This thesis aimed to investigate, first, the potentially traumatic effects of AIDS-related bereavement on HIV/AIDS aid workers in South Africa; second, the resources that aid workers utilise in order to cope with their work; and third, differences in the experiences of local versus international aid workers. HIV/AIDS work is associated with various stresses and burnout is commonly observed among HIV/AIDS caregivers. Care of HIV/AIDS aid workers, however, has been largely overlooked; research has typically focused on the experiences of professional health workers, and often outside of an African setting. This present study, therefore, addressed these limitations with the use of participant observation ethnography and ethnographic interviewing. A period of one year was spent with an organisation in South Africa that provides care for vulnerable children in need and affected by HIV/AIDS. Openended semi-structured interviews were conducted with 63 male and female local and international staff and volunteers. The interviews were analysed using discourse analysis (DA), a methodology novel within HIV/AIDS and trauma research and particularly suitable for investigating language, social context and interaction, and identities, which are factors found to be important in HIV/AIDS work. Participants’ discourses were analysed to identify how they construct their identities, concepts such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, events they experienced, and how they made sense of these phenomena. The main finding of this study was that contemporary HIV/AIDS aid work involves new challenges that have surpassed AIDS-related bereavement as the most prominent concern. The main challenges reported by participants involved the inability to control HIV/AIDS treatment and consequently inability to prevent, or control, AIDS-related death as a result of patient non-compliance. Participants further constructed HIV contraction as controllable and, therefore, avoidable, and used this micro discourse on control to counter HIV-related stigma, particularly stigma they experienced as HIV/AIDS aid workers. This rhetorical technique, however, rather maintains the macro discourse on HIV-related stigma by maintaining the blame component of the disease. Two identity constructions emerged in participants’ discourses. First, the characteristics inherent in the child identity suggested that loss is not merely a matter of death but also sadness for and on behalf of children for their various losses. Second, the caregiver identity prescribed how ‘proper’ and ‘genuine’ HIV/AIDS caregivers are expected to behave. The prescriptive nature of this identity can explain burnout among HIV/AIDS caregivers. The rewards of caregiving, however, can act as a buffer against difficult or traumatic experiences inherent in HIV/AIDS work. Managerial support and global belief systems that allow finding meaning were further identified as important coping resources for HIV/AIDS aid workers. Finally, differences between local and international participants, in terms of how they conceptualise phenomena and consequently have different needs, emphasise the role of culture in the experiences of HIV/AIDS aid workers. In the thesis I further discuss these findings in light of theories of social psychology, such as the Just World hypothesis, Cognitive Dissonance, and Identity Control Theory and Self-Categorization Theory. I conclude that although AIDS-related death no longer is a prominent issue, care of HIV/AIDS aid workers should not be overlooked. Contemporary HIV/AIDS work simply involves new challenges and traumas, and it is important that such work is continuously researched to identify evolving needs.

This thesis aims to provide a close analysis of poetry slam in the United Kingdom and United States, using the tools of ethnography and discourse analysis to produce an in-depth account, which is sensitive to the discursively constructed, situated meanings of slam participants. The aim is to explore how slam is understood by its participants, producing a partial ethnography, rather than a definitive history, defence or critique of slam. The thesis is based predominantly on research conducted in four key sites (Bristol and London in the U.K. and Chicago and New York in the U.S.), and considers how slam has been reconstructed in different geographical and social contexts. In addition, this study seeks to highlight issues around: the ways in which artists understand art worlds and their positions within them; the multiple and complex power relations with which art world participants engage; the transient, enduring and virtual communities which art world participants form; the local, translocal and transnational networks which connect these communities and individuals; and the interactions between new/avant-garde and established/dominant art worlds. It is hoped that this analysis will enrich substantially the existing meagre body of research into poetry slam, providing valuable theoretical contributions to the study of art worlds and the social construction of self and relationships. Beyond this, the thesis aims to elucidate a social scientific paradigm which links micro level analyses with macro level social structures and processes, by allying work from multiple theoretical perspectives including those of interactionism, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu and discourse analysis. This paradigm is mobilised to illuminate how slam participants actively construct their identities and negotiate the complex power relations which structure their everyday interactions. In line with the poetic focus of this research, each analytic chapter of this thesis concludes with a haiku. I begin with this thought: Power relations/Are complex navigations/Through interaction.

