Because water is basic to life, an ethical dimension persists in every decision related to water. By explicitly revealing the ethical ideas underlying water-related decisions, human society's relationship with water, and with natural systems of which water is part, can be contested and shifted or be accepted with conscious intention. Water management over the last century has privileged immediate human needs over those of future generations, other living beings, and ecosystems. In recent decades, improved understanding of water's importance for ecosystem functioning and ecological services for human survival is moving us beyond this growth-driven, supply-focused management paradigm. Environmental ethics challenge this paradigm by extending the ethical sphere to the environment. This research in water ethics considers expanding the conception of whom or what is morally considerable in water policy and management. <br /><br /> First, the research proposes a water ethic to balance among intragenerational equity, intergenerational equity, and equity for the environment. Second, the proposed ethic acts as an assessment tool with which to analyse water policy. <em>Water for Life: Alberta's Strategy for Sustainability</em> is the focal policy document for this analysis. This document is an example of new Canadian policy; it represents the Government of Alberta's current and future approach to water issues; and it implicitly embodies the ethical ideas that guided the document's production. To assess Water for Life's success in achieving the principles of the proposed water ethic, this case study used discourse analysis, key informant interviews, and comparison to a progressive international policy document, <em>Securing Our Water Future Together</em>, the 2004 White Paper of Victoria, Australia. <br /><br /> Key conclusions show that <em>Water for Life</em> is progressive by embracing full public participation, a watershed approach, knowledge-generation initiatives, a new planning model, and water rights security. However, barriers exist that can disrupt the strategy's success, including the first-in-time first-in-right water allocation system, the strategy's lack of detail, inadequate protection of aquatic ecosystems, ambiguity of jurisdiction over water in First Nations communities, and under-developed connections between substantive issues. The thesis also outlines recommendations for Alberta and implications for other jurisdictions. Additionally this research offers guidelines and an assessment tool grounded in broad ethical concepts to water policy development; and it encourages making ethical ideas explicit in assessment and formation of equitable and sustainable water policy.

This thesis is a contribution to the research of media discourse. During the last decades the media landscape has changed dramatically. These changes have been especially evident in German TV programs and the rise of private TV channels. The purpose of this thesis is to explore some of these changes more thoroughly, focusing on the live TV coverage of three soccer matches during the Soccer World Cups of 1974 and 2006 in Germany. The major research question is how these commentaries changed over the years. The thesis analyses how the reporters describe the players, the team and the coach, as well as the sport and the match itself. The relationships between the reporters and their respective audiences as well as the changing functions of the reporters are subsequently examined. The methodological approach used is Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2001; Fowler 1985; van Dijk, 2001). It provides a framework that allows analysing of language in its cultural and social context. Hence, discourse is seen as “language as a form of social practice” (Fairclough, 2001, p.18). Cultural and social contexts as well as extralinguistic factors such as images and sounds are also considered part of the discourse. The overall results indicate that in 2006 soccer has taken on greater importance in the lives of the audience. Live broadcasts of soccer matches have turned more and more into spectacles. This has led to phenomena such as the media’s growing preoccupation with entertainment (“infotainment”). Besides that, an increased presence of the ‘private’ in the public sphere can be discerned. In conclusion, this thesis identifies five principles prevalent in current live media broadcasts: commercialization, individualization, emotionalization, identification, and globalization. Even though some of these principles had already begun to emerge in the 1974 broadcast, their presence in 2006 attests to their increased importance in the German media landscape over time.

