This thesis investigates the relation between exception and governmentality in the critique of sovereignty. It considers exception and governmentality as an expression of the problem of sovereignty and argues that this problem is expressed both within the accounts of sovereignty that exception and governmentality articulate, as well as between them. Taking Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt as the paradigmatic theorists of governmentality and exception, respectively, I engage in close readings of the texts in which these concepts are most thoroughly elaborated: Security, Territory, Population and Political Theology. These readings demonstrate that, despite their apparent differences, exception and governmentality cannot be differentiated from one another. The instability evident in Schmitt and Foucault’s concepts show that the relation between them is best characterized as aporetic. / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / reganburles@gmail.com

In 2010, the government of British Columbia (B.C.) dedicated $48 million to stop the spread of HIV. The STOP HIV/AIDS pilot project promotes the uptake of HIV testing in the general population, and the use of antiretroviral therapy amongst those living with HIV/AIDS. This project operates with the rationale of ‘treatment as prevention’ (TasP), meaning that antiretroviral therapy is beneficial for the person living with HIV/AIDS, and has the secondary benefit of reducing the spread of HIV in the general population. Public health discourses are constructed via particular worldviews and involve the creation and delineation of societal problems. Undertaking a discourse analysis, I identify eight dominant discourses of TasP and STOP HIV/AIDS that include: provincial and international support for TasP and lack of federal leadership in HIV/AIDS; TasP, a ‘paradigm shift’ and a ‘game changer;’ TasP as beneficial to the individual and society; human rights and harm reduction; proof and certainty; failure of current prevention efforts; risk discourses; and, finally, universal treatment. I also identify five alternative discourses: holistic understanding/social determinants of health; stigma and discrimination; rights discourse: GIPA, informed consent and self-determination; coercion/criminalization and alternative risk discourse. Through a lens of governmentality, I explicate two overarching and simultaneous discursive strategies in realizing the objective of decreasing the spread of HIV in B.C. The first strategy acts on individuals living with HIV/AIDS, encouraging individuals to take up antiretroviral therapy. The second strategy acts on the general population, informing the population that HIV is a problem, and that treating people living with HIV/AIDS is the best way to protect society as a whole. There are various techniques within these two strategies. These discursive events have immense consequences for the uptake of health policies and programs by the public. The dominant and alternative discourses of TasP impact HIV policy and practice and specifically the individuals living with HIV and AIDS who are the subjects and targets of these initiatives. / Graduate

This thesis investigates the relation between exception and governmentality in the critique of sovereignty. It considers exception and governmentality as an expression of the problem of sovereignty and argues that this problem is expressed both within the accounts of sovereignty that exception and governmentality articulate, as well as between them. Taking Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt as the paradigmatic theorists of governmentality and exception, respectively, I engage in close readings of the texts in which these concepts are most thoroughly elaborated: Security, Territory, Population and Political Theology. These readings demonstrate that, despite their apparent differences, exception and governmentality cannot be differentiated from one another. The instability evident in Schmitt and Foucault’s concepts show that the relation between them is best characterized as aporetic. / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / reganburles@gmail.com

The purpose of this dissertation is to disseminate the construction of masculinity and femininity in sport and sports related research. The major research question is how sport and sports related research function, on the one hand in the production of 'women' and 'men' as objects and subjects of knowledge, and on the other as a technique or procedure for regulating men's and women's behaviour and ways of reflecting upon themselves. The interest is thus aimed at how gendered subjects are made. Of particular interest is the concept of equal opportunities between women and men in sport as a new way of creating sexual/gender difference. Michel Foucault's concept 'governmentality', roughly the relation between the histories of the practices of the self and the practices of government, serves as one important tool in this work. Empirically, the study derives from 22 interviews with teenagers and coaches in track and field athletics. The interviews comprises of three themes: 'me and other boys and girls in sport', 'the body' and 'the coach'. The teenagers' answers can simultaneousl be seen as reproducing and opposing conventional perceptions of men as autonomous and goal achievement oriented, and women as dependent and relation oriented. What historical conditions have made this situation possible? A genealogical study of the construction of sport, and of masculinity and femininity in sport and sports related research, show that a patriarchal governmentality, where young men were seen as the only 'appropriate' competitive sportsmen, have successively been transformed into a social-liberal and a neo-liberal governmentality. In patriarchal discourses, a strong emphasis is put on gender differentiation and 'seriousness' (i.e. competition and performance) in sport. The sporting subject is constructed as a decidedly masculine subject. In social-liberal discourses, an emphasis is put on social relations and fellowship, and the sporting subject is constructed as a gender-neutral (and somewhat disembodied) subject. In neo-liberal discourses, the subject is constructed as an individual, however gender-specific (and heterosexual), subject. Neo-liberal does not emphasise difference between subjects (social and physical difference) but difference inside the subject (individual). Modern power relations aim at procedures that occur inside the subject and not so much at what takes place between the subjects. The concept of gender equity between women and men has grown strong in sports discourse since the 70s. It can be seen as a practical strategy of guaranteeing women and men the opportunities to do the same things - competitive sport for instance. At the same time it performs two distinct and clearly differentiated gendered subjects, to be equalised. As such gender equity policies might be preceived as an apparatus that produces and regulates sexual/gender difference.

