Academic literature on the topic 'HEC Thesis Repository'

<em>The purpose of this descriptive research is to primarily analyze theses/dissertations abstracts in the field of Business Administration and Management Sciences in Pakistan.&nbsp; The researchers employed quantitative content analysis as their research technique.The researchers searched Pakistan&rsquo;s Higher Education Commission&rsquo;s (the HEC) research repository and located 281 theses in the broader field of business education, afterwards they selected some 96 theses through an iterative process of categorizing those 281 theses into various sub-fields within business education.The findings show that PhD research is often tried and tested in terms of paradigm, research approach, research design, data collection methods and data analysis.&nbsp; A typical thesis in Business Administration and Management Sciences is likely to be formulaic with these distinct features: it will be written by a male, in a five chapter format monograph, approximately 250 pages long, adhering to positivism as its philosophy, deductive in its approach, quantitative in its methodology, using an adapted survey instrument to collect data from respondents, while relying on descriptive statistics, correlation and regression as its data analysis techniques to arrive at some mundane findings and recommendations.</em>

Purpose – The paper aims to describe the characteristics and purposes of Pakistan Research Repository (PRR). A quantitative analysis of this repository is carried out by analyzing the content of the repository. A critical analysis of the entire growth strategy, population and web interface is also included in this paper. This study also proposes certain measures to make it more effective and efficient for archiving the research output of a nation. The study was designed to investigate issues relating to PRR and outline steps to develop a strategy to overcome these challenges. Design/methodology/approach – This article focuses on quantitative aspects and critical analysis of PRR. A multi-tier research design was used to meet the objectives of the study. A web search was conducted, and information was drawn from documents available on the Web site of Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan, PRR and directories of open-access repositories; data were complemented by quantitative and critical analysis of the content of the repository. Information was also gathered by literature-based review of project documents which were created for the implementation of this project. Findings – The paper has highlighted how far this repository has succeeded in bringing the research output from universities across Pakistan to the researcher community by analyzing the available content by institution, type, subject and year. This study has provided a valuable insight about the current status of PRR by identifying gaps in the content of the repository. The quantitative analysis of the repository shows that the creation of this repository was a landmark achievement, as it provided the opportunity to researchers, faculty and students for preserving, disseminating and furthering their existing knowledge at a national-level platform. Research limitations/implications – This research article is a case study and focuses on PRR only. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to throw light on other repositories in Pakistan and sharing of resources among institutional repositories in Pakistan. Practical implications – This study will be helpful for the administrative authorities of HEC and university faculty to plan for effective collection of content from the institutions and digitization of this content. The paper includes implications for the development of repositories at an institutional level in Pakistan. Social implications – This paper will help in managing PRR, and it will ultimately lead to enhance and better manage research output in Pakistan. Originality/value – This paper has identified the characteristics and purposes for creating a research repository at the national level and provided a critical view of policies and statistical view of the content of the repository.

The year 2020, which is slowly coming to an end, was special in several respects. First and foremost, it was marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, which severely limited physical contact and, more importantly, completely changed our work and business habits. Literally overnight, we were forced to switch to (almost) entirely digital communications and telecommuting. As it turned out, we were obviously working in the right direction in the past, because this transition did not stop us completely. We also proved our digital competence in the editorial board of Les/Wood and continued our work smoothly, and already in late spring, when the first wave of the epidemic was just ending, published the spring issue, as planned for that time. It was a similar story for this issue. All the editorial meetings, the work on common documents, all the communication with authors and reviewers went online without major issues. Many thanks to all those involved in this process for their willingness to take on new challenges.&#x0D; The year 2020 will also be remembered for its resounding events, which were very important for Slovenian wood science, as it gained recognition for its excellence and general social importance. The Zois Prize, the highest state award of the Republic of Slovenia for the most important scientific research achievements of the year, was at the end of 2020 awarded to Prof. Dr. Katarina Čufar for her achievements in the development of dendrochronology and wood science, which is a great confirmation of her excellence and years of hard work in these fields. At the same time, this was proof that achievements in wood science can compete with the most important achievements in other scientific fields, such as physics and chemistry. Prof. Dr. Katarina Čufar also received the Golden Plaque from the University of Ljubljana for outstanding scientific research, exemplary teaching and achievements in enhancing the university's reputation, a recognition that only confirmed her outstanding abilities. Another important recognition of Slovenian wood science was demonstrated by the appointment of Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Nikolaj Torelli with the title "Professor Emeritus of the University of Ljubljana", which is awarded by to retired professors for their recognizable contributions to the operation, reputation and development of the University of Ljubljana. Of course, we also need to mention the prestigious "Donald Michie - Alan Turing" award received by Prof. Dr. Lidija Zadnik Stirn. As a proof of the excellence of our students, we are especially pleased to point to Eli Keržič,, who received the Jesenko Award for the best Master's student 2019 at the Biotechnical Faculty, which is also an important recognition of the high quality of study programmes related to wood science. All these awards and recognitions are presented in detail in this issue, as they are important evidence of the current academic excellence of Slovenian wood science, and also present a firm basis for its future development.&#x0D; At the Department of Wood Science and Technology, a number of very good, if not exceptional, diplomas were defended in September 2020. However, two graduates – Katarina Remic (Academic Study Programme in Wood Science and Technology) and Toni Šauperl (Professional Study Programme in Wood Engineering) – prepared the main findings of their diploma theses and co-authored them with their mentors in the form of scientific articles to be published in this issue. The articles are both extremely interesting. Among the co-authors of the scientific articles in this issue are some of our PhD students, Nina Škrk, Vanja Turičnik, Rožle Repič, Jaša Saražin and Jure Žigon. We are very happy when young people start writing articles, because it shows, on the one hand, the potential for scientific excellence in research, and it also represents a solid basis for the further development of technical terminology in Slovenian.&#x0D; Additionally, another event is undoubtedly important for the development of the journal Les/Wood. After pioneering the publication of original data and photographs at the Repository of the University of Ljubljana (RUL) in an earlier issue, Sebastian Dahle and co-authors, as well as Nina Škrk and co-authors, also used this practice in their articles in this issue. Thus, this approach seems to have caught on, keeping Les/Wood in step with the leading international journals.I am thus confident that you will find a lot of interesting reading in this issue. You are also welcome to prepare and submit your articles for publication in future issues so that Les/Wood can continue to develop. Thank you in advance.

