This poststructural study utilizes Foucault’s theories of power/knowledge nexus and disciplinary power to explore the discursive formation of inclusion of a district level Exceptional Student Education leadership team in order to understand how the discourses are constructed, practices are normalized, and power relations are legitimized. This type of analysis interrogated the assumptive groundings of special education in the district, and how these have been taken-for-granted and normalized in the professional knowledge, policies, and practices of the field. Data from multiple sources: semi-structured interviews, observations, multimodal forms of communication, observation journal, and researcher reflexive journal produced findings within four dominant discourses---the philosophical understanding of inclusion discourse, the contextual discourse, the politics of leading discourse, and the logistics of inclusive schooling discourse. The normative understanding of inclusion within this district is anchored in a structure of difference, emphasized through ability. The areas of commonalities among and within these discourses, where tensions and contradictions lie, include the continuum of segregating spaces, the utility of the academic achievement frame, and the necessity of specialists and professionalized knowledge. Future research may entail exploring a radical restructuring of inclusive education, and conducting non-traditional qualitative studies that focus on the relational power dynamics and decision-making processes among district administrators. Implications for practice are also discussed.

In spite of its thematic and stylistic heterogeneity, Jean-François Lyotard’s corpus may be plausibly interpreted as, by and large, an attempt to grapple with the following problem set: a) In general: if we reject all transcendent/systematic philosophical frameworks, can we consistently make normative claims? Can we ground them in any way? Do we need to? b) In particular: if we reject the philosophical framework of humanism, what does this mean for ethics and/or politics? Can one be an antihumanist without abandoning ethics? The basic issue is over the titular possibility of a “wild normativity” – that is, a normativity that does not derive its force from any kind of transcendent guarantor. As I reconstruct him, Lyotard begins from a methodological rejection of transcendent guarantors in general; this plays itself out in particular terms as a rejection of humanism. Thus, beginning from a thought not of universality and totality but of singularity and difference, and wishing at a certain point in his career to ensure that the problem of justice stays firmly on the agenda, Lyotard gives us to think the very possibility of an ethical antihumanism. My dissertation is both an interpretation of Lyotard’s work as it unfolds in time, as well as a contribution to thinking through the general-particular problem set that I argue is at play in his work.

The term “evidence-based” is ubiquitous in practice and policy-making settings around the world; it is de rigueur to claim this approach. This dissertation is an inquiry into the work of evidence-based policy-making with a particular focus on the social practices of policy work/ers involved with developing policies relating to chronic disease at the Ministry of Health in British Columbia (B.C.), Canada. I begin with an examination of tensions in the policy-making literature germane to the relationship between knowledge, its production, and policy-making: the environment into which evidence-based policy-making emerged in the 1990s. Drawing on the theorising of knowledge, discourse, and power – particularly from Foucault’s work – for the analytic approach, I present the commitment to claims of “evidence-based” practices found in key government policy framework documents and policy workers’ accounts of their practices, gathered through interviews. I then show the unravelling of this commitment in those accounts. This research reveals how the policy frameworks construct chronic disease as a financial burden on the health care system and direct policy workers to develop policies with this construction in mind. The discourses associated with evidence-based policy-making narrow how policy workers can think about evidence and its production to positivist, scientific methods and numerical measures that will provide proof of cost cutting. Proponents of evidence-based policy-making laud it as keeping politics and ideology out of the policy-making process. However, the policy workers I interviewed reveal the power relations organising their deeply political work environment. Furthermore, the minutiae constituting policy-making practices produce a “managerialist approach to governance” (Edwards, Gillies, and Horsley, 2015, p. 1) in which people with chronic disease are noticeable by their near-absence. When they do appear, they are responsibilised to decrease the burden on the health/care system and the economy. I argue that as a governing project with an appearance of failure, given the many cracks in the commitment to the claim and the practices of being evidence-based, the discourse of evidence-based policy-making is actually quite successful. It has continuous effects: people are separated (so-called apolitical policy workers into imagined neutral space and decision-makers into political space), knowledge is divided, costs and responsibilities are downloaded to individuals, and evidence-based discourses appear in countless settings. The governing works. / Graduate

After the Jomtien conference and the World Declaration, Education for all in 1990, by UNESCO, education began to be a topic of greater relevance for global politics, and not only for domestic politics. The thesis aims to examine the construction of the OECD’s discourse about higher education using Chile as a Case of study, through the analysis of the OECD’s document Reviews of National Policies for Education, Education in Chile, published in 2017, and on the Law 21091 of Higher Education in Chile promulgated in 2018. For this, from poststructuralist theory, and using the concepts of legitimacy and norm as a theoretical framework, discourse analysis is carried out using the What is the Problem Represented to be approached. Thus, the thesis reveals that the OECD discourse is built on OECD preconceived standards, and not on particular standards for Chile, however, this also leads Chile to recognize itself as a country part of a world elite.

