Since the 1990’s, the retreat of multiculturalism has been described as an integration policy trend across European states. There is however much disagreement among scholars on how this phenomenon should be understood and whether it actually exists. As previous research suggests that the Netherlands is perceived as an extreme example of the withdrawal of multiculturalism, this thesis seeks to critically examine integration in a Dutch governmental context. This is being done by making use of a post-structural policy analysis, which is aimed at understanding the discursive construction of a policy document. More specifically, it has been chosen to utilize Bacchi’s “What is the problem represented to be?” approach, as it focuses on how problems are being represented and understood instead of solely focusing on solving problems. Thus, the theoreotical framework is based on Bacchi’s WPR methodology in combination with previous literature on multiculturalism and assimilationism. The object for analysis is the official Dutch integration policy document of 2007 “Make sure you belong”. By critically examining this document, it can be concluded that Dutch integration is indeed withdrawing from multiculturalism and showing strong features of assimilationism. It can additionally be concluded that the government has a powerful role in constructing meanings.

The media form an integral part of our everyday life and have a significant impact on how we perceive, understand and construct reality, our part in it and our own identity. This diploma thesis is therefore concerned with the portrayal of the female orgasm in selected internet media that are aimed primarily at women. Through an analysis of selected internet articles, I show that an orgasm is not (just) a biological phenomenon, but it is more a discursive construct. At the same time, I introduce the ways the media help to (re)produce a common idea of what the female orgasm is, how to experience it, and what the consequences are of (not) experiencing it. On the one hand, the analysed media create an impression of a certain sexual emancipation of women; they stress a woman's right for sexual pleasure and orgasm. On the other hand, the way the topic of female orgasm is described creates a kind of universal formula for doing and experiencing sexuality. Despite declaring plurality and diversity, the media in fact create clearly defined boundaries and marginalize those who do not fit. Key words: gender, sexuality, female orgasm, body, post-structuralism, media

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Do words mirror reality? This question has been at the core of several linguistic disputes for decades. Several scholars have investigated the relationship between the signifier and the signified, and different literary theories suggest different approaches. This study is a close reading analysis of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, a novel that has been the subject of several scholarly studies relating to the role of language. This study aims to analyse the role of signification in the novel seen from a post-structuralist perspective in order to show how Auster problematizes language. Several explicit remarks on language are made from various characters in the novel, each expressing and conveying different language views. Nevertheless, a post-structural view on language wins favour as post-structural ideas and concepts are seen in the narrative language and the constructive level of the text. The analysis shows that Auster uses a post-structural view on language to illustrate the instability of signification in language. Auster problematizes the stability of language in order to illustrate the tentativeness of truth and ambiguity of reality. The language view of the narrator is used to illustrate the mimetic view that language is able to accurately record reality. The mimetic view on language is problematized by using the notebook as a symbol for the relationship between the signifier and the signified. The arbitrariness of language is illustrated through the means of the notebook in order to problematize truth. Auster uses the character of the protagonist Daniel Quinn to illustrate the belief in an essential truth within literature. This view is then problematized by using arbitrariness in the structural level of the text in order to illustrate the relativity of truth. The character of Stillman Sr is used to illustrate the belief of man being able to control language. However, the search for a divine language turns out to be a gnostic and meaningless quest since no cosmic solutions are achieved. The failure of Stillman´s quest is used to argue for the predominance of language over man. Language determines how people perceive truth. The perception of truth and reality is dependent on language. Since language is arbitrary, there is no truth which consists outside of language.

No / Workers in public sector organisations might expect any threat to their physical and psychological safety and wellbeing to fall far short of any unreasonable risk. However, the evidence is by no means certain. One of the most persistent and prevalent organisational perils is work victimisation. A propensity towards this type of abuse in government organisations is most disturbing, since they remain a major employer, and hence, have a direct bearing on the occupational fates of a large and growing number of personnel. This paper provides a brief discussion of work victimisation and focuses attention one of its most unrepentant and enigmatic perpetrators, the corporate psychopath. The paper highlights some individual and institutional measures designed to enable employees to mitigate the risk of abuse by these victimisers.

