Following the philosophical oeuvre of Michel Foucault, I locate and discuss how the discursive formulation of adolescent health promotion defines the conceptual possibilities and determines the boundaries of nurses’ thinking and practices as they are written about in nursing texts. From my archaeological work, I locate and name two confident nursing practices within the context of young people and their health: “reducing risk” and “promoting well becoming” and go on to locate those practices within two broader theoretical discourses within human science: the biological view and the social constructionist view. From my genealogical work, I consider how the management of the adolescent body has become a matter that situates biological life (puberty) as a political event and situates the nurse within governing practices of pastoral power. I question the ways in which adolescent health may be shaped through political interests of economy and social order and question: When is an adolescent ever deemed responsible in matters pertaining to their health? I offer an alternative view of responsibility and argue for a shift in established binary thinking that allows for the consideration of co-responsibility. / Graduate / 0569 / 0758 / 0680 / mmryan@uvic.ca

This thesis investigates the relation between exception and governmentality in the critique of sovereignty. It considers exception and governmentality as an expression of the problem of sovereignty and argues that this problem is expressed both within the accounts of sovereignty that exception and governmentality articulate, as well as between them. Taking Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt as the paradigmatic theorists of governmentality and exception, respectively, I engage in close readings of the texts in which these concepts are most thoroughly elaborated: Security, Territory, Population and Political Theology. These readings demonstrate that, despite their apparent differences, exception and governmentality cannot be differentiated from one another. The instability evident in Schmitt and Foucault’s concepts show that the relation between them is best characterized as aporetic. / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / reganburles@gmail.com

This thesis investigates the male body in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, first published in 1818, and Kenneth Branagh’s film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, released in 1994. So doing, the thesis focuses on the analysis of hysteria and homoeroticism in three male-male relationships: Victor and the monster, Victor and Walton, and Victor and Clerval. The main argument claims that, in the novel, Victor Frankenstein displays symptoms of male hysteria, which result from his repressing homoerotic desire and give evidence of male embodiment. It is not possible for Victor to repress bodily needs in the long run, and he experiences and reacts to the world with his body and mind. In the film, on the other hand, Victor’s heterosexuality is emphasised and he is depicted as a strong, powerful man rather than a nervous member of the upper class. The divergences between the representations of the male body in the primary texts, the thesis argues, reflect different ideas about the male body in the 1810s and 1990s. Although the image of the muscular and masculine, heterosexual man that was prevalent in the 1990s was already in the making in the 1810s, it was not as consolidated. The discussion of masculinity from a historical perspective makes use of Michel Foucault’s outline of the history of sexuality, Mark S. Micale’s account of hysteria and George L. Mosse’s ideas about masculinity. For a differentiated analysis of male-male relationships, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s continuum of male homosocial desire is drawn on.

Power, Criminality and the gamble about bordering normality. From theperspective of Foucault. This study is about how criminality becomes a strategy of power used by the individual to overcome difficulties and gain advantages. This strategy of power sets loose a process of identity formation within the individual that gives shape to his own norms which are opposite to the one of the society. The individual norms and the normative society cooperate with one another in a cultural teamwork. The individual get to use the original strategies of power when being sentenced to prison as the prison is experienced as a miniature, criminal society where the hierarchy is based on the level of criminality. The individual is then taught that the original tactics and strategies are the one that works.

This thesis effects a (dis)ordered look as a disordered construct. A Thesis by Publication format has been employed, where instead of a traditional linear argument: A + B = Conclusion, this work follows a cartographical route - instead of traditional thesis chapters, there are scholarly journal articles. Whilst related, these papers each concentrate on different threads of the problem that we currently call &quotAttention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder". Connected by short linking summaries, they constitute a cartographic survey utilising Foucault's (1977; 2003b) notion of a discursive/technological grid to examine &quotADHD" as a discursive formation and schooling as a system of formation of &quotdisorderly" objects.

Abstract: The good student: power, subjectivities and schooling Schooling has become one of the core, generalisable experiences of most young people in the Western world. This study examines the ways that students inhabit subjectivities in school through the normalising vision of the good student. The idea that schools exist to produce good students who become good citizens is one of the basic tenets of modernist educational philosophies that dominate the contemporary education world. This study takes a different position, arguing that the visions of the good student deployed in various ways in schools act to produce various ways of knowing the self that are ultimately concerned with behaviour and discipline rather than freer thought and action. Developing the postmodern theories of Foucault and Deleuze, this study argues that schools could be freer places than they are, but current practices act to teach students to know themselves in certain idealised ways through which they are located, and locate themselves, in hierarchical rationales of the good student. Part of the promise of schools lies in the ways that students become negotiators and producers of their subjectivities, albeit in narrow and limiting ways. By pushing the ontological understandings of the self beyond the modernist philosophies that currently dominate schools and schooling, this study problematises the ways that young people are made subjects in schools. Part of this modernist tradition is found in the institutional tendency to see students as fixed, measurable identities (beings) rather than dynamic, evolving performances (becomings). Schools and schooling largely appear to make sense to us because we think we understand what happens and what should happen in schools. The good student is framed within these aspects of cultural understanding. However, this commonsense attitude is based on a hegemonic understanding of the good, rather than the good student as a contingent multiplicity that is produced by an infinite set of discourses and experiences. I argue that this understanding of subjectivities and power is crucial if schools are to meet the needs of a rapidly changing and challenging world. This study utilises socially critical case study research across multiple sites to investigate those micropractices of power in schools that produce the normalising vision of the good student. Data from three school sites was gathered using a variety of techniques including interviews and focus group research.

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.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on February 26, 2008) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2005. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 144-149).

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.