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Coming dissertations at Uppsala university

  • Dissent and Harmonies : On Literature Education, Democracy and Agonism Author: Emma Nilsson Tysklind Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-539569 Publication date: 2024-10-29 12:39

    This thesis is an exploration of the relationship between literature education and democracy. The aim of the thesis is to develop an understanding of literature education as a possible space for democracy. I develop this understanding theoretically by turning to agonistic theory, to theory of performative emotions, to theory of school as free time, and to theory of literary attunement. I also develop this understanding empirically, by turning to two classes in upper secondary school and their L1 Swedish teachers.

    Two collaborative projects were conducted at two different schools, in two classes in their last year of upper secondary school. In the first collaboration, a teacher and her students read and discussed the play Miss Julie by August Strindberg. In the second collaboration, another teacher and his students read and discussed the short story “Farangs” by Rattawut Lapcharoensap. When designing the teaching, the teachers and I intended for the classroom to become an arena of democratic conflict, in which there is space for dissent. In the thesis, I contrast a socialising focus in democratic literature education to a subjectivating focus. Rather than viewing literature education as a space that fosters democratic citizens, I explore the classroom as a space that has the potential to become democratic in itself, at least momentarily.

    The thesis comprises four articles. In the first article (I), didactic conditions for agonistic literature discussions are formulated, in light of the classroom conversation on Miss Julie. The second article (II) centres on political emotions, particularly the performative role of emotion in the discussion on “Farangs”. In the third article (III), the relevance of Mouffean agonistic theory to education is informed by Masschelein and Simons’ theory of school as ‘free time’. School is therefore not viewed as preparation for a pre-set mode of future societal participation, but as time freed for the next generation to form their generation. The fourth and last article (IV) combines the concept of ‘free time’ with Felski’s concept attunement, to suggest a way of understanding the teaching of literature as a place of becoming, individually and collectively, in relation to the literary text. Collective identity formation in relation to the literary text is discussed in terms of democratic moments.

  • Historical Olive Agroecosystems of Sicily : Operationalising Biocultural Heritage for Sustainable Futures Author: Vincenza Ferrara Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-539512 Publication date: 2024-10-29 09:30

    Inspired by a vision of agriculture as an ecological practice (agroecology), this thesis provides insights into theoretical approaches and research methods that, when integrated, allow us to investigate the biocultural heritage of historical agroecosystems, with a special focus on olive (Olea europaea L.) agroecosystems on the island of Sicily. 

    Agroecosystems with deep historical roots offer an incredible research opportunity since they represent ‘long-term experiments in agriculture’ running for millennia, where a wide range of human practices in agriculture is embedded in heterarchical structures of multiple ecological dynamics. By approaching century-old olive trees as living archaeological proxies, their yet undocumented biocultural heritage is documented from three complementary observation points. Following the roots of these trees underground, I trace the memory from plant microfossils (phytoliths) stored in the soil. Walking among them with past and present locals, I tend to cyclical rhythms of entangled plant behaviour and human practices throughout history elucidated by written sources and oral narratives. Observing them from the sky via aerial photographs, the temporal and spatial changes in land use and land organisation are analysed through new geospatial methods. 

    The derived knowledge, when combined, represents a step forward to understand the multi-dimensional causal structures (heterarchies) of historical olive agroecosystems, showing that it is possible to investigate biocultural heritage in a way that knowledge of the past can be operationalised for today´s and future management of these agroecosystems. This can happen only in collaboration with locals who, over the centuries, have worked daily in and with historical agroecosystems, accumulating an alternative, complementary and deep local ecological knowledge on those ecologies. 

    In the final section of the thesis, it is argued that in an agroecology of the long term, biocultural heritage is a bridge between the past and the future of our essential agroecosystems.

  • Computer Vision and Explainability in Human-Human and Human-Robot Interaction Author: Marc Fraile Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-539584 Publication date: 2024-10-29 08:11

    Guided play is a natural part of learning during childhood, and has been widely employed to study aspects of social interaction in child development. Such analysis in infants can help early detection of developmental issues; while in later childhood we can employ similar techniques to enrich our knowledge on child-child interaction and potentially apply it to child-robot interaction. This doctoral thesis contributes to the growing field of automatic social signal analysis by exploring the application of modern end-to-end Deep Learning-based Computer Vision approaches for detection of engagement-related states. It further explores the use of explainable AI as a knowledge distillation tool, targeting both experts (what are the best XAI techniques to help researchers understand the model's decision-making process?) and novices (how can explanation techniques help disclose information to the end-user?). In the four included papers, me and my co-authors contribute a new dataset in child-child interaction controlled for the level of rapport, show that feature-based methods outperform end-to-end training for rapport detection in our dataset, and show that end-to-end training succeeds in a very small infant engagement dataset, even when feature extraction methods fail. We further show that explanation methods can enhance user trust towards a socially assistive robot, and that judging the human-likeness of attention mapping techniques provides a quantifiable comparison technique that favours the same traits that are identified as desirable in the literature: distribution locality and class sensitivity.

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