This ethnographic case study explored the insights and experiences of a small selection of working graduates from Dubai Women's College. Based on a literature review and a preliminary study, the following themes were identified and employed as stimuli for discussion: the balance between work and family responsibilities, gender issues in the workplace, issues of power relationships for women, coping with restrictions in an Arabic Islamic environment, reasons for work, and sources of influence and satisfaction. The research utilized feminist post-structural theory to collect the data and then analyze and interpret the comments made by the women. Self-reflexivity and transparency of the positionality of the researcher were critical in this research that relied on an unstructured personal interview approach. The research resulted in a rich description of the thoughts and concerns of five diverse women. Through discourse analysis, the dominant socio-cultural discourses in the areas of gender, marriage, kinship, ethnicity, meritocracy, materialism and religion that women interact with in this cultural environment were identified. The extent to which the women take up, disrupt and challenge these discourses was also explored with a view to suggest ways to 'better' women's lives. Implications of this study include an agenda for increased emancipation of women by greater freedom of choice through self awareness and the development of potential strategies to support empowerment.

<p>In the thesis, I endeavour to create a platform on which to construct an understanding of &lsquo / integration&rsquo / in a multilingual and multicultural setting, post-apartheid. I have selected UWC as the research site as it is an institution of higher education and an inherently South African one which houses a large number of diverse ethnicities, cultures and languages. I appeal to the poststructuralist approach as it is one that explores the possible sociopolitical, economic and historical influences on which I argue and which forms the backdrop to understanding integration amongst the various groups. I am especially drawn to the topic of integration as there is to date no well-defined definition of what that means in the &lsquo / new&rsquo / South Africa. Different identities are explored in relation to how students identify themselves within their social networks, across various cultures and through language choices. In particular, I look at the three dominant &lsquo / South African&rsquo / groups, namely: Indians, Blacks and Coloureds and also two international student groups, the Batswanas and Chinese. use a qualitative approach and undertake focus groups and one-to-one interviews as well as participant observations and analyzing documentation. Data analysis is achieved through Discourse Analysis of transcribed interviews. One of the conclusions is that integration will not occur overnight. However, the broadening and exercising of linguistic options could be seen as a step in right direction to integration across the various ethnic groups. The study ends with recommendations and gives an overall view of integration at UWC. One of the recommendations is that UWC needs to give students more opportunities to practice their multilinguality and thereby broaden their linguistic repertoire which could in turn facilitate integration.</p>

<p>In the thesis, I endeavour to create a platform on which to construct an understanding of &lsquo / integration&rsquo / in a multilingual and multicultural setting, post-apartheid. I have selected UWC as the research site as it is an institution of higher education and an inherently South African one which houses a large number of diverse ethnicities, cultures and languages. I appeal to the poststructuralist approach as it is one that explores the possible sociopolitical, economic and historical influences on which I argue and which forms the backdrop to understanding integration amongst the various groups. I am especially drawn to the topic of integration as there is to date no well-defined definition of what that means in the &lsquo / new&rsquo / South Africa. Different identities are explored in relation to how students identify themselves within their social networks, across various cultures and through language choices. In particular, I look at the three dominant &lsquo / South African&rsquo / groups, namely: Indians, Blacks and Coloureds and also two international student groups, the Batswanas and Chinese. use a qualitative approach and undertake focus groups and one-to-one interviews as well as participant observations and analyzing documentation. Data analysis is achieved through Discourse Analysis of transcribed interviews. One of the conclusions is that integration will not occur overnight. However, the broadening and exercising of linguistic options could be seen as a step in right direction to integration across the various ethnic groups. The study ends with recommendations and gives an overall view of integration at UWC. One of the recommendations is that UWC needs to give students more opportunities to practice their multilinguality and thereby broaden their linguistic repertoire which could in turn facilitate integration.</p>

BDSM (bondage, discipline/dominance, submission/sadism and masochism) has recently gained greater visibility in dominant discourses around sexuality. However, these depictions are often constructed in rigid ways to typically exclude experiences of sexual intimacy. Despite this apparent exclusion, constructions of subspace (an altered mental state induced through BDSM encounters) on online blogs intrigued me to consider it as an alternative to widely accepted notions of sexual intimacy. Using a poststructuralist theoretical framework, I conducted an online ethnographic study in which I explored the varied ways in which self-identified South African BDSM individuals construct meaning around sexual intimacy. Through a Foucauldian discourse analysis, I consider how constructions of intimacy in the BDSM community might have been silenced through exclusionary definitions in dominant discourses. I identified four discourses in the text: A discourse of romantic vulnerability, a discourse of knowledge, a discourse of difference/sameness and a discourse of role differentiation. The findings suggest that BDSM practitioners, in constructing meaning around intimacy, at times comply with dominant discourses and at other times subvert normative ideas around sexuality, gender and sexual intimacy. I conclude with implications for gender and sexuality studies as well as the discipline of psychology in its engagement with BDSM identities and practices. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / Psychology / Unrestricted

