Living well to the end:a phenomenological analysis of life in extra care housing

OBJECTIVES: To understand older adults' experiences of moving into extra care housing which offers enrichment activities alongside social and healthcare support. DESIGN: A longitudinal study was conducted which adopted a phenomenological approach to data generation and analysis. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews were conducted in the first 18 months of living in extra care housing. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used because its commitment to idiography enabled an in-depth analysis of the subjective lived experience of moving into extra care housing. Themes generated inductively were examined against an existential-phenomenological theory of well-being. RESULTS: Learning to live in an extra care community showed negotiating new relationships was not straightforward; maintaining friendships outside the community became more difficult as capacity declined. In springboard for opportunity/confinement, living in extra care provided new opportunities for social engagement and a restored sense of self. Over time horizons began to shrink as incapacities grew. Seeking care illustrated reticence to seek care, due to embarrassment and a sense of duty to one's partner. Becoming aged presented an ontological challenge. Nevertheless, some showed a readiness for death, a sense of homecoming. CONCLUSIONS: An authentic later life was possible but residents required emotional and social support to live through the transition and challenges of becoming aged. Enhancement activities boosted residents' quality of life but the range of activities could be extended to cater better for quieter, smaller scale events within the community; volunteer activity facilitators could be used here. Peer mentoring may help build new relationships and opportunities for interactive stimulation. Acknowledging the importance of feeling-empathic imagination-in caregiving may help staff and residents relate better to each other, thus helping individuals to become ontologically secure and live well to the end.

Changing attitudes to the future in Hungary

In the mid-1990s a theoretical definition of future orientation was elaborated by Hungarian futurists Nova´ ky, Hideg and Kappe´ ter to conduct empirical research on the capacity of human foresight under given historical conditions. Future orientation is a way human thinking is manifested, where thoughts are filled with preconceptions, imagination and expectations. Our research has shown that the following component parts characterise future orientation: thinking about the future, applying regular social techniques to limit its uncertainty, actions taken in the interest of the future, and expectations concerning the future. Based on these component parts the future orientation of Hungarian society was studied empirically in 1995 and in 2006. Comparative analysis of the findings of the two surveys is presented below.

La ciudad, el poeta y su familia melancolica (Poesia Chilena de los ultimos 50 anos)

This dissertation explored the relationship among poets, cities, and the construction of nation-ness. It was an interpretive reading of Chilean poetry and Chilean-ness as a way of inventing the nation from its very origins, starting with the colonial epic poem La Araucana and the founding of Santiago, its capital city. In this dissertation, poetry not only dealt with cities or "city poets" but also with the very conception, drafting, and systematic invention of cities as a "dream of order". The construct of a "community" of Chileans has maintained family ties with "Melancholy" in the collective imagination. This structure of melancholy reinforced the idea of "an order and a community" passed along by poets through generations. This dissertation also explored the moment when this melancholic family was fractured, divided, and Santiago was darkened by the events of September 11, 1973 and the rise of dictatorship, brutality, and censorship. ^ The methodology employed to examine different aspects of the construction of the city-nation included theoretical approaches such as Benedict Anderson's idea of nations as "imagined communities," Ángel Rama's analysis of Latin American urban rationality in his book The Lettered City , and the idea of the poet as an urban seer or visionary, the "flâneur" studied by Walter Benjamin in Charles Baudelaire's poetry. A central finding was that this "imagined community" have been severely transformed since 1950. In Chilean poetry, two works served as major referents: Pablo Neruda's Canto General, a totalizing idea of collective identity carved from the stones of the ruins of Machu Picchu, and Nicanor Parra's Poemas y Antipoemas (1954), which begun to illustrate the slow "decomposition" of the "The Lettered City." Among such conflicting images of (post-)modernity, poet Enrique Lihn became the central counter-figure who put an end to a long tradition of producing canonical nation-building cultural artifacts. His book El paseo Ahumada (1983) impacted the new generations of Chilean poets. The conclusion brought together the five-century history and diverse poetic experiences of the traditional Lettered City with the latest currents of marginalized urban poetry (1987-2003), the so-called "barbarians," flâneurs who were (re)inventing Chilean-ness in the globalized, and anti-Utopian city of "Sanhattan." ^

