Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 477-487). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Supervisor: Douglas Foley. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 1999. Graduate Programme in Political Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [479]-489). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ56242.

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The purpose of this discourse analysis of health promotion and healing practices was to describe their functioning historically through practices of governance and risk in the context of neoliberal society. The results portray a constructed subjectivity (identity) among citizens and residents of contemporary society who enact expected health promotion and healing behaviors.Two series of texts were analyzed from a Foucauldian perspective: the Healthy People series from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and the series on Uninsurance published by the Institute of Medicine. The findings generated five themes that comprise the reality of current illness care system rationalities:First, the U.S. illness care system, functioning through technology of insurance or wealth extraction, is dysfunctional as a comprehensive illness care delivery system.Second, health promotion and healing have been subsumed under illness care--if they are addressed it is only as discrete indices that comprise compliance monitoring.Third, micro determinants of health (such as behavioral patterns, genetic predispositions, social circumstances, shortfalls in medical care, and environmental exposures), while important, continue to be the single focus of illness care in the U.S. Conversely, macro determinants of health, contingent on macro-level economic and political structures, remain unrecognized as having any bearing on health outcomes. Macro determinants of health frame the configuration of the social infrastructure in which micro determinants of health unfold.Fourth, neoliberal ideology in the U.S. continues to be the status quo for illness care.Fifth, constructed health promotion and healing identity for individuals is one of health anomie, a new prudentialism where access to health promotion and healing has to be acquired from outside the venue of illness care.How can we become different from what we have become? While acknowledging the limitations inherent in this current discourse of heath promotion and healing, other alternatives must be explored for betterment of human health and wellbeing--such as a shift toward "care of the self" or "self care" that encompasses an embodiment of an arché health, a health that moves beyond contemporary illness discourses of mind-body, one that defies society's inscription of our subjectivity.

While computers and composition researchers are concerned with the theoretical and pedagogical impacts of new technologies in our field, these researchers have only recently begun to consider the ramifications of the growing use of online social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook in academia. This dissertation fills a much-needed space in the field in its consideration of the pedagogical implications of social networking sites. Online social networking sites can provide teachable moments to talk with students about audience, discourse communities, intellectual property, and the tensions between public and private writing. Thus, if writing instructors ignore the growing conversation regarding online social networking sites, they may potentially miss out on familiar and accessible spaces for teaching rhetorical analysis.In this dissertation, through a qualitative analysis of undergraduate students and university writing instructors, I trace common threads in these individuals' attitudes and perceived beliefs about MySpace and Facebook. In chapters 1 and 2 I draw on Michel Foucault's theories of bio-power and confession to raise questions and concerns regarding pedagogical uses and abuses of online social networking sites, focusing specifically on issues of privacy and surveillance. In chapter 3, I outline the methods and methodologies that guided the qualitative portion of my study; the results of this study are reported in chapters 4 (students' views of social networking) and 5 (instructors' views), respectively. In chapter 5, I use technological literacy as a framework to argue that the immense popularity of online social networking sites coupled with the sheer amount of writing produced by students in these sites provides a compelling reason for rhetoric and composition instructors to begin paying attention to online social networking sites. To conclude chapter 5, I provide specific classroom activities that focus on MySpace and Facebook for instructors interested in bringing social networking back to the classroom. These classroom materials can be adapted to multiple classroom settings and can be modified based on a particular instructor's pedagogical needs.

