The high levels of HIV prevalence amongst young people in several sub-Saharan African countries, in spite of massive HIV prevention interventions, has prompted calls to investigate the contextual factors that drive the epidemic. A crucial component that often has been missed in the literature is an understanding of the mediation processes involved in HIV prevention communication within cultural contexts. The uniqueness of this study is thus premised in its focus on the structures and processes of meaningproduction within social groups, with regard to sex and HIV/AIDS, and how the produced meanings affect the interpretation and impact of HIV prevention texts. Using Hermeneutics, Reception Theory and the Social Constructionism Theory, this study examines how students at University of KwaZulu-Natal, University of Zululand and the Durban University of Technology make sense of the cultural meanings offered by HIV prevention messages, such as ‘Abstinence’, ‘Be faithful’, ‘Condomise’ and Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT). A multi-method approach, involving a questionnaire survey, in-depth interviews with sampled students and HIV/AIDS coordinators, and non-participant observations, was used to obtain data for the study. Findings of the study support the conclusion that the categories of students’ responses to HIVprevention messages were often predicated upon their relationships and participation in the various social groups. Their decisions to adopt/not adopt these prevention options were often based, therefore, on how meanings attached to these options articulated with the social significance of sex and sexual practices. In the context of intersubjective meaning-formation, therefore, the relational categories of abstinence, being faithful, condomise and VCT should not be conceptualised as discreet, frozen categories, but should rather be understood as open-ended possibilities existing concurrently, coextensively and dialectically. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.

Dubai’s population is unique in that its nationals represent only 15% of the total population, with expatriates comprising the other 85%. Two questionnaires were developed to collect data.  One was written in English and designed for non-nationals who live and work in Dubai, with the aim of mapping the cultural diversity in Dubai as well as investigating non-national’s perceptions about living in Dubai and its cultural diversity.  The second was written in Arabic and designed for UAE nationals with the aim of investigating their opinions regarding cultural diversity and multiculturalism in the UAE.  An unstructured interview was also utilised in order to collected detailed data from senior nationals.  Data was analysed from descriptive statistics perspectives. Findings reveal the common concepts of multiculturalism in the United Arab Emirates, which refers to diverse ethnicities living in the Emirates and where UAE nationals recognise the rights of all ethnicities within a human rights framework.  Additionally, UAE nationals and the UAE government accept the presence of this cultural diversity, enjoying the mutual respect and benefits arising from it.  Multiculturalism refers also to the UAE government’s rules and regulations designed to protect nationals and non-nationals’ rights in celebrating their cultures and religions. Further, Multiculturalism refers to the continuous management of this cultural diversity by the UAE government through implementing governmental strategies and carefully planned policies aimed to address this diversity, to manage the challenges created by it, and to manage the forces of change in order to promote social harmony where both UAE nationals and non-nationals alike can derive maximum benefit from the cultural diversity.

This thesis analyses face-to-face and one-to-one supervision sessions between British academics and Chinese students in a British university. It argues that identity relations can be reproduced and transformed in discursive practices. Three levels of identity relations – interactional, institutional, and sociocultural – are identified to investigate both collective identities and individual styles in intercultural institutional discourse. Chapter 1 presents a review of the literature covering the major contributions to our understanding of the relationship between discourse and identity, and, based on these, Chapter 2 argues for a multi-modal analysis of intercultural institutional interaction, combining three complementary approaches: Conversation Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis; ethnographic analysis and discourse analysis; and qualitative and quantitative analysis. Chapter 3 introduces the specific context of the study and process of data collection, and presents the research focus on the reproductive and transformative attribute of identity relations in discursive practice. The institutional identity dyad SUPERVISOR-STUDENT is taken as a focal point around which interactional and sociocultural identity relations pivot. Taking supervisors and students as two separate but related homogeneous groups, Chapter 4 investigates their shared discursive practices to demonstrate the nature of the collective identities reproduced by the relevant social structures. Chapter 5 complements this analysis by highlighting the contrasts and differences amongst individual supervisors and students, and examining the ways in which identity relations are transformed. In order to enrich our understanding of these collective identities and personal styles, the qualitative discourse analysis is supplemented by word frequency statistics, and ethnographic accounts of participants’ orientations and routine linguistic and institutional practices. The conclusion to this thesis in Chapter 6 reinforces its contribution to the study of discourse and identity, that is, the introduction of a rich, multi-modal approach to the investigation of collective identities and personal styles. With supervision sessions taken as a specific type of institutional discourse, the routine and individual practices of British academics and Chinese students are analysed to provide insights into intercultural talk-ininteraction in the institutional context, supervision styles of local supervisors and participation styles of international students at a British university. As a result, the thesis concludes with a discussion of the implications for spoken English teaching in China and proposals for future research.

