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This dissertation presents an account of fictional discourse which is teleological. According to it, questions about what is said in fiction and how it ought to be said are answerable in terms of the goals and methods belonging specifically to fiction-making as a practice. Viewed in such a way, it is argued that the incompleteness of fictional discourse and its apparent tolerance of inconsistency are distinctive of it. Moreover, it is argued that there is a sense in which one can produce true statements in fiction without thereby committing one self to the thesis that words made use of in fiction are endowed with reference. Throughout the dissertation, the view espoused in it is contrasted with rival positions on the issues of what fiction is about, and whether it can be true. It is argued that a teleological account of fictional discourse can present a coherent alternative to these.

With the knowledge that risk has become an omnipresent concept used to understand various social problems, this study aims to fill a perceived gap in literature by investigating the way in which risk discourse is applied to understand different categories of crime, namely traditional crime and corporate crime. It is hypothesized that risk logic is heavily applied to the understanding of traditional crime, with minimal attribution to conversations surrounding corporate crime. The pervasiveness of risk as a technique or tactic of government renders the study of its application to different types of crime an important addition to the existing risk literature. Using the method of a comparative content analysis, the parallels and discrepancies between the ways in which risk is used to discuss traditional and corporate crime by Canadian federal criminal justice organizations are explored. The results indicate a lack of focus on risk logic with respect to corporate crime, but demonstrate that risk discourse is perhaps not altogether absent from corporate crime discussions.

Women’s periodicals at the start of the twentieth-century were not just recorders but also producers of social and cultural change. They can be considered to both represent and construct gender codes, offering readers constantly evolving communal identities. This dissertation asserts that the periodical genre is a valuable resource in the investigation of communal identity formation and seeks to reclaim for historians of British modernist feminism a neglected publication format of the early twentieth century. I explore the discursive space of three unique women’s periodicals, Bean na hÉireann, the Freewoman, and Indian Ladies Magazine, and argue that these publications exemplify the importance of the early twentieth-century British woman’s magazine-format periodical as a primary vehicle for the communication of feminist opinions. In order to interrogate how the dynamic nature of each periodical is reflected and reinforced in each issue, I rely upon a tradition of critical discourse analysis that evaluates the meaning created within and between printed columns, news articles, serial fiction, poetry, and short sketches within each publication. These items are found to be both representative of a similar value of open and frank discourse on all matters of gender subordination at that time and yet unique to each community of readers, contributors and editors. The dissertation then discusses the disparate physical, political, and social locations of each text, impact of such stressors on the periodical community, and the relationships between these three journals. Ultimately, I argue that each journal offers a unique model of contested feminist identity specific to the society and culture from which the periodical arises, and that is established within editorial columns and articles and practiced within the figurative space of poetry and fiction selections in each journal.

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<p>This research aimed to give an account of the development of concepts of text and discourse and the various approaches to analysis of texts and discourses, as this is reflected in core linguistic literature since the late 1960s. The idea was to focus specifically on literature that notes the development stimulated by a proliferation of electronic media. Secondly, this research aimed to describe the nature of electronic news texts found on the internet in comparison to an equivalent printed version, namely texts printed in newspapers and simultaneously on the newspaper website.</p>

