This thesis examines the Women in Peacebuilding Program (WIPNET) of the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP) and the Raging Grannies, two current women’s movements at the frontlines of organizing for peace in their respective contexts. Based on fieldwork in West Africa and North America, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and content analysis of relevant documents, the thesis locates these groups within the wider politics of both the feminist movement and the peace movement. The thesis draws on three bodies of literature: feminist international relations, especially literature on women and war, feminist analyses of security and the relationship between militarism and patriarchy; peace studies, especially the concepts of the “positive” and “negative” peace, conflict transformation, and nonviolence; and social movement theory, especially in reference to collective identity and tactical repertoires of protest. The thesis investigates the relationship between “women”, “motherhood”, “feminism” and peace, concluding that, while women peace activists may organize around gendered identities, the relationship between women and peace is more complex than an essentialist position would propose. A detailed analysis of the tactical repertoires used by women peace activists examines activists’ gendered use of bodies and the manipulation and exploitation of gender and age stereotypes. This is followed by an analysis of the internal and external outcomes of activism, such as personal empowerment, collective identity formation, and policy impacts. The study concludes that women peace activists operate on understandings of “peace” and “security” that are distinct from those of mainstream actors; that they manipulate, challenge, and subvert gender stereotypes; and they use a range of protest and peacebuilding tactics, some of which attract reprisals from the state. Women’s peace activism also creates new political opportunities for women to express opposition to patriarchal militarism, thus challenging the marginalization of women within international and national politics on issues of peace and security. Following Cynthia Cockburn (2007), the thesis draws conclusions not about what women’s peace activism definitively is, but rather what it can look like and what it might achieve.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Focussing on the 'long 1970s' (1968-1980), this thesis offers a new account of the emergence of performance forms, including Happenings, participatory art, performance art, and performances for the camera, in visual art and related contexts at the ICA. The research is driven by two central aims: firstly, to create space for discourse about women artists and feminist concerns in art in the UK, and secondly, to build a feminist methodology and historiography that allows for a re-thinking of performance events and approaches to interpreting them. My research involves methods drawn from performance studies, history of art and visual studies, cultural history, and feminist theory. Chapters are organised around works by important UK-based artists including Carlyle Reedy, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and David Medalla, as well as international visitors Carolee Schneemann and Charlotte Moorman. Initially focussing on historical 'recovery' of performances by women artists in order to challenge received or dominant histories of performance, I then shift over the course of the thesis towards reflecting on feminist implications and effects of my historiographical approach. Here the ICA functions as an organising principle rather than a central subject, and so while research begins with the ICA Collection held at Tate Archive, the scope of the study is also broadened to include other sites and archival repositories. As a methodological counterpoint to this, I also question and critique the limits of institutional and archival representation, and conduct interviews with artists and arts professionals. Considered through the lens of each case study, I argue that the 1970s, as a period which saw new performance forms emerge dialogically alongside feminist practice, is a rich area of research for thinking about pre-histories of live art in the UK, as well as questions of identity, identification, and diversity which resonate into the present.

Abstract not available

I am a woman who writes. I am a writer who is a woman. In the Words of a Woman is an exploration of how these two facts of my life merge and influence each other. It is a work written to mediate between the supposed dichotomies of creative and critical, personal and academic, imaginative and scholarly. My desire is that this text will serve as autobiography, critical inquiry, creative response, and credo. The form of this thesis dances between prose and poetry. I have thoughts that need to be expressed sometimes in one form, sometimes in the other, and sometimes in the interplay of the two. As a collection of essays, I have brought together works that are primarily concerned with my story as a woman and a writer with essays that articulate my engagement in other women's writing. Within and between the prose pieces, I have included poems that touch on the same topics, giving different shadings to these themes. This text is a May Day dance, a joyous enactment of a performance long in the creating and rehearsing, not without struggles and challenges, but I hope for the reader a pleasure to participate in. / Graduation date: 1998

The classroom practices discussed in this thesis come slowly and at a "slant" to feminism through critical reading of texts, a practice that I call a (re)presentation of the silent women in texts. Given our patriarchal western culture, making meaning, and especially making sense, of the role and representations of females offers a special challenge. Often, we readers discover that women are represented by "silence" or rendered according to the patriarchal value system, with little or no thought given to their actual cultural roles. My analysis and construction of a "point of perspective" for the silent or silenced females in male-authored canonical texts offers students a way to enrich their experience with a text and to enrich their abilities as critical readers. Creating a fiction with the intent of having it appear transparently neutral may have been a common motive for both Geoffrey Chaucer and J.M. Coetzee as they created their silent women with their use of what Wayne Booth refers to as a distant narrator-agent. By distancing themselves as authors from their tales, Chaucer and Coetzee create the appearance that they are merely recording the words of others, but both authors make representations and speak for females. Kenneth Burke's dramatistic approach to rhetorical analysis, including the analysis of literary discourse, anticipates the much later critical stance that writing never emerges completely unscathed by authorial motive and purpose. / Graduation date: 1997

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in Psychology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-264). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ99142

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-67).