This thesis discusses the findings of a 'virtual' ethnography of a 'virtual team' of teleworkers called 'FlexiTeam'. The concept of teleworking refers to workers who use Information and Communication Technologies to work flexibly in time and space. A 'virtual team' is a group of teleworkers organised into a 'team'. There are three substantive findings of this research. First, the discourses of virtual teamwork as 'effortless' and 'flexible' are subject to critique through a description of the forms of labour and (self-)discipline enacted on the part of FlexiTeam members in order to implement 'best practice'. Second, the analysis examines how team members' commitment to this 'best practice' can be understood in relation to their identity at work. This is explored using a theory of subjectivity as constructed through social relationships at work. The analysis focuses on FlexiTeam's social relationship with clients, their employing organisation and within the team. The client relationship is highlighted in particular because FlexiTeam are interesting in their role as 'teleworking consultants'. FlexiTeam not only practice but also sell the concepts of teleworking and virtual teams. Unlike existing studies of 'top-down' change imposed by management upon the workforce, FlexiTeam are active in the production of the very same discourse they also consume. It is argued that this production/consumption relationship constructs a reflexive dynamic for team members' subjectivity, as they strive to be 'experts', 'exemplars' and 'embodiments' of the 'best practice' discourse they sell. However, the third finding suggests that, for some team members, their relationship to the 'best practice' consultancy discourse is characterised less by 'internalisation' and more by ambiguity, ambivalence and instrumentality. This exposes the limits to the 'normalising' power of discourse, even in the case of a team who produce the discourse in question, thereby helping to develop a more sophisticated theory of the subjectivity/discourse relationship.

La question de la voix, dans le domaine de la didactique des langues étrangères, est très souvent mal abordée surtout quand il s’agit d’étudier les réactions des apprenants devant cette matérialité de la langue et les affects qui y sont liés. Le domaine affectif par rapport aux langues étrangères a toujours été notre centre d’intérêt, car il exprime, entre autres, la singularité du rapport aux langues et la complexité des positions subjectives. Pourquoi le désir de langues étrangères est-il mis à l’abri, tandis qu’il peut susciter la fascination des langues autres, l’amour ou peut-être la haine, s’il s’agit, par exemple, de l’inhibition du désir ?Toutes ces questions nous ont amenée à prendre comme sujet principal de notre recherche le phénomène de la voix et de l’aborder à travers une anthropologie des voix. Nous avons voulu aussi aborder, dans notre recherche, la problématique des émotions dans l’apprentissage des langues étrangères ainsi que leur rôle dans la formation des attitudes et des représentations par rapport aux langues. / The voice in the field of the didactics of foreign languages is an issue which has been poorly examined, especially when it comes to studying students’ reactions in relation to this very important component of the language, as well as its affects. The complexity of affective relationships a subject can establish with foreign languages has always been at the center of our interest. Why is the concept of “desire” that is related to the acquisition of foreign languages neglected, when it actually depends on the desire whether the subject will love the language, be fascinated by it, or hate it, if the desire is inhibited?All these questions led us to choose the phenomenon of voice as the main topic of our research and to examine it, among other things, using an anthropological approach.In our research, we also dealt with the problem of emotions and their role in the formation of attitudes and ideas in relation to foreign languages."

This study explores an emancipatory politics of being human by asking what is at stake for a world predicated on the human being as subject. I commence with a critique of modernity and its tenet of human exceptionalism as the logical basis for our separation from social, ecological, and material others. Inextricable from these others, humans, I argue, are assemblages that merit representation as such. I demonstrate this by recruiting two human faculties conventionally considered evidence for both our human exceptionalism, or separation from perceived others, and its correlate of subjectivity: memory and emotion. I then demonstrate how even emotion and memory, as supposed wellsprings of subjectivity, in effect undermine the very premise of it in light of their assemblaged nature. I situate this study in Mauritania, where I investigate the politics and spatialities of slavery and abolition. There, I demonstrate how memories, emotions, and the humans that experience them are both consituents and products of human-environment assemblages. I then reveal both the discursive and material repercussions of remembering, feeling, and representing the world as subjects separate from this world. Finally, I suggest alternative avenues for geographic research in pursuit of a politics of being human beyond the human being as subject.

