<p>This thesis attempts to address the notion of unreliable narration and its treatment tn the postmodern novel. More specifically, it seeks to identify a number of characteristics shared by novels which offer fictional treatments of historical biographies and autobiographies. These characteristics include the use of dual ontological narrative structures, self-reflexivity, the deconstruction of authority and the genre in question, and finally, the existence of psychological truth in the narrators.</p> <p>Chapter One briefly addresses the historical development of unreliable narration, examining works from Henry Fielding through to postmoderntsm. Chapter Two begins the Inquiry into specific works by examining Michael Ondaatje's autobiographical novel, Running in the Family, and the way that the narrator fabricates a relationship with the father he has barely known in order to cope with the experience of loss. Chapter Three concerns Timothy Findley's The Wars, and the deconstruction of authority in the portrayal of history through a narrator who, because of emotional involvement with his/her subject, actively fictionalizes what ts ostensibly intended to be a faithful historical account. Finally, Chapter Four examines Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries, and its narrator's active invention of emotional experience in order to impose meaning on what she perceives as a meaningless existence.</p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

No / This paper analyses Foucault's notion of technologies of the self, but does so through a non-Foucauldian style of analysis. It traces the use of the term technology back to the works of Aristotle and elaborates upon this definition. Here, technology is seen to be central not only in the production of works, but also in the production of selves. This idea is then developed through the work of other thinkers who have a similar technological view of the production of the self, particularly Marcel Mauss and John Dewey. Another important element emerges from their works, which is the production of self through the technology of habit or habitus. It is argued that habitus is not a socially determinate concept, because it allows for the development of both practical and critical reason, both of which permit the agent some freedom in their activities. However, it is possible to use the connotation of habitus with routine to understand something of the nature of social power. The concept of capacity is also introduced to extend the self-reflexive and knowing aspect of habitus, showing how this is an essential feature of the agential self. However, it is argued that although the development of practical and critical reason allows for reflexivity, the self is always grounded in technologies of the body and self, which constitute the aspect of the self reflected upon. Reflexivity, then, is a secondary and partial aspect of the self.

This dissertation, "From Reflection to Reflexivity: Challenging Students' Conceptions of Writing, Self, and Society in the Community Writing Classroom," examines the disconnect that characterizes much of the discussion of reflective writing in community writing studies and argues for the potential of reflexivity as a concept to further develop the kinds of reflective writing assigned in community writing classrooms. Many practitioners and scholars view reflective writing as a potentially powerful tool that may help students learn challenging or abstract theories and practices from their own community writing experiences. With such potential, it can be disappointing when student reflective writing does not achieve teacher expectations of critical thinking and analysis, stopping before critical engagement and understanding is achieved. Instead, it often centers on students' personal feelings and motivations that shape or arise from their community experiences. This dissertation argues that one reason for such a disconnect between teacher expectations and actual student writing, comes from the word "reflection" itself. While a traditional understanding of reflective writing asks students to look back on their experiences, observations, feelings, and opinions, community writing teachers use the term "reflection" with qualifiers like "critical," "sustained," or "intellectually rich." In qualifying their expectations for reflective writing, teachers are in fact asking for something very different from reflection, namely, reflexivity. When reflexive thinking is presented to students as "qualified reflection" it loses the considerable theoretical grounding that makes it a particularly unique way of using experiences as the foundation for inquiry. Building on theories of epistemological reflexivity for researchers in the social sciences, this dissertation highlights the methodological reflexivity theorized and practiced by feminist researchers. Feminist reflexivity specifically affords researchers more nuanced ways of looking at issues of positionality, social transformation, and agency. Such strategies have the potential for moving student reflections from private writings toward writings that impact students' understandings of the rhetorical and theoretical issues that community writing hopes to illustrate. This combination of feminist reflexivity and community writing reflections can provide community writing theorists and practitioners with alternative ways to solve reflective writing's challenges. / Ph. D.

My thesis aims to unobscure the ideology of wasting through embodied storytelling, philosophical inquiry, and sociopolitical history. In particular, I take the trashcan as a material representation of an "edge of externalization" --a concept I explore throughout this thesis to describe the edges beyond which waste management networks, strategies, and failures become visible. These edges offer spaces to critically engage with the inevitabilities backed into a wasting ideology that necessitates the disconnection between nature/society. Therefore, these edges offer spaces to understand and transform the alienation of our human nature. The human relationship to waste and to the trashcans in our homes is a familiar story hidden by strategic pedagogies of obfuscation. This project seeks to replace dominant behaviorist pedagogies with an alternative "compost pedagogy," which emphasizes a process of becoming through the transformation of the trashcan. Through a reflexive and creative process, the thesis explores my personal experiences with waste in the hope that my stories will not only unobscure global systems of wasting, but that my stories of unlearning, mending, and reimagining wasting will resonate with many lived experiences. / Master of Science / The purpose of this thesis is to explore the role of the trashcan as a waste management technology within our homes and use stories about alternative experiences of waste and waste management to challenge the normative narratives surrounding waste. I use the trashcan as a spectacle to understand the history of how material disposability arose in the twentieth century and as a way to understand the systems of our world most informed by the practices of waste and wasting. Using the lens of pedagogy, I aim to unobscure the dominant and oppressive education and infrastructure surrounding wasting and propose an alternative form of pedagogy I identify throughout my thesis as the compost pedagogy.

