Progressing into the 21st century young pregnancy and parenthood in the United Kingdom is a focus of political, media and public attention. The country is described as experiencing an epidemic, with the highest rates of young pregnancy and parenthood recorded in Western Europe. Statistics demonstrate that in 2000 38,690 under 18 year-olds in England became pregnant, of which 44.8% ended in legal termination. In light of this data, and within their remit to address the issue of Social Exclusion, New Labour commissioned a report into young pregnancy resulting in the development and implementation of the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy. The Strategy has two main aims; namely reducing the rates of young conceptions and providing better support and education for young parents. This thesis argues from a conceptual framework that questions the contested assumption that young pregnancy and parenthood is a problem. A literature review demonstrates a lack of representation of the voices and experiences of young mothers. This directs the research question to ask what is the experience of young mothers in their own words and placed within context? Critical Discourse Analysis is used to examine three examples of context shaping data that includes government policy, a newspaper article and a radio talk show programme. The analysis reveals discourses that suggest there is a right time and framework for motherhood. These discourses form a dialectical relationship with voices and experiences of young mothers that are analysed using Discourse Analysis. This analysis elicits two key central discourses permeating the experiences of young mothers that are the Good- Bad mother binary that informs and exacerbates experiences of maternal ambivalence. Moreover, these discourses inform the practice of discrimination against young mothers. The thesis concludes with a call to listen to the experiences of young mothers in order that their needs might be more fully understood. It suggests that discrimination against young mothers be incorporated into Equal Opportunity and Anti- Discrimination policy.

There is a public perception that Canada is an ideal place for cultivating global citizenship because of its culturally plural demographics and official policies of multiculturalism. Global Citizenship Education (GCE) is a growing field in Canadian education and is an explicit focus in the Alberta social studies curriculum. This thesis brings together four conversations within which multiculturalism and GCE are both related and conflated: (a) the public perceptions of Canada as a model of cultural diversity and global citizenship, (b) the scholarly discussions of GCE and multiculturalism, (c) the policy context where multiculturalism is set alongside GCE, and (d) the practical ways that the two are mutually related in curriculum and lesson documents. There are four interrelated sections to this thesis; each identifies the tensions inherent to multiculturalism, GCE, and the perceived relationship between these fields. First is a wider philosophical and theoretical framing of the topic. Second is the examination of educational research on the topic. Third is a critical discourse analysis of policy, curriculum, and lesson plan documents in the province of Alberta. Last is a synthesis of the findings from all three sections. The analysis finds that there are philosophical and ideological tensions inherent to both fields and to the relationships between them. This contributes to conceptual and ideological conflation and confusion. This finding raises some important concerns in terms of possibilities and constraints to thinking about cultural diversity and social inequities in new ways. It highlights how multicultural contexts of GCE can lead to the recreation of tensions, conflation, and ambiguity. However, the Alberta context demonstrates that a multicultural context can also open critical spaces and possibilities for GCE through engagements with tensions and complexities. Thus this thesis contributes theoretically, by presenting a framework and perspective for interrogating and critically inquiring into the relationship between the two fields. It also contributes to the policy and curriculum discussions in educational research and practice by highlighting the importance of foregrounding key tensions inherent to each field and by identifying the potential negative consequences of leaving these tensions implicit.

There is a public perception that Canada is an ideal place for cultivating global citizenship because of its culturally plural demographics and official policies of multiculturalism. Global Citizenship Education (GCE) is a growing field in Canadian education and is an explicit focus in the Alberta social studies curriculum. This thesis brings together four conversations within which multiculturalism and GCE are both related and conflated: (a) the public perceptions of Canada as a model of cultural diversity and global citizenship, (b) the scholarly discussions of GCE and multiculturalism, (c) the policy context where multiculturalism is set alongside GCE, and (d) the practical ways that the two are mutually related in curriculum and lesson documents. There are four interrelated sections to this thesis; each identifies the tensions inherent to multiculturalism, GCE, and the perceived relationship between these fields. First is a wider philosophical and theoretical framing of the topic. Second is the examination of educational research on the topic. Third is a critical discourse analysis of policy, curriculum, and lesson plan documents in the province of Alberta. Last is a synthesis of the findings from all three sections. The analysis finds that there are philosophical and ideological tensions inherent to both fields and to the relationships between them. This contributes to conceptual and ideological conflation and confusion. This finding raises some important concerns in terms of possibilities and constraints to thinking about cultural diversity and social inequities in new ways. It highlights how multicultural contexts of GCE can lead to the recreation of tensions, conflation, and ambiguity. However, the Alberta context demonstrates that a multicultural context can also open critical spaces and possibilities for GCE through engagements with tensions and complexities. Thus this thesis contributes theoretically, by presenting a framework and perspective for interrogating and critically inquiring into the relationship between the two fields. It also contributes to the policy and curriculum discussions in educational research and practice by highlighting the importance of foregrounding key tensions inherent to each field and by identifying the potential negative consequences of leaving these tensions implicit.

