This thesis is a study of three global issues – development cooperation, education and gender - and their transformation to local circumstances in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR), a landlocked country in Southeast Asia. Combining post-colonial and post-structural perspectives, it sets out to understand how discourses of education and gender in Laos intersect with discourses of education and gender within development cooperation represented by organisations such as the World Bank and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). Through field observations, analysis of national and donor policies on education and gender, and interviews with Lao educationalists, this thesis offers an analysis that shows the complexities arising at the intersection where the first-world-north meets the local in the context of development cooperation. Foucault’s notion of the production and reproduction of discourses through different power-knowledge relations is used to show that the meanings accorded to education and gender within development cooperation, indeed are historically, culturally and contextually constructed. Within development cooperation policy, first-world-north discourses appear to have a hegemonic status in defining education and gender. Thus ‘Education for All’ and ‘Gender Mainstreaming’ become privileged discourses that also take root in Lao national policy-making. Development cooperation further brings with it discourses defining the cooperation itself. Partnership is one such privileged donor discourse. These policy discourses are however interpreted by Lao educationalists that are not influenced by policy alone; rather, contextual discourses also affect how policies are understood and negotiated. It is when these discourses intersect that structures of power and preferential rights of interpretation become visible. The analysis points to how the perspectives of international development cooperation organisations representing the first-world-north are in positions to set the agenda for development cooperation within policy. This position of power can, from a post-colonial perspective, be traced back to how former colonial structures created a privileged position for first-world-north knowledge that still prevails. This is to some extent acknowledged by development cooperation organisations through the emphasis on partnership. However, in the local context, partnership is not experienced as a discourse which has the effects of redistributing power. Partnership is rather transformed into a discourse of superiority and subordination where development cooperation organisations monitor and evaluate and local actors adjust and implement. Lao education officials however express alternative interpretations of partnership that are based on face-to-face collaboration and collective effort. These strategies have closer links to local practices and also reflect contextual discourse-power-knowledge relations which the education officials are well aware of. These strategies of negotiation also extend to the issues of education and gender. Discourses of ‘Education for All’ and ‘Gender Mainstreaming’ are acknowledged among the education officials as policy goals which to some extent also extend into practice. These discourses are however renegotiated to accommodate local circumstances. ‘Education for All’ is thus replaced by the ‘5-pointed star’ which serves as an operationalisation of the concept of ‘learner-centred education’. ‘Gender Mainstreaming’ has to co-exist with local discourses that on the one hand build on patriarchal organisations of society and on the other hand build on local strategies for access which weaken patriarchal structures. The analysis ultimately stresses the importance of incorporating local, contextual knowledge in educational development cooperation processes, both among international and national stakeholders. This process can be supported by a willingness to deconstruct taken-for-granted understandings and value systems; and in doing so, recognising the normative aspects operating both in the areas of education and gender.

The aim of the dissertation is to highlight how different ideas about gender and gender discourses have created varying conditions for the formation of school leadership in different eras. The empirical material consists of historically documented material in a text-based study and interview material comprising interviews with a total of 18 comprehensive school principals from two interview studies. The period covered by the material is 1830–2006. The theoretical point of departure is post-structural theory formation, where Joan W. Scott’s and Judith Butler’s theoretical line of reasoning constitutes the basis of the dissertation’s gender and discourse analyses. The analyses highlight active gender discourses throughout the history of school leadership and which gender discourses regulate principals’ everyday work in the 21st century, how different gender discourses intervene and gain ground among principals and have significance for which gender and professional positions are possible for today’s principals to adopt and allocate to teachers and students. The dissertation highlights four active gender discourses: the essential sexual difference discourse, the sameness discourse, the difference discourse and a transgressive gender discourse. The results indicate the survival force of the essential sexual difference discourse, where femininity is always subordinate to masculinity. The greatest gender battle has been around femininity. Throughout its history school leadership has mainly been focused on and talked about in terms of female/feminine and male/masculine, but where femininity has always been questioned and subjected to constant definition and redefinition. Thus far in the 21st century the difference discourse’s femininity affirming dimension has been normalised and takes shape in a new and transgressive gender discourse where both femininity and masculinity are available for both female and male principals’ identifications and materialisations. However, at the same time as principals have related to new and transgressive gender ideals in certain situations they defer to the essential sexual difference discourse’s gender stereotyped and hierarchical divisions and expectations. The dissertation shows how the transgressive gender discourse contributes to the dissolution of gender polarity, with optional identities. Parallel with this and contrary to what in terms of gender could be described as the basis for a more democratic and equal school, the dissertation also shows how female principals and female teachers, together with certain groups of girls, sometimes find themselves in continued subordinate and vulnerable positions in accordance with a very old essential sexual difference definition.

