Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2005. Graduate Programme in Sociology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-225). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNR11576

This multi-layered and multi-perspective inquiry focuses on adult adoptees’ sense-making of, and presentation of, their sexuality and self/identity. It is situated firmly within postmodern and social constructionist traditions, whereby both the personal/particular and social/shared dimensions of experiences are negotiated, disenfranchised/marginalised voices are privileged, and the distinctions between, research, art and therapy are disrupted. Due to the adoptees being placed in, and conceived as, marginalised group members, their local and marginalised voices are privileged within this thesis. The aims of this research were:  To gain access to, and gather, adult adoptee’s personal narratives/stories around the subject of their sexuality, their sexual identity and their adoption;  To give ‘voice’ to adult adoptees around the subject of sexuality and adoption;  To represent, and then present, these narratives/stories, honouring both the individual particulars of ‘lived experience’ and also to highlight any shared thematic qualities of the participants. A bricolage approach was used, using Kinchloe and Berry’s (2004) formalised theoretical concept of the ‘POET’ (the point of entry text). To capture the multiplicity of the research, and the POETs, a three-phase approach was applied. Phase one incorporated my auto-ethnographic account, of my lived experience of sexuality as an adoptee, through an analysis of my narratives and poems. Phase two explored the participants’ understanding, and presentation of, their sexuality from the analysis of their interview data. These data were analysed through a heuristic approach, developing individual depictions, a group depiction and then a final creative synthesis. In phase three, an interpretative phenomenological analysis, was applied to highlight thematic individual and shared themes of the participants’ data, to present a more structured and thematic representation. The data from phase one, two and three, highlighted the vulnerability, and cultural socio-political constructs, that can affect the self-formation and sexuality of an adoptee. The data from phase three established four superordinate themes: 1. Sexual attitudes, 2. Vulnerability, 3. The ‘Other’, and 4. The Feminine. The research demonstrates that adult adoptees, as vulnerable, are more open and susceptible to external influence regarding their sexuality and self-formation, and proposes an ‘inherent potential toward vulnerability’ within the adoptee. Therefore, there is a relationship between the adoptee, as inherently vulnerable, and how they constitute their sexuality and self-formation. Implications for practice require careful ethical consideration of the adoptees’ inherent vulnerability and how this impacts their sexuality and self-formation. These considerations for good practice/therapeutic intervention are underpinned by an awareness of potential ethical, political and social issues regarding the adoptee’s susceptible influence by the ‘other’. Therefore, an awareness of how ‘non-directive practice’ can be integrated ethically by the practitioner is emphasised. These implications are not always evident in counselling/psychotherapy training and supervision, and therefore need careful consideration by the practitioner at a personal level, and in relation to social policy, when working with adoptees.

This thesis presents a method for identifying resonant cultural phenomena and uses it to identify themes in the representations of millers, tailors, and weavers in early modern English proverbs, jests, and ballads. It then examines whether these stereotypes appear in the records of defamation and abusive language from four different contemporary courts. It argues that all three trades were associated with habitual occupational dishonesty, that millers had a reputation for super-sexuality, and that tailors were considered to be poor and inferior to other men. However, it also argues that these stereotypes were conditioned by generic characteristics of proverbs, jests, and ballads and therefore that stereotypes should be assessed within and across different media. Finally, it argues that the dishonesty, super-sexuality, and inferiority associated with millers, tailors, and weavers suggest that perceived moral character played a more important role in the creation of stereotypes than perceived economic or social position, political or religious allegiance, or ethnic or regional background.

acase@tulane.edu / Abstract Future racial socialization (FRS) is a future-oriented concept that speaks to how adolescents intend to racially socialize their own children. This future-oriented parenting decision has been associated with the existing racial socialization messages that adolescents receive from their own caregivers prior to becoming parents themselves. Research has posited that parental racial socialization is arguably one of the most important developmental processes for African American youth (Hughes, 2006), and has been largely conceptualized as a process between parents and children. However, a new force called Social Networking Sites (SNS) has entered our ecological world over the last 20 years; possibly catalyzing a shift to occur in the racial socialization processes of adolescents, especially the African American adolescents of today known as being a part of the Generation Z or as the iGeneration (approximately born 1995-2012). It is important to understand how SNS are altering the adolescent development processes so that we can understand its benefits and risks. This study is a secondary data analysis of archived data that examines the relation of Parental Racial Socialization to Future Racial Socialization (FRS) as moderated by SNS and Racial Identity (RI), in African American Adolescents. In the current study, the participants are 300 African American high school students in a large southern urban city. The students ranged in age from 13 to 19 years old and attended a predominately (98%) African American high school in the United States. Findings demonstrate that racial identity plays a significant role in the relation between PRS (cultural socialization type) and FRS, and when specifically examining African American girls, racial centrality (a subcomponent of racial identity) and SNS play a significant role in moderating the relation between two types of PRS and FRS. / 1 / Ashlee Yates

Drawing on a Norwegian empirical study of girls’ and boys’ teacher-led classroom conversation participation, this paper focuses on how students attending an upper secondary school vocational programs, participate in classroom discussion when observed in homogenous groups. This quantitative study has shown that gender identities associated with heterogeneous conversational patterns as exaggerated when observing homogenous classroom participation. The discussion describes not only the influences of class and peer group pressure to explain this phenomenon, in addition clarifies the contextual difference in quality when girls take the floor in a homogenous classroom setting.

This thesis is an investigation into the accounting practices by which British and American expatriates make sense of Western involvement in the Middle East. Based on the analysis of an audio-taped archive of some sixty hours of face-to-face interview material recorded in Kuwait during a ten-month period in the year immediately following the Persian Gulf Conflict of 1990-91, this project explores the interactional work by which speakers situate their conversational contributions in dialogic anticipation of a range of competing but mutually co-implicative demands for accountability which they take their talk and their participation in the circumstances of that talk to entail. Specifically, speakers are seen to manage the productive tension between the competing demands for accountability to conflicting assumptions about the nature of prejudice on the one hand, and the awareness of and/or sensitivity to cultural difference on the other, in and while attending to the situated concerns for their warrant in making the claims that they do and the degree to which they are implicated in those claims in and through the activity of their production. In this way, conflicting assumptions are show to be constitutive of the social practices whereby speakers account for Western involvement abroad.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Adelaide, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 567-588).

Thesis (doctoral)--Australian National University, 1997. / Title from screen.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Michigan State University. Dept. of Telecommunications, Information Studies and Media, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on June 19, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 62-68). Also issued in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-112).