Key leaders within the social work field have repeatedly challenged social work educators to address issues of race and racism, in addition to other forms of identity and oppression, in social work education and practice. Little is known, however, about if and how these issues are being addressed by social work faculty teaching advanced clinical practice courses. This qualitative study examines the manner and extent to which 15 social work faculty, all of whom teach advanced clinical practice courses in one of four graduate social work programs on the East Coast of the United States, conceptualize and address issues of race and racism in their teaching of clinical social work. Analysis of the 15 interviews suggests that most participants view race primarily as an individual ethnic or cultural identity and racism as a largely micro level phenomenon that is the result of racial prejudice. Few participants appeared to understand race as a social identity situated within structures of power and privilege or how racism operates at a structural or institutional level. For example, in discussing a case vignette provided by the researcher, they focused on symptomatology, diagnosis, and assessment rather than the possible implications and effects of race and racism on a client of color. Overall, participants in this study appeared to lack conceptual, historical, and sociological knowledge about race and racism. While participants in this study view themselves as committed to addressing issues of diversity and social justice, they also acknowledge their struggle to enact this commitment in the classroom. The findings from this study suggest that additional faculty development opportunities and institutional support will be needed before clinical social work educators are likely to meet the challenge to effectively address issues of race and racism as well as other issues of identity and oppression in the classroom.

This paper puts into question ideas of politics limited to the theories of social movements and contentious politics. In using the concept of black counterpublic, understood as a web of relations and spaces, I show how black politics of folklore expands the sites and forms of politics in Colombia of 1960. In doing so, I describe two aspects of the black counterpublic from the point of view of black political intellectuals into the racialized field of Colombian folklore: a. the way black political intellectuals understood race and racism in Colombia and, b. their forms of politics. That is, their form of organization and mobilization. For this, I propose a new understanding of folklore beyond ideas of entertainments, apolitical culturalism and essentialism which, in turn, make black politics look trivialized and less political under the integrationist racial project of the mestizo State. Also, I shed some light on the idea of race and racism from below, from the point of view of black political intellectuals; and I pluralize and decentralize black politics from social movement understanding of politics.

The food an infant is fed can reflect many things: a source of nutrition, the social and cultural circumstances into which an infant is born, or even a family’s beliefs about the body and breast milk as a source of nutrition. Exclusive breastfeeding, currently the gold standard for infant feeding in the United States (US), is often identified as an expectation in discourses on being a “good mother.” African American mothers in particular are the least likely group in the US to breastfeed in any capacity and many efforts are underway to increase the breastfeeding rates of this population. This dissertation presents findings of a three-part qualitative study whose purpose was to examine how African American mothers define being a good mother and to learn what factors they experience in early motherhood that may influence their decisions for infant feeding and infant care. Because most research in this area focuses on low income African American mothers, this research has a distinct focus on middle class African American mothers to allow for the consideration of factors besides low socioeconomic status that may contribute to breastfeeding behavior. By defining good motherhood in accordance with middle class African American mothers’ definition, this research argues against the standard that aligns “good motherhood” with breastfeeding and suggests instead that, in some instances, being a good mother means caring and providing for the family at the exclusion of breastfeeding. Included are suggestions for alternative strategies that extend beyond educating and encouraging African American mothers to conform to a standard that can appear to be in conflict with their primary values.

Honours Thesis 1999 Department of Political Science, University of Melbourne. / Title from electronic document (viewed 17/6/10) Bibliography p. 43.

