Although serious illness is often associated with aging in contemporary society, increasing numbers of young adults are being diagnosed with a variety of serious illnesses. In order to learn more about what it is like to be seriously ill during young adulthood, I completed a qualitative study with ten young women who had recently been affected by a life-threatening or chronic illness. The research was informed by a theoretical approach based on social constructionist and phenomenological principles that recognize that physiological processes such as illness are socially mediated and given meaning within a certain socio-cultural context. Thus,the life course and its corresponding stages are not universal or biologically determined, but rather are social constructions based on socio-cultural factors and the meanings given to certain biological events. This research involved participants between the ages of 20 and 37 from around Saskatchewan who had been affected by a serious illness within the previous three years. The methodological approach that I utilized was interpretive and drew upon phenomenological, feminist, and participatory visual approaches to qualitative research. The young women participated in phenomenological interviews and a photovoice project that explored their lived experiences of serious illness and the specific issues that they faced because of illness. I analyzed the data thematically, incorporating phenomenological concepts of embodiment, temporality, and relationality. Although the interview and photographic data highlighted a range of experiences, the data highlighted several similarities among participants. Foremost, the data revealed that serious illness was highly disruptive for the young women; specifically, participants were required to negotiate disruptions to their sense of embodiment, everyday lives, expectations for the future, and social relationships. Ultimately, serious illness brought about embodied and social experiences that conflicted with how participants had previously envisioned young adulthood and their life course. As such, their experiences of illness had profound implications for their self identity and brought about a complex process of trying to make sense of illness. Based on these findings, I conclude that the young women experienced and made sense of illness within the context of socio-cultural expectations related to age and the life course, as well as gender. I also identify the implications of this research for health care and support services aimed at this population.

The overall purpose of this study is to analyze how students talk and write about writing to understand why mainstream students struggle with writing when they are neither economically nor culturally marginalized. Composition scholars' literacy narratives have identified problems in education and literacy encountered by marginalized students, but they fall short in identifying and accounting for problems that mainstream students face. After examining literacy narratives by composition scholars, this study assesses interviews, questionnaires, and literacy narratives from 77 college students, ranging in ages from 18 to 26. These accounts indicate that mainstream students have had few opportunities to examine their literacy skills within the context of their developing sense of self. Because literacy narratives are stories about writers developing a voice to share with their community, ethos is central to this examination. Building upon classical and contemporary models, two aspects of ethos are developed in my analysis: ethos as it relates to students' character, identity, and self-awareness, and ethos as students' sense of their relationship to the communities that shape their character and form their audience as writers. My assessment of student accounts develops four conclusions. First, standardized testing and formulaic writing have done little to foster students' confidence or self-awareness. Second, as a result, exigence becomes a necessary addition to writing assignments to encourage students to learn from their writing and see themselves as writers. Third, having students write their own literacy narrative is a valuable exercise so that they may become aware of how literacy affects their identity. Fourth, students' self-assessments reveal that their perceptions of writing bear little resemblance to issues defined in recent debates in composition studies, particularly the rift between personal and academic writing and the debate concerning expressivist and social-epistemic pedagogies. I define an alternative, an ethos-based pedagogy, placed within the post-process theory paradigm as defined by Thomas Kent. An ethical pedagogy focuses on developing students' character and confidence and on moving students to examine the relationship between interior and exterior spaces they inhabit and on considering how these spaces influence them on a personal and a social level. An ethical pedagogy can move students to form stronger relationships with language and their literacy practices.

