Through Foucault’s genealogy and ethics of the self, I examine the experiences of Asian teacher candidates in the K-12 Canadian school system and how those experiences influence what teaching means for them. I look at the connections between race, the body and education and ask, how do the embodied experiences of racialized students inform the formation of the racialized teacher candidate? In my study I reveal that discourses of racism and discrimination are embodied and constitute racialized subjectivity. Through using individual interviews and a focus group, I listen to the narratives of my participants as they recount experiences in education. These stories and my analysis have important implications for educators, scholars, researchers and policy-makers interested in race, the body and education as well as concerns of diversifying the teaching personnel and transforming curriculum.

Through Foucault’s genealogy and ethics of the self, I examine the experiences of Asian teacher candidates in the K-12 Canadian school system and how those experiences influence what teaching means for them. I look at the connections between race, the body and education and ask, how do the embodied experiences of racialized students inform the formation of the racialized teacher candidate? In my study I reveal that discourses of racism and discrimination are embodied and constitute racialized subjectivity. Through using individual interviews and a focus group, I listen to the narratives of my participants as they recount experiences in education. These stories and my analysis have important implications for educators, scholars, researchers and policy-makers interested in race, the body and education as well as concerns of diversifying the teaching personnel and transforming curriculum.

The potential of a broad enactive approach in education has yet to be realized. This thesis contributes to the development of a well-rounded enactive educational theory and practice. This thesis argues that a broad enactive perspective has the potential to challenge, reframe and reconfigure problems, issues and practices in education in ways that improve teaching, learning and research communities. It establishes that a broad enactive approach as a theory of embodied mind, a dynamic co-emergence theory, and a method of examining human experience helps to realize the meaning, scope, and potential of enactive education. It takes as its point of departure Dewey’s broad enactive philosophy of mind, cognition, embodiment, experience, and dynamic co-emergence. It shows, through an examination of an actual public classroom encounter, that a broad enactive approach has the potential to reconfigure responsibility, ethics and justice in education. It demonstrates using a case study of the enactment of impostor feelings in higher education how a broad enactive approach to education as the potential to reconfigure teaching, learning and research practices.

This qualitative study focuses on students and instructors who study, teach, and learn critical concepts of identity, such as gender, race, and dis/ability. The participants’ reflections on these university classroom experiences are examined in order to explore the ways they understand their encounters with privilege and power. In classes that take up discussions of identity – critical identity classrooms – the intention is often to teach, study, and learn how (our) identity or identities manifest in social life, how these manifestations can be problematized, and how these explorations can lead to social change. Often, these courses centre on discussing identity in terms of oppression, rather than investigating the intersections of privilege and oppression. A major contention of this study is that a lack of discussion about privilege in the academy enables the pervasive invisibility of many unearned social advantages to remain under-theorized and ‘invisible.’ This study questions how it is that we come to understand concepts of identity to be one-dimensional, rather than understanding privilege as dynamic and situated. Using in-depth interviews with 22 undergraduate students and 8 instructors from 2 contrasting universities, this study explores 3 main questions: (1) How do students in higher education who are engaged in critical identity studies interpret privilege, both for others and themselves? (2) How do the participants understand their experiences inside and outside the classroom to be related to notions of privilege and oppression that often arise in critical identity classrooms? (3) How does using a multi-site approach to study critical identity classroom experiences extend the ways in which students’ understandings of privilege can be explored? Using these research questions, the intersections of space/location, power, and identities as they inform notions of privilege and oppression are demonstrated. The participants’ reflections expose how questions of belonging, safety, and ‘place’ contribute to the silences around the study of privilege. The study suggests that understanding privilege and oppression as located within the same network of relations, rather than as binary opposites, will aid in making privilege more accessible as a topic of study in critical identity classrooms.

Autism is a condition that receives considerable attention around the world. In France and the United States there are significant ruptures between the various groups treating individuals with the disorder. The current study first explored some of the reasons for these conflicts and then attempted to bridge French psychodynamic theories and English biological models of autism using cognitive measures. Specifically, this experiment examined multisensory integration and motor defense mechanisms in people with varying levels of autistic traits from a nonclinical population. Participants viewed a rubber hand that was stroked either synchronously or asynchronously with their own hand and rated the extent to which they felt that their hand resembled the rubber hand. It was hypothesized that the more autistic tendencies participants expressed, the less multisensory integration and embodiment they would exhibit through their reported feelings of the illusion. It was also expected that people with higher autistic traits would demonstrate rigid musculature through their performance on the Purdue Pegboard. Results partially supported the first hypothesis but did not support the second. The data revealed that individuals with higher autism scores experienced the asynchronous condition significantly more than those with lower autism scores. There was no difference in performance on the Purdue Pegboard task in relation to one’s reported levels of autism. Results are discussed in the context of efforts to integrate research and develop a more cohesive view of autism among the many parties involved in treating the disorder.

