This thesis reviews the potential contributions of the United States Air Force to stabilization and reconstruction operations. Specifically, the Air Force's On-Scene Commanders Course and Air Force Mission Support Group Commanders are assessed as potential Air Force assets that could be employed in stabilization and reconstruction operations. This research will determine the course's ability to satisfy key needs identified in the post-conflict literature and if the course would be useful for other U.S. agencies with responsibilities in post-conflict operations. Finally, this paper asks if Mission Support Group Commanders can provide critical skill-sets valuable in stability operations. This work will assess the applicability of these Air Force leaders' duties for possible use in post-conflict operations by reviewing the Air Force's Objective Wing Structure and duty histories of current and former Mission Support Group Commanders. / US Air Force (USAF) author.

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'Psychology and the Construction of the 'Normal' Family in Postwar Canada, 1945-1960,' investigates the manner in which psychological discourse constructed notions of the normal postwar family in Canada. Despite their pronouncements to the contrary, I argue that the psychologists' discussions of what constituted the normal family were shaped by and reflected their social values, and not so-called objective, scientific concerns. In psychological discourse, normal families were those that conformed to the idealized expectations constructed by the psychologists themselves. These expectations reflected the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon middle-class point of view that dominated postwar Canadian society. Through its specialized discourse, psychology compared, differentiated, hierarchized, homogenized and excluded families and individuals. Together these techniques constituted its 'normalizing power. ' The study seeks to understand the role of professional social sciences in shaping the private experience of ordinary Canadians and the political uses to which the concepts of social scientific rhetoric are put. It suggests that social scientists endowed with the power to influence social convention determined acceptable ideas about the family and family life. This raises important questions about the political motivation of this expert intervention into the private lives of Canadians.

'Psychology and the Construction of the 'Normal' Family in Postwar Canada, 1945-1960,' investigates the manner in which psychological discourse constructed notions of the normal postwar family in Canada. Despite their pronouncements to the contrary, I argue that the psychologists' discussions of what constituted the normal family were shaped by and reflected their social values, and not so-called objective, scientific concerns. In psychological discourse, normal families were those that conformed to the idealized expectations constructed by the psychologists themselves. These expectations reflected the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon middle-class point of view that dominated postwar Canadian society. Through its specialized discourse, psychology compared, differentiated, hierarchized, homogenized and excluded families and individuals. Together these techniques constituted its 'normalizing power. ' The study seeks to understand the role of professional social sciences in shaping the private experience of ordinary Canadians and the political uses to which the concepts of social scientific rhetoric are put. It suggests that social scientists endowed with the power to influence social convention determined acceptable ideas about the family and family life. This raises important questions about the political motivation of this expert intervention into the private lives of Canadians.

The years following World War II symbolized a new beginning for the United States. While at the height of global power, Americans founds that they were able to experience a leisurely existence where items, desired instead of necessary, could be purchased by almost anyone. This increased prosperity, however, also caused a rise in the number of addicts that included not only the hard-core drug users, but "junkies" who were addicted to filling the emptiness within through the use of illegal drugs to television to sex in order to do so. This dissertation examines the phenomenon of the rise of addicts following World War II, using the literature of addiction in order to elucidate the reasoning behind this surge. Contemporary American authors formed a new genre of writing, "junkie literature," which chronicles the rise of addiction and juxtaposes questions of identity and the use of "junk." Burroughs's Junky and Trocchi's Cain's Book are among the first to represent the shift in the postwar years between earlier narratives of addiction and the rise of junkie literature through an erasure of previously held beliefs that addiction was the result of a moral vice rather than a disease. Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries, Ann Marlowe's How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z, and Linda Yablonsky's The Story of Junk continue this trend of semi-autobiographical writing in an effort to show the junkie's identity in society, as well as the way addiction mirrors capitalism and consumerism as a whole. Finally, Hubert Selby's Requiem for a Dream, Bret Easton Ellis's Less than Zero, and John Updike's Rabbit at Rest explore a different kind of junk addiction, focusing on the use of television, diet pills, sex, cocaine, and food to fill an ineffable void inside that the characters of the novels find themselves unable to articulate. Using Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, as well as various socio-historical critics, this dissertation investigates the rise of addiction narratives in the postwar years, linking the questions of identity to consumerism in contemporary American culture.

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