Selected Topics in Humanities and Social Sciences Vol. 6

T.S. Eliot’s query in The Waste Land, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” may be said to sum up the hermeneutic situation of any language act, whether of sign production or interpretation. Whereas traditional topoi of expressionist aesthetics, such as the artist’s subjectivity, empirical psychology, truthfulness, intentionality, etc. have become irrelevant in the heteroglot discourse of the most famous dirge on the decaying West, Eliot’s awareness of the matrical role of cultural semiosis allows us to place him among the founding fathers of semiotic aesthetics. Rooted in the insights of Charles Sanders Peirce and Martin Heidegger (“Destruktion”, 1920), and enlarged by post-war contributors, such as Roland Barthes (Mythologies, 1957, [1], Umberto Eco (Trattato di semiotica generale, 1975) Michel Foucault (L’archeologie du savoir,1969), Rene Girard (Mensonge romantique et verite Romanesque, 1961), and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (Mille plateaux, 1980), the semiotic approach to art makes interpretation dependent on a mediating third (Peirce: the Interpretant), which is variously related to context, regime of signification, episteme, schemata, triangulation of desire. Our archaeology of T.S. Eliot’s contextual knowledge allows us to complete the poet’s own hypertext, which functions as a key to interpretation, and to fill in the meaning structure of The Waste Land, whose fragmentation and abrupt shifts in space and time make it look like a puzzle. In this essay, we are interested in digging up the innermost circle of reference, which is the historical context of the poet’s conversation with Marie Larisch, a cousin of Bavarian King Ludwig II, in the opening of the poem. In our attempt to retrieve the land under erasure, surfacing through allusions in the fictional “Waste Land”, we are taking a journey through Neuschwanstein and environs.

The study was aimed at finding out trainee-teachers and their lecturers’ perceptions of what happens in the university activity system, synergistic and contradictory factors inherent, and how the factors shaped learning and teaching. The study was guided by socio-cultural theories and used activity theory and reflective practice. Informed by qualitative methodology the study used interview, document analysis and bio-data questionnaire. Data analysis used a priori codes from research questions, activity theory, and interview protocol. In the university activity system trainee teachers, the subjects of interest, were learning theory expressed as teacher knowledge. Trainee teachers were supported by three groups of lecturers whose different specialisms was fodder for a potential synergy of collaboration. Contradictory factors shaped learning e.g.  motives contradicting objects of learning to teach; the teacher education programme was officially concurrent and yet educationally consecutive because of lack of exploration of concurrent learning; the contextual factors existing when study was conducted limited teaching and learning to general pedagogy as opposed to specialist pedagogical content knowledge. Synergistic and contradictory factors tended to attenuate learning because of lack of agentic action on the part of stakeholders - trainee teachers and lecturers. The study recommends finding innovative ways of using scarce resources to produce high quality teachers.

In Zimbabwe, the problem of university graduates failing to find work is a major issue. It's unclear why the quickly increasing informal sector, which has the capacity to absorb university graduates, is failing to capitalise on university graduates' high-level abilities to boost growth and competitiveness. Many university graduates are looking for employment, doing vending or employed in jobs not directly related to degrees offered in universities.   Snowball sampling was utilised in this exploratory case study to find 42 university graduates in Mutare. Unstructured interviews and observations were utilised to collect information on the barriers that keep graduates from becoming entrepreneurs. The study discovered that the participation of unemployed graduates in entrepreneurship was constrained by their degree orientations and experiences, whereas the growth of graduates who were already in entrepreneurship was constrained by various socioeconomic factors.

In the southwestern United States, the current qualitative phenomenological study looked at how veterans and spouses reported their lived experiences of moving from military to civilian life owing to unanticipated medical retirement.  The sample consisted of ten married veteran couples who lived in or around the southwestern United States and had one partner who was wounded, ill, or injured while serving in the US Army's IDES. The primary data collecting source was semi-structured interviews, which were supplemented by the researcher's journal and a demographic questionnaire. When they or their spouses received notice of UMR, 15 out of 20 participants (75%) expressed some form of anxiety about the future, and 16 out of 20 participants (80%) described their experiences of the IDES process using language that indicated feelings of being pushed through a complex process without enough information or consideration of their needs. The data also revealed that 13 of the 20 participants (65%) believed military support was insufficient throughout their transitions, and that 19 of the 20 participants (95%) felt a proactive approach to utilise resources and supports benefited their transitions to civilian life after UMR. The veterans' and their spouses' experiences underlined the need for the Department of Defense to expand present programmes for service members and their families.

