This compilation thesis examines parents' and teachers' approaches to curriculum objectives that involve shared responsibility between home and school regarding the children's upbringing and education. On the basis of four articles, the meanings of good teachers, good parents, and a good cooperation practice along with the meaning of gender in home-school relationships were examined. Questions were asked from both a teacher and a parent perspective about concrete practices and constructs with respect to this cooperation. The overall aim was to conduct an exploratory study on the importance of gender in the home-school relationship. The first article explores the use of gender and diversity in research on home and school relationships. In the second article, access to the research field of “home and school relationships” was problematized. Article 3 analyzes teachers´ and parents´ experiences regarding parents’ being resources in the primary school setting. The article focuses on what teachers expect from "ideal" mothers and fathers as well as what parents expect from "ideal" teachers. Article 4 analyzes the experiences that teachers and parents have with regard to the practical consequences of home and school cooperation. The theoretical starting point includes feminist poststructuralist theories and discourse analysis. Inductive qualitative interviews were executed in a mainstream district in Sweden with an increasing immigrant population; the interviewees included 25 parents and the eight teachers who taught their children. In order to interpret and to understand the meanings of the interviews, two context analyses were conducted. One involved the mapping of the local context and preconditions that surrounded the study's informants with respect to the socio-economic context, local school plans, action plans, and management of the educational activities. The second involved analyzing the rhetoric of governance and policy in the longer term, regarding the importance of gender in the home-school relationship with respect to the former Swedish elementary school and the current nine-year compulsory school. The thesis’ main results show that gender has great importance in homeschool relationships: Women/mothers bear the overall responsibility for engaging in cooperation, while this responsibility is largely made invisible in the research. In concrete home and school practices, the responsibility is also mostly not problematized. The study analyzes the construction of a cooperation practice that operates in two versions and affects performative practices at both home and school. Through a “mother responsibility” discourse in regard to home and school practices, mothers are expected to become teachers´ servants based on teachers´demands. The result indicates that both parents and teachers express attitudes that may raise questions regarding whether they, despite the curriculum mission to counteract traditional gender patterns, are truly dependent and reliant on a cooperation practice in which mothers are made particularly responsible and thus contribute to asymmetric gender patterns. The study’s results are surprising, given all government interventions in the Swedish compulsory school, which, since the 1960s, have focused on gender equality through education, training, and research. Both parents and teachers viewed the cooperation practice as a practical aid in their efforts to manage their own professional roles. The conditions for cooperation are based on the fact that the dominant discourse that emphasizes female care and responsibility is never challenged. Instead, the cooperation practice focuses on supporting those processes in which women are key leaders and where male teachers and fathers have only a limited responsibility for specific activities. In order to change this gendered situation, both the structural factors on the outside as well as the gender-blind approaches on the inside must be challenged in parallel so that sufficient strength can be mobilized to counter a normalization process that is reinforced by intersecting effects.

As a contraceptive technology, women’s sterilization is a medical event that is uniquely situated in relation to the dominant discursive link between women and reproduction. Intended as a contraceptive option that permanently ends a woman’s potential ability to sexually reproduce, women’s sterilization presents a significant point for exploring the discursive formation of femininity, and how the concepts thereof relate to broader questions of access, control, and regulation of sterilization and the female sterilization patient. This study uses a Foucauldian feminist theory of discourse to explore such questions in a qualitative discourse analysis of women’s sterilization, from both a historical perspective and from within contemporary medical texts. Sterilization has had a particularly tumultuous history in the provision of reproductive healthcare for women; situated within public health and welfare discourse that differentiates the “unfit” from the “fit” reproducers, women have been forcibly sterilized under classist and racist eugenic programs, while subtle yet coercive forms of sterilization abuse continue to occur as inequality of reproductive healthcare access is an ongoing issue for immigrant women, poor women, and women of colour. In light of this historical analysis, as well as the impact of feminist and bioethics discourse upon contemporary medical practice, an analysis of medical texts further explores the association of women with reproduction in the discursive form of the sterilization patient. This study argues that the sterilization patient is situated within a discourse of ideal femininity, associated with normalized forms of mothering, sexuality, and family structure. Given the historical link between the discursive “fit” reproducer, these concepts have continued implications for women’s experience of accessing sterilization as a contraceptive option. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2007-07-17 17:09:15.595