This study aims at highlighting the ideological implications of school development as a discursive practice. More comprehensively the aim is also contributing to rearrangements and shifts in perspective when school development is the matter. One of today´s most widespread and dominant discourses are said to be the one which concerns development, and according to many interpreters, development is one of the most prominent commandments in the modern as well as the post-modern narratives. School development as a concept has for the last 15 years established itself firmly in both Swedish school policy and in Swedish school research. It may sound obvious and commendable but also such axioms may be questioned. The design of the study lies in the field of discourse research and more specifically within critical discursive psychology, which draws on both a post-structural and a postmodern conception of discourse. The study is based on the idea that the ideological potential of arguments occurs, develops and changes in discursive practices and not anywhere else or at any abstract level. The starting point is a perception that certain issues and topics within e.g. conversation, depending on time and context will be seen as controversial, while others will be taken for granted. One part of the basis of the study consists of texts with a direct bearing on a specific school research and development project which took place between 2003 and 2008. Participating partners in the collaboration were the Swedish National Agency for School Improvement, Karlstad University, Dalarna University and 13 municipalities in Sweden. Another part of the basis of the study consists of texts in which  ‘school development’ is considered and negotiated in more general terms, usually without reference to the project. All texts derive from the period 2003 – 2006. The analysis shows that school development as discursive practice often rely on a set of stereotypical expressions and ways of arguing. Stereotypes, which among other things, tend to divide people into suitable and non-suitable, capable and non-capable, which may be regarded as a somewhat unexpected implication of school development. The material has been dramatized by an intrigue inspired by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman´s texts. He has written extensively on the modern in relation to the postmodern and about the ambivalence which resides in between and school development as discursive practice can be understood in much the similar way.

In this study I explored the research questions, how do students understand membership in a community and the responsibilities of our various locations and what pedagogical rationales and practices move students from awareness of social injustice towards acting to transform the societal structures that reinforce injustice? This project engaged in a critical and classroom action research using ethnographic tools with a class of Grade 7 students from a Vancouver elementary school. The purpose was to create spaces in curriculum for student initiated social justice oriented actions while testing a pedagogy founded in student inquiry, criticality and praxis. This was an experiment in applying critical discourse to instructional design. While teaching about social justice issues, the teacher- researcher sought to employ the principles of social justice in the pedagogy as well as the methodology of this study. The methodology sought to be consistent with the principles of social justice through attempting to create a collaborative critical research cohort with students through using data collection to foster a dialogic relationship between teacher- researcher and students. The data collection was in the forms of teacher and student generated fieldnotes, a communal research log, photography, questionnaires, interviews and written reflections. The findings from this research were analyzed through the themes of teacher tensions, constructs of student and teachers, and resistance. The analysis of the data provided opportunities for identifying power dynamics within the concepts being critiqued, exploring the makings of the cognitive unconscious and entering into a dialogic relationship with students about official and hidden curricula. Conclusions drawn from this research included that the experiment of teaching and researching for social justice in a socially just manner requires not only a grounding in theory and an awareness of the normative discourse, but an investigation of and critical reflection on those social constructions of teacher and student that are deeply embedded in the collective cognitive unconscious of the classroom. Teacher tensions and student resistance are productive as they provoke awareness of these constructions and their effects on the classroom.

Contrary to common folk and expert theory, the human self is not unitary. There is no Cartesian theatre or homunculus functioning as a metaphorical overlord. Rather, it is an abstractum gleaned from a person�s experiences-a centre of narrative gravity (Dennett 1991). Experiences are a person�s cognisance of her ventures in life from a particular unique perspective. In perspectivising her experiences, the person imputes a certain structure, order, and significance to them. Events are seen as unfolding in a certain inherently and internally coherent way characterised by causality, temporality, or intentionality, etc. In other words, a person�s self emerges out of her innumerable narrativisations of experience, as well as the different protagonist roles she plays in them. Her behaviours in different situations can be understood as different life-narratives being foregrounded, when she is faced with different stimuli different experiences/events present. In real life, self-reflective discourse frequently alludes to a divided, partitive self, and the experiences/behaviours that it can engage in. In academic study, this concept of the divided and narrative-constructivist self is well-represented in disciplines ranging from philosophy (e.g., Dennett 1991, 2005), developmental psychology (e.g., Markus & Nurius 1986; Bruner 1990, 2001; Stern 1994), cognitive psychology (e.g., Hermans & Kempen 1993; Hermans 2002), neuropsychology (e.g. Damasio 1999), psychiatry (e.g., Feinberg 2001), to linguistics (e.g., McNeil 1996; Ochs & Capps 1996; Nair 2003). Depending on the particular theory, however, emphasis is often placed either on its divided or its narrative-constructivist nature. This thesis argues, however, that the two are coexistent and interdependent, and both are essential to the self�s ontology. Its objectives are therefore: (i) to propose a partitioned-narrative model of the self which unifies the two perspectives by positing that the partitioned-representational (Dinsmore 1991) nature of narratives entails the partitioned structure of the self; and (ii) to propose that the partitioned-narrative ontology of the self is what enables and motivates much of our self-reflective discourse and the grammatical resources for constructing that discourse. Partitioning guarantees that a part of the self, i.e., one of its narratives, can be selectively attended to, foregrounded, objectified, and hence talked about. Narrativity provides the contextual guidance and constraints for meaning-construction in such discourse. This claim is substantiated with three application cases: the use of anaphoric reflexives (I found myself smiling); various usages of proper names, including eponyms (the Shakespeare of architecture), eponymic denominal adjectives (a Herculean effort), etc.; and partitive-self constructions which explicitly profile partitioned and selectively focal narratives (That�s his hormones talking). When analysed using the proposed model, these apparently disparate behaviours turn out to share a common basis: the partitioned-narrative self.