The advent of medical journalism was initially felt to be an answer to the problem of communicating health and medical information to the public. However, currently, there is a concern among scientists with the way the media, newspapers in particular, communicate health and medical information. The concern of the medical community in particular and of the scientific community in general is that newspapers ‘distort’ health and medical information. In order to deal with this ‘perceived’ problem, scientists adopt a mechanical view and propose to solve it by issuing guidelines for journalists to follow when writing health and medical news. Close investigation of journalistic practice shows that many of the proposed guidelines are already present in journalistic practice, and yet, the concern for ‘distortion’ remains. The overall aim of the thesis is to contribute to this issue. Adopting an Applied Linguistics perspective, more specifically, using the discourse analytic methodology of Genre Analysis, the thesis demonstrates that Health and Medical News Reports are first and foremost news stories and that the proposed guidelines fail to achieve the envisaged changes precisely because they seem to be ignorant of this essential reality. In order to reach this conclusion, Genre Analysis is applied to different types of texts with a view to comparing their structures. Some of the text types used have already been described in the literature, but others are analysed for the first time in this thesis. Thus, comparison is made between Health and Medical Research Articles and Health and Medical News Reports, between Popularised Health and Medical Texts and Health and Medical News Reports, between News Texts and Health and Medical News Reports and between Health and Medical Press Releases and Health and Medical News Reports. Genre Analysis shows that Health and Medical News Reports are first and foremost news stories and, therefore, that the discourse of ‘distortion’ is somewhat ‘misguided’. However, because of its nature as a structural analysis, Genre Analysis leaves one important question unanswered, namely the ‘why’ of the discourse of distortion. Although it is beyond the scope of this thesis to investigate this question, in the thesis, it is indicated that a more context-sensitive analysis, using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for example, could fruitfully be pursued. This thesis draws on four types of data. The main data set consists of Health and Medical News Reports published in The Herald and The Guardian between April and May 2007, where possible, corresponding press releases were collected. Email interviews were conducted with authors whose research was reported in the two newspapers. Finally, ethnographic observation of newsrooms and face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted with journalists who wrote the reports over a period of one week.

This thesis is submitted for the award of PhD by publication. It comprises four interconnected, published research papers linked by a contextualising narrative. The publications are all peer-reviewed research articles published between 2012 and 2017 in relevant UK journals. I am the sole author of three of the papers and first author of one paper. My thesis considers how social workers make sense of complex and uncertain information in child welfare and protection social work. My first paper considers the how an understanding of human judgement and sense-making can influence social worker's capacity of child-focused thinking. My synthesis of the literature indicated that social workers' styles of judgement are strongly bounded or influenced by external factors such as complexity of information and time available to make decisions. It is this "bounded" model of rationality which I have employed to provide the theoretical and conceptual framework for this thesis. I have included two papers exploring data which I collected in a non-participatory ethnographic study of social workers' sense-making in a local authority children and families team. These papers represent a valuable contribution to current understandings of social work sense-making. This naturalistic study identified a number of key themes and processes in sense-making which are directly relevant to developing and maintaining best practice. The final paper was developed over the period of my PhD studies. The paper builds on existing research and develops theories of bounded rationality into a conceptual model which I have referred to as an "Ecology of Judgement" for child welfare and protection social work. By modelling the complex interplay between the mind of the social worker and the information environment in which they are operating the model has utility in practice development and research.

In the last decades, scholars from different disciplines, ranging from economy to law, have tried to better identify and target the working poor in order to provide them with legal protection. Some have referred to categories such as ‘non-standard or precarious forms of employment,’ ‘informal labor’ and ‘popular economy’ to refer to the working poor. My dissertation questions those categories and their ability to target the workers most in need, as well as their underlying assumptions that the activities of the working poor are not regulated by law, but rather fall into a legal vacuum. Using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, I conducted research with one group of vulnerable workers (whom I refer to as street rebuscadores) in Bogotá (Colombia) to answer two main questions: 1) how can we better target and characterize the social grouping to whom the most vulnerable segment of the working poor in Bogotá belongs? 2) How do both State and non-State legal regimes, such as constitutional law, labour law and derecho de policía, interact to influence the productive strategies of the most vulnerable workers in Bogotá? Following Bourdieu’s theory of practice, I found that street rebuscadores constitute the most vulnerable segment of the working poor in a city deeply segregated by class, that they share a similar volume and composition of overall capital (or habitus) and that they share similar practices associated with that habitus. Following a legal pluralist approach, I also concluded that as a social group engaging in regulatory activities, street rebuscadores are situated in a semi-autonomous social field generating internal normative rules, but that is also vulnerable to rules from the larger social matrix in which it is situated. Within that semi-autonomous social field, the vulnerability of street rebuscadores is legally constructed and accentuated by the State, and existing regulatory frameworks are perpetuating and reproducing their condition, although not without resistance.

