Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Laszlo Kulcsar / Nepali women are often barred from going abroad through discriminatory state policies, and the women engaging in foreign employment are generally perceived as "loose" women in Nepalese society. The female migrant workers are also represented as lacking "agency" and "victims" of sex trafficking in the Nepalese media. Despite the unfavorable socio-political contexts, a substantial number of Nepali women have engaged in transnational labor migration in the last two decades, often "illegally" by using the open Nepal-India border to reach the destination countries. The study investigates the impact of women's migration on the dominant discourse relating to female workers' sexuality and agency by analyzing the experiences of female workers from Chitwan, Nepal, who have returned after working as housemaids in the Persian Gulf. The study finds that the dominant discourse is both contested and reproduced during the emigration process and after the return of female workers. However, the dominant discourse is overall restructured in the emigrant communities due to women's participation in foreign employment and return with diverse experiences. As women's varied migration experiences are hardly reported in the national media, the discursive change in the local communities does not necessarily bring a (similar) change in the national discourse. While violence prevailed against female workers in the Gulf, most acts of violence were indirect and non-physical. The extreme forms of violence, such as physical and sexual abuses, which are usually reported in the media, were somewhat uncommon. The major complaints of the respondents were low wages, withholding and non-payment of wages, withholding of passport, extremely long hours of work, constant criticism, lack of adequate rest, and the feeling of confinement. The violence against the housemaids was largely facilitated by the sponsorship-based labor recruitment system in the Gulf that bound the migrant workers with their employers. At the micro level, the living arrangement (having to live with the employers) was also a contributing factor to violence against the female workers. The female workers who were employed in a household with multiple housemaids were less likely to experience violence than those who were the only maid in the employer's house.

Master of Science / Curriculum and Instruction / Thomas Vontz / Discourse analysis (DA) explores the relationships between discursive practices and wider social and cultural structures, relations, and processes. In this paper I explore, through a qualitative DA of education reporting in the Topeka Capital Journal (January 2014- January 2016), state press releases, and gubernatorial state speeches, how notions of fiscal crisis, both material and narratively cultivated, function to underscore the logic of neoliberalism. While considering potential context specific properties of local reporting and the cultural, geographical, and historical context of the region, I connect my findings with the larger, scholarly body of work pertaining to these issues. Connecting media language and policy discourse across local and global dimensions adds to a growing theoretical and qualitative understanding of the facets of education restructuring and reform within the framework of the global movement and adds material resources in the form of analysis as tools for educational practitioners and grassroots organizations working to craft alternatives to the neoliberal doctrine.

Zines are small circulation media that amateurs make and distribute. Inspired by both the lack of ethnographic research on the do-it-yourself (DIY) culture of zine-making in urban studies and the growing interest in ethnographically oriented research in literacy studies, rhetoric, and linguistics this research explores the people, places, and practices behind zine publication in New Orleans, Louisiana through participant observation at two specialized loci—the Iron Rail and punk shows—as well as semi-structured interviews with people who make, distribute, and consume zines. This research argues that zine-makers use zines to reinterpret urban space in search of an authentic relationship with the city. They then share these interpretations with others who participate in DIY punk culture. In doing so, zine-makers refuse conventional rules developed for classroom literacy and resist capitalism in their zines' content and in their methods of publishing by both building on local knowledge and opposing corporate media.

Poststructuralist accounts of gender provide a useful theoretical space to unpack the workings of power and domination as they structure the organization of our language, representations, concepts, and discourse in general. One significant flaw of this theory is a failure to adequately account for the social realm of embodied individuals, social interactions, and interpretive moments. In this paper, I offer conventional femininity as a particular type of gendered habitus that highlights this theoretical flaw as it necessarily links what is promising and useful about poststructuralist accounts of gender with the physical, social, interactive, and interpretive everyday lives of women.