This thesis analyzes discourses of identity construction in the production and consumption of translated fiction in the contemporary British book culture. Drawing from ethnographic methods, it investigates what middle class, engaged readers make out of the translated novels they read, particularly in the ways that these books have been produced and marketed to them. The study concludes that translated fiction illustrates the multilayered meaning structures regarding taste and identity in reading communities and in the publishing industry in contemporary Britain. The theoretical framework of the thesis is based on sociological and anthropological studies on identity, intercultural communication and the consumption of art, alongside theories of reading and literary exchange from literary studies and translation studies. Data for the analysis on reading has been collected through participant observation/focus groups at over 30 book group meetings. Research methods also include interviews with individual readers and publishing industry professionals. Analysis of reading communities concentrates on responses to translated novels as texts that have undergone linguistic transference and as stories that portray other cultures. These responses are contextualized with the value orientations that arise from current trends of cultural consumption in the UK, such as monolingualism, cosmopolitanism and omnivorousness. The thesis also includes a case study on Turkish literature, exploring recent trends in literary production and the cultural role of literary translators. The study reveals the complex inflections of taste and identity in the practices of the agents of print culture. The textual-linguistic dimensions of translated texts are often the subject of negative evaluations when readers do not recognize the agency of the literary translator as an artist. Moreover, the opportunity of cultural encounter enabled by the reading experience activates varying discourses of intercultural communication, depending on readers’ cultural capital, their level of commitment to cosmopolitanism and the orientation of the book group’s discussion. In the production and consumption of translated fiction, the tension that arises between the pleasure and distinction dimensions of literary products translates into dilemmas between exoticism and cosmopolitan egalitarianism.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from file title page. Jaye Atkinson, committee chair; David Cheshier, Marian Meyers, committee members, Electronic text (105 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Dec. 6, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-102).

This thesis examines the representation of racial violence in black British literature. Long part of the black British experience, from racial murder to premeditated campaigns of harassment targeting individuals and families, and to police brutality, racial violence has curiously attracted next to no critical attention. This is particularly true of fictive representations, where black writers have sought to capture and convey the embodiment of racism and particularly the nature of what bell hooks has described as “white terror”. This thesis argues that this lacuna is a consequence of the concern to establish admixture, as expressed by terms such as hybridity, syncretism, and creolisation, as the central point of reference in discussions about black British identities. Triumphal accounts of British multiculturalism have followed the success of this paradigm, although some seek to partially solemnise the celebrations with merely passing references to the victims of real life racial murders. Abstract notions of “becoming” deflect attention from uninterrupted processes of forcible essentialisation from without, where the “other” serves as handmaiden to the formation of white subjectivities. This is the case with violent racism, where subjective violence, or physical violence, operates in tandem with symbolic violence, or racialised stereotypes, to essentialise the “victim”. In so doing the perpetrator rapidly arrives at a form of white racialised subjectivity which however must be continually refreshed through further symbolic or physical violence. As Pnina Werbner has argued, these experiences have ontological significance for the victim also and the communities for which the victim was taken be a representative. However this significance has been largely ignored, or at least bracketed, in accounts bent on celebrating “new ethnicities” and postcolonial London, an emerging disciplinary field which, in John McLeod’s words, examines the ways that the capital’s “transcultural facticity has made possible new communities and forms of culture” and which have the added effect of disrupting the “pastoral articulation of English national culture”. This thesis seeks to qualify the revelry that animates these accounts by foregrounding literary representations of racial violence and harassment. Each representation, drawn by writers who have been heralded as multiculturalism’s new baristas, serves as a reminder that multiculturalism is not without fierce contestation and that black lives, if not marked by violence, are still very much at risk of being targeted in this way. The novels examined include: Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black; David Dabydeen’s The Intended; Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album ; Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore ; and Courttia Newland’s The Scholar. Writing myself into the thesis as a socially situated reader, each novel will be examined with a concern to highlight the representation of racial violence; the spatial significance of representations; responses to racial victimisation; and the “whiteness” at work in racist violence. Using interdisciplinary resources the thesis will attempt to build a theory of white subjectivity and racial violence and throughout there will be an overarching concern to determine whether these works articulate an anti-racist position and, if so, what this may be taken to say about black tenure in multicultural Britain.

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Sciences de l'information et de la communication : Lyon 2 : 2007. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr.

Thesis (MPhil)--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

This dissertation considers the relation between culture and communication with respect to the development of aboriginal media in Canada. It introduces and elaborates a concept of cultural politics with which to interpret the history of contact between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people. This concept is further applied to an analysis of Canadian cultural and communications policy and the intervention of native broadcasters in policy procedures and discourses. The dissertation undertakes a critical review of existing research on aboriginal media. It assesses the usefulness of interpretive tools drawn from poststructuralist philosophy, ethnography and postcolonial theory in understanding the relation between cultural politics and communication practices. These tools are then implemented in the presentation of a case study of Wawatay Native Communications Society, a regional native broadcasting organization based in Northwestern Ontario.

An important connection exists between ethnographic film and indigenous media though they are rarely linked in film theory. The link is not just hypothetical. Cast in the form of historiography, ethnographic film and indigenous media practices may be read as a continuist discourse with a number of critical turns. One such turn is the transformation of the ethnographic subject into a critical public. What is described as indigenous media allows us to categorize this transformation as a significant difference for the practice of ethnography, but the question remains as to whether this difference is retreivable in the terms set by ethnography. The emergence of the indigenous ethnographer has consequences for understanding the problems in the relations between Western and non-Western cultural formations. As a means through which a culture or nation may represent its own historical evolution, indigenous media is also, however, a discourse in formation--characterized by heterogenous claims and practices.