Abstract Ongoing tension surrounding values education in both the wider community and among politicians and academics, as well as the plethora of values education programs on the commercial market, all contribute to a number of competing values education discourses that can make it difficult for individual classroom teachers to make choices regarding what and how to teach values. The aim of the current study was to contribute to an understanding of discourses of values education in Australia and investigate the way in which the Discourse models of government policy documents and classroom teacher Discourse models of values education intersect in terms of both alignment and fragmentation. In addressing the problem of how teachers choose to bring clarity to competing values education discourses, this research comprises two parts. The first part is an analysis of a key policy text, the National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools (2005). The second part focuses on fourteen interviews with seven primary school classroom teachers conducted at different times during one school term. Each teacher was interviewed twice. The interviews were treated as objects of analysis and not just as an information source. The informal theories that underpin the policy and interview texts are analysed through James Paul Gee’s (2005) lens of “Discourse models”. This is a critical discourse approach to analysing a social phenomenon, with analytic focus placed on the language in the texts, as well as the localised and broader social context in which the language is situated. The way in which the policy and interview texts functioned strategically was analysed. The Discourse models evident in the texts were then identified through the use of ‘storylines’ as an analytic tool. In identifying Discourse models, insight was gained into how the official policy and the teacher participants in the study conceptualised values education. Analysis of the policy document showed how the text acted strategically to build legitimacy and the appearance of consensus surrounding the approach to values education advocated in the document. The storyline that emerged was one of the Australian Federal Government as a ‘hero’ intervening in values education to save young people who are at moral risk in the 21st century. Analysis of the interview transcripts showed how these texts also acted strategically to build legitimacy and the appearance that each participant’s approach to values education was right, normal and needed. A similar storyline emerged in the interview texts, where young people were in need of rescuing due to the moral peril of current times but it was the teacher participants who were now in the role of ‘hero’. The teacher participants in the study showed that they called upon a multiplicity of social roles, everything they were as moral beings, in their efforts to rescue students. The results indicate that there is both alignment and fragmentation in the Discourse models identified in both the policy and interview texts. Values education was conceived of in largely behavioural terms, where values were fixed, and change towards these value norms was focused on the individual behaviour of the student. Alignment centred on a dominant ‘salvation’ story in the texts that regarded values education as a way to rescue students from moral peril. This master model of the salvation story was fractured, however, by the experiences of the classroom teachers in the study. Most poignant was that not all students were able to be rescued despite the best of professed intentions. There are several implications emerging from these findings. First, the explicit move towards fixed values norms has exclusionary effects. Second, the focus on changing the behaviour of students as individuals ignores systemic levels of oppression. Third, and overall, the didactic teaching of values creates tensions over the perceived interference of the state in the lives of young people. Recommendations emerging from the study include that teachers be given increased opportunities to become more aware of their own values systems, the impact of these in the classroom; and develop their understanding of the broader social structures in which values education in classrooms is situated. This awareness is a necessary complement to the official discourses of values education in Australia in order to mitigate the potential exclusionary effects of policy. 130105 Primary Education 35%, 160506 Education policy 35%, 1399 Other Education 30%