No / There is widespread debate within critical management studies (CMS) as to the possibility of introducing CMS principles and ideas into organizational life. There is similarly a critique of its potential to replace the hegemony of `mainstream' business school thinking with an alternative hegemonic practice. In this article we use a reflexive analysis of our involvement as critical thinkers within the delivery of leadership-development programmes to consider these debates and explore CMS perspectives with participants. Our initial attempts were naive, but a more nuanced understanding given by theorizing our own practices offers some ways of avoiding the substitution of one hegemony with another. Although working as critical thinkers within mainstream programmes will always be problematic, we suggest that using a dialogical approach in leadership training programmes is one way of struggling with the inherent difficulties, while introducing participants to different ways of theorizing their worlds.

How people survive and thrive through adversity is a question which has prompted much research. There is little agreement on the definition of resilience beyond the basic idea of "bouncing back", resulting in many studies which offer contradictory and confusing information. This study sought to organise the literature into broad conceptual categories, and attempted to explain some of the differences in definitions and research methods at the level of paradigm. A need to reconceptualise resilience was identified and undertaken in view of input from ecosystemic, cybernetic and postmodem paradigms. Attention was given especially to the role oflanguage, meaning and description, and the role of the observer/researcher in such a reconceptualisation. Guidelines were offered for approaching research in future. Finally, the context of the researcher was examined in an attempt at self-reflexivity as part of the process of research as proposed in the reconceptualisation. / Psychology / M.A. (Clinical Psychology)

A component part of modern project management practice is the ‘lessons learned’ activity that is designed to transfer experience and best practice from one project to another, thus improving the practice of project management. The departure point for this thesis is: If we are learning lessons from our experiences in project management, then why are we not better at managing projects? It is widely cited in most project management literature that 50–70% of all projects fail for one reason or another, a figure that has steadfastly refused to improve over many years. My contention is that the current rational approach to understanding lessons learned in project management, one entrenched in the if–then causality of first-order systems thinking where the nature of movement is a ‘corrective repetition of the past in order to realise an optimal future state’ (Stacey 2011: 301), does not reflect the actual everyday experience of organisational life. I see this as an experience of changing priorities, competing initiatives, unrealistic timescales, evaporation of resources, non-rational decisions based on power relations between actors in the organisations we find ourselves in; and every other manner of challenge that presents itself in modern large commercial organisations. I propose a move away from what I see as the current reductionist view of lessons learned, with its emphasis on objective observation, to one of involved subjective understanding. This is an understanding rooted in the particular experience of the individual acting into the social, an act that necessarily changes both the individual and the social. My contention is that a narrative approach to sense making as first-order abstractions in the activity of lessons learned within project management is what is required if we are to better learn from our experiences. This narrative approach that I have termed ‘thick simplification’ supports learning by enabling the reader of the lessons learned account to situate the ‘lesson learned’ within their own experience through treating the lessons learned as a potential future understanding .This requires a different view of what is going on between people in organisations – one that challenges the current reliance on detached process and recognises the importance of embedded phronesis, the Aristotelian virtue of practical judgement. It is an approach that necessarily ‘focuses attention directly on patterns of human relating, and asks what kind of power relations, ideology and communication they reflect’ (Stacey 2007: 266).

Det är terapeuten som definierar situationen i terapirummet och vanligt är att terapeuten betonar betydelsen av den unika individen, vilket kan medföra att sociala och kulturella faktorer förbises. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka psykoterapeuters reflekterade kring kön, genus och sexualitet. Frågeställning: Vilka diskurser framträder i terapeuters utsagor om genus, kön och sexualitet utifrån terapeutisk praktik samt utifrån personliga erfarenheter? Metod: Halvstrukturerade intervjuer genomfördes med fem psykoterapeuter och resultatet analyserades utifrån ett diskurspsykologiskt perspektiv. Resultat: Tre diskurser identifierades; den psykologiska, den biologiska och den samhälleliga. De två förstnämnda diskurserna kännetecknades av meningsbyggande utifrån dominanta diskurser, med en dikotomisk syn på kön, heteronormativ föreställning om sexualitet, naturaliserade uppfattningar om moderskap, intrapsykiska förklaringsmodeller och avsaknad av en kritisk och reflexiv hållning. Den samhälleliga diskursens normkritiska aspekt kännetecknades av en kritisk och flexibel hållning i förhållande till det egna kunskapsfältet, uttryck gjordes för kunskap om makt och ställningstaganden uttrycktes emot heteronormativa förväntningar i vår sociala och politiska kontext. I diskussionen lyftes frågan om vilket ansvar terapeuten har för att lyfta in frågor om makt i terapin samt behovet av reflexivitet inom det psykologiska kunskapsfältet. / The therapist defines the situation in the therapy-room and the emphasis of the unique individual is common, instead of being aware of social and cultural elements. The aim of this study was to examine therapists reflections of gender, sex and sexuality. Questionformulation: Which discourses emerge out of the therapists stories about gender, sex and sexuality based on their clinical work and personal experiences. Method: Semistructured interviews were effectuated with five psychotherapists and a discursive psychological perspective was used in analysing the results. Results: Three discourses were identified; the psychological, the biological and the social. The two discourses first lined were recognised by meanings of dominant discourses, including a dichotomy view on gender, a heteronormative idea of sexuality, naturalised opinions of motherhood, intrapsychic explanations and a lack of a critical stance towards the discipline of psychology. The social discourse embraced a norm critical aspect, which was recognised by a critical and flexible stance, a knowledge in power and stances against heteronormative ideas in our social and political context. In the discussion were themes highlighted such as the responsibility of the therapist when it comes to questions of power in therapy and the need for reflexivity within the discipline of psychology.

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2012. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Since John Grierson first coined the term “documentary film” in the 1920s, there has been a debate about the objectivity or subjectivity of the filmmaker. Some theoreticians believe that a documentary filmmaker may not interact subjectively with her subject. Contemporary perspectives lean towards acknowledging the subjectivity of the filmmaker, and accept that subjectivity is intrinsic to the making of a documentary film. Some would even argue that it is precisely the subjectivity of the filmmaker – the meeting of an individual, subjective perspective with the pro-filmic world – that makes a particular film unique. Brecht believed that the structure of a theatre piece could be used to counter the audience's uncritical emotional engagement and identification with the content of the work. This Verfremdungseffekt enables the audience to engage intellectually with the work. The audience does not get lost in the content of the piece, but rather views it from a critical distance. Brecht believed that this distantiation does not exclude entertainment, but that the audience would be able to enjoy the production while viewing it from a critical, intellectual distance. The self-reflexive mode of representation is identified by Nichols as one of the primary ways for a filmmaker to engage with her subject. Self-reflexivity entails the inclusion of cues within the film reminding the viewer that it is, indeed, a film. The motivation for this is to make the audience aware of the constructed nature of the film, thereby acknowledging the subjectivity of the filmmaker. The most overt form of self-reflexivity in documentary films is the inclusion of the director in the film. The focus of this study is, however, more specifically on how editing devices can be used to foreground the construction of a film. Structural analysis of a selection of recent South African documentary films is undertaken as part of this study. The result of this in-depth analysis is a list of twenty-eight conspicuous, selfreflexive editing devices used in these films. To test the effect of self-reflexive editing devices, I purposely incorporated them into the construction of a documentary series, Booza TV, of which I was one of the editors. The goal of Booza TV is to change viewers' perceptions of alcohol and alcohol abuse. Both quantitative and qualitative research results pointed to the ability of the series to achieve this goal. The perception change, however, is not the focus of this study. Instead, findings specifically related to the viewer's experience of the editing of the production are analysed. These findings show that viewers do notice self-reflexive devices, that the devices can contribute to their enjoyment of the production and that self-reflexive devices are able to communicate subtext to the audience. The conclusion is drawn from the research conducted in this study that the potential of a documentary film to change viewers' perceptions is as dependent on the way the film has been constructed as it is on the content of the film. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Sedert John Grierson in die twintigerjare begin het om die term 'dokumentêre film' te gebruik, word daar gedebatteer oor die objektiwiteit al dan nie van die filmmaker. Party teoretici glo dat 'n dokumentêre filmmaker nie subjektief mag omgaan met haar onderwerp nie. Kontemporêre perspektiewe neig egter om te erken dat die dokumentêre filmmaker subjektief is, dat subjektiwiteit intrinsiek is aan die maak van 'n dokumentêre film, en boonop dat dit juis die subjektiwiteit van die filmmaker is wat 'n film uniek maak. Dit is die ontmoeting van 'n individuele, subjektiewe perspektief met die waarneembare wêreld. Brecht het geglo dat die struktuur van 'n teaterstuk of film gebruik kan word om die gehoor se verbintenis met die inhoud daarvan te verbreek. Hierdie Vervremdungseffekt lei daartoe dat die gehoor in staat is om krities om te gaan met die produksie. Dit lei verder tot 'n kritiese interaksie met die materiaal. Die gehoor raak nie verlore in die inhoud van die stuk nie, maar slaag daarin om dit intellektueel te beskou. Brecht het geglo dat hierdie vervreemding nie vermaak uitsluit nie, maar wel die gehoor toelaat om die teaterstuk of film te geniet terwyl hulle dit krities en intellektueel beskou. Die self-refleksiewe voorstellingsmodus word deur Nichols geïdentifiseer as een van die primêre maniere vir 'n filmmaker om met haar onderwerp om te gaan. Selfrefleksiwiteit behels die insluit van tekens binne 'n film dat dit 'n film is. Die motivering hiervoor is om die gehoor bewus te maak van die konstruksie van die film, om sodoende die subjektiewe perspektief van die filmmaker te erken. Die mees blatante vorm van self-refleksiwiteit in dokumentêre films, is die insluiting van die regisseur in die film. Die fokus van die studie is egter op die gebruik van redigeringstegnieke om die konstruksie van 'n film op die voorgrond te plaas. Daar word van strukturele analise gebruik gemaak in hierdie studie om 'n verskeidenheid hedendaagse Suid-Afrikaanse dokumentêre films in diepte te beskou. Die resultaat van hierdie analise is 'n lys van ag-en-twintig sigbare redigeringstegnieke wat in hierdie films gebruik is. Om die effek daarvan te toets, het ek doelbewus self-refleksiewe tegnieke gebruik in die konstruksie van 'n dokumentêre reeks genaamd Booza TV, waarvan ek een van die redigeerders was. Die doel van Booza TV is om gehore se persepsie aangaande drank en drankmisbruik te verander. Beide kwantitatiewe en kwalitatiewe navorsingsresultate het aangedui dat die reeks dié doel wel bereik. Persepsieverandering is egter nie die fokus van hierdie studie nie. In stede daarvan word daar in diepte gekyk na gehore se ervaring van die self-refleksiewe redigeringstegnieke in die produksie. Daar is gevind dat gehore self-refleksiewe redigeringstegnieke raaksien, dat die tegnieke kan bydra tot gehore se genot van die produksie, en dat die tegnieke gebruik kan word om subteks in die film te kommunikeer.

The demographic time bomb means that older people will become a major part of tomorrow's society. This has become an increasingly pressing issue for older people and government policy alike. ONS (2009) statistics suggest that past retirement age, the sense of quality of life (QoL) experienced by older people begins to decrease, with the fastest decline occurring after the age of 70. This research therefore began by investigating how ICT could be implicated in the social life of the older person and thus improve their QoL. Literature reviews of the field of older people's involvement with ICT indicated that there was very little research between the more general studies of ICT involvement (which include far more than the purely social aspects) and the very specific (which involve examining the social impact of just one piece of technology). This study therefore aimed to fill the gap between the two extremes. It also aimed to generate theory in an under-theorised area. The study began with a focus group and interviews asking questions around how people thought social life had changed with the advent of new technologies, how they experienced the technology, and how things could be improved in the future. The study was qualitative in nature and adopted a grounded theory approach in order to inductively generate theory. The study of the lived experience of ICT also contributed to a phenomenological approach. Comparative analysis of transcripts obtained in Phase One (Year One) enabled a set of Grounded Theory Categories to be created which accounted for what was happening in the data. A core category of identity was identified which influenced subsequent data collection in Phase Two (Year Two). Phase Two participants were then involved in more focused interviews around identity concepts. Further analysis in Year Two enabled a Schema of Subject Positions to be created concerning (digital) identities which accounted for all of the participants in the study and the ways in which they viewed and interacted with technology. The Categories were also subsumed within a Grounded Theory Model involving a tripartite identity schema aligned with Giddens theory of the reflexive project of the self. Findings suggest that participants are implicated in methods of identity involvement which can be playful or pragmatic; can be viewed in moral, immoral and amoral ways (leading to ideas of the authentic and the inauthentic); and can represent the individual or explore new identities. Identity construction can ultimately be implicated positively with the use of ICT, and may lead to a virtuous cycle of ICT usage which can improve quality of life by affirming better self-views or enabling the testing of new views of selfhood. Positive technology identities can be offered as identity role models for other older people to follow.