Los Angeles has long been identified as a fragmented city, by nature of its cosmology and those constructed perceptions that constitute it in the collective imaginary. In an effort to articulate, interrogate and understand such a place, we have come to rely on its representations to function as mediators of meaning, delivering through their simulation of the city an experience of the real, lived Los Angeles. As a result, the relationships between the real and the representation become skewed, altering the processes by which we engage with the everyday. To better understand the implications of this dialectic, I examine four representations of the city: Disneyland, David Hockney’s “Domestic Scene, Los Angeles,” David Gebhard and Robert Winter’s A Guide to Architecture in Southern California and the BBC “One Pair of Eyes” installment “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles.” By analyzing representations of Los Angeles produced in a range of media, it becomes possible to discern the complex relationships between the real and envisioned Los Angeles, and to recognize the constructive force that emerges out of this discursive space. / text

The subject of this study is gender norms in the preschool and children who oppose those norms. The aim is to investigate how the discourses are linked with the way in which preschool teachers and teaching assistants talk about children’s gender identity. This study is founded in feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis, which was a basis for the interpretation of the results. My research questions are: • How do educators express themselves concerning gender norms? • What do educators need to work with a gender critical agenda? • How do the educators describe their work concerning gender, gender norms and children who oppose those norms? • For educators who have experience with children who do not identify with the gender they was given at birth, how do educators describe their own treatment of said children, and how would they describe the treatment from the other members of the teaching team? The study consists of qualitative interviews with five educators who were asked questions relevant to: norms, gender, gender criticism and how they work with those topics. I found both positive and negative aspects of gender work in preschool. Generally norms are seen as something you have to adapt to. Sometimes there are collisions between the different approaches from younger and older educators gender work, and sometimes this collision takes place between educators and parents. I found that the educators I interviewed generally want to question the heteronorm, only they sometimes dont realise how affected they are by it themselves.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Den här uppsatsen har till syfte att belysa hur heteronormativitet kan ta sig uttryck i förskolan, och vad några femåringar säger om hur de ser på familjebildning och kärleksrelationer. Undersökningen bygger på intervjuer om familjeformer med åtta femåringar. Intervjuerna genomfördes med utgångspunkt i ett antal bilder föreställande människor i olika familjekonstellationer. Den teoretiska utgångspunkten för uppsatsen är en normkritisk pedagogik, med rötter i feministisk poststrukturalism och queerteori. Resultatet av undersökningen visar att barnen i studien hade ett starkt heteronormativt sätt att prata om familjebildning. I ljuset av den tidigare forskning som redovisas i uppsatsen, blir det tydligt att förskolans sätt att arbeta med frågor om sexuell läggning inte lever upp till de krav som läroplanen ställer.

This master thesis deals with the gender perception in leaderships positions. Starting from our awareness of a gendered leadership gap, this thesis aims to show our development towards our understanding of reality as socially constructed. We apply the Discourse in order to see how oppression works on women. In the course of our master thesis, we came across poststructuralists, like Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, philosopher and psychoanalysts, like Freud, Beauvoir, Irigaray, Kristeva and Butler, as well as sociolinguists, like Cameron, Miller, Baxter and Tannen. Their ideas have enriched our gendered Discourses. Furthermore, by dealing with their ideas, we were able to understand how powerful words can be. Words have the power to create identities, our reality and oppress certain groups of people. The group of people we have focussed on are women. Although the category “women” is fragmented and gender is one of many features of persons, there is something that all women share – oppression through language. Thus, women are less likely to move in the corporate ladder and lead. In two Discourse Analysis based on job advertisements for leadership positions offered in Germany and Italy, we see how language-in-use may cause a reason for a gendered leadership gap. The Discourses available to us influence how we understand the reality around us, construct our identities and negotiate our roles. With this thesis, we hope contribute to today’s Discourses and raise people’s awareness of how our language keeps women from entering leadership positions.