LL.D. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

With my dissertation entitled “Between the Flash and Fall of Turning”: “New York” School Poets, American Pragmatism and the Construction of Identity, I seek to account for the depiction of the anti-foundational self which emerges time and again in the poetry of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch. While theorizing the self as a contingent, provisional, and shifting construct is hardly new to a theoretically oriented academy transiting into the present century, scholars and critics have tended to ground such interpretations in “structural linguistics” and so-called “French philosophy.” One of the goals of this project, therefore, is to propose that the philosophical skepticism toward the self as a site of stable and enduring meaning has always been felt and articulated by American Pragmatism, specifically in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James and John Dewey. While a handful of critics have looked to Pragmatism to account for the protean self in the work of “New York” School Poets, these commentators have tended to focus their attention largely on O’Hara’s and Ashbery’s poetry. This project seeks, on the one hand, to round out this work with close readings of all the major “New York” School Poets, and extend it, on the other, by looking beyond poetry to visual art and classroom pedagogy to examine evidence of a Pragmatist orientation across the disciplines, despite the apparent interpretive consensus that American Pragmatism “goes silent” at mid-century.

This thesis argues that Hegel’s views on subjectivity are deeply rooted in, and defined by, both language and time. Specifically, we claim that Hegel’s account of subjectivity is decisively characterized by fundamentally ontological conceptualizations of both language and time. What we conclude is that Hegel’s philosophy and its conceptualization of subjectivity is a robust attempt to reconcile the changing, finite, temporal modes of being with the classical philosophical expectation that philosophy arrive at truth, which is non-finite and ahistorical. By defining time as becoming and language as the medium for the rational expression and comprehension of being that is meaningful for us, we claim that Hegel’s approach to the being of subjectivity is developed through a thematic relation of language and time. Overall this thesis aims to make an original contribution to Hegel studies and his views on subjectivity, time, and language by arguing that comprehending subjectivity means grasping how it becomes. This thesis begins, then, with the idea that both being and time are becoming, and that this is at once a finite and non-finite notion. From there, we emphasize that what Nature becomes is us, human subjectivity, and that we apprehend this being that is meaningful for us as time and through language. In history, subjectivity becomes as the written embodiment of a particular people, and, in philosophy, subjectivity becomes linguistically according to an ahistorical, non-finite notion of becoming as the subject’s own self-determination; neither excludes the other because there is only the continual becoming of our making sense of the rational whole.

Nous analysons ce qu'est la douleur pour l'homme. Expérience humaine radicalement subjective, la douleur ne peut pas s'objectiver. Pour l'appréhender nous préférons à l'auto évaluation quantitative de la douleur l'hétéro-évaluation de ce que l'homme douloureux montre de lui-même par la médiation de son corps et surtout ce qu'il dit de cette expérience : la mise en récit. D'où l'importance de se tourner vers l'homme douloureux, pour qui la douleur est une pensée et une souffrance.L'homme qui se plaint de douleur fait part à autrui d'un « mal-être » dans lequel le sens qu'il attribue à l'expérience vécue possède une grande importance. Douloureux, sa présence au monde est altérée. Se plaindre de douleur représente une adresse au cœur de l'intersubjectivité où de nombreux phénomènes subjectifs s'échangent, s'entrecroisent et s'influencent. La forme de la plainte dépendra de nombreux facteurs dont les enjeux et les circonstances. Pour s'apaiser, l'homme douloureux, surtout celui dit douloureux chronique, doit bénéficier d'une reconnaissance première, réciproque et mutuelle, et d'une recherche de sens.L'engagement réciproque sollicité par se plaindre de douleur représente une rencontre intersubjective tendue qui se déroule entre une indifférence redoutée et une reconnaissance espérée, au risque du ressentiment : un chemin audacieux vers un champ des possibles. Une mise à l'épreuve de l'humanisation de l'autre au cours de laquelle des échanges produisant une déshumanisation ou une réhumanisation se succèdent. / We analyze what pain feels like to humans. Radically subjective human experience, pain cannot be objectified. In order to apprehend it we prefer hetero-assessment rather than quantitative self-assessment of pain. What painful man shows from himself through the mediation of his body and especially what he says about his experience: the story-telling. This is what explains the importance of being more attentive to the painful man, to whom pain is a thought and suffering.The man who complains about pain expresses to others his bad feelings in which the meaning he attributes to the experience has a great importance. In pain, his presence in the world is altered. Complaining about pain represents a request in the heart of intersubjectivity where many subjective phenomena are exchanged, intersected and influenced. The form of the complaint will depend on many factors, including challenges and circumstances. To soothe, the painful man, especially for the patients with a chronic pain, must receive a first recognition, reciprocal and mutual, and a search for meaning.The mutual commitment sought by complaining of pain represents a tensed intersubjective meeting which takes place between a feared indifference and a hoped recognition, with the risk of experiencing resentment: a bold path to a field of possibilities. A testing of the humanization of the other while trades will pass through producing dehumanization or re-humanizing.

