Educational disadvantage, long recognised as a factor in determining post-school options, manifests in forms of marginalisation from and resistance to education, and in under-representation in tertiary education. Moreover, while student voice is becoming a more normalised aspect of decision making in schools, marginalised students have limited opportunities to participate in education reform processes. The practice of &quotstudents as researchers" (SaR) extends student voice through engaging students in researching the educational issues that directly affect them and inviting participation in pedagogical and school reform issues. In this research, I examine the application of an SaR model with marginalised secondary school students, and the outcomes for the participants and their schools. The Student Action Research for University Access (SARUA) project provides the site of my empirical investigation. The research is informed by two complementary lines of theory: Habermasian critical theory, which provides the framework for participatory research, and Bourdieuian social reproduction theory, which scaffolds the aims of empowerment underlying SaR. These theories are extended by a theory of imagination to take account of difference and to establish a link to post-modern considerations. I employed a participatory action research methodology to investigate changes in the students' awareness of post-school options, their aspirations regarding tertiary study, and the development of related educational skills as a result of their participation in the project. The principal findings from the research are that the SARUA model provides an effective medium for the empowerment of marginalised students through engagement in meaningful, real-life research; that participant schools are positioned to benefit from the students' research and interventions when school and student habitus are in accord; and that the SARUA model complements current pedagogical reforms aimed at increasing student engagement, retention, and progression to higher education.

Charlotte Brontë’s problematising of first-person narrative foregrounds the fluidity of the concept of identity and insists on its constructed nature. Brontë uses specific narrative techniques in The Professor, Jane Eyre and Villette to achieve this foregrounding, which leads to a complex and sophisticated exploration of the individual’s relationship to society, and how this influences the way individuals construct their identity. Each of these novels presents a different example of such self-construction through the characterisation of the first person narrator. Brontë’s questioning of the stability of the self encourages readers to be aware of such constructs. In my first chapter, I look closely at how narrative authority is parcelled out in Brontë’s nineteenth-century society, and what influence the conferring or withholding of such authority has on the construction of a narrative self. The next three chapters are devoted to discussion of specific examples of narrative self-construction in Brontë’s first-person novels, how her protagonists deal with narrative authority, and the difficulties inherent in speaking or writing with such authority for nineteenth-century women in particular. Individuals construct a sense of their self through telling stories. Brontë’s fiction asks the question, if “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life” is this tantamount to denying women the right to an arena for the construction of a self at all? What role do readers play in the construction of a narrative self for a writer? In the concluding chapter my aim is to open out my analysis of Brontë’s fiction by examining the idea of narrative as a place more generally for imaginative self-construction. I structure the chapter around J. Hillis Miller’s argument in On Literature that the role of reading and writing in this regard has irrevocably changed in the twenty-first century due to the influence and popularity of the on-line world.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 258-272). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (M.Arch.) - Carleton University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-104). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Mémoire (M.A.)-- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1994. / Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Thesis (D. Min.)--Ashland Theological Seminary, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 138-142).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-106).

Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1997. / Title from title page screen, viewed June 13, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi (chair), John B. Freed, Lawrence W. McBride, Anne M. Rosenthal. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 205-215) and abstract. Also available in print.

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