A critique of the social construction of space was fundamental to Virginia Woolf's overall feminist project of decentering patriarchal and imperial values. In A Room of One's Own (1929) Woolf famously emphasized that financial independence and a private space were vital to female creativity. But Woolf was concerned with the politics of space throughout her writing, an aspect of her thought that has not been widely addressed. My thesis examines Woolf's ongoing preoccupation with spatiality in two closely related works of her late career, The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938). In these texts, Woolf interrogates the cultural construction of private and public realms as mutually exclusive, with domestic space being women's proper place and public space as the territory of men. Some critics stress Woolf's portrayal of the imbrication of urban space and individual consciousness in The Years, but tend to overlook the action of the English countryside and its influence on subjectivity. Also overlooked by critics is the way that the deployment of textual space in Three Guineas, and the intertextual connections between The Years and Three Guineas-which were originally conceived of as one text entitled The Pargiters-develop Woolf's critique of the politics of space. My argument draws on key texts of sociology, geography and cultural theory that address the construction of space and place. Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space (1974), Doreen Massey's Space, Place and Gender (1994), and Susan Stanford Friedman's Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998) frame my discussion and help to show how The Years and Three Guineas unsettle dominant spatial dualisms: public/private, here/there, home/abroad, and inside/outside. In doing so these works foreground the relationship between subjectivity and space and demonstrate how space is produced through ideology and practice. In addition I show how Woolf's dramatization of social spaces as mobile and interpenetrating illustrates the interface between constructions of family, nation, and empire.

Includes bibliographical references / This thesis explores the beliefs of mathematics teachers working in a rural school in South Africa. This is premised on the argument that understanding the beliefs of teachers is a necessary, even if insufficient, prerequisite to designing effective teacher development programmes. I postulate that take-up rates of new content and teaching methods are low due to unmanaged cognitive conflict with pre-existing beliefs about the nature of teaching. A broad review of the literature on beliefs as a concept is conducted to establish theoretical grounding for the study of beliefs as an abstract object of analysis (Green, 1971; Nespor, 1987; Pajares, 1992). I particularly refer to Ernest's (1989) models of mathematics epistemology, and Adler's (2001) dilemmas of teaching mathematics in multilingual classrooms. Multiple studies of mathematics teachers' beliefs are drawn upon to relate beliefs to classroom practice. Qualitative data on two mathematics teachers working in a rural school in the Eastern Cape was gathered over the period of a month, using ethnographic methods as outlined by Thompson (1992) for gathering evidence of beliefs. Primary data, which consisted of pre-interviews, multiple lesson observations and stimulated-recall post-interviews, was analysed for evidence of teacher beliefs. Secondary data, in the form of a researcher journal and socio-economic information about the school, was also gathered to provide rich context data in which to situate the teachers' work. Particular attention was paid to teacher beliefs about teaching and learning, mathematics and language. Further evidence for beliefs was then obtained through close examination of an observation extract using classroom discourse analysis. The main finding of this thesis was that not only does a school's context provide logistical constraints to curriculum implementation and pedagogical change, but that the worldviews of teachers affect their interpretation of the curriculum (Chapman, 2002). Significantly, a relationship between the mathematics epistemology a teacher holds and their ability to admit language as a critical pedagogical factor is suggested. I conclude that detailed understanding of what teachers believe may provide a productive approach for teacher development programmes that aim to effect change.

This research investigates how power dynamics function in three cases of participatory art, each created by a different artist. Participatory art (PA) is understood as art whose physical or visual properties are shaped or altered by the viewers’ engagement. The study responds to the fact that discourses on PA often refer to the emancipation of participants. Rooted in concepts from Foucauldian biopolitics, the research also assumes that PA inevitably involves a distribution of power among artists and participants, which often vacillates between cultivation and instrumentalization. Data for this qualitative, multi-case study were collected through interviews with the three artists and with three viewers of each studied work. The researcher’s memories of her participatory experiences in the studied artworks, captured in a journal, were also considered as data. Detailed narrative findings illustrate how artists’ and viewers’ positions in relation to particular works are never detached from the art systems that frame them. Yet, these positions are not necessarily static and can shift in significant ways. Therefore, the balance between cultivation and instrumentalization can change from work to work, from participant to participant, and from situation to situation. The study shines a light on the potential of critical reflection, enacted once artists and viewers “step out” of the work, for realizing, questioning, and critiquing the conditions of participatory artworks. The researcher suggests that it is in such reflective spaces that awareness of one’s power within a work, and the emancipation that follows, are more likely to occur.

