Considerable research has been done on conceptions of poverty and on the welfare state; however, there is little research into the relationship between the two the ways in which poverty discourses shape welfare states and how transitions in welfare states influence poverty discourses. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, I explore the underlying construction of poverty in Albertas income-support policy as it has developed within an active social policy framework. In the government documents analyzed, poverty is constructed as an objective and neutral assessment of unmet basic needs and is effectively removed from political debate. Also constructed as a lack of labour-market attachment, the poverty discourse that does exist is subsumed within the market discourse. The thesis argues that we need to expand our conceptions of poverty to improve our poverty alleviation strategies, to revitalize the place of social policy in Alberta, and to enrich the way in which we live together. / Family Ecology and Practice

<p>The concept of community development is founded on the premise that changes in the living conditions of people are best effected by the people themselves. The term community evokes the idea of a homogeneous social group who can recognise their common interests and work together harmoniously for their common good. The concerns of the leading development agents and donors in the past two decades have been on empowering communities to participate in their own development by taking control of decisions and initiatives that seek to improve their living conditions. The zeal to address these concerns has in the past decade been pushed with such resounding statements that people&rsquo / s participation in development projects has not only been seen as a basic human right, but also as an imperative condition for human survival. It has been strongly argued in the UNDP reports that the overall development strategy is to enable people to gain access to a much broader range of opportunities.</p> <p><br /> From this perspective, development as a social activity seeks to ensconce economic liberalisation, freedom of association, good governance and access to free market economy as the guiding tenets of an improved life in all communities in the world. The realization of this dream posed a major challenge to many governments in the Third World and the 1980s saw the emergence of &lsquo / associational revolution&rsquo / &ndash / the proliferation of small-scale non governmental organizations (NGOs) with relative autonomy from the state. The mainstream development agencies perceived the NGOs as the best instruments to instigate changes in the living conditions of the poor and the disadvantaged people. For this reason, NGOs became increasingly instrumental in implementing development objectives in the rural and disadvantaged communities. Development in this sense consists of processes in which various groups are stimulated to improve aspects of their lives particularly by people from outside their community. This has drawn attention to how these outsider- development agents communicate development information particularly due to the sociolinguistic situation in many rural African communities. The real concern is with is that the target majority of the people in the rural areas are not speakers of the dominant languages of the development discourse, in most cases this is the official foreign languages taught in schools.</p> <p><br /> Communication is a fundamental part in community development programmes and language emerges as a key factor in effective communication and implementation of these programmes. While it is evident that social interactions are sustained by agreeable communicative principles, the role of language and the different mode of communication applied to development interventions have received very little attention from the parties concerned. This has yielded detrimental repercussions in the quality of interaction at the grassroots level. More often than not, it is assumed that once there is a common language, effective communication will take place and for this reason language use and mode of communication are never given much thought in the field of development interaction.</p>

Since the early 1990s, there has been an increasing focus on the education of boys in the media, impacting more recently on education policy processes. Some previous research has documented the background to this focus, including the impact on earlier policies and programs addressing the education of girls. However, the ways in which discourses about masculinity have informed gender equity policies in education have not been analysed at a fine-grained level. This study identifies the major perspectives involved in debates about the education of boys, and the various discourses informing them 1) advocates for boys' perspectives informed by discourses including biological essentialism and anti-feminism; 2) feminist and profeminist perspectives and discourses; and 3) social psychological perspectives and discourses. A theoretical framework for understanding discourse and policy, as well as gender and masculinities is developed, drawing on critical discourse theory and theories about gender relations. Using critical discourse analysis, drawing on the work of Fairclough, I analyse the discourses about masculinity informing two recent policy documents: Gender Equity: A Framework for Australian Schools and Education Queensland's Boys Education Strategy. The study found that the Gender Equity Framework was primarily informed by (pro)feminist discourses, although advocates for boys discourses informed the Framework in significant ways as well. The Boys Education Strategy, while primarily framed by advocates for boys' discourses, was largely informed by (pro)feminist discourses at the micro level. In both cases, discourses marginalised in the broader culture and in the debates generally, such as those associated with marginal sexualities or minority cultural groups, were found to be marginal. These findings have implications for policy and policy processes, gender equity policy and for teacher education. In particular there is a need for further research on the role of the media in policy processes as well as work on developing teacher understanding of and responses to policy processes and the construction of gender and masculinities.