The news media serve as the Canadian public’s main source of information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This thesis examines the ways in which the Canadian media portray the conflict, through a lens of Habermas’ (1962) public sphere theory, Foucault’s (1926 – 1984) ideas on discourse, and Rawls’ (1921 – 2002) conceptions of equality and justice. Building on these theories, Noelle-Neumann’s Spiral of Silence theory (1974), Said’s Orientalism (1978), and d’Arcy’s (1913 – 1983) conception of the right to communicate are examined to arrive at a framework for analyzing Canadian news. Looking at ideological representations, power manifestations, issue framing, and social responsibility within the media, this thesis explores whether the Canadian media portray the conflict in such a way that fosters a downward spiral of opinions within the Canadian public. A Critical Discourse Analysis of coverage in two national English Canadian newspapers, The Globe and Mail and the National Post, during three separate timeframes of increased violence in Israel and Palestine between 2000 and 2009 reveals that newspaper representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are often entrenched in predefined ways of portraying the Other, fostering an Israeli-Palestinian spiral of silence in Canadian media.

This thesis is an intendedly critical, non-deterministic/non-reductionist, and, a tentatively theoretical, post-disciplinary narrative of the class struggles in Turkey over the period of 1989-1995. Much of the argumentation draws upon a critical reading of the corporatist literature, and, radical Political Economy, specifically focusing upon Marx&rsquo / s theory of distribution. Distribution is seen as, inter alia, a moment of production, as production-determined distribution. Wages and profits are argued to be determined as the joint effect of class struggles in production, in the realm of ideology/discourse, the condition of Labour, the State power, and, the organisational capacity of Labour. Particular emphasis is placed upon the formation of new Capital strategies in the late Eighties and early Nineties. More specifically, the ESK is seen as the archetype of the so-called competitive corporatism in Turkey. Competitive corporatism is a State form, a partial phenomenon, and, a question of hegemony.

The goal of this study is to critically examine health information sources in order to determine whether Aboriginal women are represented in these resources, and if so, how they are being presented. This research is intended to illuminate the practices around the construction of information, and to demonstrate that the manners in which information is conveyed can be problematic. To accomplish these goals, critical discourse analysis was utilized to explore both consumer health publications available to pregnant women in Edmonton, Alberta, as well as academic publications available to students and healthcare providers through the University of Alberta Libraries. Through this critical analysis of these resources, it is clear that information is being constructed in a manner that supports neocolonial practices and reinforces negative stereotypes of Aboriginal women. The analysis of these sources also demonstrates ways in which information can be constructed more appropriately, to avoid racializing tendencies.

This thesis purports to make two contributions to understandings of biotechnology. First, it presents a novel framework through which to view biotechnology as a complex series of fundamentally social and politically economic mediations rather than a decontextualised collection of technical and scientific phenomena. Second, the thesis presents a method for analysing contemporary discourses about biotechnology within this framework. The framework presented in the first content chapter of the thesis identifies what I see to be the four primary mediating "movements" that are central to seeing Biotechnology as Media: Alienation, Translation, Recontextualisation, and Absorption. The next chapter explicates these movements more fully using a combination of social practice and discourse theory. Using these four movements and the mediation framework as a guide, I then critically analyse a corpus of seventy two exemplary texts (approximately 700,000 words) about contemporary biotechnology. Mediation, in the sense I use it here, is not concerned with one particular media form or technology. Rather, it focuses on the process of mediation as the movement of meanings (Silverstone, 1999). I argue that seeing biotechnologies as mediations can provide a deeper and more critical understanding of how ways of seeing, being, acting, and describing (discourses) associated with contemporary biotechnology are moved from micro- and macro-biological and scientific contexts into the everyday lives of citizens and ecosystems. In particular, such a view highlights the forces and voices that currently determine the path and substance of political-economic movements in biotechnology and, consequently, how everyday perceptions of biotechnology are shaped or silenced in processes of mediation. A core assumption of the thesis is that processes of mediation are not neutral. Rather, they are always inherently interpretive, politically economic, and ethically significant. Any mediation involves "filtering" processes via which "content" is transformed into a form that is appropriate for a given medium by persons who have control over the medium, and by the nature of the medium itself. This applies as much in laboratory and scientific contexts as it does in the contexts of mass consumption, whether in newspapers, policy papers, movies (such as Gattaca), or consumer goods. The same is true in the mediation of biotechnology: there are technological and discursive restrictions on what and who can "contribute to" and "come out" of biotechnology and also what is construed as being a valuable and desirable outcome of biotechnology research and development. The three central analysis chapters of the thesis outline firstly how biotechnology can function as a time-based medium for the reproduction of already powerful discourses on, for example, the role of technology in human development and the consumer market as the moral medium between generators of new technologies and their "consumers". I identify exemplars of how the history of biotechnology and mediation (movement) is expressed in the corpus. This is followed by a more concentrated analysis of the ethical and social significance of the key "official" mediations presented in the corpus. I focus in particular on how the predominant policy evaluations of biotechnological mediations expressed in state, national, and international policy documents construct a "virtuous cycle" of product development that will ostensibly "deliver the benefits" of biotechnology to all citizens who, in the corpus, are framed predominantly as "consumers". The final chapter of the thesis reflects on the significance of biotechnology at the macro level of social practices and systems. Apart from its direct function as a technical medium for alienating hitherto inalienable aspects of life, such as configurations of DNA, and turning them into products for sale, I argue that, as a suite of mediating movements, biotechnology has the potential to effectively, and for the most part invisibly, mediate our more general understandings and experiences of ourselves, of other species, and of the world we live in. More specifically, I argue that biotechnological mediations actively, and often forcefully, promote a narrowing of the range of evaluative resources on offer to the general community, and indeed to biotechnologists themselves. Biotechnological mediations can therefore be described as part of a broader movement away from conditions of heteroglossia or dialogue (multi language, multi voice) toward conditions of monologia (one language, one voice). The thesis concludes with an important question: if we can identify these narrowing effects or mediations of biotechnology by using techniques such as Critical Discourse Analysis and by seeing biotechnology in a mediation framework, what can we do to interrupt them and generate movements that are more generative of heteroglossic and socially responsive ways of seeing, being, and acting? I offer a number of responses to the question in the conclusion.

The institutionalisation of neo-liberalist discourse has significantly changed the way in which the relationship between government and community organisations is described and regulated in Australia. These changes are most clearly articulated in government policy discourse as a move away from ‘funding’ community service organisations, to ‘purchasing’ the delivery of services. Under previous funding models, responsiveness to community need was emphasised. Local knowledge was valued and community organisations were largely viewed as best positioned to assess local needs and to design services to the meet those needs. In contrast, new highly regulated funding models have created a change in discourse that positions the community organisation as a seller of services to the government. In the ‘quasi-market’ the government is usually the only (or main) purchaser of services. As the sole purchaser, the government is now (potentially) responsible for specifying the nature of services that they are prepared to purchase. These changes in positioning have been accompanied by significant devolution of previous government provision of human services to the non-profit sector, and are supplemented by considerable changes in regulation practices. The principal questions asked in this research are: How have the changes in discourse and practice at the government level influenced existing discourse and practices in community organisations? How have changes in discourse and practices within and among community organisations affected their capability to operate in a way that is consistent with the values inherent in community discourse? This research approaches the research questions from a Social Constructionist epistemology informed by the work of Michel Foucault and also neo-institutional theorists. This research implements Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as the methodological framework to draw out and analyse tensions that arise from a contest of the discourses of ‘community’ and ‘managerialism’. This research critically examines emergent structures and practices of community organisations in New South Wales (NSW) through the critical analysis of relevant texts and data from four focus groups and nineteen interviews of management committee members and coordinators from community organisations throughout NSW Australia, with a focus on Greater Western Sydney. The way in which these changes at the government level have been translated in discourse and practice at the organisational level, has resulted in a number of tensions within and among community organisations. The major tensions that emerged, and are discussed and analysed in this research, were: Increased managerialism and the impact on ‘traditional’ beliefs – or the ‘institutional myths’ – of community discourse and practice. Increased reliance by governments on community organisations and the effects of this on organisational capacity: A shift of emphasis in accountabilities coupled with increased ‘professionalisation’ and the impact on ‘community representation’. Need or desire for alliances among community organisations and the impact of this on diversity and individual responsiveness. With these tensions came significant frustration and hardship as traditional strategies became more difficult to action in the quasi-market. Much of this tension was due to the use of one discourse to interpret another. What is required in community organisations is an increase in ‘critical consciousness’ to develop a ‘cultural literacy’. This study identified a number of strategies that were assisting community organisations to re-define their position in the new discursive context. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No description available.

