The concept of the ‘procurer’ comes from section 212 of Canada’s Criminal Code, which prohibits directing, enticing, assisting or profiting off the prostitution of another person. A contentious debate surrounds Canada’s prostitution laws, with a constitutional challenge currently before the Supreme Court. Within this climate of debate, the concept of the ‘procurer’ has moved out of the strictly legal sphere and into a broader discourse, with a range of parties laying their claims to truth on the “realities” of the industry generally and on the procurer specifically. Using a methodology of Foucauldian discourse analysis, this thesis examines Ontario Provincial Court case summaries to consider the contribution of the Canadian judiciary to discourse on the procurer. Findings suggest that the judiciary replicates many of the existing stereotypes of prostitution and its participants, such as the procurer as pimp, while (re)producing a small counter discourse of the procurer as business manager.

Feminist activism has a rich history in Canada, but mobilization on the issue of violence against women specifically gained considerable momentum during what is often referred to as the “second wave” of the feminist movement. Since this time, the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec have seen a proliferation of both grassroots and public policy responses to intimate partner violence and sexual violence. This study is an effort to construct a feminist history of the activism that occurred between 1970 and 2010, as well as to make sense of feminist claims-making strategies using a social constructionist approach to social problems and to make sense of feminist activism as a social movement using social movement impact theory. In constructing a feminist history, documents from the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives were consulted and interviews with current and former feminist activists were conducted. The historical component of this study focuses on how feminist activists first recognized and responded to the problem of violence against women. This analysis suggests that throughout the last forty years, feminist activists have engaged in a multi-pronged project of providing feminist services for victims of intimate partner and sexual violence, advocating for social and legal change as the “official” response to violence against women, and conducting their own research on the extent and nature of violence against women. Various strategies were used in this process, including forming partnerships and coalitions, but activists also faced challenges from within and outside the movement, including internal debates, struggles to fit in, and backlash from counter movements. The final chapter discusses how the history of feminist activism on violence against woman cannot easily fit into strict constructionist approach to understanding social problems and, as a social movement, is difficult to evaluate given the myriad goals, mechanisms for reaching those goals, and interpretations of success associated with the movement. Future research directions are also suggested, including looking at evidence of claims-making from other sources; bridging the gap, theoretically and pragmatically, between the “mainstream” feminist movement and other streams of women’s activism; and, more conceptual work on feminist movements and the separation between intimate partner and sexual violence.

The ultimate aim of this inquiry is to expand understandings of what it can mean to engage meaningfully with children, youth, and families and the systems designed to support them, in context. By widening our gaze to include the discursive, political, and other dimensions of lived experiences, practitioners and policy makers may be able to engage in practices that prioritize the wellbeing of all community members, recognizing social justice as central to this development. Methodologically, the challenge has been to work emergently, in line with social constructionist and postmodern understandings of social reality in which conditions are always in flux. Since there has been a call from qualitative researchers to make visible more ‘messy texts’ through which decision making processes can be made transparent, this document tracks the course of the study from beginning to end. By making explicit the methodological decisions as they are made, and contextualizing these decisions within not only the academic literature and data but also within personal and political realities, the author aims to demonstrate an ontological approach to learning and change. By experiencing research not only as product (findings), but also process (ways of engaging), the researcher highlights the transformative potential of relating differently with(in) one’s inquiry. The five-part exploration itself begins by unpacking dominant discourses of both struggles and support, which are becoming increasingly individualized due to a number of contextual realities. It then explores relational theories of subjectivity as well as theories of multiplicity, in an effort to look at other – albeit often concealed – dimensions of experience. By taking these theories and the multitude of practices they inform into consideration, possibilities for other ways of engaging in human service practices and policy development become intelligible. However, even when relational processes are acknowledged, avenues for action are significantly constrained through power relations. Deliberately incorporating notions of nomadism, non-unitary subjectivity, situatedness, and diversity into our discourses and practices can function politically in that they can provide opportunities for us to embrace and enact new narratives and ways of being. These in turn open space in which different kinds of meaningful social engagement can occur. In the pursuit of more just ways of being, deliberately attending to multiple stories can thus contribute to shifts in practice and policy that are responsive to what was, what is, and what may be possible. Drawing from existing empirical research as well as personal narratives shared by community members and policy makers, this dissertation argues that by blurring lines between self and other, contextualizing practices, understanding change as ontological, reconceptualising power, and recognizing justice as an ongoing and shared responsibility, we might collectively access and mobilize fruitful possibilities that are often obscured. / Graduate

