My dissertation examines racial power dynamics and whiteness in a previously all-white suburban school district that is now home to a very racially, ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse population. Specifically, I explore how white parents make sense of and respond to changing racial demographics in their community and the extent to which whites maintain privilege and power as they comprise a declining proportion of the community population overall. In light of the current political and social context in the U.S that has accompanied demographic change, there is a great need to critically examine the racial ideologies of whites as they relate ongoing structures of inequality, particularly in suburban areas that are previous centers of white isolation and modern epicenters of demographic change. Using a multi-modal case study methodology, I found that in this particular suburban context, where residents of color possessed similar or greater levels of income and education than white residents, and students of color performed at similar levels as white students in the public schools, dominant ideologies that associated whiteness with superiority and goodness persisted and led some white parents to flee the changing community and schools. Moreover, despite the increasingly small proportion of whites in the community and schools, white parents and residents were able to leverage their racial privilege and status in ways that reasserted and maintained unequal racial power relations in Parkwood through school district policies and practices. This research highlights the often invisible and under-examined ways in which white interests are continuously centered and served in ways that reproduce structures of racism in the “post-racial” era. Overall, the findings from this study contradict dominant colorblind narratives and point to the many ways in which whiteness operates, often in surreptitious ways, to maintain the racial status quo and exert social control over people of color even in contexts in which logic might imply that the power and privilege associated with whiteness would be threatened.

This thesis examines the representations of surveillance in mainstream cinema. Using ideology critique it will show how filmic illustrations of monitoring depoliticize the relationship between surveillance and structural relations of power.In order to provide a foundation for this inquiry, a political economy critique of surveillance will be undertaken in four areas. Focusing on the workplace, consumer surveillance, urban policing and intelligence gathering, this thesis will contextualise surveillance as historically relevant and intimately connected with modern constructs such as the nation-state, military power and capitalist economic organisation. In recent years, the role of surveillance has been intensified in response to the challenges posed by globalization, the restructuring of capitalism in the 1980's and 90's and the declining legitimacy of nation-state governments. These developments are both aided by, and in turn promote, pervasive networks of surveillance. Driven by risk management and other forms of economic reasoning as organisational logic, developments in information communication technologies accelerate surveillance capabilities rendering them more invasive and intense. In this way, surveillance can be conceived of as complicit with prevailing relations of power on a macro, sociological level.In order to show how mainstream cinematic representations of surveillance ideologically obscure this relationship, this thesis begins with an overview of 30 popular films. It then moves to a comparison of four recent Hollywood portrayals of surveillance with the four areas of political economy critique identified above. This analysis will reveal that these films have a tendency to focus on sentimental themes such as individual heroism, antagonist versus protagonist struggles and romantic subplots, in a way which deflects attention from collective experience with surveillance webs. More pertinently, the narrative structures of these films feature dichotomies between malevolent and benevolent monitoring, aligning legitimate and benign surveillance with the state. At the same time, the accompanying imagery of surveillance devices fetishizes monitoring, deterministically glorifying technology as a powerful and omniscient force. The overall effect is to depoliticize monitoring as a natural part of the fabric of everyday life.

The study produces a genealogy of ‘the child’ as the shifting subject constituted by the confluence of discourses that are utilized by, and surround, Western Australian precompulsory education. The analysis is approached as a genealogy of governmentality building on the work of Foucault and Rose, which enables the consideration of the research question that guides this study: How has ‘the child’ come to be constituted as a subject of regimes of practices of pre-compulsory education in Western Australia? This study does not explore how the historical discourses changed in relation to ‘the child’ as a universal subject of early education, but it examines the multiple ways ‘the child’ was constituted by these discourses as the subject at which government is to be aimed, and whose characteristics government must harness and instrumentalize. Besides addressing the research question, the study also develops a set of intertwining arguments. In these the author contends that ‘the child’ is invented through historically contingent ideas about the individual and that the way in which ‘the child’ is constituted in pre-compulsory education shifts in concert with the changing problematizations about the government of the population and individuals. Further, the study demonstrates the necessity to understand the provision of pre-compulsory education as a political practice. Looking at pre-compulsory education as a political practice de-stabilizes the takenfor-granted constitutions of ‘the child’ embedded in present theories, practices and research with children in the field of early childhood education. It also enables the de- and reconstruction of the notions of children’s ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘citizenship’. The continuous de- and reconstruction of these notions and the destabilization of the constitutions of ‘the child’ creates a framework in which improvement is possible, rather than “a utopian, wholesale and, thus revolutionary, transformation” in early education (Branson & Miller, 1991, p. 187). This study also contributes to the critiques of classroom discipline approaches by reconceptualizing them as technologies of government in order to reveal the power relations they silently wield.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Title from file title page. Emanuela Guano, committee chair; Layli Phillips, Juliana Kubala, Wendy Simonds, committee members. Electronic text (116 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Dec. 13, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 98-116).

