Magister Artium - MA / South Africa transitioned from an apartheid system of government, with one ruling party to a new democracy; a transition that is still currently in progress. With this transition came many new freedoms, such as the ability to choose and freely express one’s linguistic and cultural preferences, amongst many others. This study analyses the negotiation of identity in constitutionally multilingual parliamentary discourses in the Western Cape in order to create a better understanding of the influence the new South Africa has on the identities constructed in parliamentary discourses whereby polylingualism is used as a linguistic resource. The parliamentary discourse is deemed constitutionally multilingual due to the fact that before 1994, African languages were not considered official, but presently Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa are credited provincial official languages in the Western Cape and are amongst the eleven national official languages. In order to investigate how performative identities are constructed discursively in the relatively new spaces of linguistic democracy, this study conducted a multisemiotic analysis on political manifestos in conjunction with a discourse analysis of a randomly selected Hansard Report of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament, which is the only parliament of the national nine to have an alternate political party in government. In collaboration with consulting the Standing Rules of the House, the National Language Policy Framework, the Western Cape Language Policy and observing the actual sitting, scholarly literature pertaining to language use, multisemiotic features and identity negotiation were evaluated to better understand the discursive spaces in which identity is negotiated as well as to achieve the objectives of this study.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the discursive construction of teacher subjectivity by mapping and complicating the normative discourses that dictate the im/possibility of what counts as a “good teacher” in Taiwan. This research employed the “new” postmodern ethnography and various methods of data collection, including archival documents, interviews, classroom and school observations, and a researcher’s journal. Data was analyzed using critical discourse analysis and thematic analysis. Feminist poststructuralist theories of identity, subject formation, agency, and teachers as a discursive category were used to inform analyses about the working of regulatory discourses on teacher identity and about teachers’ negotiations. This study juxtaposed competing discourses and historicized discourses as strategies to destabilize commonsense assumptions about the good teacher. The stories about teachers’ schoolgirl days were also gathered not only because there is a dearth of such stories that cut across Taiwan’s history from martial law to democratization but also because educational biography is assumed to be reproduced in teaching. This research found that the normative discourses of the “good teacher” include (1) Good teachers promise students high scores on examinations; (2) Good teachers are moral teachers; (3) Good teachers devote themselves to students; and (4) Good teachers strengthen the nation. Two transgressive discourses that arise from my analysis of archival texts include (1) Good teachers recognize students’ homosexual identities; and (2) Good teachers question the government’s educational policies. The researcher concluded that the “good teacher” should be better understood as a “normative ideal” (Young, 1990, p. 320) that designates what a teacher ought to be, but obscures the cultural and historical specificities of the identity category good teachers and excludes the excessive discourses and knowledge that teachers employ to live the identity called teacher. Implications for teacher-education curriculum are provided. The researcher also suggests implications for (1) the future research on teacher education; (2) the methodologies used to study teachers; and (3) the education and educational research in Taiwan. / text

This dissertation attempts to contribute to the literature on the transformation of gender relations and patriarchy by creating a discursive nexus between two seemingly incompatible paradigms: materialist dialectics as interpreted by Mao Tsetung and poststructuralist feminism. Despite the important differences between the two traditions, it argues that they have important ontological similarities. This creates the potential for a fecund cross-fertilization, a potential which has been largely unrecognized by scholars. This dissertation argues that Mao's ontology of ceaseless transformation arising from universal and concrete contradictions provides an essential foundation for any progressive praxis of social transformation. It examines aspects of how the maoist approach to materialist dialectics was put into practice in revolutionary China, along with a summary of some of the recent contributions to this paradigm by Bob Avakian. It examines the historical experience of transforming patriarchal relations and ideas under Mao and argues that, though there were real shortcomings, the historical experience of revolutionary China remains an essential foundation and contribution to transforming patriarchal gender relations and identities. Focusing on the writings of Judith Butler, it discusses the contributions of poststructuralist feminist, particularly its thorough critique of essentialism and the deconstruction of the categories and conceptual foundations of feminism. Butler's emphasis on the cultural production of gender and sex, along with the need to destabilize the regulatory functions and frameworks which police them, are invaluable in developing the ability of maoist materialist dialectics to transform gender relations. The dissertation includes a discussion of sexuality, violence and democracy as way of pointing towards a thoroughly materialist and dialectical method and approach which can move beyond the anchors of metaphysics while embracing thinking from a wide spectrum, including Queer theory. The dissertation concludes with a brief discussion on how such abstract theoretical concerns are relevant to current political realities.

CHARLES UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Institute of Political Studies Department of Security Studies Master thesis 2019 Tetyana Demyanchuk CHARLES UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Institute of Political Studies Department of Security Studies Tetyana Demyanchuk Understanding of hybrid warfare in Ukraine: to what extent this understanding is shaped by its internal experience? Master thesis Prague 2019 Author: Tetyana Demyanchuk Supervisor: Mgr. Tomáš Kučera, Ph.D. Academic year: 2018/2019 Bibliographic note DEMYANCHUK, Tetyana (2019) Understanding of hybrid warfare in Ukraine: to what extent this understanding is shaped by its internal experience? 50 p. Master thesis. Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Security Studies. Mgr. Tomáš Kučera, Ph.D. Abstract Hybrid warfare has achieved notoriety of being a buzzword attempting to explain the changes in the modern warfare that blur the lines between war and peace, conventional and irregular warfare. Despite its definitional shortcomings, it made its way into the official discourse of the politicians commenting on the conflict in Ukraine and Russia's involvement in it, which did not add clarity. This thesis aims to bring a Ukrainian perspective to the discussion, and it attempts to provide a deep interpretation of sufficiently...

Despite the growing interest in the issue of identity formation in the broader TESOL research field, few studies have been concerned with the question of female teachers’ identity formation from a feminist poststructuralist perspective. This study also seeks to further the feminist poststructuralist research within the Iranian TESOL and bridge the substantive gap within the existing literature, which is an almost untouched area of research regarding the teachers’ identity formation. This thesis attempts to explore the construction of identities of eight Iranian female teachers of English and the discourses that shape them through examining their narratives, using data gathered from interviews and email correspondences. In a two-year collaboration with the participants, I applied a feminist poststructuralist conceptual framework to examine the participants’ main subject positions and the prevailing discursive practices that construct them. The research data, collected by individual interviews and email correspondence, indicates the teachers’ identities as multiple, complex, and contradictory. I contend that multiple subject positions stem out of the clash of the multiple discourses that are available to them. Impacted by both gender and professional discourses that sometimes even collide, the findings show how these women struggle to conceive a sense of coherent self. The results of the analysis indicate that the gender and professional discourses are of normative, disciplinary, and individualizing nature. Negotiating identities within themselves and within the complex cultural context they live in, these female teachers are involved in an ongoing process of adjustment, adaptation and resistance.

Between 2006 and 2008 the German television series “Türkisch für Anfänger“ (Turkish for Beginners) about the life of a multiculturally blended family in Berlin was aired on the television network ARD. This thesis analyzes the gender construction of the six main characters in order to find out which concepts of gender they mirror, and how they perform their gender identities. This analysis of gender is carried out in close interaction with other categories of identity such as ethnicity or age. The theoretical foundation for the study is feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (FPDA), which is interested in the multiple power relations in which individuals are embedded in their social interactions. These structures of power are reflected in their gender constructions. The approach assumes that in each situation several competing discourses are available for individuals within which they need to position themselves. With the help of the FPDA this master’s thesis investigates these discoursive structures subjects adopt to negotiate their relationships and identities. In addition, the thesis relies on Erving Goffman’s concept of face-work and his metaphor of playing a role in social interaction which is meant to be a theatrical stage. His work is applied to the gender construction of the subjects mainly to underline that gender also needs to be performed. The gender construction of the six characters is analyzed on three different levels: their language use, their nonverbal behaviour, and camera editing. Therefore the analysis focuses on verbal communication, nonverbal behaviour and paralinguistic features, and the media components. The analysis of eleven selected scenes shows that the gender constructions of the characters and the performance of those constructions are not stable, but rather fluid. They continuously shift between different gender identities, sometimes positioning themselves at the same time as powerful and powerless within and towards varying discourses. Thus each character constructs a number of different gender identities during the course of the series, as well as within particular scenes.

