title: British Women Travellers And The Harems: Liberties, Enslavement and Domesticity

authors: Ammar, Hiba

abstract: This thesis examines the complex perspective of a woman traveller. Wortley Montagu, Martineau, Burton and their contemporaries, represented the harem through various lenses. The Oriental harem has fascinated Western civilization since time immemorial. This sacred place, reserved for the women and children of the Muslim household, had long been a terra incognita to British outsiders, until the publication of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s (1689-1762) Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), which gave impetus to a whole tradition of travel writings, particularly harem accounts, penned by British women. The aristocratic Wortley Montagu recasts Turkish women from their previous Western image as over-sexed and soulless beings to idealized domestic goddesses, living in an ideal world, the harem. Harriet Martineau(1802-1876) , travelled to the Ottoman Empire more than a century after Wortley Montagu’s residency in Oriental lands. Martineau was a rare talent. She was an accomplished journalist and a pioneering figure in Western sociology. She spent her life validating a place for herself and her sex in a patriarchal and male-dominated society; she earned her own keeping, and lived independently. Martineau related her eastern experience in Eastern Life: Past and Present (1848), in which the Oriental harem figures very little. Martineau pitied the women she encountered in Egypt, and depicted them as slaves of a corrupt system, the harem and the practice of polygamy. My thesis ends with the travel writings of Lady Isabel Burton (1831-1896) whose view of the Oriental women she met in Syria is the most tempered. Her Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Lands: from my Private Journal (1875) displays a tolerance of other cultures and a move toward moral and cultural relativisms.
Each of the women considered in this thesis formed her own harem, projecting on to this distant Oriental structure her fears, hopes and desires. Wortley Montagu’s harem was a utopia for women only. The Victorian Martineau opined that the Oriental harem was a hell on earth. Lady Isabel Burton constructed a happy medium between the two. Although at times ambivalent towards the Syrian women she encountered, she partook in their customs and manners, particularly public bathing, smoking and other Eastern indulgences. Her attitude illustrates that the British home and the Oriental harem are not so dissimilar, bridging the gap between us and them.

text: British Women Travellers And The Harems: Liberties, Enslavement and Domesticity This thesis examines the complex perspective of a woman traveller. Wortley Montagu, Martineau, Burton and their contemporaries, represented the harem through various lenses. The Oriental harem has fascinated Western civilization since time immemorial. This sacred place, reserved for the women and children of the Muslim household, had long been a terra incognita to British outsiders, until the publication of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s (1689-1762) Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), which gave impetus to a whole tradition of travel writings, particularly harem accounts, penned by British women. The aristocratic Wortley Montagu recasts Turkish women from their previous Western image as over-sexed and soulless beings to idealized domestic goddesses, living in an ideal world, the harem. Harriet Martineau(1802-1876) , travelled to the Ottoman Empire more than a century after Wortley Montagu’s residency in Oriental lands. Martineau was a rare talent. She was an accomplished journalist and a pioneering figure in Western sociology. She spent her life validating a place for herself and her sex in a patriarchal and male-dominated society; she earned her own keeping, and lived independently. Martineau related her eastern experience in Eastern Life: Past and Present (1848), in which the Oriental harem figures very little. Martineau pitied the women she encountered in Egypt, and depicted them as slaves of a corrupt system, the harem and the practice of polygamy. My thesis ends with the travel writings of Lady Isabel Burton (1831-1896) whose view of the Oriental women she met in Syria is the most tempered. Her Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Lands: from my Private Journal (1875) displays a tolerance of other cultures and a move toward moral and cultural relativisms.
Each of the women considered in this thesis formed her own harem, projecting on to this distant Oriental structure her fears, hopes and desires. Wortley Montagu’s harem was a utopia for women only. The Victorian Martineau opined that the Oriental harem was a hell on earth. Lady Isabel Burton constructed a happy medium between the two. Although at times ambivalent towards the Syrian women she encountered, she partook in their customs and manners, particularly public bathing, smoking and other Eastern indulgences. Her attitude illustrates that the British home and the Oriental harem are not so dissimilar, bridging the gap between us and them.