Poetica de la brevedad en Borges

Although he did not write copious novels, endless essays, or long poems, Jorge Luis Borges is considered one of today's best modern writers. His works have never been more than ten pages long. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate that the willing use of concise expression in Borges's writings is inscribed in a poetic worldview of great implications. This view is based on the synthesis of philosophical, literary, and cultural issues that Borges interprets, discusses, refutes, and re-elaborates with a new conjectural approach. ^ This dissertation is based on a methodological review of all his current scholarly work and on a thorough examination of the four volumes of his Complete Works, edited by Emece, in 2002. His pantheistic vision, the epiphanic moments, and his love/hate relationship with language, conform an aesthetic of resounding silence that enlightens the hidden aspects of his brief masterpieces. ^ Even though Borgesian studies flood the library he once imagined, they have been presented in an isolated manner. This dissertation establishes a link among the various aforementioned aspects as studied by Borges scholars, and demonstrates the powerful influence of Borges's illuminating and precise vision. ^ Paradoxically, the poetry of brevity in Borges's works is filled with allusions to the things that Borges silences, because, from a panoramic pantheism, his words almost reach an epiphanic enlightenment that flashes between preterit and future nothingness. ^ By replacing extension with intensity, and mastering the art of omission, Borges's laborious work reaches power and concentration that only the very greatest talents can achieve. His delicate verbal conciseness provides his readers with a virtually infinite freedom of imagination because it exposes them to the chaotic world of mythical probabilities, where an instant encompasses eternity. ^

Through the prisms of gender and power: Agency in international courtship between Colombian women and American men

Since 1999 Colombia has experienced dramatic increases in emigration, particularly the emigration of women towards the U.S. as fiancées of U.S. citizens or residents. Parallel to this trend is the increased number of websites facilitating these Colombian-American matches. This dissertation investigates the agency of Colombian women and American men who pursue romantic courtship through the services of International Marriage Brokers (IMBs) from the “Gendered Geographies of Power” (GGP) framework of analysis. It examines how both groups’ social locations, their positioning in multiple axes of differentiation including gender, nationality and social class, affects how and why they exert their agency across and within different geographic scales. Most importantly, it investigates the role the imagination plays (imagination work) in both men and women’s agency, an aspect of the GGP framework that has been under-researched and theorized to date. The research also finds that this imagination work is promoted and cultivated in deeply gendered ways by IMBs seeking to profit off this transnational courtship. ^ Employing data collected via interviews and content analysis of IMBs’ websites, the dissertation analyzes comparatively the expectations each group (women, men and IMBs) bring to their imagination work and experiences of the courtship marketplace. A central question posed and answered in the dissertation is “What do women and men courting each other in cyberspace seek and do they find it?” The dissertation finds that the men seek “traditional” women and the women seek “liberated” less “macho” men. Ironically, the men find Colombian women who are among the most “liberated” women in their homeland but who downplay this aspect of themselves in order to strategically find a more modern man and migrate abroad where they expect to find greater personal and professional opportunities.^

Blotto in the Lifeboat

Blotto in the Lifeboat is a book of poems that investigates natural processes and idiosyncrasies of human societies. Ranging from the absurd to the scientific in tone, the poems in Blotto in the Lifeboat situate themselves on the blurry-line between fact and imagination, employing a style that Thomas Lux describes as “imaginative realism.” The middle of three sections is comprised solely of the long poem, “A Compendium of the True and Wondrous,” which collages remarkable facts and anecdotes to highlight the strange realities of the world and the rapidity of change. The first and third sections contain shorter, narrative poems in which the surreal or comic is often employed. The language of the poems in BLOTTO IN THE LIFEBOAT reflects a similar desire to affix the fantastic to the familiar. Metaphors in the tradition of Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Simic rely on wild leaps of imagination to illuminate the real world.

