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Health and social policies identify empowerment as a guiding ideal for health promotion, yet there is little theoretical understanding of youth empowerment. The need for theory to guide practice and research in working with youth in a health promotion context led to this grounded theory study to develop a theory of youth empowerment. A community health nurse acting on BC Ministry of Health's adaptation of the World Health Organisation's Healthy Cities Initiative initiated a community organising project in an inner city community of Vancouver, which merged with the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation Blueprint for Youth Services policy. The study was based on 32 months of participant observation where the researcher was a co-facilitator of a community organising effort aimed at engaging youth in identifying their quality-of-life issues, and developing and implementing their solutions. Of the ,123 youth entering the process, 66 attended at least three meetings of which 18 demonstrated ongoing commitment to the community action process. Partnering between adults and youth as the process of empowering youth emerged as the core category in the analysis, comprised of two sub-processes, Creating an Empowering Environment for Youth and Becoming Empowered. An empowering environment allowed youth to take responsibility in a welcoming social climate with enabling support from adults. The adults demonstrated their belief in the capacity of youth to act in the community, expected youth to take responsibility, cared for youth, and offered encouragement through acting-with interactions with young people. Youth felt welcome and participated in the process, taking responsibility for voicing, decision making and action on their qualityof- life issues. The adults transferred the power to youth by giving up their responsibility for voicing, decision making and taking action. By taking responsibility and acting in the community with enabling support, the youth became empowered by controlling the process and incrementally developing their competence, self-esteem, confidence and understanding, which cultivated their belonging to the community. Participating in an empowering process enhanced their development and set in motion a social change process that raised the consciousness of adults and influenced organisational practice. The theory identifies youth empowerment as an ecological construct and a capacity-building process.

Drawing on insights from feminist scholarship and gender studies, this thesis offers a new reading of selected medieval German texts with a special emphasis on the negotiation of gender and power. All three parts of the thesis demonstrate how the use of modern theories helps us to re-examine a medieval text's implications and ethical values, and to reconsider traditional views of the text. Part One focuses on the discussion of gender boundaries. Didactic and fictional texts, such as Thomasin von Zerclaere's Der welsche Gast and Ulrich von Liechtenstein's Frauendienst, show that violations of gender boundaries and the questioning of the traditional power relationship between the genders are crucial to the textual negotiation of masculinity and femininity. As I demonstrate in Part Two, the unequal relationship between men and women is especially important for the system of male homosocial bonding underlying medieval society. Examples of the physical and symbolic exchange of women and their favours are offered by didactic texts, such as Marquard vom Stein's Der Ritter vom Turn, and fictional texts, such as the Nibelungenlied. Aspects of this exchange are not solely related to medieval marriage practices, but are also reflected in courtly rituals, such as "frouwen schouwen" (watching the ladies). The importance of the conventionally beautiful female body as an object of exchange becomes obvious in Part Three, where I examine encounters between Christian knights and women defying the norms of feminine beauty. Here I focus on female figures that are defined as "doubly Other": both in their relationship to the masculine Self, and in their relationship to the ideal of medieval Christian femininity. Texts such as Wolfdietrich B and Der Strieker's Die Konigin vom Mohrenland show how the negotiation of gender and power assumes a new dimension in light male encounters with Wild Women, heathen women, "supernatural" women and old women, where the male partner often has to struggle to uphold his privileged masculine position.

This thesis explores the implications of the work of Michel Foucault for the Enlightenment project. Specifically, it asks whether and how the modern drive to explain the world so as to guide political action and promote progressive change, can be defended in the light of Foucault's critique of Western philosophy, his reconceptualisation of power relations and his account of the subject. Firstly, it is shown how Foucault's genealogy, a hybrid and polemical approach, aims to call into question the theories and practices which underpin the present. Genealogy problematizes what we have come to take for granted, and in so doing it requires that we rethink not only the nature and history of Western philosophical thought but also the role of intellectuals. To attempt to write a history of truth is to ask what one can know of a concept which structures the very limits of our knowledge. It is to become aware of the forces and constraints involved in our production of truth, and thus to bring to light the complex relationship between knowledge and power. Secondly, Foucault argued that, since ancient times, forms of knowledge and relations of power, characterised by individualising and totalising tendencies, have steadily but discontinuously integrated into disciplinary technologies which have been instrumental in constituting the sovereign human individuals which philosophy assumes as given. Following Foucault's lead in focusing not on what power is, but on how it operates historically and in concrete ways, it is shown how Foucault reconceptualised relations of power as strategies of governance which depend on the existence of free subjects capable of resistance. Thirdly, the spotlight falls on the role of relations of power and knowledge, especially the human sciences, in manufacturing subjectivity (from souls and bodies to individual actors), which is in turn related to Foucault's call to irreverently question the limits of philosophy and to engage in aesthetic stylistic experimentation upon ourselves within and against the bounds imposed on us by our present. The thesis concludes by arguing that Foucault's iconoclastic genealogy of our limits and our possibilities leaves us with a rich set of analyses and strategies with which we might render modernity unfamiliar and available for refabrication. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, 1997.