This study describes the move structure of sub-genre; the discussion part in the doctoral theses of Pakistani research scholars. The study embraces six disciplines of social sciences, i.e. Education, Economics, Geography, Sociology, Statistics and Psychology. Thirty doctoral theses have been retrieved from Higher Education Commission (HEC) Pakistan Research Repository. Total data consist of 18, 80, 566 words approximately. The textual data of the discussion part of doctoral research thesis are analyzed in terms of the analysis of Peacock (2002) model which is the modified version of Dudley Evans (1994) move analysis. It is quite similar to Dudley’s model, but in addition to the 9 moves, move cycle is also proposed by Peacock. Not even a single obligatory move is found in selected theses which reveal that the rhetorical pattern of Pakistani PhD scholars does not match with this model of move structure. Contrary to move structure, move cycles proposed by Peacock (2002) are largely established in those research thesis. This study may be beneficial for PhD supervisors and research scholars to construct the relevant part with proper move structure for effective writing.

On 12 March 2020, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte announced a lockdown of Manila to stop the spread of COVID-19. The cities, provinces, and islands of the Philippines remained under various levels of community quarantine for the remainder of the year. Under the strictest lockdown measures, known as Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ), no one aged below 21 or over 60 years was allowed out, a curfew was implemented between 10pm and 5am, and only one person per household, carrying a quarantine pass, was allowed to go out for essential items (Bainbridge &amp; Vimonsuknopparat; Ratcliffe &amp; Fonbuena). The policing of these measures was strict, with a heavy reliance on police and military to enforce health protocols (Hapal). In early April, Duterte warned that violators of the lockdown who caused trouble could be shot (Reuters). Criticisms concerning the dissemination of information about the pandemic were exacerbated when on 5 May, 2020, Filipinos lost an important source of news and entertainment as the country’s largest media network ABS-CBN was shut down after the government denied the renewal of its broadcast franchise (Gutierrez; “ABS-CBN”; “Independent Broadcaster”). The handling of the pandemic by the Duterte government has been characterised by inaction, scapegoating, and framed as a war on an existential threat (Hapal). This has led to feelings of frustration, anger, and despair that has impacted and been incorporated into the artistic expression of some Filipino creatives (Esguerra, “Reflecting”). As they did in the rest of the world, social media platforms became a vital source of entertainment for many facing these harsh lockdown measures in the Philippines in 2020. Viral forms included the sharing of videos of recipes for whipped Dalgona coffee and ube-pandesal on TikTok, binge-watching KDramas like Crash Landing on You on Netflix, playing Animal Crossing on Nintendo Switch, and watching Thailand’s Boys’ Love genre web series 2Gether: The Series on YouTube. Around the world, many arts and cultural organisations turned to online platforms to continue their events during the COVID-19 pandemic. #RomanceClass, a Filipino community of authors, artists, and actors who consume, produce, and enact mostly self-published English-language romance fiction in the Philippines, also turned to these platforms to hold their community’s live literature events. This article analyses this shift by #RomanceClass. It contends that, due to their nature as an independent, born-digital literary organisation, they were able to adapt swiftly and effectively to online-only events in response to the harshness of the Filipino lockdown, creating new forms of artistic innovation by adopting the aesthetics of Zoom into their creative practice (for example, name tags and gallery camera view). This aesthetic swiftly became familiar to people all over the world in 2020, and adopting digital platforms encodes within it the possibility for a global audience. However, while #RomanceClass are and have been open to a global audience, and their creative innovations during the pandemic have clearly been informed by transcultural online trends, this article argues that their adoption of digital platforms and creative innovations represented a continuation of their existing ethos, producing material explicitly intended for a Filipino audience, and more specifically, their existing community, prioritising community connection over any more expansive marketing efforts (McAlister et al.). The Live Literature of #RomanceClass The term #RomanceClass refers to a biblio-community of authors, readers, artists, and actors, all involved in the production and consumption of English-language romance novels in the Philippines. #RomanceClass began online in 2013 via a free writing class run predominantly on Facebook by author Mina V. Esguerra (for more on this, see McAlister et al.). As the community has developed, in-person events have become a major part of the community’s activities. However, as a born-digital social formation, #RomanceClass has always existed, to some extent, online. Their comfort in digital spaces was key to their ability to pivot swiftly to the circumstances in the Philippines during the lockdowns in 2020. One of the most distinctive practices of #RomanceClass is their live reading events. Prior to 2020, community members would gather in April for April Feels Day, and in October for Feels Fest for events where local actors would read curated passages from community-authored romance novels, and audiences’ verbal and physical responses became part of the performance. The live readings represent a distinctive form of live literature – that is, events where literature is the dominant art form presented or performed (Wiles), a field which encompasses phenomena like storytelling festivals, author readings, and literary