Thesis advisor: David L. Blustein / Critical studies have developed a tendency to schematically neglect the ways in which individuals actively participate in social and self-construction, even while constrained by the systems in which they are embedded. The current study explores discursive forms of self-construction embedded in an organizational hierarchy. Under critical analysis are 13 interviews with individuals employed as mid-level administrators by a large, private Catholic university in the United States (heretofore referred to as “PC University”). As mid-level university employees, most administrators are structurally bound to institutional priorities to some degree, regardless of any personal interpretation of supporting and competing discourses. In the context of this “middle ground,” people may be situated at intersections of overlapping and competing discourses, feeling pulled to position themselves differently depending on the context and its perceived stakes and expectations. How and why they make sense of, (re)constitute, and resist this positionality (in the context of a research interview situation) are the topics of interest. This study utilizes Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA; Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine, 2017), a translation of critical discourse analysis (CDA; Martínez-Alemán, 2015). To aid in establishing empirical rigor, I enlisted principles from constructivist grounded theory (CGA; Charmaz, 2017). The shifts and innovations to the original grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) that Charmaz evokes make the method an ideal match for studying subject formation from a critical (Foucauldian) discourse-analytic perspective. Results eventually took the form of 12 recurrent patterns grouped into 3 coherent groups. These groups corresponded to the categorical ways in which participants explained or justified their beliefs and actions related to institutional change. Generally, participants justified statements in three ways: in terms of morality, rationality, and fear. In terms of self-construction, how participants constructed change often related to group identification and outgroup orientation and ultimately, whether or not participants identified with the institution or as an outsider. These identifications were fluid in conjunction with changing circumstances including how groups were constructed and described in any given moment. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

This article contributes to dialog in the field about the nature of the manuscript review process. It develops a psychoanalytic framework for understanding how participants in the review process construct each other as subjects in discourse and why the experience of alienation inevitably marks this process. The framework suggests that participants can draw on different subject positions with regard to this alienation. One is imaginary and entails the failed fantasy that lack and alienation can be overcome. The other is symbolic and entails a mutual engagement with this failure. The article suggests imaginary positions are less constructive, resulting in struggles between participants as others. By contrast, it suggests symbolic positions are more constructive, resulting in struggles with otherness and opportunities for more creative outcomes. The article explores reviewer reflexivity as an important element of symbolic interactions in which participants have responsibility for the production of relationships in the review process.

Orientadora: Mariele Rodrigues Correa / Banca: Cláudia Aparecida Valderramas Gomes / Banca: Meyre Eiras de Barros Pinto / Resumo: O envelhecimento populacional é um fenômeno mundial que se apresenta na atualidade com um percentual em ascensão. Esta conjuntura tem mudado as configurações da pirâmide etária e produzido impacto nos processos de subjetivação no cenário contemporâneo, especialmente no que se refere às mulheres. A elas são demandadas a obediência aos padrões morais e corporais ditados pela sociedade atual, ainda fortemente marcada por imperativos patriarcais, que cultuam a beleza e a juventude eternas a serviço, principalmente, do homem. Este trabalho dedica-se a investigar e compreender os sentidos dados ao processo de envelhecimento na sociedade ocidental contemporânea para mulheres adultas de diferentes faixas etárias. A coleta de dados foi realizada por meio de entrevistas semiestruturadas direcionadas a dois grupos de mulheres com idades entre 20 a 35 anos e de 65 a 80 anos, sendo estas posteriormente sistematizadas, transcritas e qualitativamente analisadas, tendo como suporte metodológico a Análise de Conteúdo proposta por Bardin (2009). No percurso da pesquisa, primeiramente discorremos acerca das singularidades e pluralidades que envolvem o processo de envelhecer na atualidade. Em seguida elegemos refletir sobre os ditames juvenis impostos e propagados pelo aparato midiático que se configuram como dispositivos reguladores do processo de envelhecer. Versamos também acerca da trajetória feminina de construção e dominação patriarcal dada por meio dos discursos de silenciamento avançando... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: Population aging is a worldwide phenomenon that presents itself today with a rising percentage. This conjuncture has changed the configurations of the age pyramid and has produced an impact on the subjectivation processes in the contemporary scenario, especially when it comes to women. From them is required obedience to the moral and bodily standards dictated by today's society, still strongly stained by patriarchal imperatives, which promote an eternal cult to beauty and youth, mainly in service of men. This study is devoted to investigate and comprehend the meanings given to the aging process in contemporary Western society for adult women from different age groups. The gathering of data was performed through semi-structured interviews headed towards two groups of women aged 20 to 35 years and from 65 to 80 years; those interviews were later systematized, transcribed and qualitatively analyzed, using Bardin's (2009) Content Analysis proposal as methodological support. Through the course of the research, the singularities and pluralities that encompass the aging process today are the first matters brought to discussion. Then we chose to reflect on the youth precept imposed and diffused by the media apparatus, which is configured as regulating device of the aging process. We also talk about the trajectory of construction and patriarchal domination of the feminine, through the silencing speeches, advancing to the beauty dictatorship, and culminating, finally, in the acceptance... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre