Since its birth at the time of the French Revolution, Left/Right has been a key tool for understanding politics. This thesis investigates how we think about politics using Left/Right: how it shapes, constrains and interacts with our most deeply-held conceptions of politics, how its meaning and implications have developed historically and in the British context, and why it might warrant the attention of the student of ideologies. After outlining the methodological underpinnings of the study and histories of Left/Right, the thesis examines uses of Left/Right in a range of contexts of actual thinking about politics. Left/Right is widely used in both the academic study of politics and popular commentary on British politics. The early New Left in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s is studied as a group attempting to influence the discourse around the political label “the Left”; a section of the neo-conservative New Right in Britain in the 1980s, around The Salisbury Review, is analysed as a political group with a complicated relationship to the political label “the Right”. Left/Right emerges as an element of the contested “common sense” of politics. Further, it is argued that some elements of common sense, such as Left/Right, may be expressed through narratives. Left/Right is theorized as a political narrative, or as a story about politics. The concept of political narrative explores the possibility that Left/Right may be susceptible to “interpretation”, both in terms of the assumptions about how politics is done and how politics should be done that underlie it, and more complexly in its relationship with a master narrative of political conflict understood as class struggle. Students of ideologies can learn much about how we think about and do our politics by attending to Left/Right.

Shakespeare's Influence on the English Gothic, 1791-1834: The Conflicts of Ideologies examines why some of the most influential Gothic novels and playwrights of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries frequently alluded to Shakespeare. During a time of great conflict between changing views of religion, class systems, and gender roles, writers of the Gothic addressed these important issues by looking back to Shakespeare's treatment of the conflicted ideologies of his own time. This project begins by examining the links established between the horrors exposed in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother and Shakespeare. Walpole's incorporation of unsettling scenes from Shakespeare sets the stage for other Gothic writers to allude to similar Shakespearean quandaries in their own works. The first chapter establishes what is "pre-Gothic" about some of the conflicted ideologies hinted at in Shakespeare's darkest plays. The second chapter explores how Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis incorporate Shakespearean epigraphs, quotations, and allusions into their own works to confront terrors of the 1790s. The third chapter reveals how P. B. Shelley, in his Zastrozzi, St. Irvyne, and The Cenci responds to worrying questions originally raised Shakespeare. Chapter four focuses on the Romantic era's most renowned female playwright, Joanna Baillie, and her use of Shakespeare to hint at the treatment to which women are still subject in England during her own time. Finally, this study concludes with a brief look at how the threatening implications of the Gothic continue to revisit the dramas of Shakespeare through major works of Gothic fiction from the past 200 years including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. Though the threats of the past might have changed, Shakespeare still plays an important role in speaking to the unresolved ideological conflicts that still haunt the consciousness of Western civilization.

This thesis is an attempt to find out what makes right and wrong.

This thesis seeks to provide an account of the role played by ideologies in acts of mass violence against civilians, such as genocides, murderous state repression, war crimes, and other ‘atrocities’. Mass violence of this kind has already received extensive study, with scholars frequently emphasising their belief that ideology is important. Until now, however, discussions of ideology have been held back by a lack of conceptual and theoretical development, leading to narrow portrayals of ideology’s role, vagueness over its relevance, and dubious assumptions about its theoretical implications. This thesis addresses these problems by building a more focused and integrative theoretical framework for analysing the ideological dynamics of atrocities. I engage in an extensive conceptual and methodological discussion, to establish the best way of defining and utilising the concept of ideology. In doing so, I emphasise how ideology can be important even for that majority of atrocity perpetrators who do not meet classic but misleading stereotypes of fanatical killers driven by burning hatred. I then detail my actual account of the ideological dynamics of deadly atrocities, which centres around the identification of six ‘justificatory mechanisms’: dehumanisation, guilt-attribution, threat-construction, deagentification, virtuetalk, and future-bias. These justificatory mechanisms describe sets of ideological processes that recur across different cases of violence against civilians, and which make that violence look permissible or even desirable to those who, in a variety of roles, carry it out. I then substantiate this account through three case studies: of Nazi atrocities, Stalinist oppression, and Allied area bombing in World War II. These cases demonstrate the cross-case applicability of the six justificatory mechanisms, and illustrate how the framework I offer allows us to construct more causally explicit, psychologically plausible, and comprehensive pictures of the way key ideologies feed in to the most destructive campaigns of violence against civilians.