This thesis is an investigation into the accounting practices by which British and American expatriates make sense of Western involvement in the Middle East. Based on the analysis of an audio-taped archive of some sixty hours of face-to-face interview material recorded in Kuwait during a ten-month period in the year immediately following the Persian Gulf Conflict of 1990-91, this project explores the interactional work by which speakers situate their conversational contributions in dialogic anticipation of a range of competing but mutually co-implicative demands for accountability which they take their talk and their participation in the circumstances of that talk to entail. Specifically, speakers are seen to manage the productive tension between the competing demands for accountability to conflicting assumptions about the nature of prejudice on the one hand, and the awareness of and/or sensitivity to cultural difference on the other, in and while attending to the situated concerns for their warrant in making the claims that they do and the degree to which they are implicated in those claims in and through the activity of their production. In this way, conflicting assumptions are show to be constitutive of the social practices whereby speakers account for Western involvement abroad.

This thesis employs a social constructionist perspective to analyze constructions of the International Criminal Court (ICC), specifically (1) the notion of impunity; (2) the presence of a critical analysis; and (3) the connection between state support/opposition and favourable/negative portrayals of the Court. The theory chapter focuses on the propaganda model’s main premise that “media serve the interests of that state … framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate accordingly” (Herman & Chomsky, 1998, p.32). A thematic qualitative content analysis and several tools of grounded theory deconstructed 1,982 articles collected from The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Overall, the newspapers contained a high level of support for the propaganda model’s main assertions. Some of these conversations were quite limited and/or biased; specifically, American newspapers manipulated debates to justify American opposition to the Court.

The aim of this thesis is to study what role the Swedish school meal has as a public meal in Swedish culture. An additional aim is to study the meal patterns of children, including the school meal. An ethnological questionnaire with 192 informants was used to study people’s perceptions and memories of the school meal. The school meal was seen as part of the Swedish welfare state, but also as a second-class meal, which did not live up to the ideal, which was a meal with the same values as a meal served at home. Observations in school canteens (25 hours), interviews with the school meal staff (six informants) and focus group interviews with children in grade 4-5 (seven groups with a total of 52 children) were carried out at three schools in central Sweden. Firstly, the data was analysed as to how the teachers interacted with the children in relation to the pedagogic meal. The teachers took on three different roles:  “the sociable teacher role”, “the educating teacher role” and “the evasive teacher role”. Secondly, the children’s understanding of food and meals in the school meal context was analysed. The results showed that the children used ideas from the adult world among their peers in the school meal situation. This included the implementation of institutional commensality, the telling of stories about food and the classification of foods in dichotomies. A questionnaire covering the meal patterns of the children and intake of some snack foods was also distributed to the children attending grade 4-5 at the three schools and their parents. Matched pairs (n=147) were analysed for agreement. Most children had a regular meal pattern, and there was general agreement between child and parent reports, except for sweets and chocolate. The expectations on the school meal are high. At the same time, there appears to be a social construction depicting the school meal in a negative way. In order to come to terms with the negative public view of the school meal, the social construction of the school meal needs to be addressed.

