This thesis explores participatory research involving the author and a small group of adults with Asperger’s syndrome, as co-researchers. The research was based on the assumption that people with Asperger’s syndrome think differently from neuro-typical people (people who do not have Asperger’s syndrome or autism). It is not denied that people with Asperger’s syndrome have difficulties, but the thesis argues that these are caused by living in a world which is dominated by neuro-typical people who do not understand or allow for the differences that people with Asperger’s syndrome have. The research is based on the assumption that adults with Asperger’s syndrome are able to be co-researchers and that part of the task of the researcher and the co-researchers was to find a way of working together that was enabling to all involved in the research. The original aim of the research was to ascertain what kind of service provision adults with Asperger’s syndrome wanted and this formed the research question: ‘What support do adults with Asperger’s syndrome want?’ The findings of the research challenge traditional notions of support as the emphasis is taken away from support to consider forms of understanding. It has resulted in the proposal of a new way of understanding Asperger’s syndrome. It proposes models for understanding how people with Asperger’s syndrome and neuro-typical people relate to each other. These models challenge a currently prevailing deficit-based understanding of Asperger’s syndrome. The author and the co-researchers worked collaboratively to design research tools, collect and analyse data and disseminate findings. The data was collected from other adults with Asperger’s syndrome who took part in questionnaires and then different adults with Asperger’s syndrome who took part in a focus group and individual interviews. The work was informed by the literature on spatial understandings of how society is ordered. The thesis uses this spatial understanding as a way of analysing how people with Asperger’s syndrome are regarded in a society which is dominated by people who are neuro-typical. Insights from a spatial understanding are also used to consider the process of the research, including an application of the social model of disability to participatory research involving adults with Asperger’s syndrome. My original contribution to knowledge is that I have demonstrated that people with Asperger’s syndrome have the potential to work in group situations on a complex piece of research. I have shown that people with Asperger’s syndrome are able to make a significant contribution to the understanding of how people with Asperger’s syndrome and neuro-typical people relate to each other. I have also demonstrated how a non-disabled researcher and co-researchers with Asperger’s syndrome can work together and devise working methods which are enabling. In the words of the thesis, I have demonstrated how an ‘autistic research space’ can be created. This thesis discusses the role of the neuro-typical researcher in the creation of this research space. The research is regarded as having been co-produced and the meaning of this is explored. The thesis discusses the nature of participatory research using a spatial understanding. Emancipatory research is said to be based on the social model of disability, where non-disabled researchers are not involved. I have shown that participatory research can also be based on the insights from the social model of disability and achieve the outcomes required for emancipatory research. I have proposed a framework for planning and analysing participatory research. Perhaps the most significant contribution to knowledge is the new way of understanding Asperger’s syndrome proposed by the research which challenges the more traditionally accepted deficit based model.

Entertainment Education is a communication strategy widely used in non-formal community education for the purpose of inspiring behaviour and social change. As an international development strategy for educational interventions in mostly developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, the practice is founded on persuasive communication aimed for the diffusion of ‘modern’ innovation. Entertainment Education has been commended for its efficiency in creation of awareness amongst target communities, but criticised for its inability to generate enduring practical change in the lives of the target community members. Situating this practice within Emancipatory Transformative Education, I interrogated the emancipatory principles of democratic practice in Entertainment Education as representational of an intercultural educational space. I did this with a sample case of Geenu Nti programme situated in Northern Nigeria and executed by an American centre for international development. My interaction with the programme stakeholders and audience through the use of semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and documentary analysis revealed that despite efforts at participatory practice, the programme fell short of the key emancipatory values of intellectual equality and freedom in its educational content and process. This raised the need for the reconceptualization of current approach in the management of transformative change in individuals and communities and a relational concern with practitioners’ approach to emancipatory education in general. Drawing on the thoughts of emancipatory education philosophers like Freire, Rancière and Biesta as well as trialectic change philosophers like Bergson, Chia and Ford & Ford, I conceptualised the principles of a model of emancipatory educational change practice. These principles were then articulated into a realisable interactional space with ideas drawn from Ross and Harré to develop a Model of Emancipatory Education for Change which presents an equally creative and expressive inter-subjective communicative relationship between the educator and the ‘educandee’**. Here the educator, through democratic authority simultaneously challenges and nourishes the educadee’s freedom for autonomous growth within individual and collective existential realities, while equally navigating personal growth. The model furthers the idea of emancipation as a process of subjectification to a conceptualisation of emancipation as a process of subjectified socialisation. NB **: The term ‘educandee’ is adopted from Kivelä et al. (1995) and Biesta (1998) and introduced in the later part of the work to signify my concept of participants in communicative educational engagements. I use the term educandee to convey my concept of an educational participant who, under a relatively equal power relation with the educator, actively participates in the educational process as an autonomous individual creating response to own existential circumstances under the intentional support or guidance of a skilled practitioner. This represents the ‘educated’ which is generally my preferred term as against the ‘learner’ or ‘student’ that I deliberately avoided using except when presenting the ideas of other scholars and in their own terms.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Mindfulness and the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programme is becoming increasingly popular in the Western world. These days, there are many institutes and organisations that support and promote mindfulness, while there is also a growing body of research and academic literature on the topic. Yet, despite the implicit connection to social change, the focus of secular mindfulness in the Western world has primarily remained on the benefits that mindfulness hold for the individual. This notion prompts the question whether there is a relationship between mindfulness and social change. The key theoretical constructs that constitute the theoretical framework of my study include Habermas’s critical theory and his emancipatory-cognitive interest in knowledge creation, and Mezirow’s transformative learning theory, which expanded the Habermasian theory in terms of adult education and learning. Guided by my theoretical framework, the primary research question was formulated as follows: ‘What are the relationships between mindfulness, emancipatory learning and social change?’ In order to address this research question, I selected a case study research approach and collected data using both quantitative and qualitative instruments. For my empirical investigation I selected, as my case study, an MBSR programme offered in Cape Town, South Africa. The data were collected from 55 adult learners who participated in the programme. To my knowledge, this is the first academic research study that investigates the MBSR programme in the field of adult education and learning in a South African context.

An intersectionality-based content analysis was done; an eclectic and abductive approach was needed to understand the entanglement of comorbidity and intersectionalities impacting self-identified women transnationally.  The research project is presented in three parts detailing its specific features. For example: Part 1 contains the aim and research questions. The scope is nine transcripts/extracts from the narratives collected from sources of public domain (such as web-based channels and platforms where speakers, either orally or in writing, expressed their experience with types of autoimmune disease. Theoretical framework takes place in this section and it is formed by foundations from theories, social transformation-based arguments and contributions from the authors whose expertise in their fields have made a permanent difference in diverse societal, educational and scientific contexts. Authors such as Butler, Ahmed, Crenshaw, Joyce et al., Olkin, Celinski and Gow, Brinkman et al., and many more are valuable citations included in each of their respective sections. Part 2 describes the methods of analysis, coded collected data material and research design; Part 3 describes the analysis on content material and findings to answer the research questions previously created, to address and understand the studied phenomena. The work-in-progress related to our non-profit association (NPA) is also briefly mentioned as the emancipatory technology I have designed from scratch, where I am the main member and first founder. Based in Linköping, Sweden, it is a space to empower one another to face our unique complexities while sharing a place to strengthen each other through education within transnational environments.

The illicit drug overdose crisis is an ongoing epidemic that continues to take lives at unprecedented rates and British Columbia, Canada has been identified as the epicenter in Canada, where approximately five deaths per day are linked to unregulated substances most often including fentanyl (Service, 2022). In Victoria, British Columbia, community drug checking sites have been implemented as a public health response to the ongoing overdose crisis and the unregulated illicit drug market through a community-based research project called the Vancouver Island Drug Checking Project. In addition to providing anonymous, confidential, and non-judgmental drug checking services with rapid results, the project has conducted qualitative research aimed to better understand drug checking as a potential harm reduction response to the illicit drug overdose crisis and the unregulated illicit drug market (Wallace et al., 2021; Wallace et al., 2020). An analytical framework was utilized to understand the impact substance use stigma has on those accessing drug checking services, as well as those who avoid accessing these services as a direct result of substance use stigma. This study found that the risk of criminalization and the anticipation of being poorly treated appear to be the most significant barriers related to stigma, rather than actually experiencing stigma. Further, it appears the implementation of community drug checking creates tensions that need to be navigated as sites and services balance a hierarchy of substances and stigma; differing definitions of peers; public yet private locations; and, normalization within criminalization. The findings suggest the solution to substance use stigma and drug checking will not come from continuing as we are, but through making changes at all levels (individual, interpersonal, and structural) and thus for all people who access community drug checking. / Graduate

This dissertation empirically expands the existing knowledge on participatory democracy through a study of Jamaica's Parish Development Committees (PDCs). These groups offer an avenue for Jamaicans to inform government policy, and this analysis explored the extent to which supportive institutional, infrastructural and superstructural (referring to the society's culture and power configurations) conditions for robust implementation of this democratization initiative existed. This inquiry involved observing more than one hundred hours of PDC activities at locations across Jamaica and conducting sixty key informant and four focus group interviews with relevant stakeholders. The analysis was bolstered by an appreciation of emancipatory politics employed by the country's general population since slavery not only to survive oppression, but also to influence the nation's political agenda. Riots during slavery and in the present day, for example, have offered citizens an avenue towards self-determination. This study found that the emergence, survival and thriving of PDCs in Jamaica is determined largely by the extent to which emancipatory political tactics are successfully applied by PDC stakeholders to combat a number of continuing challenges in these committee's environments. The democratization initiative symbolized by the PDCs promotes inclusiveness yet is led predominantly by older, educated middle class individuals with talents and capacities garnered from several years of experience in various fields. The dissertation argues that the opportunity cost of a more inclusive order explains this fact, in that Jamaica's finite resources mean there is limited space for a learning curve and the cash strapped committees have only been able to survive when their members could help to defray the cost of their operations. The dissertation explores other central challenges confronting the PDCs and the strategies these participative organizations have employed to address each. Primarily, this analysis provides a micro-scale view of the interaction of the factors that have shaped the power and possibility of Jamaica's democratization initiative. / Ph. D.

This research explores the subjective experiences of women with mental health challenges residing in a supportive housing building in Southern Ontario. Drawing on principles of Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR), five women were brought together to engage in an arts-based workshop meant to provide the opportunity to reflect on their experiences, express themselves through alternative means, and connect with peers over shared experiences. Over six meetings, participants have been invited to contribute to group discussions by taking and analyzing photos that represent their journey while living in supportive housing. Drawing on a critical feminist and Mad Study scholarship, this project used intersectionality as its theoretical lens. This choice intends to emphasize the interconnected and compounded system of oppression that women experience when their identity intersects across various dimensions such as gender, gender expression, race, mental health status, class, and more. This research is essential because of the pervasiveness of discrimination, disempowerment and oppression of people diagnosed with a ‘serious mental illness’ and how these infiltrate relationships and social systems. However, little empirical data exists to explore the in-depth perspective of these individuals, who lack power and voice in society. In particular, women with a psychiatric diagnosis live at the intersection of multiple oppressive factors. Thus, to counterbalance oppression, it is essential to recognize these women as the experts in their lives. Moreover, women’s active participation in research and their photographs and stories offered a nuanced understanding of issues affecting them. From the photographs (visual data) and the meaning given by participants through their stories (narrative data), issues emerged related to stigmatization, gender-based violence, economic limitations, inadequate support, and various forms of discrimination. Furthermore, participants expressed their insights into desired changes within and beyond the supportive housing program. The relevance of this research is threefold: 1) it gave agency to women living in supportive housing to outline their unique needs and wants; 2) it contributed to the paucity of qualitative research situated at the intersection of gender and ‘mental illness’; 3) through KTE activities, it has the potential to inform housing and helping professionals on ways to improve housing projects, design activities, and foster residents’ engagement for this population group. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

Published Articles / The dawn of a democratic South Africa in 1994 established a society entrenched in Human Rights milieu. As such, public schools are meant to align their policies with the rule of the law. Particularly, section 10 (1) of South African Schools Act, 84 1996 (hereafter SASA) respectfully prohibits the administration of corporal punishment directed at a learner in public schools. The subsequent section 10 (2) of SASA admonishes that any person contravening section 10 (1) of SASA is liable on conviction to a sentence which could be imposed for assault. These mentioned provisions of the school legislation are consistent with section 10 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (RSA) which affords every person the inherent right to dignity of the person. Against the afore-mentioned legislative provisions, teachers have resorted to the use of sarcasm as a tool to inflict punishment in the manner that it could be equated with corporal punishment. Sarcasm is a form of language that is used to cause emotional and psychological harm, belittle, ridicule and humiliate the person it directed at. Judged against the provisions of the legislation governing schools in South African public schools, sarcasm could be said to be a direct violation of fundamental rights of learners to dignity of the person. In order to explore the intonation of sarcasm as supplement for corporal punishment the research paper employed a qualitative critical emancipatory research (CER) approach. Data gathered through a purposive sample of ten secondary teachers was analysed by the use of textual oriented discourse analyses.

Black girls continue to suffer from inequitable treatment in schools resulting in disparate academic and social outcomes. While deficit ideologists have continued to attribute outcomes to cultural deficiencies within the Black community, research has found various systemic issues of racism and sexism seriously affecting Black girls in schools. However, the experiences of this population remain under or uninvestigated. When Black girls’ experiences in school are investigated, they are commonly framed as a group in need of saving and their perspectives and voices eliminated from the work. Further, this group is often homogenized and all their experiences limited to those of the inner-city or urban environments. Using a critical raced-gendered epistemology, grounded in critical race theory and Black feminism/womanism, this qualitative interview study explores Black high school girls’ experiences in a predominately White suburban public school in the southeast. Through the method of storytelling that includes constructing counter narratives, five girls (ages 14-16) relay their experiences in this predominately White suburban educational space. Parent reflections as well as document review augment these girls’ stories to further illuminate their experience. A grounded theory analysis of these data uses my own cultural intuition. This analytic approach foregrounds the intersectionality of Black girls’ understanding of their racial and gendered educational experiences in a predominantly White suburban environment, the systemic barriers that serve to inhibit their success, and the methods of resistance girls use to persist in these spaces. This study is significant in both its methodology as well as results, offering critical insight into how to conduct equitable and liberatory research and create education policies to improve outcomes for this underserved group.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-04T20:01:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 5 / Programa Institucional de Capacitação de Docentes e Técnicos / O presente estudo constitui-se em uma reflexão sobre as possibilidades emancipatórias da prática pedagógica realizada na escola através do jogo teatral. Para tanto, propõe como suas principais referências o pensamento de Theodor W. Adorno e de Paulo Freire, promovendo ainda o diálogo com teóricos da área de teatro-educação, como Richard Courtney, Viola Spolin, Ingrid Koudela, entre outros. Como base empírica da reflexão, foram feitas observações de um grupo de crianças e adolescentes, participantes de atividades realizadas através do jogo teatral na escola, bem como entrevistas com esses alunos e a professora. As observações e as entrevistas foram posteriormente analisadas com procedimentos interpretativos, com base filosófica inspirada na fenomenologia e na hermenêutica. A análise desse material nos permitiu concluir que o jogo teatral promovido na cena pedagógica da escola pode proporcionar o desenvolvimento sensível do aluno, que, ao colocar-se no “papel” do outro, se identifica com ele, possibilitando o a / The present study constitutes in a reflection about the emancipatory possibilities of the pedagogical practice carried out in the school through the theather game. Thus, it proposes as its main references the thought of Theodor W. Adorno and Paulo Freire. Furthermore, it promotes the dialog with theorists from the theather-education area, like Richard Courtney, Viola Spolin, Ingrid Kaudela, among others. As empirical base of the reflection were made observations in a group of children and teenagers that were participants in activities done through the theather game in the school, as well as interviews with these students and the teacher. The observations and the interviews were lately analysed by procedures of interpretation philosophically based on phenomenology and hermeutics. The analysis of this material allowed us to conclude that the theather game promoted on the pedagogical scene of the school might proportionate the sensitive development of the student that putting himself in the other’s “role” can i