Sustaining culture through architecture : how can local, vernacular architectural principles be adapted to contemporary design in a village in Guyana

This thesis explores how architecture can adapt local vernacular design principles to contemporary building design in a rural setting. Vernacular buildings in Guyana present a unique and coherent set of design principles developed in response to climatic and cultural conditions. The concept of “habitus” proposed by philosopher Pierre Bourdieu describing the evolving nature of social culture was used to interpret Guyanese local buildings. These principles were then applied to the design of a Women’s Center in the village of Port Mourant on the east coast of Guyana. The design specifically interpreted the “bottom-house” of local Guyanese architecture, an inherently flexible transitional outdoor space beneath raised buildings. The design of the Women’s Center demonstrates how contemporary architectural design can respond to climatic requirements, local preferences and societal needs to support the local culture.

Vernacular perceptions of masculinity and fatherhood among Newfoundland offshore workers and their families

My thesis is an ethnographic study of how offshore workers of Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as their families, express and reflect upon traditional Newfoundland constructs of fatherhood and masculinity through narrative and ritual. With a schedule that often involves a constant shift between home and away, offshore workers in the province take part in high-risk professions in order to provide for their families back home. These professions, and their associated lifestyles, involve the incorporation of routine strategies that allows family culture to maintain itself. At the same time, these professions largely carry on a tradition of hegemonically masculine practices, albeit in a newer context. Drawing on a blend of literary and ethnographic research based on the Avalon Peninsula, I utilize examples of current Newfoundland culture to describe how nostalgic memoirs of outport Newfoundland create models of hegemonically masculine fatherhood in the province. I go on to explain how those models manifest themselves in the experiences of current offshore workers, and how they affect their spouses and children. Furthermore, through examining how young adults with offshore-working parents describe their experiences of their fathers, it is possible to see how the effects of local hegemonic masculinities are manifested through narratives about fathers who worked away from home.

Other Than a Citizen: Vernacular Poetics in Postwar America

Few symbols of 1950s-1960s America remain as central to our contemporary conception of Cold War culture as the iconic ranch-style suburban home. While the house took center stage in the Nixon/Khrushchev kitchen debates as a symbol of modern efficiency and capitalist values, its popularity depended largely upon its obvious appropriation of vernacular architecture from the 19th century, those California haciendas and Texas dogtrots that dotted the American west. Contractors like William Levitt modernized the historical common houses, hermetically sealing their porous construction, all while using the ranch-style roots of the dwelling to galvanize a myth of an indigenous American culture. At a moment of intense occupational bureaucracy, political uncertainty and atomized social life, the rancher gave a self-identifying white consumer base reason to believe they could master their own plot in the expansive frontier. Only one example of America’s mid-century love affair with commodified vernacular forms, the ranch-style home represents a broad effort on the part of corporate and governmental interest groups to transform the vernacular into a style that expresses a distinctly homogenous vision of American culture. “Other than a Citizen” begins with an anatomy of that transformation, and then turns to the work of four poets who sought to reclaim the vernacular from that process of standardization and use it to countermand the containment-era strategies of Cold War America.

In four chapters, I trace references to common speech and verbal expressivity in the poetry and poetic theory of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, against the historical backdrop of the Free-Speech Movement and the rise of mass-culture. When poets frame nonliterary speech within the literary page, they encounter the inability of writing to capture the vital ephemerality of verbal expression. Rather than treat this limitation as an impediment, the writers in my study use the poem to dramatize the fugitivity of speech, emphasizing it as a disruptive counterpoint to the technologies of capture. Where critics such as Houston Baker interpret the vernacular strictly in terms of resistance, I take a cue from the poets and argue that the vernacular, rooted etymologically at the intersection of domestic security and enslaved margin, represents a gestalt form, capable at once of establishing centralized power and sparking minor protest. My argument also expands upon Michael North’s exploration of the influence of minstrelsy and regionalism on the development of modernist literary technique in The Dialect of Modernism. As he focuses on writers from the early 20th century, I account for the next generation, whose America was not a culturally inferior collection of immigrants but an imperial power, replete with economic, political and artistic dominance. Instead of settling for an essentially American idiom, the poets in my study saw in the vernacular not phonetic misspellings, slang terminology and fragmented syntax, but the potential to provoke and thereby frame a more ethical mode of social life, straining against the regimentation of citizenship.

