This legal comparative study explores the nature and development of rabbinic thought on intermarriage. One could hardly phrase the query that lies at the heart of this work better than the Talmud itself: "Is she forbidden or permitted?" (bSanhedrin 82a). This challenge, posed to Moses as part of an exegetical exploration of the problem of intermarriage, asks so much more than whether an Israelite might marry a Gentile. It points to conflicts between biblical law and narrative, biblical and rabbinic law, as well as incompatibilities within rabbinic halakhah. The issues of status, national identity and gender loom large as the various legal and narrative sources on intermarriage are set on an hermeneutic collision course. In this way many rabbinic sources display a deep understanding of the complexity inherent to any discussion of intermarriage in rabbinic tradition. Considering intermarriage as a construct that lies at the intersection between identity and marital rules, we begin this study of rabbinic legal systems with an analysis of the notion of intramarriage and Jewish identity in halakhah as expressed through the system of the asarah yuchasin (ten lineages). Discussion of various systems dealing with intermarriage follows, including qiddushin (Jewish betrothal/marriage) and the status of the offspring of intermarriage, the concept of the qahal (congregation of God), the arayot (levitical incest laws) as well as the individual legal rules related to marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Gentiles. The role of narrative in the representation of case law and rabbinic engagement with these legal systems forms an integral part of our analysis of the law. The overall conclusion of the dissertation is that rabbinic approaches to intermarriage were characterized by multiplicity and diversity. Rabbinic tradition engaged with the issue of intermarriage through a wide variety of often unrelated and incompatible legal systems. Furthermore, it is apparent that conflicting attitudes towards the interpretation and implementation of these rules are represented in both tannaitic (c. 70-200 C.E.) and amoraic sources (c. 200-500 C.E.), such that several key problems related to intermarriage in early rabbinic tradition remain unresolved.

This study uses institutional ethnography (IE) to address the question of how young women, considered to be “at risk” youth, make decisions about their working lives. Based on interviews with young women and program workers in housing, employment, young mothers’ and girls’ programs, field observations, and document analysis at Gen-Y (pseudonym for a women’s community-based social services agency), young women’s provisioning experiences are used to critique current program and policy models that feature notions of choice and risk. Provisioning is a concept that captures a wide range of work and work-related activities that young women perform for themselves and people they feel responsible for. IE is applied to understand how institutional processes and practices give rise to the conditions under which young women participants at Gen-Y make career and life decisions.

The impetus for this study came from my own history of being a single mother while completing my undergraduate degree and the struggles that entailed. The research uncovers both the barriers and facilitators experienced by single mothers in undergraduate programs in a Canadian context and utilizes a framework of access and equity in education. The co-participants belonged to diverse social and political identities in terms of age, race and ethnicity, sexuality, (dis)ability, and countries of birth. All the women attended universities in Southern Ontario. Twenty-five women agreed to be interviewed in either a group or individual interview. Co-participants were encouraged to contribute to the design and analysis of the study wherever possible. Previous research based in the United States conceptualized single mother students as social assistance recipients and explored their difficulties within this context. This study suggests using a wider lens to include other experiences identified by co-participants and the literature review. The study locates barriers both within the university as well as in the larger society such as interpersonal violence, stress, financial insecurity, racism and other forms of discrimination. However, it also identifies supports and strengths single mothers encountered such as family, friends, children as motivation, professors, on-campus supports, and critical pedagogy, all of which were largely missing from previous research. Many women challenged the often pathologizing dominant discourse and instead described single motherhood as empowering, independent, and liberating as compared to being a part of a traditional nuclear family. Co-participants also identified feeling isolated, discussions around which engendered a social group outside of the research project. By creating awareness of the needs of diverse single mother students, this project aims to disrupt the still-prevalent notion of the “traditional student” and accompanying policies and practices in institutions of education and the wider community. While much has been documented in Canada about the need for access, equity, and inclusive schooling, single mothers in particular have not been a main focus and included among other intersections of identity. The findings from this study address this gap and contribute to the literature.

