No description available.

This poetry manuscript experiments with narrative and lyrical approaches while exploring themes of memory, family, gender roles, sexuality, and identity.

No description available.

Literature on recovery from anorexia nervosa indicates that research studies often exclude the experience of recovery from a subjective point of view. As a result there seems to be a lack of understanding as to what the process of recovery entails. The aim of this study is to explore the process of recovery from the participants’ perspective. The focus of this study is on the narratives of young women who consider themselves recovered from anorexia nervosa with or without formal treatment. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine young women who reported recovery from adolescent-onset anorexia nervosa. The resulting interview transcripts were subsequently analysed qualitatively using a narrative analytic perspective in order to explore the ways in which participants narrated their recovery experiences. Particular attention was paid to the subjective perspective of the perceived causes of anorexia nervosa, how participants narrated what it was like to be anorexic, how treatment was experienced and various aspects of the recovery process. The narratives of recovery suggest that recovery has diverse meanings, creates different expectations and has different manifestations for different individuals. The narratives suggest that, rather than a dichotomy within recovery, there are shades of recovery through which traces of anorexia emerge. Experiences of treatment too are not clear cut with a tension existing between resistance to treatment and dissatisfaction with treatment. By presenting these narratives, this study aims to explore the contradictions and difficulties within recovery experiences in order to extend that which is already known about recovery from anorexia nervosa.

Thesis advisor: Elizabeth Rhodes / Historically, the narrative frame tale boasts a long and varied trajectory that originated in ancient India and includes texts such as the Panchatantra and the Arabian Nights. Eventually, many Eastern fables and the frame-tale structure that accompanied them entered the Western literary tradition through the cultural bridge that was medieval Spain. Considering the frame tale’s popularity in medieval texts, especially in fourteenth century Italian novella collections, it is curious to observe a decline in its use during the early-modern period in Europe. This study examines how the traditional framed novella collection dissolves into more fluid narrative forms. Novel, more structurally subtle types of framing devices, including the character-as-frame and the place-as-frame, maintain several consistent narratological functions with their historical counterparts. The frame tale’s form may have changed, but its function remains. The first chapter of this dissertation focuses on Boccaccio’s Decameron as the model for how a traditional frame tale functions. Four narratological framing functions – the aesthetic, the perspectivist, the metaleptic frame break, and the self-reflexive – work in concert to organize the text and engage readers in actively interpreting it. The remaining three chapters examine three exemplary moments in literary history when authors redesign and deploy the narrative frame: Lazarillo de Tormes, Part I of Don Quijote, and Cien años de soledad. These texts each create a paradigm shift by utilizing a well-known, well-established formal device in innovative ways. This dissertation argues that by understanding these works in a new light as framed texts, and by exposing the consistent functions at work within them, readers can better understand both the world of the text and the world outside it. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Romance Languages and Literatures.

Thesis advisor: Curt Dudley-Marling / Improving educational outcomes for students with disabilities remains a challenge for professionals in the field of special education. With the passage of <italic> NCLB <italic/> and <italic> IDEA 2004 <italic/> has come the recommendation to establish higher standards for educational productivity for these students. This call to action seems warranted, especially in light of recent findings published in a report by the U.S. Department of Education (2002) entitled <italic>A New Era: Revitalizing Special Education for Children and Their Families <italic/>. The report suggests that students with disabilities drop-out of high school at twice the rate of their peers and higher education enrollment rates for students with disabilities are 50 percent lower than rates for the general population. Recent literature indicates that improving educational outcomes for students with disabilities depends in large part on creating constructive partnerships between their families and schools. The present study contributes to the knowledge base on partnership-making by investigating family-school partnerships in special education from the perspective of parents. This study utilized the qualitative methodology known as narrative inquiry to investigate the following research questions: 1. What stories do parents tell regarding their personal experiences with the special education process? 2. What do these stories tell us about the family's perspective of family-school partnerships in special education? 3. What can we learn from these stories that might translate into effective policy and practice in schools? Findings from interviews with fourteen parents of students receiving special education services indicated that they were concerned about issues of teacher effectiveness, honesty and trust, and their role in securing services for their children. Knowledge derived from their experiences offer suggestions for schools, institutions of higher education, and future researchers. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

University of Macau / Faculty of Arts and Humanities. / Department of English

Disruption to the life narrative is a common long-term experience following acquired brain injury. It can lead to barriers in being able to fulfil roles and engage in daily activities and occupations. Disruption occurs not only for the person who sustains the brain injury, but is also an experience for significant others in their lives. This narrative study gathered participants’ personal ‘sense making’ of life events following such disruption. Extended narrative interviews were combined with a photo-elicitation technique for six people with acquired brain injury and six people who had a significant other in their life with an acquired brain injury, all living in a rural area. It involved discussion around the patterning of their daily activities and roles both pre and post injury. Narrative analysis led to individual case studies of barriers and opportunities to lives impacted by brain injury. Issues were highly individualised and whilst the rural context presented an advantageous place to live for some due to tranquillity, it was less advantageous for others. However, synthesis of findings across cases considered the narrative form produced by the twelve accounts. This revealed that individuals drew on attributes of previous roles and careers to construct meaning and manage their lives, even when they could no longer engage with past roles and careers. Approaches to self-management post injury appeared to follow a pattern of drawing on internal schema underpinned by values, skills and meaning of previous roles and careers. This constitutes a form of capital built up from life pre-injury that is being utilised to achieve health and wellbeing, which I have called ‘embodied occupational capital’. An opportunity to work with individuals whose lives are affected by acquired brain injury has been offered, by way of focusing on this ‘embodied occupational capital’ to empower them to make positive change.

Tese de mestrado. Engenharia de Serviços e Gestão. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2010

This project explores the notion of a world experienced and mediated through the image. The focus is on issues related to representation of that world to self through image-based narrative. Central to the creation of these worlds is imagery published in various public access media such as television, the internet, print publishing. Although filtered and interpreted personally, because of their ubiquity and familiarity, these images collectively constitute representation of our culture. Our construction of the world (the way we represent it to ourselves) is contingent on our encounter with such images.Sited within the milieu of a media-fixated age, the project aims to deal with our desire to make sense of the litter of images that people our visual horizon. The project seeks to employ these images as objects of direct experience and to consider the subjective frameworks and cultural narratives through which they are filtered.The work will play on the desire to make relational sense of images, often by invoking narrative. Painting will be used as a means to provoke encounter between imagery, with the performative act of painting, itself a narrative, both being and representing a process of mediation