festivals (Dane; Harvey; Weber; Wilson). In October 2019, we interviewed several #RomanceClass community members and attended one of these live reading events, Feels Fest, where we observed that the nature of the event very clearly reflected the way the community functions: they are “highly professionalised, but also tightly bound on an affective level, regularly describing [themselves] as a found family” (McAlister et al. 404). Attendance at live readings is capped (50 people, for the event we attended). The events are thus less about audience-building than they are community-sustaining, something which they do by providing community comforts. In particular, this includes kilig, a Filipino term referring to a kind of affective romantic excitement, usually demonstrated by the audience members in reaction to the actors’ readings. While the in-person component is very important to the live reading events, they have always spanned online and offline contexts – the events are usually live-tweeted by participants, and the readings are recorded and posted to YouTube by an official community videographer, with the explicit acknowledgment that if you attended the event, you are more than welcome to relive it as many times as you want. (Readings which contain a high degree of sexual content are not searchable on YouTube so as not to cause any harm to the actors, but the links are made privately available to attendees.) However, the lockdown measures implemented in the Philippines in 2020 meant that only the online context was available to the community – and so, like so many other arts communities around the world, they were forced to adapt. We tend to think of platforms like Zoom as encoded with the potential to allow people into a space who might not have been able to access it before. However, in their transition to an online-only context, #RomanceClass clearly sought to prioritise the community-sustaining practices of their existing events rather than trying in any major way to court new, potentially global, audiences. This prioritisation of community, rather than marketing, provided a space for #RomanceClass authors to engage cathartically with their experiences of lockdown in the Philippines (Esguerra, “Reflecting”). Embracing the Zoom Aesthetic: #RomanceClass in 2020 #RomanceClass’s first online event in 2020 was April Feels Day 2020, which occurred not long after lockdown began in the Philippines. Its production reflects the quick transition to an online-only co-presence space. It featured six books recently published by community authors. For each, the author introduced the book, and then an actor read an excerpt – a different approach to that hitherto taken in live events, where two actors, playing the roles of the romantic protagonists, would perform the readings together. Like the in-person live readings, April Feels Day 2020 was a synchronous event with a digital afterlife. It was streamed via Twitch, and participants could log on to watch and join the real-time conversations occurring in the chat. Those who did not sign up for a Twitch account could still watch the stream and post about the event on Twitter under the hashtag #AprilFeelsDay2020. After the event, videos featuring each book were posted to YouTube, as they had been for previous in-person live reading events, allowing participants to relive the experience if they so desired, and for authors to use as workshopping tools to allow them to hear how their prose and characters’ voices sounded (something which several authors reported doing with recordings of live readings in our interviews with them in 2019). April Feels Day 2020 represented a speedy pivot to working and socialising from home by the #RomanceClass community, something enabled by the existing digital architecture they had built up around their pre-pandemic live reading events, and their willingness to experiment with platforms like Twitch. However, it also represented a learning experience, a place to begin to think about how they might adapt creatively to the circumstances provoked by the global pandemic. They innovated in several ways. For instance, they adopted mukbang – a South Korean internet phenomenon which has become popular worldwide, wherein a host consumes a large amount of food while interacting with their audience in an online audiovisual broadcast – in their Mukbang Nights videos, where a few members of #RomanceClass would eat food and discuss their books (Anjani et al.). Food is a beloved part of both #RomanceClass events and books (“there’s lots of food, always. At some point someone always describes what the characters are eating. No exceptions”, author Carla de Guzman told us when we interviewed her in 2019), and so their adoption of mukbang shows the ways in which their 2020 digital events sought to recreate established forms of communal cohesion in a virtual co-presence space. An even more pointed example of this is their Hello, Ever After web series, which drew on the growing popularity of born-digital web series in Southeast Asia and other virtual performances around the globe. Hello, Ever After was both a natural extension of and significantly differed from #RomanceClass in-person live events. Usually, April Feels Day and October Feels Fest feature actors reading and performing passages from already published community books. By contrast, Hello, Ever After featured original short scripts written by community authors. These scripts took established characters from these authors’ novels and served as epilogues, where viewers could see how these characters and their romances fared during the pandemic. Like in-person live reading events – and unlike the digital April Feels Day 2020 – it featured two actors playing virtually side-by-side, reinforcing that one of the key pleasures derived from the reading events is the kilig produced through the interaction between the actors playing against each other (something we also observed in our 2019 fieldwork: the community has developed hashtags to refer specifically to the live reading performance