Black gay male identities and their place within the social hierarchy are organized by interlocking systems of race, sexuality, gender and class. This produces the social marginality of black gay men in seemingly neutral ways. Prominent features of this systemic oppression are stock stories of black gay life that construct black gay men as pathological, dangerous, conflicted, inauthentically black, emasculated, and heretical within public and academic discourses. In order to better understand these dynamics and add to the empirical literature on race/sexuality intersections, fifty-two men identifying themselves as black/African American and as having relationships with other men, participated in semi-structured one-on-one interviews which explored their accounts of the structural arrangements, social interactions, and cultural meaning systems that defined the experience of being both black and gay in America. These interviews revealed that black gay men construct rich and complex counter narratives which not only expose the complex structural arrangements, cultural practices and racial ideologies that produce their marginality, but also remediate black gay manhood as part of the black diaspora. These narrative challenges illuminated discursive, performative and cultural practices, as well as social interactions occurring in three areas of the men‘s lives. First, were strategic uses of a hegemonic masculine form I call the "Super Black Man" (SBM) by which the men counteract the heteronormative, and hypermasculine prerequisites of respectable black masculinity, and represent themselves as racially-conscious and respectable black men. Participants also constructed narrative challenges to those cultural repertoires produced by the black church which organize the dominant scripts of black, Christian identity. These accounts were distinguished by the academic resources they utilized to re-theorize the relationship between Christian faith and the black body, confront the white racial framing and heteronormative assumptions embedded in church doctrine, and transform their outsider status within these communities. Finally participants‘ narratives also illustrate multiple dimensions by which a black racial framing organizes their experiences as black gay men, and their connection to black communities. These negotiations suggest the need to theorize race/sexuality intersections as having both structural and interpretative dimensions and to see the intersection of race and culture as complicating the manifestation of racial inequality.

Thesis (M.A.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-86).

Staging a Shared Future argues that theatre provides vital insight into the construction and use of narratives in the Northern Ireland since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA). This document signaled the end of thirty years of violent conflict between Protestants and Catholics, but could not heal the distrust that remained. Thus, one of the goals of the ongoing peace process has been to replace old sectarian narratives emphasizing differences and grievances between the communities with newer narratives emphasizing similarity and shared purpose. I examine nine plays staged in Belfast since the GFA that have endorsed and interrogated these new narratives of progress and argue that theatre, as an inherently communal event, provides an excellent opportunity for residents of the state to collectively imagine what a "shared society" actually means. I conduct close readings of complete productions including script, direction, acting choices, venue, and marketing. I also compare these performances to other forms of public discourse including television, government policy documents, radio, and fiction. Chapter one provides an overview of Northern Irish theatre and public discourse; each subsequent chapter explores the ways theatre has tackled one particular issue facing the construction of a "shared future" narrative. Chapter two focuses on productions that staged meetings between Catholics and Protestants. The Wedding Community Play Project (1999), Two Roads West (2009), and National Anthem (2010) offered different visions of what it would take for these historical enemies to consider themselves equal partners in the state. Chapter three looks at the state's general discomfort with public discussions of Troubles-related traumas. Convictions (2000), The Chronicles of Long Kesh (2009), and The Sign of the Whale (2010) all advocated for ways of addressing trauma that did not depend on competitive grief or hierarchies of victims. Chapter four concentrates on representations of those who have been marginalized within Northern Ireland. To Be Sure (2007), This is What We Sang (2009), and God's Country (2010) all pointed to the need for Northern Ireland to think broadly about ideas of "belonging" and to create a more inclusive "shared future." Throughout, I argue that theatre will play an essential role in negotiating the continuing tensions within Northern Ireland. / text

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex and lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder that is widely variable in presentation and intensity of defining features. ASD affects 1 in 94 Canadians and is increasing in prevalence. The variety of professionals who work with children with ASD have an accumulation of experiences that can be instructive and inspiring for other practitioners. This study explored how their wealth of experiences might be encapsulated as short vignettes or stories that could be analyzed and used as resources for educating current and future professionals. Six stories were collected from diverse professionals, and themes were summarized in order to demonstrate the types of lessons that can be learned from a clinician’s story of a significant moment or event in working with a child with ASD. The stories highlighted challenges and breakthroughs in communication and managing the child’s challenging behaviours, as well as skills and techniques that professionals have found effective in practice. The study shows that clinicians’ stories hold valuable information that can be shared with professionals in an interesting and memorable manner. Future research could expand on this study to build larger collections of stories with additional viewpoints and specific professional insights and experiences with a variety of children in their practice. / Graduate / 0518 / 0727 / 0758

The purpose of this research was to document how racial ideologies were expressed in relational organizing practices in a working class Latino Elementary school in Texas. By identifying dominant and subjugated racial ideologies, this research contributes to effort to challenge inequitable racial systems in schools through community organizing for school reform. I employed a participant ethnographic approach by becoming a volunteer relational organizer with a community organizing institution at Walnutbrook Elementary. I worked with working class Latino parents and the school staff to identify and challenge inequitable racial systems at the school. Using a racial systemic framework, I describe how dominant racial ideologies shaped relational organizing practices through racial narratives repeated throughout the organizing actions. I also document how some working class Latina leaders were able to counter narrate subjugated ideologies by using differential techniques as their organizing practices. Through microethnographic case studies, I am able to tell the stories of how schooling institutions continued inequitable racial systems by narrating dominant racial ideologies while local community leaders created spaces through which to challenge these systems and ideologies by privileging their Latina epistemologies. / text

