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Pleasure Consuming Medicine investigates the significance of the classification of drugs for conceptions of personhood in the context of consumer citizenship. It examines how drug discourses operate politically to sustain particular notions of personhood and organise bodies. As the normative conception of social life shifts to a discourse of consumer agency and active citizenship, it is argued, drugs come to describe the moral boundaries of a freedom configured around personal consumption. The thesis tracks the parallel rise of two discourses of drug mis/use from the 1970s - a discourse of 'drug abuse' and a discourse of 'patient compliance' - illustrating how these discourses bind personal agency to medical authority through a vocabulary of self-administration. It describes how illicit drugs are constructed as a sign and instance of excessive conformity to consumer culture, and how this excess is opportunistically scooped off and spectacularised to stage an intense but superficial battle between the amoral market and the moral state. Pleasure Consuming Medicine uses a theoretical frame developed from queer theory, corporeal feminism, governmentality studies and cultural studies to explore the political character of drug regimes, tracing some of the ramifications for sex, race, class, and citizenship. Then it turns to the field of gay men's HIV education to conceive some alternative and provisional vocabularies of safety. The thesis develops an argument on the exercise of power in consumer society, with the aim of contributing to cultural and critical understandings of consumption, embodiment, sex, health, and citizenship.

Foucault speaks of the formation of an individual’s identity, or the process of becoming someone else, as a worthy game. For postmodernists, it is considered a life-long process of reconstruction and re-evaluation. The identities that are the focus of this research are psychiatrists, but also the self. This research follows previous post-graduate research that reflected on knowledge, power, space, surveillance, the body and organisational control. The major questions of this earlier research was; “What constituted normality in the work place and who were the arbiters of this normality” Chapter one of this work - Psychiatrists in Post-modernity, introduces the research project through the research questions, motivation for the project and the challenges to be met. Chapter two is a theoretical chapter that presents Post-modern Philosophical Perspective and discusses the history of development of post-modern thought in social research. Chapter three – History, Myth and Reality, places today’s psychiatry in Australia, in historical context. Chapter four – People, Politics and Purpose, considers the current state of mental health policy in Australia. Chapter five – Methodology and Methods, considers the methodological debate in the social sciences between qualitative and quantitative research methods. Chapter six – Outcomes and Interpretation presents an interpretation of the research interviews and discusses the connections and possible meanings of the stories told by psychiatrists, within the context of the post-modern philosophical perspective. Chapter seven – Post-modern Psychiatry considers the question: is there or can there be a post-modern psychiatry? It takes the interpretations, connections and meanings from Chapter six and locates them in the wider social context of the Australian National Mental Health Strategy / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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This study examines participants' perceptions of the significant messages and meanings communicated to them through the ceremony of the Blessingway (a ritual titled after the Navajo Blessingway), a contemporary women's birth ritual performed by midwives. A narrative approach was used for data gathering based on Fisher's rationale that meaning emerges through narrative. Fifteen women participated in open-ended interviews. Thirteen of the women identified themselves as midwifes. Four major themes emerged from the data: (1) interconnectivity, (2) care, (3) change, and (4) power. The results of the study show the Blessingway's role in communicating a group's care during a time of transformation, usually birth. Adoption, marriage, and entry into midwifery were also mentioned in the study as occasions for a Blessingway ritual. During a Blessingway, many levels of relationship intersect and emphasize the "web of connectedness" the women consider part of their lives. The continuous, multidimensional, and overlapping nature of interconnectivity defines the places of connection highlighted during the Blessingway ceremony. The sense of connectedness generates bonds of care--cohesion, nurturance and safety--and provides a "cocoon-like" environment. Once nurtured and protected, the women feel the support of their community. The women then resolve and transform the contradictions and ambiguities of their liminal state, acknowledge their value of self, recognize their own power, the power of their community, the power of the circle of women and the power of the archetypal woman. / Graduation date: 1997

Graduation date: 2006

published_or_final_version / Public Health / Master / Master of Public Health

The aim of this research lies in the study of how Japanese console videos games have been re-territorialized into Taiwan in Taiwanese context. Since making its debut in 1970s, video game industry has developed into a multi-billion dollar business in which Japanese console and game developers have been the pioneers. Academic studies on video games, however, had been largely focusing on the physical and mental affection of video game playing, and it is until recent years that video game has begun to be analyzed as a cultural product. Looking to fill the research space of how video games have been consumed and received under different geographical and social contexts, this research examine show Taiwanese, the former colonial subjects of Japan, localize Japanese console video games through measures during the process of production, re-production, circulation, and consumption in the context of Taiwanese society. Attention has been particularly paid to Taipei City Mall, where gamer gatherings of a Japanese video game had been regularly held. Through intensive participatory observation on the gathering and in-depth case studies on a few selected personalities, the author will show how a Japanese cultural good is being re-territorialized under an alien social context. The thesis then argues a new paradigm, in which the individual desire is considered as equally important with other mediation factors, should be adopted in conceptualizing the migration of a cultural good. / published_or_final_version / Modern Languages and Cultures / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis is about understanding the dynamics involved in the socialisation of international human rights norms. It examines the process within an analytical framework of transnational advocacy networks, the spiral model, in the context of China’s modernisation. Existing literature points to China’s economic power and potential political influence on the international arena and the Chinese state’s authoritarian regime domestically in explaining the limited achievements transnational advocacy networks have had in inducing human rights changes in China. This thesis responds with a novel perspective constructed in three steps by examining: 1) the relationship between China’s identity and political legitimacy since the beginning of China’s modernisation in the 1840s; 2) how China’s modernisation drive impacts the development of its domestic civil society; 3) the potential of human rights INGOs in inducing human rights changes with case studies of the Dui Hua Foundation and the Rights Practice. It is found that under this novel perspective, the Chinese state’s authority has been limited by rising social problems, which threaten the state’s political legitimacy to rule. Chinese civil society actors play an important role in producing solutions to these social problems, convincing the state to further relax its control. Human rights INGOs contribute to this relationship through strengthening Chinese civil society actors’ capacity in solving social problems and monitoring official institutions, while also informing government officials about reforms that could make domestic practices more compatible to international human rights norms. In this vein, despite the fact that international human rights norms have been altered by China’s power, they remain influential on China’s behaviour by the careful alignment of the human rights work of transnational advocacy networks to suit China’s interest to political legitimacy. This thesis confirms and strengthens the spiral model as a framework to understand the socialisation of international human rights norms. This thesis contributes to understanding the power of international human rights norms, i.e. the extent to which they influence the behaviour and practices of states, as well as the role of transnational advocacy networks in situations where human rights violations persist. / published_or_final_version / Modern Languages and Cultures / Master / Master of Philosophy

abstract / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy