Sailivik is a story about the evolutionary process of planning a mental healing retreat for the Inuit of Pangnirtung, Nunavut. The story is created through community consultation related to site selection, development of program and facility lists, initial site planning, and the building of a qammaq. It offers insights to methods of community work, Inuit landscape preferences, contemporary Inuit culture, and the land-based nature of sociological and psychological healing in an Inuit context. Further, any ideas of a finite outcome are challenged as the project continues to evolve and grow with further community efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of the social field as described by Pierre Bourdieu as well as to explore the possibility of creating a more focused and tailored set of conditions in the form of a model to repurpose the field theory to more clearly be applicable to bilateral negotiations. The methodological approach is conceptual analysis based on the epistemology of critical realism. The supporting theories for the approach are a combination of systemic, chaos and complexity theory while the fundaments for the implementation of the methodological approach are the four main concepts in Bourdieu’s theory of the social field:  the field, habitus, illusio and symbolic capital. One of the main points of repurposing this specific dynamic is to explicitly allow for deliberate human agency within the field. Analytical data consists purely of the secondary type. This essay is not empirically based but rather theoretical and abstract. The paper is founded on the basic principles of macrosociology and presumes social agency where appropriate. This paper focuses on creating a tentative framework model based on repurposed concepts derived from Bourdieu. The results are arguably interesting but are mostly limited to affecting further development of this tentative model and prefacing application of it through attempting to implement it in an analytical manner on empirical data.

Sailivik is a story about the evolutionary process of planning a mental healing retreat for the Inuit of Pangnirtung, Nunavut. The story is created through community consultation related to site selection, development of program and facility lists, initial site planning, and the building of a qammaq. It offers insights to methods of community work, Inuit landscape preferences, contemporary Inuit culture, and the land-based nature of sociological and psychological healing in an Inuit context. Further, any ideas of a finite outcome are challenged as the project continues to evolve and grow with further community efforts.

This study of newspaper content from ten papers in four countries with substantial Muslim minorities uses discourse and sentiment analysis to identify general attitudes toward Muslims. / Masters by research Thesis

This thesis is the first dedicated sociological attempt to offer a critical response to cultural studies and allied discourses that concern themselves with the relationship between technology and violence. A critical reconstruction is necessary because these cultural theorists have failed to adequately contextualize their arguments in relation to both the globally ascendant neoliberal policy outlook and its associated social Darwinian technoculture: the combined pernicious effects of which could be described as the logic of ???social constructionism as social psychosis???. The most prominent manifestation of this theoretical psychosis has to do with an interest in biotechnology in particular. The problem I identify in the treatment of this theme is how easily it can be used to support a technologically determinist position. One undesirable side effect is that these determinists are able to project from present trends a dystopian exhaustion of all critique through their focus on violence. In the thesis of ???bioglobalism??? this state of affairs is also deployed to take sociologists to task for insufficient recognition of processual ???network??? forms of distributed agency in technological processes. At stake therefore is the recovery of sociological critique. It follows that the core of my thesis is the radical reworking of two related heuristic devices: seriality and contingency. Seriality is taken to refer to social practices as diverse as the possible relationships between the social problem of rationality, case studies of individuals who have run amok, and the functioning of network characteristics. I use contingency to eschew seriality???s deterministic accounting of the social. Here I propose a new conceptual relationship between creativity and action. Emphasis is accordingly placed upon two related normative projects: Raymond Williams???s cultural materialism, and three of the ???problematiques??? Peter Wagner has identified as inescapable for theorizing modernity: the continuity of the acting person, the certainty of knowledge, and the viability of the political order. I conclude with a renewed conception of the role of normative critique as a form of conceptual therapy for bioglobal projections of seriality.

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The substantive task of the thesis is to explore a dimension of social change - the emergence of social science research within New Zealand by 1984. The thesis begins by asking questions about the status of any account - as description, understanding, or explanation. In the first instance, these questions are discussed within positivist and anti-positivist traditions. Following on from these, the work examines a series of post-positivist approaches that focus on method, general theory, and methatheorising. Many accounts of social science development emphasise the role of a rational social science idea, others stress contextual considerations. In finding these wanting, the thesis argues for the incorporation of culture, structure and agency, and discusses attempts at resolving these within the work of Anthony Giddens and Andrew Abbott. The final part of the theoretical discussion explores the potential of Critical Realism for causal analysis. Within this tradition, Margaret Archer's work is particularly useful with its commitment to robust notions of agency, culture and structure, and emphasising their interplay through time. With some modest revision to attune her position to the demands of practice, the thesis suggests 'Retroductive Narrative Realism' that incorporates ontological insights and the two practical moves of analysis and narrative. The thesis argues that these moves must be explicit, using the analytic to create hypothesis that are then tested via narratives that link emerging structural and cultural forms. The thesis uses this approach for the substantive task of writing a theoretically informed account of social science research. It works within the spheres of State, University and broader social spaces, centring interests and the role of conditioned interaction. The account is presented within four phases: the inheritance - research by the State for the purposes of the State; in search of independent means - research by the State of broader social forms; alternative benefactors - research of social issues by broader social and University interests; on the brink of bankruptcy - a questioning of the State and social forms by social and University interests. Over these four periods it is possible to trace the emergence of social research, then social science, and then specific disciplines.

This thesis examines the valuation of transitional justice. It argues the need for and advances a more theoretically expansive set of ideal standards that can be used to assess the process and substantive outcomes of transitional justice decision-making. In so doing, it advocates a victim-inclusive and sustainable model of justice. Effective decision-making is understood in ideal terms as being :(l) politically and publicly inclusive; (2) methodically planned; (3) politically purposive; and (4) legally comprehensive in the sense of equally recognising state obligations and victim rights.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Linguistics & Psychology, Department of Linguistics, 2005. / Bibliography: p. 329-355. / Preamble -- Research objectives and methodology -- Theoretical and epistemological frameworks -- Culture, identity and power -- Meetings -- "The clearing of the sky" -- Project reform. / The data for this research thesis derives from a development project in Samoa. Through the study of key project events and their associated discourses the study identifies and interprets cultural and professional resources that the project team draws on as they negotiate their way through the project; in particular the 'resources' (including communication resources) that participants bring to project interactions. The thesis explores how participants used these resources and what consequences resulted (for them and for others) from such use. -- This study takes a critical and ideological stance, underpinned by a belief in the value and possibility of social action. While not primarily a call to action, the thesis presents its interpretations in the context of larger ethical and political challenges, with a view to informing change, specifically what deliberate action might be taken to improve processes and practices in future projects. The project is explored as a 'soft' system of social interactions and processes; and as a 'Third Space' (Bhabha 1990, 1994) where traditional boundaries of sociocultural organisation, or of professions, are destabilised and where newlyconstructed practices, orders of discourse, identities and representations are required. -- The study is evaluation and policy oriented. It explicitly addresses the implications of knowledge gained from the research for future project design and implementation. In making recommendations for project change, the study argues for the inclusion of local research as a legitimate project task, to inform evaluative processes and create a framework for ongoing modification to project design and implementation. The recommendations for change made in this study are concerned with determining principles and codes of practice for: - identifying and developing intercultural competence in project situations ; - project training (for intercultural project work, including ongoing participant research) ; - improving project systems ; - using relevant approaches/techniques in organisational change management. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / 397 p