Women’s lived experiences of abuse and depression are examined within the context of gendered and racialized pathways to incarceration among 403 women randomly selected from a diagnostic unit in a state prison. This study utilizes feminist action research and community psychological methods to understand what factors predict incarcerated women’s placement on the mental health caseload and provides quantitative support for the pathways theoretical framework. Findings indicate that, among the sample, the prevalence of abuse experiences prior to incarceration exceeded 90%, prevalence of mental health problems exceeded 70%, and less than 35% were receiving mental health care. Being Caucasian, experiencing depression and suicidal ideation, and serving time for certain types of (non-violent, non-property, and non-drug related) crime (e.g., cruelty to children, prostitution, public order, “technicals,” and others) predicted the placement of women on the mental health caseload. Implications for trauma-informed, anti-racist, gender-responsive policies and interventions are discussed.

A Feminist Action Research methodology was used as a collaborative process with five ACT Health social workers based at the Community Health Centres and four at the Woden Valley Hospital. The primary purpose of the study was to investigate, both through critical reflection and action in their work setting, the participants' relevance or otherwise to Aboriginal people in the ACT and region. Behind this is the question of how encapsulated social work is by racism. The impetus for the study arose from my unresolved concerns regarding these issues, having been a social worker in ACT Health for 6 years, to 1990. Decisions on how to proceed involved a process of ongoing consultation between the participant social workers and myself. Exploratory meetings were held in March and April, with an ongoing program being held 2-3 weekly from June to September, followed by a review in December. Most gatherings were specific to the Woden Valley Hospital or Community Health settings. However two half-day workshops were held for all the participants. All the sessions from June were taped. Aboriginal leaders were consulted, as were several managers in ACT Health. The phenomena of institutional, cultural and personal racism were addressed by the social workers through discussion, exercises, and anti-racist initiatives in their work setting. They found that significant time restraints presented an example of institutional racism working against their good intentions. Another dimension arose from implicitly racist education in social work courses when most of the participants undertook their undergraduate courses in the 1960s and 1970s. Aspects related to professionalism such as its language and separation of a personal and professional self were indicative of cultural racism. Stories of personal racism were shared, in the context of raised awareness leading to changing those attitudes and behaviours. The fact that the study took place in 1993 - a watershed year for Aboriginal/white relations in Australia - seemed to lead to greater momentum for the project. The social workers found that participation in this study increased their knowledge of, and their confidence - both actual and potential - in interaction with Aboriginal people. However, they also understood these to be just small steps towards greater justice for the indigenous people. An outcome of the project has been involving some colleagues in similar anti-racist actions to those the social workers participated in during the time of the study. The action research project has continued on in different ways, beyond 1993, despite my withdrawal as 'the researcher' who took the initiative.

Participatory research methodologies and the use of interactive communication technologies (ICTs) such as email are increasingly seen by many researchers, including feminists, as offering ways to enhance women’s inclusion, participation and empowerment. However, from critical and poststructuralist perspectives, some researchers suggest the need for greater caution about claims that participatory methodologies and certain communication technologies automatically enhance inclusion and empowerment. These researchers argue that issues of power, agenda and voice in the research context require greater attention (LeCompte, 1995). The major argument made in this thesis is that feminist researchers need to adopt a more critical and rigorous yet pragmatic approach to evaluating women’s empowerment, inclusion and participation, and that this approach needs to include an analysis of diversity and difference, macro and micro contexts, power-knowledge relations, and the contradictory effects of participation. The outcomes of this study suggest that this approach can create new knowledge and understanding that will enable the development of more effective strategies for women’s empowerment and inclusion. To explore and support this argument, findings are presented from a detailed evaluation and critique of a