Situated in the postcolonial modernizing discourse of development, many empowerment narratives tend to pre-identify, pre-construct and categorize community development workers/ mobilizers as empowered bodies, catalysts, and change agents. These bodies are expected to and are assumed will facilitate a transformation in oppressed peoples’ self image and belief’s about their rights and capabilities. Although feminist academics/activists have been critical of imperialist, neo-liberal and politico-religious co-optations of understandings of empowerment, limited attention seems to have been paid to the material effects of empowerment narratives on the lives of these community development workers. Nor does there appear to be sufficient analysis into how local community development workers/mobilizers who find themselves in precarious positions of employment, engage with these narratives. Provided with guidelines based on project objectives and lists of targets, many development workers/mobilizers in Pakistan tend to live with expectations of how best to ‘translate/transform’ empowerment from the abstract into the concrete while restricted in their space to critically reflect on theoretical notions that drive their practice. This thesis provides insight into the economy of empowerment narratives and the potential they have to mediate ‘encounters’ shaping ‘subject’ and ‘other’ by critically exploring how bodies of community development workers are put to work and are made to work. Drawing on feminists poststructuralist and postcolonial theory my work explores how these community workers/mobilizers located in the urban metropolis of Karachi, embedded in a web of multiple intersecting structures of oppression and power relations ‘encounter’, theorize, strategize and act upon understanding of empowerment and community development through an arts informed cooperative inquiry. Through the use of prose, creative writing, short stories, photo narratives, artwork and interactive discussions my participants and I begin to complicate these narratives. As a result empowerment narratives begin to appear as colliding discourses, multi-layered complex constructs, which may form unpredictable, messy and contradictory assemblages; as opposed to linear, universal, inevitable and easily understood outcomes and processes. I conclude that the insistence to complicate and situate such messy understandings in specific contexts is important for women’s movements if empowerment is to retain its strategic meaning and value in feminist theorizing.

The purpose of this project was to empower the incarcerated women at the Jefferson Correctional Institution in Monticello, Florida, through the use of a faith-based program, 'Empowered to Endure Hardship.' The project consisted of sixteen (16) consecutive weeks of group participation, involving 75 women who were divided into two groups. Group A, the target group, consisted of 45 women who completed the questionnaires and participated in all of the group sessions and activities. Group B, the control group, consisted of 30 women who only completed the questionnaires. The sessions in which the target group participated included video and audio preaching tapes, live preaching, group interaction and discussions, prayer and a short devotional period at each session. All of the sermons contained one common thread: How to overcome or endure hardships in life. Practical examples were given for endurance and overcoming techniques were demonstrated. The overall hypothesis was as a result of Group A's participation in an organized structured group, the participants would receive fewer disciplinary reports, corrective counseling reports, and confinement visitations than those in Group B. While this goal was attained by Group A, there was not enough significant difference in Group B to merit any real attention. This does not mean the project was a failure. For in the ensuing weeks after the project was completed, the members of Group B continued to ask that another group be formed in which they could participate to receive the same empowerment that Group A had received. This model of ministry for the women at Jefferson Correctional Institution is ongoing and allows for additional components of ministry as future needs arise.

This qualitative inquiry uses a life history prospective approach to investigate the social context in which adolescent girls’ sexual feelings emerge and in which girls’ sexual experiences occur. Nine adolescent girls were interviewed at two points in time during their adolescence and themes from their narratives were analyzed with respect to their experiences with sexuality. It appears that peers, family members, and sexual/dating partners have a major effect on both, girls’ sexual experiences and their connection with their sexual feelings. Prospective analysis revealed that over time, the social contexts of adolescent girls became more complex and girls became exposed to increasingly contradictory messages about what they should do and feel and behave. Girls appeared to have internalized the social messages around sexuality, which was evident through how girls talked about sexuality and through girls’ direct reports that their decisions were affected by the social and familial implications of their decisions.

