This study has identified the discourses surrounding water birth and analyses how these discourses are utilised by the media in New Zealand to represent water birth. The philosophical approach that underpins the study is that of philosopher Michel Foucault and his theory on discourse, power and the subject. His framework is used in a discourse analysis to reveal three main discourses: the scientific medical discourse, the natural birth discourse and the dive reflex discourse. Data used for this study consisted of 30 newspaper articles containing the word 'water birth' collected over a five-year period (2000-2005) from New Zealand's eight main broadsheet newspapers. Analysis was a two-part process: Foucauldian discourse analysis and a media discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995b).Firstly, the discourse analysis showed the subject and the power positions each discourse offered women for positioning themselves in that discourse. The literature and texts revealed Foucault's theory on power relations and resultant subjectivity within institutions and how waterbirth within institutions is disciplined, surveilled, excluded and circulated. The second part of the analysis revealed how the media chooses to deploy the three identified discourses that represent waterbirth in New Zealand. This textual analysis followed the framework of Fairclough's (1995b) media discourse analysis, showing media strategies that are used to promote the discourse deemed to be ideologically significant by the media outlet. Textual analysis identified that the scientific medical discourse contests waterbirth as an unsafe, unproven practice that puts babies' lives at risk. This discourse categorises women who choose waterbirth as unsafe, irrational, alternative, tree-hugging hippies who favour perceived benefits of waterbirth for themselves above the safety of their baby. The natural birth discourse contests that waterbirth is a safe practice that has encountered few problems since its emergence as a validated birthing practice in the late 1980s. It promotes waterbirth as having multiple benefits for both mother and baby and as a way of enhancing the physiological process of birth through non-intervention. The dive reflex discourse underpins the issue of babies drowning when born into water. This discourse details a reflex that suppresses the normal breathing mechanisms in neonates at birth. Literature debates its existence and troubles the overall trustworthiness of such a reflex to prevent a baby drowning when born into water. It is this discourse that sways people's views and positioning on the overall discourse of waterbirth.

Lesbian language can be defined as a codified (Queen 1997) and/or an indexible and discursive body of knowledge (Morrish and Sauntson 2007). A large proportion of research has been conducted on the heterosexual-homosexual binary and the construction of the social relations that constitute normalcy and its discursive opposite, abnormalcy, and the various codifications that exemplify these locations. The objective of this present research is to locate the social construction of inclusion within lesbian language using the empirical research technique of memory work (Haug 1987). The data were obtained from a longitudinal group process involving six respondents identifying as lesbian. The results consist of the analysis of discursive patterns produced by the group using written narratives and discussions ensuing from the reading of the narratives. Memory work is the methodology used to obtain the data and is supported by a broad theoretical framework comprising ethnographic sociolinguistics (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Bourdieu 1980; Rampton et al 2006), critical discourse analysis (Halliday 1994), queer theory (Butler 1990-1997) as well as the newly evolving post-queer theories (Seidman 1997; McLaughlin 2003). My focus is on the richer patterns of discursive content that denote the production of textual lesbian-specific inclusion. The results were contextualised as negotiations of inclusion through the process of self-construction within the dichotomous social locations constituting society, specifically those that surround the concept of reality fantasy - and the accumulations of knowledge realised as inclusiveness. Through these three discrete modes of discursive and cultural expression as bodies of research, the memory work group participants demonstrated their discursive and cultural self construction and subsequent inclusion in lesbian language. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

