From a normative perspective, sport is often viewed as a form of benign entertainment and an optimal vehicle for health and community development devoid of political bias. This thesis examines the way sport has been constructed and mobilized as an instrument of neoliberalism, especially through a nexus of biopedagogies that instruct ways of knowing, ordering and conditioning bodies. Historically, sport's instrumental role to the politics of governance similarly continues to be a powerful way and useful vehicle to exercise dominance and mastery over one's own body, nature and others. Building upon the work of Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose, I contend that psy-prefixed disciplines that surfaced from Western capitalism play a distinct role in mobilizing sport to reconfigure the body in such a way that it serves political economic goals. This thesis offers a sociological approach to critically examine the disciplining of the body through sport with the intent to foster moral development, social inclusion and peace-building according to a neoliberal framework of health. Drawing from Foucault’s work as a kind of theoretical toolbox to inform a geneaology, with some archaeological examples, of the biocitizen as he or she has been made a useful subject of neoliberal health. This geneaology addresses the shifts and splits in the human sciences that have contributed to the ubiquity of psy- practices and disciplining techniques that shape the youth education of bodies, movement and physicality. Foucault’s notion of “dividing practices” and the relational interdependency of what is constructed as normal or deviant, reveals a co-dependent producing of the self and its normalization as well as the problematizing and policing of the “other.” These systems of difference undermine the diversity of physical cultures and practices while also creating a binary oriented approach to healthism discourses, which effectively order, dominate and subordinate specific bodies, thereby furthering networks of inequality and exclusion. Finally, the last section turns to the period of modern aestheticism, theatre performance and critical pedagogy in order to rethink possibilities of sport beyond the present limits of the competitive capitalist rubric that shapes body knowledges and practices in current physical education. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2011-08-29 13:43:27.429

While engineers and their patrons have always claimed that technology has advanced the common good, I intend to show that more often than not engineers have been mercenaries for those at the center of knowledge, power, and wealth. Engineers design technology that marginalizes certain types of knowledge, people, and culture in favor of those at the center. Far from being a common good, engineered systems have advanced social and environmental inequity by being designed using exploitative social, political, and economic methods. In response to the negative impacts of engineered systems, the mainstream engineering profession has committed in recent years to being much more socially and environmentally responsible. However, the discourse of responsibility adopted by the profession is narrow in scope as it does not recognize the context and process in which technology is designed. Seeking a different way, some engineering reformers are attempting to create different cultures in engineering, in which the technology designed by engineers not only minimizes damage but seeks to create more equity in our communities. These new cultures have been articulated as Humanitarian Engineering or Peace Engineering or Social Justice and Engineering. A key component of these cultures is the concern for the needs of the marginalized whether in communities far away or close to us. While much has already been written about changing the education curriculum, little has been written about how engineers may design technology that values and advances knowledge, people, and culture at the margins. This thesis will theorize as to how engineers may design technology in a socially just manner by articulating an engineering design theory based on power and resistance. This design theory is then validated through discourse analysis of a contentious engineering project, the Site 41 landfill in northern Ontario. I show through the analysis of engineering design discourse at Site 41 that dominant power relations created structures of oppression that marginalized non-experts, Aboriginal communities, and the environment. Alternative design methods that resist these oppressive structures such as participatory, ecofeminist, deep ecological, and decolonized design are proposed as a way for engineers to have worked more justly at Site 41. / Thesis (Master, Civil Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-21 12:37:46.28

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Syftet med denna studie var att utifrån ett socialkonstruktionistiskt perspektiv och ett Foucault-inspirerat diskursanalytiskt ramverk visa på några av de sätt att tala om och förstå den bildterapeutiska processen som finns tillgängliga för och används av bildterapeuter. Syftet var även att beskriva hur dessa sätt att tala kan påverka bildterapeuter i det bildterapeutiska arbete de bedriver. Datainsamlingen genomfördes med semistrukturerade intervjuer med bildterapeuter. I resultatet lyftes tre distinkta sätt att tala om processen fram, som gav den tre olika innebörder. Dessa tre diskursiva konstruktioner framställde den bildterapeutiska processen som en blottläggande process, som en experimenterande process och som en reflekterande process. Det framkom också att de olika konstruktionerna kan möjliggöra för en bildterapeut att ta en informationssökande, kreativitetsbefrämjande respektive guidande position i terapiarbetet. Studien bidrog på så vis med att uppmärksamma och tydliggöra diskursers betydelse för studier av den bildterapeutiska praktiken.