State violence, and policing in particular, continue to shape the black British experience, racialising geographical areas associated with African and African-Caribbean communities. The history of black struggles in the UK has often centred on spaces of racial violence and resistance to it. But black-led social movements of previous decades have, for the most part, seen a decline in both political mobilisations, and the militant anti-racist slogans and discourses that accompanied them. Neoliberalism, through securitisation, resource reallocation, privatisation of space and the de-racialising of language, has made radical black activism an increasingly difficult endeavour. But this does not mean that black struggle against policing has disappeared. What it does mean, however, is that there have been significant changes in how anti-racist activism against policing is articulated and carried out. Three high-profile black deaths at the hands of police in 2011 led to widespread protest and civil unrest. These movements of resistance were strengthened when the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States mobilised hundreds of young people in solidarity actions in England. In this thesis, I argue that, over time, racist metonyms used to describe places racialised as black (Handsworth, Brixton etc.) and people racialised as black (Stephen Lawrence, Mark Duggan etc.), have led to the rise of metonymic anti-racism. While metonymic anti-racism was used alongside more overt anti-racist language in the period between the 1950s and early 1990s, I argue that such overt anti-racist language is becoming rarer in the post-2011 period, particularly in radical black grassroots organisations that address policing. Intersecting with metonymic anti-racism are gender dynamics brought to the surface by female-led campaigns against police violence, and forms of resistance which target spaces of post-industrial consumer capitalism. Understanding how police racism, and resistance to it, are being reconceptualised through language, and reconfigured through different forms of activism, provides a fresh understanding of grassroots black struggle in Britain.

[pt] O presente trabalho investiga o processo de construção social do maxixe, uma dança de movimentos intensos e sensuais que fez parte do cotidiano dos cariocas entre os séculos XIX e XX. Com o auxílio das fontes da imprensa periódica, bem como músicas e peças teatrais, os casos analisados demonstram que a dança era forjada de maneira dinâmica, em diálogo com o mundo atlântico e com os conflitos sociais de um Rio de Janeiro em plena transformação. Baseado na experiência dançante de trabalhadores pobres, negros e pardos, o maxixe tinha seus significados estrategicamente construídos por diferentes sujeitos que encontravam na dança um objeto polissêmico de disputa e negociação sobre as tensões entre raça e nacionalidade colocadas pelo fim da escravidão. / [en] The present work investigates the social construct process of the maxixe, a dance of intense and sensual movements that took part of cariocas everyday life between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Supported by periodicals, songs, as well as theatrical plays, the case studies analyzed illustrate how the dance was fashioned in a dynamic way in dialogue with both the Atlantic World and the social conflicts of a transforming Rio de Janeiro. Based on the dance experience of poor, black, and mixed workers, the maxixe had its meaning strategically constructed by different characters that found in the dance a polysemic object of dispute and negotiation on the tensions between race and nationality imposed by the end of slavery.

This study introduces the Fanonian thought on race and racism, rhetoric of modernity, and new humanism as three constitutive thematic areas in order to enable a new understanding of the South African situation. These thematic areas are examined with specific reference to socio-economic development within the limited context of post-apartheid South Africa. This is done by reading Fanon’s text in the context of South Africa to provide the background against which the unfolding of the post-apartheid era and its political discourses may be analysed. In essence, this study is based on Fanon’s predictions that he made in the text written more than 50 years ago about the future of post-colonial states. Therefore, this study argues that Fanon’s thought has proven to be more prophetic with regard to post-apartheid South Africa and its political reforms which left the fundamental question of structures such as land, economy, and labour unaddressed. What happened on 27 April 1994 is not genuine liberation, but a mere transition from apartheid to democratic dispensation that left the status quo in spatial arrangements uninterrupted. Indeed, it was an elite pact between the African National Congress and white monopoly capital, which betrayed the national liberation movement and the black majority. The contention is that South Africa celebrated the cosmetic reforms that attributed the term liberation incomplete in the absence of fundamental and structural changes. What is therefore recommended is that for there to be success, there must be genuine liberation that is consistent with the needs of society. This means bringing to an end the racially marked structures and reimagining the black condition, through jobs, education, social and economic programmes aimed at empowering the black majority to depend on themselves as opposed to relying on the State. / Development Studies / M.A. (Development Studies)

