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The international student experience presents an interesting and complex case in which a student must adjust to a new environment. Informed by poststructural theories, this exploratory study aimed to gain an in-depth understanding of eight Saudi international students’ linguistic, cultural, and identity experiences while living in Canada. It examined how Saudi students’ linguistic and cultural transitions within Canada relate to their L2 learning. To conduct this study, narrative inquiry was adopted as a methodology to gather narratives from Saudi participants by conducting semi-structured interviews. In the first part of the findings, using thematic analysis, I found nine emergent themes that revealed participants’ cultural/linguistic challenges, e.g., language anxiety and problems with academic English, and demonstrated participants’ difficulties socializing in their new L2 communities. In the second part of the findings, a narrative co-construction of one Saudi female participant’s life story in Canada revealed that gender-related issues were a central theme in Saudi female students’ integration. Linking all these emergent themes to poststructural L2 acquisition (SLA) theory, four key conclusions about the Saudi international student experience were brought to light: 1) Saudi participants faced challenges in building an academic identity in which they could participate confidently; 2) the formation of a non-native speaker identity impacted their ability to fully participate in the L2 community; 3) while attempting to gain access to the L2 community, some participants found themselves constrained and secluded by what they perceived as a lack of communicative competence; and 4) female participants talked about the re-negotiation of the Saudi female identity throughout their stay in Canada. Given these conclusions, this study carries various policy implications through which university administrators can build support services and foster international student inclusion.

This study examines the representations of identities of the Hungarian Self and the Chinese Other in the Hungarian official foreign policy discourses surrounding the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This research paper uses Lene Hansen’s poststructuralist discourse analysis to examine how Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán represents Hungary’s identity in relation to the Chinese one since 2013 when the agreement on the BRI was signed. The study’s analysis reveals that the Hungarian Self and the Chinese Other have shared more similarities than differences since 2013. Historically, the Chinese Other has been considered radically different and threatening communist Other in relation to the democratic Hungarian Self. However, the representations of identities took a pivotal turn in the early 2010s when Hungary started to glorify China rather than despite it. Ever since then, the Chinese Other has been constituted as an equal in relation to the Hungarian Self and the differences between them have therefore not been radical. The analysis disclosed that the Other was most often described in regional terms, i.e. as the ‘’East’’ and as something that the Hungarian Self wanted to be a part of. Historically, Hungary and China have been constituted as temporally inferior in relation to the West, however, the analysis showed that the East has caught up with the West and that it is the East that will be leading in the future. Finally, by elevating the issue to a moral basis, Hungary presents itself as an ethically driven actor who has two main responsibilities; a responsibility to include the Chinese Other in European businesses and projects as well as an explicit international responsibility to defend traditional values and differences that exist between nations.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how male and female educators treat boys and girls in care situations to gain knowledge about whether different demands are asked of children depending on gender. This also relates to the question of how girls and boys are constructed in the treatment and what consequences this may have for their room for maneuver in care situations. Furthermore, the study also intends to investigate how female and male educators relate to both the concept of care, the actual care and how they view the role of care in preschool. By using methods such as interviews and observations of educators in different care-related situations, we have investigated how they view their own care for girls and boys, and what it looks like in practice. In addition, we have tried to get a grip on the importance of care in preschool today, in relation to learning. We have our theoretical starting point in feminist poststructuralism, which together with previous research on female and male educators in preschool and the concept of care has helped us understand our results. The results of our study show that there are many similarities in the reasoning about the role of care in preschool, how you want to meet each child according to its individuality, but despite this, the children provide different types of care based on their gender. We have been able to see that educators think that care is often the most important thing for the children in preschool, but that they rarely talk about care as a prerequisite for children’s wellbeing, development and learning towards society.