interactions of some of their actors, such as #gahoates, in reference to actors Gio Gahol and Rachel Coates). The scenes are purposefully written as video chats, which allows not only for the fact that the actors were unable to physically interact with each other because of the lockdowns, but also tapped into the Zoom communication aesthetic that commandeered many people’s personal and professional communications during COVID-19 restrictions. Although the web series used a different video conferencing technology, community member Tania Arpa, who directed the web series episodes, adapted the nameplate feature that displayed the characters’ names to more closely align with the Zoom format, demonstrating #RomanceClass’s close attentiveness to developments in the global media environment. Zoom and other virtual co-presence platforms became essentially universal in 2020. One of their affordances was that people could virtually attend events from anywhere in the world, which encodes in it the possibility of reaching a broader, more global audience base. However, #RomanceClass maintained their high sensitivity to the local Filipino context through Hello, Ever After. By setting episodes during the Philippines’ lockdown, emphasised by the video chat mise en scène, Hello, Ever After captures the nuances of the sociopolitical and sometimes mundane aspects of the local pandemic response. Moreover, the series features characters known to and beloved by the community, as the episodes function as epilogues to #RomanceClass books, taking place in what An Goris calls the “post-HEA” [happily ever after] space. #RomanceClass books are available digitally – and have a readership – outside the Philippines, and so the Hello, Ever After web series is theoretically a text that can be enjoyed by many. However, the community was not necessarily seeking to broaden their audience base through Hello, Ever After; it was community-sustaining, rather than community-expanding. It built on the extant repository of community knowledge and affect by using characters that #RomanceClass members know intimately and have emotional connections to, who are not as familiar and legible to those outside the community, intended for an audience with a level of genre knowledge (McAlister et al.; Fletcher et al.). While the pandemic experience these characters were going through was global, as the almost universal familiarity with the Zoom aesthetic shows, Hello, Ever After was highly attentive to the local context. Almost all the episodes featured “Easter eggs” and dialogues that pointed to local situations that only members of the targeted Filipino audience would understand and be familiar with, echoing the pandemic challenges of the country’s present reality. Episodes featured recurrent themes like dissatisfaction with the government’s slow response and misaligned priorities, anger towards politicians exacerbating the impact of the pandemic with poor health and transportation policies, and recognition of voluntary service and aid rendered by private individuals. For example, the first episode, Make Good Days, an epilogue to Mina V. Esguerra’s novel What Kind of Day, focusses on the challenges “essential worker” hero Ben (played by Raphael Robes) faces as a local politician’s speechwriter, who has been tasked to draft a memorial speech for his boss to deliver in honour of an acquaintance who has succumbed to COVID-19. He has developed a “3:00 habit” of a Zoom call with his partner Naya (Rachel Coates), mirroring the “3:00 habit” or “3:00 Prayer to the Divine Mercy” many Catholic Filipino devotees pray and recite daily at that specific hour, a habit reinforced through schools, churches, and media, where entertainment shows allow time for the prayer to be televised. Ben and Naya’s conversation in this particular 3:00 call dwells on what they think Filipino citizens deserve, especially from local government officials who repeatedly fail them (Baizas; Torres). They also discuss the impact that the pandemic has had on Naya’s work life. She runs a tourism and travel business – which is the way that the two characters met in What Kind of Day – which she has been forced to close because of the pandemic. Naya grieves not just for the dream job she has had to give up, but also sympathises with the enormous number of Filipinos who suddenly became unemployed because of the economy closing down (Tirona). Hello, Ever After draws together the political realities of living in the Philippines during the pandemic with the personal, by showing the effects of these realities on characters like Ben and Naya, who are well-known to the #RomanceClass community. #RomanceClass books encompass a wide variety of protagonists, and so the episodes of Hello, Ever After were able to explore how the lives of health workers, actors, single parents, students, scientists, office workers, development workers, CEOs and more could be impacted by the pandemic and the lockdowns in the Philippines. They also allowed the authors to express some of their personal frustrations with living through quarantine, something they admit fueled some parts of the scripts (“Behind the Scenes: Hello, Ever After”). #RomanceClass novels like What Kind of Day all end happily, with the romantic protagonists together (in contrast to a lot of other Filipino media, which ends unhappily – for more on this, see McAlister et al.). Make Good Days and the other episodes of Hello, Ever After reflect the grim realities of pandemic life in the Philippines; however, they do not undercut this happy ending, and instead seek to reinforce it. Through Hello, Ever After, the community literally seeks to “make good days” for themselves by creating opportunities to access the familiar comfort and warmth of kilig scenes. Kilig refers to a kind of affective romantic emotion that usually has a physical manifestation (Trinidad, “Shipping”; “Kilig”). It does not have an equivalent word or phrase in English, but can be used as a noun to denote a thrilling state of excitement or as an adjective to describe moments or