This transformative case study used qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the social construction of collaborative and technology leadership among students in a graduate-level course on curriculum leadership. Analysis of interactions among students during an asynchronous computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) project using critical discourse analysis was completed. Student dialogue was analyzed for how students across different social groups interacted discursively to promote and inhibit the development of leadership in the domains of collaboration and technology, while socially constructing the knowledge context for learning about the societal curriculum for diverse social groups. Findings were that women more than men were verbose and promotive, and that much of their power/language exchanges involved mutual understanding. Black students were underrepresented in the graduate course, but gained power through language and course design. Latino students lacked self-advocacy and emphasized cultural diversity in their use of power/language. An interview with the professor provides insight into the structures that frame student's experiences. These findings are discussed through a three-tiered Critical Discourse Analysis Framework and recommendations are made for educators, leaders and education leadership preparation programs that use on-line learning platforms that support collaborative learning experiences.

Statistics show that “ethnic affiliation” and “disability”, under the discrimination law, with a margin constitute most of the discrimination reports made in 2015, 2016 and 2017. The purpose of this thesis is to describe how Östergötland's local media construct and maintain the image of people who are protected by law of discrimination. Our goal is to explain of how the media can have the power to influence society's general perception of these two groups. Through the social constructionism theory and the critical discourse analysis, we explain how general perceptions of these groups can lead to negative attitudes and discrimination. Through a critical discourse analysis and a qualitative text analysis of articles from Östgöta Correspondenten and Norrköpings Tidningar regarding these groups showed that people with disabilities were often presented as a "burden" of some kind and rarely described as "just” individuals but instead defined or biasedly nuanced based on their disability. People with foreign background were generalized and forced to represent a larger group. The topic of the articles were often negative, and it was common with dehumanization and objectification. The media, which is easily accessible as newspaper articles can generate in common "truths" that might collectively lead to social action. Our study result shows that media reflects a society, in which people with disability and foreign background are marginalized and placed outside the norm. That kind of categorization may likely lead to negative attitudes and exclusion for the affected groups.

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Despite intensified and concerted efforts to realise sustainable development. Western industrialised countries have in recent years experienced several mass protests against institutions perceived variously to have the potential to govern the global economy in environmentally sustainable or unsustainable ways. This thesis examines how different actors in the news media attempt to legitimate and de-legitimate neoliberal approaches to economic governance on grounds that these approaches are or are not environmentally sustainable. By using a critical discourse analysis perspective to analyse texts produced by actors with competing political commitments (neo-liberal and left-liberal), it discusses how primarily profit-driven generic conventions can govern what can and cannot be said in debates on sustainability. The thesis suggests that the effectiveness of (cultural) politics aimed at legitimating and de-legitimating neo-liberal approaches can be understood in teens of the relationship between an instrumental rationality geared at maximising the effectiveness of existing institutional systems and a communicative rationality geared at achieving understanding.

This study was undertaken using Foucault’s genealogical approach to explore an aspect in the governmentality of the nursing profession from the 1950s to the present. It uses developments in the education of nurses in South Australia as a case in point, but includes, at all stages, a concomitant analysis of global trends in the profession and education of nurses. Hence, data were collected from historical documents such as government reports, professional nursing journals, nursing text books and curriculum documents across the period for analysis, from South Australia and Flinders University as a particular case. I thought of these texts as data and examples of the production of discourses about nursing education and practice influenced by the Foucauldian method of process of The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). These discourses produced in both social and professional spheres mirror the sociological knowledge development of the professionalisation agenda that has enveloped the process of professional legitimacy since the Second World War. The interactions are described intertextuality, with each chapter in this thesis presenting the interconnectedness of a variety of discourses. The Foucauldian perspective achieved the purpose of seeking how nursing was shaped by the society and influenced society to form what constituted a nursing professional, to the present time. ‘Uncertainty’ in the nursing profession was the key concept found in the investigation. Nursing attempted to reduce uncertainty by regulating nursing education, and by setting boundaries for the practice of professional nursing. This governmentality generation process reflects other forms of surveillance developed during the late 20th century, and was used to establish the subjectivity of nurses in terms of ‘who’ has the right to define nursing and its knowledge systems. The role of the nurse and the requirements for a nurse were emphasised as personal characteristics rather than as professional behaviour when nurse ‘training’ occurred solely in the hospitals. Who defined the role of nurse and who could be a nurse was decided by medical officers and administrators rather than nurses themselves. As the description of the role of the nurse was expanded to the social sphere, the debates about the appropriate place for nursing students’ training was influential in bringing about change. Establishing nursing education in the tertiary sector facilitated the professionalisation of nursing. I explored curriculum development as an example of the internal governmentality of nursing. The historical analysis of curriculum development processes at an Australian university and its antecedent organisations, showed how nursing educators think about nursing and the role of nurse and how they reflect these requirements in the teaching of nursing students. The way of thinking about nursing and the professional nurse role was also actively observed in the discourses arguing for the use of the thinking tools of nursing such as the nursing process, other problem-solving approaches and latterly for the use of clinical reasoning. This study uncovered the process of handling uncertainty internal and external to nursing through processes of professional education. Uncertainty control was an essential in nursing education and thinking tools were key in the process for nursing educators to re-set the parameters of nursing. Professional education aims to develop both the individual nurse and the profession, as a whole, which may lead to conflicts of interest. Therefore, it is important for nurse educators to be aware of these potential conflicts of interests in their governmental strategies. It is also necessary to develop an interactive and corroborative curriculum that includes the many stakeholders interested in the development of the nursing profession.

