It is evident that there is fairly widespread disapproval of intimate interracial relationships. This thesis explores the experiences of those involved in such relationships, how they manage their relationships, and the kind of pressures they confront. It considered the ways in which the reactions and attitudes of significant others and strangers impact upon such relationships and, the adaptive processes people involved have developed. The thesis also explored a range of popular explanations of the motivation of those involved in intimate interracial relationships. Utilising qualitative research methodology the study used semi-structured interviews with 20 black men and 20 white women about their experiences and involvement in intimate interracial relationships. The main findings of the study were that: 1) People involved in interracial relationships develop, individually and jointly, a range of strategies that enables them to manage their relationship in the face of hostilities and disapproval from significant others and strangers. 2) The people involved (particularly the black partners) go through a personal crisis because their sense of identity and cultural affiliations are called into question by significant others and strangers. 3) People involved in the relationship look 'within' for support and reinforcement rather than seeking the approval and acceptance of their relationship from significant others and/or strangers. 4) There is often an attempt to control and manage information about the relationship; for example whom to inform and when to inform significant others. 5) People involved in the relationships develop friendships with people in similar type relationships. 6) Black women were deemed by people involved in the relationship to express the most vehement opposition towards interracial relationships

No description available.

This work is centred on the ethnomethodological concern that all texts can be respecified, as situated accomplishments of members' practical action and practical reasoning. Using, as a foundation, the work of Garfinkel (1967) and Sacks (I 992a; 1992; b) it undertakes the explication of members' methods of understanding and maldng sense of news reportage concerning airliner crashes. Methodologically it is grounded in Sacks' work on membership categories, devices and category bound activities. It is the assertion of this work that the study of the language of the news media should not be motivated by theoretical concerns and finthermore that the subject matter be considered as formally located in the occaisioned particulars of its Use.

No description available.

No description available.

The thesis presented here constructs a challenge to our understanding of the society we live in. It confronts our capacity to revise and re-interpret our history in such a way as to obscure, if not eliminate, that which we deem inappropriate, uncomfortable, or expendable. It is further contended that this tendency to ahistoricism is a feature of official discourse. The state is complicit in the process and a principal architect of the structure of knowledge that imbues the process with authority. This thesis contributes to our knowledge and understanding of the discursive strategies of the state by creating a theoretical framework that facilitates the critical analysis of official documents. By locating the authors, their textual productions, and their readers in time and space, it becomes possible, as it were, to read between the lines and recognise the retum effect on domestic govemance of the technologies of domination developed abroad. The purpose here is not to liberate the subjugated knowledges of the welfare recipient, the immigrant, or the raCially oppressed, but 5 to critique the creativity of state power in producing, annexing, and eliminating identity within the context of the nation-state. Three documents have been selected as exemplars of the extent to which a colonising mentality, a way of understanding social relations born of colonial rule, continues to permeate social policy in both its formulation and documentation. The Scarman report (1981), the Griffiths report (1988), and the Macpherson report (1999) taken together articulate a post-modern thematic of difference. By focusing, as they do. on the Other within the body politic, these documents reveal a great deal about the Self that organises English social reality.

This thesis develops three independent lines of investigation on the social psychology of political action and social change. Rather than developing a grand theory, I focus on adapting current perspectives in the social psychology of emotion, automaticity, goals and mental simulation to the study of political action and social change. The approach taken is eclectic both theoretically and methodologically. In Chapter 1, I review the social psychology of political action and social change. In doing so, I conceptualise political action and social change and explore current explanations of these phenomena. I also introduce moral emotions, automaticity and imagination in order to mark the way for the subsequent chapters. In Chapter 2, I examine the role of the moral emotions in political action and social change. Specifically, I explore the antecedents and consequences of anger, sympathy, and admiration. Drawing on theories of intergroup relations and emotion, I show that legitimate status, competence, and warmth all elicit admiration. Notably, admiration towards the authorities and centres of group power inhibits political action aimed at challenging the social order. However, when the target of admiration is a subversive hero or “martyr”, admiration uniquely predict willingness to challenge the status quo. In Chapter 3 I investigate the role of automaticity in political action. More specifically, I develop a dual process account of political action. I demonstrate that controlled (vs. automatic) processes lead to an increase in political action tendencies in members of a disadvantaged group. Notably, automatic protest attitudes influence political action through anger. That is, the more positive one’s automatic protest attitudes are the more anger they feel in relation to group grievances. Notably, automatic attitudes are more likely to predict political action when one is low in the motivation and ability to deliberate on political issues. In Chapter 4 I examine the role of imagination in political action and social change. I demonstrate that being able to imagine a particular social change goal (e.g., revolution or reform) uniquely predict political action tendencies aimed at that goal. Notably, imagination also qualifies the influence of efficacy and anger on politic action tendencies. Put simply, anger only predicts political action for collective mobility when group members can imagine this social change goal. In addition, efficacy only predicts action aimed at revolution when one can imagine an alternative social system (e.g., economy). In Chapter 5 I draw some conclusions, and discuss the limitations and issues that arise from the work presented here. Finally, I propose some avenues for future research. In iii addition, I put forward a typology of social change in the hope that it will engender future work on the social psychology of political action and social change.

The aftermath of World War II witnessed large-scale military demobilisation and. in its wake, a vast influx of returning servicemen. Their homecoming signalled a transition from military to civilian life which was often described as 'readjustment.' The term is usually taken to imply a process of homogenisation which engendered a condition of conformity in ex-servicemen and, by extension, in society at large. This thesis argues against this view and demonstrates that 'readjustment' wasn't intended to reproduce conformity but, on the contrary, was to provide the means for the reconversion of the 'conformist' ex-serviceman into the independent, autonomous citizen necessary for the functioning of a democratic society, especially in contradistinction to the conformism associated with the totalitarian Other. It was assumed that servicemen had become habituated to the military's authoritarian regimen of regulation and command which subsumed individuality. Hence, 'readjustment' was concerned with the 'nonconformist' individual who would become indispensable to a postwar' Americanism' which was being defensively constructed against totalitarianism and, moreover, against the 'totalitarian' implications of a conformism often seen as endemic in America as a mass society. This study recontextualises postwar film narratives (1945-48) in relation to the discourse of 'readjustment' and, by treating 'conformity' as a complex, contradictory and unreliable term, it problematises 'readjustment' and its role in the construction of postwar 'conformity.' The thesis draws methodologically on Michel Foucault's work on discourse theory, and Dana Polan's approaches to 1940s' narrative and social history. The study comprises two principal areas of research: part one analyses the sociological construction of 'readjustment,' and part two examines how 'readjustment' and its ramifications were refracted through film narrative. The film readings acknowledge the incoherence and instability implicit in the title's key terms through an approach which highlights narrative inconsistency, ambivalence and contradiction, and which works to disturb the notion of postwar social history as a stable, coherent narrative.

No description available.

No description available.