The Ironman triathlon began in 1978, according to popular accounts the result of an argument among a group of athletes about who was the fittest. Thirty years later, participation in the Ironman has grown exponentially despite the physical and mental demands of the sport. In my dissertation I examine the ways different types of pain and pleasure function in the production of bodies and selves within this sporting practice and how these understandings of pain and pleasure intersect with neoliberal discourses. My study adds to an important body of literature in the sociology of sport that has explored pain and injury. This literature has revealed the normalization of pain and injury in sport, at the expense of athletes’ short and long-term health. Exploring pain and pleasure in a recreational sport and fitness practice and in light of neoliberal governmentality offers new insights. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 recreational Ironman triathletes and incorporated my own Ironman experiences into the project. Mediated representations of the sport helped to contextualize the interview and autobiographical materials. I subjected the information that I gathered to a critical discourse analysis informed by the theoretical perspectives of Michel Foucault. My findings reveal that there are multiple ways that people construct their experiences of pain and pleasure in the Ironman context. Athletes strive to negotiate “positive” and “negative” kinds of pain in an effort to produce skilled, disciplined bodies, capable of finishing the event and claiming an “Ironman identity.” Pleasure in this sport seems mostly connected to ideas of challenge, achievement, rewards, and recognition. The constructions of pain and pleasure largely reify dominant sport and exercise discourses which promote discipline, toughness, and achievement. Considering the Ironman in light of neoliberalism, it was evident that values of health, self-esteem, the use of pain, and the primary use of non-work/leisure time for training and racing were intricately connected to ideas about individual responsibility. I argue that as the “Ironman identity” becomes more normalized, our understandings of bodies and health shift in problematic way. This reinforces neoliberal ideologies of self-responsibility and makes diminished State responsibility for citizens more insidious than it is already. / Thesis (Ph.D, Kinesiology & Health Studies) -- Queen's University, 2010-12-22 11:37:39.876

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The study presented in this dissertation focusses on the analysis of novices' trajectories in learning genres of their profession, engineering. The goals of the study are: (a) to refine the current understanding of what constitutes professional genre knowledge and of how novices learn and use genres of professional communication, and (b) to test the effectiveness of the suggested pedagogy for an Engineering Communication course. This qualitative longitudinal exploration includes ten case studies that span eight years and trace the participants' trajectories through the university and workplaces. I use a combination of three theoretical perspectives---Rhetorical Genre Studies, Activity Theory, and situated learning---as a lens for the analysis of novices' learning trajectories on their way to becoming professional communicators. The study demonstrates that in addition to the knowledge of genre conventions and understanding of an audience's expectations, genre knowledge is a result of a summative effect of such ingredients accumulated from different sources at different time periods as (a) cultural capital, (b) domain content expertise, (c) the novice's understanding of the improvisational qualities of genre, (d) agency, as reflected in the novice's ability to both seize and create kairotic moments in the chronological flux of time and enact genres in the ways that are recognizable by the community of practice, (e) formal education, (f) workplace experiences, and (g) private intention. The study indicates that the ingredients of genre knowledge accumulated in one context may be used in another, that is, that rhetorical strategy may be portable, thus allowing novices to adapt genres learned elsewhere to a new rhetorical situation. The study also shows that communication practices can be successfully taught outside of local contexts, for example, in the academic classroom. In addition I draw pedagogical implications of the inquiry for the communication classroom; for example, that communication instructors need to extend their pedagogies beyond teaching genre conventions and audience awareness and provide classroom contexts that would allow students to develop the understanding of genre as allowing for flexibility and educated intervention. The study also shows that the timing of the offering of domain-specific communication courses is crucial for the students to be able to develop the sense of connections among communication courses, subject matter courses, and professional practice.

No description available.

This study examines the oral strategies employed by Zulu speaking people in the expression of conflict and criticism in their social discourse. These oral discourses, viz. izibongo and naming practices, are analysed to ascertain the socially acceptable ways in which Zulus articulate their frustrations and discontent in various social settings. These are commonly used in rural communities, but they also echo in urban social settings. Hostility and ill-feelings are thus channelled through the sanctioned form of these various oral expressions either as a means of merely airing one's dissatisfaction or as a means of seeking personal redress. The study also reveals that these particular forms of oral expression with critical content, do not exist for their own intrinsic value simply to artfully describe a particular individual. They are composed primarily to serve a particular social function of conflict articulation and expression in non-conflictual ways. The function of these oral forms is that of a "socio-cultural archive" (Conolly 2001), which is vested in the memory of those who can express in performance, their renditions of personal and group identity. The aesthetic beauty of these forms must be regarded as a secondary function and a direct by-product of the primary function, which is personal identity expressed in a way which ensures that issues which could cause conflict are highlighted so as to diminish their conflictual potential. The reason for this is that in order to fulfill the first function, which is conflict reduction, Jousse (1990) states there has to be a form (rhythm, balance and formula) which makes the expressions memorisable - which literate people equate to 'poetry'. / Thesis (Ph.D)-University of Durban-Westville, 2003.