Despite the existence of literature investigating the impact of unexpected medical retirement on veterans' transition to civilian life, there was a lack of systematic review of this literature among veterans. The influence of veterans' UMR on their transition to civilian life was investigated in this systematic review of literature. The researcher chose 15 studies for the systematic review based on the implementation of a search strategy created on the basis of six criteria for inclusion in accordance with the research phenomenon. Transition issues (with two sub-themes of female veterans and identity), employment experience, and sources of support emerged from a synthesis of the included research, revealing three primary themes on the influence of veterans' UMR on transition to civilian life: The review's findings, which are based on a synthesis of recent literature, add to the body of knowledge in the subject of veterans' rehabilitation. There were also consequences for practice, such as the necessity to address veteran prejudice during their job search following UMR and female veterans' alienation due to sexual trauma. Future researchers should reduce the scope of systematic reviews on veterans' transition experiences after UMR to allow for meta-analysis, and conduct a systematic review on solely female veterans' transition experiences after UMR to highlight their particular needs even more.

South African state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have been underperforming for the past decade riddled with poor service delivery, employee retrenchments, lack of employee motivation and inability to embrace innovative approaches in management of business. There has been a call from the South African government for SOEs to self-renew and become effective in service delivery. As a result the role of human resource management (HRM) assist organisations to become effective through the use of innovative human resource practices. This paper is an investigation carried out at a selected South African SOE to determine the effectiveness of HRM in creating organisational competitiveness. A qualitative research approach was adopted where interviews were used to gather data from the company’s human resource practitioners and departmental heads. Non-probability sampling was used and 24 participants were purposively selected. The study revealed that HR practitioners do not participate in policy reviews whereas their skills are underutilised, they lack latest technology and it was noted that there is excessive control from high authorities.

Scientific methods have gained a reputation in the past few centuries as the primal candidate to address the complex questions of the natural world. Despite being one of the most inevitable and inexorable processes in human biology, ageing had long escaped the attention of scientists rigorously involved in alleviating human ailments. However, in the past few decades, dedicated efforts of various foundations, research institutions, and industries have mainly contributed to our understanding of ageing. A new field of study called Biogerontology was introduced to deal with the complexity of metabolism and biological mechanisms that drive ageing, filling in the lacuna between Gerontology and Geriatrics. This chapter provides a concise account of various theories of ageing and how their collective effects could lead to the currently established hallmarks of ageing.

This study aims to investigate diversion as a gratification factor influencing mobile phone technology use by public university undergraduate students in Nairobi, Kenya. The objective of the study was to assess the influence of diversion on undergraduate university students’ use of mobile phones. The study employed the uses and gratifications theory and media technological determinism theory. The target population was 246,871 undergraduate university students in public universities in Nairobi, Kenya. The study design used was quantitative design. The research used self-administered questionnaires as data collection tools. The sampling technique that was employed in this study was purposive sampling to get a sample size of 573 undergraduate students. The data was analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics and then processed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 22. Findings revealed that mobile phone technology has become essential in diversion activities among undergraduate university students. The study concluded that the higher the need for diversion, the higher the need for mobile phone technology use among undergraduate university students. The study recommended, first to software developers that they could develop a specific mobile phone software for university students to use for diversion. Since this study focused on undergraduate university students in public universities in Nairobi, Kenya, the researcher recommends that another study could be carried among post graduate students and also among private universities to find out the gratification factors influencing mobile phone technology use.

Ferguson’s detailed biography provides a window into the context of policies and people who led the US into full-blown engagement in Vietnam. He provides evidence from Kissinger‘s early academic writings involving Kantian philosophy and nineteenth century diplomacy, but continuing much later, that his subject was not the one-dimensional realist some have taken him to be. Ferguson emphasizes that Kissinger in fact embraced idealist ethics, thought Prince Metternich to be backward-looking, and had serious reservations about the thrust of Bismarck‘s power politics… Ferguson's analysis of Kissinger's record on Vietnam during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations shows that, while he critiqued the implementation of the general war strategy, he never opposed it. Both Ferguson and Kissinger ignore evidence that Kennedy was shifting his position on Vietnam and that significant intra-Vietnam peace talks were taking place in 1963. Such omissions provide a false perception of historical alternatives... Ferguson's assessment shows that Kissinger's and the United States' expectations for what could be achieved at the negotiation table in 1967-68 were unrealistic–a major critique of Kissinger and Nixon's conduct... Kissinger's justifications for staying in Vietnam were usually geopolitical rather than grounded in a thorough understanding of what was going on the ground, and his view of power relations, at least during the 1950s and 1960s, paid insufficient attention to nonaligned countries' contributions to international stability. Furthermore, Kissinger considered maintaining US credibility to be a nearly independent reason for sustaining the war effort. Credibility arguments, on the other hand, operate best when its proponents are otherwise headed in the right direction. The US security architecture would survive the post-Vietnam conclusion that troop commitments would be severely constrained, just as it had survived concessions to avoid nuclear war over Berlin or Cuba. The Kissinger-Nixon approach to Vietnam was marred by bad judgement rather than an excess of or deficiency of foreign policy realism.