No description available.

This research examines problematic and taken for granted issues in Scottish Secondary Education, from a critical community psychological perspective. Young people are positioned as central to the research, in particular young people experiencing exclusion being the most disempowered group in education, and to fully understand problems they experience the thesis develops a standpoint with young people. Methodologically the research is grounded in a particular approach to praxis. Critical reflection, action and knowledge construction all influence one another cyclically in complex relationships, at times conflicting and at others developing together dialogically and these relationships are embraced and reflected upon carefully. Power and knowledge are viewed as being inextricably linked and knowledge, what is legitimated within a certain frame of reference as ‘truth’ or ‘reality’, is viewed as being constructed by dominant groups with the power to do so. Ethnography was carried out in three educational settings: a mainstream High School; a Special School in a city centre catering for young people experiencing exclusion; and a Youth Project where permanently excluded young people were on an alternative curriculum. Qualitative methods were used in a varied and tailored way for each setting and group of people and included Participatory Action Research and group work with young people, interview and group work with teachers, active participation in settings leading to fieldwork notes, and collection of textual information. Analysis involved careful examination of a wide variety of material, drawing on various methods of discourse analysis. The research material was analysed for the ways in which education made possible and placed limits on legislation, social practices, ways of speaking and ways of being. The assumption that adults must be in control of young people in education was found to be absolute and pervasive, stemming from societal ideas of young people, but also perpetuating them. This emerged throughout my research, from practices in mainstream school to ways of speaking available to adults and young people. Inclusion, while often spoken of in relation to equality and social justice, in practice is often conditional, and is re-positioned in this thesis as a form of control. School exclusion is often described in education as being expelled or suspended, but is repositioned in this research more generally as being excluded from learning and peers, and is argued as inherently problematic. Problematic, institutional, educational discourse is constructed as often placing limits on ways of speaking, such that critical reflection and action within secondary education becomes very difficult for adults and young people. Ways of speaking available to young people are examined and demonstrate that while education imposes particular ways of speaking and being, young people find opportunities to resist and reconstruct. Ways of being are examined, between adults and young people in educational settings, and an account of performance of resistance and compliance between young people and adults is developed. This research draws on a complex and multi disciplinary use of theory, literature, methodology and methods, and in doing so constructs an account of young people’s experiences in education that is based on a standpoint with young people. By grounding the research in the interests of young people, particularly those experiencing school exclusion, it challenges assumptions of dominance and control that have implications for education as a whole and all those operating within.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:51:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 1307.pdf: 2216303 bytes, checksum: 5f2e521f10e215ad8a43ba918e97cd08 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-02-02 / The work and its organization are suffering continually modifications front to the new requirements from the contemporary society. The insertion of new information and communication technologies in the productive processes directs new studies to better understand the logic behind the transformation process and the work organization. The proposal is to study analytically and qualitatively the transformation of the work generated from the insertion of information and communication technologies in the productive processes, as well as the difficulties experienced by the workers. The focus inside the service sector is realized by the study of the Communitarian Library of the Federal University of Sao Carlos (UFSCar) as organization. By the ethnography descriptive methodology, the analysis is made to identify how the library have changed and continue to modify itself with the introduction of information and communication technologies in its products and services and how the employees have been dealing with the difficulties generated by this process. / O trabalho e sua organização vêm a tempos sofrendo modificações frente às novas exigências da sociedade contemporânea. A inserção de novas tecnologias de informação e comunicação nos processos produtivos direciona novos estudos a serem realizados para entender melhor toda a lógica do processo de transformação e organização do trabalho. A proposta é estudar analítica e qualitativamente a transformação do trabalho gerada a partir da inserção de tecnologias de informação e comunicação nos processos produtivos assim como as dificuldades encontradas pelos trabalhadores com a introdução das mesmas. O recorte dentro do setor de serviços é feito pelo estudo da Biblioteca Comunitária da Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar) como organização. Pela metodologia etnográfica descritiva, a análise é feita para identificar como a biblioteca se modificou e vem mudando com a introdução de tecnologias de informação e comunicação nos seus produtos e serviços, e como o funcionário enfrenta as dificuldades decorrentes dessa introdução.