Between 2006 and 2008 the German television series “Türkisch für Anfänger“ (Turkish for Beginners) about the life of a multiculturally blended family in Berlin was aired on the television network ARD. This thesis analyzes the gender construction of the six main characters in order to find out which concepts of gender they mirror, and how they perform their gender identities. This analysis of gender is carried out in close interaction with other categories of identity such as ethnicity or age. The theoretical foundation for the study is feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (FPDA), which is interested in the multiple power relations in which individuals are embedded in their social interactions. These structures of power are reflected in their gender constructions. The approach assumes that in each situation several competing discourses are available for individuals within which they need to position themselves. With the help of the FPDA this master’s thesis investigates these discoursive structures subjects adopt to negotiate their relationships and identities. In addition, the thesis relies on Erving Goffman’s concept of face-work and his metaphor of playing a role in social interaction which is meant to be a theatrical stage. His work is applied to the gender construction of the subjects mainly to underline that gender also needs to be performed. The gender construction of the six characters is analyzed on three different levels: their language use, their nonverbal behaviour, and camera editing. Therefore the analysis focuses on verbal communication, nonverbal behaviour and paralinguistic features, and the media components. The analysis of eleven selected scenes shows that the gender constructions of the characters and the performance of those constructions are not stable, but rather fluid. They continuously shift between different gender identities, sometimes positioning themselves at the same time as powerful and powerless within and towards varying discourses. Thus each character constructs a number of different gender identities during the course of the series, as well as within particular scenes.

Although significant growth has occurred in some areas of the grief and bereavement literature, little attention has been paid to the phenomenon of adult child loss from the perspective of parents. Simultaneously, there have been mounting challenges to the traditional grief work hypothesis, which translates 'detachment' as healthy grieving, by proponents of the 'continuing bond' model. While the notion of an ongoing connection with the deceased seems to more accurately describe the experience of bereaved parents, there has been minimal research to explore evidence for this. The intent of this qualitative study was to examine the written and spoken discourse of parents bereaved of adult children in an effort to understand the ways that language is used to give account to that experience and to discern something of the nature of the parent-adult child relationship in death. A discourse analytic approach (Potter & Wetherell, 1987) was taken in order to understand more specifically the function, structure, and variability of written and spoken accounts of bereaved parents. Discourse was collected from diverse sources, including solicited written submissions, face-to-face interviews, published writings and Internet chat between bereaved parents. The findings revealed a range of discursive devices and practices available to participants, through which they achieved reconstructions of their deceased adult children, their relationships with their children, and their experiences of parental bereavement. The most prominent result was the discovery of the use of extreme case formulations (Pomerantz, 1986) by bereaved parents. This particular discursive device had only previously been identified in contexts of conflict. Additionally, participants used categorization, detailed description, characterization, comparison, contrast, paradox, evidence-building, and metaphor as discursive strategies and devices. The social actions performed in the process included: constructing/reconstructing, convincing, remembering, evaluating, describing, and demonstrating parental investment. The discursive content ranged from talk of how special the child was, to the constancy of thoughts about the deceased child. There was also discursive evidence in support of the of 'continuing bonds' model. This study promises to inform the literature on parental bereavement as well as to widen the field of discursive psychology to now include research in grief and loss.

This thesis examines the relationship between worker identity and workplace practices from the perspectives of white and Aboriginal women working in a multinational forest company in the northern prairies. Over the course of three manuscripts I demonstrate the salience of ascribed and constructed identities of women to their experiences and representations of forest employment and corporate discourse. Setting the context for the remainder of the thesis, the first manuscript presents an analysis of employment segregation by gender and Aboriginal identity in Canadas forest sector in 2001 using segregation indices. Results demonstrate that forest employment was vertically segregated by both gender and Aboriginal ancestry in the forest sector in 2001. Men and women of First Nations ancestry were over represented in less-stable and lower paying occupations in woods based forest industries, and both white and First Nations women were over represented in forest services and clerical occupations. To explore womens perceptions of company practices of diversity management and restructuring, I then analysed interviews with women working in forest processing using critical discourse analysis. In my second manuscript, I demonstrated how womens representations of diversity management practices were linked to their social identities in terms of Aboriginal identity and class. Yet, as a whole, these representations prompted a questioning of the meaning of difference within diversity management, and of diversity managements ability to further the interests of marginalised workers. My third manuscript examining representations of restructuring, argues that there is a two way relationship between womens identities as workers and their representations of restructuring. Whether women reproduced or resisted restructuring was linked to their presented work identities and restructuring and practices in turn were helping to shape womens worker subjectivities. Results from this thesis demonstrated that how women represent themselves and workplace practices is related to their different experiences in the specific set of social relations of forestry work in the northern prairies.

