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This work is a collectivist engagement between researcher and participants in a knowledge quest for self-hood through engaged bodily awareness and sense. The world of the teen girl is explored from a philosophical, social, and political perspective that emphasizes expression of self through embodied knowing and being. The process is performative where yoga is used as an arts-based method to explore the self through bodily awareness. The body is reclaimed as a way to know oneself. Yoga is the expression of the living, being, and knowing body. The asana practice, the still of meditation, and the flow of the breath are emancipatory discourse where each of us moves, changes, and grows; and ultimately becomes. This becoming is a consciousness raising experience that finds and grows voice. The transformative process engages a physical expression where participants’ and researcher’s individual sense of self is connected with their universal sense of self hereby replacing current patterns of harmful thinking with new consciousness that is reflective of self awareness and realization. Found poetry is used to explore the experience of the participants. The poetic representation brings the reader into the world of the teen girl. Voices that have been secret and silenced are celebrated. The body is the instrument through which power and ownership of the moment and the self are expressed through emotion and experience. The participants and researcher move collectively and intuitively from passive objects to self-knowing subjects; subjects who are thoroughly engaged in the world and aware of their highest potential as liberated selves. The findings of this collectivist and activist research approach indicate that embodied engagements elicit the space where flesh speaks and external and internal become unified as one. Yoga is an artful, embodied expression that is about experiencing the world without being enslaved by the world. This is not a passive engagement but an activist engagement that challenges hegemonic ideas of girls in the world and in the world of a girl. This further embraces the idea of the unity of whole-self and mind-body interconnectedness where we are not passive observers of the body with awareness of self located in the head watching over the body as object. Subject and object as separate dissolve and mindfulness is the present. The end result is one where we become; we become fully engaged in a creative and fluid self-hood enabling self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and self-love. / Graduate / 0727 / 0525 / 0273 / kyte_d@yahoo.ca

This work is a collectivist engagement between researcher and participants in a knowledge quest for self-hood through engaged bodily awareness and sense. The world of the teen girl is explored from a philosophical, social, and political perspective that emphasizes expression of self through embodied knowing and being. The process is performative where yoga is used as an arts-based method to explore the self through bodily awareness. The body is reclaimed as a way to know oneself. Yoga is the expression of the living, being, and knowing body. The asana practice, the still of meditation, and the flow of the breath are emancipatory discourse where each of us moves, changes, and grows; and ultimately becomes. This becoming is a consciousness raising experience that finds and grows voice. The transformative process engages a physical expression where participants’ and researcher’s individual sense of self is connected with their universal sense of self hereby replacing current patterns of harmful thinking with new consciousness that is reflective of self awareness and realization. Found poetry is used to explore the experience of the participants. The poetic representation brings the reader into the world of the teen girl. Voices that have been secret and silenced are celebrated. The body is the instrument through which power and ownership of the moment and the self are expressed through emotion and experience. The participants and researcher move collectively and intuitively from passive objects to self-knowing subjects; subjects who are thoroughly engaged in the world and aware of their highest potential as liberated selves. The findings of this collectivist and activist research approach indicate that embodied engagements elicit the space where flesh speaks and external and internal become unified as one. Yoga is an artful, embodied expression that is about experiencing the world without being enslaved by the world. This is not a passive engagement but an activist engagement that challenges hegemonic ideas of girls in the world and in the world of a girl. This further embraces the idea of the unity of whole-self and mind-body interconnectedness where we are not passive observers of the body with awareness of self located in the head watching over the body as object. Subject and object as separate dissolve and mindfulness is the present. The end result is one where we become; we become fully engaged in a creative and fluid self-hood enabling self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and self-love. / Graduate / 0727 / 0525 / 0273 / kyte_d@yahoo.ca

