I began my inquiry into women's lawbreaking from a disquiet between what I "knew" from academic feminist accounts and what I "saw" as a worker. My understanding of women's lawbreaking came from a distorted representation of women lawbreakers as victims produced by academic feminist scholarship. This distorted representation came from a feminist practice of emphasizing women's victimhood as an explanatory framework. As a result, women have been rendered 'victims' - a representation that relies on women's object, rather than subject, status. Further, this distorted 'victim' representation fails to examine the way women can, and do, negotiate 'structures' to shape their own lives. As a result of my disquiet, I began to ask what is it about victimization that contributes to women's lawbreaking? I adapted Dorothy Smith's method of inquiry to develop a method which includes women's agency and yet retains feminist insights into economic and cultural gender inequities. This method allows one to understand agency in the context of victimization and its entanglement with lawbreaking by understanding the dialectic nature of social interaction. This dialectic understanding of action is important because we can examine not only what things come into view as structural or institutional processes, but also see more clearly the undercurrent of resistance and survival so relevant to feminism. Further, this method looks at women's lawbreaking differently - it captures women's agency as a counter-discourse to existing feminist discourses of victimization. A small research study was conducted for this thesis. Nine women were interviewed about their lives growing up and their experiences with lawbreaking. From this data, three areas were explored: "invalidation", "addiction" and "negotiation". The analysis of these themes explores, and then maps out, courses of women's lawbreaking action and how those courses are coordinated by the ruling relations. This project aims to contribute to feminist scholarship on women's courses of lawbreaking action by offering Smith's method of inquiry as a way to capture both women's agency and how that is coordinated by the organizational and social relations of ruling.

This thesis, presented as a collection of articles, journalistic in its tone, is titled "Menace or Moral Panic? Methamphetamine and the New Zealand Press". Within the collection, evidence and background information is presented that supports a claim that a moral panic fitting Stanley Cohen's classic model occurred between 1999 and 2004.This moral panic was also identified using Stuart Hall's definition of a moral panic outlined in his mugging study published in 1978 as well as the more contemporary model of Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994). Jock Young's theory of The Deviance Amplification Spiral is also addressed and can be applied to this collection when considering the close 'symbiotic' relationship that our press here in New Zealand have with our police force. In looking at this particular subject it is vital that we look at how drugs and drug use play a role in the media. Also as part of the backgrounding for this collection it was of critical importance to find whether a moral panic happened anywhere else in the world in relation to methamphetamine. Two previous moral panics about methamphetamine are featured in this collection as part of a case study presented in "Ancient Anecdotes meet Modernity: Drugs and the Rise of Methamphetamine" in which between the years of 1989 and 1996 America passed through two moral panics brought on to a considerable extent by a mixture of media hype and political opportunism. By including a foreign case study we can begin to see how the New Zealand methamphetamine situation had similarities to the American example, making identification of New Zealand's moral panic more definitive. Giving verification to the claims, a lengthy analysis of twenty-five samples from the New Zealand press is also featured in this collection. By looking at the way the stories from the samples developed identification of the various stages of the moral panic become more visible. The last article in this collection investigates, using expert interviews, if there is enough evidence to support the claim that methamphetamine may be a menace to New Zealand society, but that the extent of that menace may be exaggerated by a moral panic brought on by our media and fuelled by our police force.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Tasmania, 1996. / Library has additional copy on CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-108).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2008. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 108-126). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 178-190). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-119). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1992.

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2009. / Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 68 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1996. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118-128). Also available via the Internet.