Geographers researching cinema have predominantly been interested in how geographic meaning is constructed and negotiated within film, but have been less productive in accounting for how these constructs are received by viewers. Using the method of observational online ethnography, I therefore investigate how fans in online reviews have interpreted the nature/society binary in the film Dersu Uzala. Working from a social constructionist view of nature I begin by deconstructing the binary as it appears in Dersu Uzala before proceeding to illustrate the way this constitutive absence is made up for by the visuality of the film’s landscapes and techniques of geographic realism. Turning to the fan reviews I find that, rather than challenge the historical and constructed division between nature and society, many fans accept the binary as inevitable and consistent with their ideas about contemporary reality. More than passive consumption however, this concurrence is actively rearticulated in the ways that the fans incorporate the binary into their own lives and in the new discursive practices of the internet. In so doing I make headway into the exploration of audience analysis by geographers and continue to advance geography’s foray into cultures of the internet.

Popular literature on Tibetan Buddhism often overemphasizes the psychological dimension of the religion's beliefs and practices. This misrepresentative portrayal is largely traceable to the writings of the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung. By employing distinctly psychological terminology and interpretive strategies in his analyses of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and mandala symbolism, Jung helped to establish precedents that were adopted in subsequent analyses of the religion. Imposing a psychological lens on Tibetan Buddhism obscures other essential elements of the tradition, such as cosmology, physiology, and ritualism, thereby silencing the voices of Tibetans in analyses of their own practices. Jung's imposition of his own voice in place of that of Tibetans has commonly been criticized as an act of intellectually imperializing Orientalism that furthers Jung's personal aims of solidifying his system of analytical psychology. This thesis supports and demonstrates the validity of that critique through close analyses of Jung's commentaries on Tibetan Buddhism. However, Jung’s psychoanalytic perspective and qualifying comments found elsewhere in his corpus ultimately contextualize his commentaries and reveal that his writings on Tibetan Buddhism should not be treated as shedding light on the religion. Rather, they offer an additional lens for understanding analytical psychology. Furthermore, Jung's perspective as a psychoanalyst demonstrates the inherent instability of Orientalist epistemology that attempts to make sense of Eastern cultures on Western terms. Derridean deconstruction of Jung's commentaries reveals that the laws of psychoanalysis subvert those of Orientalism, thus allowing us to undermine the Orientalist episteme in which Jung writes and creates the possibility for appropriating foreign cultural content differently

This bachelor thesis engages in the question of silence in the writings of Fenno-Swedish modernists Mirjam Tuominen and Gunnar Björling, silence being understood as both a poetic theme and a question of literary form. Alongside this exposition runs a discussion about the possibilities and impossibilities of interpretation in the field of academic literary studies. This query is connected to the different ideological positions of the two writers, conjoined by ideas about anti-comprehensibility. Considering certain weaknesses of classical hermeneutics as well as the theory of deconstruction, especially in the case of reading poetry, this thesis tries to point out possible routs for a practice of a more dynamic interpretation, with special regard to understanding the trope of silence in the modernist poetry of Tuominen and Björling. The composition explicitly applies a ”method of wandering” inspired by Maurice Blanchot’s understanding of the priests of Dionysus in Hölderlin’s writings – maundering in the holy night – as a metaphor for a critique-in-the-creating. This complies to Theodor W. Adorno’s idea of the aporetic situation of the interpreter and the unsolvable conflict between scientific discourse and art understood as a medium of truth in a more radical sense. The study aspires to perform a dialogue between different faculties of interpretation, and to make this dialogue viewable, so that the question of understanding remains ambiguous in line with the poetics of Tuominen and Björling. The results that follow bare the mark of aporia, but points towards a possible reading of silence (in Björling’s and Tuominen’s writings) as connected to a certain kind of sensibility and confidence in the immanence of truth in existence.

This research project explores the creative and critical functions of editing in art, film and writing. The written component analyses the histories and discourses of 'cutting and splicing' to examine their various roles in processes of signification. The artistic practice uses more speculative and open-ended methods to explore the social 'languages' that inform our inter-subjective experiences. This project argues that editing is a creative methodology for making meaning, because it allows existing symbolic systems to be appropriated, revised and rewritten. By emphasising the operations of spacing, questioning and play, it also identifies editing as an essential tool for critically engaging with the potentials of art and theory.