year: 2013

title: Design approaches to supercapacitor based surge resistant UPS techniques

authors: Kularatna, Nihal

subjects: Inverters

abstract: Time constants of supercapacitors are in the range of 100mS to tens of seconds compared to the time durations of power line transients, which are usually within a few hundred microseconds. Therefore supercapacitors should withstand short duration surges with energy values specified in IEEE C62-41 series and IEC 61400-4-5 and similar standards. After experimentally confirming this useful property of supercapacitors, new topologies for supercapacitor based surge-resistant uninterruptible power supplies were developed. Paper summarizes the approach to developing suitable topologies for surge-resistant UPS systems based on supercapacitor energy circulation techniques, despite the lower continuous DC voltage ratings of commercial supercapacitors.

text: Design approaches to supercapacitor based surge resistant UPS techniques Time constants of supercapacitors are in the range of 100mS to tens of seconds compared to the time durations of power line transients, which are usually within a few hundred microseconds. Therefore supercapacitors should withstand short duration surges with energy values specified in IEEE C62-41 series and IEC 61400-4-5 and similar standards. After experimentally confirming this useful property of supercapacitors, new topologies for supercapacitor based surge-resistant uninterruptible power supplies were developed. Paper summarizes the approach to developing suitable topologies for surge-resistant UPS systems based on supercapacitor energy circulation techniques, despite the lower continuous DC voltage ratings of commercial supercapacitors.

year: 2011

title: Māori and pacific infant and toddler cultural pedagogy: Reclaiming a cultural lens

authors: Glasgow, Ali

abstract: An Indigenous cultural renaissance emerged in the 1980’s in Aotearoa New Zealand. Communities established early childhood programmes that reflected native spirituality, values, and Indigenous knowledge, with instruction in local, Indigenous languages (Hunkin-Tuiletufuga, 2001). Indigenous communities sought ownership over the education of their children, within a culturally driven framework that focussed on retention of knowledge, language, and cultural identity.
These strong early stages have lost traction, with increasing numbers of Māori and Pacific community services unable to meet the rigorous regulatory criteria, assurance auditing processes, funding restraints, and other considerations that have impacted the numbers of families using these services. Nowadays, a mere percentage of those once in operation remain, with the majority of Māori and Pacific children and their families enrolling in mainstream early childhood education services (Ministry of Education, 2013).
Central to the educational success for Māori and Pacific children is an understanding that they are culturally located and the acknowledgement that effective education must encompass their culture. A cultural discourse gaining prominence reveals the need for culturally sound pedagogical practice for Māori and Pacific communities (Rameka & Glasgow, 2016; Rau & Ritchie, 2011). This trend is gaining impetus in the wider Pacific region (Glasgow, 2012), thus driving a movement for reclaiming and reframing education for Pacific peoples (Sanga, 2012).

text: Māori and pacific infant and toddler cultural pedagogy: Reclaiming a cultural lens An Indigenous cultural renaissance emerged in the 1980’s in Aotearoa New Zealand. Communities established early childhood programmes that reflected native spirituality, values, and Indigenous knowledge, with instruction in local, Indigenous languages (Hunkin-Tuiletufuga, 2001). Indigenous communities sought ownership over the education of their children, within a culturally driven framework that focussed on retention of knowledge, language, and cultural identity.
These strong early stages have lost traction, with increasing numbers of Māori and Pacific community services unable to meet the rigorous regulatory criteria, assurance auditing processes, funding restraints, and other considerations that have impacted the numbers of families using these services. Nowadays, a mere percentage of those once in operation remain, with the majority of Māori and Pacific children and their families enrolling in mainstream early childhood education services (Ministry of Education, 2013).
Central to the educational success for Māori and Pacific children is an understanding that they are culturally located and the acknowledgement that effective education must encompass their culture. A cultural discourse gaining prominence reveals the need for culturally sound pedagogical practice for Māori and Pacific communities (Rameka & Glasgow, 2016; Rau & Ritchie, 2011). This trend is gaining impetus in the wider Pacific region (Glasgow, 2012), thus driving a movement for reclaiming and reframing education for Pacific peoples (Sanga, 2012).

year: 2017