My attention to the vernacular argues for an alignment among writers who have been segregated by the assumption that race and aesthetics are mutually exclusive categories. In reading these writers alongside one another, “Other than a Citizen” shows how the avant-garde concepts of projective poetics and composition by field develop out of an interest in black expressivity. Conversely, I trace black radicalism and its emphasis on sociality back to the communalism practiced at the experimental arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Olson and Duncan taught. In pressing for this connection, my work reveals the racial politics embedded within the speech-based aesthetics of the postwar era, while foregrounding the aesthetic dimension of militant protest.

Not unlike today, the popular rhetoric of the Cold War insists that to be a citizen involves defending one’s status as a rightful member of an exclusionary nation. To be other than a citizen, as the poets in my study make clear, begins with eschewing the false certainty that accompanies categorical nominalization. In promoting a model of mutually dependent participation, these poets lay the groundwork for an alternative model of civic belonging, where volition and reciprocity replace compliance and self-sufficiency. In reading their lines, we become all the more aware of the cracks that run the length of our load-bearing walls.

Towards an Archaeology of Media Ecologies: The Case of Italian Free Radios

This article looks at the contemporary reinvention of the term Media Ecologies in the work of Matthew Fuller, arguing that its provenance is less form Postman's Media Ecology Association andmore form the work of Felix Guattari. It then presents an account of free radios in Italy and France in the 1970s and contemporary pirate radio as exemplary cases of media ecologies in Fuller's sense of the term

Primitivism, Regionalism, and the Vernacular in Le Corbusier's middle years, 1929-1945

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Integrated Housing Approach for Riyadh’s hot arid Climate: solutions from the desert vernacular

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Power control in cognitive radios, Internet-of Things (IoT) for factories and industrial automation

Cognitive radio (CR) is fast emerging as a promising technology that can meet the machine-to machine (M2M) communication requirements for spectrum utilization and power control for large number of machines/devices expected to be connected to the Internet-of Things (IoT). Power control in CR as a secondary user can been modelled as a non-cooperative game cost function to quantify and reduce its effects of interference while occupying the same spectrum as primary user without adversely affecting the required quality of service (QoS) in the network. In this paper a power loss exponent that factors in diverse operating environments for IoT is employed in the non-cooperative game cost function to quantify the required power of transmission in the network. The approach would enable various CRs to transmit with lesser power thereby saving battery consumption or increasing the number of secondary users thereby optimizing the network resources efficiently.

Implementación de la señalización DTMF y respuesta interactiva de voz usando radios E&M

El presente trabajo tiene como finalidad el estudio de alternativas de radios que soporten tanto la señalización E&M como DTMF y a partir de ello, lograr que interactúen con servicios de respuesta interactiva de voz. Con radios VHF se puede expandir la cobertura en servicios de comunicación telefónica. Se diseñó un circuito para facilitar la integración de tarjetas E&M y el radio Motorola Pro 3100, utilizándose como un receptor para conectar llamadas de otros radios hacia una planta telefónica conectada a un Router cisco que es una CME o la planta telefónica conectada a una computadora con Elastix. Así un radio que contenga teclado DTMF, puede hacer llamadas hacia las plantas telefónicas como si se tratara de un teléfono y también un teléfono hacer llamadas a los radios, mediante una IVR hacer consultas en una base de datos

¿Hacia dónde van los radios sociales?

Hasta la aparición de Internet, la radio ha sido, y de hecho lo sigue siendo en las regiones más desfavorecidas por la brecha digital, el medio que más han utilizado los movimiento sociales. El artículo hace un breve repaso a la aparición de las radios sociales diferenciando el contexto americano del europeo ya que éstos marcaron lo que han sido las radios posteriormente. En un segundo epígrafe se profundiza en la experiencia de las radios sociales en el Estado español y su situación actual. Por último, se explicitan los cuatro retos que tienen por delante la radio social para ser incidente: la movilización, la construcción de la comunidad global, el desarrollo de la ciudadanía y la apropiación de la tecnología.

Assessment and Protection of maritime-vernacular architectural Heritage on the Mediterranean Coasts. Documentation and Preservation Strategies for the Dry Docks on the Island of Formentera.