There is a growing evidence-base in the epidemiological literature that demonstrates significant associations between people’s living circumstances – including their place of residence – and their health-related practices and outcomes (Leslie, 2005; Karpati, Bassett, & McCord, 2006; Monden, Van Lenthe, & Mackenbach, 2006; Parkes & Kearns, 2006; Cummins, Curtis, Diez-Roux, & Macintyre, 2007; Turrell, Kavanagh, Draper, & Subramanian, 2007). However, these findings raise questions about the ways in which living places, such as households and neighbourhoods, figure in the pathways connecting people and health (Frolich, Potvin, Chabot, & Corin, 2002; Giles-Corti, 2006; Brown et al, 2006; Diez Roux, 2007). This thesis addressed these questions via a mixed methods investigation of the patterns and processes connecting people, place, and their propensity to be physically active. Specifically, the research in this thesis examines a group of lower-socioeconomic residents who had recently relocated from poorer suburbs to a new urban village with a range of health-related resources. Importantly, the study contrasts their historical relationship with physical activity with their reactions to, and everyday practices in, a new urban setting designed to encourage pedestrian mobility and autonomy. The study applies a phenomenological approach to understanding living contexts based on Berger and Luckman’s (1966) conceptual framework in The Social Construction of Reality. This framework enables a questioning of the concept of context itself, and a treatment of it beyond environmental factors to the processes via which experiences and interactions are made meaningful. This approach makes reference to people’s histories, habituations, and dispositions in an exploration between social contexts and human behaviour. This framework for thinking about context is used to generate an empirical focus on the ways in which this residential group interacts with various living contexts over time to create a particular construction of physical activity in their lives. A methodological approach suited to this thinking was found in Charmaz’s (1996; 2001; 2006) adoption of a social constructionist approach to grounded theory. This approach enabled a focus on people’s own constructions and versions of their experiences through a rigorous inductive method, which provided a systematic strategy for identifying patterns in the data. The findings of the study point to factors such as ‘childhood abuse and neglect’, ‘early homelessness’, ‘fear and mistrust’, ‘staying indoors and keeping to yourself’, ‘conflict and violence’, and ‘feeling fat and ugly’ as contributors to an ongoing core category of ‘identity management’, which mediates the relationship between participants’ living contexts and their physical activity levels. It identifies barriers at the individual, neighbourhood, and broader ecological levels that prevent this residential group from being more physically active, and which contribute to the ways in which they think about, or conceptualise, this health-related behaviour in relationship to their identity and sense of place – both geographic and societal. The challenges of living well and staying active in poorer neighbourhoods and in places where poverty is concentrated were highlighted in detail by participants. Participants’ reactions to the new urban neighbourhood, and the depth of their engagement with the resources present, are revealed in the context of their previous life-experiences with both living places and physical activity. Moreover, an understanding of context as participants’ psychological constructions of various social and living situations based on prior experience, attitudes, and beliefs was formulated with implications for how the relationship between socioeconomic contextual effects on health are studied in the future. More detailed findings are presented in three published papers with implications for health promotion, urban design, and health inequalities research. This thesis makes a substantive, conceptual, and methodological contribution to future research efforts interested in how physical activity is conceptualised and constructed within lower socioeconomic living contexts, and why this is. The data that was collected and analysed for this PhD generates knowledge about the psychosocial processes and mechanisms behind the patterns observed in epidemiological research regarding socioeconomic health inequalities. Further, it highlights the ways in which lower socioeconomic living contexts tend to shape dispositions, attitudes, and lifestyles, ultimately resulting in worse health and life chances for those who occupy them.

Thesis (M.A.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Anthropology, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (MA (Counselling Psychology))--University of Pretoria, 2003. / Includes bibliography.

This research focuses on the influence of institutions on entrepreneurship among Kuwaiti youth. It aims to capture the role played by institutions on youth entrepreneurship at the backdrop of a dampening ‘spirit’ for it. This research is currently very important due to various economic and geo-political factors leading to an economic downturn, which has led to the need for entrepreneurial ventures. It reviews and consolidates concepts and factors purported to facilitate and increase entrepreneurship for the benefit of the society and economy of Kuwait. This research uses a social constructionist approach to make sense of how institutions influence Kuwaiti youth in their quest to become entrepreneurs. It exposes institutional endorsement and legitimacy from formal and informal institutions. It shows the use of regulative, normative and cognitive dimensions and influences on entrepreneurial intentions and actions. This research shows how institutions interact with Kuwaiti youth and what role they play in the formulation of intentions and actions concerning entrepreneurship. A number of key formal and informal institutions have come to the fore that influence one another (in)directly as living entities, and likewise influence the youth (in)directly. The research contribution also shows that young people have to approach some key institutions and in return their desire to become entrepreneurs is strengthened or weakened depending on how institutions respond and what role they are willing to play in their lives.