scenes that evoke this feeling. Creating and becoming immersed in kilig is central to #RomanceClass texts and events: authors attempt to produce kilig through their writing, and actors attempt to provoke it during live reading performances (something which, as mentioned above, was probably made more difficult in the one-actor live readings of the fully online Aprils Feels Day 2020, as much of the kilig is generated by the interactions between the actors). Kilig scenes are plentiful in Hello, Ever After. For instance, in Make Good Days, Naya asks Ben to name a thing he hated before the pandemic that he now misses. He replies that he misses being stuck in traffic with her – that he still hates traffic, but he misses spending that time with her. Escapism was a high priority for many people and communities creating art during the 2020 lockdowns. Given this, it is interesting that #RomanceClass chose to create kilig in their web series by leaning into the temporal moment and creating material specifically revolving around the lockdown in the Philippines, showing couples like Ben and Naya supporting each other and sharing their pandemic-caused burdens. Hello, Ever After both reflected the harsh reality in which the community found themselves but also gave them something to cling to in the hardest days of lockdown, showing that kilig could be found even in the toughest of circumstances when both characters and community members found themselves separated. Conclusion As a community which began in a digital space, #RomanceClass was well-positioned to pivot to an online-only environment during the pandemic, even though in-person events had become such a distinctive part of their community outputs. They experimented and innovated significantly in 2020, producing a range of digital outputs, including the Hello, Ever After web series. On the surface, this does not seem especially unusual: many arts organisations innovated digitally during the pandemic. What was particularly notable about #RomanceClass’s digital outputs, however, was that they were not designed to be marketing tools. They were not actively courting a new audience; rather, outputs like Hello, Ever After were designed to be community-sustaining, providing the existing audience comfort, familiarity, and kilig in a situation (local and global) that was not in any way comfortable or familiar. We Will Be Okay is the title of the second Hello, Ever After video, an epilogue to Celestine Trinidad’s Ghost of a Feeling: a neat summary of the message the episodes offered to the #RomanceClass audience through these revisitings of beloved characters and relationships. As we have discussed elsewhere, #RomanceClass is a professionalised community, but their affective ties are very strong (McAlister et al.). Their digital outputs during the pandemic showed this, and demonstrated again the way their community bonds are reinforced through their repeated re-engagement with their texts, just as their pre-pandemic forms of live literature did. There was kilig to be found in revisiting well-known couples, even in depressing circumstances. As the community engage together with these new epilogues and share their affective reactions, their social ties are reinforced – even when they are forced to be separated. References “ABS-CBN: Philippines’ Biggest Broadcaster Forced Off Air.” BBC, 5 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 &lt;http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52548703&gt;. Anjani, Laurensia, et al. “Why Do People Watch Others Eat Food? An Empirical Study on the Motivations and Practices of Mukbang Viewers.” Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. April 2020. DOI: 10.1145/3313831.3376567. Bainbridge, Amy, and Supattra Vimonsuknopparat. “This Is What Life Is Like in the Philippines amid One of the World’s Toughest Coronavirus Lockdowns.” ABC News, 29 Apr. 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 &lt;http://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-29/philippines-social-volcano-threatening-to-erupt-amid-covid-19/12193188&gt;. Baizas, Gaby. “‘Law Is Law Unless Friends Kayo’: Netizens Slam Gov’t Double Standards.” Rappler, 13 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 &lt;http://www.rappler.com/nation/netizens-reaction-law-is-law-double-standards-government-ecq-guidelines&gt;. “Behind the Scenes: Hello, Ever After.” Facilitated by Mina V. Esguerra. RomanceClass, 7 Aug. 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 &lt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-9FuCSX08M&gt;. Dane, Alexandra. “Cultural Capital as Performance: Tote Bags and Contemporary Literary Festivals.” Mémoires du Livre 11.2 (2020). &lt;http://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/memoires/2020-v11-n2-memoires05373/1070270ar.pdf&gt;. Esguerra, Mina V. What Kind of Day. Self-published, 2018. ———. “Reflecting on Hello, Ever After.” Mina V. Esguerra, 23 April 2021. 17 May 2021 &lt;http://minavesguerra.com/news/reflecting-on-hello-ever-after/&gt;. Fletcher, Lisa, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins. “Genre Worlds and Popular Fiction: The Case of Twenty-First Century Australian Romance.” Journal of Popular Culture 51.4 (2018): 997-1015. Goris, An. “Happily Ever After… and After: Serialisation and the Popular Romance Novel.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 12.1 (2013). 22 Mar. 2021 &lt;http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2013/goris.htm&gt;. Gutierrez, Jason. “Philippine Congress Officially Shuts Down Leading Broadcaster.” New York Times, 10 July 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 &lt;http://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/world/asia/philippines-congress-media-duterte-abs-cbn.html&gt;. Hapal, Karl. “The Philippines’ COVID-19 Response: Securitising the Pandemic and Disciplining the Pasaway.” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs (2021). &lt;http://doi.org/10.1177/1868103421994261&gt;. Harvey, Hannah. “On the Edge of the Storytelling World: The Festival Circuit and the Fringe.” Storytelling, Self, Society 4.2 (2008): 134-151. “Independent Broadcaster ABS-CBN Shut Down by Philippines Government in ‘Crushing Blow’ to Press Freedom.” ABC News, 6 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 &lt;http://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-06/philippines-news-outlet-closure-abs-cbn-duterte/12218416&gt;. “Make Good Days.” Dir. Tania Arpa. RomanceClass, 26 June 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 &lt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqpij-S7DU&amp;t=5s&gt;. McAlister, Jodi, Claire Parnell, and Andrea Anne Trinidad. “#RomanceClass: Genre World, Intimate Public, Found Family.” Publishing Research Quarterly 36 (2020): 403-417. Ratcliffe, Rebecca, and Carmela Fonbuena. “Millions in Manila Back in Lockdown as Duterte Loses Control of Coronavirus Spread.” The Guardian, 4 Aug. 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 &lt;http://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/04/millions-in-manila-philippines-back-in-lockdown-as-duterte-loses-control-of-coronavirus-spread&gt;. Reuters. “‘Shoot Them Dead’ – Philippine Leader Says Won’t Tolerate Lockdown Violators.” CNBC, 2 April 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 &lt;https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/02/philippines-duterte-threatens-to-shoot-lockdown-violators.html&gt;. Tirona, Ana Olivia A. “Unemployment Rate Hits Record High in 2020.” Business World, 9 Mar. 2021. 22 Mar. 2021 &lt;http://www.bworldonline.com/unemployment-rate-hits-record-high-in-2020/&gt;. Torres, Thets. “5 Times the Government Disobeyed and Ignored Their Own Laws.” NoliSoli, 13 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 &lt;http://nolisoli.ph/80192/ph-government-disobeyed-and-ignored-their-own-laws-ttorres-20200513/&gt;. Trinidad, Andrea Anne. “‘Kilig to the Bones!’: Kilig as the Backbone of the Filipino Romance Experience.” Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference, 2020. ———. “‘Shipping’ Larry Stylinson: What Makes Pairing Appealing Boys Romantic?” Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference, 2018. Trinidad, Celestine. Ghost of a Feeling. Self-published, 2018. Weber, Millicent. Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. Cham: Palgrave, 2018. “We Will Be Okay.” Dir. Tania Arpa. RomanceClass, 3 July 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 &lt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed2SamGU3Tk&gt;. Wiles, Ellen. “Live Literature and Cultural Value: Explorations in Experiential Literary Ethnography.” PhD thesis. University of Stirling, 2019. Wilson, Michael. Storytelling and Theatre: Contemporary Professional Storytellers and Their Art. Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2005.

This chapter first examines the two statutory constructs occupying an intermediate position between the employment contract and contract for services that have been formulated by the UK Parliament as a repository for the conferral of certain statutory employment rights. These two statutorily recognized personal work contracts—the ‘worker’ contract and the ‘contract personally to do work’—are intermediate contract types, lying somewhere between the contract of employment and the contract for services. The discussion here is situated within the context of the controversy surrounding the growing numbers of atypical working contracts, such as contracts entered into by ‘gig economy’ workers, ‘zero-hours’ workers, casual workers, etc. The chapter then turns to address the legal status of agency workers. It examines whether the Agency Workers Regulations 2010 address the disadvantages experienced by this section of the UK workforce.

The Talmud is the repository of thousands of years of Jewish wisdom. It is a conglomerate of law, legend, and philosophy, a blend of unique logic and shrewd pragmatism, of history and science, of anecdotes and humor. Unfortunately, its sometimes complex subject matter often seems irrelevant in today's world. In this edited volume, sixteen eminent North American and Israeli scholars from several schools of Jewish thought grapple with the text and tradition of Talmud, talking personally about their own reasons for studying it. Each of these scholars and teachers believes that Talmud is indispensible to any serious study of modern Judaism and so each essay challenges the reader to engage in his or her own individual journey of discovery. The diverse feminist, rabbinic, educational, and philosophical approaches in this collection are as varied as the contributors' experiences. Their essays are accessible, personal accounts of their individual discovery of the Talmud, reflecting the vitality and profundity of modern religious thought and experience.

In this history of the black peasants of Amazonia, Oscar de la Torre focuses on the experience of African-descended people navigating the transition from slavery to freedom. He draws on social and environmental history to connect them intimately to the natural landscape and to Indigenous peoples. Relying on this world as a repository for traditions, discourses, and strategies that they retrieved especially in moments of conflict, Afro-Brazilians fought for autonomous communities and developed a vibrant ethnic identity that supported their struggles over labor, land, and citizenship. Prior to abolition, enslaved and escaped blacks found in the tropical forest a source for tools, weapons, and trade--but it was also a cultural storehouse within which they shaped their stories and records of confrontations with slaveowners and state authorities. After abolition, the black peasants' knowledge of local environments continued to be key to their aspirations, allowing them to maintain relationships with powerful patrons and to participate in the protest cycle that led Getúlio Vargas to the presidency of Brazil in 1930. In commonly referring to themselves by such names as "sons of the river," black Amazonians melded their agro-ecological traditions with their emergent identity as political stakeholders.