Este trabalho apresenta uma proposta de atividades desenvolvidas, no Colégio Americano, com a oitava série do Ensino Fundamental, a qual aborda a formação de um indivíduo mais crítico, mais consciente e mais comprometido com as questões de seu tempo por intermédio do trabalho com a leitura. Consideramos as especificidades dessa série quanto ao desenvolvimento cognitivo, afetivo e psicológico. Fundamentamos esta pesquisa por meio das contribuições da Análise do Discurso, da Lingüística, da Teoria da Literatura, assim como por meio das contribuições teóricas oriundas da área da Educação. Faremos, aqui, uma descrição apenas das duas propostas que serviram de fonte de dados para realização dessa pesquisa: a primeira constou de um estudo comparativo, com enunciação de juízos, entre a obra Capitães da Areia, do escritor Jorge Amado, e o Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente; a segunda, de registro, de impressões, de questionamentos, de reflexões sobre a realidade que circunda o educando, por meio dos diferentes gêneros textuais estudados em aula, como também por meio de fotografias, a fim de os alunos comporem uma revista de leitura de mundo. Com o objetivo de facilitar a aplicabilidade desta proposta e de garantir material viável e acessível a todas as escolas, com bons resultados experimentais, apresentamos uma descrição detalhada dos procedimentos que realizamos. Ainda um fator a ser considerado em nossa pesquisa é a possibilidade de adaptação deste trabalho a diferenciados níveis de ensino, por intermédio do estudo de outras estratégias de leitura e de produção textual. / This work presents a proposal of activities developed, at Colégio Americano with the 8th grade. It focus on the formation of individuals who are more critical, more conscious and more engaged with the questions of their times through reading. We took into consideration the specificities of this school grade as to their cognitive, affective and psychological developments. We based this research on the contributions of the Analysis of Speech, Linguistics, and Theory of Literature as well as on the theoretical contributions of the field of Education. Here we describe only the two propositions that worked as data sources for this research. The first one was a comparative study, with judgment manifestation, between Jorge Amados Capitães da Areia and the Child and Adolescent Statute; the second one, the noting of feelings, questionings, reflections about the reality that surrounds the students, by means of different text styles studied at class as well as pictures, so that students could produce a world reading magazine. In order to facilitate the applicability of this proposal and of guaranteeing useful and accessible material to any school, with good experimental results, we present a detailed description of our procedures. Another point to be considered in our research is the possibility of adapting this work to different grades, by means of studying other reading and text production strategies.

[pt] Esta dissertação buscou empreender uma genealogia e análise crítica de processos feministas de subjetivação. Como ponta de partida, foram usadas uma experiência que faz parte da trajetória da pesquisadora e o estudo de caso dos grupos de Consciousness-Raising (C-R). Fenômeno popular do feminismo americano dos anos 70, C-R foi uma ferramenta adotada pelo Women s Liberation Movement por meio da qual mulheres organizavam-se com uma metodologia própria para responder perguntas usando exemplos de suas vidas pessoais, além das próprias emoções. As respostas eram tratadas como dados a serem analisados e comparados, de modo a pensar coletivamente o que é ser mulher e identificar opressões estruturais da sociedade. Baseada em vasto levantamento documental, relatos e literatura da época, esta pesquisa pretendeu compreender o funcionamento da dinâmica dos grupos de C-R e pensar criticamente, a partir de autores pós-estruturalistas, pós-colonialistas e da teoria queer, nas diversas implicações políticas e subjetivas de ferramentas e práticas de subjetivação feministas. Com foco nas relações entre C-R e a questão da diferença foi investigado o surgimento e materialização da política identitária nos movimentos feminista e LGBT+, e analisado o papel da cultura material na construção e consolidação de valores normativos dentro e fora desses movimentos. / [en] This thesis sought to undertake a genealogy and critical analysis of feminist subjectification processes. Its starting points were a personal-academic experience of the researcher and the case study of the Consciousness-Raising (C-R) phenomena from the American second-wave feminist movement. C-R was a tool developed and widely adopted by the Women s Liberation Movement, in which women organized themselves using their own methodologies to answer questions based on their personal lives and emotions. The answers were used as data to be analyzed and compared in order to provoke collective reflection on what it means to be a woman and to identify structural oppressions. Based on vast archival research, personal testimonies and feminist literature produced at the time, this thesis aimed to comprehend the dynamics of C-R groups to reflect critically - drawing from post-structuralist, post-colonialist and queer theory - on the several political and subjective implications of feminist subjectification practices and tools. Through focusing on the relationship between C-R and the issue of difference, it also analyzed the development of Identity Politics within the feminist and LGBT+ movements, as well as the role played by material culture in the construction and consolidation of normative values within and outside said movements.

This dissertation used a post-structural feminist theoretical lens to examine women’s under-representation in mathematics graduate programs and careers. Five dominant discourses that potentially influence women’s decision to enter mathematical careers were discussed, including how those discourses interact in competing and complementary ways to shape women’s and men’s ideas about the nature of mathematics. The study investigated the long-term impact of a single-sex reform-based summer mathematics program on high school girls. The study utilized a variety of data collection techniques including surveys, field observations, phenomenological interviews, and artifact collection. Nine participants who were enrolled in a summer mathematics program for high school girls in 2000 were purposefully selected to best represent the overall population of program participants during that time period. Results of this study indicate that these women rejected the traditional procedural way that mathematics was taught to them. They saw mathematics as irrelevant and had very little knowledge of potential careers in mathematics. However, the findings of this study suggest that programs like the one studied here can have positive outcomes on girls’ academic performance, their perceptions of their own math ability, and their perceptions of mathematics as field of study. Overall, this study allows researchers to better understand the lived experiences of women in mathematics, hopefully leading to a more dynamic model that can begin to explain how competing discourses influence girls’ and women’s decision to enter mathematics careers. Based on these findings, recommendations for changes in teaching practice are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to examine adult literacy beyond its constraints as a social problem and instead consider the implications of illiteracy as a particular form of lived experience, analogous to women's oppression at large. Through a complex system of meaning making, the knowledge accrued by illiterate adults is qualitatively different, and examining these differences in terms of their correlation to coping mechanisms developed in the face of social alienation and diminished professional prospects yields a greater understanding of class privilege and how nontraditional learners fit into a larger social structure. From the perspective of academic feminism, adult illiteracy presents several problems regarding the scope of an inclusive feminist community that acknowledges privilege and difference. The primary method through which information regarding feminism is conferred is printed materials, which utilize highly specific, specialized jargon, and unwittingly create an exclusive community marred by internalized racism and class stratifications. This study explores other methods through which feminist ideation might theoretically be possible, i.e. cultural "reading" communities and vocational and continuing education programs focused on cultural competencies, as women come out of their imposed silences and become aware of their circumstances in a way that resembles feminist thought, if perhaps without sophisticated language with which to communicate those ideals. In this way, feminist ideation and semiotics tie in together, as attitudinal change may occur without the semantic realization of what this entails. This goal of this paper is also, in part, to justify why acknowledging gendered learning differences and a particular female subjectivity for adult literacy clients will yield better results for their self-valuation, as gender is a component of diversity all but ignored within the scheme of adult literacy pedagogical theory.

