Current writing and research on addiction recovery is inconclusive about what is effective in promoting recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction. This thesis focuses on the narrative commentaries of people currently in recovery in an effort to determine what elements may be common among them that promote and sustain their recovery conditions. In depth interviews were conducted with eight individuals who offered personal details about their addictions and their recovery. Analysis of their narratives reveals a variety of thematic conditions related to the maintenance of sobriety and other personal goals.

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No description available.

Male circumcision is one of the most common paediatric surgeries. Most research has concentrated on assessing medical risks versus benefits, yet the majority of infant circumcisions are performed for social reasons. A few studies have surveyed reasons for circumcising/not circumcising. However, they have not revealed the decision-making process. Drawing upon embodiment theories, this study explored expectant parents’ decision-making about circumcision. Interviews were conducted with six individuals. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was utilized to identify themes. Findings revealed eight major themes, including ‘gender jurisdiction’ (whether fathers should have more decision-making power than mothers). Another centred on deciding whose body was the focus – the baby’s or the father’s. All participants perceived bias, both pro- and anti-circumcision, in the information they received from health professionals. They expressed a strong need for objective information and support. The findings may be helpful to obstetricians, paediatricians, and midwives – as well as individuals and families facing this decision.

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to understand and describe the lived experience of novice counsellors. Specifically, this study sought to determine what common experiences aid development and/or detract from a counsellor’s self-identity. It identifies how a counsellor is shaped by their experience and training. As well, it establishes the significance of understanding the impact of personal experiences on a counsellor’s professional development and isolates the needs of the developing counsellor as expressed by the participants themselves. Together, the lived experiences of all participants shared four common themes: anchoring, uncertainty, knowledge seeking and self-awareness. These four themes frame the over-arching phenomenon that describes the collective experience of the novice counsellor - transition. The significant feature or essence of transition is accepting and acknowledging on-going learning and change. The conclusions of this study promote discourse on the training experience of counsellors in the hope of modifying counsellor training programs.

Nature is often considered a site of pristine perfection existing outside of human interaction. It is this notion that has led humanity to draw away from the environment and has encouraged the continual degradation of the Earth today. This exploratory research investigates the world as a series of permeable and impermeable boundaries – a shifting interwoven-web of matter, where all things are drawn together. Nature is to be understood as the continual arena of interchange between all the things of the world. Humanity and all of its constructs are merely a subset embedded within the greater reality of the physical world. This practicum examines the phenomenological ways in which humanity is entwined within the natural world, with implications for how this concept may be applied to the field of landscape architecture. The result is an open-ended design for a park and interpretive center for Gillis Quarries, in Garson, Manitoba.

Current writing and research on addiction recovery is inconclusive about what is effective in promoting recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction. This thesis focuses on the narrative commentaries of people currently in recovery in an effort to determine what elements may be common among them that promote and sustain their recovery conditions. In depth interviews were conducted with eight individuals who offered personal details about their addictions and their recovery. Analysis of their narratives reveals a variety of thematic conditions related to the maintenance of sobriety and other personal goals.

No description available.

My thesis emerges out of the new disciplines of trauma studies and gender theory, both of which explore the coming into being of the subject. The traumatic event is that which overwhelms the subject and cannot be integrated into a sense of self Gender theory explores the ways in which woman is positioned as object in the patriarchal culture, and so cannot fully experience herself as subject. Both disciplines have mobilized narrative as a goal - narrative depends upon the adoption of a position as subject. I aim to theorize the body of the survivor of trauma and to explore the means by which the traumatic symptom might be transformed into narrative. Post-1980 psychiatrists have linked the traumatic symptom to the work of Pierre Janet (1859- 1947) on hysteria. Janet regarded the body as inseparable from consciousness and was concerned with the ways in which the whole organism engaged in the performance of activity. Janet's writing stood at the beginning of a tradition of thought on the 'body image', in which the performance of activity on a psycho-physical level was regarded as the basis of subjectivity. I am interested in mobilizing this theoretical framework as a therapeutic strategy for trauma. Through bodily movement, elements of narrative are explored - temporal sequence and flow, occupying new positions or perspectives - as a means of approach to a more integrated sense of self I also propose to conceptualize the gendering of the subject as a mode of somatic performance. The transformative potential of physical movement provides a means by which the objectified body, which is positioned outside of its own intentionality, can explore the possibility of occupying new positions as a subject.

This thesis is a theoretical exploration of the problem of the neighbour as an encounter with the Grey Zone. I look at various materials that can be formulated as expressions of the anxiety over the unknown that can come out in confrontation with problematic neighbours. Using an interpretive lense that recognizes the fundamental ambiguity in any speech (Blum 2010, Bonner 1997, 1998) I attempt to show how such talk is grounded in the problem of anxiety in the face of the unknown. I begin with an analysis of city life and problem neighbours in general, I then move to a theoretical discussion of the problem that Žižek’s formulation of the Neighbour as Other and Raffel’s discussion of a shared world brings out. I then look at the problem of a specific kind of bad neighbour, a methadone clinic can have in terms of the experience of parenting, and how this is articulated in some theoretical writings on city life. I then turn to an analysis of the proverbial fence as a solution to the Neighbour, followed by an analysis of the Russell Williams case as a call to revisit the problem of the Neighbour in relation to the Grey Zone. Though seemingly disconnected, all the cases I deal with can be understood as part of a conversation on the relation of health, neighbourliness and anxiety in the city to the problem of an encounter with the unknown.