This thesis is an exploration of the institutional engagement between farmers and government, as well as a discourse about the development process in Ethiopia. The discussions are based on the fieldwork conducted from January 2012 to March 2012 in the eastern Ahmara region of the Dewa Chefa district (woreda). The ethnographic material will show how the public’s opinion is altered by the government and national media in terms of the discourse on development, economic growth and change of a farmer’s life. The discourses portray an unrealistic view of real, existing practices and engagements among the farmers and the agricultural bureau in the woreda. The main argument of the thesis is to show how the government's development discourses have multiple purposes that are not only attributed to the development practices and engagements, but also to the political realities and relations which exist between the government and the rural agricultural people. The thesis will explain how engagements, practices and discourses are strategized by the government and its institutions to assert power and to ensure farmers’ compliance. Also, it will explain the farmers' engagements and practices, and their strategies to deal with the development process and the government's strategies to assert power.   The theoretical framework is based on the deconstructive, or anthropological development critique. It will argue that understanding development as governmentality and discourses will be vital in discussing development as a power relationship and way of controlling others and extending government's power over its subjects. In such a view of development as nation state construction, the thesis will explain how development knowledge and discourse are reworked, reformulated and multiplied as new forms of knowledge and discourses to serve the purpose of the government in power within the nation.

Rape cultures in the United States facilitate acts of rape by influencing perpetrators’, community members’, and women who survive rapes’ beliefs about sexual assault and its consequences. While much of the previous research on rape in university settings has focused on individual attitudes and behaviors, as well as developing education and prevention campaigns, this research examined institutional influences on rape culture in the context of football teams. Using a feminist poststructuralist theoretical lens, an examination of newspaper articles, press releases, reports, and court documents from December 2001 to December 2007 was conducted to reveal prominent and counter discourses following a series of rapes and civil lawsuits at the University of Colorado. The research findings illustrated how community members’ adoption of institutional discourses discrediting the women who survived rape and denying the existence of and responsibility for rape culture could be facilitated by specific promotional strategies. Strategies of continually qualifying the women who survived rapes’ reports, administrators claiming ‘victimhood,’ and denying that actions by individual members of the athletic department could be linked to a rape culture made the University’s discourse more palatable to some community members who included residents of Boulder, Colorado and CU students, staff, faculty, and administrators. According to feminist poststructuralist theory, subjects continually construct their identities and belief systems by accepting and rejecting the discourses surrounding them. When community members incorporate rape-supportive discourses from the University into their subjectivities, rape culture has been propagated.

Orientador: Ubiratan D'Ambrosio / Banca: Roberto Alves Monteiro / Banca: Maria do Carmo Domite-Mendonça / Banca: Antônio Vicente Marafioti Garnica / Banca: Antônio Carlos Carrera de Souza / Resumo: Este trabalho pretende pensar a etnomatemática diante das crises do contemporâneo, sobretudo as crises do conhecimento, tematizadas por discursos pós-modernos. Para tanto, discute a questão do conhecimento a partir de possibilidades abertas pelo pensamento de Nietzsche, buscando colocar tal pensamento frente a concepções cartesianas de conhecimento, hegemônicas na modernidade. A questão do espaço e da espacialidade é tomada, pois, desde esta discussão, que é a base para a investigação de campo empreendida junto a jovens e adolescentes moradores de regiões de Laranjal do Jari, Amapá, que têm suas práticas sócio-espaciais desenvolvidas sobre palafitas: moram, estudam, trabalham, divertem-se, namoram, encontram-se e desencontram-se em uma cidade construída sobre palafitas. As crises do conhecimento estão na base da investigação - que se quer interpretativa -: de seus procedimentos às análises e busca de compreensão, tanto de questões de espacialidades e etnomatemática do espaço, quanto do cotidiano sócio-espacial dos participantes da pesquisa. / Abstract: This dissertation aims at thinking ethnomathematics vis-à-vis contemporary crisis in knowledge mainly as it is viewed under the perspective of postmodern discourse. This is achieved by contrasting possibilities opened according Nietzsche's perspectives with Cartesian's point of view about Knowledge which is viewed as hegemonic in the modernity. In this dissertation the question of space and spatiality is taken as a background to present the debate, mentioned before, which is empirically supported by a field work research among youngsters and adolescents living in Laranjal do Jari, in the Amapá state - Brazil, a place almost entirely built over palafits. They were chosen as subjects in the research due to their social and spatial experience resulting from their living in houses constructed over palafits at the Jari River where they live, study, work, have fun and fall in love performing their social interactions. Knowledge and its Crisis constitute the theoretical grounds of the investigation. It is undertaken under an interpretive approach ranging from the data collection to their analysis in order to achieve comprehension of issues both in ethnomathematics as a conceptual body and in the social and spatial cotidianity of the research subjects. / Doutor