This thesis contributes to the established literature on farm women within the context of family farming. It recognises that not enough is yet known about the discourses and agency which influence their lives. Consequently, this study has sought to establish what dominant discourses shape the lives of farm women, their responses to these discourses and how their discursive positioning influences their agency. This study employed a qualitative case study approach involving interviews with a diverse mixture of independent farm women, along with women farming in marital relationships. This thesis engages these narratives to showcase the colourful, complex life-experiences of farm women. In addition, and where present, women�s partners were interviewed to provide male farmers� perspectives about women in family farming. This research has found that women�s lives are shaped by positioning and contextualising discourses, with which they comply to ensure that the family farm survives. Their subservient discursive positioning limits the agency they can express, although they are able to mobilise indirect agency through supporting their partner; an implicit form of agency which has previously been unrecognised or understated. Cumulatively, this thesis highlights the need to recognise the diversity of farm women, and how they are able to exercise agency from their constrained subject positions within the family farming context. Furthermore it emphasises that agency is a dynamic, and far more varied concept than previously understood.

This thesis offers new insights into physiotherapy practice by asking 'how is physiotherapy discursively constructed?' Physiotherapy is a large, well-established, orthodox health profession. Recent changes in the economy of health care in developed countries, added to an increasing prevalence of chronic illness amongst aging populations, and growing public distrust for the established health professions, are now challenging physiotherapists to consider how best to adapt to the future needs of health care consumers. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2008

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis concerns the intersection of social semiotic theory and critical discourse analysis (CDA), applying systemic-functional (SF) theory to verbal-visual news media texts. The aim of the thesis is to develop social semiotic descriptions of visual meaning in order to facilitate analyses of evaluative stance in visual-verbal text. The texts studied are ‘factual’ daily broadsheet news photos and prominent visual-verbal ‘displays’ that incorporate these photos alongside headlines and captions. Such displays introduce investigative stories on the front page of broadsheet weekly news reviews and are referred to in the thesis as ‘standout’ texts. They are significant because they may also be read as independent texts and play a critical role in positioning a wide readership on the issues investigated in the story. The SF system of verbal appraisal was used in this thesis to develop a corresponding system of visual appraisal. The process involved applying general appraisal options to a corpus of news photos and proceeding to further delicacy in a repeated cycle of analysis and system-building. Once refined in this way the system was applied alongside the verbal appraisal system to account for evaluation in verbal-visual standouts. In the thesis four Australian and four Greek standouts introducing stories on asylum seekers were analysed in order to explore the potential for variation and the impact of context on evaluative meaning choices. The thesis contributes insights into SF theory, media discourse and CDA. The visual systems developed allow appraisal analysis to be extended to images and to verbalvisual texts. Visual appraisal analysis in the thesis provides new evidence for the ideological and evaluative power of news photos. Verbal-visual appraisal analysis shows how each semiotic contributes to evaluative meaning, and to its accumulation and spread across a text. In respect to media discourse, the thesis also provides evidence for the ‘standout’ as an orbital verbal-visual news genre. The comparison of evaluative stance in two sets of standouts demonstrates consistent editorial choices in texts within each context and contrasts across the two sites. The Australian texts display more evaluative complexity, greater emphasis on entertainment and offer two different stances, aligning a diverse target audience. The Greek texts are more straightforward and construct a single stance, aligning a narrower audience. By identifying the semiotic choices involved in the evaluative positioning of readers by visual-verbal texts, the thesis can contribute to more informed and reflective practice. Thus, as well as making theoretical advances, the findings have relevance for journalism and education at a time when the impact of images is changing our conception of literacy.