This thesis is a study of the experiences of young people living together in groups. It uses two children's homes in the north east of Scotland as its research sites. The ways in which data were collected were devised in consultation with the young people involved and required the researcher to 'live-in' th units for a year long period. This thesis concentrates on the ways in which the young people structured their resident groups and gained status and position within them. It argues that fixed roles or positions were not in play; rather there was constant change and fluidity. Young people, it is argued, gained position through a complex set of negotiations which required them to consider their skills and abilities as well as the social context in which they were operating. This inter-relationship supports some of the ideas put forward by Pierre Bourdieu and the conceptual analysis developed during the course of this thesis draws upon his work. The thesis as a whole contributes to the debates both within the study and practice of residential child care and broader sociological debates around children and young people. It illustrates the wide range of skills and knowledge used by the young people thus challenging bully/victim stereotypes and beliefs about the solely 'negative' influence of peers. Furthermore this thesis demonstrates the ways in which young people use their social agency to negotiate around 'adult' influences and controls.

This qualitative research employed the single case study approach to review the process by which service users and the staff of a food bank successfully broke through the bureaucratic resistance and secured new premises from the City of Montreal. This study explores the capacity of weaker parties to achieve their desired goal through strategic intervention on social exchange network despite the pre-existing asymmetric power relations. The conception of goal attainment, power relations and social exchange were discussed in order to develop the research questions. Case materials were collected from multiple sources: documentary research, in-depth interviews, and observation. The findings demonstrate that internal solidarity, potential uses of coalitions and expansion of resource networks are fundamental factors for members of a subordinate group to gain power and to achieve their goals. Implications for community organization practice were drawn from the overview of the empirical findings and theoretical concepts.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2008. / In recent years, more studies are exploring how contextual factors may influence mate preferences. Based on social learning theory, power, attitudes towards egalitarian gender roles, and type of mating were expected to influence women's romantic preferences for physical attractiveness and for resources. An online questionnaire was administered to a community sample and data analyses were employed using structural equation modeling (SEM) and multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA). Results showed that, as women's power increased, women showed increased preferences for physical attractiveness and sexiness in potential short-term mates and increased preference for intelligence in potential long-term mates. Power and attitudes were also found to be significant in predicting women's preferences for physical attractiveness relative to potential earning capacity in both short-term and long-term mating conditions. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-92). / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / 92 leaves, bound 29 cm

This thesis examines the representations of surveillance in mainstream cinema. Using ideology critique it will show how filmic illustrations of monitoring depoliticize the relationship between surveillance and structural relations of power.In order to provide a foundation for this inquiry, a political economy critique of surveillance will be undertaken in four areas. Focusing on the workplace, consumer surveillance, urban policing and intelligence gathering, this thesis will contextualise surveillance as historically relevant and intimately connected with modern constructs such as the nation-state, military power and capitalist economic organisation. In recent years, the role of surveillance has been intensified in response to the challenges posed by globalization, the restructuring of capitalism in the 1980's and 90's and the declining legitimacy of nation-state governments. These developments are both aided by, and in turn promote, pervasive networks of surveillance. Driven by risk management and other forms of economic reasoning as organisational logic, developments in information communication technologies accelerate surveillance capabilities rendering them more invasive and intense. In this way, surveillance can be conceived of as complicit with prevailing relations of power on a macro, sociological level.In order to show how mainstream cinematic representations of surveillance ideologically obscure this relationship, this thesis begins with an overview of 30 popular films. It then moves to a comparison of four recent Hollywood portrayals of surveillance with the four areas of political economy critique identified above. This analysis will reveal that these films have a tendency to focus on sentimental themes such as individual heroism, antagonist versus protagonist struggles and romantic subplots, in a way which deflects attention from collective experience with surveillance webs. More pertinently, the narrative structures of these films feature dichotomies between malevolent and benevolent monitoring, aligning legitimate and benign surveillance with the state. At the same time, the accompanying imagery of surveillance devices fetishizes monitoring, deterministically glorifying technology as a powerful and omniscient force. The overall effect is to depoliticize monitoring as a natural part of the fabric of everyday life.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2006. / "December 2006." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-75). Online version available on the World Wide Web. Library also has microfilm. Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [2006]. 1 microfilm reel ; 35 mm.

Thesis (M.A.)--Hong Kong Baptist University, 2005. / Dissertation submitted to the School of Communication. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 47-48).