major feminist action research project that involved women in rural, regional and remote Queensland, Australia and elsewhere, a university research team and several government and industry partners. The project made extensive use of ICTs, including email and the Internet, and aimed to be empowering and inclusive. Given the many contradictory discourses of empowerment that currently circulate, empowerment is seen as a problematic concept. The multiple meanings and discourses of empowerment are therefore identified and considered in the analysis. With the increasing importance of communication technologies in rural community development, this study also evaluates the effectiveness of ICTs as a medium for empowering rural women. The ‘politics of difference’ (Young, 1990) that underpins attempts to include a diversity of rural women in feminist research projects presents many challenges to feminist praxis. Chapters 1 and 2 propose that, in evaluating such projects, researchers need to take diversity and difference into account to avoid reproducing stereotyped images of rural women, and to identify those who are included and excluded. This is because of the complex nature of the identity ‘rural woman’, the multiple barriers to women’s participation, and the diverse needs, agendas and ideologies of participants and stakeholders. The concept of seriality (Young, 1994) is used in this study to avoid reproducing ‘rural women’ and feminist researchers as women with a singular identity. Chapters 1 and 2 argue that a comprehensive and critical analysis of these complex issues requires an eclectic, transdisciplinary approach, and that this can be fruitfully achieved by using a combination of two feminist frameworks of theory and epistemology: praxis feminism and feminist poststructuralism. While there are commonalities between these frameworks, the feminist poststructuralist framework takes a much more cautious and critical approach to claims for empowerment than praxis feminism. The praxis feminist framework draws on feminist theories that view power as social, cooperative and enabling. Women’s diverse needs, values, issues and experiences are taken into account, and the analysis aims to gives voice to women. The purpose of this is to better understand the processes that meet women’s diverse needs and could be empowering and inclusive for women (or otherwise). In contrast, the feminist poststructuralist framework uses Foucault’s (1980) analytic of power as positive and strategic, exercised in all our interactions, and intimately connected to knowledge. The power-knowledge relations, and the multiple and shifting discourses and subject positions that were taken up in various research contexts are identified and analysed. The purpose of this is to highlight the contradictions and dangers inherent in feminist practices of empowerment that often go unnoticed. To achieve its practical and critical aims, this study uses two different, but complementary, research methodologies: participatory feminist evaluation and feminist deconstructive ethnography, and multiple research methods, which are outlined in Chapter 3. This eclectic approach is argued to provide maximum flexibility and creativity in the research process, and to enable the complexity and richness of the data to be represented and understood from a diversity of perspectives. Triangulation of the multiple methods and sources of data is employed to increase the validity and rigour of the analysis. Assessing how well feminist projects that use ICTs have met the aim of including a diversity of women requires an analysis of a wide range of complex social, economic, cultural, technological, contextual and methodological issues related to women’s participation. Analysing these issues also requires giving voice to a diversity of participants’ and stakeholders’ assessments and meanings of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’. The results of this analysis, set out in Chapter 4, suggest that differences in perceptions of diversity and inclusion are strongly related to participants’ and stakeholders’ political and ideological beliefs and values, and their degree of commitment to social justice issues. The evaluation found that a limited diversity of women participated in the project, and identified many barriers to their participation. Feminists argue that women-only activities are often more empowering than mixed gender activities. The evaluation findings detailed in Chapter 5 suggest that the project’s women-centred activities, particularly the workshops and online groups, were very successful in meeting the multiple needs of most participants. However, contradictory or undesirable effects of the project’s activities were also identified. This analysis demonstrates the need to consider the various groups of participants and their diverse needs in assessing how well feminist methods and activities have met women’s needs or are empowering. Chapter 6 identifies various forms and features of empowerment and disempowerment and categorises