Magister Artium - MA / In the thesis, I endeavour to create a platform on which to construct an understanding of 'integration' in a multilingual and multicultural setting, post-apartheid. I have selected UWC as the research site as it is an institution of higher education and an inherently South African one which houses a large number of diverse ethnicities, cultures and languages. I appeal to the poststructuralist approach as it is one that explores the possible sociopolitical, economic and historical influences on which I argue and which forms the backdrop to understanding integration amongst the various groups. I am especially drawn to the topic of integration as there is to date no well-defined definition of what that means in the 'new' South Africa. Different identities are explored in relation to how students identify themselves within their social networks, across various cultures and through language choices. In particular, I look at the three dominant 'South African' groups, namely: Indians, Blacks and Coloureds and also two international student groups, the Batswanas and Chinese. use a qualitative approach and undertake focus groups and one-to-one interviews as well as participant observations and analyzing documentation. Data analysis is achieved through Discourse Analysis of transcribed interviews. One of the conclusions is that integration will not occur overnight. However, the broadening and exercising of linguistic options could be seen as a step in right direction to integration across the various ethnic groups. The study ends with recommendations and gives an overall view of integration at UWC. One of the recommendations is that UWC needs to give students more opportunities to practice their multilinguality and thereby broaden their linguistic repertoire which could in turn facilitate integration. / South Africa

This dissertation maps a proto-poststructuralist tradition and fuses a subsequent methodology with/in a practice derived from performance studies to uncover a spatially informed corporeal notion of subjectivity. Combining the cultural and historically radical motility of the street skateboard and precursory surfboard with an ambulatory interpretation of radical political philosophy and subjectivity this work explores, through the lens of a drifting practitioner, a quotidian routine in The Commute, and a distinctly urban practice, in The Skateboard Dérive. Functioning as case situations these performance events are used to elaborate, produce, and apply a drifting approach to critical spatial inquiry through the recognition of four elemental notions: drifting, situating, becoming, and fragmenting.

<p>From Labov's (1963) finding that the centralization of the /ay/ and /aw/ diphthongs in Martha's Vineyard was emblematic of resistance to local economic and social change, to Mendoza-Denton's (2008) finding that variation in the realization of the /I/ vowel corresponds to gang affiliation among Latina girls in a Northern California high school, identity has been at the center of sociolinguistic analysis and theory for nearly a half century. Despite the centrality of this construct, sociolinguists have rarely stopped to ask about the epistemological, theoretical, and even political implications of identity. This dissertation offers a sustained, interdisciplinary critique of identity, both in linguistics and more generally in contemporary social theory. Through engagements with cultural anthropology, feminist theory, cultural studies, and linguistics, this critique calls attention to identity's epistemological baggage (e.g. collusion with neo-liberalism and Englightenment-era humanism) and theoretical tendencies (e.g. overestimation of agency) and suggests a turn to poststructuralist theory of subject formation. The dissertation is organized around three sections: historiography, theory, and empiricism, as follows.</p><p> The study begins with historiography, tracing the relationship between language and social analysis in a limited archive that includes the work of 19th and 20th Century language scholars, including William Dwight Whitney, Leonard Bloomfield, and Noam Chomsky. Focusing specifically on the relationship between Labov's variationist sociolinguistics and Chomsky's generative program, the historiography analyzes the conditions that led sociolinguistics to a form of social theory scaffolded around identity. </p><p>Poststructuralist theory of subject formation is introduced, with an emphasis on the work of Judith Butler (1990, 1997, 2004) and Michel Foucault (1975, 1976, 1981). A set of terms that animate this framework are introduced, including interpellation, subjectivization, discourse, subjectivity, subject position, subject type, power, and identity.</p><p>Two empirical studies of adolescent language are introduced and the findings are considered in light of the constellation of terms introduced in the prior section. The first is a case study focusing on the speech of one adolescent Mexican American female, "María," whose language use underwent reorganization over a three-year period coinciding with a change in community and school. Segmental and suprasegmental variables were analyzed from data collected from two time periods, T1 and T2. In order to account for modifications in "María's" vocalic production, two vowel variables were selected for acoustic analysis: pre-nasal and non-pre-nasal allophones of /æ/. These variables were selected because of their saliency in both Latino varieties of English (Thomas, Carter, & Coggshall 2006; Fought 2003; Thomas 2001). Midpoint measurements were taken for F1, F2, and F3 for a minimum of 25 tokens of each variable from T1 and T2 using PRAAT phonetics software (Boersma & Weenink 2009). Maria's production of prosodic rhythm was also analyzed using the Pairwise Variability Index (Lowe & Grabe 1995). Changes in F1 and F2 for both vocalic variables were statistically significant--both allophones of /æ/ were lowered and backed from T1 to T2. Conversely, no statistically significant difference was found in prosodic rhythm. These findings are analyzed in the context of the poststructuralist framework already set forth.</p><p>The second study is an intensive ethnographic investigation of a `majority minority' middle school in North Carolina that took place over a five-month period. Detailed ethnographic fieldnotes and unscripted interviews with 50 African American, white, and Latino speakers in social groups identified during observation constitute the data for this study. The analysis focuses on the subjectivizing effects of the institution, particularly the institutional discourses of `choice' and `value,' on the cultural and linguistic practices of its students. Using discourse analytic methods, the analysis shows that talk by students across all major social divisions (grade level, popularity status, gender, and ethnicity) is inflected by institutional discourses. </p><p>A complementary analysis considers the subjectivizing function of language ideology in the middle school context. Analysis of interview and ethnographic field data show three distinct discursive formations about language: `proper talk,' `ghetto talk,' and Spanish.</p> / Dissertation