This thesis uses the photographic portrait as an example of contemporary art practice to examine developments in aesthetic sensibility and constructions of meaning with particular address to ineffable qualities in both the subject and in the photograph. It examines the contribution of practice to a wider cultural debate, predominantly described as poststructural. Thomas Ruff's contention that it is impossible to photographically depict an individual, establishes a methodology that interrogates assumptions and directs examination toward reconfiguring issues of theory and practice. In the photographic portrait, what is `essential' equates with the expectation of visual statements that are definitive and what is 'ineffable' is that which transcends words. The persistent premise of capturing the 'essence' is dependant on the notion of 'presence', the certainty of pure perception or essential meaning, now undermined by poststructuralism in terms of conceptions of meaning and authorship. If essential depiction is problematic, how might a correlative adjustment to conceiving and validating photographic meaning be framed? How are essential or ineffable qualities displaced, formed and manifested? What constitutes the contemporary 'meaningful' portrait? Realigned as 'depictions of people', the 'portrait' serves a complex function, adjusted in the light of psychoanalysis and poststructuralism and visibly manifested as metaphor for contemporary consciousness. With particular reference to texts by Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, this thesis demonstrates photographic practice as a form of discourse that visualises implicit truth-values, and participates in debate. It asserts figural interpretations to photographs over literary systems like narrative, and immanent property over aspirations to 'transcendence' or 'essence' and proposes reconfigurations of psychological, critical or poetic 'fiction' as alternatives. It repositions the ineffable as a conceptual domain of possibility that assimilates the dynamic of differance as its poststructural equivalent and proposes a conceptual aesthetic that celebrates aspects of poststructuralism and is rooted in what the photograph provokes rather than what it depicts.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how secondary school media educators might best meet the needs of students who prefer practical production work to ‘theory’ work in media studies classrooms. This is a significant problem for a curriculum area that claims to develop students’ media literacies by providing them with critical frameworks and a metalanguage for thinking about the media. It is a problem that seems to have become more urgent with the availability of new media technologies and forms like video games. The study is located in the field of media education, which tends to draw on structuralist understandings of the relationships between young people and media and suggests that students can be empowered to resist media’s persuasive discourses. Recent theoretical developments suggest too little emphasis has been placed on the participatory aspects of young people playing with, creating and gaining pleasure from media. This study contributes to this ‘participatory’ approach by bringing post structuralist perspectives to the field, which have been absent from studies of secondary school media education. I suggest theories of media learning must take account of the ongoing formation of students’ subjectivities as they negotiate social, cultural and educational norms. Michel Foucault’s theory of ‘technologies of the self’ and Judith Butler’s theories of performativity and recognition are used to develop an argument that media learning occurs in the context of students negotiating various ‘ethical systems’ as they establish their social viability through achieving recognition within communities of practice. The concept of ‘ethical systems’ has been developed for this study by drawing on Foucault’s theories of discourse and ‘truth regimes’ and Butler’s updating of Althusser’s theory of interpellation. This post structuralist approach makes it possible to investigate the ways in which students productively repeat and vary norms to creatively ‘do’ and ‘undo’ the various media learning activities with which they are required to engage. The study focuses on a group of year ten students in an all boys’ Catholic urban school in Australia who undertook learning about video games in a three-week intensive ‘immersion’ program. The analysis examines the ethical systems operating in the classroom, including formal systems of schooling, informal systems of popular cultural practice and systems of masculinity. It also examines the students’ use of semiotic resources to repeat and/or vary norms while reflecting on, discussing, designing and producing video games. The key findings of the study are that students are motivated to learn technology skills and production processes rather than ‘theory’ work. This motivation stems from the students’ desire to become recognisable in communities of technological and masculine practice. However, student agency is not only possible through critical responses to media, but through performative variation of norms through creative ethical practices as students participate with new media technologies. Therefore, the opportunities exist for media educators to create the conditions for variation of norms through production activities. The study offers several implications for media education theory and practice including: the productive possibilities of post structuralism for informing ways of doing media education; the importance of media teachers having the autonomy to creatively plan curriculum; the advantages of media and technology teachers collaborating to draw on a broad range of resources to develop curriculum; the benefits of placing more emphasis on students’ creative uses of media; and the advantages of blending formal classroom approaches to media education with less formal out of school experiences.

Interpersonal violence and abuse in New Zealand is so widespread it is considered a normative experience. Mental health nurses witnessing the inscribed effects of abuse on service users are lead to consider whether we are dealing with a breakdown of the mind or a breakdown in social or cultural connection (Stuhlmiller, 2003). The purpose of this research is to examine the cultural context which makes violence and abuse against women and children possible. In 2003, the public debate on prostitution law reform promised to open a space in which discourses on sexuality and violence, practices usually private or hidden, would publicly emerge. Everyday discourses relating to prostitution law reform reported in the New Zealand Herald newspaper in the year 2003 were analysed using Foucauldian and feminist post-structural methodological approaches. Foucauldian discourse analysis emphasises the ways in which power is enmeshed in discourse, enabling power relations and hegemonic practices to be made visible. The research aims were to develop a complex, comprehensive analysis of the media discourses, to examine the construction of harm in the media debate, to examine the ways in which the cultural hegemony of dominant groups was secured and contested and to consider the role of mental health nurses as agents of emancipatory political change. Mental health promotion is mainly a socio-political practice and the findings suggest that mental health nurses could reconsider their professional role, to participate politically as social activists, challenging the social order thereby reducing the human suffering which interpersonal violence and abuse carries in its wake.