The importance of vernacular architecture as an integral part of our cultural heritage is often undervalued, and the management of rural constructions of heritage value often requires the application of more flexible and adjusted preservation principles compared to monumental assets. For vernacular architecture, the preservation and consolidation concern not only their physical substance but also their intangible values and purpose in society. More than other heritage values, the vernacular raises the question of prospective functions it can fulfill in contemporary societies without undermining its legacy. This work analyzes the topic by studying the case study of the dry docks on the Balearic Island of Formentera, including abundant documentation of traditional construction techniques and materials realized through a field study, followed by the assessment of threats to and opportunities for vernacular architecture on Formentera, closing with suggestions for the maintenance and potential functions of the dry docks. For this, a comparative case study was introduced: the capanni da pesca at the Adriatic coast of Italy. The suggestions focus on the importance of maintenance for rural heritage, expressed through the creation of a guide for owners of protected dry docks highlighting good and bad practice examples and recurrent works of care. Furthermore, the thesis seeks to raise awareness for the significance of landscape and social factors in the discourse about vernacular heritage sites. Ultimately, different outlines of tourism development are proposed. The idea is to explore rural and sustainable tourism as a tool for territory development and enhancement of the cultural heritage value by helping to prevent the destination's decline through careful evaluation of its limits of acceptable change and identifying beneficial, sustainable scenarios for the future of the heritage asset and the respective community.

As relativas que são fáceis na aquisição do português brasileiro

The acquisition of Portuguese by two Brazilian children (aged 2;0 -5;0) is discussed in an attempt to describe and explain the first relative clauses produced in naturalistic, observational studies, according to the framework of generative syntax theory. The results show that at around 3;0: a) the child starts to deal with relative clauses as modifiers of N; b) cleft sentences appear before relative clauses, and c) the first relatives confirm the prevalence of the vernacular strategy of relativization in Brazilian Portuguese identified by other studies based on adult data.

O sincretismo de culturas sob a ótica da arquitetura vernácula do imigrante japonês na cidade de Registro, São Paulo

O presente artigo aborda os métodos construtivos empregados pelos imigrantes japoneses que vieram, em 1918, para a cidade de Registro, na região do Vale do Ribeira do Iguape, no estado de São Paulo. A vinda dessa nova frente de imigração foi incentivada pelo Governo do Estado, com o propósito de promover o processo de colonização, bem como de estimular o desenvolvimento econômico do Vale do Ribeira do Iguape por meio da expansão da cultura do café para a região. As características dessa frente de imigração são muito diferenciadas em relação às demais, tendo em vista que os que dela faziam parte chegaram ao Brasil como proprietários de terras e com apoio financeiro e logístico oferecido por uma empresa particular japonesa, responsável por gerenciar o empreendimento. Esses imigrantes, portanto, contaram com auxílio de uma complexa infra-estrutura, cujo objetivo era viabilizar a sua missão de desenvolvimento da região. Mesmo tendo essa particularidade lhes proporcionado a liberdade de recriar sua cultura em solo brasileiro, a realidade do novo habitat forçou-os a reinterpretar seus hábitos culturais ante as novas circunstâncias físicas, econômicas e sociais encontradas. A fim de entender esse processo de adaptação, foi realizado um estudo dos métodos construtivos empregados em suas edificações, baseado nos conhecimentos desses imigrantes sobre sua arquitetura tradicional. Essa análise permitiu examinar o longo processo de sincretismo entre a cultura oriental e o conhecimento construtivo vernáculo dos habitantes do Vale do Ribeira do Iguape.

(FAB11_2_003) Authentic Japanese architecture after Bruno Taut: the problem of eclecticism

This paper will examine attitudes to eclectic stylistic borrowing in Japan in the twentieth century in light of the concept of authenticity. I am particularly interested in how an earlier claim correlating European modernist and traditional Japanese architecture continues to colour conceptions about what is an 'authentic' response for Japanese architects to make to contemporary conditions. Non-Western and vernacular architectures generally have been the repository for touristic desires for regional authenticity and difference. Yet Japan's unique role in the development of modernist architecture has given a peculiar intensity to the demand for its architecture to resist a perceived postmodern decadence.

Discovering the Law Again: John Grisham, Ed Stevens and the Postmaterial Lawyer

This paper uses three films adapted from the novels of John Grisham, The Firm, The Rainmaker and A Time To Kill, as well as associated television series like Ed to map a vernacular theory of what I have termed the 'postmaterial' lawyer. Grisham's work has been the focus of much critique by legal scholars who suggests he hates lawyers, is critical of the concept of law, and provides 'outlandishly' happy endings. I will challenge these critiques and, in tracing the history of legal thrillers and trial movies, suggest that Grisham and the related texts' explorations of how a just practitioner can operate in an unjust system constitute a powerful interrogation of what law can be.