Recent research into advanced breast cancer has suggested that young women in general tend to have more aggressive disease, present at a later stage of disease progression and suffer many more issues and concerns than their older counterparts. Whilst breast cancer in women in general has been the target of a vast amount of research and public attention, values and beliefs surrounding advanced breast cancer have not been a focus of concern. The aim of this thesis is to explore scientific journals, the media and to listen to the young women themselves in order to identify the understandings of advanced breast cancer in young women and the ways in which these understandings are perpetuated and sustained over time. The goal is to illuminate the various discourses that are currently being drawn upon to understand this life-limiting illness and the impact these discourses have on the lives of young women concerned. Poststructuralism is the theoretical perspective within which this thesis is located. This approach allowed for a focus on language, power and text. Discourse analysis of three data sets was used. These data sets were drawn from scientific and medical journals (251), medical texts (5), clinical practice guidelines (2), newspaper articles (230) and transcribed conversations with 12 young women diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. The main discourses identified within and across the various data sets were; the discourse of numeracy, the discourse of tragedy and several discourses of the body; the thin body, the declining body, the object body and the gendered body. While the emphasis of each of these discourses varied across the three data sets, they were all present in each to some degree, reflecting broader cultural stories within which the individual stories are located. Young women diagnosed and living with advanced breast cancer are currently being portrayed as living with a tragic disease, controlled and constrained by the statistics and probabilities and played out within and on a body in ‘perpetual disintegration’. The discourses of tragedy, numeracy and the thin, object, gendered and declining body all relate to larger stories of what it is to be dying before one’s time in Western society today.

This thesis is concerned with making explicit the role that language plays in apprenticing social subjects into different social or 'discourse' communities. It focuses specifically on the textual and rhetorical strategies of school history texts written by students, aiming to bring a close linguistic analysis of the texts into relationship with the wider social and cultural context. In particular it focuses on three semantic domains. These are Cause, Time and an area of interpersonal evaluation known as Appraisal. The main questions addressed are ???How do the semantic motifs of Cause, Time and Appraisal function within the discourse of school history? How are they grammatically and lexically realised? What are the semantic and grammatical shifts and interactions that occur as a result of students moving through the different levels of their apprenticeship? In order to answer these questions the analytical tools of systemic-functional grammar are applied to a corpus of texts produced within the context of Australian secondary schooling. These texts represent the range of written genres that history students need to produce in order to fulfil the objectives and outcomes of the history curriculum. A major feature of the research is the use of Appraisal theory, a framework recently developed in systemic-functional linguistics, for analysing the linguistic resources used to negotiate emotions, judgements and social valuations. This theory proves valuable in taking us beyond more traditional linguistic concerns with interpersonal meaning, which focus on modality and mood structure. The main findings of the linguistic analysis show that construals of Cause, Time and Appraisal are core linguistic tools both for interpreting the past and for persuading audiences of the validity of such interpretations. Analysis also reveals that induction into the (discourse) community of historians can be generally characterised as a process of the student expanding their repertoire of metaphorical and specialised language resources as they move from recording the past to arguing about the past. By providing a fine grained linguistic analysis of the different types of texts that make up school history writing, the research is able to provide insights into the apprenticeship process and into the function and role of history both within and beyond the school context. The major conclusion reached here is that history inducts students into an abstract world of grammatical metaphor and in so doing provides them with the linguistic means to talk about people and time as abstract entities. It also provides them with the positioning and persuading strategies (the ???intellectual flexibility???) necessary for social positions of responsibility.

This thesis offers new insights into physiotherapy practice by asking 'how is physiotherapy discursively constructed?' Physiotherapy is a large, well-established, orthodox health profession. Recent changes in the economy of health care in developed countries, added to an increasing prevalence of chronic illness amongst aging populations, and growing public distrust for the established health professions, are now challenging physiotherapists to consider how best to adapt to the future needs of health care consumers. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2008

This research examines hospital length of stay as a feature of contemporary health care reforms. The ideas of Michel Foucault on governmentality enable length of stay to be studied, not as numerical values of hospital use, but rather as one of the social and political processes through which certain concepts are made susceptible to measurement and part of practice. In this study length of stay is examined as a programmatic rationality, evident in the reengineering of the modern hospital. However, the focus of analysis is not the ‘effect’ of this reengineering, as seen in the substantial changes to hospital treatments and the shifting burden of responsibility for health and ill-health care to individuals and communities. Rather, analysis is directed at understanding how such rationalities make possible reengineering or shifts in the local contexts of hospital care practices. (For complete abstract open document)