Mediation promises a way for conflicting parties to address differences and reach an agreement to settle their dispute. This study looks at mediation discourse of five cases from a university conflict resolution center through the lens of Girard’s (1977) theory of mimetic desire. Girard (1977) suggests that we are all in a pattern of mimesis. Antagonism that is prevalent in conflict develops, in Girard’s view, from the cycle of desire when one person wants an object and another person copies that desire for the object. The two parties quickly forget the object, but antagonism emerges as the mimetic desire continues. Girard argues parties have a tendency to place blame on a scapegoat to break the antagonism pattern. Alternatively, in her application of Girard’s theory, Cobb (1997, 2003, 2010a, 2010b) advocates a social constructionist perspective where disputants work on turning thin conflict stories into thicker ones to break the pattern. This project addresses a need for research on cycles of antagonism in discourse constructed by disputants during real mediation sessions. Knowing how disputants construct discourse lends insight into how people handle their most challenging interpersonal problems. The analysis of discourse through the guiding frameworks of conflict tactics, production format, and tenor of discourse sheds light on how disputants construct perpetuated mimicked antagonism and how they break the pattern. Additionally, findings highlight the emergence of weapons and wounds in the discourse suggesting that communicative violence is constructed whether or not there was actual physical violence. Components of thin conflict narratives are evident in findings from all five cases. Yet, while two cases are characterized by discourse of perpetuated mimicked antagonism, three represent a break in that pattern without placing blame on a scapegoat or constructing a thicker conflict narrative. The distinctions between a perpetuated and broken cycle are unpacked through the discussion of: a) animator-only position; b) indirectness and presumptive attribution; and c) shift in footing between talking to the other disputant and the mediators. This project provides a more nuanced understanding of the Girardian perspective relating to conflict mediation to contribute to the extant literature on conflict discourse and mediation practice. / text

Narrative measures derived from English and Russian tell and retell narrative language samples of 20 L1-Russian, L2-English bilingual adults were correlated with their overall, speaking and verbal proficiency self-ratings to verify the validity of the selfrating scale for both languages. In English, measures of fluency, productivity and grammaticality were moderately correlated with speaking proficiency self-ratings. Strength of correlations with tell versus retell narratives varied by category of narrative measure. For Russian, correlations were not significant due to ceiling effects in proficiency. The effects of modifications to narrative measures were considered, showing that correlations with temporal fluency and productivity increased as mazes and fillers were excluded, while correlations with grammaticality increased as article omission errors were excluded. Sources of variation in self-ratings and narrative measures are described, and recommendations are presented for an alternative narrative elicitation method. / text

Over the years, the landscape of educational leadership has evolved, but with a continued focus on leadership in relation to an official title or role. While it used to be practical for schools and districts to rely on the leadership of a single leader, times have changed and leadership has become more complex; the dependence on a single leader has become unrealistic. In recent years, there has been an increased emphasis on teacher leadership in general and teacher leadership in the context of leadership teams in particular. The purpose of this narrative inquiry was to better understand teacher leader identity within the context of a leadership team by examining the narratives of teacher leaders participating on a team as well as narratives from other team members. Specifically, this study examined: 1) How are teacher leader identities narrated? and 2) How do teacher leaders come to see themselves as leaders? Four teacher leaders and four team members from a PBIS Team were interviewed, and four team meetings and one staff meeting were observed. Transcripts and field notes were analyzed to compose the identity narratives of each teacher leader, and to understand the context and influential factors. Findings indicate that teacher leaders had leadership identities that were a part of their teacher identities but different from their classroom identities and also had passion for creating positive school climates. Additionally, the district and school contexts and the role of the principal influenced teacher leader involvement, development, and leadership practice.

In Uncanny Capitalism, I examine works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that incorporate literary elements typically associated with gothic fiction into their depictions of America's capitalist economy. In so doing, I trace a widespread tendency found throughout American literature to some of its earliest and most revealing manifestations, arguing that the gothic lent itself to such uses because eighteenth-century thinkers had long relied upon the fictional mode to represent the divergence between their own commercial societies and the feudal economies of the past. In the course of its development, capitalism occasionally displayed characteristics that linked it with the gothic practices it had supposedly left behind. When it did, my chosen writers used the gothic to represent the convergence between America's commercial economy and its putative other.Chapter one examines the dichotomy that J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur establishes between Europe and America in Letters from an American Farmer that is founded upon two opposing forms of power: an oppressive European one and another that is American and productive. This opposition collapses in the letter devoted to Charles Town where Europe's feudal institutions have made an uncanny reappearance on American soil. Chapter two reads the self-incriminating narrators of Edgar Allan Poe's tales of murder and confession as grotesque examples of the types of coercion upon which the nation's emerging market economy depended in the nineteenth-century. Chapter three examines Frederick Douglass' alternation between the formal techniques of the realist and gothic novels in his 1845 Narrative, and argues that Douglass uses the figure of the gothic monster to apprehend the way in which slavery violates the natural order by commodifying human beings and placing them on a par with the brute creation. I conclude the dissertation with an analysis of the uncanny episodes in The Blithedale Romance that Nathaniel Hawthorne uses to reveal the long reach of the commodity form and the futility of any efforts at escaping the deleterious effects of the market revolution via a Transcendentalist retreat into nature.

In this thesis the structure and usage of narrative within a social media platform isexplored, with Twitter as the chosen social media network. Narrative and storytellingwithin a social media sphere such as Twitter primarily focuses on bringing a certaincharacterization and voice to a user account with story and narrative generally coming insecond place. By studying and comparing real-life cases of storytelling on twitter I havecome to the conclusion that a narrative structure that combines a good character with awell-executed characterization is the ideal way of using Twitter as a platform forstorytelling.

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Colonial powers exert dominance over their subject countries in multiple registers, for example, education and spatial constructions, which foster the colonised other‘s identification with the colonial power centre. Racial and local cultures of subject nations are thus systematically distorted and the transmission of memory through material culture is obscured. Focusing on contemporary Taiwan, this research examines how architectural and ideological strategies were employed by the dominant authorities to consolidate the power centre and explores possible means for shaping Taiwanese spatial subjectivity in the historical aftermath of such situations. The research examines the Formosans‘ ambiguous identification with local cultures and marginal spatial propositions, as well as discussing the inculcation of the 'great Chinese ideology‘ by analysing the teaching materials used in modern Taiwanese primary education. Reviewing aspects of contemporary post-colonial theory, the research explores the spatial implications of Taiwanese post-colonial textual narratives and argues for them as a potential source for the construction of contemporary spatial conditions, as these novels are shaped by an awareness of the importance of local cultures and the voices of marginalised people. The thesis thus suggests that a re-thinking of Taiwan‘s public spaces can be stimulated by spatial metaphors in textual narratives that associate peoples‘ memories of political and local events with spatial images that were previously suppressed. To explore the potential for the generation of space through reference to literary works, this research studies the ‗narrative architecture‘ experiments of the 1970s and 80s and goes on to propose a series of representational media for the construction of spatial narrations in Taiwan. Multiple spatial propositions concerning the island‘s post-colonial condition can be suggested by the visualisation of spatial metaphors that are embedded in Taiwanese textual narratives. At the end of the thesis, two proposals for post-colonial spatial narration are put forward, which transform the spatial propositions latent in the devices developed through a new juxtaposition with existing urban contexts. The intention of the research is to indicate a new urban spatial strategy for Taiwan, one that can allow its people to grasp the multiple layers of their conflicted spatial history while at the same time responding to the ongoing spatial confrontation between the power centre and the voices in the margins.

The increasing globalization of information, culture, and knowledge problematizes traditional notions of citizenship. These contemporary notions of citizenship emphasize the growing subjective and individualistic nature of civic identity as well as a push towards engagement at a community rather than the political level. The shift in the concept of citizenship, from what it means to what one does, implies that while globalization is expanding private and public worlds outwardly, the individual person is looking closer to home for ways to engage and relate through their own personal lives and stories. Citizenship is no longer confined to the adult realm of politics and policy, it has evolved into a concept that has potential to include rather than exclude, and strengthen nationalism, community identities, and global presence. Often thought of as merely “citizens in the making”, children are excluded from civic or political engagement until they are of legal age. This study aimed to show that children do view themselves as citizens and understand their role in the community as a means for civic engagement. Through the use of narrative inquiry and arts-informed methods this research focused on children’s own perception of civic identity and the potential role that community engagement has on this identity development. The use of storytelling and painting/drawing allows children to express themselves in a more inclusive and holistic manner, which also allows them to communicate more concisely what they really think and feel. The key findings of this study were that children do identify as citizens through their individual notions (I-identities) or the small groups they are a part of in their immediate community (We’s-identities), and that they recognize this citizenship through membership and responsibility. These findings are significant because they imply that children do see themselves as citizens and that their civic identities go through a growth process from individual (I-identities), to small groups (We’s-identities), to the larger society as a whole (We-identities), and that is through community engagement and education that membership and responsibility is recognized. This research could be used to enhance child and youth programming, educational curriculum, and community projects to order increase skill development and engagement in relation to how children move through and comprehend these civic identity stages. / Graduate