Regions are the manifestation of ideology and power in the landscape. This study maintains that changes in the allocation and exercise of state power are reflected in Western Canada's regional geography at different time periods and that the ideology(ies) supporting this power is (are) actively advanced by the creation, maintenance, and continued existence of those regions. Traditional approaches to historical geography neglect this socio-political aspect of region. To that end, alternate, contemporary approaches are applied. Aspects of critical social theory will illuminate the roles of both ideology and power and their crucial place in forming the human-built environment. Different places in different time periods will be analysed. These include: the territories of the Canadian North-West 'circa' 1885; Alberta and Saskatchewan to provincehood, 1905; and the Inuvialuit Settlement Area, 1990.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX210353.

Thesis (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 194-208).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2002. / Title from title page screen (viewed Feb. 26, 2003). Thesis advisor: Sherry Cable. Document formatted into pages (x, 99 p. : 1 ill.). Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-85).

 The relationship between Internet technology and human beings has been the main focus in the realm of Internet study. Those studies, generally speaking, either paid attention to the political, economical and social influences of the burgeoning Internet technology on human society, or focusing on the changing of human behavior, attitudes and psychological conditions in the Internet technological environment. Lacking of considering the core nature of Internet technology, most of studies, though proposed many insightful arguments, cannot explain why and in what way the Internet has such great influences on human beings. Since the Internet technology constructed the cyberspace, its relationship with human beings has been undoubtedly influenced by the inherent nature of the Internet. Examining the intrinsic nature and the bias of Internet technology, this study proposes the concept of cyber-micropower to describe the power relationships in the Internet field, and explores the origins of cyber-micropower. By investigating the formation and operational mechanism of the three kinds of cyber-micropower – information micropower, context micropower and subject micropower, this study provides a new analytical framework to the Internet study as well as understanding various cyberspace phenomena. The qualitative methods, especially critical literature research, online participant observation, and oral history are adopted to make thick description of various online phenomena, get empirical online data and develop the key concept of cyber-micropower. Particularly, the formation of information micropower is examined through the phenomenon of online free. Based on the analysis of online virtual identity, the formation process of context micropower and subject micropower can be developed. Then, the operational mechanism of cyber-micropower was mainly investigated through human flesh searching phenomenon. Briefly, this study argues that the bias of Internet technology is liquidity. As the core features of the Internet, both digitalization and networking of information directly reflect the widespread requiring for liquidity. This liquid Internet plays the role by empowering cyber subjects. Cyber-micropower, then, is the liquid networking relations among cyber subjects. During online interactions and the Internet use, cyber subjects always tend to make surveillance and self-surveillance, restriction and self-restriction, group participating and other ways, through which cyber subjects adapted to the new liquid cyber contexts and relations, as well as positioning their own locations in the liquid network. This new liquid disciplinary model in the “many watch the many” kind of cyberspace is the operational mechanism of cyber-micropower. Accordingly, disciplined cyber subjects and cyber conditions are like numerous panopticons superimposed together. Then, this study further argues that with the development of Internet technology, the liquid may be faster, and a larger scale of digitalization and intensive networking will follow. Such trends, though may liberate human beings initially, will go beyond humans’ ultimate state in the end. The liquid nature of information restricts cyber subjects’ ability of self-reflexive and understanding. And the liquid cyberspace may promote multiple and unstable virtual identities. As a result, cyber subjects’ cyber-micropower will become more fragile and sensitive. And the human nature may also be networked and liquefied gradually. Yet, when human beings become numerous nodes in the liquid network, not only their traditional ethics and morality are in the danger of reversing, but also the meaning of humans’ existence may be challenged. / published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy