This thesis focuses on the various manifestations of queerness in video games, and investigates how video games' queer potential connects and clashes with LGBTQ politics, as well as with gaming culture and hegemonic masculinity. Through the lens of queer theory, I adopt two main angles of approach. Firstly, I concentrate on video game characters and study them as vessels of queer politics. Focusing on two game characters, and their reception within gaming communities, I explore the limits and potentials of the queer politics in video games. As such, despite the prevalence of heteronormative values in video game narratives, I argue that some game characters embody unexpected vessels of queer hope. Expanding upon this argument, this thesis moves away from queer characters and interrogates the inherent queerness of games themselves. In doing so, I delve into multiple choice dialogue systems and forms of ‘aimless' game exploration, and argue that games can enfold the player in a queer, timeless bubble where alternative possibilities loom on the horizon. As such, I argue that the player escapes from normative time structures and freely articulates game time and space. In this way, these sequences occur in a queer temporality which runs counter to core game mechanics, such as achievements and rewards. Extending this queering of game, I finally argue that particular counternormative gaming practices, such as intentionally losing, celebrate the failure of heteromasculinity both inside and outside gaming culture. In this way, and throughout this thesis, I argue that video games operate as a multidimensional medium, providing various instances where queerness manifests itself. While I demonstrate that some of these instances can be found in other popular media such as cinema and literature, I argue that video game queerness also takes unique shapes that are exclusive to the medium. As such, I suggest that video games, as a polysemic medium, gleam with queer potentiality, and are pioneers in revealing new queer embodiments.

Ho, Tin Man Flora. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 40-43). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / 摘文 --- p.iii / Acknowledgement --- p.iv / Table of Contents --- p.v / List of Figures --- p.vii / Chapter CHAPTER 1: --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Knowledge Management --- p.1 / Social Dilemma --- p.4 / Factors Affecting People Contributing to KM --- p.5 / Individual Factors --- p.5 / Intrapersonal Factors --- p.6 / Interpersonal Factors --- p.7 / Organizational Factors --- p.10 / Conclusion --- p.14 / Chapter CHAPTER 2: --- METHOD --- p.16 / Participants --- p.16 / Questionnaire --- p.16 / Measures --- p.17 / Chapter CHAPTER 3: --- RESULTS --- p.20 / Validity Analysis --- p.20 / Demographic Variables --- p.22 / Dimensionality --- p.22 / Reliability --- p.23 / Model Testing Results --- p.23 / Hypothesis Testing --- p.24 / Chapter CHAPTER 4: --- DISCUSSION --- p.27 / Factors affecting past behaviors --- p.28 / Factor affecting future intentions --- p.31 / Conclusions --- p.32 / Implications --- p.33 / Limitations --- p.34 / Appendix I --- p.36 / References --- p.40

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This study draws on multiple modes of expression in texts that have been generated by my experience of midwifery development since I moved from England to Australia in early 1997. The Professional Doctorate in Midwifery at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) has enabled me to produce and study my work as a midwifery practitioner, researcher, educator, writer and activist and to engage in a process of scholarship that both informs and is generated by practice. This has allowed me to analyse the complex issues that I, and other midwives in Australia, face as we strategise to narrow the gap between our ideals and the realities of the professional and political constraints that challenge midwifery. The study analyses the rhetorical communications I have employed as both carriers of 'vision' and 'means of persuasion' and the deliberate strategies to make changes that I believe will benefit childbearing women. My portfolio challenges me and others, to explore how we are able to identify, enact, and convince others of the emancipatory potential of midwifery. Rhetorical innovations are therefore linked to the exposition of woman centred midwifery care; an overall goal being to enable situations in which women can experience the potential power that transforms lives, through their experiences of childbirth. In the process, I aim to produce new knowledge that will equip midwives to understand practice, policy and political situations and see new possibilities for responding and taking action. I have analysed and explained my work using a framework appropriated from rhetorical theory and drawing on a range of feminist perspectives. This involves identifying and critiquing the rhetorical innovations that I have used when trying to create possibilities and persuade others of the value of midwifery and the need to make changes happen in practice, education and regulation. My study analyses the rhetorical nature of my own work as presented in my portfolio in a range of carefully selected texts that I have authored during my candidature. These include journal and newsletter articles, conference papers, research activities, policy submissions, education and training materials, the development of midwifery standards, formal and informal communications, and other documents, all aimed in one way or another at the rhetorical strategy of stimulating interest and action. The portfolio texts that arise from this work form the empirical data that is studied. However, in varying ways these texts elicit understandings about the rhetoric and reality of Australian midwifery and the deliberate strategies that are employed by midwives to make changes that will benefit childbearing women. They therefore stand in their own right as contributions to the thesis with their own discursive and epistemological intent. The reflexive process employed in this thesis highlights comparisons between what is being positioned as the potential of midwifery with what is also presented as the reality played out in contemporary Australian maternity service provision and in midwifery education and regulation. The thesis weaves its way around the portfolio documents, attempting to bring to life and discuss the culture in which rhetorical innovations and intentional strategies are aimed at narrowing the gap between 'rhetoric and reality'.

The selected publications presented here are concerned with the development of practice and knowledge in midwifery. The thesis underlying the publications is that the development of a positive personal relationship between women and their midwives is fundamental to effective and sensitive midwifery care. The methodology used is essentially different to the thesis written prospectively. This is because the publications presented arise from years of work informed by 'hands on' practice, development of policy, leading change and development, supported by research and communicated and disseminated through writing. The work presented therefore could be viewed as a long research project, with these activities forming an iterative process in thinking through and writing for publication, as well as continuing practice development and research. The extended essay serves to introduce the publications and show how they are linked through common themes developed over time. It also demonstrates the originality, importance and contribution of the publications. The publications presented may be viewed conceptually in a number of different ways however these are all related to the relationship between women and their midwives. The essay is presented in sections. The first is the Introduction to key concepts and theories. The second is The Midwife with Woman Relationship. This introduces publications that describe the nature and purpose of the relationship. The third section, Changing Practice: the New Midwifery is concerned with what the midwife does in the context of that relationship. Publications introduced in this section propose ways of working in the best interests of women and their families. The fourth section, Influencing Policy Nationally and internationally, is concerned with the creation of national policy that has supported the development of what I have called the New Midwifery. The fifth section, Transformative Change and Rediscovering Midwifery is concerned with developing the organisation and culture of care, that is its context, to enable midwives to work in the best interests of women and their families. The sixth section Developing Patterns of Practice that Enable Personal Relationships Between Women and Midwives: One-to-One Midwifery introduces publications concerned with the development and evaluation of new structures that facilitate continuity of care and thereby relationship.

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Within literacy and composition studies, writing, as a social act, is believed by many to have the potential to effect change in and transform situations of injustice. Community literacy, as an emergent practice within composition studies, embraces and stretches this notion of linking literacy to social change. Community literacy also embraces and stretches the notion of the dynamic relationship between theory and practice. This thesis focuses on the project of possibility that community literacy presents, as it attempts to transform situations of injustice through literate acts and as it attempts to transform the current field of composition studies. In this thesis, I have attempted to look broadly at the way the theories and practices of community literacy and composition studies mutually impact and refine each other so as to provide a richer sense of what is involved in both this particular literacy project and in its emergent place within this academic field. In Chapter 1, I explore the conversation that community literacy has recently entered among current theories and developing practices of literacy and composition. In Chapter 2, I examine how, because it is grounded in certain--sometimes conflicting--theories, advocates of community literacy are acting as negotiators among these diverse theories, pushing at the boundaries of the existing conversation in composition studies to potentially create--or open up the space for--new understandings of composition and the teaching of writing. / Graduation date: 1997

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This study develops and tests the strengths and weaknesses of an analytical framework entitled sociologies to examine students' responses to socioscientific issues. Sociologies (Latour, 1987) is defined as the unpredictable and heterogeneous networks of links and associations that constitute the construction, accumulation, and mobilization of knowledge in the face of controversy. Recognizing the asymmetry of knowledge production, sociologies looks at how some knowledge is rendered more credible, and more powerful, than others. The framework consists of five questions: a) how causes and effects are attributed; b) what points (ideas) are linked to which other; c) what size and strength these links have; d) who the most legitimate spokespersons are; and e) and how all these elements are modified during the controversy. Latour calls the answer to these five questions "sociologies". Under this rubric, the production of knowledge is contentious because knowledge is socially constructed in a world where discourse and politics and knowledge and power are inextricably related. I argue that the framework of sociologies is an improvement upon commonly used analytical frameworks in socioscientific research in education as, unlike previous forms of analysis, it foregrounds the social construction of knowledge (as evidenced in discourse) and highlights the contentious, complex, unpredictable, and dynamic nature of knowledge production prevalent in these issues.