The dissertation investigates the embodied experience of fatness in spaces between subjectivity and subjection on one Internet newsgroup and one listserve. Literature on identity politics, computer-mediated communication, and the social construction of the body is reviewed as it relates to the possibility of individuals with shared characteristics and/or interests utilizing technology to transform meanings for their corporeal experience. Using the methods of critical ethnography, I provide an interpretation of the ways in which site participants fluidly invoke and reject dominant meanings for the fat body within their project of resignifying fat bodies. Emergent themes include narratives of personal fat experience, comparisons of fit within cyberspace and "real" space, discussions of the pleasures and pains of fat bodies, attempts at guarding borders of identity and community, explorations of the mutual constitution of identities and oppressions, and finally, strategies for reconceptualizing fat.

This thesis explores online practices of women in Québec, a culturally and historically distinct province in Canada that is undergoing rapid social and technological transformations, and analyses the discourses that emerge. It zeroes in on blogging, as a facilitator for exploring, constructing and challenging gendered identities. It draws on and contributes to a growing body of literature that investigates and legitimises women's online writings, an area that remains under analysed. This online ethnography was accomplished through face-to-face interviews with 23 Frenchspeaking women bloggers, home visits and an analysis of their blogs. Using feminist critical discourse analysis, the thesis analyses how informants locate themselves inside and outside traditional and mainstream discourses of femininities. It first explores how participants discuss their blogs using domestic metaphors, thereby linking their online expressions to ideas and ideals of the home. Second, it reveals how bloggers share a common concern with putting forward a favourable self, emphasising personal qualities such as education, respect, affability, and impressive online networks. Third, it analyses self-improvement narratives in participants' interviews and blog entries, examining recurring discussions of personality, values and views; body size and image; emotional and mental health; and professional and homemaking skills. The last chapter underlines how blogging provides women with opportunities for networking, a place to discuss challenges and with a means to claim time for themselves. The thesis draws out the complex engagements in an activity they find pleasurable despite working within mainstream gender role constraints and still facing a digital divide. In both discourse and practice, participants seem at ease with blogging but remain highly influenced by traditional discourses. This gives rise to a sense of contradiction where they feel like they exist, have a public life and make a contribution but also exhibit a sense of compulsion and regulation. They break out of the limits of normative femininities perhaps – at the same time creating new 'women's worlds' – even as the use of blogging reinstates and produces conservative forms of self-management.

This PhD thesis is an ethnographic investigation into the drinking practices of young people undertaken in the Canterbury (Kent, United Kingdom) night-time economy. This research took place across a series of fieldwork sites, including: pubs, night-clubs, the street, and young people’s houses across the city. The research included an in-depth ethnography which took place in a city-centre pub where I was working as a bartender, which adapted the methodological approach of the Chicago School of Sociology to urban studies in a contemporary context. Specific examples from the research included a case study with two young men in the pub who were drinking after work, and a wide-range of other ethnographic examples taken from scenarios arising through my position at the pub resulting from bar conversations and informal interviews. These were selected from a number of literally thousands of young people who I encountered across the two years of fieldwork in the pub. The licensee of the pub, Andrew, acted as a gatekeeper for the research, as his approach to the pub business corresponded to interaction and the possibility of building ethnographic relationships with young people. Other ethnographic data examples were also taken from the wider Canterbury night-time economy, away from the pub at the centre of the in-depth ethnography. The variety of data sets included participant observation, conversation, informal interviews and the field diary. Drawing from the accounts of participants in the fieldwork and emergent themes in the ethnography, the thesis argues that young people are the subject of a normalization of extreme drinking practices in the night-time economy. This is explored through the adaptation of the model of drug normalization theory, where young people’s experiences of alcohol and extreme drinking practices are examined in relation to specific dimensions of drinking. The media stereotyping of extreme drinking practices by young people is also subject to critique, where it will be argued that the term “binge” drinking is an imprecise and moralistic view of young people’s activities in the night-time economy.

The following thesis examines the impact of social and legacy media on young people’s political engagement as well as on their attitudes to, feelings towards and beliefs about politics. This was accomplished using a three-tiered design which integrated both quantitative and qualitative techniques. The aim of this design was to ensure that young people were afforded a voice in the ongoing debate around youth apathy. To this end, a direct comparison of social and legacy media coverage of various case studies was undertaken. This initial comparison was accompanied by a series of interviews using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009). The interviews focused on individual engagement with politics and social and legacy media, in order to get a sense of each individuals understanding of their role in British politics as well as the feelings and attitudes towards media and politics more widely. The three-tiered design concluded with a quantitative questionnaire assessing governmental trust, political efficacy, self-efficacy, and self-esteem by way of a series of standardised measures. From this mixed-methods approach, two main findings arise. Firstly, that social media such as Twitter hold the potential to facilitate political engagement in young people, beyond what is currently achieved by the British legacy media. The second finding suggests that there has been fundamental paradigmatic shift of youth conceptions of politics from what could be considered traditional political behaviours (such as voting and party membership; Strømsnes, 2009) to lifestyle orientated choices (such as boy/buycotts; Copeland, 2014; Gil de Zúñiga, Copeland & Bimber, 2014), mediated by social media. Overall the results of the thesis foster a dualistic understanding of British young people who are simultaneously engaged with and apathetic toward “politics” dependant on how the term is defined.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Questionnaire in English and Korean. Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 243-253). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Questionnaire in English and Korean. Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 243-253). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 224-239). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on October 5, 2009). Thesis advisor: Professor Byron Scott. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation examines Concerned Women for America (CWA), an anti-feminist Christian conservative organization, as a way to study how religion intertwines with media and culture within the larger contexts of globalization and transnational politics. Over the last twenty-five years, CWA has formulated a specific US American religious nationalism, in which women play an important role. Starting in the 1970s, CWA established itself as a "Christian women's alternative to feminism" in order to defend US culture and national sovereignty and to protect women, children and the "natural" family. Since the 1990s, CWA has expanded its interests to the international arena, especially within the United Nations, and now focuses on sex trafficking as a global concern. To better understand what discourses reveal about culturally and religiously-based attitudes in the United States, I use transnational feminist cultural studies as a theoretical and methodological tool. This approach offers ways to historicize, critique, and de-essentialize discourses and examine how both religious nationalisms and feminisms function as systems of representation and as transnational movements. The signifying practices of CWA take shape in multiple locales. The first part of the dissertation critiques the historical narrative created by CWA about its formation and the culture war with US feminism in the 1970s and 80s, focusing specifically on the importance of the Equal Rights Amendment. In the next section, I scrutinize CWA's media coverage of UN conferences and proceedings pertaining to women and children, arguing that CWA situates itself as an expert on family and national sovereignty issues by generating truth claims about the purpose, function, and outcome of the United Nations. In the final analysis chapter, sex trafficking is analyzed as a transnational economic and political practice providing an entrance point for groups, such as CWA, to engage in contemporary Christian missionary discourses. I demonstrate how CWA's conceptualization of women, nation, and itself as a Christian public policy organization is interconnected with and mutually constituted by feminism.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 154-160). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.