This thesis explores elementary schools’ homework practices on Prince Edward Island. I employ a feminist perspective that incorporates Foucault’s concept of governmentality (Foucault, 1991a) to examine homework as a ‘site’ where institutions (family and school) interact and power circulates. I focus on the ways in which the daily lives and subjectivities of mothers, and to a lesser extent teachers, are organized and regulated in the process of making homework work. I assembled and analyzed reports and policies related to education reform, parental involvement and homework. I draw on Foucault’s approach to genealogy (Foucault, 1984) to examine how homework has been established in these texts as a ‘good’ educational practice for young students, in spite of its dubious effects on educational achievement. Mothers and teachers are explicitly and implicitly addressed in education policy and practice as primary agents for the accomplishment of homework. Following qualitative research methodology, I conducted twenty in-depth interviews with mothers and teachers of elementary aged students. These mothers and teachers often have ambivalent feelings about homework, sharing frustrations about its effects on family time and relations and doubting its value for children. At the same time, ‘doing homework’ was closely linked to being a ‘good mother.’ Thus, my analysis draws attention to the complex ways that homework and parental involvement discourses work on and through people, to produce particular kinds of experiences and feelings. While homework may ‘fail’ to accomplish its professed educational aims for students, I argue that it serves to render women responsible for growing portions of educational labour. My study sheds light on the workings of power in the home/school relationship and more generally on the workings of neoliberal governance and educational reform. Modern government works through routine administration of our lives, in schools and families, and other institutions, often through persuasion, incitement and engagement rather than through explicit policy. I suggest the daily practice of homework is a concrete example of this and, extending Foucault’s analysis through feminist perspectives, I explore the unequal operation and effects of homework for those who are its main targets.

We often encounter mental illness in our daily lives. People who are diagnosed with a mental disorder are marked as different and thereby stigmatized and confined to spacial isolation. This thesis analyzes the function of mental illness by examining the protagonist of Irena Vrkljan's Buch über Dora. I argue that in Buch über Dora stigmatization and isolation of otherness becomes visible in how the book's protagonist is excluded from certain spaces. My main question is which role is ascribed to Dora by society. Othering – and therefore excluding – mentally ill persons such as Dora is necessary to establish the order of society. Another important issue are the similarities between Dora and other female characters in the novel.The symptoms of the pressure to succumb to societal norms are shared by the first person narrator, among others. It is my aim to show that and how all woman can easily be pushed into Dora's role. This leads to the central question or my thesis: Are we not all a bit like Dora? To date, Irena Vrkljan's works have been largely neglected by the germanic academic community. Germanistik has not yet found a way to accommodate her bilingual and bicultural oeuvre. The first part of my thesis addresses this issue. The second part develops a constructivist theoretical framework for my analysis of space. First, I draw on the work of Michel Foucault "Of Other Spaces", "Discipline And Punish", and "Madness And Cilvilization", in which he describes space as a construct that reproduces societal norms. Second, Sigmund Freud's "Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" helps to grasp how mental illness is pathologized. While Foucault focuses on the function of norms, Freud analyses the consequences of aberrant behaviour for women. The third part focuses on the fragmentary structure of the novel and continues with an detailed analysis of heterotopias such as the cemetery, Dora's room, the market and the untended park. By identifying with Dora, Buch über Dora questions the norms and shows her otherness as something that we all share. She may be stigmatized as mentally ill but she is by no means fundamentally different to other women.

The research question that I posed for this investigation is how the principles of Foucault’s governmentality can shed light on the political discourse on the achievement gaps (AGs) at the federal level. The AGs have been for some years now an actively researched phenomenon in education in the U.S. as well as in the rest of the world. Many in the education profession community, politicians, social activists, researchers and others have considered the differences in educational outcomes an indication of a grave deficiency of the educational process and even of the society at large. I began this work with a review of the educational research relevant to the above mentioned research question. Then I presented my research methodology and de- scribed how obtained my data and analyzed them both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results of the analysis were discussed in the light of federal legislation, the work of Foucault on governmentality, and the relevant literature and woven into a series of narratives. Finally, I abstracted these narratives into a model for under- standing the federal policy discourse. This model consists of an intersection of eight antitheses: (1) the rgime of discipline versus the apparatuses of security, (2) the appeal to danger versus assurances of progress or even success, (3) the acknowledgement of the association between the AGs and the “disadvantage” of the students and the disregard and even prohibition of the equalization of school funding, (4) the desire for all students to be “equal,” but they have to be dis-aggregated, the (5) injunction of research based instruction practices imposed by an ideology-driven reform policy, (6) we expect equal outcomes by using market forces, which are known to produce a diversity of results, (7) the teacher is a “highly qualified” professional, but also a functionary of the government, and finally (8) the claim to honor local control and school flexibility versus the unprecedented federalization and bureaucratization of the schools, which is a mirror of the contrast between the desire to establish apparatuses of security in schools and the means to establishing them through rgimes of discipline.