Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 47-48).

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2009. / Title from screen (viewed on August 26, 2009). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Jonathan Eller, John Rudy, Thomas Marvin. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-68).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 47-48) Also available in print.

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala universitet, 1989. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-150).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1975. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

This study examined the narratives of three women music teachers’ professional practice, drawing on the research question: Through examining processes of subjectification: (a) How do mid-career women music teachers construct narratives of their professional and musical practice? (b) What are the implications for women music teachers’ professional and musical sustenance? Participants Hayley, Becky and Lynne, all with 12 years teaching experience, told stories of diverse musical participation within and beyond their schools and within a range of social groups and institutional settings. Taking a post-structural feminist theoretical perspective, these narratives were viewed as 'technologies of the female self' (Foucault, 1988; Tamboukou, 2008, 2010). The research question was shaped and answered through the concept of subjectifcation and considered how these women constructed a portrait of ‘self-in-practice.’ This questioned how they fashioned their personal pedagogical approach, how they created and projected a music departmental identity within the school, and how they conceptualised their musical and teaching selves. Data collection took place over a seven-month engagement with three participants and involved: a narrative/biographical interview; the compilation of a ‘memory box’ in which participants gathered artefacts related to the theme, ‘My music, my teaching’; and a follow-up conversational interview. In the final interview participants presented their artefacts and told stories related to their gendered experiences in music and teaching. Narratives showed the ‘woman music teacher’ is a site of struggle, where material roles within different discursive fields such as the home, the community as well as the school, pulled at other subjectivities. Through an analysis of processes of gendered subjectification, these women music teachers presented a complex narrative of their professional lives, within discursive fields of competing and complementary institutional discourses. While individually teachers conceptualised their musical and teaching subjectivities in personal, biographically-shaped ways, collectively they used similar discursive strategies to create a music subject department identity. They all told stories of their practice sustained by moments of ‘musical space’ and enabling others. Extra-curricular music provided valued moments of musical and aesthetic gratification and professional autonomy, functioning as a way to project the standing of the music subject department in the school and the local community, but this also added to an already burdensome workload. The education system in Northern Ireland is undergoing a prolonged yet stilted process of reform, and with the increase in the collaborative sharing of curriculum with other schools, it is likely that in the future secondary music teachers will be teaching in very different circumstances. This may be particularly challenging for established music teachers who have worked to create musical worlds in their subject departments drawing on personal and affective biographical resources. It is suggested that identity work with teachers’ narrative understandings of their self-in-practice, as a form of professional development, may allow space for teachers to imagine and negotiate alternative personal/professional identities, values and beliefs within new managerial and collaborative structures.

The ‘technology’ of risk structures social relationships within and outside of organisations, even though risk tends to be perceived externally as objective, neutral and apolitical. In adopting a poststructuralist perspective, this research investigates the impact of ‘calculating’ risk and how cultural, economic, social, psychological and political aspects influence the concept of risk and risk management practices. Hence, it provides a contextualized understanding of how risk and risk management are constructed intra-organisationally. This is a study of risk based on immersion. After six months of critical ethnographic fieldwork in a Brazilian development bank, called BrazBank, and applying the Discourse Theory of Laclau and Mouffe as well as the Logic of Critical Explanation of Glynos and Howarth, this research contextualises and challenges the universal logic of the discourse of ‘risk’, from a regulatory point of view. This research links macro- and micro-discourses of risk to reveal its ‘hidden power’ and to provide a glimpse into the fundamental contingencies in this discourse of control. It considers that the potential multiple interpretations of risk allows the construction of a hegemonic discourse, with boundaries that constitute and subvert certain claims in a rhetorical historic (re-)articulation of power. By doing so, it exposes how a technology that was supposed to simplify and enable, creates miscommunication in an organisation. ‘Risk’ became a battleground as controlling the understanding of risk, meant control of the organisation. Therefore, reflecting shifts in the international macro-context of risk regulation, the power of risk shifted between departments and their managers over political mandates and empowered and constructed experts and non-experts. This research illustrates different articulations of risk in the BrazBank context, how different individuals and groups developed competing interpellations of risk and, by examining the role of ideology, how and why certain conceptions of risk management practice were conserved, even as an illusion or secret, to maintain hierarchical positions and power imbalances.

This thesis explores the relationship between capitalism and exploitation in wake of the 2007-08 global financial crisis and subsequent economic recessions among the world’s most advanced capitalist nations. Starting from the position that not enough theoretical work has been done, particularly within criminology, to analyze the harms caused by crises in capitalism, I argue that a structural-Marxist framework can help fill this gap in the literature. By building a theoretical model based on Karl Marx’s original work on crises in capitalism, the structuralism of Louis Althusser, and as the philosophical materialism of David Harvey, I examine the ways in which the global financial crisis is not the unexpected event mainstream narratives maintain, but rather one that has been over a century in the making. On an empirical level, drawing insight from the Greek financial crisis, the model proposed is deployed to analyze the role that international financial institutions have had in the recent crisis and draw a link between these patterns and the status of modern capitalism, suggesting that the economic trauma we face now is intimately linked to the predisposition of capital (re)production and accumulation. This thesis ultimately underlines the fact that while we are governed by this ‘new’, more aggressive capitalism, it is also ‘the same’ in that Marx’s insights regarding the contradictions of capital accumulation are equally applicable today as they were in his time.