This study is a descriptive research project which examines a purposeful census of the best selling children's books for 0-8 year olds in the United States in 2003. This cross-sectional study of these social artifacts evaluates the extent to which the ideologies of the environmental movement have been inculcated into culture. It evaluates how the environment is represented in children’s literature and the extent to which children's literature meets the goals of environmental education. Through narrative semeiotic analysis of the themes, as well as the manifest (text) and latent (pictures) content, varying degrees of pro and antienvironmental ideologies reflected by these representations emerged. Analytic induction revealed that these representations reflected ideologies of human domination over nature. In addition, in most cases, the representation of the environment did not reflect or meet the goals of environmental education. This finding sheds light on the role children's books play in the environmental socialization of America's youth.

This study aims to account for variation on women’s political empowerment in localities during wartime. I draw upon political ideologies and civilian-armed group interaction literature to argue that gender ideologies could explain why some conflict-affected areas have more women’s political empowerment than others. I argue that gender egalitarian ideologies in armed groups leads to specific organizational structure and political discourse where women are allowed to take leadership and political-related roles within the armed groups. More specifically, I argue that gender egalitarian armed groups not only encourage women to take public roles within their group but also to engage in politics in communities under their territorial control through four strategies: ideological meetings, penetration of social and political organization, establishment of social behaviors and infiltration in electoral politics. I test this argument using quantitative sub-national data looking at territorial control of non-state armed groups and number female mayor candidates in Colombia from 1997 to 2007. I expect that guerrilla areas, are more likely to have more female candidates compared with paramilitary areas. Surprisingly, I found an opposite direction, where paramilitary areas have more female candidates compared with guerrilla areas. I offer an alternative explanation based on the qualitative sources in order to account for the unexpected findings.

Although DuBois has been the subject of considerable scholarly work, little of that scholarship has concentrated on his political thought. This dissertation addresses that lacuna in the literature on DuBois by analyzing his writings from the standpoint of a concern with their political and philosophical dimensions and their relation to the social and intellectual contexts within which DuBois wrote and acted. Most significant in this research among the contexts within which DuBois' work was constituted are those aspects related to: (1) rise of the corporation as a central organizing force in United States political economy; (2) development of intellectuals as a self-conscious, discernibly interested stratum in twentieth-century American society; and (3) the continuing efforts of elites within the Afro-American population to congeal a social and political agenda for themselves and hegemony over the organization of the race. This study identifies collectivism as a useful critical concept in interpretation of the intellectual and institutional thrusts of those three elements of the environment of DuBois' theoretical development and points of similarity and confluence among them. Collectivism is seen as a meta-theoretical outlook that values specialized expertise in social decision-making, rational organization and planning and asserts the primacy of the economy in society. To that extent collectivism provides a rubric subsuming the principal ideological stances common among intellectuals during the early decades of this century-i.e., socialism, progressivism, and the varieties of managerialism--and their derivatives. DuBois' thought is found to demonstrate sharp continuities at the philosophical or meta-theoretical level. These continuities are most significant in his attitudes concerning the nature and purposes of knowledge and the proper organization of society in general and of the Afro-American population in particular, and they resonate with the attitudes of his collectivist contemporaries. Notwithstanding DuBois' movements into and out of the university and "activism," the Socialist Party, the NAACP, Pan-Africanism and finally the CPUSA, he is found to have maintained throughout his career commitment to: (1) a positivist-pragmatist view of knowledge; (2) a rationalistic, collectivist view of proper social organization, including a preference for meritocracy; and (3) a belief that the elite of "ability" or the "Talented Tenth" should have primacy in and over the Afro-American population.

This study focuses on how minorities are stigmatized in the French media. It limits itself to the case of the proposal of the denaturalization law and the consequent discourse about it. The subject is introduced through a short background on the law and its relevance to the possible racist nature of the debate, followed by some background on racism in France, an overview of the theory on new racism and how it can explain stigmatizating discourses. Critical Discourse Analysis is used as the method to uncover said discourses as it is a method related to the in-depth analysis of implicit dominant ideologies and power-structures. The study analyzes twenty articles from two French newspapers in order to determine how stigmatizing discourses are expressed. The results in the discussion show recurrent racist narratives that systematically denigrate and stereotype Muslims and immigrants. They also show a pattern of the dominant culture negating space to minorities.