The aim of the dissertation is to analyse works of a Moscow conceptualist Dmitrij Prigov. Prigov approached his medially diversified legacy (that was characterized by media diversity and quantitative hypertrophy) as a life-long project Dmitrij Aleksandrovič Prigov. (project DAP). One of the goals of the project was to remain unidentified, which means to suspend the straight-forward relation between an individual media product and the intention of the authorial subject. However, the connection between the media products and the authorial subject preserved. It is the modality of the connection that changed. The dissertation focuses on the analysis of the modality of the connection. The research begins with an analysis of the media products and proceeds toward the issue of authorial subjetʼs identity construction. Nevertheless, it is the media products that the identity of the authorial subject is constructed by. Authorial subject, however, plays the role of the (co-)agent in the production process of the media products together with other non-human agents like iterable patterns, instruments, techniques and semiotic systems. Methodologically, the dissertation emerges from the intersection of media theories, social theories and the theoretical reflection of the phenomena gathered under the umbrella...

The study explores the reproductive decision-making of eight self-identified lesbian women in same-gendered relationships as it is interested in the ways in which they construct their reproductive decisions, particularly as it relates to their gender. Four open-ended, semi-structured, joint interviews were conducted with couples who have already made the decision to parent, thereby offering retrospective accounts. Interview transcriptions were analysed by employing thematic analysis underpinned by principles of Foucauldian discourse analysis and rooted in a feminist poststructuralist theory. Three discursive themes are identified in participants' accounts namely: 1) the discourse of heterosexual gender roles; 2) the discourse of heteronormative parenting; and 3) the counter-discourse of parental responsibility and the responsible parent. In a context where lesbian mothers' reproductive decisions are often called into question and where lesbian mothers' parental roles are constructed according to gender binaries, the study concludes that in exercising their limited agency within restrictive heteronormative discourse, participants made their reproductive decisions based on their ability to care for a child in terms of pragmatic factors, their capacity to meet the child's emotional needs and to protect them from potential "othering" by segments of the society. The findings of this study carry implications for addressing the marginalisation and stigmatisation of lesbian women who wish to become parents and raise their children without having to justify their decisions purely because of their sexual identity. / Mini Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Psychology / MA / Unrestricted

This thesis looks at the construction of China as a security threat in the United Kingdom, through the theoretical lens of techno-Orientalism. The main argument is that techno-Orientalist ideas influence the Western perception of China as a security threat, which leads to the creation of certain fears regarding China which affects the identity creation of both the United Kingdom and China. Techno-Orientalism shows how the West perceives itself as losing its grip on modernity, and thus the future; the East is being perceived as the producers of technology which lead to the opposite of the desired Western liberal humanism. Thus, the East is on its way to take over modernity and turn it into a technological oppressive future. These ideas influence how the United Kingdom perceives China as a security threat, and this is shown through a Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis of debates in the British Parliament.

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Women in combat roles are present in at least 40% of armed rebellion movements, yet the narrative of women outside of traditional roles in conflict is invisible in various discursive communities of practice. Silence and misrecognition are the root of this issue: to be considered as agents and full partners of social interaction, female combatants need to exist in the discourse of leaders and institutions. Embedded in the feminist IR theory, I utilise Critical Discourse Analysis and Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis to unveil the extent of recognition given to female fighters in data internal and external to conflicts. United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1325, 1820 and 1889 are analysed to explore whether women are institutionally ‘allowed’ to exist as agents in war beyond the roles of victim and peacemaker. Analysis of discourse from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party then serves to dive deeper into the recognition of female fighters by the leaders of armed struggle movements. Despite the ambitions of gender equality of all three actors, the research reveals that a greater level of feminist ideology seems to exceptionalise female combatants, thus not including and recognising them to the same extent as men.

This thesis in its theoretical part deals with psychoanalytic and poststructural - ie posthumanistic views on the three interrelated, but in some aspects contradictory concepts of love, desire and jouissance. These concepts are examined as components (as will be pointed out) of not merely traditionally depicted heterosexual relationships. The above mentioned aspects considering the concept of love are mythology and constructedness, afterthat with respect to the concept of desire the aspect is the never-ending postponement, and in the view of jouissance the aspects are the loss and fragmentation of the self, its relationship to Freudian libido, and to the death instinct. This thesis traces the development of forms of the above concepts used by the psychoanalytic and poststructuralist authors such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, in their primary texts and also takes account of how they are received in the secondary literature. The theoretical part is therefore based on the scrutinization of primary texts and relevant secondary literature on these issues in the field of philosophy, gender and cultural studies and feminist and critical theory. In the second part the Czech literary texts dealing with the topics of...