This feminist poststructuralist study explores discourses of gendered and sexualized subjectivity of South African women who self‐identify as bisexual. The discipline of psychology has typically upheld a monosexual binary, where heterosexuality and homosexuality are positioned as the only legitimate categories of sexual identification. Within such a structure bisexuality is not considered a viable sexual identity. In broader public discourses female bisexuality is generally constructed in delegitimising ways, such as through constructions that necessarily equate bisexuality with promiscuity or describe it as an eroticized male fantasy, as a threat to lesbian politics, or as a strategy to retain heterosexual privilege. Data collection entailed conducting individual interviews with thirteen bisexual women and the transcribed texts were analysed using discourse analysis. The analysis focused on how bisexuality is Constructed in the interview texts, how the various constructions of bisexuality function and how Gendered subjectivity intersects with participants’ identity as bisexual. The analysis identifies a number of discourses that impact on, in varied and contradictory ways, participants’ positioning as bisexual. In a post‐apartheid context, participants regard fixing their Identity along strictly defined lines of difference as oppressive and resist bisexuality as being primary To their identity. Participants challenge the traditional gender binary through unsettling the automatic Linking of sex, gender and sexuality in discourses of sexual desire. However, participants also demonstrate the coercive effects of dominant discourse in the gendered positioning of subjects, with Heterosexuality in particular functioning as a normative sexual category with implications for participants’ gendered subjectivity. It then appears that parallel to its ability to disrupt the gender binary, bisexual discourse also acts in ways to support it. The analysis further indicates that in claiming a bisexual identity, participants risk marginalization in The face of delegitimising discourses that construct them in negative terms of promiscuity, hypersexuality and decadence. Powerful silencing discourses further construct same‐sex attraction As un-African and as sinful. The analysis concludes with a discussion of participants’ strategies to Normalize bisexuality. This study contributes to research accounts that explore diversity in sexual identification and creates Greater visibility of bisexual women in South African discourses of sexuality. It also contributes to theories of female sexual identities and adds to theoretical debates around the challenge to dominant gender and sexuality binaries posed by bisexuality. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Psychology / unrestricted

This dissertation is an analysis of observations among, and interviews with, Romanian and Swedish employees at a Swedish development aid project in Romania. The aim has been to study the categories of ‘humanity’: how the notions of the ‘human(e)’ and the ‘inhuman(e)’ were created in the context of the project. Further, the aim of the thesis has been to connect the relations in everyday life as it develops in an aid project to the social and societal processes of change in today’s Europe. Chapter 1 introduces the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the study. Chapter 2 analyses media representations of institutionalized children in Romania, and describes the development aid in Romania. Chapter 3 describes and analyses the practical work with the children in the everyday life of the project. Chapter 4 focuses on the locally employed project staff, and their adoption of a ‘more human(e)’ identity through working with the Swedish NGO. Chapter 5 analyses how the construction of difference took place in the everyday life of the development aid project. Chapter 6 analyses the development aid as exchange of gifts and applies models of analysis of social work with the so-called deserving and undeserving clients. Chapter 7 is a concluding chapter. The construction of the ‘human(e)’ and its opposite, the ‘inhuman(e)’, could be found on three levels. These categories were used in reference to: (1) the children, the sick elderly and the poor families that were the clients of the aid project and were expected to be ‘humanized’ in the course of project implementation; (2) the Romanians who were employed by the Swedish organization and who were to be humanized through their work and through learning Western views on what the human being is; and (3) by implication, the whole Romanian society and all the Romanians who were also to be ‘humanized’ through the intervention of the Western NGOs.

Adults working as teachers and doctors can find it difficult to communicate well with young people about the issues that affect their wellbeing and learning and thus miss opportunities to contribute when their clients experience adversity. Drama is often used as a pedagogical tool to assist people to develop their communication skills. Dramatic portrayals however, can reinforce rather than challenge limiting stereotypes, and there is the potential for learning through drama to contribute to a patronising world-view and lead to the assumption that a set of formulaic approaches can bridge the communication divide. There is thus a need for research that engages both theoretically and technically with the use of drama as a tool for applied learning. In this thesis, a reflective practitioner methodology is used to explore the use of drama as a method in participatory enquiry and as a tool in the professional education of teachers and doctors. Use of the practitioner perspective permits analysis of the alignment between theory and practice. The Learning Partnerships project provides the context within which to conduct this enquiry. In this project the researcher leads drama workshops that bring together classes of school students and tertiary students completing their studies in medicine or education. The adolescents work as co-investigators with the teachers and doctors, exploring how to communicate effectively in the institutional contexts of schools and clinics.