There is a current wave of interest in pornography as a vehicle for queer, feminist and lesbian activism. Examples include Dirty Diaries: Twelve Shorts of Feminist Porn (Engberg, Sweden, 2009), the Pornfilmfestival Berlin (2006-) and the members-only Club LASH in Stockholm (1995-). Based on ethnographic fieldwork designed around these cases, the purpose of the thesis is to account for, historicize and understand this transnational film culture and its politics and ethics. The fieldwork consists of interviews, questionnaires and participant observation, including participation as one of the filmmakers in Dirty Diaries. The thesis studies queer, feminist and lesbian pornography as an interpretive community. Meanings produced in this interpretive community are discussed as involving embodied spectatorial processes, different practices of participation in the film culture and their location in specific situations and contexts of production, distribution and reception. The thesis highlights a collective political fantasy about a safe space for sexual empowerment as the defining feature of this interpretive community. The figure of safe space is central in the fieldwork material, as well as throughout the film culture’s political and aesthetic legacies, which include second wave feminist insistence on sexual consciousness-raising, as well as the heated debates referred to as the Sex Wars. The political and aesthetic heterogeneity of the film culture is discussed in terms of a tension between affirmation and critique (de Lauretis, 1985). It is argued that the film culture functions both as an intimate public (Berlant, 2008) and as a counter public (Warner, 2002). Analyzing research subjects’ accounts in terms of embodied spectatorship (Sobchack, 2004, Williams, 2008), the thesis examines how queer, feminist and lesbian pornography shapes the embodied subjectivities of participants in this interpretive community and potentially forms part of processes of sexual empowerment.

This thesis investigates the effects of explicit input-based focus on form on the comprehension and production of noun clauses by the intermediate level students studying at Atilim University. To this end, a comparison was made between the comprehension and production scores of two groups of students from this context, one receiving explicit input-based focus on form (Group 1) and the other receiving no additional instruction other than the one suggested in the syllabus they were following (Group 2). Before and after this instructional intervention, both groups were given three different tests, namely an interpretation test (to evaluate how the students comprehended noun clauses), a production test (to evaluate how they used noun clauses), and a grammaticality judgment test (to evaluate the students&amp / #8223 / explicit knowledge of noun clauses). The comparisons between Group 1 and Group 2 revealed that explicit input-based instruction may have a power to influence the L2 learners&amp / #8223 / comprehension and explicit knowledge of noun clauses. However, the results indicated that this type of instruction may not be effective on the production of learners as it is on their comprehension of L2 forms.

In the chapters of my thesis, I explore how "soft" consciousness-raising novels of the first, second and third-waves of feminism practice underground feminism by covertly exposing women's socio-political issues outside of the confines of feminist rhetoric. In moving away from the negative connotations of political language, the authors enable the education of female audiences otherwise out of reach. Working from and extending on various theorists, I construct a theoretical model for what I term underground feminism. Running on the principal of conducting feminist activism without using feminist rhetoric, underground feminism challenges the notion that "subtle" feminism means weak feminism. In illustrating how underground feminism works in novels and in physical activism, I hope to encourage the recognition of the political utility of women's writings that do not fit the strict archetypes of feminist authorship. Analyzing the effectiveness of covert feminist conversion narratives, I discuss one soft consciousness-raising novel for each wave. The novels - Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893), Dorothy Bryant's Ella Price's Journal (1972), and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) - accused by scholars of employing weak feminist politics, are investigated as feminist literature that disidentifies with the feminist label with the possibility of facilitating a wide spread conversion process in "would be" feminists. After analyzing how the novels place women's issues at the center of discourse by discussing female education, women's voice, and narrative control, I consider how the underground feminism implicit in the texts extends to activism outside of literature. I also end by arguing that these novels enable a more intricate conversation about women's issues in which the voices of both self-identified and non-identified feminists are recognized.