This thesis explores the role and positionality of three Black public intellectuals in post-94 South Africa, namely, Simphiwe Dana, Ntsiki Mazwai and Sisonke Msimang. For the purpose of this study, I analysed the twitter postings shared by these intellectuals on various social matters that concern the condition of the Black in post-94 South Africa. Using Fanon’s Native Intellectual Consciousness as a lens, the study seeks to capture and evaluate an emergent form of ‘cyber’ activism in the country. The main argument of this thesis is that, the concept and function of intellectualism must undergo a complete overhaul, beginning with the accommodation of more voices, particularly those of oppressed Black women. For this reason, the study is based on three Black women and seeks to dismantle the colonial lens through which Black women are studied This study not only historicises Black women as producers, users and custodians of knowledge but it also situates their lived experiences as relevant ‘knowledges’ albeit ignored in discourse. Moreover, the study is not only a form of epistemic protest against epistemic racism, but it is also a form of Black positioning in communication studies. I therefore posit that, Black Twitter is the communicative plane on which blackness performs and articulates itself, for itself. For this purpose, I conceptualise Black Solidarity within Communication studies; a field that often pretends to be only marginally affected by issues of race. This study contributes to Communication Studies, a new, raw and altruistic way of studying blackness by allowing it to think, and speak through its pain as opposed to the usual pathologising white gaze. Using the decolonial concept of a traditional Imbadu as the methodological aspect in conducting this study, I observe that even in the face of debilitating colonial hangover, blackness persists through those intellectuals whose intergenerational trauma forces them to think and speak from Blackness. The chosen intellectuals who are feminists by choice, think and speak from Blackness albeit being silenced by oppression. As such, the study itself is a pedagogical contradiction to the orthodox axiology of a detached scholar and hence written in the autobiographical form. / Communication Science / D. Phil. (Communication)

The focus of fighting tyranny and the justifications of the consecutive wars in fantasy literature for children and young adults play a noteworthy role in the intertwinement of literature and its educational potential. This genre is filled with numerous images of violence, in particular different scenarios of war and its justifications. In the books war constitutes the final battle between good and evil, and thus manifests the protagonists’ ultimate moral decisions between these two forces. The following books constitute the corpus: C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56), Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence (1965-77), Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000), J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007), Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle (2002-11), Amanda Hemingway’s Sangreal Trilogy (2005-07), and P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast’s House of Night novels (2007-2014). Although not all the books feature wars, all display justifications for war and the imperative to fight tyranny. Located within an intersection of diverse critical theories, my thesis engages literary texts in order to reflect on their capacity to negotiate, challenge, subvert, and perpetuate values and power structures. Motif analysis forms the centre of this analysis. I deploy a varied approach to literary analysis, relying upon literary and cultural theories (especially theories of ideology) to understand the realizations of the different motifs. Through issues of character construction, (political) authority, religion, and the construction of difference, the reader learns much about the culture and values of the respective world. Furthermore, this analysis invites the reader to find parallels between the fabricated world and the real world, and thus transfer what s/he has learned from the texts his/her own world. Engaging in such a reading ensures the drawing of direct connections between the reality constructed in the books on the one hand, and politics, the construction of difference, religion, and just war theory in the reader’s world on the other. The content analysis leads to broader cultural messages, which comprise assumptions about gender, power, ethnicity, religion, and morality. This methodology emphasizes the relevance as well as the complexity of the books and their educative potential, and facilitates the analysis of the books as tools for the defence and perpetuation of Western values and culture.