In this dissertation I historicize dominant discourses of disability and place my analysis of five published disability narratives in dialogue with those discourses in order to show how the authors of these narratives craft alternative rhetorics to resist representation that casts them as unsuited to public space. Critical to my dissertation is my belief that personal narratives by rhetoricians with disabilities are invaluable sites of rhetorical inquiry, especially in light of the marginalized subject position of people with disabilities in the larger culture. Because my dissertation connects rhetoric and disability studies, my purpose is two-fold. For rhetorical theorists, I argue that attention to dominant discourses of disability and the alternative rhetorics in disability narratives can expand our present understanding of rhetorics of the body to interrogate: (1) who has the authority to speak and who doesn't; (2) who the dominant culture grants the position of subject and who the dominant culture sees as inherently "Other" or an object; and (3) how differing intersections of identity as configured by the actual appearance of the body can often determine whether or not the body "speaks" or is "spoken of" and, in conjunction, whether or not that body is heard, ignored, or silenced. For disability studies scholars, I rediscover the disability narrative as a genre that provides people with disabilities an opportunity to make meaning of their embodied experiences and their material circumstances while simultaneously addressing the ways in which disability itself is also a social construction similar to race, class, and gender. Ultimately, I argue that disability narrative can be a vehicle for a "rhetoric of resistance" that I posit allows people with disabilities to: (1) move their bodies and their voices from the margins to the center of public space; (2) revalue the embodied experience of disability as a site for knowledge and meaning making; and (3) challenge dominant discourses of disability that cast the disabled body as inferior and thereby serve as justification for the cultural devaluation and social marginalization of people with disabilities.

Stories can play a crucial role in conveying health information to audiences. Several theories have been used to describe cognitive processing of narratives and subsequent belief change; yet there have been no comparative studies to date examining these theories.A primary objective was to compare transportation, flow, and AIME. A secondary objective of this study was to examine previous experience with a health issue as a possible moderator between exposure to entertainment television narratives and subsequent belief change. This is important to examine because previous experience may predispose audience members to have more durable attitudes.A pre-test/post-test experimental design was used to test theories of cognitive processing of narrative entertainment television programs with three different health topics: binge drinking, problem-eating behavior, and unprotected sexual intercourse. Stimuli were drawn from one-hour, broadcast television programming. Measures of the theories, health related beliefs, and previous experience with the three health issues were assessed.Findings revealed that different constructs represented in the three theories were significant predictors of belief change. Results showed that while most individual constructs of theories predicted belief change, the theories were not interchangeable. An analysis of the extent to which participants reported cognitive processing according to each theory revealed more flow and AIME experienced in comparison to transportation. Reports of flow and AIME were equal in a third condition. More globally, all three theories accounted for a significant portion of belief change, but no differentiation was evidenced between the theories in their ability to predict belief change.In analyses of the effects of exposure to television narratives, belief change was significant in all three treatment conditions. Previous experience with a health issue did not impede belief change following exposure to television narratives. This lends support to theorizing about cognitive processing of narratives in that previous experience with an issue may enhance story-consistent beliefs.Overall, findings demonstrate that a more fruitful endeavor in future research on the persuasive impact of narratives is to devote attention to the underlying constructs of theories, rather than assuming cognitive processes are the same among theories.

Aniara is a versified epos written by Harry Martinson in 1956. The story is about a large group of people who are being evacuated from earth to Mars because the earth is radiated. However something goes wrong. They fall out of course and end up on a never ending journey in space. This essay examines the relations between the epos Aniara and Lars Rudolfssons dramatization for Stockholm City Theater, played during the fall/winter of 2010. Through performativity and narrative theories I analyze narrations and characterization in the text and in the play. I analyze ideas of the characters appearances in the play, how the starship Aniara physically is represented on stage and what the dance and the music of the play represent. The essay has evolved to a study around the most important symbols of both the epos and the play – time and space.