This thesis considers the automatic acquisition of knowledge about discourse connectives. It focuses in particular on their semantic properties, and on the relationships that hold between them. There is a considerable body of theoretical and empirical work on discourse connectives. For example, Knott (1996) motivates a taxonomy of discourse connectives based on relationships between them, such as HYPONYMY and EXCLUSIVE, which are defined in terms of substitution tests. Such work requires either great theoretical insight or manual analysis of large quantities of data. As a result, to date no manual classification of English discourse connectives has achieved complete coverage. For example, Knott gives relationships between only about 18% of pairs obtained from a list of 350 discourse connectives. This thesis explores the possibility of classifying discourse connectives automatically, based on their distributions in texts. This thesis demonstrates that state-of-the-art techniques in lexical acquisition can successfully be applied to acquiring information about discourse connectives. Central to this thesis is the hypothesis that distributional similarity correlates positively with semantic similarity. Support for this hypothesis has previously been found for word classes such as nouns and verbs (Miller and Charles, 1991; Resnik and Diab, 2000, for example), but there has been little exploration of the degree to which it also holds for discourse connectives. We investigate the hypothesis through a number of machine learning experiments. These experiments all use unsupervised learning techniques, in the sense that they do not require any manually annotated data, although they do make use of an automatic parser. First, we show that a range of semantic properties of discourse connectives, such as polarity and veridicality (whether or not the semantics of a connective involves some underlying negation, and whether the connective implies the truth of its arguments, respectively), can be acquired automatically with a high degree of accuracy. Second, we consider the tasks of predicting the similarity and substitutability of pairs of discourse connectives. To assist in this, we introduce a novel information theoretic function based on variance that, in combination with distributional similarity, is useful for learning such relationships. Third, we attempt to automatically construct taxonomies of discourse connectives capturing substitutability relationships. We introduce a probability model of taxonomies, and show that this can improve accuracy on learning substitutability relationships. Finally, we develop an algorithm for automatically constructing or extending such taxonomies which uses beam search to help find the optimal taxonomy.

School has an important role in contributing to digitalization, where digital tools can increase students' knowledge development. The aim of this study is to study how popular-historical podcasts can be used in history teaching at upper secondary level. Furthermore, the starting point for the study is to investigate how the content of podcasts can promote a historical awareness. The popular-historical podcasts is analyzed with the help of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's discourse theory and Jürn Rüsen's theory of history awareness. In order to be able to fulfil the analysis and to understand the content, the study takes inspiration from a qualitative discourse analyzis. The results of the study show that the content of the podcasts in various ways promotes Rüsen's historical awareness and can contribute to promoting a historical awareness. They affect content as actors, causal relationships, connections to present and future, and different historical views. The results also show differences in the podcasts discourses where the P3 history is more easily understood and has a clearer story while the history podium's language is more difficult. Consequently, there is a struggle between how different characters can be determined. History awareness is affected in a clearer and broader way in the History podium and can therefore be considered to affect history awareness to a greater extent while P3 history promotes it in a more understandable way. The conclusion is that the podcasts can be used to promote history awareness and be used as digital teaching material.

Adopting a social constructionist methodology, this research explores the contexts, discourse and practices of cosmopolitanism amongst African migrants in Johannesburg, South(ern) Africa’s economic hub and top migrant destination. The research argues that the central function of this cosmopolitanism is to serve as a counter-narrative to an exclusive South African nationalism and as an expression of a more general struggle to overcome the unwarranted limitations of being born in a country which does not provide enough opportunities. On the basis of both qualitative and quantitative data collected between 2006 and 2008 in Johannesburg, this study challenges the still widely held assumption that cosmopolitanism is not for those whose mobility is ‘unprivileged’ and argues that this assumption becomes particularly unsustainable once situated in the contexts of Africa’s unachieved nation-states, hyper-diverse urban centres and multiple alternative systems of belonging and identity. Instead, this study argues that it is exactly these conditions that have actually allowed a particular type of cosmopolitanism to emerge rather than having suppressed it. The three empirical chapters explore how migrants’ counter-narrative to discourses of nationalism, exclusion and pathologisation of migration constructs notions of mobility and space in particularly cosmopolitan, de-territorialised terms; generates a concept of cultural diversity and the engagement with the Other as normal, enriching and unproblematic; and establishes a more inclusive and multifaceted cosmopolitan social order that is claimed to be morally superior to that of nationalism. Finally, the conclusion provides some pointers towards three central imperatives for future research on cosmopolitanism: firstly, the imperative to address the present disconnect between cosmopolitanism from above and from below – and as part of that the lack of attention to empirical forms of cosmopolitanism; secondly, the importance of paying more attention to the social, cultural and economic contexts in which forms of empirical cosmopolitanism are embedded; and, thirdly, the need to overcome the three ‘isms’ that the majority of research on cosmopolitanism and migration remains stunted by: ethnocentrism, class-centrism and, somewhat ironically, methodological nationalism. The study argues that if we want to know more about how individuals become cosmopolitan agents of change and reformulate social orders ‘from below’, we should begin to treat migrant populations, and particularly those who move within and across the African continent, as a crucial source of knowledge about how to negotiate both the uncertainties and the opportunities that are intrinsic to more de-territorialised, post-national forms of social organisation and identity.