In this thesis I contemplate the work that subjects perform when giving accounts of themselves, and the work that researchers might perform when working with those accounts. It is composed of a series of philosophical contemplations emergent from reflections upon my experience of conducting life-history narrative interviews with forty people aged between eighteen and sixty-five. It is motivated by questions about the practices through which subjects, their experiences and their accounts of that experience are constituted and articulated. It is motivated, too, by ethical questions related to the practices through which researchers engage with the accounts that subjects of research give of themselves. It is a reflexive project in which my presence as researcher and author is figured as an intellectual resource. This is accomplished through the inclusion of a self-conscious textual ‘I’ who gives an account of himself. I ask how we might understand biographical accounts of experience to have been constituted and performed as accounts, and their narrators to have been constituted and performed as narrating and narratable subjects. In pursuing these questions I trace and articulate those temporalised and spatialised practices and relations through which subjects are constituted, and constituted as intelligible to themselves and each other. I work to give an account of subjects as the play of possibilities within, and differences among, intersecting repertoires of regulatory and regularising technologies of subjectification. I resist, however, giving accounts of subjects that suggest that they are reducible to these technologies. I am, then, concerned with articulating a subject who is simultaneously, paradoxically, regulated and irreducible, knowable and not. These concerns are articulated and performed through contemplation of philosophical and ethical questions related to working with transcriptions of life-history narrative interviews. Rather than suppose the transcribed interview to be a patient text awaiting interpretation, I perform the act of approaching the text with patience. I work with transcriptions of narrative interviews as resources for the reflexive development of my theorising, and for the articulation and performance of patient theorising through deferral of close attention to one narrative until the final chapter. I work with theory in this way, not as if there is a hypothesis to be tested through research, but with research as a space through which questions of theory might be developed. I open the text to philosophical questions, propositions and concepts motivated more towards further openings rather than closures. It is an assemblage of thoughts, knowledges, relations, memories and forgettings which instantiate multiple trajectories that arc in multiple directions without necessarily meeting or arriving. It is a text of bits and fragments, absences and presences, inclusions and omissions, locutions and lacunae. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Politeness Phenomena and Mild Conflict in Japanese Casual Conversation

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.

"April 2002" / Thesis (MA (Hons))--Macquarie University, Division of Society, Culture, Media & Philosophy, Centre for International Communication, 2003. / Bibliography: leaves 222-232. / Introduction -- Historiography of NGOs -- Historiography of globalisation -- World social forum, the who is who in the anti-globalisation/deglobalisation movement and alternatives -- Critical discourse analysis, discourse historical method and study's methodology -- Data analysis, findings and impact of NGOs' discourse on global civil society and TNCs -- Summary of findings, limitations and avenues for future research. / Non-Government-Organisations (NGOs) have been in the forefront of the struggle against the alleged negative impact of globalisation on developing countries and disenfranchised communities around the world. But despite the fact that NGOs and other grassroot movements are becoming increasingly strident, the discourse of this sector of civil society has not been subjected to any substantial and concerted academic study, particularly in the field of international communication. -- The present study aims at partially filling this gap by 1) reviewing the current general state of NGOs, 2) surveying the latest debates relative to the outreach of globalisation and 3) examining the alternatives being proposed. While drawing mainly on a select sample of NGOs and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) press communiques, the core focus of this study is to deconstruct the NGOs' discourse with a view to gauging its linguistic and hermeneutical underpinnings and situating its relevance within the ongoing debate on globalisation and alternatives. -- This study also aims to examine the discourse of NGOs in the context of a multidiscourse environment relative to the present state of global community development in general and civil society and disenfranchised communities in developing countries in particular as part of the praxis of mainstreaming alternative views and discourses. -- For this, an interdisciplinary methodology of text analysis, juxtaposition and interpretation, based largely on the matrix outlined in Wodak's (Matouschek, Wodak & Januschek, 1996, p. 60), Historical Discourse Method (HDM), Van Dijk's (1998) Media Discourse Approach and Fairclough's (1995, 2001) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used throughout this study. -- And in order to gauge the impact of NGOs' discourse on global civil society, sample articles are examined to decode the perspectives of pro-globalisation media vis-a-vis NGOs' discourse within the parameters of TNCs/Civil Society/NGOs relationships, international political economy and NGOs' taxonomy within International Regimes. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / x, 232 leaves

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed January 9, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 258-271).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Adelaide, 1985. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 647-681).

Thesis (S.T.M.)--Yale Divinity School, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [99]-106).