Écfrasis y Lecturas Icono-textuales en las "Leyendas" de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

The relationship between literature and the visual arts is ancient and it has been studied from different conceptual frames. Scholars agree that both have a descriptive function and therefore share the common goal of portraying a fictional or nonfictional reality. Based on this correspondence between two different modes of artistic expression, the Roman poet Horace coined the well-known simile ut pictura poesis --as is painting so is in poetry-- which in turn functions as the theoretical underpinning of ekphrasis, a rhetorical device through which one medium of art tries to describe the essence and form of another medium of art, with the purpose of enhancing the original work described. Spanish post-romantic poet and writer Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870) mastered this rhetorical strategy by expertly weaving all of his artistic interests into his prose. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze how Bécquer makes his readers both see and hear through his prose. My semiotic research encompasses the various forms of ekphrasis used by Bécquer in the “Leyendas”. It shows how both images and symbols produce in readers sensory experiences that enhance their role as active participants in the creation of meaning. Thus, Bécquer´s prose is like a painting which not only tells a story, but also reflects reality through the eyes of the reader’s imagination. By using these ekphrastic strategies in his collection of short stories, Bécquer makes words, paintings, and music converge and collide with iconography, visual culture, and intertextuality. These components must be read, seen, heard, and understood to be more than just complementary to the text, but rather crucial elements, equal in importance to verbal expression. This analysis shows how Bécquer’s “Leyendas” not only tackle notions such as fantasy, figuration, and imagination, but also the importance of the reader´s gaze. Bécquer integrates processes such as imaginative action, iconization and visualization, into a semantic web whereby the reader creates his own particular hermeneutic image.

Through the Prisms of Gender and Power: Agency in International Courtship between Colombian Women and American Men

Since 1999 Colombia has experienced dramatic increases in emigration, particularly the emigration of women towards the U.S. as fiancées of U.S. citizens or residents. Parallel to this trend is the increased number of websites facilitating these Colombian-American matches. This dissertation investigates the agency of Colombian women and American men who pursue romantic courtship through the services of International Marriage Brokers (IMBs) from the “Gendered Geographies of Power” (GGP) framework of analysis. It examines how both groups’ social locations, their positioning in multiple axes of differentiation including gender, nationality and social class, affects how and why they exert their agency across and within different geographic scales. Most importantly, it investigates the role the imagination plays (imagination work) in both men and women’s agency, an aspect of the GGP framework that has been under-researched and theorized to date. The research also finds that this imagination work is promoted and cultivated in deeply gendered ways by IMBs seeking to profit off this transnational courtship. Employing data collected via interviews and content analysis of IMBs’ websites, the dissertation analyzes comparatively the expectations each group (women, men and IMBs) bring to their imagination work and experiences of the courtship marketplace. A central question posed and answered in the dissertation is “What do women and men courting each other in cyberspace seek and do they find it?” The dissertation finds that the men seek “traditional” women and the women seek “liberated” less “macho” men. Ironically, the men find Colombian women who are among the most “liberated” women in their homeland but who downplay this aspect of themselves in order to strategically find a more modern man and migrate abroad where they expect to find greater personal and professional opportunities.