No description available.

Media is a big part of people’s everyday lives. It influences both how we see ourselves and the world to some extent. There are many different types of media, for example: television shows, movies, the radio, news papers, advertisements which are placed in random places and the internet. In these different forms of media, there are images of men and women, which are represented in different ways and with different characteristics. Research has been made on a lot of movies and television shows and this thesis will be adding to this vast amount of research by analyzing gender representation in the movies Sex and the City 1 and 2. By using discourse analysis, the results show different types of gender representation and whether the characters in Sex and the City challenge the patriarchal privilege. Assuming social constructivism, we believe that these images of gender representation in movies affect our perception of what a man or a woman is. Our results suggest that the characters do still follow the patriarchal privilege but some characters do on occasion challenge them. However the outcome is rarely successful.

From a social constructionist understanding of social reality, this research explores how the female entrepreneurs and female entrepreneurship are represented in official discourses. From the view point of post-structuralist feminism, this research takes the position that discourses are linguistic practices that create truth effects. It finds that the texts on the official website, including the policies and the female entrepreneurs¡¦ stories, have the potential to reproduce the stereotype of gender.

In contemporary times, policy makers and risk managers find themselves required to make decisions about how to prevent or mitigate complex risks that face society. Risks, such as global warming and energy production, are considered complex because they require knowledge from multiple scientific and technical disciplines to explain the mechanisms that cause and/or prevent hazards. This dissertation focuses on these types of situations: when experts from different disciplines and professions interact to coordinate and legitimize risk characterizations. A review of the risk communication literature highlights three main critiques: (1) Risk communication research historically treats expert groups as uniform and does not consider the processes by which they construct and legitimize risk understandings. (2) Risk communication research tends to privilege transmissive and message-centered approached to communication rather than examine the discursive management and coordination of different risk understandings. (3) Rather than assuming the taken-for-granted position that objective scientific knowledge is the source of legitimacy for technical risk understandings, risk communication research should examine the way that expert groups legitimate their knowledge claims and emphasize the transparency of norms and values in public discourse. This study performs an in-depth analysis of the case of cesium chloride. Cesium chloride is a radioactive source that has several beneficial uses medical, research, and radiation safety applications. However, it has also been identified as a security threat due to the severity of its consequences if used in a radiological dispersal device, better known as a “dirty bomb.” A recent National Academy of Sciences study recommended the replacement or elimination of cesium chloride sources. This case is relevant to the study of risk communication among multidisciplinary experts because it involves a wide variety of fields to discuss and compare terrorism risks and health risks. This study uses a multi-perspectival framework based on Bakhtin’s dialogism that enables entrance into the discourse of experts’ risk communication from different vantage points. Three main implications emerge from this study as seen through the lens of dialogism. (1) Expert risk communication in cross-disciplinary situations is a tension-filled process. (2) Experts who interact in cross-disciplinary situations manage the tension between discursive openness and closure through the use of shared resources between the interpretative repertoires, immersion and interaction with other perspectives, and the layering of risk logics with structural resources. (3) The emergence of security risk Discourse in a post-9/11 world involves a different set of resources and strategies that risk communication studies need to address. In the case of cesium chloride issue, the interaction of experts negotiated conflict about the characterization of this isotope as a security threat or as being useful and unique. Even though participants and organizations vary in how they characterize cesium chloride, most maintained some level of balance between both characterizations—a balance that was constructed through their interactions with each other. This project demonstrates that risk characterizations risks shape organizational decisions and priorities in both policy-making and regulatory organizations and private-sector and functional organizations.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 119-125).