Participatory research methodologies and the use of interactive communication technologies (ICTs) such as email are increasingly seen by many researchers, including feminists, as offering ways to enhance women’s inclusion, participation and empowerment. However, from critical and poststructuralist perspectives, some researchers suggest the need for greater caution about claims that participatory methodologies and certain communication technologies automatically enhance inclusion and empowerment. These researchers argue that issues of power, agenda and voice in the research context require greater attention (LeCompte, 1995). The major argument made in this thesis is that feminist researchers need to adopt a more critical and rigorous yet pragmatic approach to evaluating women’s empowerment, inclusion and participation, and that this approach needs to include an analysis of diversity and difference, macro and micro contexts, power-knowledge relations, and the contradictory effects of participation. The outcomes of this study suggest that this approach can create new knowledge and understanding that will enable the development of more effective strategies for women’s empowerment and inclusion. To explore and support this argument, findings are presented from a detailed evaluation and critique of a major feminist action research project that involved women in rural, regional and remote Queensland, Australia and elsewhere, a university research team and several government and industry partners. The project made extensive use of ICTs, including email and the Internet, and aimed to be empowering and inclusive. Given the many contradictory discourses of empowerment that currently circulate, empowerment is seen as a problematic concept. The multiple meanings and discourses of empowerment are therefore identified and considered in the analysis. With the increasing importance of communication technologies in rural community development, this study also evaluates the effectiveness of ICTs as a medium for empowering rural women. The ‘politics of difference’ (Young, 1990) that underpins attempts to include a diversity of rural women in feminist research projects presents many challenges to feminist praxis. Chapters 1 and 2 propose that, in evaluating such projects, researchers need to take diversity and difference into account to avoid reproducing stereotyped images of rural women, and to identify those who are included and excluded. This is because of the complex nature of the identity ‘rural woman’, the multiple barriers to women’s participation, and the diverse needs, agendas and ideologies of participants and stakeholders. The concept of seriality (Young, 1994) is used in this study to avoid reproducing ‘rural women’ and feminist researchers as women with a singular identity. Chapters 1 and 2 argue that a comprehensive and critical analysis of these complex issues requires an eclectic, transdisciplinary approach, and that this can be fruitfully achieved by using a combination of two feminist frameworks of theory and epistemology: praxis feminism and feminist poststructuralism. While there are commonalities between these frameworks, the feminist poststructuralist framework takes a much more cautious and critical approach to claims for empowerment than praxis feminism. The praxis feminist framework draws on feminist theories that view power as social, cooperative and enabling. Women’s diverse needs, values, issues and experiences are taken into account, and the analysis aims to gives voice to women. The purpose of this is to better understand the processes that meet women’s diverse needs and could be empowering and inclusive for women (or otherwise). In contrast, the feminist poststructuralist framework uses Foucault’s (1980) analytic of power as positive and strategic, exercised in all our interactions, and intimately connected to knowledge. The power-knowledge relations, and the multiple and shifting discourses and subject positions that were taken up in various research contexts are identified and analysed. The purpose of this is to highlight the contradictions and dangers inherent in feminist practices of empowerment that often go unnoticed. To achieve its practical and critical aims, this study uses two different, but complementary, research methodologies: participatory feminist evaluation and feminist deconstructive ethnography, and multiple research methods, which are outlined in Chapter 3. This eclectic approach is argued to provide maximum flexibility and creativity in the research process, and to enable the complexity and richness of the data to be represented and understood from a diversity of perspectives. Triangulation of the multiple methods and sources of data is employed to increase the validity and rigour of the analysis. Assessing how well feminist projects that use ICTs have met the aim of including a diversity of women requires an analysis of a wide range of complex social, economic, cultural, technological, contextual and methodological issues related to women’s participation. Analysing these issues also requires giving voice to a diversity of participants’ and stakeholders’ assessments and meanings of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’. The results of this analysis, set out in Chapter 4, suggest that differences in perceptions of diversity and inclusion are strongly related to participants’ and stakeholders’ political and ideological beliefs and values, and their degree of commitment to social justice issues. The evaluation found that a limited diversity of women participated in the project, and identified many barriers to their participation. Feminists argue that women-only activities are often more empowering than mixed gender activities. The evaluation findings detailed in Chapter 5 suggest that the project’s women-centred activities, particularly the workshops and online groups, were very successful in meeting the multiple needs of most participants. However, contradictory or undesirable effects of the project’s activities were also identified. This analysis demonstrates the need to consider the various groups of participants and their diverse needs in assessing how well feminist methods and activities have met women’s needs or are empowering. Chapter 6 identifies various forms and features of empowerment and disempowerment and categorises them as social, technological, political and psychological. A model is developed that illustrates the interrelationships between these four forms of empowerment. Technological empowerment is identified as a new under-theorised form of empowerment that is seen as increasingly important as ICTs become more central to women’s networking and participation. However, the findings suggest that the extent to which participants want to be empowered needs to be respected. While many participants were found to have experienced the four forms of empowerment, their participation was also shown to have had various disempowering effects. The project’s online group welink (women’s electronic link), which linked rural and urban women, including government policy-makers, was assessed as the most empowering project activity. The discourse analysis and deconstructions, undertaken in Chapter 6, identify competing and contradictory discourses of new communication technologies and feminist participatory action research. The various discourses taken up by the researchers and participants were shown to have both empowering and disempowering effects. The analysis demonstrates the intersection between empowerment and disempowerment and the shifting subject positions that were taken up, depending on the research context. It was argued that the discourses of feminist action research operated as a ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1980) that regulated and constrained the discourses and practices of this form of research. An analysis of a highly contentious welink discussion challenges feminist assumptions that giving voice to women will lead to empowerment, and suggests that silence can, in some circumstances, be empowering. This analysis highlights the intersection of voice and silence, the limitations of the gendered discourse of care and connection, and how this discourse, and other factors, regulated the use of more critical discourses. Critical reflections on the study are made in Chapter 7. They include the suggestion that an ‘impossible burden’ was placed on the project’s feminist researchers who used an egalitarian feminist discourse that produced expectations of ‘equal relations’ between participants and researchers. However, these relations had to be established in the context of a university-based project that involved senior academic, government and industry staff. Drawing on the new knowledge and understandings developed, this study proposes several principles and strategies for feminist participatory action research projects that seek the inclusion and empowerment of rural women and use ICTs. They include the suggestion that feminists need an awareness of the limits to the politics of difference discourse when power-knowledge relations are ignored. A further principle is that there is value in adopting a Foucauldian analytic of power, since this enables a better understanding of the complex, multifaceted and dynamic nature of power-knowledge relations in the research context. This approach also provides an awareness of how processes that attempt to empower will inevitably produce disempowerment at certain moments. Principles and strategies for undertaking participatory feminist evaluations are also suggested.