This article is sub-divided to discuss entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial education, the composition of STEM and NON-STEM subjects, STEM education and the intentions of students in these two areas to participate in entrepreneurship. Academic literature on entrepreneurship has grown noticeably in recent years, establishing itself as a substantial and recent subject of study in academia for creating jobs and wealth in order to address the problem of unemployment and poverty in developing countries. Previous studies have indicated that such initiatives are critical to reviving emerging countries' shattered economies. As a result, the curriculum of education in developing nations has been altered to include entrepreneurship education. Students' participation in entrepreneurship based on STEM and non-STEM topics, on the other hand, differs. While most studies have focused on entrepreneurship and the opportunity it avails for students and the society at large, the intention of students to participate in entrepreneurship based on STEM and Non-STEM subjects may not have been adequately addressed in academia in Nigeria. The present study intends to address this flaw in knowledge. The study drew its data from secondary source and engaged content analysis as its methodology. The research looked at entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial intent, STEM and non-STEM courses and education, and students' intentions to participate in them. In its closing section, the study stated that students' intentions to engage in entrepreneurial activities could result in beneficial outcomes in terms of job and wealth creation in a depressed economy like Nigeria's. However, the study is of the view that the engagement of students on entrepreneurship based on STEM and non-STEM could achieve a better result if it could be anchored on students’ potentials.

This chapter offers new evidence and methods for understanding the distributive effect of a universal government policy to eliminate user fees in public universities in Ecuador. The main argument to eliminate user fees in higher education is that it will increase enrollment among the poor. In this regard, eliminating tuition fees is supposed to be a progressive policy. Using several panel data, however, credible evidence exists that eliminating tuition fees has no significant impact on opportunities for tertiary education. In addition, the policy becomes regressive two years after its implementation. Results, however, are sensitive to the welfare indicator used, i.e., either assets index or income poverty. In any case, results show that, at a minimum, the policy had non-progressive effects.

Teachers in various disciplines of education have grown more relevant and competent in their instruction delivery as a result of the emergence of information, communication, and various technology. Many, as opposed to a single writing tool, are freely available on the internet for teachers to use at their convenience time, even if they have no prior understanding of coding or programming. We revealed on a 4-week descriptive survey study involving students from Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education, Michael Otedola College of Primary Education, and Lagos State University in Lagos State, Nigeria, in this study. The primary difficulties inhibiting the successful use of authoring tools in the teaching and learning process were highlighted. We discovered that SES (Socio-Economic Status), limited computer skill, time constraints, data plan costs, unstable power supply, and knowledge of the tools' existence all have a significant impact on their utilisation. Finally, we suggested that instructors benefit from power stability, greater social well-being, and periodic seminars and workshops, among other things, to help them enjoy the modern technological era.

Youth alcohol consumption, its misuse and abuse are among the most prevalent mental health problems among young adults today. An observation of this behaviour was made amongst both in-and-out of the campus undergraduates of Adekunle Ajasin University. This study therefore investigated the contextual factors within which this behaviour which is of utmost concern to the university authority occurs, with the aim of proffering solution to the problem. The participants were 240. Males (150), females (90). Hierarchical regression revealed that Parental alcohol use is a causative factor [\(\beta\)=.20, p < .01], personality also significantly predicted this behaviour Extraversion [\(\beta\)=-.03, p< .01], Conscientiousness. [\(\beta\)=.33, p < .01] and Neuroticism [\(\beta\)= .15, p < .05]. Males were found to be more involved in the act. The fresh students or those in lower levels of study also drink more than those in higher levels of study which indicates conformity and immaturity that characterize this age range and generally, poor social skills. Based on these findings, there’s urgent need for psycho-education for these youths and necessary actions taken by the university authority to curb this behaviour.

The study is to bring to for: (a) The fluency and articulation of speech sounds, (b) To x-ray the different organs of speech and (c) the function of each organ of speech.

Each organ of speech or articulator plays a special and crucial role in the production of speech sounds. These speech sounds ease communication in human beings. The tongue, lips, teeth, lungs, vocal cords, velum, soft and hard palate, larynx, pharynx are important articulators in human communication. This study examined organs of speech or articulators, their functions and pedagogical implications. The different segments of the diagram of the organs of speech have been used to aid the study. The study discovered that the ear functions as an important organ of speech in sound production. The study has also discovered that fluency and articulation are obtained through the study of organs of speech as second language (L2) learners and speakers. The study recommended among many others that teaching of organs of speech at any level of learning be very practical and the use of language laboratory is sina qua non. This is imperative because the study of phonetics and phonology is scientific in nature and has to be proved through listening to native speakers, near – native speakers, role model speakers and transcriptions.