This thesis is concerned with the nature and application of educational theory. In particular, it will examine the contribution social theories can make in guiding educational practices which are intended to achieve specific educational aims. Recent social theories relevant to education have focused, primarily, on the relationship between school and society under capitalism. Such theories have been developed in order to illuminate two central questions, "to what extent are schools independent of the class structures and ideologies of capitalist society?" and relatedly, "to what degree, under capitalism, can schools develop the critical social awareness necessary for personal autonomy?". In this thesis it is argued that a number of recent theories fail to help in providing answers to these questions because they do not offer convincing explanations of the school-society relationship. The reason for this is that they are guided by inadequate, epistemological methodological and metaphysical assumptions. In particular, they have been guided either by a naturalist view of social theory predicated on a Logical Positivist view of natural science or by an anti-naturalist view. This latter view typically asserts that explanations for social action must necessarily make reference to concepts such as rules, meanings, goals and purposes. And it is noted that these concepts can have no place within a Logical Positivist account of science. However, I argue that neither the guiding assumptions of naturalists or anti-naturalists, who have accepted a Logical Positivist view of natural science, can enable the construction of theories which capture significant dimensions of schooling under capitalism. In this thesis a number of Liberal and Radical theories of the school-society relationship, which have been influenced either by the guiding assumptions of Logical Positivism or by its anti-naturalist contrasts are critically examined. It is argued that while Radical theories such as those of Young, Freire and Bowles and Gintis have made a contribution to an understanding of the school-society relationship, their explanations of this relationship are inadequate. Consequently, they fail to guide educational practice by not showing how a pedagogy aimed at developing the critical social awareness necessary for personal autonomy is possible. On the basis of the criticisms of these Radical theories an alternative theory of the school-society relationship is advanced, one which is guided by the tenets of a Realist theory of natural science suitably qualified to apply to social theory. Through the development of this Realist social theory it is possible to explain how relevant aspects of educational practice can be guided, by the alternative social theory developed, in order to fulfil the aim of personal autonomy.

Pre-literate children experience written text as a meaningless material object, the word-object, but the compulsory and institutional aspects of reading pedagogy make this an experience from which they cannot escape. Some children begin to associate their own negative experiental sense with the word-object before they are able to learn to read. As reading pedagogy continues, these children begin to read back experiental sense which prevents them from converting the word-object to meaningful text. Experiental sense is repressed because it is psychically painful. It retains qualities of phenomena repressed from childhood: it is active and intractable to reason. The result is an intractable illiteracy which may be interpreted as biologically based �dyslexia.� Further attempts at reading pedagogy in childhood and adulthood generally result in reproduction of the inability because this pedagogy requires learners to attempt to read linguistically which elicits experiental sense. As these children become adults, their avoidance of reading sometimes structures their social relations to accommodate and compound their problems. The method to overcome the problem replaces experiental sense with positive feelings about written language. The power of language to denote emotions of pleasure and affirmation from learners� lives is used. These emotions are enhanced through a technique of affirmative intersubjectivity. Short spoken affirmative texts are made by learners, tape recorded and reproduced as written texts by the literacy worker. Through allowing learners control and autonomy over their spoken and written texts, the positive emotions in them are associated by learners with the written texts. Exercises on the affirmative written texts are used to demonstrate regularities about written language. Learners then progress to reading suitable independent texts and other activities. There are suggestions about how to enhance learners� feelings as competent readers and writers. The thesis uses a methodology of action research and includes five case studies of adults with literacy problems. Concepts from social theory, psychoanalysis and object relations theory are used and adapted to understand written language, schooling and illiteracy.

This dissertation examines the cleared spaces after disaster and the way the rhetoric of utopian projects is taken up by corporate and privatizing ventures to mask projects that seek to shut down participation in the public sphere. Chapter one argues that there are mechanisms within societies that can push against these forces by promoting a cosmopolitan sensibility that protects the commons and respects the alterity of the Other. Such mechanisms have theoretical roots in the thinking of Robert Nozick and Fredric Jameson but have been rethought more recently by Bruce Robbins, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Seyla Benhabib. I read literature alongside documentaries and memorials to discover the way cultural texts model these methods of pushing back against neoliberal projects in the wake of 9/11 and Katrina by bringing ethics, as Emmanuel Levinas does, into "real world" situations. Projects that co-opt the commons after disaster convey a imitative cosmopolitanism that can be counteracted through giving agency to those who do not have it, constructing communities of access for the future, supporting a form of public mourning that promotes critique, and protecting post-disaster spaces from becoming only tourist destinations. Chapter two looks to the way the 9/11 fiction of Moshin Hamid, Claire Messud, Alissa Torres, Paul Auster, and Jonathan Safran Foer models a cosmopolitanism that repairs the self's relationship to the Other by allowing the Other an agency previously unavailable before 9/11. Chapter three examines how When the Levees Broke, Trouble the Water, Kamp Katrina, Katrina Ballads, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge, and Zeitoun foreground the vulnerability of Gulf Coast residents by linking their vulnerability to the nation's now damaged ecological relationship to the coast. Chapter four explores the cultural memory at a range of 9/11 and Katrina memorials in New York, Washington D. C., and along the Gulf Coast in order to find memorials that reinvigorate the commons by melding public mourning with critique. The epilogue examines the larger implications of my dissertation for the field of American studies in examining the culture of disaster that has arisen in the past decade.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Este trabalho pretende examinar a relação entre a Trilogia da Incomunicabilidade, de Michelangelo Antonioni, a Trilogia do Silêncio, de Ingmar Bergman e a teoria social. Parto da hipótese de que essa relação se dá através de canais de interlocução entre as narrativas ficcionais e a sociologia. O foco será dado nas teorias sobre a condição do indivíduo moderno, especificamente, as obras de Georg Simmel e Norbert Elias. Temas como a indiferença, a solidão e o esvaziamento de sentido serão observados nas trilogias tendo em vista uma tendência à fragilização dos laços individuais com o outro. Algumas cenas serão tomadas como modalidades específicas de um problema sociológico, de maneira a atestar, junto às teorias, a coexistência de versões poéticas do drama individual nas sociedades modernas. / This thesis aims to review the relationship between the Trilogy of Incommunicability, by Michelangelo Antonioni, the Trilogy of Silence by Ingmar Bergman, and social theory. It is based on the hypothesis that this relationship occurs through channels of dialogue between fictional narratives and sociology. The focus will be on the theories about the condition of the modern individual, specifically in the works of Georg Simmel and Norbert Elias. Themes such as loneliness, indifference and the lack of meaning will be observed focusing on the tendency to the weakening of individual bonds with one another. Some scenes will be taken as specific modalities of a sociological problem, in order to testify, along with the theories, the coexistence of poetic versions of the individual drama in modern societies.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Este trabalho pretende examinar a relação entre a Trilogia da Incomunicabilidade, de Michelangelo Antonioni, a Trilogia do Silêncio, de Ingmar Bergman e a teoria social. Parto da hipótese de que essa relação se dá através de canais de interlocução entre as narrativas ficcionais e a sociologia. O foco será dado nas teorias sobre a condição do indivíduo moderno, especificamente, as obras de Georg Simmel e Norbert Elias. Temas como a indiferença, a solidão e o esvaziamento de sentido serão observados nas trilogias tendo em vista uma tendência à fragilização dos laços individuais com o outro. Algumas cenas serão tomadas como modalidades específicas de um problema sociológico, de maneira a atestar, junto às teorias, a coexistência de versões poéticas do drama individual nas sociedades modernas. / This thesis aims to review the relationship between the Trilogy of Incommunicability, by Michelangelo Antonioni, the Trilogy of Silence by Ingmar Bergman, and social theory. It is based on the hypothesis that this relationship occurs through channels of dialogue between fictional narratives and sociology. The focus will be on the theories about the condition of the modern individual, specifically in the works of Georg Simmel and Norbert Elias. Themes such as loneliness, indifference and the lack of meaning will be observed focusing on the tendency to the weakening of individual bonds with one another. Some scenes will be taken as specific modalities of a sociological problem, in order to testify, along with the theories, the coexistence of poetic versions of the individual drama in modern societies.

Orientadores: Marko Synésio Alves Monteiro, Milena Pavan Serafim / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Geociências / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-23T01:55:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Guimaraes_MariaKatyAnneValentimdeOliveira_M.pdf: 2792817 bytes, checksum: 61e97e78cb8ccd165873cb3ddbc547ea (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Resumo: O objetivo deste trabalho é de compreender, a partir do método etnográfico, as práticas e os desafios da gestão de um projeto de pesquisa em rede da Embrapa. O estudo foi realizado junto ao GeoMS (Sistema de Informação Georreferenciada), um projeto desenvolvido através do Sistema Embrapa de Gestão (SEG) no estado do Mato Grosso do Sul, durante o período de 2006 a 2012. Este projeto gerou como principal produto o Sistema Informatizado de Suporte ao Licenciamento Ambiental (Sisla) alterando o modelo de licenciamento do estado do Mato Grosso do Sul que passou do manual para o digital. A descrição detalhada das práticas de gestão de um projeto de pesquisa em rede, no cotidiano de execução, mostra os desafios desse tipo de empreendimento. O gestor enfrenta barreiras de ordem burocrática, políticoinstitucional e culturais ao longo de todo o processo, desafios que impactam diretamente na viabilidade do projeto. A fim de gerir e superar esses desafios, o estudo mostra as práticas de translação de interesses necessárias para que o projeto consiga se efetivar. Tais práticas, que são essenciais para a manutenção da rede e tornam possível sua execução são aqui descritas a partir do quadro analítico da Teoria Ator-Rede (LATOUR, 2000, 2001). Esta dissertação concluiu que há uma série de práticas de gestão que permanecem invisíveis para os relatórios oficiais de finalização dos projetos de pesquisa. Essa "gestão que não aparece" mostra-se fundamental para que os produtos finais, pretendidos pelos cientistas e gestores, fossem de fato entregues. A análise de tais práticas, portanto, contribui para uma compreensão melhor de como ocorre à gestão de projetos de pesquisa em rede na Embrapa, apontando para os desafios enfrentados pelas instituições públicas de pesquisa brasileiras / Abstract: The objective of this thesis is to offer an analysis, through ethnographic research, of the practices and challenges of the management of a network research project at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation - Embrapa. This study was conducted at the GeoMS (Georeferenced Information System) project, developed under the auspices of the Embrapa Management System (SEG), in the State of Mato Grosso do Sul, from 2006-2012. The GeoMS Project generated as its main product the Computerized System for Environmental Licensing Support (Sisla), which changed the environmental licensing procedures of that state from manual to digital. The detailed description of management practices involved in conducting large-scale network research projects show the challenges faced by such enterprises. The manager faces bureaucratic, cultural as well as political and institutional barriers throughout the process. Such challenges have a direct impact on the viability of these projects, demanding thus attention from researchers interested in science and technology policy. The study shows how the translation of diverse interests was used to overcome these challenges. These translation practices were analyzed through the lens of Actor-Network Theory (LATOUR, 2000, 2001). The thesis concludes that such translation practices in management remain invisible to official reports, although they are fundamental to the actual reaching of the intended goals of the project. The analysis of such practices contributes, therefore, to the understanding of how network projects are carried out at Embrapa. It also adds to the knowledge of the challenges faced by public research institutions in Brazil / Mestrado / Politica Cientifica e Tecnologica / Mestra em Política Científica e Tecnológica

Despite widespread health promotion and nutrition education efforts, gaps between official healthy eating messages and people’s actual eating practices persist. There is increasing recognition that emphasizing individual responsibility for eating may have limited applicability in improving people’s health. Many experts advocate that future research on healthy eating should involve exploration of how food practices are shaped by social structures (or determinants) and individual agency. The purpose of this study was to explore the ways in which people engage with food structures to construct everyday notions of healthy eating. ‘Food structures’ draws on the concept of ‘structure,’ described by the social theorist Anthony Giddens, to refer to the range of food rules and resources people draw on. The research was conducted as part of a qualitative study on family food decision-making that included 144 participants from 13 African Nova Scotian, 10 European Nova Scotian, 12 Punjabi British Columbian and 11 European British Columbian families. These groups were chosen for their potential differences in perspectives based on place, ethnocultural background and histories of immigration to Canada. Data collection consisted of individual interviews with three or more family members aged 13 and older, and, with each family, observation of a grocery shopping trip and a family meal. Analysis followed common qualitative procedures including coding, memoing and thematic analysis. Together, the analyses support views that the gaps between official healthy eating messages and people’s eating practices may not be closed by further education about how to eat. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of Anthony Giddens and Michael Foucault, the findings suggest that one way to understand why people eat the way they do and how changes in eating habits occur is to think about the constant exposure to change through everyday, taken-for-granted practices. The findings also suggest that further healthy eating discourses may require more reflection with respect to the roles of nutrition educators and the social roles/autonomy of people in goals for health and well-being. Dietary goals for the population cannot be considered as isolated scientific objectives without taking into consideration how healthy eating discourses provide social standards beyond messages about healthy eating. / Land and Food Systems, Faculty of / Graduate

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The purpose of this research study is to develop and describe a model to enhance the empowerment professional nurses to promote the recovery of people who have been diagnosed with depression. Depression is a prevalent psychiatric disorder that despite its increase worldwide, often goes undetected or inadequately treated. The biomedical model's reductionist and dualistic approach proves to be inadequate for nursing practice to address depression and calls for the examination of a multifaceted holistic approach. A multifaceted holistic approach views disease as having multiple causes that are amenable to multiple therapeutic interventions. Despite research evidence about the effectiveness of such an approach, an in-dept literature search did not reveal the availability of such a model to enhance the empowerment of professional nurses to promote the recovery of people who have been diagnosed with depression. The research question that emerged was: • How can professional nurses in the Western Cape be empowered to promote the recovery of people who have been diagnosed with depression? The assumption is that this question was necessary to address. To realise the purpose of this research study, the following objectives were formulated: • To explore and describe the self reported attributes needed by professional nurses to promote the recovery of people who have been diagnosed with depression. • To explore and describe how these self reported attributes can be facilitated in the work environment. • To propose a model to enhance the empowerment of professional nurses to promote the recovery of people who have been diagnosed with depression. • To develop guidelines for the operationalisation of the model. The theoretical framework for this research study was adopted from the Critical Social Theory. The research design and method used was qualitative, explorative, descriptive and contextual in nature. The research was done in two phases. In phase one the researcher did semi- structured interviews with a purposive and convenient sample of fourteen (14) professional nurses who were working in the Cape Town Metropolitan area and the West Coast. Each interview was transcribed from the tape recordings, verbatim and open coding was used to identify and analyse the content. In phase two the model was designed based on the findings of phase one. The six components, namely goals, concepts, definitions, relationships, structure and assumptions as described by Chinn and Jacobs, were used to develop the model. The guidelines for critical reflection as described by Chinn and Kramer were used to evaluate the model. A purposive sample that consisted of a group of psychiatric nurse specialists was asked to validate the model during a group discussion. As a result of their daily interaction with people who have been diagnosed with depression, professional nurses identified increased workload, lack of professional development and a lack of organizational support as barriers to implement the identified attributes support, positive approach, interpersonal skills and awareness of structure to promote the characteristics of the recovery approach. After the data analysis an empowerment model that would support professional nurses to promote a recovery approach in their working environments was developed. To ensure trustworthiness, Lincoln and Guba's model was used throughout the study. Ethical considerations were maintained throughout this qualitative research study.

