Teacher-student writing conferences are an important component in college writing courses. Coming from different cultural and educational backgrounds, many ESL students are not familiar with this practice and tend to listen to the instructor passively. Their perception of the conference may affect their interaction with the instructor. This study investigates how ESL students' perception affects the teacher-student interaction in the writing conferences. The multiple-case study explores: (1) ESL students' expectations of the writing conference and factors contributing to the expectations, (2) participation patterns of ESL students in the conferences, and (3) ESL students' perception of the effectiveness of teacher-student conferencesA questionnaire, distributed to 110 (65 NS and 45ESL) students enrolled in the first-year composition classes, examines students' previous writing experience and expectations of the writing conferences. Pre-conference interviews with 19 focus students (8 NS and 11 ESL) were conducted to verify the survey results. Students' participation patterns were investigated via the video-recorded writing conferences of the 19 focus students. Students' perceptions of the conference were investigated through the post-conference interviews with the 19 focus students and follow-up interviews with six Chinese students.The questionnaire results showed that ESL students and NS students expect to receive feedback on their drafts at the writing conference. ESL students, not familiar with the dynamic feature of the conference, expected the instructor to directly tell them what to do without planning to explain their own thoughts. These student expectations were shaped by factors beyond individual preferences. ESL students' expectations were reflected in the way they participate in the writing conferences. Compared with NS students, who knew better how to "buy" the teacher feedback by asking for opinions or suggestions and announcing plans of revision, ESL students tended to be good listeners at the conference by answering questions. They seldom initiated comments and questions in the conferences. Post-conference interviews revealed that ESL students perceived the conference as effective as they received directive feedback from the teacher. It was noted that their participation was constrained by their preconceived assumption of the teacher-student relationship. The findings offer implications on how to conduct conferences to maximize students' benefits.

Over 500,000 maternal deaths occur globally each year. Over half of these deaths take place in sub-Saharan Africa. The purpose of this study was to understand the sociopolitical and cultural context of childbirth in Liberia including practices, beliefs and traditions that influence maternal health, illness and death. The concepts of vulnerability, human rights related to reproductive health, gender-based violence and war trauma within the theoretical perspectives of global feminism provide the framework for this study. Critical ethnography was used to study 10 cases of severe maternal morbidity and eight cases of maternal mortality. Data collection included participant observation, field notes and semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 54 women, family members and community members. Three major themes derived from the data were Secrecy Surrounding Pregnancy and Childbirth; Power and Authority; and Distrust of the Healthcare System. The interpretive theory, Behind the House, generated from data analysis provides an effective way of understanding the larger social and cultural context of childbirth and childbirth related practices, beliefs and traditions in Liberia. It defines the complexity and challenges women in Liberia face in their reproductive health. This interpretive theory moves beyond the biomedical understanding of birth by contextualizing childbirth as a social as well as a biological process. This study provides a starting point for more relevant, sensitive and culturally congruent public health programs and policies to address maternal morbidity and mortality in this population.

There are two temporally differentiated sources of information about Jews, no longer present in southern rural Moroccan communities, and the question is: which factor is paramount in the formation of memory? Is it the long-circulated narratives of shared life experiences between Muslims and Jews? Or do actual current events in the Middle East have greater weight in forming opinions, attitudes, and ideology about Jews and their relationship to Muslims?This dissertation examines the memories formed by successive Muslim generations about their former Jewish neighbors in southwestern Morocco. I am interested in how social memories of Muslims about erstwhile local Jews are generated, maintained, and reproduced through oral testimonies, personal narratives, images, urban sites, family manuscripts, personal experiences, and media. I interviewed four cohorts of great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and young adults who allowed me to record their personal narratives, family and village stories, jokes and sayings in the spring, summer, and fall of 2004.Drawing on sources as diverse as personal narratives, family manuscripts, archeological evidence, Islamic legal manuscripts, media, and textbooks, I use a generationally stratified sample to understand how four age cohorts (all from the same region and whose life experiences correspond to specific historical events) think of, understand, and represent Jews. Using Labovian apparent-time sampling methodology, I argue that there is a strong correlation between the historical and ideological period and the attitudes of the cohorts about Jews. My data show that the fracturing of the traditional indigenous model of knowledge transmission has led to the emergence of new convoluted discourse about Jews. The young generation's knowledge about Jews is partly appropriated from Western and Christian anti-Semitic discourse before being "Islamized."

This thesis examines how the village of Birzeit is made as place. The reader is taken on a tour designed to show some of the sights of Birzeit and three sets of practices that are key in forging Birzeit-as-place. The first set of practices cohere around homes: the dilapidated houses in the Old City, the modern Spanish Apartments, the frequently empty dwellings of diaspora and two destroyed homes. The second set of practices involves families: the negotiation of different distances by families stretched across continents, the extensive efforts of some families to live in close physical proximity that contrast with others who are witnessing the increasing nuclearization of family living space and attendant family practices. Thirdly, im/mobilities: the movements of disapora in the summer, students travelling to and from Birzeit University and immigrants who have migrated from the north and south of Palestine to work in and around Ramallah. In offering a passing glimpse at some of the dynamic relationships that cohere around and between these material and imaginative spatial practices, I hope to (re)present Palestine as a vibrant and dynamic place, shaded by social, political, economic and cultural differences that maybe similar to other parts of the world. In doing so my chronicle departs from accounts of Palestinian space that tend to prioritize the ongoing practices of Israeli Occupation and its effects. Nevertheless, Birzeit is coloured by such practices too, which penetrate and complicate practices of home, family and im/mobility. The tour stages a series of empirical stories and events that were drawn from the eleven months of fieldwork I conducted in Birzeit between June 2005 and October 2007, during which time I conducted participant observation, interviews and archival research. These stories are punctuated by a set of theoretical engagements. I choose to keep these moments separate to explore how theory and Birzeit as I experienced it might converse with one another. I hope that each will be an equal partner in the conversation, that each will complicate and extend the other, and that this conversation will also build a affirmative relation between this place and you.

This dissertation presents an instrumentalist’s perspective on cognition and meta-cognition in music performance. The goal of the study is to identify and apply methods of inquiry that are phenomenologically resonant with instrumental practice. The first chapter, situating the study in the context of the writer’s musical training, examines ways of studying and representing performance knowledge. The second chapter presents a case study of the preparation of Tōru Takemitsu’s Masque for Two Flutes (1959-1960). Using grounded theory methodology, this chapter investigates the role of gesture in the negotiation of musical understanding. Chapters 3 through 5 draw on Herbert H. Clark’s joint activity theory of language use to conceptualize music-making, taking into account context, process, and other domains of musical activity. Finally, Chapter 6, in addition to re-defining "virtuosity" for the 21st century instrumentalist, presents a set of philosophical considerations for cognitive studies in music performance.

This thesis seeks to uncover some of the cultural practices central to youth activist subcultures across three urban centres in Canada: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. I undertake this work within the context of rising moral and state claims about the apparent need for ‘good citizenship’ to be exercised by young people, alongside a late modern relationship between liberalism, neoliberalism, and Canada’s history of class- and race-based exclusions. The theoretical framework bridges cultural and political sociology with youth cultural theory. It also draws heavily upon the work of feminist philosophers of agency and the state. The main methodology is ethnographic, and was carried out within a phenomenological and hermeneutic framework. In total, 41 young people, ages 13-29, were involved in this research. Participants self-identified as being involved in activist work addressing issues such as globalization, war, poverty and/or colonialism. The findings of this study suggest that the effects of the historical and contemporary symbol of the ‘good citizen’ are experienced within youth activist subcultures through a variety of cultural means, including: expectations from self and schooling to be ‘responsible,’ with its associated burdens of guilt; policing practices that appear to rely on cultural ideas about the ‘good citizen’ and the ‘bad activist’; and representations of youth activism (e.g. within media) as replete with out-of-control young people being punished for their wrong-doings. Wider effects include the entrenched impacts of class- and race-based exclusions, which manifest within youth activist subcultures through stylistic regimes of ‘symbolic authorization’ that incorporate attire, beliefs, and practices. Although findings suggest that many young people come to activism via a predisposition created within an activist or Left-leaning family, this research also highlights the relational means by which people from outside of this familial habitus can come to activist practices. Taken together, findings suggest that youth activism must be understood as a cultural and social phenomenon, with requisite preconditions, influences, and effects; that such practices cannot be disassociated from wider social inequalities; and that such effects and influences demand scrutiny if we are to reconsider the role of activism and its part in expanding the political boundaries of the nation-state.