Over the past five years an often emotive and controversial public debate has emerged in Australia over access to reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation and donor insemination. The debate was in part prompted by a policy announcement made by the Federal Government who aimed to effectively bar single and lesbian women from accessing these technologies on the basis of marital status. The resulting public debate has centred around questions concerning which ‘types’ of women should be allowed to access reproductive technologies and therefore reproduce. The debate was a highly salient one and the issues have been widely discussed amongst the public, within parliament and through the media, thereby creating a forum where ideas of just what constitutes ‘valid’ motherhood are publicly and privately contested. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the discursive construction of categories of motherhood identity, using the public policy debate around access to reproductive technologies in Australia as a research site. I specifically investigate the designation of particular identities of motherhood as ‘good’ and therefore acceptable, and others as deviant and therefore undeserving of access to the full range of social services available. The research is situated within the field of critical social policy and utilises theories of governmentality, feminism, sexuality and motherhood. The use of theories of governmentality, as developed by Michel Foucault [1979] and implemented by Mitchell Dean (1999), is primary within the research because they enable a consideration of the techniques and discourses through which the identity of the mother is governed and through which individual women act upon and construct their own identities. The analysis engendered by the use of governmentality is educated by an understanding of the socially constituted and inscribed body highlighted within feminist and postmodern approaches. The use of a critical social policy approach situates the research within an epistemological paradigm which offers an analysis that is able to conceptualise the operations of power and the marginalisation and manipulation of particular identities. Theories of sexuality and motherhood are utilised in order to critique these central aspects of women’s experiences which have been largely disregarded in much ‘traditional’ social policy analysis. file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/uqlclayt/Desktop/01front.txt (4 of 17)23/03/2006 1:16:06 PM file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/uqlclayt/Desktop/01front.txt The methodology employed in this research is influenced by an understanding of the functioning of discourse as a device through which social processes and identities are questioned and transformed. I therefore utilise discourse analysis in order to investigate the construction of motherhood identities within the debate around access to reproductive technologies. The specific methodology that I use is critical discourse analysis as developed by Norman Fairclough (1992, 1995, 2003) and Ruth Wodak (2001). In order to investigate the construction of motherhood identities within the study site I conduct a critical discourse analysis of the media texts from two major newspapers which relate to the debate. I also analyse the parliamentary debate which considered the introduction of legislation aimed at allowing individual Australian State governments to restrict access to reproductive technologies. I compare and contrast this analysis with an examination of the mother identities expressed in the narratives of individual single and lesbian women who engage with the reproductive technologies discussed in the debate. In essence this thesis identifies, in the public policy debate around reproductive technologies, a moment of problematisation where the practices of governing involved in the production of motherhood identities are made apparent. I use an analysis of this moment in order to identify and question the construction of motherhood which takes place within policy debates and how individual women construct their own identities as mothers both in relation to and separate from this. The newspaper and parliamentary texts are found to govern women’s behaviour through the identification and promulgation of narrow ‘good’ mother and ‘good’ citizen identities which constrain the range of mother identities deemed to be acceptable. The women’s narratives are found to reject the negative characterisation of their identities within popular discourses and construct a mothering persona for themselves which paradoxically also serves to highlight and enforce many of the characteristics of the idealised ‘good’ mother identity.