This thesis takes a gender-sensitive approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and asks whether and how Palestinian women’s different formal and informal political activism in ‘peacebuilding’ and ‘resistance’ can make a contribution to positive sustainable social and political change. Taking a bottom-up qualitative approach to conflict research, and deriving data mainly from in-depth interviews, participant observation and textual analyses, I problematise mainstream international conflict resolution and gender development approaches, revealing their mismatch with the Palestinian reality of prolonged occupation and settler colonialism on the ground. I critique in particular two aspects of mainstream gender and conflict approaches: Firstly, the essentialist feminist assertion that women are better ‘peacemakers’ than men due to their (alleged) more peaceful nature, and, secondly, the ‘liberal’ peace argument that dialogue is the best (and only) way to resolve conflict. These two claims are hardly applicable to the Palestinian context, and their implementation through policy programmes can even block genuine political and social change. Through their tendency to trace the roots of conflict in social gender relations and at the level of identity, they tend to give a distorted depoliticised picture of the conflict. Doing so, they risk alienating local constituencies and might even exacerbate social and political fragmentation. My analysis counters such (mostly western-originated) mainstream gender and conflict initiatives by starting from the local. Proposing a contextualised gender-sensitive approach to conflict transformation, which pays attention to intra-party dynamics such as ‘indigenous’ gender constructions and the political culture of resistance, I trace those forms of female political agency that are able to gain societal support and are conducive to sustainable social and political change. Bridging theoretical insights from the fields of conflict resolution and gender theory and questioning some of their widely held assumptions, I hope to contribute to knowledge in both fields.

For the purpose of achieving gender equality in education, this study analyses the transformative power of the elementary school teacher candidates on society. The theories in the field of sociology of education have been used as a starting point for the study. Based on the feminist pedagogies of different strands of feminism, feminist critical pedagogy has been presented to achieve gender equality in education. The transformation of curriculum and the hidden curriculum are elaborated to achieve a non-sexist education. After the depiction of the situation Turkey holds in the field of women&rsquo / s education, the research conducted in three universities using feminist methodology and interview method is presented. With a view on their gender socialization, gender perceptions of the teacher candidates are analyzed. The ways their lives both inside and outside the household are affected by patriarchal hegemony are depicted and their ideas on education and the reproduction of gender through education are analyzed. The new generation of teachers holds low transformative power to transform the inequalities in society. However, the females in the group are leading their own individual struggles that lead to changes in their close circles. The simplified notion of patriarchy they have makes them blind to the reproduction of it by women and supports the bias against feminists. The fact that they are open to change and yet detached from civil society is reason to conclude that in the short run the most influential results can be obtained through the institutional changes at teacher training programs and schools.

This thesis deals with the issue of cyberbullying and it examines the differences in its perception depending on gender. In the beginning the thesis describes transformation of communication based upon time and technologies used to communicate. It is followed by the comparison of cyberbullying and bullying where similarities and differences are shown. After this theoretical part comes the practical part of the thesis which is started by the justification of the chosen research method - qualitative research, individual interviews with grammar school children in the age 10 to 15 years. The following part describes the construction of the research - creating the scenario of the interviews followed by the description of the interviews which were afterward transcribed and analyzed. The interviews were analyzed by open coding and showed that there are differences regarding cyberbullying and gender but they also showed that there are similarities in the usage of communication media. The results proved that in the selected sample of children girls are more likely to take part in cyberbullying than in bullying. The results also showed that girls are more likely to share more personal information and photos on the internet than boys although we can observe that this is starting to change because boys are...