Ce projet de thèse en Sciences du Langage entend s'intéresser aux discours qui concernent le corps des intersexes. Il s’agit de se pencher sur les discours de la construction corporelle et identitaire chez les personnes intersexes dans la mesure où leurs sexes peuvent difficilement correspondre aux catégories du sexe binaire. Si l’on considère que le sexe et le genre sont construits discursivement selon un processus de différenciation sexuelle, il semble alors pertinent de s’attacher aux formations discursives qui entourent ces corps non-normés. En prenant pour appui un corpus hétérogène d’articles et d’ouvrages médicaux, de prises de parole médiatiques et informelles de personnes intersexes, il sera question d’analyser les processus discursifs qui permettent de produire une identité sexuée. Plus largement il s’agira de dégager une matrice discursive de la construction normée des genres qui passe par un dispositif d’essentialisation de la différence sexuelle. L’objectif de cette thèse est donc d’identifier les structures discursives qui servent à construire des identités sexuées binaires et à naturaliser la différence des genres. Je m’intéresserai aux discours médicaux pour montrer comment ils se situent face aux variations sexuelles et quelles sont les idéologies qui les sous-tendent ; cela me permettra de montrer en quoi ils reflètent et ils produisent une vision dichotomique des sexes. Il s’agira également de montrer comment les intersexes se situent face aux discours qui essentialisent et binarisent les sexes et éventuellement comment ils les déjouent. Il me semble en effet que la construction du genre chez les intersexes est rendue difficile par les stéréotypes sexuels, et qu’étudier les discours qu’ils.elles produisent sur leur(s) identité(s) peut servir à dégager en creux les processus langagiers qui stabilisent la division des sexes. / This thesis discusses how discourses on variations of sex development (intersexuality) couldsometimes produce and maintain a difference between the sexes and sometimes destabilize it.Elaborated within the field of discourse analysis, this thesis unfolds along a twofold theoreticalapproach. First, I seek to establish a dialogue between French Discourse Analysis and GenderStudies, to discuss the concepts of ideology, discursive formations and preconstruct. Secondly,addressing issues of the practices of categorisation and of construction of gender identities, thisdissertation falls within the field of the Gender & Language Studies. My analysis especiallyfocuses on how speakers use semantic, lexical, enunciative and pragmatic resources in order toproduce the meaning of sex. It led me to analyze how they create gender identities but alsohow they produce, spread and contest the ideologies of gender, by both naturalizing anddenaturalizing the sex difference. These analyses are based on a collection of medicaldiscourses (publications, children’s medical files), a collection of on-line activist discourses (fromforums and associations websites), and a collection of pornographic discourse involving atypicalsexes. Carrying qualitative analysis, the dissertation shows that the meanings of sex areunceasingly done and undone through discourses: they are produced by heteronormativity,they are affirmed or subverted by subjective positions, and they are reconfigured in thediscourses of desire.

Gaelic-medium education (GME) as it exists today started in 1985, when two classes offering instruction through the medium of Gaelic opened within primary schools in Glasgow and Inverness. GME grew rapidly throughout the first decade of its availability, and 1258 students were enrolled in the system by 1995. This thesis examines outcomes of this system in terms of the degree to which former pupils who started in GME during this period continue to use Gaelic in their daily lives, and provides an assessment of their language ideologies and attitudes. The 2011 census showed a diminution in the decline of Gaelic speakers in Scotland, but marginal growth of 0.1% was recorded in the number of speakers under the age of 20. Whilst this growth has been understood by politicians and policy-makers as evidence of the role of GME in revitalising the language, the census figures give a limited picture of the actual language practices of reported speakers, the extent to which they use Gaelic, or of their beliefs, feelings and attitudes regarding the language. Internationally, little research appears to have been done on the life trajectories of adults who received a bilingual education through a minority language; that is to say, on the effect that the bilingual classroom has on such individuals’ relationship to the language after formal schooling is completed. The first students to receive GME at primary school are now in their late 20s and early 30s, and prospects for the maintenance and intergenerational transmission of Gaelic by this group are currently unknown. The principal research questions of this investigation comprise the following: - What role does Gaelic play in the day-to-day lives of former Gaelic-medium students who started in GME during the first decade of its availability; how and when do they use the language? - What sets of beliefs and language ideologies do these Gaelic-medium educated adults express in relation to Gaelic? - How do these beliefs and ideologies relate to their actual language practices, to their attitudes concerning the language, and to future prospects for the maintenance of Gaelic? Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods, I provide an assessment of Gaelic use, language ideologies and attitudes among a sample of 130 Gaelic-medium educated adults. A thematic, ethnography of speaking methodology is employed to analyse qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 46 informants. Additionally, responses to an electronic questionnaire are evaluated by statistical analysis using Spearman’s rank order correlation co-efficient to investigate the relationships between non-parametric variables of reported language use, ability, socialisation and attitudes. The results are discussed with reference to extensive research literatures on language, culture and identity, language revitalisation in the international context, and the perceived limitations of GME which have previously been identified with regard to the revitalisation of Gaelic.