Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 158-169). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 1999. Graduate Programme in Psychology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-67). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ39238.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 183-186). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 149-151).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 158-169). Also available on the Internet.

In the current context of health care, the registered nurses’ perception and enactment of accountability may be constrained by many factors out of their control. The purpose of this research was to examine how registered nurses perceive accountability and translate this to professional practice. A Grounded Theory approach was adopted to explore 11 registered nurses’ understanding and experiences enacting accountability in clinical practice. Data were obtained through semi structured interviews. The theory that emerged provides a detailed portrait of the process of enacting and/or retreating from accountability. The process encompasses 4 stages where the registered nurses: develop personal understanding, then gain professional knowledge, find their way in the complex healthcare system and concludes with becoming professionally confident. The development of the stages exposed a multitude of challenges faced by the registered nurses in fulfilling accountability expectations. Importantly, the registered nurses’ expended significant effort in finding a balance between their individual accountability and the collaborative accountability of the healthcare team and organization which contributed to retreating from accountability. The contextual factors of financial and human resources, institutional culture and healthcare system processes were found to contribute to the registered nurses enacting and/or retreating from accountability. The study findings illustrate the importance of ongoing reflective practice, mentorship and continuing education, all of which have implications for nursing educators and healthcare executives in preparing and supporting registered nurses’ in practice. Further research on the concepts of this theory of accountability is needed to obtain a greater understanding of how the concepts can be operationalized within the context of current healthcare systems.

Breast cancer social movements have, in many ways, succeeded in increasing the visibility of the disease in North America, yet researchers understand little about the effects of this visibility; there is little information about how women with breast cancer navigate breast cancer discourse. Feminist relational autonomy helps us to understand that women's degree of autonomy in making treatment decisions regarding their breast cancer is affected by their understanding of the disease and available options. I draw on the results of multiple qualitative interviews and online discussion group posts from 12 women with breast cancer in Nova Scotia, Canada, to examine the interconnections between breast cancer discourse and approaches to decision-making. Many representations of the best ways to “do” breast cancer cross the boundaries of allopathic and homeopathic medicine, popular self-help literature, and support services approaches to care, making them extremely pervasive in women’s lives. An idealised subject position that portrays women with breast cancer as strong, positive survivors/thrivers connects to a context in which certain identities are more likely to be accepted than others. Constraining the identities worthy of social recognition, breast cancer discourse is taken up in ways that limit the actions participants could imagine and justify, and encourage self-governance and discipline of others.

In this thesis, I sought to establish whether the mere presence of money differentially affects the perception of competent and autonomous control over life outcomes among people of relatively low and high self-perceived wealth. According to my theoretical perspective regarding the effects of monetary cues, thinking about money should cause people to view themselves in terms of their own relative financial resources. As money is perceived as a resource that enables competent and autonomous control over life outcomes, the presence of money should cause people low in wealth to feel lower in personal control and autonomy and should motivate the preservation or retrieval of a sense of control and autonomy. By contrast, the presence of money should cause the wealthy to feel higher in personal control and autonomy. Three experiments were designed to test hypotheses stemming from this view and to broaden our understanding of how and why money affects cognition and behaviour. In Experiment 1, I tested whether a money prime affected perceived control, autonomy, and need for structure. For people low in self-perceived wealth, money decreased autonomy and control over life outcomes, and increased the need for structure. People high in wealth were not affected by the money prime. In Experiment 2, I examined whether the presence of money had consequences for interactions with others in social environments characterized by low and high structure. In a setting lacking structure, the presence of money caused people of lower socioeconomic status (SES) to prefer less social contact compared to people of higher SES. The interacting effects of money and SES diminished when the environment was structured in nature. In Experiment 3, I tested competing hypotheses regarding whether the presence of money can influence attitudes and beliefs about external sources of control. I found that when people who were lower in wealth were primed with money, versus not, they reported lesser belief in a controlling god. By contrast, when people of higher wealth were primed with money, versus not, they reported greater belief in a controlling god. I discuss my findings vis-à-vis the current perspective and previous money priming research. / Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC); Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS)

Debates on nationalism highlight loyalty and solidarity as the main benefits of a shared national identity, at the same time contrasting nationhood with universalist models of political action. This interdisciplinary thesis attempts to show nationalism as part of a broader project of modernity. In doing so, I defend a comprehensive view of nationhood, which, I argue, accounts for the recent transformation of nationhood, and explains the potential of national identity to open to universal values and norms. First, I put forward my view of nationhood, which defines nations as forms of political experience. I argue that nations have an ability to create a common public world. Second, by investigating the idea of the modern self and its relationship with individual autonomy, this thesis shows that modernity is characterised by a tension between rational autonomy and subjectivisation. This political self, I argue, develops in a bounded political community. Third, I argue that nations provide access to a common world in which everyone is recognised as moral and political agents. The paradoxical nature of the modern self takes advantage of the capacity of nations to be a source of solidarity that transcends national borders.

This thesis explores the engagement of a group of Mapuche-Pewenche communities with tourism in southern Chile. I argue that Trekaleyin, their tourism initiative, is part of a broader and long history of resistance and struggles for autonomy, territory and decolonisation, in which identity, development, agency and relations with other beings are negotiated, revitalised and re-produced. From my experience working as a development practitioner with these communities in the beginnings of Trekaleyin, I became interested in understanding the ways in which, as a collective experience, it is embedded in and articulated with political concerns and contestation with regards to neoliberalism and multiculturalism. I also became interested in how the communities are incorporating and reactivating diverse and solidarity economies in their work on tourism, while at the same time reworking their relations with and the market economy itself. I suggest that through Trekaleyin, the communities are also re-producing a relational and open sense of place and connectivity, mobilising particular ways of knowing, being and relating to territory and more-than-human beings in a context of global neoliberalism, reshaping scales and their possibilities. With this thesis I aim to explore how, through their engagement in tourism, community members are disrupting, expanding and hybridising discourses and practices around development, the economy, nature and cross-cultural relations, reworking them so as to craft a better position from where they can participate in them, but the consequences of which extend beyond the “local”, affecting us all, both indigenous and non-indigenous. Therefore, from an ethnographic site and poststructural, post-human and decolonising geographic approaches, this thesis brings new perspectives to the study of development, tourism and the environment, particularly among indigenous peoples, in which autonomy, hybridity, diversity and relational ontologies are articulated.