them as social, technological, political and psychological. A model is developed that illustrates the interrelationships between these four forms of empowerment. Technological empowerment is identified as a new under-theorised form of empowerment that is seen as increasingly important as ICTs become more central to women’s networking and participation. However, the findings suggest that the extent to which participants want to be empowered needs to be respected. While many participants were found to have experienced the four forms of empowerment, their participation was also shown to have had various disempowering effects. The project’s online group welink (women’s electronic link), which linked rural and urban women, including government policy-makers, was assessed as the most empowering project activity. The discourse analysis and deconstructions, undertaken in Chapter 6, identify competing and contradictory discourses of new communication technologies and feminist participatory action research. The various discourses taken up by the researchers and participants were shown to have both empowering and disempowering effects. The analysis demonstrates the intersection between empowerment and disempowerment and the shifting subject positions that were taken up, depending on the research context. It was argued that the discourses of feminist action research operated as a ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1980) that regulated and constrained the discourses and practices of this form of research. An analysis of a highly contentious welink discussion challenges feminist assumptions that giving voice to women will lead to empowerment, and suggests that silence can, in some circumstances, be empowering. This analysis highlights the intersection of voice and silence, the limitations of the gendered discourse of care and connection, and how this discourse, and other factors, regulated the use of more critical discourses. Critical reflections on the study are made in Chapter 7. They include the suggestion that an ‘impossible burden’ was placed on the project’s feminist researchers who used an egalitarian feminist discourse that produced expectations of ‘equal relations’ between participants and researchers. However, these relations had to be established in the context of a university-based project that involved senior academic, government and industry staff. Drawing on the new knowledge and understandings developed, this study proposes several principles and strategies for feminist participatory action research projects that seek the inclusion and empowerment of rural women and use ICTs. They include the suggestion that feminists need an awareness of the limits to the politics of difference discourse when power-knowledge relations are ignored. A further principle is that there is value in adopting a Foucauldian analytic of power, since this enables a better understanding of the complex, multifaceted and dynamic nature of power-knowledge relations in the research context. This approach also provides an awareness of how processes that attempt to empower will inevitably produce disempowerment at certain moments. Principles and strategies for undertaking participatory feminist evaluations are also suggested.

Ma thèse s’articule autour de nombreux cas cliniques d’analysantes femmes et vise à montrer certaines formes de déni de la sexualité féminine au Moyen-Orient. Nous nous sommes proposée d’explorer dans un premier temps et d’exposer les idées et les théories psychanalytiques régnantes en matière de sexualité féminine, tant en Orient qu’en Occident. Dans un deuxième temps, nous exposons les cas cliniques puis, à la lumière de ce que nous avons relevé dans les récits littéraires, les études sociologiques, et la littérature psychanalytique consultée à cet effet, nous tâchons de répondre à la question suivante : Pourquoi ces femmes qui présentent toutes le même profil familial, socioculturel et économique, que nous pouvons considérer comme des femmes (apparemment) modernes, présentent-elles toutes certaines défaillances dès lors qu’il s’agit pour elles d’assumer leur vie (sexuelle) de femme tout court. D’où le titre de notre recherche : Les formes de déni de la sexualité chez la femme au Moyen-Orient. / My thesis is based on numerous clinical reports of women under analysis, and purports to show certain forms of denial for a female sexual life in the Middle East. First, we explore and present current psychoanalytic concepts and theories on the sexual life of women, either in the East or in the West. Second, we study these clinical reports in light of what we have found in literary tales, in sociological research, and in the literature on psychoanalysis, and we try to answer the following question: Why do women, who have the same family, socio-cultural and economic profiles, and who we can can call (apparently) modern, show similar failures in what regards their simple sexual lives? Hence the title of our research is: The categories of denial of sexuality for women in the Middle East.

This doctoral thesis had two purposes. 1. To study some preschool teachers’ possibilities to develop a gender aware pedagogy by applying theories of organisation, profession and collaboration. 2. To do qualitative research by drawing on principles of research for social justice, as a contribution to the development of methodology in feminist educational action research. The following research questions helped elucidate these purposes: How do preschool teachers create space for reflection and knowledge processes over time? What individual and collective actions do preschool teachers take over time? How can this study contribute to organisational development? Feminist pragmatism served as the philosophical underpinning for feminist action research (FAR) as a methodology and method. The preschool teachers were regarded as agents for change in their own pedagogic and organisational practices. Over a three-year period meetings were conducted on a regular basis. One-on-one interviews, group interviews, numerous emails, telephone calls and some observations completed the data collection. The analytical research narrative emerged by linking the preschool teachers’ actions to their ambiguous professional status. Actions were interpreted by applying the principles inherent in FAR, what, who and critical incidents over time. The absence of professional recognition from the municipal employer and parents for the preschool teachers was evident. Since the preschool teachers needed professional recognition, they experienced the collaborative nature of this study of great value as it conferred legitimacy for their professional development. There emerged meaningful pedagogic change over time, which emphasised the temporal aspect of organisational change from the bottom up. Collective actions began to take root in a shared value system. The design of the project – to collaborate with an outside ally – was decisive in regard to creating space for reflection and collective actions. Collective actions were possible due to the courage of individual participants who dared break silences surrounding organisational injustices. In conclusion, it can be stated that organisational change over time is indeed possible by practising radical openness for agency. Transformative knowledge processes can be achieved provided that genuine offers of participation are issued and well received. By elaborating on terms such as action, participation, emancipation, social justice and knowledge, a methodological contribution could be made to feminist action research. / Denna avhandling hade två syften. 1. Att i ett organisations-, professions- och pedagogiskt samverkansperspektiv studera några förskollärares möjligheter och hinder för utvecklingen av en genusmedveten pedagogik. 2. Att bedriva kvalita-tiv forskning utifrån antaganden om forskning för social rättvisa, som ett bidrag till metodologiutveckling. Följande frågeställningar belyste dessa syften: Hur skapar förskollärare utrymme för reflektion och kunskapsprocesser över tid; vil-ka individuella och kollektiva handlingar utför förskollärare över tid; vilka bi-drag till verksamhetsutveckling kan en studie av detta slag göra? Med feminis-tisk pragmatism som vetenskapsteoretisk grund tillämpades feministisk aktions-forskning som satte förskollärarnas frågeställningar i centrum. Under tre års tid ägde regelbundna träffar rum för gemensamma reflektioner, utvärderingar och planeringar av pedagogiska handlingar. Enskilda och gruppintervjuer, deltagande observationer samt en stor mängd mejl-, telefon- och brevutbyten kompletterade datainsamlingen. Den analytiska forskningsberättelsen växte fram under åter-koppling till förskollärares handlingar och i ljuset av förskollärares diffusa pro-fessionstillhörighet. Handlingarna tolkades utifrån de i feministisk aktionsforsk-ningsmetodologi inneboende principerna vad, vem och kritiska händelser över tid. Organisations- och professionsteoretiska analyser visade att förskollärarnas handlingar varken erkändes som professionella av den kommunala arbetsgivaren eller föräldrarna. Förskollärarnas behov av professionell erkänsla var stort, men när den uteblev, visade sig det långsiktiga utvecklingsarbetet vara av stort värde, därför att förskollärarna lyckades åstadkomma pedagogiskt sett meningsfulla förändringar, vilket understryker den temporala aspekten av organisatoriska för-ändringar underifrån. Förskollärarnas kollektiva handlingar började rota sig i en gemensam värdegrund. Formen av utvecklingsarbetet - att samarbeta med en al-lierad utifrån - var avgörande för skapandet av utrymme för reflektion och kol-lektiva handlingar. Kollektiva handlingar möjliggjordes i hög utsträckning tack vare enskilda deltagares mod att bryta tystnader om orättvisor i den egna verk-samheten. En slutsats är att det är möjligt att åstadkomma organisatoriska för-ändringar över tid genom en radikal öppenhet för agency. Transformativa kun-skapsprocesser kan åstadkommas om erbjudanden till ett genuint deltagande i ett förändringsarbete lämnas och mottas. Genom en problematisering av termer som handling, deltagande, emancipation, social rättvisa och kunskap gjordes ett me-todologiskt bidrag till feministisk aktionsforskning.