2025 / A novel harmonic language has emerged within certain choral works of the 21st century that is symptomatic of a more post-structuralist interpretation of musical form and tonal direction. Works by Composers Ola Gjeilo and Frank Ticheli have been canonized in repertoires of professional and amateur choirs alike, sought after for their unique color and impactful performances. Compositions of this style are common in their aim to project topics such as peace, transcendence, and metamorphosis, but are unique to the choral genre in its structural manifestation of such. These works have, in their most characteristic parts, moved beyond the conventional teleological organization of tonal harmonies, and towards a phenomenological process that, while remaining largely triadic, ambiguates function and turns attention towards the moment and away from any harmonic end goal. A unique harmonic and syntactic organization is observed in which clear direction and thematic statements are most actualized within the center of the work, surrounded by sections of an ambient, teleologically indeterminate nature, thus inverting the traditional paradigm of stability within a tonal work. As the compositions become less harmonically ambiguous and more directed, these composers create and utilize dominant and subdominant functional implications to set up tonal expectations, then subvert these implications through unexpected means. Consequently, middleground structures evolve phenomenologically, leading the listener to shift their attention away from the functional and teleological aspects of harmony, and toward entraining solely to the euphony of the music. Important attributes of the style include the mixture of smooth voice-leading progressions with classically tonal phrase structures, a seemingly wandering sense of tonal centricity projected through overall downward contour, and the prioritization of subdominant cadences.

<p>In this paper Mona Hatoums installation Corps étranger is discussed via a post structuralized method based on associative and semiotic comparisons with vanitas, a post-modern self-portrait, and as a representative for modern visual art. The analyze touches upon pornography, science fiction and the quest for scientific conquest in outer and inner space. Theoretical references are Foucault, Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Dolar, Said and Virilio. Hatoum makes the observer a voyageur with the aid of the latest medical technology, endoscope, which gives her the opportunity to make an introvert self-portrait when she films her own throat and rectum. But at the same time she makes the portrait of us all. I interpret this as a fictious science with postcolonial ideas, and the reference to science fiction is close at range. Hatoum takes the role as the other, the woman or the stranger and might flirt with Jülich interpretation of Corps étranger as a sign of the visual cultures colonisation of the human body’s inside, that is a conscious reference to sexuality, ethics and the search for knowledge and power.</p>

Tourism visits to sites associated to varying degrees with death and dying have for some time inspired academic debate and research into what has come to be popularly described as ‘dark tourism’. Research to date has been based on the mobilisation of various social scientific methodologies to understand issues such as the motivations of visitors to consume dark tourism experiences and visitor interpretations of the various narratives that are part of the consumption experience. This thesis offers an alternative conceptual perspective for carrying out research into museums that represent genocide and occupation by presenting a discourse analysis of five Lithuanian museums which share this overchig theme using Foucault’s concept of ‘discursive formation’ from ‘Archaeology of Knowledge’. A constructivist methodology is therefore applied to locate the rhetorical representations of Lithuanian and Jewish subject positions and to identify the objects of discourse that are produced in five museums that interpret an historical era defined by occupation, the persecution of people and genocide. The discourses and consequent cultural function of these museums is examined and the key finding of the research proposes that they authorise a particular Lithuanian individualism which marginalises the Jewish subject position and its related objects of discourse into abstraction. The thesis suggests that these museums create the possibility to undermine the ontological stability of Holocaust and the Jewish-Lithuanian subject which is produced as an anomalous, ‘non-Lithuanian’ cultural reference point. As with any Foucauldian archaeological research, it cannot be offered as something that is ‘complete’ since it captures only a partial field, or snapshot of knowledge, bound to a specific temporal and spatial context. The discourses that have been identified are perhaps part of a more elusive ‘positivity’ which is salient across a number of cultural and political surfaces which are ripe for a similar analytical approach in future. It is hoped that the study will motivate others to follow a discourse-analytical approach to research in order to further understand the critical role of museums in public culture when it comes to shaping knowledge about ‘inconvenient’ pasts.

[pt] Esta dissertação objetiva problematizar o conceito de poder presente na filosofia de Michel Foucault a fim de mostrar as suas conseqüências para se pensar o político na Teoria de Relações Internacionais (RI). Busca, desse modo, aprofundar o diálogo com as vertentes críticas que contestam os pressupostos do realismo desde a década de 80. Mesmo se tais perspectivas já obtiveram certa visibilidade na área de Teoria das Relações Internacionais, as teorias que seguem o pós-estruturalismo continuam confinadas às margens do pensamento de RI. A presente dissertação busca, portanto, explorar o conceito chave do pensamento de Foucault, o poder, para expor tanto os pressupostos quanto as implicações de sua utilização para se pensar a política global. Por meio da análise do modo com que Foucault trabalha o conceito de poder, conclui-se que o filósofo apaga, em grande medida, as fronteiras normativas entre os conceitos de poder e violência. Como conseqüência dessa indiferenciação conceitual, Foucault concebe o fenômeno político como campo de forças, como acontecimento estratégico ou como a continuação da guerra por outros meios. Pretende-se, por meio deste trabalho, pensar acerca da desejabilidade normativa de tal concepção política e de sua capacidade de prover um modelo capaz de constituir alternativa ao realismo em RI. A dissertação contrapõe, finalmente, a visão do político de Foucault a visões que outras perspectivas críticas, como aquelas inspiradas pelos trabalhos da Escola de Frankfurt, oferecem para se pensar um novo paradigma teórico e prático para a política global. / [en] This dissertation problematizes the concept of power present in Michel Foucault`s philosophy in order to show its consequences for thinking the political in International Relations (IR) Theory. It seeks to deepen the dialogue with the critical perspectives that question the assumptions of realism since the 1980s. Even if such critical perspectives have already obtained some visibility in International Relations Theory, poststructuralist theories remain confined to the margins of IR thought. This dissertation seeks, consequently, to explore the key concept of Foucault`s thought, power, in order to reveal its assumptions as well as its implications for thinking abou global politics. By means of the analysis of the way Foucault constructs his concept of power, we arrive at the conclusion that the philosopher erases the normative borders between the concepts of power and violence. As a consequence of his conceptual indifferentiation, Foucault conceives the political phenomenon as a field of forces, as a strategic event or as a war continued by other means. This work seeks to question the normative desirability of such a conception of the political and about its capacity to provide an alternative model do realism in IR. This dissertation opposes, finally, Foucault`s vision of the political to visions that other critical perspectives, such as those inspired by the works of the Frankfurt School, offer to help us think another theoretical and practical paradigm for global politics.

