Each year in the United States between 800,000 and 900,000 adolescents, aged 19 or younger, become pregnant. Over one-half of these pregnancies end in a live birth. Several studies have shown that the younger sisters of adolescent mothers have teenage childbearing rates two to six times higher than childbearing rates of women in the general population. The purpose of this focused ethnography was to gain a better understanding of the influences of a pregnant and parenting adolescent on her younger sister. Purposeful sampling was used to recruit younger sisters of parenting teens. Fifteen (15) African American females, ranging in age from 12 to 17 years old, participated in the study. The mean age of the participants was 14. The researcher identified and selected informants through community agencies in which the informants’ older sisters participated in services for teen mothers. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, field observation notes, a fieldwork journal, and a demographic information sheet. Interviews were conducted in the informant’s home. Data were analyzed using Spradley’s Development Research Sequence of a domain analysis, taxonomic analysis, componential analysis, and cultural themes (Spradley, 1979). Seven cultural themes emerged from the data: (a) Mixed Emotions, (b) Centering on Mother/Baby, (c) Childcare Engagement, (d) Sharing of Experience as Warnings, (e) Recognition of Hardship, (f) Change in Family Relationships, and (g) Intentions, Hopes, and Dreams. Findings from this study indicated that the younger sisters of parenting adolescents are greatly impacted by their older teen sister’s pregnancy and parenting. Knowledge from this study may be used to shape future interventions designed and tailored for younger sisters to discontinue the cycle of teenage childbearing in families. Nurses involved in providing care for pregnant and parenting teens need to identify younger sisters, be aware that they are at particular risk for early sexual activity and parenting, and encourage involvement of the entire family in prevention efforts.

Drawing on Weber’s rationalisation theory and feminist critiques of the consumption-production literature, this thesis describes the impacts and changes in dietary practices that have occurred in households as a result of limited or constrained time available for family food provisioning, and how these changes can be understood as a product of contemporary Australian policy, cultural and food landscapes. It adopts feminist ethnography and household food strategies as important methodological innovations to forge a culturally informed account of convenience-orientated dietary practices in family households within contemporary Australian society. The data were collected from 15 Brisbane family households between January 2002 and August 2006. The thesis argues that dietary practices observed in ‘time-poor’ households have evolved as solutions to the problem of time scarcity by women whose role has traditionally been to feed families. The ‘solutions’ are shaped by the resources to which households have access, and ideas and traditions about family care, food and its responsibility, and available alternative options. Change is observed in diets, menus, source of prepared meals and prepared ingredients, but also organisation of food provisioning and distribution of workload. Also being reshaped is the role of food in the expression of cultural identity, commensality and, in the family setting, the transmission of food skills and knowledge. An analysis that critiques the usefulness of ‘speeding up’ domestic food provisioning as a viable and sustainable solution to the retention of the family meal is drawn, highlighting the problematic nature of persistent nostalgic interpretations of commensal eating patterns in culinary, food activism, sustainability and nutrition discourses. In the absence of a coherent moral philosophy for guiding current public health policy and practice, Kittay’s public ethic of care is proposed as a suitable model. A key challenge for future research is to ensure that household level sociocultural analysis continues to enrich broader debates in food policy and public health.

As issues of gender inequality in the military are addressed, women will continue to fill jobs traditionally occupied by men, and ultimately take on a greater percentage of leadership responsibility. For these reasons, women will remain the fastest growing population within our active duty forces. An increased need for research, advocacy, and resources for programs and services designed specifically for women veterans is necessary in order to prepare for an upsurge in the numbers of women who will be seeking services in the years to come. This research utilized a feminist ethnographic approach for data collection and analysis. Data was collected using mixed methods consisting of an online survey (n=915), telephone interviews with women veterans and community reintegration specialists (n=31), and participant observation at veteran focused events. This study provides an in depth understanding of US women veterans’ experiences both in the military and after, emphasizing the different gendered experiences of participants. Among the many findings, I conclude that women veterans negotiated and performed gender in a way that worked for them within the professional militarized environments that they were a part of. However, upon leaving the military, many experience challenges associated with having to renegotiate gender, often times in civilian workplace settings where traditional aspects of masculinity and femininity are still upheld as societal norms. This research is meant to contribute to a growing body of literature on veteran transition and help fill the existing gap in anthropology of the military on the intersections of gender, gendered role-making, and military service. It will be of interest to lawmakers, policy experts, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and community stakeholders tasked with identifying the short-term and long-term challenges affecting women veterans as they enter civilian life after service, and how to appropriately tailor programs and services to meet the needs of the population.

No description available.

