builds connections to PPP advantages and drawbacks, and provides critical assessment of net benefits that PPPs may bring along to the society. Findings – The article concludes that future PPP research in transitional countries such as Kazakhstan and Russia, particularly in the area of organisational and power arrangements in partnerships, may delineate new concepts such as government as a guarantor of a PPP project, social significance of a PPP project, and risk management in a country’s contextual environment. Practical implications – In transitional countries, in which PPPs are in their infancy, clarification of theoretical positions, and identification of commonalities and differences between meanings attached to the PPP terminology may enable better decisions by researchers and practitioners in their selection and further development of partnerships and related concepts. Originality/value – Research in the field of PPPs in transitional countries such as Russia and Kazakhstan is in its infancy. The paper intends to contribute to the body of knowledge about PPPs by providing detailed account and categorisation of their principal meanings, forms, models, underpinning theories, and drawing insights for future research in transitional countries.

De volta para os braços da rainha dos céus: migração, memória e festa em Caicó/RN

The present work has as an objective to seize up some particular meanings of the Feast of Sant Ana (The saint which represents the city of Caicó/RN), a central event of the calendar festive-religious of that city, looking for to perceive on how it combines with the symbolic poles sacred: profane through the social bonds that are present there performed and expressed through the social networking and of local belongings. Such bond ties reveal themselves through a very especial manner, through the migration of returning to the feast, when collectively are produced and updated knowledge and codes that reinforce the representation of the local belonging, nominated as being caicoense . We seek on perceiving how the many events of this feast (from a perspective of a religious order as well as laic) acting on a conclusive way to an identity of the re-meaning of that city, especially in its relation with the migrant natives: the sons and daughters that return to the arms of Sant Ana

Material culture in massive multiplayer online role-playing games : the social, cultural and educational meanings of virtual goods in world of warcraft

Michaela Rizzolli

FRAMEWORK SYNTHESIS FOR SYMBOLIC EXECUTION OF EVENT-DRIVEN FRAMEWORKS

Symbolic execution is a powerful program analysis technique, but it is very challenging to apply to programs built using event-driven frameworks, such as Android. The main reason is that the framework code itself is too complex to symbolically execute. The standard solution is to manually create a framework model that is simpler and more amenable to symbolic execution. However, developing and maintaining such a model by hand is difficult and error-prone. We claim that we can leverage program synthesis to introduce a high-degree of automation to the process of framework modeling. To support this thesis, we present three pieces of work. First, we introduced SymDroid, a symbolic executor for Android. While Android apps are written in Java, they are compiled to Dalvik bytecode format. Instead of analyzing an app’s Java source, which may not be available, or decompiling from Dalvik back to Java, which requires significant engineering effort and introduces yet another source of potential bugs in an analysis, SymDroid works directly on Dalvik bytecode. Second, we introduced Pasket, a new system that takes a first step toward automatically generating Java framework models to support symbolic execution. Pasket takes as input the framework API and tutorial programs that exercise the framework. From these artifacts and Pasket's internal knowledge of design patterns, Pasket synthesizes an executable framework model by instantiating design patterns, such that the behavior of a synthesized model on the tutorial programs matches that of the original framework. Lastly, in order to scale program synthesis to framework models, we devised adaptive concretization, a novel program synthesis algorithm that combines the best of the two major synthesis strategies: symbolic search, i.e., using SAT or SMT solvers, and explicit search, e.g., stochastic enumeration of possible solutions. Adaptive concretization parallelizes multiple sub-synthesis problems by partially concretizing highly influential unknowns in the original synthesis problem. Thanks to adaptive concretization, Pasket can generate a large-scale model, e.g., thousands lines of code. In addition, we have used an Android model synthesized by Pasket and found that the model is sufficient to allow SymDroid to execute a range of apps.

Non-Symbolic Fragmentation

This paper reports on the use of non-symbolic fragmentation of data for securing communications. Non-symbolic fragmentation, or NSF, relies on breaking up data into non-symbolic fragments, which are (usually irregularly-sized) chunks whose boundaries do not necessarily coincide with the boundaries of the symbols making up the data. For example, ASCII data is broken up into fragments which may include 8-bit fragments but also include many other sized fragments. Fragments are then separated with a form of path diversity. The secrecy of the transmission relies on the secrecy of one or more of a number of things: the ordering of the fragments, the sizes of the fragments, and the use of path diversity. Once NSF is in place, it can help secure many forms of communication, and is useful for exchanging sensitive information, and for commercial transactions. A sample implementation is described with an evaluation of the technology.