This dissertation is about boys and fatness. In it I explore the central discourses that shape young men’s (13-15 years) experiences of their bodies, particularly in relation to body size, shape, and fatness. A central objective is to listen, hear, and take seriously the embodied health rationalities of young men as they negotiate the multiple and contesting discourses that confront them in their daily lives. I employ a feminist poststructural lens to account for the nuanced, alternative, and contextually specific ways young men think about and do health. Data collection was divided into three phases (non-participant observation, photo(focus) groups, and interviews) and was implemented at two Toronto area sites, including an exclusive private school and a publicly funded parks and recreation community centre. I demonstrate that there is not one way of experiencing fatness and masculinity, rather the young men’s constructions of fatness and health were fluid, shifting, contradictory and cross cut by other salient identity categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, social class, and age. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, I show how obesity discourse provides a set of resources by which young men are able to construct themselves as autonomous, rational, neoliberal subjects, and how these subjectivities are differentially constituted depending on social and cultural positioning. I also reveal how differently raced and classed young men take up and embody normative ideals of the lean muscular male body through culturally appropriate masculine technologies of the self (i.e. sport and heterosexuality). The multiplicity of health and body discourses available to the young men gave rise to contested and ambivalent experiences and practices, such that dominant discourses were not always articulated in a straightforward and predictable manner, but were imbued with alternative and, in some cases, subversive meanings. To date, the social sciences have neglected to account for the relationship boys and men have with fatness discourses. By centering the analysis on the embodied experiences of diverse racialized and classed youth, this research demonstrates that weight and shape is more than a biomedical problem to be eradicated, but a discursively compelled embodiment that exists at the crossroads of the social, cultural, psychic, and biologic.

The potential of a broad enactive approach in education has yet to be realized. This thesis contributes to the development of a well-rounded enactive educational theory and practice. This thesis argues that a broad enactive perspective has the potential to challenge, reframe and reconfigure problems, issues and practices in education in ways that improve teaching, learning and research communities. It establishes that a broad enactive approach as a theory of embodied mind, a dynamic co-emergence theory, and a method of examining human experience helps to realize the meaning, scope, and potential of enactive education. It takes as its point of departure Dewey’s broad enactive philosophy of mind, cognition, embodiment, experience, and dynamic co-emergence. It shows, through an examination of an actual public classroom encounter, that a broad enactive approach has the potential to reconfigure responsibility, ethics and justice in education. It demonstrates using a case study of the enactment of impostor feelings in higher education how a broad enactive approach to education as the potential to reconfigure teaching, learning and research practices.

This qualitative study focuses on students and instructors who study, teach, and learn critical concepts of identity, such as gender, race, and dis/ability. The participants’ reflections on these university classroom experiences are examined in order to explore the ways they understand their encounters with privilege and power. In classes that take up discussions of identity – critical identity classrooms – the intention is often to teach, study, and learn how (our) identity or identities manifest in social life, how these manifestations can be problematized, and how these explorations can lead to social change. Often, these courses centre on discussing identity in terms of oppression, rather than investigating the intersections of privilege and oppression. A major contention of this study is that a lack of discussion about privilege in the academy enables the pervasive invisibility of many unearned social advantages to remain under-theorized and ‘invisible.’ This study questions how it is that we come to understand concepts of identity to be one-dimensional, rather than understanding privilege as dynamic and situated. Using in-depth interviews with 22 undergraduate students and 8 instructors from 2 contrasting universities, this study explores 3 main questions: (1) How do students in higher education who are engaged in critical identity studies interpret privilege, both for others and themselves? (2) How do the participants understand their experiences inside and outside the classroom to be related to notions of privilege and oppression that often arise in critical identity classrooms? (3) How does using a multi-site approach to study critical identity classroom experiences extend the ways in which students’ understandings of privilege can be explored? Using these research questions, the intersections of space/location, power, and identities as they inform notions of privilege and oppression are demonstrated. The participants’ reflections expose how questions of belonging, safety, and ‘place’ contribute to the silences around the study of privilege. The study suggests that understanding privilege and oppression as located within the same network of relations, rather than as binary opposites, will aid in making privilege more accessible as a topic of study in critical identity classrooms.

A growing body of work suggests that narrative comprehension involves the simulation of the events and actions described in a narrative (e.g., Barsalou, 2008; Matlock, 2004). Preliterate children’s ability to simulate a narrative character’s movements is explored here in three studies. Children’s simulations of a character’s movements were found to be constrained by their expectation of the duration of the described activities (i.e., walking vs. driving) and by their expectations about the motivating influence of certain psychological factors (i.e., character being eager or not eager to get to a location). Using a novel methodology these findings reveal an ability among preliterate children to create impressively rich and dynamic mental representations of narrative events and address. The implications of the present investigation speak to the larger issue of how human minds comprehend narratives and represent narrative events.

Breast and penis augmentations are century old processes of body modification continuing in development and practice today. This Masters thesis is a content analysis of breast and penis augmentation print and internet advertisements to explore one facet of augmentation discourse presented in public space. Relevant theoretical literature includes fetish discourse and medical discourse as existing frameworks that conceptualize augmentation predominantly as a process of body fragmentation. After reviewing this literature, I expand to blend together perspectives from three body theorists, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, as an alternate framework for embodiment. I then use content analysis to examine the data collected from 21 print sources and 27 internet sources. The data indicates fetish discourse, focusing on body fragmentation, is the dominant content in breast and penis augmentation advertisements; however, I argue in the conclusion that incorporating elements of embodiment into fetish discourse is a better perspective for future research.