Mémoire (M.A.)-- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1988. / Ce travail de recherche a été réalisé à l'Université du Québec à Chicoutimi dans le cadre du programme de maîtrise en arts plastiques extentionné de l'Université du Québec à Montréal à l'Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. CaQCU Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Thesis (MPhil)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Por meio de uma investigação que incide sobre as práticas críticas, o trabalho apresenta uma elaboração sobre o potencial político da desconstrução para uma leitura de textos literários comprometida com reivindicações identitárias feitas às margens dos discursos hegemônicos. O gesto desconstrutivo, como proposto pelo pensador franco-argelino Jacques Derrida, desafia a estabilidade de categorias que fundamentam estes discursos, tais como “essência”, “natureza”, “origem” e outros nomes metafísicos que envolvem a idéia de identidade a si, demonstrando, desta forma, que toda estrutura é atravessada por uma falta constitutiva. Sugerindo uma noção de identidade enquanto diferença, o trabalho examina estratégias gerais da desconstrução e propõe uma análise de suas apropriações nos esforços teórico-críticos dos autores indianos Gayatri Spivak e Homi Bhabha no que diz respeito à leitura de produções textuais que articulam questões de gênero e diferença sexual e de nação e diferença cultural respectivamente. / By way of investigating critical practices, this work deploys an elaboration on the political potential of deconstruction aimed at a reading of literary texts committed to identity claims from the margins of hegemonic discourses. The deconstructive gesture, as proposed by French-Algerian thinker Jacques Derrida, challenges the stability of categories that ground these discourses, such as “essence”, “nature”, “origin”, and other metaphysical names which involve the idea of identity to itself, demonstrating, thus, that every structure is crossed by a constitutive lack. In suggesting a notion of identity as difference, this work examines general strategies of deconstruction and proposes an analysis of its appropriations by the theoreticcritical efforts of Indian authors Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha in the reading of textual productions that articulate questions of gender and sexual difference, and of nation and cultural difference respectively.

