In acknowledging that the Hansard Oral Question Period records did not focus on the increasing personnel expenditures, this thesis will seek to identify and analyze how political party members convey their support or opposition for these austerity measures, during the first session of the 41st Parliament Oral Question Period exchanges; in particular, how these exchanges are structured within the setting of parliamentary debate and for what purposes. Furthermore this thesis examines, how parliamentary exchanges relate to the five (5) debate purposes identified in the literature: (1) position claiming; (2) persuading; (3) negotiating; (4) agenda-setting; and, (5) opinion-building (Ilie, 2017), within the four (4) categories identified in the review of the Hansard records; that is: safety and security concerns, Canada’s official language policies, regional cuts, and public service reductions in areas directly related to the Canadian Forces and Canadian Veterans.

This research focused on diversion and community-based alternatives to custody for young offenders. For the purposes of this research, diversion, and community-based responses to youth crime include informal processes and non-incarcerating sanctions utilized for young offenders for the purposes of diverting youth away from the formal justice system at any juncture, and/or reintegrating that offender within the community. Measures of interest included extrajudicial measures, extra-judicial sanctions, conferencing, restorative justice, and intensive support and supervision under the YCJA (2002). This research followed a qualitative approach to examine policy and practice. Phase 1 involved an examination of over a decade of policy-related discussions within the House of Commons and Senate as well as their respective committees and resulting legislation reported by Legisinfo. Initially, all transcripts were examined. At a later stage, a proportional stratified random sample was drawn, restricting the sample to 32 items. Phase 2 involved semi-structured interviews conducted with 14 professionals in the field of youth justice with the aim of accessing practice narratives on policy implementation. Chain-referral and maximum variation sampling techniques were employed to access a diverse group of professionals including police, youth workers, restorative justice personnel and probation officers in the regions of Greater Vancouver, the Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island in the province of British Columbia. Participants ranged in length of service from one year to over 35 years. Thematic narrative analysis of phases 1 and 2 occurred iteratively with data collection. In this dissertation, I present findings regarding community youth justice measures at three levels: the operational/practice level, the policy-making level and the macro socio-political level. Specifically, findings related to the operational level include: insufficient resources available to individual workers; narrowing the net of youth who are eligible for services; a reliance on informal and formal charitable contributions to provide basic youth justice services; and outsourcing of diversion strategies by government to community organizations. On a policy-making level, I discuss findings related to the complex fusion of restorative justice and diversion strategies; the substitution of anecdotes for evidence in policy-making; and the simple rather than complex stories used to frame the “youth justice problem” by policy-makers. Finally, on the macro socio-political level, I highlight the reversal of the welfare state and the associated implications of this reversal. I analyze and discuss the impacts that ideological and policy shifts have on policy-making and individual practice, notably on the efforts of professionals who must begin the work of closing the gaps in youth justice services, and who do so based on their own understanding of social responsibility and the “ethos of care.” This research contributes to the body of work on youth justice in Canada by exploring the connections and disconnects between policy discourses at each of the political, policy and practice levels and highlights how such a multi-dimensional analysis is a meaningful way to assess an important social policy issue. / Graduate / 0627 / lorinda.stoneman@gmail.com

Talking to a computer is hard. Large vocabulary automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are difficult to use and yet they are used by many people in their daily work. This thesis addresses the question: How is ASR used and made usable and useful in the workplace now? To answer these questions I went into two workplaces where ASR is currently used and one where ASR could be used in the future. This field work was done with designing in mind. ASR dictation systems are currently used in the Australian Public Service (APS) by people who suffer chronic workplace overuse injuries and in the Hansard department of Parliament House (Hansard) by un-injured people. Analysing the experiences of the users in the APS and at Hansard showed that using an ASR system in the workplace follows a broad trajectory that ends in the continued effort to maintain its usefulness. The usefulness of the ASR systems is �performed into existence� by the users with varying degrees of success. For both the APS and Hansard users, they use ASR to allow work to be performed; ASR acts to bridge the gap between otherwise incompatible ways of working. This thesis also asks: How could ASR be used and made usable and useful in workplaces in the future? To answer this question, I observed the work of communicating sentences at the ACT Magistrates Court. Communicating sentences is a process that is distributed in space and time throughout the Court and embodied in a set of documents that have a co-ordinating role. A design for an ASR system that supports the process of communicating sentences while respecting existing work process is described. Moving from field work to design is problematic. This thesis performs the process of moving from field work to design, as described above, and reflects the use of various analytic methods used to distill insights from field work data. The contributions of this thesis are: � The pragmatic use of existing social research methods and their antecedents as a corpus of analyses to inspire new designs; vi � a demonstration of the use of Actor-Network Theory in design both as critique and as part of a design process; � empirical field-work evidence of how large vocabulary ASR is used in the workplace; � a design showing how ASR could be introduced to the rich, complicated, environment of the ACT Magistrates Court; and, � a performance of the process of moving from field work to design.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

The diploma thesis deals with the personality of Robert Maxwell, his biography, his taking effect on the British media and political scene. The thesis follows also Maxwell's book distribution, founding its first publishing house and several newspapers which he owned. The thesis contains information not only about the Robert Maxwell's personality but also about the historical context his times in Great Britain and focuses on the historical aspect of the media field, business and politics.

Whilst the number of women in the British Parliament increases in line with social progress towards gender equality, androcentric language use in the House of Commons prevails and perpetuates a harmful outdated hierarchical order of gender. The aims of this study are two-fold, (1) to gain insight into how androcentric occupational titles are used to negotiate the hierarchical structure of the Chamber, (2) to explore how MPs’ male bias is reflected by their use of androcentric generic nouns. From a gender perspective with the theoretical framework of feminist critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study analyses debates from the Hansard at Huddersfield Corpus. The analysis found that the term chairman can be used to ascribe rank as it contains an additional level of authority that the gender-neutral chair lacks. Through the use of androcentric generic nouns, the analysis uncovered how a male bias is internalised from various linguistic constructions such as conventional expressions and quotations that portray man as the norm. Stereotypical associations to denominators of professions, subject areas, and their hierarchical order determined by the hegemonic relationship between women and men were found to influence lexical choices. As a result of MPs’ use of androcentric generic nouns, non-male people are misrepresented and constrained by the implications of their connotated gendered meanings.

This thesis contributes to the burgeoning field of the history of sexuality in New Zealand and seeks to distill the more theorised and reflexive understanding of the subjectively understood queer male identity since 1948. Emerging from the disciplines of History and English, this project draws from a range of narratological materials: parliamentary debates contained in Hansard, and novels and short stories written by men with publicly avowed queer identities. This thesis explores how both 'normative' identity and the category of 'the homosexual' were constructed and mobilised in the public domain, in this case, the House of Representatives. It shows that members of the House have engaged with an extensive tradition of defining and excluding; a process by which state and public discourses have constructed largely unified, negative and othering narratives of 'the homosexual'. This constitutes an overarching narrative of queer experience which, until the mid-1990s, excluded queer subjects from its construction. At the same time, fictional narratives offer an adjacent body of knowledge and thought for queer men and women. This thesis posits literature's position as an important and productive space for queer resistance and critique. Such texts typically engage with and subvert 'dominant' or 'normative' understandings of sexuality and disturb efforts to apprehend precise or linear histories of 'gay liberation' and 'gay consciousness'. Drawing from the works of Frank Sargeson, James Courage, Bill Pearson, Noel Virtue, Stevan Eldred-Grigg, and Peter Wells, this thesis argues for a revaluing of fictional narratives as active texts from which historians can construct a matrix of cultural experience, while allowing for, and explaining, the determining role such narratives play in the discursively constructed understandings of gender and sexuality in New Zealand.