This research project applies feminist revisions of Habermas's theory of communicative action to evaluate levels of participation in individually-based development programs through the case study of one such program. Utilizing a triangulated methodology of participant observation, interviews, and discourse analysis, combined with considerations of feminist ethical issues, this research study examines the role of dialogue and "being heard" in the recovery and rehabilitation of women who used prostitution to feed chemical addiction. I utilize a "feminist communicative action" to evaluate a unique type of development program: one aimed at individual development. In addition, this project assesses the place of human communication, emotions, and community in the sustainability of such recovery programs. / Media & Communication

[Truncated abstract] Conservative, incremental and modest approaches to redressing gendered workplace cultures have had limited success in challenging the demographic profile of densely masculinist workplaces. In this thesis I draw on a study of women in police work to argue that combating highly institutionalised, entrenched masculinist practices calls for more than modesty. Indeed the study shows that ambitious, even contentious, recommendations for new procedures can play an important role when the goal is tangible change in cultures where there is an excess of men. In conclusion I posit the need for some bold risk-taking, alongside incremental tactics, if the aim is to change the habits and practices of masculinist organisations . . . This dissertation maps that interventionist process across a four-year period. In assessing the role played by the feminist methodology I analyse what people can learn to see and say about organisational practices, how they participate in or seek to undermine various forms of teamwork, as well as how individual team members display their new understandings and behaviours. I conclude that the techniques for supporting women in authoritarian, densely masculinist workplaces should include some bold and highly visible ‘critical acts’, based on commitment from the top coupled to strongly motivated and highly informed teamwork.

abstract: ABSTRACT As a graduate student earning both a Master of Arts in Social Justice and Human Rights and a Graduate Certificate in Nonprofit Leadership Management, I have tried to bridge the theoretical and the empirical in a meaningful way. A problematic chasm between the nonprofit professional and the client being served existed, and I wanted to research this chasm. I wanted to understand what challenges a woman of color faced if she was both a client and a nonprofit professional, possessing dual identities and engaging in a sort of welfare system border crossing. There was a gap in the academic research on women in the nonprofit sector, more specifically the charitable, human services sector, and there was little to no research on women who have been both clients and caseworkers. Therefore, I conducted a series five of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with women of color working at a local food bank. As an employee of the food bank, I recorded my own observations and field notes in order to write a feminist institutional ethnography. I employed interpretive, less conventional design methods, which were aligned with my commitment to social justice. The research highlighted many negative stories about oppression and exclusion women faced in the nonprofit sector. It also confronted the problematic stereotype welfare recipients, specifically women of color, are faced with as a result of the politics of disgust and dominant myth of the Welfare Queen. The research sought to explain how and why women of color transition in and out of the welfare state, and how they manage to work within a food bank, where they are constantly surrounded by inequalities. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Social Justice and Human Rights 2015

Participatory research methodologies and the use of interactive communication technologies (ICTs) such as email are increasingly seen by many researchers, including feminists, as offering ways to enhance women’s inclusion, participation and empowerment. However, from critical and poststructuralist perspectives, some researchers suggest the need for greater caution about claims that participatory methodologies and certain communication technologies automatically enhance inclusion and empowerment. These researchers argue that issues of power, agenda and voice in the research context require greater attention (LeCompte, 1995). The major argument made in this thesis is that feminist researchers need to adopt a more critical and rigorous yet pragmatic approach to evaluating women’s empowerment, inclusion and participation, and that this approach needs to include an analysis of diversity and difference, macro and micro contexts, power-knowledge relations, and the contradictory effects of participation. The outcomes of this study suggest that this approach can create new knowledge and understanding that will enable the development of more effective strategies for women’s empowerment and inclusion. To explore and support this argument, findings are presented from a detailed evaluation and critique of a major feminist action research project that involved women in rural, regional and remote Queensland, Australia and elsewhere, a university research team and several government and industry partners. The project made extensive use of ICTs, including email and the Internet, and aimed to be empowering and inclusive. Given the many contradictory discourses of empowerment that currently circulate, empowerment is seen as a problematic concept. The multiple meanings and discourses of empowerment are therefore identified and considered in the analysis. With the increasing importance of communication technologies in rural community development, this study also evaluates the effectiveness of ICTs as a medium for empowering rural women. The ‘politics of difference’ (Young, 1990) that underpins attempts to include a diversity of rural women in feminist research projects presents many challenges to feminist praxis. Chapters 1 and 2 propose that, in evaluating such projects, researchers need to take diversity and difference into account to avoid reproducing stereotyped images of rural women, and to identify those who are included and excluded. This is because of the complex nature of the identity ‘rural woman’, the multiple barriers to women’s participation, and the diverse needs, agendas and ideologies of participants and stakeholders. The concept of seriality (Young, 1994) is used in this study to avoid reproducing ‘rural women’ and feminist researchers as women with a singular identity. Chapters 1 and 2 argue that a comprehensive and critical analysis of these complex issues requires an eclectic, transdisciplinary approach, and that this can be fruitfully achieved by using a combination of two feminist frameworks of theory and epistemology: praxis feminism and feminist poststructuralism. While there are commonalities between these frameworks, the feminist poststructuralist framework takes a much more cautious and critical approach to claims for empowerment than praxis feminism. The praxis feminist framework draws on feminist theories that view power as social, cooperative and enabling. Women’s diverse needs, values, issues and experiences are taken into account, and the analysis aims to gives voice to women. The purpose of this is to better understand the processes that meet women’s diverse needs and could be empowering and inclusive for women (or otherwise). In contrast, the feminist poststructuralist framework uses Foucault’s (1980) analytic of power as positive and strategic, exercised in all our interactions, and intimately connected to knowledge. The power-knowledge relations, and the multiple and shifting discourses and subject positions that were taken up in various research contexts are identified and analysed. The purpose of this is to highlight the contradictions and dangers inherent in feminist practices of empowerment that often go unnoticed. To achieve its practical and critical aims, this study uses two different, but complementary, research methodologies: participatory feminist evaluation and feminist deconstructive ethnography, and multiple research methods, which are outlined in Chapter 3. This eclectic approach is argued to provide maximum flexibility and creativity in the research process, and to enable the complexity and richness of the data to be represented and understood from a diversity of perspectives. Triangulation of the multiple methods and sources of data is employed to increase the validity and rigour of the analysis. Assessing how well feminist projects that use ICTs have met the aim of including a diversity of women requires an analysis of a wide range of complex social, economic, cultural, technological, contextual and methodological issues related to women’s participation. Analysing these issues also requires giving voice to a diversity of participants’ and stakeholders’ assessments and meanings of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’. The results of this analysis, set out in Chapter 4, suggest that differences in perceptions of diversity and inclusion are strongly related to participants’ and stakeholders’ political and ideological beliefs and values, and their degree of commitment to social justice issues. The evaluation found that a limited diversity of women participated in the project, and identified many barriers to their participation. Feminists argue that women-only activities are often more empowering than mixed gender activities. The evaluation findings detailed in Chapter 5 suggest that the project’s women-centred activities, particularly the workshops and online groups, were very successful in meeting the multiple needs of most participants. However, contradictory or undesirable effects of the project’s activities were also identified. This analysis demonstrates the need to consider the various groups of participants and their diverse needs in assessing how well feminist methods and activities have met women’s needs or are empowering. Chapter 6 identifies various forms and features of empowerment and disempowerment and categorises them as social, technological, political and psychological. A model is developed that illustrates the interrelationships between these four forms of empowerment. Technological empowerment is identified as a new under-theorised form of empowerment that is seen as increasingly important as ICTs become more central to women’s networking and participation. However, the findings suggest that the extent to which participants want to be empowered needs to be respected. While many participants were found to have experienced the four forms of empowerment, their participation was also shown to have had various disempowering effects. The project’s online group welink (women’s electronic link), which linked rural and urban women, including government policy-makers, was assessed as the most empowering project activity. The discourse analysis and deconstructions, undertaken in Chapter 6, identify competing and contradictory discourses of new communication technologies and feminist participatory action research. The various discourses taken up by the researchers and participants were shown to have both empowering and disempowering effects. The analysis demonstrates the intersection between empowerment and disempowerment and the shifting subject positions that were taken up, depending on the research context. It was argued that the discourses of feminist action research operated as a ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1980) that regulated and constrained the discourses and practices of this form of research. An analysis of a highly contentious welink discussion challenges feminist assumptions that giving voice to women will lead to empowerment, and suggests that silence can, in some circumstances, be empowering. This analysis highlights the intersection of voice and silence, the limitations of the gendered discourse of care and connection, and how this discourse, and other factors, regulated the use of more critical discourses. Critical reflections on the study are made in Chapter 7. They include the suggestion that an ‘impossible burden’ was placed on the project’s feminist researchers who used an egalitarian feminist discourse that produced expectations of ‘equal relations’ between participants and researchers. However, these relations had to be established in the context of a university-based project that involved senior academic, government and industry staff. Drawing on the new knowledge and understandings developed, this study proposes several principles and strategies for feminist participatory action research projects that seek the inclusion and empowerment of rural women and use ICTs. They include the suggestion that feminists need an awareness of the limits to the politics of difference discourse when power-knowledge relations are ignored. A further principle is that there is value in adopting a Foucauldian analytic of power, since this enables a better understanding of the complex, multifaceted and dynamic nature of power-knowledge relations in the research context. This approach also provides an awareness of how processes that attempt to empower will inevitably produce disempowerment at certain moments. Principles and strategies for undertaking participatory feminist evaluations are also suggested.