[pt] O governo Lula da Silva (2003-2010) tem sido tratado na Análise da Política Externa Brasileira (APEB) principalmente sob uma abordagem de mudança versus continuidade. Contudo, a forma como a área avalia mudança e continuidade pode precisar ser reestruturada e, se mudança ou continuidade forem encontradas, podem ser de um tipo diferente do que a literatura estabeleceu até agora. Resultado ilustrativo disso é a redução da capacidade do campo de entender a recente guinada à extrema direita no Brasil e como a forte polarização e as disputas de memória sobre os governos Lula e Dilma poderiam se relacionar com a política externa, por exemplo. Esses movimentos recentes parecem desafiar as análises tradicionais de custo-benefício, bem como considerar a profunda influência entre os discursos domésticos de identidade e a Política Externa oficial. Portanto, proponho olhar para abordagens pós-estruturalistas e construtivistas de política externa, identidade e biografias nacionais, os quais analisam os discursos da política externa no contexto de uma ontologia lacaniana de falta e ansiedade, levando à busca contínua por uma (impossível) estabilidade e segurança ontológica. Compreendendo a política externa como práticas discursivas que traçam fronteiras entre o doméstico e o internacional e as narrativas biográficas do passado, do presente e do futuro desejado, a literatura sugere um papel central para os significantes mestres e os investimentos libidinais sobre eles. A partir daí, a principal contribuição desta tese é apresentar a (re)construção das narrativas biográficas brasileiras sob a ótica dos analistas da APEB, que inclui políticos e acadêmicos, com o objetivo de mapear os significantes mestres em torno dos quais circulam suas narrativas hegemônicas. De acordo com o campo, os significantes mestres encontrados como norteadores das narrativas biográficas hegemônicas do Brasil foram miscigenação/democracia racial, legalismo/pacifismo, desenvolvimento e autonomia. Em torno deles, muitos outros relevantes circulam. Posteriormente, esses significantes mestres e suas cadeias de significação foram contrastados com os discursos oficiais do PEB durante o período Lula, tentando entender se e em que medida os discursos da Política Externa de Lula poderiam ter deslocado significados sobre as narrativas da identidade brasileira. Esta tese dá atenção especial aos discursos raciais e sua relação com um sentimento de insegurança ontológica do self brasileiro. Não objetivando apresentar respostas definitivas ao assunto e encontrando muitos elementos de complexidade e ambiguidade discursiva durante o período Lula, levando também em consideração a natureza deslizante/cambiante dos significantes, um dos principais objetivos deste trabalho é mostrar o papel construtivo da academia da APEB na compreensão brasileira de suas narrativas biográficas. Outro objetivo é explorar como os discursos domésticos de identidade, parte da política externa, ativamente informam e/ou limitam a Política Externa oficial e como esta influencia as compreensões internas de eu e outro (política externa) no Brasil. Tal abordagem rompe com a ideia tradicional de Política Externa como uma ponte entre o doméstico e o internacional. Diferentemente, entende-a como uma construção discursiva enraizada em narrativas libidinais e imaginárias, ancorada por significantes mestres (e deslizantes), de seu eu ou ego, bem como do ideal do ego e dos outros. / [en] Lula da Silva s government (2003-2010) has been approached in Brazilian Foreign Policy Analysis (BFPA) mainly under a framework of change versus continuity. Nonetheless, the way the area assesses change and continuity might need to be framed differently and, if either change or continuity are found, it might be of a different kind than the literature has established so far. An illustrative result of this is a reduced capacity of the field to understand the recent turn towards the far-right in Brazil and how the strong polarization and memory disputes over the Lula and Dilma governments could relate to foreign policy, for example. Those recent movements seem to defy the regular cost-benefit calculus, as well as to consider the deep influence between domestic discourses of identity and official Foreign Policy. Therefore, I propose to look at post-structuralist and constructivist approaches to foreign policy and identity and national biographies that analyze foreign policy discourses in the context of a Lacanian ontology of lack and anxiety, which leads to the country s continuous search for (impossible) stability and ontological (in)security. Understanding foreign policy as discursive practices drawing frontiers between the domestic and the international and the biographical narratives of past, present, and desired future, the literature suggests a central role to master signifiers and the libidinal investments over them. Henceforth, the main contribution of this thesis is presenting the (re)construction of Brazilian biographical narratives under the lenses of the analysts of BFPA, which includes both politicians and academicians, aiming to map the master signifiers around which their hegemonic narratives circulate. According to the field, the master signifiers found guiding Brazil s hegemonic biographical narratives were miscegenation/racial democracy, legalism/pacifism, development, and autonomy. Around those, many other relevant ones circulate. Later on, those master signifiers and their chains of significance were contrasted to the official BFP discourses during Lula, trying to understand if and to what extent Lula s Foreign Policy discourses could have dislocated meaning over Brazilian identity narratives. This thesis pays special attention to racial discourses and their relation to a sense of ontological insecurity of the Brazilian self. Not aiming to present definitive answers to the matter and finding many elements of complexity and discursive ambiguity during Lula, also taking into consideration the sliding/shifting nature of signifiers, one of the main objectives of this work is to show the constructive role of the BFPA academia in Brazil’s understandings of its biographical narratives. Another central goal is to explore how the realm of domestic identity discourses, part of foreign policy, actively inform and/or limit official Foreign Policy and how this one influences back Brazil s domestic understandings of self and other (foreign policy). Such an approach disrupts the traditional idea of Foreign Policy as a bridge between the domestic and the international. Differently, takes it as a discursive construction entrenched to libidinal and imaginary narratives, anchored by master (and sliding) signifiers, of its self or ego, as well as the ideal of the ego and the others.