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<p>Nursing is a primary partner on the interprofessional team, yet there is minimal empirical evidence of nurse educators acting as architects of interprofessional education. Feminist poststructuralism (FPS) guides an exploration of nursing’s engagement in interprofessional education (IPE) using Yin’s (2009) case study methodology. A multiple case design of three English-language baccalaureate nursing programs investigates research questions: What are the antecedents of nursing’s engagement in IPE; how are nurse educators/nursing faculty engaged in IPE; how does gender impact nursing’s involvement in IPE development and implementation; and, how is nursing’s IPE engagement impacted by contextual factors inherent in health professional and academic contexts? Data from documents, archival records, individual and focus group interviews, field notes, non-participant observation, and a demographic questionnaire are reported in three individual case reports. A cross case analysis report is interpreted through FPS tenets including language, discourse, subjectivity, and power. Findings indicate that despite valuing IPE, nursing’s IPE engagement is minimal, inconsistent, and diverse in the presence of discrepant and/or uncertain understandings of the term interprofessional. The cross-case analysis outcome speaks principally of nursing’s general experience in the academy, with IPE engagement seemingly providing the vehicle to convey messages of enduring concern and tension inherent in nursing’s experience in the academy. Prominent concepts uncovered include nurse academic, professional subjectivity, and professional identity. Historic, hegemonic discourses of women, nurse, and nursing’s relationship with medicine impact nursing’s professional subjectivity such that nurse academics’ sense of professional self and professional confidence are viewed as antecedents to nursing’s IPE engagement.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>This thesis examines how obscenity can be used either to maintain or to challenge gender stereotypes. Though this thesis focuses on only three texts, the questions raised concerning the relation between obscenity, gender, and subjectivity have wide applications. The primary theory applied here is a feminist poststructuralism which sees gender as socially constructed through language. According to poststructuralism, everything is formed socially or culturally through language. This includes the realities people experience of themselves and their surroundings; therefore, the language used to describe, and ultimately to construct, gender, is extremely important for a feminist critique of gender construction in our patriarchal society. Obscenity plays an often theoretically neglected role in the construction of gendered subjectivities. Drawing attention to the interconnection between obscenity and gender construction is important to feminists for several reasons. Understanding this interconnection may allow feminists not only to undermine stereotypical gender subjectivities, but to create entirely new subject positions.</p> <p>To investigate the relationship between obscenity, gender, and subjectivity, this thesis examines the following texts: Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Women of Brewster Place, and for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. The Introduction provides a general survey of critical work concerning obscenity and gender construction as well as providing an introduction to poststructural theory. Chapter I examines Last Exit to Brooklyn and raises questions about, among other things, the misappropriation of obscenity by Selby's female characters where women swear but do so in a patriarchal manner. Selby, in privileging violence over language, silences his female characters in his reinscription of the patriarchy. Chapter II examines The Women of Brewster Place and the context Naylor creates which clearly condemns male violence and gives power to female voices. Chapter III examines for colored girls ... and finds several similarities between Naylor's and Shange's use of obscenity. The new subject positions that these two authors create will be investigated.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

This study regards the problem of a binary in dance discursive practices, seen in how "world dance" is separated from European concert dance. A close look at 1930s Kenya Luo women's dance in the context of "dance history" raises questions about which dances matter, who counts as a dancer, and how dance is defined. When discursive practices are considered in light of multicultural demographic trends and globalisation the problem points toward a crisis of reason in western discourse about how historical origins and "the body" have been theorised. Within a western philosophical tradition the body and experience are negated as a basis for theorising. Historical models and theories about race and gender often relate binary thinking whereby the body is theorised as text. An alternative theoretical model is established wherein dancers' processes of embodying historical meaning provide one of five bases through which to theorise. The central research questions this study poses and attempts to answer are: how can I illuminate a view of dance that is transhistorical and transnational? How can I write about 1930s Luo women in a way that does not create a case study to exist outside of dance history? Research methods challenge historical materialist frameworks for discussions of the body and suggest insight can be gained into how historical narratives operate with coercive power--both in past and present--by examining how meaning is conceptualised and experienced. The problem is situated inside a hermeneutic circle that connects past and present discourses, so tensions are explored between a binary model of past/present and new ways of thinking about dance and history through embodiment. Archives, elder interviews, and oral histories are a means to approach 1930s Luo Kenya. A choreography model is another method of inquiry where meanings about history and dance that subvert categories and binary assumptions are understood and experienced by dancers through somatic processes. A reflective narrative provides the means to untangle influences of disciplines like dance and history on the phenomenon of personal understanding. / Dance

Overlapping and entangled crises that comprise and propel society require near constant (re)orientation in order to understand, explain, and address the workings of a multiplicitous world. For those invested in education, this means confronting complexity through the prism of teaching and learning. Educational scholars across fields and disciplines have sought to name, describe, and make sense of this complexity. Many do so in ways that recognize the difference between recent events and cycles of change that have come before. In other words, they engage in inquiry with a recognition that a convergence of factors produces this moment as different, and thus requires difference in approach to understanding. Building on recent scholarship in posthumanism and social studies education, this dissertation draws upon foundational texts in posthumanism, poststructuralism, and new materialism to re-orient understanding of how social studies teachers learn in the posthuman convergence. In particular, this inquiry explores what happens when social studies teachers are confronted by potentially destabilizing content during professional learning experiences located in a university setting. Considering how learning unfolds in and through complexity, this study examines how the intersecting, overlapping, and nested contexts of the inquiry, within the broader context of the posthuman convergence, intervene in professional learning experiences and shape the ways in which collective and individual learning (un)/(re)fold. Employing transqualitative methods, this dissertation explores the material-discursive entanglements that constitute social studies teacher professional learning. Transqualitative research is a hybrid of traditional qualitative research design and critical qualitative methods that seeks to disrupt the traditional qualitative focus on the human experience and embrace a posthuman perspective in research design and methodology. Data includes ethnographic participant observation field notes, photographs, artifacts, individual and group interviews, spatial maps, and analytic memos. Resisting settled findings, this project (re)orients understanding through disclosing provocations meant to support thinking differently about how social studies teachers learn in highly complex contexts. As such, this dissertation strives to help map the complicated terrain that teachers are currently navigating, while informing those invested in supporting teacher learning in the current challenging environment.