Studiens syfte är att undersöka hur Stockholms Prideparad representeras i Dagens Nyheter och Aftonbladet åren 1998, 2009 och 2013. Frågor som ställs är vilka diskurser som används i rapporteringen av paraden, samt vilken kunskap om sexualitet som reproduceras och genereras i artiklarna. Studien utgår från Michel Foucaults teorier om kunskap, makt och sexualitet; Norman Faircloughs diskursteori; samt queerteori. En kritisk diskursanalys enligt Faircloughs tredimensionella modell tillämpas på materialet som utgörs av sex stycken artiklar, en för varje tidningen och utvalt år. Analysen av artiklarna visar att de dominerande diskurserna i båda tidningarna var en event-/nöjesdiskurs som sammanfattar paraden. Skillnaderna är större mellan artiklarna från olika år än mellan artiklarna från olika tidningar. Samtliga artiklar reproducerar en heteronormativ ideologi: under 1998 sker det genom exkludering enligt heteronormens första princip och tydlig åtskillnad av deltagare och åskådare. 2009 och 2013 har sexualitetsdiskursen förändrats, och reproducering sker genom assimilering av hbtq-gruppen. I slutdiskussionen betonas paradoxen kring benämningen av hbtq-personer som å ena sidan bidrar till uppfattningen av heterosexualitet som norm, men å andra sidan synliggör hbtq-gruppen.

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.

This thesis focuses on Hannah Arendt’s theory of natality, which is identified with the event of birth into a pre-existing human world. Arendt names natality the “ontological root” of political action and of human freedom, and yet, as critics of Arendt’s political writings have pointed out, this notion of identifying freedom with birth is somewhat perplexing. I return to Arendt’s phenomenological analysis of active human life in The Human Condition, focusing on the significance of natality as the disclosure of a unique “who” within a specific relational web. From there, I trace the distinct threats to natality, speech-action, and worldly relations posed by the political philosophical tradition, on the one hand, and by the modern biopolitical “rise of the social” on the other. Drawing connections between Arendt’s theory of the social and Michel Foucault’s work on the biopolitical management of populations, my thesis defends Arendt’s contentious distinction between social and political life; the Arendtian social, I argue, can fruitfully be read as biopolitical. / Graduate

Syfte och frågeställningar: Studiens syfte är att undersöka hur internetanvändares medvetenhet, uppfattningar och attityder kring övervakning på internet ser ut. Övervakning i  form av insamling och kartläggning av data, genom cookies. Metod och material: En kvantitativ enkätundersökning och kvalitativa djupintervjuer har genomförts. Huvudresultat: Internetanvändare är medvetna om insamlingen, men inte om kartläggningen, av data på internet. Respondenterna och intervjupersonerna uppfattade och associerade cookies med personifierad annonsering, men reflekterade sällan över det. Deltagarna ställde sig övervägande positiva till insamlingen och kartläggnigen, samtidigt som en viss oro fanns kring det.

Abortion remains a contentious issue, which greatly raises ethical problems. This thesis examines the leading arguments in the Swedish abortion debate around the – in terms of legislation – critical years of 1938 and 1974. With Foucault's genealogical method, Butler's theories of gender as a social construction in relation to power and doxa, the study examines what the development of the argumentation says about the views on morality, the woman's body, life, individual and state? How has the arguments pro and against abortion changed over time and what does this say about the norms that guide and orientate the arguments? The most obvious change in argumentation is seen in the shift from an absolute moral and conservative position into an increasingly relativistic and liberal position, and this study will argue that this shift has its prerequisites in the changing status of the citizen and state. Yet, despite these developments, a moral ambivalence can be discerned in the arguments advanced in favour of the right to abortion. The question of what life is grievable and when this occurs is constantly negotiated. This constant negotiation is modulated and modified by different discourses. As this study shows, the absolutistic and the relativistic discourse gives rise to radically different positions. But while the relativistic discourse once radicalized the discussion on abortion, mainly because it served to relativize an absolutist position, it serves radically other purposes today. The subjectivist stance could even be seen to threaten individual’s right to self-determination over their own bodies.