Original sin: divine and symbolic violence in the turn to the Apostle Paul

When we take a step back from the imposing figure of physical violence, it becomes possible to examine other structurally violent forces that constantly shape our cultural and political landscapes. One of the driving interests in the “turn to Paul” in recent continental philosophy stems from wrestling with questions about the real nature of contemporary violence. Paul is positioned as a thinker whose messianic experience began to cut through the violent masquerade of the existing order. The crucifixion and resurrection of the Messiah (a slave and a God co-existing in one body) exposed the empty grounding upon which power resided. The Christ-event signifies a moment of violent interruption in the existing order which Paul enjoins the Gentiles to participate in through a dedication of love for the neighbour. This divine violence aims to reveal and subvert the “powers,” epitomised in the Roman Empire, in order to fulfil the labour of the Messianic now-time which had arrived. The impetus behind this research comes from a typically enigmatic and provocative section of text by the Slovene philosopher, cultural critic, and Christian atheist Slavoj Žižek. He claims that 'the notion of love should be given here all its Paulinian weight: the domain of pure violence… is the domain of love' (2008a, 173). In this move he links Paul’s idea of love to that of Walter Benjamin’s divine violence; the sublime and the cataclysmic come together in this seemingly perverse notion. At stake here is the way in which uncovering violent forces in the “zero-level” of our narrative worldviews aids the diagnosis of contemporary political and ethical issues. It is not enough to imagine Paul’s encounter with the Christ-event as non-violent. This Jewish apocalyptic movement was engaged in a violent struggle within an existing order that God’s wrath will soon dismantle. Paul’s weak violence, inspired by his fidelity to the Christ-event, places all responsibility over creation in the role of the individual within the collective body. The centre piece of this re-imagined construction of the Pauline narrative comes in Romans 13: the violent dedication to love understood in the radical nature of the now-time. 3 This research examines the role that narratives play in the creation and diagnosis of these violent forces. In order to construct a new genealogy of violence in Christianity it is crucial to understand the role of the slave of Christ (the revolutionary messianic subject). This turn in the Symbolic is examined through creating a literary structure in which we can approach a radical Nietzschean shift in Pauline thought. The claim here, a claim which is also central to Paul’s letters, is that when the symbolic violence which manipulates our worldviews is undone by a divine violence, if even for a moment, new possibilities are created in the opening for a transvaluation of values. Through this we uncover the nature of original sin: the consequences of the interconnected reality of our actions. The role of literature is vital in the construction of this narrative; starting with Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, and continuing through works such as Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, this thesis draws upon the power of literature in the shaping of our narrative worlds. Typical of the continental philosophy at the heart of this work, a diverse range of illustrations and inspirations from fiction is pulled into its narrative to reflect the symbolic universe that this work was forged through. What this work attempts to do is give this theory a greater grounding in Paul’s letters by demonstrating this radical kenotic power at the heart of the Christ-event. Romans 13 reveals, in a way that has not yet been picked up by Critchley, Žižek, and others, that Paul opposed the biopolitical power of the Roman Empire through the weak violence of love that is the labour of the slaves of Christ on the “now-time” that had arrived.

“SINGING CHASES AWAY THE BLUES.” KNOWLEDGE AND USE OF THE VOICE AS HEALTH PROMOTION RESOURCES FOR CHORISTERS

Objetivo: Compreender o conhecimento e o uso da voz por mulheres que cantam em coral e as repercussões para a promoção da saúde. Métodos: Realizou-se estudo qualitativo, de dezembro de 2011 a fevereiro de 2012, com 13 mulheres de 23 a 66 anos, membros de um coral de uma universidade, em Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil. Coletaram-se os dados através de entrevista semiestruturada. Aplicou-se a análise temática para organizar os resultados em categorias, analisando-as à luz do interacionismo simbólico. Resultados: Identificaram-se dois núcleos de sentido: conhecimento sobre voz e uso da voz. As coralistas definiram a voz como meio de comunicação, identidade pessoal e forma para expressar emoções. Elas não demonstraram conhecimento consistente sobre os aspectos anatômicos e fisiológicos da voz, mas as definições apresentadas mostram que elas entendem que a voz permeia espaços pessoais, sociais e profissionais. A voz profissional e o envelhecimento destacaram-se no contexto do uso vocal. As participantes reconhecem que o conhecimento e o uso da voz podem ser aprimorados pelas atividades no coral, o que remete à promoção da saúde. Conclusão: As coralistas apresentam conhecimento limitado sobre a saúde vocal, porém, compreendem os efeitos benéficos do coral sobre sua saúde, ampliando a compreensão sobre a voz; isso estimula a adoção de hábitos saudáveis e de medidas preventivas, o que favorece o uso vocal.