A Guerra ao Terror é, até hoje, objeto de vasta literatura que busca entender e explicar suas múltiplas dimensões e suas implicações para a política externa norte-americana. Alinhados à crítica pós-moderna/pós-estruturalista das Relações Internacionais e influenciados por autores críticos como David Campbell, Richard Ashley, Robert Walker, William Connolly, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe e Richard Jackson, buscamos problematizar o papel dos discursos na construção social da realidade, das identidades e dos interesses com o objetivo de compreender as condições de possibilidade da Guerra ao Terror no pós-Onze de Setembro. Ao adotarmos uma concepção de política externa como prática social de construção de um sistema de representações e de significados, que reproduz uma identidade nacional sustentada em uma ideologia específica, buscamos identificar como os discursos tentam estabilizar e fixar sentidos para impor e naturalizar estruturas de poder dominantes. Assim, interpretamos que a Guerra ao Terror somente se tornou possível devido à existência de um discurso de americanidade capaz de dar inteligibilidade à realidade após a crise de significados do Onze de Setembro. Trata-se de um discurso de americanos sobre americanos e sobre a América que, por meio de formações imaginárias criadoras de realidades, sujeitos, objetos, ações e relações, regula o que pode ser pensado, dito, compreendido e concebido com base em uma posição específica em um determinado momento histórico. Entendemos que tal discurso exterioriza uma formação discursiva específica de genealogia puritana que acaba reproduzida nas práticas de política externa norte-americana. Pelo emprego de métodos de análise discursiva, demonstraremos como o discurso da Guerra ao Terror reproduz a estrutura de significados, narrativas, mitos e representações dos sermões políticos típicos dos puritanos da América Colonial do século XVII: os jeremíadas. Apesar da afirmação quanto à separação entre Igreja e Estado, entendemos que os Estados Unidos da América, por meio de suas práticas de política externa, constroem sua identidade nacional como ideologicamente puritana. / The War on Terror has been the object of a large literature concerned with the understanding and explaining of its multiple dimensions and implications for U.S. foreign policy. However, most of it has been committed to the dominant theoretical framework of the so-called Neo-Neo Debate, and thus not problematizing key concepts like State, identity, interest, and reality. Inspired by the so-called Third Debate, we revisit the subject of the War on Terror inspired by post-modern/post-structuralist critics such as David Campbell, Robert Walker, William Connolly, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Richard Jackson, among others. Focusing on the role of discourse and power in socially constructing reality, identities, and interests, we attempt to understand the conditions of possibility of the War on Terror in the aftermath of 9/11. We will argue that foreign policy constitutes a system of meanings and representations that (re)produces a national identity based on a specific ideology, in a never-ending attempt to stabilize and fix meanings in order to discursively impose and naturalize dominant structures of power. Therefore, we believe that the War on Terror has only become possible due to the existence of a discourse on Americanness capable of rendering reality once again intelligible after 9/11. It is a discourse of Americans about America and Americans, which, through imaginary formations that create realities, subjects, actions, and relationships, regulate what can be thought, said, understood, and conceived from a specific position in a particular moment in time. We believe that this discourse is made possible by a specific ideological formation of an essentially Puritan matrix which is (re)produced through practices of U.S. foreign policy. By employing methods of discourse analysis, we will show how the discourse on the War on Terror emulates the meanings, narratives, symbols, and representations of the typical Puritan political sermons of the 1600s Colonial America: the jeremiads. Despite claims of separation between State and religion, we believe that the United States of America, through its practices of foreign policy, constructs its national identity as ideologically Puritan.