Poetica de la brevedad en Borges

Although he did not write copious novels, endless essays, or long poems, Jorge Luis Borges is considered one of today's best modem writers. His works have never been more than ten pages long. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate that the willing use of concise expression in Borges's writings is inscribed in a poetic worldview of great implications. This view is based on the synthesis of philosophical, literary, and cultural issues that Borges interprets, discusses, refutes, and re-elaborates with a new conjectural approach. This dissertation is based on a methodological review of all his current scholarly work and on a thorough examination of the four volumes of his Complete Works, edited by Emece, in 2002. His pantheistic vision, the epiphanic moments, and his love/hate relationship with language, conform an aesthetic of resounding silence that enlightens the hidden aspects of his brief masterpieces. Even though Borgesian studies flood the library he once imagined, they have been presented in an isolated manner. This dissertation establishes a link among the various aforementioned aspects as studied by Borges scholars, and demonstrates the powerful influence of Borges's illuminating and precise vision. Paradoxically, the poetry of brevity in Borges's works is filled with allusions to the things that Borges silences, because, from a panoramic pantheism, his words almost reach an epiphanic enlightenment that flashes between preterit and future nothingness. By replacing extension with intensity, and mastering the art of omission, Borges's laborious work reaches power and concentration that only the very greatest talents can achieve. His delicate verbal conciseness provides his readers with a virtually infinite freedom of imagination because it exposes them to the chaotic world of mythical probabilities, where an instant encompasses etemity.

Nostalgia do espaço e do tempo: uma leitura da obra memorialística de Câmara Cascudo

This dissertation addresses the work of the memoirs of the potiguar writer Luís da Câmara Cascudo (1898 - 1986) from an integrated reading of four works that comprise: O Tempo e Eu (1968), Pequeno Manual do Doente Aprendiz (1969), Na Ronda do Tempo (1971) and Ontem (1972). Produced under the contingency of the modern movement and urban reform, memories Cascudo evoke the old landscapes of old, populated by those who belonged to the old romantic and provincial Natal that no longer exists, but which still survives in the idealized memory author and that is (re)constructed by him from a written permeated with touches of imagination and a sense of nostalgia. Seeking to analyze how is the process of building memoirist of Cascudo, as well as reflect on the role that memory plays in the (re)construction of a time and a lost space, we used the studies of Maurice Halbwachs (2006) and Ecléa Bosi (1994). Within this theoretical framework, we seek, above all, to understand not only how the lived experiences of Cascudo will work in this matter of his memory, but also as this will guide a writing that touches on the history and social frameworks of the past

A educação como instrumento na construção do imaginário republicano: Grupo Escolar Barão de Mipibu (1909-1920)

The purpose of this study is to search the school group Barão de Mipibú/RN, which is located in a city called São José de Mipibú. The aim of this work is to discuss about the use of education as a tool for the formation of the republican imaginary society norte-riograndense. We defined a period from 1909 through 1920. The choice of this work is about how this could be important to the Brazilian History of Education and local, as well as for Cultural History and extends to studies of everyday school life and history of school disciplines. Their achievement was through bibliography search and document analysis. The first was through a review of bibliography on the national and local historiography about the School Groups and productions of the Brazilian Republic. The last one, through the following sources, namely, just the same building of the school group Barão de Mipibú, furniture inventories, class daily, terms of visits of Education Directors and reports of the Directors, book Our History by Rocha Pombo, Educational Legislation, Legislative Congress posts, the decree of creation of School Groups, in particular Barão de Mipibú and the Group Model Augusto Severo, as well as the internal statute and finally, interviews with Alumni of the 50s. The study is inserted in the history of education and as the theoretical to assist in the analysis of sources on the imagination of the study, we looked for support in Jacques Le Goff (1994), Bronislaw Bazcko (1985), Cornelius Castoriadis (1982). At the end of this work it was possible to get the understanding that the Republican government found in the educational Field, one way to spread their ideals and collaboration in building the social Imaginary of the republic, which was constituted in the early twentieth century.