141 f. / Submitted by JURANDI DE SOUZA SILVA (jssufba@hotmail.com) on 2013-03-15T14:09:39Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Giampiero Pilatti.pdf: 2320238 bytes, checksum: c5ce672ad0f853a6bf5577f07f193f82 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Rodrigo Meirelles(rodrigomei@ufba.br) on 2013-03-22T14:17:02Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Giampiero Pilatti.pdf: 2320238 bytes, checksum: c5ce672ad0f853a6bf5577f07f193f82 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2013-03-22T14:17:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Giampiero Pilatti.pdf: 2320238 bytes, checksum: c5ce672ad0f853a6bf5577f07f193f82 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Este trabalho trata de questões relativas a “desconstrução” da obra Improviso nº 3 para Flauta Solo de Camargo Guarnieri. Foi proposto a partir de uma “excursão analítica”, a investigação e o desmembramento da estrutura musical geral em pequenas partes, tal qual um “quebracabeça” que teve suas peças separadas, incluindo exemplos no formato de partituras para melhor visualização. Partindo da observação dos pequenos elementos e a junção destes no texto musical, foi proposta a criação de alternativas e recursos de estudo através da divisão dos elementos melódicos-rítmicos e suas implicações com os aspectos técnicos flautísticos, visando auxiliar o intérprete na performance musical da obra e estimulando a criatividade interpretativa através de uma visão analítica instrumental, despertando ainda o interesse em outros intérpretes a “fabricar” suas próprias “desconstruções”, construindo a performance de uma obra por outros meios que não os mais usuais. A “excursão analítica” utilizou como referendo de base para a questão analítica formal, a obra de Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentos da composição musical, complementada pelas definições fraseológicas de Breno Braga e Esther Scliar. O objetivo principal do presente trabalho foi o registro de uma prática de perfomance, demonstrando a visão analítica de um intérprete na medida em que este necessita abordar o maior número de parâmetros possíveis de modo a construir a obra com coerência e com uma observação que visa o todo da obra. / Salvador

Made available in DSpace on 2009-11-18T18:50:25Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 ACF1C.pdf: 692387 bytes, checksum: 4d5171613a08a1a237a6c54471f4ac2a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2003 / The research aimed at analysing the political and discursive practices of the metanarrative of employability in the contemporary organizational field, heading for the understanding of the social and micropolitical devices which happen to produce some especific kinds of subjectivities within organizations. From a post-modern epistemological perspective (Weltanshauung), the research focused on the issues concerning the production of subjectivities in the existing organizational society beyond the traditional theoretical standpoints whose common assumptions are due to the modernist approaches of organizational analysis. A deconstructive theoretical approach was emphasized across the whole text and it was mainly inspired and intellectually based upon Michel Foucault's genealogical démarche. His original conceptualization of power-knowledge relations informed the development of a methodology so as to analyse the discursive practices which determine many of the human resources policies concerning employability. The main thesis presented employability as a grand-device of micropolitical control towards the production of subjectivities whose main operation technologies are: an economic modernizing rhetoric, a moralistic dietetics and an instrumental education. Several discursive fragments from different academicists, journalists and some authors from the managerial litterature were taken into account so as to carefully deconstruct their speeches. This analysis revealed the mechanisms of production of pasteurized, mercantile and erratic subjectivities. Some inquietudes of heuristic nature are featured in the domain of organizational, psychological, sociological and political perspectives heading for new studies. / A pesquisa teve como objetivo fundamental analisar as práticas discursivas e políticas da narrativa da empregabilidade na seara organizacional contemporânea rumo à compreensão dos dispositivos de produção de subjetividades nas organizações. A partir de uma perspectiva epistemológica pós-moderna, buscou-se recolocar a questão da produção de subjetividades na sociedade hodierna para além dos marcos teóricos tradicionais, comuns às abordagens modernistas da análise organizacional. O referencial teórico encontra na genealogia de Michel Foucault sua inspiração fundamental para a construção da metodologia empregada na análise das práticas discursivas que informam muitas das políticas de gestão de recursos humanos praticadas nas organizações atuais. A tese defendida é a de que a empregabilidade constitui-se em um macrodispositivo de controle micropolítico na produção de subjetividades, operando mediante três tecnologias fundamentais: uma retórica modernizadora e economicista, uma dietética moralizadora e uma andragogia instrumental. A desconstrução de diversos fragmentos discursivos, tanto acadêmicos quanto jornalísticos e de autores da literatura gerencial, enseja um conjunto de conclusões, de metamorfoses, rumo a compreensão de subjetividades pasteurizadas, mercantis e erráticas. Algumas inquietações de natureza heurística são levantadas no âmbito das epistemes organizacional, psicológica, sociológica e política rumo a novos estudos.