Much of the public debate surrounding new technologies and techniques in assisted reproductive technology (ART) is caught up in the speculative nature of imagined futures of 'science-fictive' proportions. This thesis, by contrast, examines a 'naturalized' ART donor insemination, discussing the manner in which couples (and occasionally single women) construct distributive and kinship networks as they move through the processes of fertility treatment and the selection of donor sperm. / This thesis follows a marketing trail for sperm from scientific journal, to the web, to conference floor. In doing so it examines and contrasts the information that is offered by companies distributing donor sperm and drawn upon by those making selective choices. It argues that the process of donor gamete selection---as mediated by Internet technologies---is characterized by a juxtapositioning of two trends: 'eugenic' promise, and expansion kinship networks based on 'like kinds'. This paper strives to explore these desires, beliefs and motivations at play in the commodification, distribution and consumption observed in the online marketing and sale of gametes. / This thesis contributes to the body of anthropological theorizing on gifting and commodification, and kinship, by arguing that donor sperm---in the context of current exchange practices---challenges a dichotomous categorization of gift/commodity, and is best understood as a hybrid item of exchange. Following Appadurai, the commodity candidacy of donor sperm, and the context of its commodification is explored, noting the manner in which kinship networks are extended and negotiated in the process.

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Normative ideas of age and stage-based transitions are built into policies and practices related to aging. However, how the issues of loss and depression impact older people's experiences of transition are often less prevalent. This paper discusses the sub-theme of loss identified within data from the Late Life Transitions Project; a SSHRC funded research project. In this thesis, qualitative interviews were analyzed from 30 community-residing seniors from diverse social backgrounds. Focused exploration of the everyday ways in which older people discussed major transitions and turning points revealed a strong subtheme of loss. Findings presented are related to the types of loss, the various barriers to integrating loss, coping mechanisms and the impact of social location on loss. Such discussions inform understandings of the ways in which older people discuss and make sense of their loss, and may provide guidance to plan interventions that are more relevant to older people's late life experiences.

This study sought to understand what the schools do to promote the culture of nonviolence. In asking the question, "How do school work to develop a culture of nonviolence?" I produced data through the exploration of the activities and practices implemented in school. The critical question and sub question posed in the study were, firstly, how do school work to promote the culture of nonviolence? Secondly, how does the SMT do to promote the culture of nonviolence? Thirdly, how do teachers manage their teaching and learning activities to promote the culture of non-violence? Fourthly, how do learners experience the different activities and practices that the school adopts to promote the culture of nonviolence? Using Satyagraha theory as the theoretical lens for the study, I offer an understanding on how the school as a site offers the potential to promote nonviolence. Using a participatory research approach, I used one secondary school in ILembe District to participate in this study. The data sources used to produce the data included the individual interviews, focus group interviews, photo voice, classroom conversations and observations. The findings of the study show that within the physical environment of the school, different stakeholders attempt to actively adopt non-violent ways within the particular and common spaces of the school to develop in learners the capacity to differentiate between personal and societal forms of violence. The findings signal the need of a stronger partnership with other systems of the society such as the family system, social service, police service, media and the public at large since learners learn different forms of personal and social violence from different spaces and through different relations. The school is one system of a larger system and the study shows that it can not predict, control or remove the forms of violence that play out outside of the school and in individuals who choose to think and act in violent ways. Learners and teachers also bring violence to school. This study promotes the perspective that there are activities and strategies needed to be done inside and outside the classroom to promote non-violence, but this can be easily undermined in the absence of support mechanisms and structures at multiple levels outside of the school. While the school, through different strategies and practices such as morning assembly and surveillance mechanisms can help learners to differentiate between personal and societal forms of violence although some learners and teachers within the school still act in a violent way. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.

This thesis examines the construction of social spaces in the interstices of the Internet by members of dispersed national societies. Red de Argentinos is explored as an example one of such spaces. Red emerged as an email based solidarity network of the Argentine diaspora and is now a community attached to multiple locales, for which cyberspace has a central articulatory role. These locales include the homeland but, as well, the variety of places in which individuals identifying themselves as Argentinian may be found. This project analyzes some of the factors that allow these types of virtual communities to develop. Special attention is placed on the elements that ensure bonds between members. Self-organization, solidarity, and positioning in relation to the Argentine social reality are seen here as factors that foster the development of a sense of citizenship that is constructed from below in this particular online social space. The need to include the Internet practices of diasporas as part of emerging online cultures in Latin America is finally suggested as an avenue for future exploration.

This thesis considers the figure of the metrosexual, a contemporary archetype of stylish masculinity that has received considerable attention in the global media. It traces the development of a style-conscious and consuming masculinity in the West since the eighteenth century, through the figures of the dandy, the playboy and the new man. It also traces the discourse that has emerged in relation to metrosexuality in the Western media, from its first mention to the present. The metrosexual represents a significant departure from the norms of Western masculinity, most notably in his relationship to the homosexual and homoerotic. This thesis considers the implications of such a version of masculinity as they relate to women, gay men and theories of masculine subjectivity.

This thesis elaborates on existing definitions and descriptions of simulation to develop an extended, inter-disciplinary concept of simulation that serves as an orienting model for the interpretation of culture. As cultural theory, simulation offers insights into the stabilization and propagation of cultural forms. Used descriptively, the metaphor of simulation throws into definition a cultural pattern of progressive formalization through increasingly sophisticated methods of abstraction. I find evidence of the pattern at many levels of analysis; metaphysical, social and micro-social, particularly at the level of the body. I use the speculative notion of the digital refiguring of culture to articulate this tendency towards abstraction through a parallel with the enhanced analytic and representational capacities of digital technology. I consider several actual and hypothetical ways that the computer figures in this process. I argue that the basis for cultural form is shifting away from the referential function of the body, as the abstract realm of mediated relations takes on greater importance in modern culture.