Le pilocentrisme de la France d’Ancien Régime : évolution des représentations de la pilosité de François 1er à Louis XVI

Thèse réalisée en cotutelle avec la direction de Jean-Jacques Courtine à l'Université de Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle sous la discipline anthropologie et avec la direction de Dominique Deslandres à l'Université de Montréal sous la discipline histoire

The symbolic, socio-economic and exchange value of Imperial German and National Socialist medals and badges, 1701 to the present

This thesis examines the manufacture, use, exchange (including gift exchange), collecting and commodification of German medals and badges from the early 18th century until the present-day, with particular attention being given to the symbols that were deployed by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) between 1919 and 1945. It does so by focusing in particular on the construction of value through insignia, and how such badges and their symbolic and monetary value changed over time. In order to achieve this, the thesis adopts a chronological structure, which encompasses the creation of Prussia in 1701, the Napoleonic wars and the increased democratisation of military awards such as the Iron Cross during the Great War. The collapse of the Kaiserreich in 1918 was the major factor that led to the creation of the NSDAP under the eventual strangle-hold of Hitler, a fundamentally racist and anti-Semitic movement that continued the German tradition of awarding and wearing badges. The traditional symbols of Imperial Germany, such as the eagle, were then infused with the swastika, an emblem that was meant to signify anti-Semitism, thus creating a hybrid identity. This combination was then replicated en-masse, and eventually eclipsed all the symbols that had possessed symbolic significance in Germany’s past. After Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, millions of medals and badges were produced in an effort to create a racially based “People’s Community”, but the steel and iron that were required for munitions eventually led to substitute materials being utilised and developed in order to manufacture millions of politically oriented badges. The Second World War unleashed Nazi terror across Europe, and the conscripts and volunteers who took part in this fight for living-space were rewarded with medals that were modelled on those that had been instituted during Imperial times. The colonial conquest and occupation of the East by the Wehrmacht, the Order Police and the Waffen-SS surpassed the brutality of former wars that finally culminated in the Holocaust, and some of these horrific crimes and the perpetrators of them were perversely rewarded with medals and badges. Despite Nazism being thoroughly discredited, many of the Allied soldiers who occupied Germany took part in the age-old practice of obtaining trophies of war, which reconfigured the meaning of Nazi badges as souvenirs, and began the process of their increased commodification on an emerging secondary collectors’ market. In order to analyse the dynamics of this market, a “basket” of badges is examined that enables a discussion of the role that aesthetics, scarcity and authenticity have in determining the price of the artefacts. In summary, this thesis demonstrates how the symbolic, socio-economic and exchange value of German military and political medals and badges has changed substantially over time, provides a stimulus for scholars to conduct research in this under-developed area, and encourages collectors to investigate the artefacts that they collect in a more historically contextualised manner.

Towards a Bourdieusian analysis of the disabled body and practice: embodying negative symbolic capitals and the uneasy experience of hysteresis

Within the last few years, disabled people have become the target of government austerity measures through drastic cuts to welfare justified through the portrayal of benefit claimants as inactive, problem citizens who are wilfully unemployed. For all that is wrong with these cuts, they are one of many aspects of exclusion that disabled people face. Attitudes towards disability are deteriorating (Scope, 2011) and disabled people are devalued and negatively positioned in a myriad of ways, meaning that an understanding of the perceptions and positioning of disability and the power of disabling practices is critical. This thesis will examine how Bourdieu’s theoretical repertoire may be applied to the area of Disability Studies in order to discern how society produces oppressive and exclusionary systems of classification which structures the social position and perceptions of disability. The composite nature of disability and multiple forms of exclusion and inequality associated with it benefits from a multipronged approach which acknowledges personal, embodied and psychological aspects of disability alongside socio-political and cultural conceptualisations. Bourdieu’s approach is one in which the micro and macro aspects of social life are brought together through their meso interplay and provides a thorough analysis of the many aspects of disability.

O "espetáculo do cabra macho" : um estudo sobre os vaqueiros nas vaquejada no Rio Grande do Norte

This body of work discusses the gender meanings associated with cowboys while endorsing contemporary rodeos in Rio Grande do Norte as a recreational sport and a form of ludic expression. As a result, this research has focused on rodeo practices, aiming to understand the different aspects emphasizing masculinity: these associations being constructed through relationships, contexts and the competitiveness between participants. These gender meanings hinge on the desire for a wining performance and on the behaviour exhibited among cowboys outside the competitive ring in specific social settings such as parties and recreational time. The latter were the focus of the ethnographic research; direct observation and semistructured interviews with cowboys in rodeo stadiums were also used. Through qualitative analysis of the collected data, it was revealed that historically and socially different trajectories do not immediately cause a gender crisis in cowboys, but the assignment of new significance by the social acts in each historical context. However, the presence of cowboys leads to other models of masculinity configured by expressions and the insertion of new personas, not coming directly from field activities, but imbued by the symbolic elements of the cowboy persona, constructed throughout history