Between 2006 and 2008 the German television series “Türkisch für Anfänger“ (Turkish for Beginners) about the life of a multiculturally blended family in Berlin was aired on the television network ARD. This thesis analyzes the gender construction of the six main characters in order to find out which concepts of gender they mirror, and how they perform their gender identities. This analysis of gender is carried out in close interaction with other categories of identity such as ethnicity or age. The theoretical foundation for the study is feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (FPDA), which is interested in the multiple power relations in which individuals are embedded in their social interactions. These structures of power are reflected in their gender constructions. The approach assumes that in each situation several competing discourses are available for individuals within which they need to position themselves. With the help of the FPDA this master’s thesis investigates these discoursive structures subjects adopt to negotiate their relationships and identities. In addition, the thesis relies on Erving Goffman’s concept of face-work and his metaphor of playing a role in social interaction which is meant to be a theatrical stage. His work is applied to the gender construction of the subjects mainly to underline that gender also needs to be performed. The gender construction of the six characters is analyzed on three different levels: their language use, their nonverbal behaviour, and camera editing. Therefore the analysis focuses on verbal communication, nonverbal behaviour and paralinguistic features, and the media components. The analysis of eleven selected scenes shows that the gender constructions of the characters and the performance of those constructions are not stable, but rather fluid. They continuously shift between different gender identities, sometimes positioning themselves at the same time as powerful and powerless within and towards varying discourses. Thus each character constructs a number of different gender identities during the course of the series, as well as within particular scenes.

As an anarchist and a Muslim, I have witnessed troubled times as a result of extreme divisions that exist between these two identities and communities. To minimize these divisions, I argue for an anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian Islam, an ‘anarca-Islam’, that disrupts two commonly held beliefs: one, that Islam is necessarily authoritarian and capitalist; two, that anarchism is necessarily anti-religious. From this position I offer ‘anarca-Islam’ which I believe can help open-minded (non-essentialist/non-dogmatic) Muslims and anarchists to better understand each other, and therefore to more effectively collaborate in the context of what Richard JF Day has called the ’newest’ social movements. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-08 12:11:39.996

Sexual harassments have since long been an issue all over the world and schools have not been an exception. Reports from Swedish secondary schools show how 47% of the female pupils state that they have, sometime during their time in school, been the victim of sexual harassment. Other studies claim that pupils exposed to sexual harassments will develop low self-esteem and a decreased sense of self. The Swedish curriculum state that all children shall have the right to a harassment free school environment, but still many pupils claim to be exposed to sexual harassment in school. Several studies have theorized about why sexual harassment is so prevalent in schools but what do the pupils think? This study aims to reveal and analyze pupil opinions about sexual harassment; what do they think it is and why do they think it occurs? This will be done from a post-structural feminist point of view with focus on the shaping of identity among the respondents.      The collected results of this study indicate that sexual harassment is mostly due to a dominant form of the heterosexual male ideal where sexual harassment against both men and women is used to secure ones position as a dominant male and to gain access to the hegemonic male group. According to the respondents, sexual harassment have little to do with the victims and in the discussion an alternative approach to handle sexual harassment in school is discussed.

This poststructuralist research into managerial subjectivity follows ten senior managers’ experience, during significant organizational restructuring in the National Health Service. Located in the North of England the managers were interviewed three times during an eighteen-month period. An autoethnographic component is integral to the study; this recognises the researcher was a practising manager undergoing the same organizational change, whilst researching the field. Judith Butler’s theories provide the principle theoretical framework for the study. Whilst the managers narrated a fantasy of having a ‘true’ and coherent self, the research illustrated how fragile, fleeting and temporary each managerial self is and how passionately attached to their managerial subjectivity (despite how painful) they were. Emotion is presented as inextricably tied up with gender performativity and managerial subjectivity; despite best efforts the emotional ‘dirt’ of organizations cannot be ordered away; there is a constant seepage and spillage of emotion – as illustrated in the vignettes and profiled in the Butlerian deconstruction. During organizational change there was a fear of a social (organizational) death and even the most senior of managers were profoundly vulnerable. This fear and vulnerability heightened in contact with others perceived as more powerful (in critical conversations and interviews). Failure to receive the desired recognition and the risk of being organizationally unintelligible compounded this vulnerability and triggered recurrent, unpredictable patterns of loss, ek-stasis and unravelling of the managerial self. This acute vulnerability during restructuring anticipates and therefore (re) enacts a Machiavellian discourse, one that excuses unethical behaviour and relations as a ‘necessary evil’.