Using a uniquely developed research methodology called ‘feminist virtual ethnography’ this thesis explores female adolescent subculture on the social network site Facebook, looking specifically at a group of four girls who are ‘Facebook friends’ with each other as well as friends at the same high school in a large metropolitan city in south-western Ontario in Canada. The thesis is guided by research questions that focus on how these girls virtually-represent their bodies on Facebook, and develops a theory of concurrent identity formation (CIF) as a way to understand the translatability and conversion between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual.’ Built as a collaborative inquiry between the researcher and research participants, I invited the girls to analyze screenshots of their own (and each other’s) virtual self-representations during a series of virtual conversations and to express their understandings of femininity and beauty as they problematize their identities on Facebook and in ‘real’ contexts such as at school and at home. Overall, findings reveal an interplay of body, image, and text within the girls’ systems of imagery and language. I suggest that the female adolescent body is virtually self-represented in negotiated as well as discursive ways, and that the girls’ identities are always in flux. While CIF provides a good basis for understanding these girls’ identities as ‘in flux,’ further investigation into virtual representation and CIF is needed to understand how and why adolescents display their bodies and articulate their identities in certain ways. Pedagogical implications are also discussed in my concluding chapter, where I call for a reconceptualization of literacies and methodologies, especially when dealing with girls on/and Facebook.

Dans les dernières années, différents enjeux environnementaux ont occupé un espace médiatique important, de désastres variés à joutes politiques autour d’enjeux de développement des énergies fossiles. Or, bien que les liens entre environnement et inégalités sociales fassent de plus en plus partie des discours, les écrits empiriques en travail social en français demeurent rares sur les liens entre l’environnement et le travail social. Dans de nombreux articles, la formation en travail social est identifiée comme un point de départ nécessaire pour entamer une réflexion à ce sujet. Il constituera donc, pour nous, le terrain choisi pour cette recherche exploratoire. Plus précisément, ce projet de mémoire s’intéressera donc à mieux comprendre les expériences et réflexions étudiantes sur les liens entre l’environnement et le travail social, s’intéressant à les documenter à partir de leur parcours de formation. Les données qualitatives ont été recueillies par le biais de trois groupes de discussion en ligne, regroupant des personnes qui étudient en travail social dans des universités québécoises. Une analyse thématique réflexive, ancrée dans une méthodologie féministe et guidée par un cadre théorique féministe et un cadre conceptuel nepantla, aura permis de dégager les constats principaux de ce mémoire. Une démarche réflexive a aussi accompagné ce processus de mémoire, et a été utilisée pour trianguler les données. Sept thèmes se dégagent ainsi des données, décrivant les expériences et réflexions étudiantes témoignées : (1) « De nature à crise du logement : une définition de l’environnement en discussion », (2) Comment intervenir ? Des idées variées (3) « Dans les marges des cours : des liens peu abordés » (4) « Entre privé et public : partager son vécu émotif » (5) « Entre individu et société : Questionner la formation ». (6) « Entre enseignement et apprentissage : s’outiller entre paires ». et (7) « Entre préventions et urgence : réfléchir la responsabilité professionnelle ». Ces thèmes permettent de mieux comprendre les préoccupations étudiantes, et peuvent servir de tremplin pour guider des transformations dans la formation en travail social au Québec. / In recent years, various environmental issues have occupied a significant amount of media space, from various disasters caused by human activity to political games around the development of fossil fuels. However, although connections between environmental and social inequalities are increasingly part of the public discourse, empirical writings on the links between the environment and social work in French are still rare. In articles from various provinces and countries, social work education is identified as a necessary starting point for reflection on this topic. It will therefore be the chosen field for this exploratory research. More specifically, this master’s thesis will aim to better understand students’ experiences and reflections on the links between the environment and social work, documenting it from their educational pathway. Qualitative data was collected through three online focus groups of social work students enrolled in Quebec universities. A reflexive thematic analysis, anchored in a feminist theoretical framework and methodology and informed by a nepantla conceptual framework, guided the process for this thesis. A reflexive approach also accompanied this thesis and was used to triangulate and question the research data. Seven themes emerged from the focus groups, describing the students’ experiences and reflections: (1) “From nature to housing crisis: a definition of environment under discussion,” (2) How to intervene? Various ideas, (3) “In the margins of courses: absent links”, (4) “Between private and public: sharing one’s emotional experience”, (5) “Between individual and society: questioning training”. (6) “Between teaching and learning: equipping oneself among peers” and (7) “Between prevention and emergency: reflecting on professional responsibility”. These themes not only allow for a better understanding of student concerns but can also serve as an interesting springboard to guide transformations in social work education in Quebec.