The term ‘restitution narrative’ describes the hope we all have when illness or accidental impairment befalls us to be returned to a pre-morbid condition of health as soon as possible, and in modern Western society we expect the miracle of restitutions to be mediated by medical science. Medicine is still unable to cure a wide range of illness and disability. For these people the restitution narrative fails. This study attempts to create space between health and illness, the space of the failed patient, within which to explore the iatrogenic and disabling effects on bodies and minds living in a society that has come to expect not to suffer when illness or disability is incurable and chronic. Through the medium of a purpose built website, people who are chronically ill and disabled discussed the ‘wicked issues’ that make lives already challenged unnecessarily difficult. Application of the findings of research in psychobiology is applied to speculate whether health may be worsened by being a failed patient in a culture for which health has become the ultimate good. Ideas of social fuzziology are brought into play to help imagine ways in which the dualities of health and illness, normal and abnormal, are broken down and the normalizing ideologies of medicine resisted. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Motion is a fundamental activity for the healthy functioning human organism. Its importance, however, is increasingly de-valued in Western cultures as they speed toward adopting technologies and virtual experiences as adjuncts to, and even replacements for7 traditional educational structures and processes that involve physical activity. Organised and reflective experience of human motion is becoming increasingly marginalised in teaching methodologies and learning programs in educational institutions at all levels around the globe. This inquiry sets out to gain a greater understanding of why people and human motion become disconnected, particularly during periods of formal education. A central question and two sub-questions form the basis of the inquiry. The central question asks why human motion is not valued and more utilised in education. In particular, why do learning areas that directly represent involvement with human motion, such as physical education, continually struggle in education programs. It directs the investigation to focus on the causes rather than the symptoms of the disuse and devaluation of human motion in Australian education. The two sub-questions split the praxis of the study. The first seeks to understand how the causes of devaluation work in the educational context lo affect the lack of acknowledgement; and the second considers ways to counter the disuse of human movement in education programs. To address these questions, the research focuses on rebutting the notion of a mind-body dualism. Rather, it seeks to better understand how humans learn and function as monists - integrated beings, acquiring self-knowledge in their 'world of being' in which bodily and emotional experiences, and reasoning are inextricably intertwined. I have approached this qualitative research as an ethnographic sociologist examining the issues from a critical high modernist perspective in order to demonstrate the pervading influence in Australian education of strong beliefs and values from the era of Enlightenment. Narrative analysis of 'memoir' in the form of self-defining memories was selected to gain a sensibility of the connectedness between human emotion, motion and reasoning in the lived experiences of students in three primary and three secondary schools across Years 2-12. An opportunity for human movement to be more valued and utilised in emerging educational frameworks that have life knowledge, dispositions and capabilities at their core is identified. The inquiry proposes a conceptualisation of human motion in education for new times characterised by the need for people to develop personal resources and strong positive identities in order to cope with a world of rapid change and uncertainty.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2006. / 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 28, 2007) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Popular media, literature, and theory suggests that technology has induced a newly evolved, posthuman and postmodern (or "post-Enlightenment") cyborg consciousness. I suggest, as an alternative reading to the notion that we are evolving towards a disembodied posthuman state which will revolutionise what it means to be human, that the literature of cyborgs incorporates and reinscribes traditional narratives about human identity. This project analyses representative tropes of the cyborg in contemporary discourse from an explicitly historical perspective. Although dualisms such as mind/matter or soul/body are recognised in current theorising of the cyborg, little has been written about the historical relationship of mechanism and humanity in the ongoing discussion of cyborg mind/body ontology. The cyborg in much of our literature throughout a wide range of genres is represented by the exaggerated and horrifying effacement of human embodiment to embellish an underlying concern about the consequences to the human spirit when we can be reproduced by technological means. This thesis argues that much of the discourse about the novelty of the "postmodern" human-machine, however, is not unprecedented. Cyborg literature re-presents themes and concerns regarding the man-machine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and continues to reflect a religious debate about the spirit within the material body. Beginning with current notions of the supposed obsolescence of the body, this thesis explores how the contemporary cyborg functions as a device to reflect traditional (frequently Christian) values. Drawing on eighteenth-century medical philosophy and the satirical literary responses to mechanist definitions of body and soul, I demonstrate literary connections between medical and literary metaphors of the Enlightenment man-machine and the postmodern cyborg in popular media, fiction, and theory. The debate surrounding eighteenth-century materialism, primarily metaphorical and analogical in its representation of the body's mechanisms, contributed directly to current notions of figurative disembodiment and the status of the human soul in contemporary literature. I conclude that the cyborg as a figure of literature does not indicate a revolutionary change in social consciousness but repeatedly is a device used to affirm traditional religious concepts of human reproduction, individual free will, spirit and body, and life after death.

Texte remanié de : Thèse (doctorat) : Philosophie : Uppsala universitet : 2008. / Bibliographie (p. 259-265).

Thesis (M.S.)--Western Washington University, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 30-35). Also issued online.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 2008. / Title from document title page. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-160).

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