Despite recent attempts to retrieve the body within sociology and the assumption of a now 'embodied' framework, how this should be done remains problematic, contentious and disputed. Current tensions more than partially revolve around the difficulty overcoming the limitations of foundationalist and anti-foundationalist approaches, restricting the development of a truly embodied and empirically driven conceptual framework. Remarkably little theory has entered the body and considered the body in terms of its own inner processes, the result of a persistent ontological queasiness concerning bodily interiority. The exclusion of the interior of the body problematises any integration between not just what bodies mean but also what they can do. As a field of location, I address the question of how both the female body and women's embodied experiences within the field of infertility can be both theorised and explored without succumbing to these limitations. Acknowledging the influence of both feminist and hermeneutic perspectives, and situating my approach within a temporal and biographical framework, I acknowledge both the interior and exterior of the female body. An empirical study of 15 women's experiences of infertility treatment was conducted using life story interviews and researcher-solicited diaries. Analysis focused upon the conditions of meaning-making and understanding, emphasising the biographical and temporally-situated of women's narratives in relation to the female body. By overcoming the difficulties admitting the female body into our analyses, this thesis illuminates the process of embodiment itself in the development of a truly embodied and empirically driven theoretical and conceptual framework in this field.

This doctoral thesis ("Signs of Danger/Dangerous Signs: Responding to Nuclear Threat") is a poststructural, interdisciplinary exploration of the social, political and cultural workings of nuclear threat. Drawing extensively on a nuclear waste burial initiative being undertaken by the United States Department of Energy, this work is a detailed critical analysis of the relationships between the threats posed by nuclear wastes, and the responses provoked in relation to such threats. / Working through such theorists as Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zˆizˆek (the second death, and le Reel), Francois Ewald (thresholds), Ulrich Beck (risk society), and Felix Guattari (ecology of the virtual), this work demonstrates the manner in which ecological threats, such as that posed by the nuclear, are (paradoxically) "creative" forces; that is, they have a propensity to cut through traditional social divisions (e.g., class, race), assembling news lines of affinity, and new constituencies of those at risk. Indeed, it seem that nuclear threat constitutes a novel form of threat. A form of threat that is irreducibly material, yet admits of no objective ground upon which decisions may be made. A form of threat that threatens the very biological foundations of life, yet whose ontology is to be determined through social and cultural responses. / The principle critical figure I use to analyse and illustrate the movement of threat is the vast monument/sign which is to be constructed above the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in the desert near Carlsbad, New Mexico. If constructed, this monument will be one of the largest public works project in history. The purpose of this monument is to signify the danger which is to be buried below and thereby deter---for a legislated period of 10,000 years---inadvertent human intrusion into the site. Through analyses of the semiotic issues raised by the desert monument, the appropriation of the practice of burial and its relations to cultural conceptions of death, and the use of the desert as the mise-en-scene of waste, this dissertation shows how the larger context of waste burial demonstrates an extreme and unexamined field of cultural trauma and disavowal around issues of nuclear threat.

Surprisingly enough, while it is generally acknowledged that emotion plays a vital part in the negotiation of every day life, there has been until recently a scarcity of communications scholarship directly concerned with its study. To date, those examining this variable have largely relied for the theoretical and methodological support on models imported from psychology. While their studies have arguably had a positive impact on our understanding of some aspects of emotion, this dissertation contends that an over-dependence on psychological theories and methods has resulted in a blinkered approach to its study. In general, the focus of research and scholarship has been on either display and recognition of facial expression, physiological response to environmental stimuli, subjective verbal labeling, and behavioral manifestation. On closer inspection, a positivist discourse which considers emotion in methodologically individualistic and empirically behavioral terms has informed much of this work. Building on behaviorism, intentionalist analytical philosophy, and phenomenology, emotion research in Communication Studies has tended to neglect the social. More sophisticated approaches to grasping this latter variable, found in Sociology and Anthropology, consequently have had little impact, leading communications scholars to consistently define emotion in terms of individual motivations, drives, desires, wants, and dispositions rather than as a process located in a social world. / In light of this, this dissertation strove not only to assemble a history and provide a critique of emotion study in psychology, but to relate it to advances being made in Sociology and Anthropology, especially those pertaining to communication and postmodernity. Alongside this, it endeavored to: (1) furnish a theory and methodology for explaining those relationships; (2) illuminate a way in which emotion can be reconceived as a formative and independent social variable integral to the reproduction of postmodernity; and (3) analyze the practices and discourses that have contributed to the historically changing, oftentimes, inconsistent and disputed, study of emotion. After the principle issues were introduced in the opening Chapter, the second Chapter outlined the relationships between emotion, the everyday, media, and postmodernity, with the everyday representing a key theoretical construct necessary for understanding our time. This Chapter closed with an exploration of so-called postmodern emotion. Using several theoretical frameworks, Chapter 3 tracked historical, discursive, and disciplinary interests in emotion and Chapter 4 relations between theories of emotions through pre-modern (5thC B.C.-1890), modern (1890-1960), and postmodern (1960-) periods. Next, Chapter 5 charted the etymologies of the primary emotion terms, while Chapter 6 explored approaches to the study of emotion in Communication Studies, or Communicology. After an initial analysis of 'bibliometric' data, the three primary traditional approaches were then systematically identified and examined. A fourth postmodern approach, the constructionist, was presented and assessed in the last Chapter. There it was argued that, from this perspective, communication constitutes reality and not merely provides a conduit for preformed intentional and emotional states. There, the concept of social emotion was advanced, the idea of emotion as socio-culture performance developed, and a rules based theoretical f