Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and Club Corporation of America collaborated on a multimedia-training project, Board of Governors: The Cornerstone of a Fine Private Club. This training sought to catalogue all existing support materials and articulate key philosophical and operational systems regarding relationships between Club Managers and the club's Board of Governors, which stands as the leading administrative body for philosophical and operational issues in individual private clubs. This analysis operates on two levels of investigation: 1) a case study that provides a rhetorical assessment of the development and contents of this training system, 2) based on this appraisal, an introduction of theoretical options regarding the development of training applications. Moreover, the theoretical exhortations of Michel Foucault and Augusto Boal provide a language to encourage a different modus operandi in the field of corporate training. By articulating the concept of a "dialogue training continuum," this elucidation strives to offer an alternative when rethinking training systems and their encoded discourses. By analyzing local and institutional knowledges and how those knowledges find shape in this project, this analysis argues that establishing a system where end-users may question and reshape the philosophical discourse of the company during the context of training, the overall milieu has the ability to grow and shape-shift through legitimizing and valuing the voices of all organizational constituents. / Master of Arts

In the late 1980s, references to postmodernism, post-structuralism, and Michel Foucault started to appear in nursing journals. Since that time, hundreds of journal articles and dozens of books in the discipline of nursing have cited these continental-philosophical ideas—in substantial or minor ways—in nurses’ analyses of topics in nursing practice, education, and research. Key postmodern and post-structural notions including power/knowledge, discourse, the clinical gaze, disciplinary power, de-centering of the human subject as the originator of “meaning,” and the challenge to grand narratives and binary thinking—all found their place on the pages of journals such as the Journal of Advanced Nursing, Nursing Inquiry, and Nursing Philosophy and in a predominantly American journal Advances in Nursing Science among a few other periodicals. In my dissertation, I assemble this voluminous body of publications into a “field of study.” Taking a comparative approach to this field, I argue that we can understand postmodern/post-structural scholarship in nursing as characterized by a marked difference between its non-American (in this case, Australian and New Zealand, British and Irish, and Canadian) and American domains. While each domain is heterogeneous, peculiar features distinguish American postmodern/post-structural nursing literature from its non-American counterparts. I build on a recent systematic critique of so-called American “unique nursing science” and (meta)theory by Mark Risjord (2010), who surfaced the unacknowledged legacy of the logical positivist philosophy of science on contemporary American nursing conceptions of science and theory. These influences, according to Risjord, have had profound and lasting intellectual impact on nursing theoretical work manifesting in the notions of “unique science,” a caution toward “borrowed theory,” a hierarchical model of theory, the language of metaparadigms, incommensurable paradigms, and so on. These ideas and related practices of theorizing have culminated in what I call the American disciplinary nursing matrices that shape the visibility and intelligibility of alternative practices of theorizing in the discipline of nursing. I show the ways in which these matrices are consequential for how postmodern and post-structural philosophical ideas are understood, discussed, and deployed (or not) in American nursing literature; indeed, I argue that these continental ideas, vital for nurses’ ability to critically reflect on the discipline and the profession—are unintelligible as a form of nursing knowledge within the American nursing theoretical matrices. / Graduate / 2017-09-29 / 0569 / 0344

This dissertation explores the aesthetics of contemporary Indigenous identity— its various manifestations, simulations, hybridizations, (dis)appearances, and liminalities. It is a project about the lived experience of ancestry conceived of through narratives of shapeshifting, virtuality, sacrifice, hauntings and possession. This project is representative of a period of time in an on-going journey that began long before these first words were written…and one that I intend will continue long after this book’s completion. The methodological approach to this work is multifaceted, encompassing the fields of Indigenous philosophy, digital media art and cultural studies. It is a project comprised of several interrelated strands of theoretical speculation, philosophical inquiry and creative engagement. This dissertation is in many ways an autobiographical text—a meditation on my own Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) heritage and the spaces I occupy in the world as Onkwehonwe (an Indigenous person). At its core it is about exploring different modes of engagement with my own ancestral ‘territories’, while at the same time it endeavors to ask larger questions about collective memory, community, and cultural inheritance. In being representative of a journey, the interrelated strands of writings in this text are meant to be traversal, and are about surveying and mapping different intellectual and creative territories. This text is about crossing interdisciplinary zones of theoretical inquiry that occur at the intersection and hybridization of Indigenous and Western philosophies, contemporary First Nations performance art and post-structuralist theory. It is a work comprised of ebbs and flows, movements, refrains, and cascades of articulation that interpenetrate and cross over into one another. This text is therefore best thought of as a series of theoretical passageways—a multiplicity of thoughts and critical engagements in motion, translation and conversion. It must be said that the traversals and crossings in this text are not necessarily about establishing a synthesis between differing ideologies, philosophies or cosmologies. It is not intended to be dichotomous, but rather should be read as a remix-theory that passes in-between different fields of critical inquiry. For while on the one hand this text seeks to explore different zones of intellectual and creative proximity, it is also a work that emerges from within a multitude of contradictions and myriad incommensurabilities. / Graduate

Despite the fact that the introduction of reserved parental leave has resulted in a success for gender equality in general, there are parties in the Swedish Parliament that oppose this reform, the Christian Democrats being one of them. The purpose of the study was therefore to study the effects of the Christian Democrats' problem presentation regarding reserved parental leave. The essay's three research questions came from Carol Bacchi's WPR-approach, which aimed to find the party's problem presentation regarding reserved parental leave, what presuppositions these where based on, and what discursive and subjectification effects this gives. The study shows that the problem where parents' freedom of choice and high sickness rates. Based on feminist poststructuralism, we could see that the presuppositions turned out to be about a constructed categorization where sexual characteristics are set against each other. Finally, the study shows that this had several discursive- and subjectification effects where alternative problem presentations were excluded, and that individuals are limited based on the framework that the discourse sets up, which subjectifies people based on gender.