This thesis documents the genealogy of the development of Jakarta’s urban water supply infrastructure from 1873 (the inception of the first colonial water supply network) to the present. Using an analytical framework of governmentality, supplemented by insights from postcolonial studies and political ecology, the thesis explains the highly unequal patterns of water access in Jakarta as the product of (post)colonial governmentalities, whose relations of power are expressed not only through discursive categories and socio-economic relations, but also through material infrastructures and urban spaces. The thesis presents material from the colonial archives, Jakarta’s municipal archives, and the publications of international development agencies and engineering consultancy firms. This is combined with primary data derived from interviews, questionnaires, and participant observation of the implementation of current pro-poor water supply projects in Jakarta. This data is used to document how water supply is implicated in the discursive and material production of the city and its citizens, and to challenge conventional developmentalist and academic analyses of water supply access. Specifically, a conceptual triad of water, space, and populations – produced through, but also productive of government rationalities – is used to explain two apparent paradoxes: (1) the fragmentation of access in Jakarta despite a century of concerted attempts to develop a centralized system; and (2) the preferences of lower-income households for non-networked water supply, despite its higher cost per unit volume. This analysis hinges on an elucidation of the relationships between urban governance and urban infrastructure, which documents the interrelated process of differentiation of types of water supply, water use practices, populations, and urban spaces from the colonial period to the present. This, in turn, is used to explain the barriers being encountered in current pro-poor water supply development projects in Jakarta. The thesis thus makes a contribution to current academic debates over the ‘colonial present’. The contribution is both theoretical – in the emphasis placed upon the materiality of governmentality – and empirical. Finally, the thesis also makes a contribution to the urban and development studies literatures through its reinterpretation of the urban ‘water crisis’.

Hepatitis C is known as the ??silent epidemic??. Globally 170 million people live with chronic hepatitis C, yet it receives little policy, media or public attention. In developed countries the blood-borne virus is primarily transmitted through illicit drug injecting practices, aiding its silenced and stigmatised status. In this thesis I uncover some of these silences by exploring the narratives of forty people living with hepatitis C in New Zealand and Australia. My status as a person living with hepatitis C informed all aspects of this research project; I therefore also include my own experiences, foregrounding researcher reflexivity and the co-constructed nature of the interview process. My aims are both practical and theoretical. On a practical level I explore the experiences of people living with hepatitis C in order to inform recommendations for policy, research and practice, while also working to elucidate and employ an approach that allows for an analysis of the ill body as a lived experiencing agent, located in a substantive web of connections whereby discourse, corporeality and sociality, inform and mediate one another. To this end I employ a ??political phenomenology?? influenced by phenomenological and poststructuralist theoretical approaches. The central, previously under-researched, issues that arose in participants?? narratives structure the chapter outline, with results chapters focusing on participants?? experiences of diagnosis, living with hepatitis C, stigma, support group membership, alcohol use, and hepatitis C treatment. For many participants, it was found that living with hepatitis C was a liminal experience where distinctions between what it was to be healthy or ill were not clear-cut. Indeed, many of the participants?? narratives exposed the inadequacy of Western binary categorisations to speak to their experiences of living with hepatitis C. Throughout this thesis it can be seen that the meanings that participants ascribed to health, illness, and their hepatitis C were fluid and contextual, informed by the interplay of corporeality and discourse. From this interplay comes the ability to speak into the gaps of dominant discourses, creating the potential for the disruption, or subtle realignment, of normative ways of knowing.

Hepatitis C is known as the ??silent epidemic??. Globally 170 million people live with chronic hepatitis C, yet it receives little policy, media or public attention. In developed countries the blood-borne virus is primarily transmitted through illicit drug injecting practices, aiding its silenced and stigmatised status. In this thesis I uncover some of these silences by exploring the narratives of forty people living with hepatitis C in New Zealand and Australia. My status as a person living with hepatitis C informed all aspects of this research project; I therefore also include my own experiences, foregrounding researcher reflexivity and the co-constructed nature of the interview process. My aims are both practical and theoretical. On a practical level I explore the experiences of people living with hepatitis C in order to inform recommendations for policy, research and practice, while also working to elucidate and employ an approach that allows for an analysis of the ill body as a lived experiencing agent, located in a substantive web of connections whereby discourse, corporeality and sociality, inform and mediate one another. To this end I employ a ??political phenomenology?? influenced by phenomenological and poststructuralist theoretical approaches. The central, previously under-researched, issues that arose in participants?? narratives structure the chapter outline, with results chapters focusing on participants?? experiences of diagnosis, living with hepatitis C, stigma, support group membership, alcohol use, and hepatitis C treatment. For many participants, it was found that living with hepatitis C was a liminal experience where distinctions between what it was to be healthy or ill were not clear-cut. Indeed, many of the participants?? narratives exposed the inadequacy of Western binary categorisations to speak to their experiences of living with hepatitis C. Throughout this thesis it can be seen that the meanings that participants ascribed to health, illness, and their hepatitis C were fluid and contextual, informed by the interplay of corporeality and discourse. From this interplay comes the ability to speak into the gaps of dominant discourses, creating the potential for the disruption, or subtle realignment, of normative ways of knowing.

No description available.

Diss. Umeå : Umeå universitet, 2009.

Purpose/questions: The purpose of the study is to highlight the eight different educators' perception of the notion of children's influence and participation in preschool. We also want to study how educators describe their work with the children's influence and the challenges the work entails. How do the educators in our study understand the notion of child's influence and participation? Which opportunities respective barriers do the educators find in their work with child´s influence at their preschool? According to educators, how child's initiative to his/her influence in preschool is made visible? According to educators, do all the children have equal opportunities to influence their everyday life in preschool? Methodology: To carry out our study, we have used a qualitative method and have interviewed 8 educators in 5 different preschools. Theories: We have used Foucault’s theory of power, governmentality and discourse to analyze the results we get from the educators’ interviews. Conclusions: It was obvious in our interview with the preschool educators that they are in favor of children’s influence and participation. We have come to the conclusion based on our educators’s statement that the children’s opportunity to influence and participate in preschool is governed by educators. Governance results in that all children get equal opportunity to influence and participate and it also minimizes that younger and children with less verbal communication abilities are excluded.