Social movement activism throughout the 1960s and 1970s provided space for feminist concerns in a variety of arenas. Women's movement activism and women's scholarship in history challenged the ways in which women’s experiences had been marginalized or omitted in school history programs and curricula. Women's organizations developed and broadened networks, created and published resources, and lobbied governments and institutions. Their widespread activism spilled into a range of educational circles and influenced history teachers in altering curricula to include women in course materials. Advocating for women, on a curricular or professional development level, however, was complicated because of entrenched neo-liberal systems in place within education institutions. Although the Ontario Ministry of Education and the Toronto Board of Education demonstrated clear support for a wide range of gender equity-based initiatives, they committed to implementing a 'piecemeal' approach to curricular change. The fundamental work to include women in history curricula relied heavily on grassroots networks that allowed for women’s experiences to leak into classrooms, and were responsible for bringing women’s voices into the history curricula. This study explores the initiatives of the Toronto Board of Education from 1968-1993, with particular analysis of women’s committees, teacher/librarians in resource centers, Affirmative Action representatives, individual teachers and administrators. Within the broader public sphere, the contributions of concerned parents, activists, small independent publishers, educational reformers, political leaders and women’s history organizations lent their voices to ideas about how the inclusion of women in history curricula should take shape in Toronto schools. Ministry gender equity policies and history course guidelines provided incremental and therefore politically safe responses to educational change. The Toronto Board's "add-on" approach to including women in course examinations avoided instituting major "top-down'" curricular change, which kept the integration of women’s history within classrooms on the periphery of most course work. The substantive grassroots activism and the commitment of women’s organizations and individual teachers, however, allowed women’s history to flourish within individual classrooms in Toronto and demonstrates the ways in which "bottom-up" initiatives can be a powerful force in curricular change.

This qualitative inquiry uses a life history prospective approach to investigate the social context in which adolescent girls’ sexual feelings emerge and in which girls’ sexual experiences occur. Nine adolescent girls were interviewed at two points in time during their adolescence and themes from their narratives were analyzed with respect to their experiences with sexuality. It appears that peers, family members, and sexual/dating partners have a major effect on both, girls’ sexual experiences and their connection with their sexual feelings. Prospective analysis revealed that over time, the social contexts of adolescent girls became more complex and girls became exposed to increasingly contradictory messages about what they should do and feel and behave. Girls appeared to have internalized the social messages around sexuality, which was evident through how girls talked about sexuality and through girls’ direct reports that their decisions were affected by the social and familial implications of their decisions.

The no borders movement has been an important site of anti-imperialist resistance, and as such it provides a valuable point of entry into problematizing the contradictions that constitute the relations of consciousness, praxis and ideology. By tracing the recent history of no borders activism in relation to the intensification of neoliberalism, and the prevalence of diffuse models of power, the analysis illustrates the ways in which critical praxis has been limited by the current milieu. Working from an anti-racist feminist perspective I utilize examples drawn from no borders activism to demonstrate the very real limits of informal and incidental learning in social movements. The analysis argues against the supplanting of consciousness with subjectivity as a way to avoid the problems associated with structuralist analysis. Instead, I have suggested that critical education for social action requires a dialectical engagement with the social relations that we live in, contest and transform.

Situated in the postcolonial modernizing discourse of development, many empowerment narratives tend to pre-identify, pre-construct and categorize community development workers/ mobilizers as empowered bodies, catalysts, and change agents. These bodies are expected to and are assumed will facilitate a transformation in oppressed peoples’ self image and belief’s about their rights and capabilities. Although feminist academics/activists have been critical of imperialist, neo-liberal and politico-religious co-optations of understandings of empowerment, limited attention seems to have been paid to the material effects of empowerment narratives on the lives of these community development workers. Nor does there appear to be sufficient analysis into how local community development workers/mobilizers who find themselves in precarious positions of employment, engage with these narratives. Provided with guidelines based on project objectives and lists of targets, many development workers/mobilizers in Pakistan tend to live with expectations of how best to ‘translate/transform’ empowerment from the abstract into the concrete while restricted in their space to critically reflect on theoretical notions that drive their practice. This thesis provides insight into the economy of empowerment narratives and the potential they have to mediate ‘encounters’ shaping ‘subject’ and ‘other’ by critically exploring how bodies of community development workers are put to work and are made to work. Drawing on feminists poststructuralist and postcolonial theory my work explores how these community workers/mobilizers located in the urban metropolis of Karachi, embedded in a web of multiple intersecting structures of oppression and power relations ‘encounter’, theorize, strategize and act upon understanding of empowerment and community development through an arts informed cooperative inquiry. Through the use of prose, creative writing, short stories, photo narratives, artwork and interactive discussions my participants and I begin to complicate these narratives. As a result empowerment narratives begin to appear as colliding discourses, multi-layered complex constructs, which may form unpredictable, messy and contradictory assemblages; as opposed to linear, universal, inevitable and easily understood outcomes and processes. I conclude that the insistence to complicate and situate such messy understandings in specific contexts is important for women’s movements if empowerment is to retain its strategic meaning and value in feminist theorizing.