Although the curative model of medical care is predominant it is necessary to consider the palliative strategies at the end-of-life. The inter-relation of dying children, their families and pediatric palliative care teams are seldom analyzed outside Palliative Care. However, it is important to ethnographically think about the disturbing experiences of body and subject disintegration while people are directly experiencing them, even when the person is a child or a newborn baby. A central topic in this study is how personhood, body formation and disintegration, and childhood can be understood within the context of unevenly constructed and shared palliative communication with and without words. Hence, I analyze in this study how a Palliative Care Team in the city of Buenos Aires provides care, communicates, and ultimately produces a particular companionship to dying children and their families. This work is built on qualitative information gathered and produced during my four-month fieldwork with the Palliative Care Team. The ethnographic techniques (participant observation, non-participant observation and open-ended semi-structured interviews) I conducted show that their strategies of care and communication have as the main goal the process of companionship at the end of children’s lives. It is necessary to understand how patients, parents, and other family members are situated in this field of tensions between restorative and palliative medicine, and brought into this culture of Palliative Care in a public children’s hospital. My research asks, in what ways are pediatric Palliative Care practices exclusive to the social and cultural contexts of Buenos Aires? This work has three main sections: 1. care, 2. communication, and 3. companionship. In section one I focus on the clinical and non-clinical aspects of care involving the professionals’ and volunteers’ practices of giving care. In section two I concentrate my attention on the verbal and non-verbal aspects of the Palliative Care Team communication with children and families. In section three I consider the professional production of ‘companionship’. In this thesis I will demonstrate the significance of this concept according to the Palliative Care Team members and how care and communication are the base for the ‘production of companionship.’

The purpose of this ethnographic study was to explore how youth consumption of rap music informed their ideas of gender, race, sexuality, and education at a local community center in Atlanta, Georgia. The participants in the study were comprised of three male and six female Black students from working class families, ranging in age from 13–17 years old. The data collection process included 60 formal interviews, 55 informal interviews, 27 focus group interviews, 103 participant observations, and document analyses of media materials. Atlas.ti: The Knowledge Workbench (2003) assisted with the organizing, coding, categorizing, and interpreting of the vast amount of data. Findings from the study revealed four major themes: (a) youth’s engagement with rap music fostered essentialized notions of Blackness, (b) teens believed that Blacks were intellectually inferior, (c) youth perceived their classroom teachers as racist and (d) youth responded to their teacher’s perceived racism by disassociating themselves from youth they believed to be academically inferior. The findings of this study addressed the need for candid dialogues about race in the classroom and educational policy that incorporates critical media literacy.

Since the 1960s, hemodialysis has been a common intervention for children with end-stage renal disease. For weeks, months or years, children’s activities are disrupted because they must return to the hospital to be dialyzed about three times a week, for three or four hours. Their childhoods are characterized by on-going temporal disruptions, socio-spatial dislocations and intermittent technological dependence. Little is known about how children experience hospital-based hemodialysis. The study’s purpose was to describe and interpret the children’s embodied situatedness in the temporal, spatial and technological regimes and relations of a hemodialysis unit. Time, space and technology were viewed as significant interrelated aspects of the unit and the unit was conceived as nested in the broader life contexts of the children. The theoretical framework merged concepts of sociology of children, human geographical and temporal perspectives and philosophy of technology. A focused ethnography with 11 children who received maintenance hemodialysis was undertaken at a Canadian pediatric urban hospital. The dominant theme emerging from the study findings was the notion of the children doing technological time. The children’s temporal and socio-spatial positions were an effect of their technologically mediated embodiment and shaped their perspectives, evaluations and expectations. Their accounts revealed that the rituals and routines of the unit were experienced as long and boring. Their situatedness also was comprised of socio-spatial segregation and isolation due to being tethered to hemodialysis machines in the unit’s corners. Adaptations included resignation, resistance and waiting in the short and long term to be released from hemodialysis. Having negative and positive perceptions and responses, the children held multiple and conflicting meanings about the unit’s timespace. The findings suggest that crucial changes in practices and policies are essential to envision ways to create with children an overall positive place that merges and balances technological care with child focused care.

In this study 21 trans-identified youth in Toronto and Ottawa, Ontario, Canada were interviewed about their experiences related to transition. Using the materialist research strategy of Institutional Ethnography, I explore the organization of trans-specific health care services in Ontario. I describe challenges participants had in relation to accessing care and describe key differences in how care is currently delivered in Ontario. The ways in which various politico-legal and medical forms of organization shape the provision of trans care in Ontario are explored in detail. This work provides an empirically grounded addition to the growing literature that seeks to make sense of trans marginalization and exclusion.