Rape cultures in the United States facilitate acts of rape by influencing perpetrators’, community members’, and women who survive rapes’ beliefs about sexual assault and its consequences. While much of the previous research on rape in university settings has focused on individual attitudes and behaviors, as well as developing education and prevention campaigns, this research examined institutional influences on rape culture in the context of football teams. Using a feminist poststructuralist theoretical lens, an examination of newspaper articles, press releases, reports, and court documents from December 2001 to December 2007 was conducted to reveal prominent and counter discourses following a series of rapes and civil lawsuits at the University of Colorado. The research findings illustrated how community members’ adoption of institutional discourses discrediting the women who survived rape and denying the existence of and responsibility for rape culture could be facilitated by specific promotional strategies. Strategies of continually qualifying the women who survived rapes’ reports, administrators claiming ‘victimhood,’ and denying that actions by individual members of the athletic department could be linked to a rape culture made the University’s discourse more palatable to some community members who included residents of Boulder, Colorado and CU students, staff, faculty, and administrators. According to feminist poststructuralist theory, subjects continually construct their identities and belief systems by accepting and rejecting the discourses surrounding them. When community members incorporate rape-supportive discourses from the University into their subjectivities, rape culture has been propagated. / Arts, Faculty of / Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, Institute for / Graduate

Despite apparent feminist advancements within contemporary South Africa, media representations continue to reproduce discourses that inhibit processes of gender transformation. As such, the media represents an important site of continued struggle over gendered meanings and power. While prolific research on gender and the media has been undertaken, there is still a need in South Africa to explore the ways in which media professionals themselves perceive their role in generating gendered media texts. This research therefore aimed to unpack media professionals’ perceptions of gender transformation through their work. Furthermore, given the perceived limitations of certain approaches to gender and the media in South Africa, feminist theory conceptualised as “progressive” was applied in the study towards strengthening engendered media production research. The study involved a thematic, critical discourse analysis of newspaper texts and interviews with journalists and editors from three weekly news publications. The study revealed a high level of discursive contradiction in gender representations, especially in the tabloidised newspapers. Gendered meanings were effected through different discursive devises, namely complicit, advocate and spatial discourses, which played out variously within different spaces of the newspapers. In particular, gender transformative representations of the “private” sphere lagged significantly behind those related to the “public” sphere. In addition, important negotiations over gendered meaning were being undertaken in the more “informal” newspaper spaces, such as columns and jokes pages, often neglected in news media research. The interviews further highlighted lags in feminist trajectories pertaining to the “private sphere”, with liberal-inclusionary feminist conceptions of gender transformation, focused on women’s public participation, predominating. With a few exceptions, progressive feminist perspectives, moving beyond numerical representation towards greater attention to symbolic, relational and integrated understandings of gender, were generally lacking. In addition, many participants conveyed a largely positivistic discourse of objectivity through the media. However, various discursive strategies through which social transformation values were imbibed into newspaper texts were identified, and the research highlighted potential discursive opportunities for gender transformative change. The central strategy identified was the need for the development of a progressive gender lens and the decentralisation of a liberal-inclusionary feminist paradigm within the media and broader society. / Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Sociology / unrestricted

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yes / This article supports growing calls to ‘take small states seriously’ in the international political economy but questions prevailing interpretations that ‘smallness’ entails inherent qualities that create unique constraints on, and opportunities for, small states. Instead, we argue that discourses surrounding the ‘inherent vulnerability’ of small states, especially developing and less-developed states, may produce the very outcomes that are attributed to state size itself. By presenting small states as a problem to be solved, vulnerability discourses divert attention away from the existence of unequal power structures that, far from being the natural result of smallness, are in fact contingent and politically contested. The article then explores these themes empirically through discussion of small developing and less-developed states in the Commonwealth and the World Trade Organization (WTO), considering in particular how smallness has variously been articulated in terms of what small states either cannot or will not do.

<p>This is a study of the discourses of empowerment and disempowerment that emerge from the critical discourse analysis (CDA) of life-histories written by two classes of Grade 11 high school learners in a township school in Cape Town, South Africa. The line of argument presented by this thesis is that there are political, socio-economic, familial and institutional factors and the discourses that construct them which affect learners&rsquo / resilience.</p>

<p>This is a study of the discourses of empowerment and disempowerment that emerge from the critical discourse analysis (CDA) of life-histories written by two classes of Grade 11 high school learners in a township school in Cape Town, South Africa. The line of argument presented by this thesis is that there are political, socio-economic, familial and institutional factors and the discourses that construct them which affect learners&rsquo / resilience.</p>

This thesis aims to understand the connexions between the ethical practices associated with suffering a chronic illness and possibilities of truth, subjectivity, governmentality and freedom. This is attempted via an analysis of the specific case of HIV/AIDS. In the 1980s there emerged a variety of competing ways to construct the truth of HIV/AIDS. By the early 1990s, however, one particular way of thinking about and problematizing the syndrome - an account which reflected less the repressive intentions and perspectives of recently ascendant neo-liberal governments than the efforts and world-views of grass-roots community activism - had achieved ascendancy. This approach to HIV/AIDS remains today the authoritative one, and that from which expertise on the subject is derived. The emergence to pre-eminence of this way of thinking about HIV/AIDS is mapped, and three of its principal manifestations are examined in detail, using techniques of textual analysis. It is argued that within these texts, through the use of various forms of textual management, ethical subject relations of the sort discussed by Foucault are constructed, which delimit the possibilities of being for those who are touched by the disease, and which comprise elements of an ethico-panoptic regulatory technology. The parallels and differences between the technologies of government articulated via these 'community' based discourses and those of recent neo-liberal discourses are explored, with consideration being given to their implications for the practising of resistance and of freedom by people infected or affected by HIV or AIDS. Engagement with the field in this fashion is uncommon within sociology of HIV/AIDS, and to do so raises a variety of conceptual and methodological issues. Hence, within this thesis the task of interrogating HIV/AIDS discourse is radically linked to the construction of a distinct form of sociology, derived from the Foucauldian project of the 'history of the present'.