I develop a connection between Hegel's account of Ethical Life (Sittlichkeit) and his ontology, arguing that Ethical Life draws out some of the more intuitive and subtle sides of Hegel's ontology on the one hand, and some of its more ambitious and challenging aspects on the other. Ethical Life, for Hegel, signifies our lived, normative, concrete social reality; my central claim is that Hegel uses this account to illustrate (and support) some of his key ontological convictions. I begin by showing how Ethical Life figures centrally in Hegel's attempt to ontologically prioritize intelligibility. Chapter One is devoted to Hegel's case for this ontological priority: essentially, the argument is that we ought to accept (and implicitly already do accept) the adequacy of thought to being, and that this adequacy entails that the object in its fully experienceable multilayered depth is its fundamentally "real" form. I then argue, in Chapter Two, that Ethical Life develops an account of the Self-World relation better able to accommodate a world of such intelligible objects: Ethical Life premises itself on "Self-World mutual-constitution," where Self and World each are what they are in virtue of the greater relation between them. This integrated relationship, this greater whole, becomes the ground on and out of which such intelligible objects can emerge, develop, and sustain themselves. The dissertation's second half further defines key strands of Hegel's ontology, such as the demand that a philosophically viable ontological model be a wholly self-contained and self-explanatory, self-supporting and self-determining, intelligibility- and process-oriented totalistic whole. This demand comes out, for example, in Hegel's critique of Kant, which is the topic of Chapter Three. There, I argue that Hegel charges Kant with an ontological conservatism, with retaining "pure" forms of subjectivity and objectivity, the possibility of which had been made questionable by the transcendental turn. Hegel instead suggests that we drop such problematic notions as Things-in-themselves or Pure Concepts of the Understanding, opting instead to simply recast the experienced world as conceptually determined appearances per se. The conceptual self-determination of appearances, meanwhile, is something Hegel will associate with his notion of Reason, and in Chapters Four and Five, I consider the relation of Ethical Life to this notion of Reason. Hegel characterizes Ethical Life as "actual Reason," and I argue in Chapter Four that the currently prevalent, non-metaphysical readings of Hegel's social thought (what I call the rational justifiability reading) are incomplete to the extent that they fail to adequately integrate into their account the fact that Reason, for Hegel, is (among other things) an ontologically operative principle. Hegel identifies Reason with the experienced world's conceptual self-determination, or with the intelligible framework which structures, animates, and stabilizes the experienced world. This identification is essential to Hegel, in that it methodologically opens up the possibility of developing an account that not only can be intellectually identified with the experienced world, but can be directly, experientially recognized in (or as) the experienced world. In Chapter Five, I argue that Ethical Life plays a key role here by offering an account --even an illustration-- of Reason in its operation as the experienced world's conceptual self-determination. Custom and Fate, two concepts encountered in Ethical Life, portray an uncomprehending intuition of the experienced world's conceptual self-determination in the moment of its concrete operation; the "internal" experience of this process described in Ethical Life also displays how intelligible principles can immanently sustain and determine the experienced world. Ethical Life, I ultimately argue, brings Hegel's ontology down to earth, so to speak. Through Ethical Life, we come to see that a number of Hegel's less-familiar and more seemingly foreboding claims can be associated with recognizable phenomena, or even identified with the experienced world. Yet, simultaneously, recognizing this connection helps us appreciate the ambition of Hegel's challenge to us to reconsider our presuppositions: we experience reality to be richly complex yet intelligibly ordered --Hegel's ontology asks us now to take seriously the implications of the possibility of our experience's being a veritable revelation of reality. / Philosophy

This dissertation is about the changing imaginations of academic social work in an increasingly entangled world. Broadly, my subject area is the history and philosophy of social work, with an emphasis on engagements with critical social theory. More specifically, my research explores questions of discipline, generation, and critical social theory in the Anglophone Canadian context as a means to better understand how shared perceptions of the possible and the desirable are “situated knowledges” (Haraway, 1988). To do so, I trace and theorize changing perceptions through a survey of educators, and through integrative interdisciplinary and philosophical knowledge work considering various dynamics of disciplines in general and social work in particular. Evoking my own generational standpoint, I raise as a collective disciplinary problematic the canonization of second generation critical social theories, and the need to engage in the collective work of disciplinary reflexivity on, and accountability to, the ways in which the conditions of existence and possibility of critical academic social work are changing over time. Methodologically, I elaborate a reparative historical practice through a slightly different genre or style of writing. This is a feminist strategy, one roughly within the (generational) turn towards showing what one combines and assembles and learns through engaging with the world as a means to invite further speculative and imaginative work. This strategy is also a means to begin to imagine a “post-expert,” “post-good” and “post-progress” social work, not because knowledge and intention do not matter, but because these organizing referents have each achieved a level of saturation in what they can produce in the world. As such, this dissertation contributes some of the conditions of intelligibility necessary for the collective work of imagining and reimagining something akin to justice or improvement through social work after the fall of so many left and liberal progress narratives. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This research explores changing understandings of how social work in the Canadian state context imagines and intervenes in the world. My focus is on academic social work as both educator and knowledge producer, because the university is where some ideas and practices are refined and reproduced so that they can in turn be shared more broadly. Findings include the noteworthy influence of the university on the ideas and initiatives that do gain traction, as well as a generational structural to perceptions of the possible and the desirable. Overall, this research contributes a range of resources—historical, theoretical, empirical and speculative—to the collective work of imagining and reimagining social work for a changing world.