This book provides scholars with a comprehensive collection of core references extracted from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim literature to a plethora of ancient writings associated with the name of the biblical character Enoch (Gen 5:214). It assembles citations of and references to writings attributed to Enoch in non-canonical Jewish, Christian, and Muslim literary sources (ranging in age from roughly the third century BCE up through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries CE) into one convenient thematically arranged repository, and it classifies, compares, and briefly analyzes these references and citations to develop a clearer picture of the scope and range of what one might term “the Enochic library,” or the entire corpus of works attributed to Enoch and his subsequent cross-cultural avatars. The book consists of two parts. The present volume, Volume 1, is devoted to textual traditions about the narratological career of the character Enoch. It collects materials about the distinctive epithets frequently paired with his name, outlines his cultural achievements, articulates his societal roles, describes his interactions with the celestial world, assembles the varied traditions about his eventual fate, and surveys the various identities he is assigned outside the purely biblical world of discourse within other discursive networks and intellectual circles. It also assembles a range of testimonies which express how writings associated with Enoch were evaluated by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim writers during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Volume 2, currently in preparation, will concentrate upon textual sources which arguably display a knowledge of the peculiar contents, motifs, and themes of extant Enochic literature, including but not limited to 1 Enoch (the Ethiopic Book of Enoch) and 2 Enoch (the Slavonic Book of Enoch).

Descartes’s Fictions traces common movements in early modern philosophy and literary method. This volume reassesses the significance of Descartes’s writing by bringing his philosophical output into contact with the literary treatises, exempla, and debates of his age. Arguing that humanist theorizing about the art of poetry represents a vital intellectual context for Descartes’s work, the volume offers readings of the controversies to which this poetic theory gives rise, with particular reference to the genre of tragicomedy, the question of verisimilitude, and the figures of Guez de Balzac and Pierre Corneille. Drawing on what Descartes says about, and to, his many contemporaries and correspondents embedded in the early modern republic of letters, this volume shows that poetics provides a repository of themes and images to which he returns repeatedly: fortune, method, error, providence, passion, and imagination, amongst others. Like the poets and theorists of the early modern period, Descartes is also drawn to the forms of attention that people may bring to his work. This interest finds expression in the mature Cartesian metaphysics of the Meditations, as well as, later, in the moral philosophy of his correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia or the Passions of the Soul. Some of the tropes of modern secondary criticism—a comparison of Descartes and Corneille, or the portrayal of Descartes as a ‘tragic’ figure—are also re-evaluated. This volume thus bridges the gap between Cartesian criticism and late-humanist literary culture in France.

Abstract The belief that there are intergenerational communal norms, causing the poor to have dysfunctional behavioral traits, has been characterized as the “culture-of-poverty” thesis. In the United States, a repository of these negative stereotypes has been the black community, which has been perceived to lack a strong work ethic and other proper behavioral traits. Courtland Milloy lamented: Not a whole heck of a lot has changed since that 1991 General Social Survey by the National Opinion Research Center, which found that most whites think blacks are lazy, violence-prone, less intelligent and less patriotic. Even sadder, nearly 30 percent of black people felt the same way about themselves.

Design education exists at the cross-disciplinary intersection of sociology, cognitive psychology, technology and material history. In India, as in many other countries which have experienced colonisation, the wave of decolonisation demands questioning the normative ways of knowing, doing and being. The idea of decolonisation is reflected upon as peeling off the layers of dogmas created by other cultures on existing ones. In the wake of decolonisation, there is a rising concern for plural and multicultural societies. The practise of living out day to day varies across the cultures and often ends up alienating or excluding multiplicity of voices. In today's context digital disruption, with added layers of social media, the concept of ‘self’ and the ‘other’, the idea of ‘identity’ has become a complex phenomenon equated with cultural studies. The case study shared through this paper is carried out with students of first year at NID Haryana, in their first year first semester of undergraduate programme, Bachelor in Design. Facilitating a course on Indian Society and Culture for design students, posed a pedagogical challenge to bring together diverse and eclectic approaches while training the students to deepen their understanding of their own subjective positions and exploring cultural narratives in which their design ought to function. The findings and discussion points are an outcome of the assignment attempted by the student during the module inputs ‘Approaches to Indian Culture’, structured using autoethnography research framework. The said assignment was introduced in the context of online education due to Covid -19 where students were encouraged to pay attention to their immediate home environment as a living cultural repository. The day-to-day cultural resources available to us often become invisibilised, in favour of tangible predefined ones like those of museums or tangible objects. The students were encouraged to look at being part of the cultural context, but still retain a distance from which they could question, interrogate and challenge some of the normative assumptions that come as part of belonging to the said cultural context. The paper discusses the need to become aware and situate oneself as a designer in the cultural context that has shaped his/her/their identity and intrinsic motivations. The aspirant designer was subjected to become aware of his/her vulnerable position in the light of his newly acknowledged socio-cultural context through the means of mapping cultural changes in his family over last three generations. This has been instrumental in initiating a journey to engage with cultural change with sensitivity, appreciate and become aware of the role of oneself in making conscious choices. Through this paper, we would like to investigate this process of decolonising the identity of the designer. The paper expands on complexity of aspects mapped by the students, their reflections and probes further on methods, approach that ought to be adopted in the process of decolonising the designer.