This research explores the discourses of Muslims that had emerged in The Star, Daily News, Cape Argus and New York Times before and after the bombings of the New York City’s World Trade Centre Towers on September 11, 2001. This was a qualitative study that analysed a total of 176 articles from the various newspapers from July 2001 to November 2001. A discourse analytic approach was used as the method of analysis within a broad depth hermeneutic framework. The depth hermeneutic approach emphasises the analysis of the socio-historical context in order to understand how certain constructions of Muslims had historically emerged. Therefore, this study traces the construction of Muslims and the media historically. The results indicate that the dominant discourses of Muslims that have emerged are that ‘Muslims are fundamentalists’, ‘Muslims are violent’, ‘ Muslims cannot be trusted’ and the depiction of Muslims in conflicting terms in relation to the West, namely: ‘Muslims versus the Western World’. The various sub-themes that had emerged are as follows; ‘Muslims are a force to be feared,’ ‘Islam teaches violence’ and that ‘Muslims are inhumane and uncivilised. The ideological representation of Muslims within the texts as the out-group when compared to the West is emphasised through these discourses. A comparison of the various newspapers portrayal of Muslims in the media before and after September 11, 2001, shows that the Cape Argus depicts a more positive representation of Muslims in both instances. The findings reveal that Daily News, The Star and the New York Times present a more negative view of Muslims before and after the events of September 11, 2001.

Faculty of Humanities School of Literature and language Studies 0314877y acostantino@yahoo.com / This research project aims to examine the relations of power evident in an English pamphlet (the source text) dealing with issues of sexual and reproductive health (including HIV/AIDS) in South Africa, and its Portuguese translation (the target text). A Critical Discourse Analysis model is used to study the articulated structure of the texts in social and historical terms as well as in linguistic terms. In carrying out such a critical examination of these pamphlets, which reflect institutional beliefs, I am guided by the fact that their conditions of production, distribution and consumption can reveal intricate power relations.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Johannesburg, November 2015 / The purpose of this research is to explore the role of courage in leadership. A review of the relevant literature showed that leadership has been widely studied but is still not well understood while courage has scarcely been studied and is still diversely defined. It has been found that courage rarely has a place in leadership and management frameworks. Leaders in Mauritius were interviewed on their experiences of courage. As this research is of exploratory nature, a qualitative design was adopted and unstructured interviews were used. A Narrative Analysis of the transcripts was carried out in a two-step process: Stories were extracted from the interview transcripts in a deductive manner using a three-dimensional approach consisting of personal, social and temporal dimensions. The stories were then inductively analysed to derive meaning from them using thematic and performative analysis. This research has three main contributions. First, the manifestation of courage follows a cycle of four stages, starting from the Trigger Stage, followed by the Barrier Stage, Thoughts & Actions Stage and Ending Stage. Throughout the life of the leader, one cycle feeds the next cycle and so on. Furthermore, the contexts under which courage were displayed were: Change, Pro-Active Vision, Identity Tensions and Response. Second, the following drivers of courage were identified: the external drivers Greater Cause, Support, and Sacrificing Something, and the internal disposition courage drivers Positive & Forward Looking, Self-Consciousness, Calculated Risk-taking, Values & Beliefs, Emotional Balance & Control, Prior Experience, Perseverance & Focus, and Ownership & Independency. The internal courage drivers activated in the transition between the Trigger and Barrier stages were equivalent to “Courage to Be” while the external courage drivers activated between the Barrier and Thoughts & Actions stages were equivalent to “Courage to Act”. Furthermore, it was found that leadership skills act as mere facilitators of courage and courage drivers need to be present to drive courageous acts. It was also seen that some of the drivers of courage are very close to qualities of authentic leadership. Third, the research has made a methodological contribution in terms of the development of a systematic approach to the use of narrative analysis in management research. The implications from the findings are that courage development cannot be excluded from leadership development and can start in schools as well as in organisations as an on-going process, and that the methods of analysis developed in this research can be applied. / MB2016