Background: Obesity is associated with conditions that may affect Canadians’ health status and strain the health care system. Obese individuals are subjected to stigmatization. Most public health programs to date promote weight loss. However, weight loss is rarely sustainable. Insight must be gained into the embodied, lived experiences and lifestyles of ‘target’ populations and their perceptions of and priorities concerning health and wellbeing to develop public health programs that enhance lifestyles and health. Purpose: The purpose of my research was to use critical ethnographic research methods to explore obese individuals’ perceptions of health and obesity and the impact of these assessments, as well as personal weight trajectories, on obese individuals’ health perceptions, lifestyles, quality-of-life, and behaviours. Methods: This study involved one- year ethnography. Data sources included field notes and repeated (every 3-4 months), audio-taped, semi-structured, qualitative interviews with research participants. Subsamples included obese and formerly obese individuals who were 1) pursuing weight loss to achieve health goals, 2) attempting to maintain weight loss, and 3) attempting to get/stay healthy through diet and exercise but were not concerned with weight loss. Participant observation occurred at sites identified by participants as essential to their embodied, lived experience. Results: Three major themes emerged: the importance of function to health and quality-of-life; compulsion, addiction, and the need for validation; and social impacts of various weight trajectories and perspectives. Participants recounted multiple ways in which their ever-fluctuating bodies and related bodily attitudes profoundly affected their social lives and the degree of social acceptance they experienced in coping with their bodies, participants often described highly compulsive food, dieting, and fitness behaviours and a constant search for validation of their health-related endeavours. Significance: The dominant discourse regards obese individuals as ill. This perspective may produce disempowering public health initiatives. To achieve sustainable benefits for Canadians’ quality-of-life, a greater understanding of what constitutes health and wellbeing for obese individuals, and how such factors may change over time and differing circumstances, is essential. This insight will contribute to a salutogenic and holistic approach to health, particularly in populations that may feel stigmatized as a result of health issues.

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Of the major literary modernists writing in English in the early years of the twentieth century, arguably the most misunderstood and critically neglected has been Wyndham Lewis. It is the contention of this dissertation that Lewis should be reassessed, not only as a vitally important writer and artist, but also as one the most significant critical theorists of modernity. Accordingly, the central aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate that Lewis, whose oeuvre extended from fiction, drama, poetry and literary criticism to radical experimentation in painting and drawing, to a considerable range of non- fictional, political and philosophical writings which would now be classified as critical and cultural theory, was not only a highly significant theorist of his own period, but also, pre-emptive of many of the concerns that have come to be identified with postmodernism and its aftermath. The essence of this untimeliness, it is argued, lies firstly with his consistent engagement with the nihilism hat he believed to be the engine of modernity, and secondly, with his creative deployment of the ideas of a range of continental philosophers from Kant and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and Bergson to counter that nihilism and in Nietzsche's terminology to "overcome" it. In the process, and particularly in his exploration of temporality and spatiality as they configure human identity, Lewis provided a philosophical commentary on the modern that in many ways paralleled and prefigured the intellectual trajectory of major twentieth century thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and subsequently, Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard. The genealogy of these parallels and pre-figurations will be traced through the use of the concept of repetition as it is deployed by Lewis in his critical theory and fiction, from his early short stories to his final theological fantasies.

No description available.

This thesis discusses the design of three systems that were built using Critical Making as an investigative method. The systems are: an RFID antenna that links ISBNs to online metadata; metamash.org, which aggregates ISBN metadata; and doitag.org, which allows users to associate tags with DOI numbers. Each system was designed to interrogate issues related to identification, categorization and the institutional foundations of, and individual practices surrounding, information systems, providing levers to get at deeper ontological issues. Each investigation points in its own way to a profound lack of understanding about the ontology of digital, or hybrid material/digital objects. David Weinberger's ordering scheme for material and digital objects is used because it allows for a discussion of ordering systems in general. However, focusing solely on categorization systems masks more important questions about the ontology of such objects and how building and using such objects fundamentally defines what they are.

Thesis (MEd)--University of South Australia, 1996

Thesis (MEd)--University of South Australia, 1995

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1991. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 156-160). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (MHSc--Health Science) -- Auckland University of Technology, 2005. / Also held in print (145 leaves, 30 cm.) in Akoranga Theses Collection (T 616.0250231 GAB)

Thesis (M.S.)--Bowling Green State University, 2008. / Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 65 p. Includes bibliographical references.