Business Process Management (BPM) is a discipline involving any combination of modeling, automation, execution, control, measurement and optimization of business flow. BPM should take into account well-defined input data and a single set of output data. BPM platforms include a portal and a user dashboard, providing concept, simulation, rule definition, process execution, integration, monitoring, and optimization functions. The purpose of this paper is to develop a learning application for the management of banking processes and related databases, which can be used to model the business processes specific to the educational field in finance and banking (e-banking). The application has a general character and can be used to implement any kind of business process in the online learning environment. The model chosen is the relational organizational model, using SQL (Structured Query Language), in which tables have been defined for processes, flows, states, actions, and parameters. Also, two processes are defined within the application, each with a very simple flow, which highlights the concepts of business-case e-learning applied in banking management using BPM tools. As a motivation, the present work was born out of the need to improve the classical way of learning, by calling on the modeling and execution of e-banking specific processes through BPM. If the complexity of a targeted process increases greatly, it is hard to follow and understand in a learning activity. Thus, the process becomes difficult to modify and adapt to the needs of the beneficiary and when the number of processes involved becomes large any change or development of new functionality can take a long time. Thus, a structure that uses generic data types defining process-specific entities is a solution to improve how e-business processes are developed in order to make learning easier. In this respect, all processes modeled in an e-banking business learning platform have common structural components, while being differently parameterized according to each process. The technical analysis period is thus reduced, providing a permanent overview of existing processes. The structure designed accordingly is tested through a web application that connects to a database. The developed application is therefore a generic business process management learning tool, exemplified for e-banking processes, assumed by a case study: providing a bank credit to a client. The aim of the paper is to develop the most efficient software product for e-banking, thus generating a generic platform for assimilation of any type of process flow. The system architecture modularizes the entire project (developed in Visual Studio 2012) in four levels to ensure a clearest logical separation: - Data Access Level (configured using the Entity Framework with integrated Repository pattern) - Data Transfer Level (containing the code for each entity in the database); - Services Level (containing the database query code and maintaining the consistency of all information); - User Interface Level (containing HTML code combined with Razor syntax and deploying controllers via JavaScript functions included in the forms and dictating the entire system logic). In addition, three software development templates have been used to make the work of the developer easier and to make the learning product as efficient as possible. The calls to the database - the weakest link in any application in terms of performance - have been minimized to the highest degree. The BPM-based approach together with the related concepts - the graphic process representation (BPD: Business Process Diagrams), the specific modeling standard (BPMN: Business Process Management Notation) and the BPM rule engine - facilitate a transparent and simple management of all e-business specific processes and, at the same time, their easier learning. The visual process representation method (BPMN) is integrated into the web application through the jQuery technology and the BPM rule engine and the rules itself are included in web application controllers. The business necessity of the present work is customized in the goal of fluidization and dynamism applied in solving any defined process. Thus, in the case study approached, the client applying for a credit goes through the necessary steps in a shorter time, and the cost of analyzing his/her file by the bank is smaller because it automates many portions of the whole process, the involvement of the human factor being importantly reduced. Hence, compared to the conventional version, the corresponding learning process is much simplified and easier to assimilate. Even though a process has already been automated, it often needs to be calibrated and adapted to better manage the actual situations that occur. The developed learning tool can automate large sections of the e-business process using a decision-making module able to determine the next state, based on the user input parameters and the current status of the e-banking process. This module, integrated using the MVC environment, is customized by setting limits and adding new constraints. After the credit application is completed, its initial status is defined by the flow it belongs to. After the application runs through the entire stream and reaches a terminal status, no actions can be executed on it. However, the client is able to apply to another credit that will go through exactly the same flow pattern. The resulting learning application for banking-specific e-business processes is able to manage any type of processes and modify these processes through the developed BPMN interface. The original contributions of the paper are as follows: - Theoretical and practical design of the e-business learning platform database; - Developing the web application in ASP.NET along with the related front-end technologies: HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript; - Modeling and implementing as a case study the process of learning the flows of a banking process that highlights the concepts defined by the BPM methodology. The designed and developed application fulfills its intended purpose: supporting online learning to manage any type of business process with the ability to dynamically modify and adapt these processes through the built-in BPMN interface. The database is well structured, providing measures to support the growth of the platform's complexity, as well as measures to ensure its versatility in using for educational purposes in any e-business processes other than banking.