Magíster en Ciencias Sociales mención Sociología de la Modernización / La presente investigación se basó en estudiar y comprender cómo trabajan el sí mismo los jóvenes usuarios de Facebook en sus presentaciones cotidianas mediante las proposiciones teóricas de Erving Goffman (1959), quien inaugurando la perspectiva microsociológica de la acción, adopta las metáforas teatratales para el entendimiento de las interacciones sociales como aquellas actuaciones que despliegan los sujetos para producir una determinada visión de sí mismos que dote de certeza y verosimilitud su presentación. La metodología utilizada fue la articulación entre etnografía virtual y entrevistas en profundidad, con el fin de contraponer la producción de información y a su vez, contribuir a un módulo integrado que concilie diferentes perspectivas epistemológicas para mejorar las miradas anteriores sobre el objeto de estudio. Se concluye que la presentación de sí mismo en Facebook guarda similitudes con la presentación en la “vida real”, en la que del mismo modo se desempeñan actuaciones que responden a prácticas ritualizadas vinculadas a los valores circunscritos de la sociedad. No obstante, en el entorno online hay mayor grado de control de las impresiones frente a los demás, aunque el trabajo de sí mismo se torna complejo debido a los límites entre lo qué es público y qué es privado / The present research was based on studying and understanding how the young users work on Facebook their daily presentations through the theoretical propositions of Erving Goffman (1959), who inaugurating the microsociological perspective of the action, adopts theatrical metaphors for the understanding of social interactions as those actions that the subjects display to produce a certain vision of themselves that gives certainty and verisimilitude their presentation. The methodology used was an articulation between virtual ethnography and in-depth interviews, in order to contrast the production of information and also contribute to an integrated module that reconciles different epistemological perspectives to improve the previous views on the object of study. It is concluded that the presentation of itself in Facebook keeps similarities with the presentation in the "real life", in which also perform actions that respond to ritualized practices linked to the circumscribed values of society. However, in the online environment there is a greater degree of control of the impressions in front of the others, although the work of itself becomes complex due to the limits between what is public and what is private

This dissertation examines D.H. Lawrence’s and Wyndham Lewis’s exploration of the evental subject, and asks how their work might help us understand agency in a way that does not discount powerful forms of socio-historical determinism. Examining a variety of their critical and fictional writing from the first three decades of the twentieth century, I argue that Lawrence and Lewis explore ways of thinking about the subject’s relationship to radical novelty without occluding the constraining forces of mass culture. Challenging conventional modernist forms of novelty which seek to except themselves from forces of historical and social determination, they pursue a form of novelty that emerges from these forces, yet radically reconfigures the world that history has produced. Similarly, even though the “evental subject” is conditioned by the forms of relation encoded by society, its agency lies in the power to transfigure the modes of being that have been normalized. The evental subject is not an autonomous source of agency that is exempted from the social order, but derives its agency from reconceptualizing the nature of social embeddedness—understanding social relations as unpredictably generative rather than narrowly limiting. In this regard, the forms of subjectivity articulated by Lawrence and Lewis substantially anticipate, and are illuminated by, Alain Badiou’s theory of the event. Chapter 1 argues that Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy and Studies in Classic American Literature approach the problem of the evental subject largely in terms of affect, understanding the subject not as the preexistent and stable bearer of affective experience, but as the processual product of mutually-constituting affective relationships. Chapter 2 examines Women in Love to find Lawrence negotiating love as an affective site of radical subjective possibility that reconfigures the cultural norms through which intimate relationships are coded and constrained. Chapter 3 turns to Lewis’s The Enemy to ask how his version of the evental subject largely inhabits the tension between personality and selfhood, where the former suggests social performance and the latter denotes an autonomous, ontological category. Contra the conventional turn to the autonomous self as the source of agency, he seeks to understand the subject, and its agency, as the product of social performance. Finally, Chapter 4 argues that Tarr articulates the possibilities of a radically exteriorized understanding of personality; through Lewis’s ironic portrayal of the ineluctable ways in which even the perception of choice is coded by the situation, he presents fiction and authorship as the spaces in which to imagine an evental subject.

This thesis discusses women and their changing subjectivity in connection to their participation within terrorist movements. Work emphasizes on the case of the Islamic State, currently the most influential terrorist movement; and the role of women within it. For the purpose of introduction into the topic- as well acquaintance with the current state of knowledge- work discusses historical examples of women's participation within terrorist groups. Concerning theoretical framework, this thesis is based on constructivist feminism and gender theory, which examines how thoughts about gender influence global politics. Empirical part of this thesis is devoted to the method of CDA, namely three-dimensional model of CDA implemented by Fairclough as well as additional conceptual framework - grammar of visual design introduced by Kress and van Leeuwen. The main purpose is to examine what the role of women within the Islamic state is, why they are so crucial and the most importantly how the Islamic State affects women's emancipation. Various propaganda materials of IS are analyzed in order to address these issues.

This study explores the role of rehabilitation in shaping the subjectivity of blind persons. It considers what engaging with rehabilitation services might communicate to people with visual impairments about their status, their value and their place in the world. Rather than being concerned with the practical aspects of rehabilitation, it explores how rehabilitative practices operate at the symbolic level, and interrogates the meanings about blindness which are produced within relationships where help is given and received. Drawing on Foucauldian concepts, this research traces the interplay between discourse, power and knowledge in rehabilitation services. The research design includes two phases. Through analysing the website copy of eight organisations located across South Africa, Phase One identified discourses employed by organisations as they represent themselves in the public realm. In Phase Two, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight service providers and eighteen service users across four organisations operating in the Western Cape province of South Africa. This phase identified the discourses framing rehabilitative activities and relationships. Visually impaired participants described sight loss as a significant trauma – as dislocation from society and self – revealing that service users might be particularly vulnerable to the shaping influence of rehabilitation. Data analysis found, firstly, that the discourses which frame rehabilitation services position visually impaired service users as passive recipients in relation to the work of service providers and the gifts of the public. This positioning objectifies service users and may signal to them that they are neither valued as stakeholders nor recognised as autonomous adults, while also requiring that they demonstrate gratitude towards service providers and the public. Secondly, rehabilitation is constructed as a linear journey with strictly defined outcomes. This ‘journey discourse' relies on polarised fantasies about blindness involving, on the one hand, dependency, dislocation and struggle and, on the other, independence, integration and coping. Visually impaired service users are required to demonstrate evidence of the latter while the former shadowy figure of pre-intervention blindness must be defended against. This discourse prohibits nuance and expressions of ongoing struggle, underpinning an imperative to cope found within organisations. Amid limiting discursive practices in rehabilitation, a key finding is that visually impaired service users are involved in complex negotiations of self and place. Investigating the discourses which frame and support rehabilitative practices sheds light on investments in promoting particular ways of being for visually impaired people, prompting us to consider what service providers, service users and, indeed, society as a whole might be colluding with. This work offers a novel perspective on blindness rehabilitation in South Africa as it explores an interplay between essential practical interventions found in rehabilitation and the influences on identity which those who experience sight loss undergo as they move into a new life with visual impairment.

My dissertation investigates how relativity impacts human personhood and freedom in theology. Assumptions about human subjectivity have always affected philosophical and religious discourse about time. Most Abrahamic religious traditions assume what James McTaggart has called an A-theory of time, in which time flows, and the differences among past, present and future are meaningful, in accordance with our subjective impressions. The A-theory complements an assumption that human beings can choose their actions. However, philosophers like Hilary Putnam have employed relativistic physics to contend that time does not flow, and that the future is as fixed as the past—a B-theory in McTaggart’s terminology. D. H. Mellor and others, explicitly assuming an opposition between scientific objectivity and all subjectivity, including the subjective sense of self, have built on B-theoretic arguments to claim human consciousness is illusory. Given Abrahamic religions’ emphasis on the importance of selves, this interpretation rules out any dialogue between science and religion. If Abrahamic theology is to be compatible with modern physics, we must reconcile relativity with the A-theory of time. Two potential models already exist. William Lane Craig and J. R. Lucas draw upon physicist Hendrik Lorentz to posit a universal reference frame, based on the experience of a God who lives in time much as human beings do. Robert John Russell fuses a traditional interpretation of special relativity with Boethius’s metaphysics to propose a pluricentric view of time in which God is present in every observer’s reference frame, making each relativistic construction of events true on its own terms, and eliminating the need to reconcile frames that disagree. I argue that Russell’s model is preferable: neo-Lorentzian relativity is vulnerable to scientific critique, and Craig’s view of God risks falling into occasionalism. Finally, Russell’s system not only establishes the kind of open future that is a prerequisite for free will, but in fact dovetails with personalist ontology and epistemology that place subjectivity at the heart of existence without sacrificing the importance of science. Far from being mutually exclusive, science and subjectivity need one another, and time’s flow is an excellent place for their collaboration to start.

While Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is not, strictly speaking, a translation, it is heavily indebted both to the medieval understanding of Trojan historiography and to Boccacio's handling of the romance of Troiolo and Criseida in his Filostrado. While Chaucer was a capable translator with respect and fondness for Boccaccio's text, he was also a confident innovator who was quite willing to modify, append, or totally change the text whenever the needs of his particular narrative warrant it. One such site of this deliberate alteration is in the handling of the character of Priam, King of Troy. While Chaucer includes every passage in which Boccaccio mentions Priam, he consistently modifies the phrasing or situation in order to downplay the king's political role, emphasizing instead his interpersonal or familial bonds. Furthermore, the material that Chaucer adds concerning Priam expands the changes made in translation, furthering a move away from the social and political and toward the personal and the individual. This example, one of many, indicates that Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is a work constructed around history that tries to suppress the political and historical, attempting instead to interpret events and characters in terms of their most immediate, personal settings or, when pressed, by eternal truths such as Love or Fortune. Such a focus allows us to see the "depth" of the individual or the philosophical foundations of their faith while attempting to deny the political and ideological construction of this subjectivity and belief.

Il s’agit de renouveler la lecture des quatre textes de Rousseau dans la perspective de la consolation, et de déterminer les enjeux historiques, philosophiques et littéraires de l’exigence de consolation chez l’auteur.La Lettre à Voltaire essaie, par une interprétation originale de l’optimisme, la réconciliation de sa philosophie critique et de sa foi, d’une part, et d’autre part, de l’idéal antique et de l’idéal chrétien de la consolation. Mais il s’avère que cette synthèse est insuffisante, et ce fait trahit la position difficile de Rousseau sur la consolation traditionnelle.La Nouvelle Héloïse découvre l’implication du dysfonctionnement de la consolation chez le sujet moderne. Notre tentative de lire le roman épistolaire du point de vue de la consolation vaine du héros éclaire un moment existentialiste de la subjectivité dans sa résistance à la consolation.Le sujet qui définit son existence par la difficulté d’être consolé cherche une nouvelle rationalisation de son état. En ce sens, une lecture comparative du livre I des Confessions avec le livre IV de l’Emile montre la tentative de consoler une conscience malheureuse par une reconstitution génétique du moi sans se référer à un modèle extérieur.Au bout de ces tâtonnements exigeants mais révélateurs, les Rêveries ne se donnent pour la consolation ultime de Rousseau qu’en radicalisant les éléments consolateurs précédents et qu’en exprimant cette radicalisation par une radicalisation double de la solitude. En sondant l’abîme de la subjectivité moderne dans son état-limite, Rousseau s’interroge sur une condition essentielle du sujet moderne qu’est l’inconsolable. / The objective is to reinterpret four of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's texts through the facet of consolation; and to determine historical, philosophical and literary implications of the search for consolation in his writings.Letter to Voltaire details Rousseau’s efforts to reconcile not only the conflict between his critical thought and his faith through the interpretation of the optimism, but also the dichotomous nature of ancient and Christian ideals of consolation. But the synthesis turns out to be insufficient, revealing his difficult position on traditional consolation.In New Héloïse, Rousseau discovers the prevalence of consolatory dysfunction in the modern subject. Our attempt to read the epistolary novel from the perspective of vain consolation for the hero underscores the hero's resistance to consolation and, thereby, illuminates the existentialist essence of subjectivity.The subject, whose being is defined by his inconsolability, looks for a new rationalization of his state. In this sense, our comparative reading of the first book of Confessions with book IV of Emile shows an attempt to console the misery of his consciousness through the reconstitution of self without referring to any external model.After these demanding but revealing searches for comfort, the last consolation of Reveries radicalizes the preceding elements of consolation through a double-stylistic radicalization of solitude. Marking the abyss of modern subjectivity in its limited situation, Rousseau examines the intrinsic condition of the inconsolable modern subject