Processos criativos com alunos-atores idosos: caminhos de uma dramaturgia de pertencimento

The present work is to present an experience artistic and pedagogical means of a laboratory-developed with senescent students from their memory files. Unlike other works developed with students of the third age, we make use of the archives of memory, where the drama takes from improvisations developed memories, in other words, the text is built not just recollected by students. Our work, however, is built by a look from the outside. The affective memories narrated by students serve as an engine for text construction and spectacle titled Vamos Falar de Amor. In this experiment the teacher-director also becomes an dramaturgista, and uses her imagination, that also comes filled with her own memories, in order to complete the gaps of the narrative, in a hybrid process in which the collective memory interlace the individual memory, transforming epic into dramatic. Here the route designed to get to the construction of the text and left the text for the second scripture, the spectacle. We want to show that old age is comprised of various hues, and that this phase of human development brings aspects that differ from old to old, and that education and theater can be a resumption of the social role of the elderly in contemporary surroundings. Therefore, the dramaturgy of memory creates the dramaturgy of belonging, facilitating in many aspects the Scenic Play with the elderly ones.

O aprimoramento cognitivo como bem primário em Rawls

The main thesis to be demonstrated in this work is that cognitive enhancement through the use of drugs can be included as a primary good within Rawls' thinking. To develop such notion, the text is structured in two parts. The first part intends to describe the theory of justice as equity in its elements directly related to primary goods. The first information to be verified is the unity of the notion of primary goods in all of Rawls' work. Some elements are modified, for example the distinction of natural and social primary goods. Natural primary goods are intelligence, health, imagination, vigor and chance (luck) and social primary goods are law and liberty, opportunity and power, income and wealth and the social fundaments of self-respect. The perception of some talents such as intelligence has also undergone changes, being altered from "higher intelligence" to "educated intelligence". Such fact highlights education as a primary good that permeates all of Rawls' work in different perspectives. Freedom and self-respect are social-primary goods that will also be deepened. The second part presents the definition of improvement and as to show that the distinction between enhancement and treatment is controversial. The part presents the definition of improvement and as the distinction between enhancement and treatment is controversial. Thus, we have deepened the problems related to practice improvement (enhancement) showing how the concepts of Rawls' primary goods as freedom and self-respect are not in opposition to the practice of improvement, particularly cognitive enhancement. We have shown, instead, that the ban of cognitive improvement could lead to denial of these primary goods. But how could we consider cognitive improvement as a primary social good? What we have done in this thesis is to show how cognitive enhancement is important to ensure that primary products are accessible to citizens, and we rebuilt the process that Rawls uses for choosing his primary goods to test that cognitive enhancement through drugs could perfectly be introduced as such.

O aprimoramento cognitivo como bem primário em Rawls

The main thesis to be demonstrated in this work is that cognitive enhancement through the use of drugs can be included as a primary good within Rawls' thinking. To develop such notion, the text is structured in two parts. The first part intends to describe the theory of justice as equity in its elements directly related to primary goods. The first information to be verified is the unity of the notion of primary goods in all of Rawls' work. Some elements are modified, for example the distinction of natural and social primary goods. Natural primary goods are intelligence, health, imagination, vigor and chance (luck) and social primary goods are law and liberty, opportunity and power, income and wealth and the social fundaments of self-respect. The perception of some talents such as intelligence has also undergone changes, being altered from "higher intelligence" to "educated intelligence". Such fact highlights education as a primary good that permeates all of Rawls' work in different perspectives. Freedom and self-respect are social-primary goods that will also be deepened. The second part presents the definition of improvement and as to show that the distinction between enhancement and treatment is controversial. The part presents the definition of improvement and as the distinction between enhancement and treatment is controversial. Thus, we have deepened the problems related to practice improvement (enhancement) showing how the concepts of Rawls' primary goods as freedom and self-respect are not in opposition to the practice of improvement, particularly cognitive enhancement. We have shown, instead, that the ban of cognitive improvement could lead to denial of these primary goods. But how could we consider cognitive improvement as a primary social good? What we have done in this thesis is to show how cognitive enhancement is important to ensure that primary products are accessible to citizens, and we rebuilt the process that Rawls uses for choosing his primary goods to test that cognitive enhancement through drugs could perfectly be introduced as such.