Denna avhandling hade två syften. 1. Att i ett organisations-, professions- och pedagogiskt samverkansperspektiv studera några förskollärares möjligheter och hinder för utvecklingen av en genusmedveten pedagogik. 2. Att bedriva kvalita-tiv forskning utifrån antaganden om forskning för social rättvisa, som ett bidrag till metodologiutveckling. Följande frågeställningar belyste dessa syften: Hur skapar förskollärare utrymme för reflektion och kunskapsprocesser över tid; vil-ka individuella och kollektiva handlingar utför förskollärare över tid; vilka bi-drag till verksamhetsutveckling kan en studie av detta slag göra? Med feminis-tisk pragmatism som vetenskapsteoretisk grund tillämpades feministisk aktions-forskning som satte förskollärarnas frågeställningar i centrum. Under tre års tid ägde regelbundna träffar rum för gemensamma reflektioner, utvärderingar och planeringar av pedagogiska handlingar. Enskilda och gruppintervjuer, deltagande observationer samt en stor mängd mejl-, telefon- och brevutbyten kompletterade datainsamlingen. Den analytiska forskningsberättelsen växte fram under åter-koppling till förskollärares handlingar och i ljuset av förskollärares diffusa pro-fessionstillhörighet. Handlingarna tolkades utifrån de i feministisk aktionsforsk-ningsmetodologi inneboende principerna vad, vem och kritiska händelser över tid. Organisations- och professionsteoretiska analyser visade att förskollärarnas handlingar varken erkändes som professionella av den kommunala arbetsgivaren eller föräldrarna. Förskollärarnas behov av professionell erkänsla var stort, men när den uteblev, visade sig det långsiktiga utvecklingsarbetet vara av stort värde, därför att förskollärarna lyckades åstadkomma pedagogiskt sett meningsfulla förändringar, vilket understryker den temporala aspekten av organisatoriska för-ändringar underifrån. Förskollärarnas kollektiva handlingar började rota sig i en gemensam värdegrund. Formen av utvecklingsarbetet - att samarbeta med en al-lierad utifrån - var avgörande för skapandet av utrymme för reflektion och kol-lektiva handlingar. Kollektiva handlingar möjliggjordes i hög utsträckning tack vare enskilda deltagares mod att bryta tystnader om orättvisor i den egna verk-samheten. En slutsats är att det är möjligt att åstadkomma organisatoriska för-ändringar över tid genom en radikal öppenhet för agency. Transformativa kun-skapsprocesser kan åstadkommas om erbjudanden till ett genuint deltagande i ett förändringsarbete lämnas och mottas. Genom en problematisering av termer som handling, deltagande, emancipation, social rättvisa och kunskap gjordes ett me-todologiskt bidrag till feministisk aktionsforskning. / This doctoral thesis had two purposes. 1. To study some preschool teachers’ possibilities to develop a gender aware pedagogy by applying theories of organisation, profession and collaboration. 2. To do qualitative research by drawing on principles of research for social justice, as a contribution to the development of methodology in feminist educational action research. The following research questions helped elucidate these purposes: How do preschool teachers create space for reflection and knowledge processes over time? What individual and collective actions do preschool teachers take over time? How can this study contribute to organisational development? Feminist pragmatism served as the philosophical underpinning for feminist action research (FAR) as a methodology and method. The preschool teachers were regarded as agents for change in their own pedagogic and organisational practices. Over a three-year period meetings were conducted on a regular basis. One-on-one interviews, group interviews, numerous emails, telephone calls and some observations completed the data collection. The analytical research narrative emerged by linking the preschool teachers’ actions to their ambiguous professional status. Actions were interpreted by applying the principles inherent in FAR, what, who and critical incidents over time. The absence of professional recognition from the municipal employer and parents for the preschool teachers was evident. Since the preschool teachers needed professional recognition, they experienced the collaborative nature of this study of great value as it conferred legitimacy for their professional development. There emerged meaningful pedagogic change over time, which emphasised the temporal aspect of organisational change from the bottom up. Collective actions began to take root in a shared value system. The design of the project – to collaborate with an outside ally – was decisive in regard to creating space for reflection and collective actions. Collective actions were possible due to the courage of individual participants who dared break silences surrounding organisational injustices. In conclusion, it can be stated that organisational change over time is indeed possible by practising radical openness for agency. Transformative knowledge processes can be achieved provided that genuine offers of participation are issued and well received. By elaborating on terms such as action, participation, emancipation, social justice and knowledge, a methodological contribution could be made to feminist action research.