This thesis examines quotcustomer-focusedquot communication and resident participation within the retirement village sector which is one part of the increasingly quotmarketisedquot aged-care services in New Zealand. In this respect the sector is no different from other domains of consumer life where marketing-oriented organisations aim to find out what their customers want and give it to them. This research examines communication related to customer-focused organisational activities and residents' enactment of participation within retirement village organisation (RVO) settings with respect to these processes of marketisation. Taking a critical-interpretive perspective, the thesis undertakes a collective case study involving two major New Zealand RVOs. Both organisations were defined as quotretirement villagesquot within the meaning of the Retirement Villages Act 2003, established in the 1990s, and offered quotretirement livingquot independent housing and apartments across a range of locations. A significant part of the study also examined publicly available promotional material from six RVOs operating multiple sites in various New Zealand locations. This thesis explores retirement villages as co-productions between the corporate entities that develop and market villages and the residents who live in them. The thesis also explores RVO rhetoric about quotretirement living for active 55 plusquot, RVO enactment of customer focused communication and activities, and residents responses to and expectations of both. It is argued that this co-production has implications for residents' participation, their roles and relationships with employees, as well as for organisational communication processes and structures. The rhetorical and critical discourse analysis reveals the complexity of what quotparticipationquot means for the residents. Through a close examination of these meanings, the thesis extends current understandings of relationships between quotcustomersquot and quotcustomer-focusedquot organisations and highlights the role of older people in Western Society as co-producers of the very product they purchase: the retirement village. It also raises practical and theoretical issues for organisational communication. At the practical level it highlights how communication messages, structures and processes within RVOs experience tensions in meeting the needs of both internal, current, and long-term customers, and external, potential, and future customers. The thesis offers insights into issues of individual action and freedom within the frame of market-driven and avowedly quotcustomer-focusedquot organisations and consequently suggests a reconsideration of participation in organisations in which customers are also quotinsidersquot.

This study has identified the discourses surrounding water birth and analyses how these discourses are utilised by the media in New Zealand to represent water birth. The philosophical approach that underpins the study is that of philosopher Michel Foucault and his theory on discourse, power and the subject. His framework is used in a discourse analysis to reveal three main discourses: the scientific medical discourse, the natural birth discourse and the dive reflex discourse. Data used for this study consisted of 30 newspaper articles containing the word 'water birth' collected over a five-year period (2000-2005) from New Zealand's eight main broadsheet newspapers. Analysis was a two-part process: Foucauldian discourse analysis and a media discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995b).Firstly, the discourse analysis showed the subject and the power positions each discourse offered women for positioning themselves in that discourse. The literature and texts revealed Foucault's theory on power relations and resultant subjectivity within institutions and how waterbirth within institutions is disciplined, surveilled, excluded and circulated. The second part of the analysis revealed how the media chooses to deploy the three identified discourses that represent waterbirth in New Zealand. This textual analysis followed the framework of Fairclough's (1995b) media discourse analysis, showing media strategies that are used to promote the discourse deemed to be ideologically significant by the media outlet. Textual analysis identified that the scientific medical discourse contests waterbirth as an unsafe, unproven practice that puts babies' lives at risk. This discourse categorises women who choose waterbirth as unsafe, irrational, alternative, tree-hugging hippies who favour perceived benefits of waterbirth for themselves above the safety of their baby. The natural birth discourse contests that waterbirth is a safe practice that has encountered few problems since its emergence as a validated birthing practice in the late 1980s. It promotes waterbirth as having multiple benefits for both mother and baby and as a way of enhancing the physiological process of birth through non-intervention. The dive reflex discourse underpins the issue of babies drowning when born into water. This discourse details a reflex that suppresses the normal breathing mechanisms in neonates at birth. Literature debates its existence and troubles the overall trustworthiness of such a reflex to prevent a baby drowning when born into water. It is this discourse that sways people's views and positioning on the overall discourse of waterbirth.

The death of a child spectator at the implosion of the Royal Canberra Hospital on 13 July 1997 was an accident that had a profound impact on the local community, prompting a significant cursive response. Promoted as a public spectacle, the implosion was planned as an orchestrated collision between past and future that would enable an instantaneous obliteration of past in order to create a site of future opportunities. When it resulted instead in a failed demolition and the death of a child, the reversal of popular expectation precipitated not only shock, grief and guilt, but also a widespread state of ontological instability. If a certain fascination with death and disaster had contributed to the event’s popular appeal before the implosion, it was compounded by feelings of guilt and shame in the event’s tragic aftermath. Those feelings, shared by public and journalists alike, were given expression in the mediated discursive space of the Canberra Times and other media outlets, resulting in an extensive rhetorical performance of witness, therapy and argument. In this thesis, I use the diversity of voices that are held together in the discursive web that forms the textual fabric of this study’s empirical data, not to create a historical, single perspective narrative, but to go some way in re-creating the event, and the immediate response to it, by allowing that discourse to be re-voiced. As the product of extensive cultural labour on the parts of those who produced it, the implosion discourse, of which this thesis is now a part, stands as a significant corpus of commemorative work. This discourse is evidence of an engaged polity – one that transcended the passive role prescribed for it of an audience as consumers of entertainment to become, through its own labour, agents, creators and performers of meaning. My central thesis is that it is in this cultural performance that the true practice of ‘community’ can be discerned. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis is positioned at the intersection of two fields of research: language and gender and language development, to address the lack of linguistically informed investigation into the emergence of gendered subjectivity. Rather than treat the domain of language and gender research as a site of resolve, the research problematises the area to create a site of contestation by drawing attention to the limitations of research based on a single theoretical framework which proposes unified gender identity as gender difference. Gender will be read not as singular identity but multiple, as a Foucauldian 'nexus of subjectivities'. The study is an investigation into the construction of gendered subjectivity through a critical discourse analysis of a family playing games. The initial contention is that gender is a process which may be performed in multiple ways which are linked to the subject positions taken up in competing discourses. Focusing on children playing games, the study examines how gendered relationships are constructed in discursive practices to propose that it is possible to identify the performance of multiple femininities/masculinites through an analysis of patterns of interaction where the negotiation of power relationships is made visible in language and action. The study is a reflexive ethnographic case study based on data collected of two siblings, a boy and a girl, and their parents playing games at home. Conducted from within a framework which strategically combines poststructuralist readings with linguistic analysis, the research is an example of the viability of 'postlinguistic' approach to discourse analysis. The thesis argues that the study of a culture as it is lived in a family reveals the emergence of gendered subjectivity in the constitutive relationship which exits language, subjectivity and discourse. It is suggested that the development of a child's multiple gendered identities towards normative gender patterns may be traced in the discursive practices which s/he mobilises as a result of the subject positions in which s/he is positioned during the research period / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis is concerned with making explicit the role that language plays in apprenticing social subjects into different social or 'discourse' communities. It focuses specifically on the textual and rhetorical strategies of school history texts written by students, aiming to bring a close linguistic analysis of the texts into relationship with the wider social and cultural context. In particular it focuses on three semantic domains. These are Cause, Time and an area of interpersonal evaluation known as Appraisal. The main questions addressed are ???How do the semantic motifs of Cause, Time and Appraisal function within the discourse of school history? How are they grammatically and lexically realised? What are the semantic and grammatical shifts and interactions that occur as a result of students moving through the different levels of their apprenticeship? In order to answer these questions the analytical tools of systemic-functional grammar are applied to a corpus of texts produced within the context of Australian secondary schooling. These texts represent the range of written genres that history students need to produce in order to fulfil the objectives and outcomes of the history curriculum. A major feature of the research is the use of Appraisal theory, a framework recently developed in systemic-functional linguistics, for analysing the linguistic resources used to negotiate emotions, judgements and social valuations. This theory proves valuable in taking us beyond more traditional linguistic concerns with interpersonal meaning, which focus on modality and mood structure. The main findings of the linguistic analysis show that construals of Cause, Time and Appraisal are core linguistic tools both for interpreting the past and for persuading audiences of the validity of such interpretations. Analysis also reveals that induction into the (discourse) community of historians can be generally characterised as a process of the student expanding their repertoire of metaphorical and specialised language resources as they move from recording the past to arguing about the past. By providing a fine grained linguistic analysis of the different types of texts that make up school history writing, the research is able to provide insights into the apprenticeship process and into the function and role of history both within and beyond the school context. The major conclusion reached here is that history inducts students into an abstract world of grammatical metaphor and in so doing provides them with the linguistic means to talk about people and time as abstract entities. It also provides them with the positioning and persuading strategies (the ???intellectual flexibility???) necessary for social positions of responsibility.