The creation and rapid growth of the Spanish political party Podemos has created high expectations among citizens who want to participate in politics beyond voting. With a strategy that combines analogue and digital media, the party has emerged as the third biggest party in the last general elections, June 2016. Podemos has been conceived as a hybrid between a political party and a social movement, striving for wining the elections while relaying on grassroots activism through decentralised groups called “circles”, which operate locally and interact with the party via digital media. Although the potential of digital media for participation has been many times stressed, how the circles use these media depends highly on ongoing power relations and struggles within the party. Through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, this research analyses the perceptions of seven participants in two Podemos circles from the perspective of media practices, and looks into the potential of digital tools for political participation and the way ongoing power relations affect this participation. The results show that media practices within the circles are limited by the position of power of the leaders, who make use of analogue media to convey unidirectional messages that can hardly be countered via digital media. Furthermore, the research analyses the existence of relevant tensions in Podemos as a party that promotes citizen participation within a hierarchical, top-down organisation.

<p>This thesis was successfully defended on December 16th, 2013 at McMaster University.</p> / <p>In response to humanitarian crises within sovereign nation-states, many voices in global politics have begun to frame their arguments in terms of a responsibility to uphold basic human rights. The most prominent example of this theme is found in the idea of the responsibility to protect, an international framework for crisis response developed by an international commission and consolidated at the United Nations. A major challenge to this frame of thinking is the traditional disjuncture between the concept of ethico-political responsibility, on the one hand, and nation-state sovereignty on the other. A critical investigation of the ethical and political impulses articulated within the doctrine of the responsibility to protect demonstrates that much of the emergent consensus surrounding the responsibility to protect framework is premised on ideational and normative ambiguity. Part of the reason for this is the complexity of the idea of ‘responsibility’. This project seeks to explain some of the contestation of the responsibility to protect by first developing, and then applying, a conceptual framework that differentiates between monological impulses of ‘being responsible’ and more socially embedded practices situated within relational regimes of accountability and answerability.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The purpose of this study is to explore 12–14-year-old self-identified girls’ narratives of being- and moving in the space of the Swedish power sport context. While children and sports are associated with health, well-being and a good childhood, the current thesis examine the space of sport with a critical view. Against the background of gender binarity as a current pillar in sport, and the historical legacy that consolidate femininity and women as anomalies, sport will be approached as a male dominant space. The empirical data was collected through three semi-structured focus group interviews. To analyse the collected material, a three-dimensional space structure was utilized, including temporality, sociality, and spatiality. Three research questions were investigated, focusing on the participants´ experiences of gendered stereotypes, their perceptions of their own limitations and possibilities, and how the sports domain is depicted in their narratives. Informed by the narrative analysis, three narrative plots were identified: negotiating the premises of sport; power dynamics of generation and temporality; girl’s barriers and prospects. It was found that the participants stories displayed girls being exposed to various forms of gendered stereotypes, demonstrating the girl-boy power dynamic. The quantitative difference in sport participation (between boys and girls) was found to have an immediate impact on girls’ conditions to do sports. The wide range of age and experience in a team was narrated as a barrier to their individual development. It was also found that the participants experienced limited access to female role models, women’s games and (social) encouragement. Another important finding demonstrated how sport discourse function as a gatekeeper of sport opportunities for young girls, feeding a male hyper confidence. All findings pointed to an existent popular opinion about boys/men’s precedence doing sports, and a lack of interest in girls´/women’s sport.

Bipolar mood disorder has been traditionally researched, explored, and explained from a modernistic, psychiatric perspective. The purpose of this study is to explicate an alternative description for bipolar mood disorder, from a postmodern perspective. The widely accepted psychiatric knowledge focuses on the signs and symptoms of the disorder, pharmacological treatments, and manualised psychotherapies. This thesis shifts the focus from an intrapsychic, deficit perspective towards one which is inclusive of surrounding discourses and patterned relationships. The social constructionist research approach is followed, utilising vignette and thematic analyses for textual deconstruction and reconstruction. In addition to these data analyses, discourses were analysed using the actual text of the co-researchers. This allowed for a thorough explication of the ways in which discourses shape the construct bipolar mood disorder. From these analyses, emergent themes were then distilled and compared to the existing body of literature in the bipolar mood spectrum field of study. Process models were generated to depict the various pertinent aspects of the social construction of bipolar mood disorder. This research has value for the treating professional, allowing for a broader, more inclusive discourse perspective to add to the already established medical model view. Further, this research gives credence to the voice of the person who has been diagnosed with the illness. This research may also contribute to the epistemological debates within modernist and postmodernist paradigms. Key words: Bipolar mood disorder, medical model, pharmacology, mania, depression, psychiatry, psychotherapy, titrating power relations, expert, problem determined systems, belonging, problems of therapy and therapeutic problems, vignette analysis, people as meaning generating beings, context, reflexivity, self-reflection, multiple realities, positivism, social constructionist epistemology, qualitative research, process model. / Psychology / D. Litt. et Phil. (Psychology)

This study investigates how power relations were negotiated and expressed through the use of certain linguistic practices in a public context. More specifically, it looks closer at how job applicants presented themselves publically through newspaper advertisements and which discursive codes they made use of to portray themselves as reputable, desirable employees that fit into the bourgeois concept of respectability. The survey accordingly moves within the theoretical frameworks of the respectability discourse, altering power relations, self-presentation and the public sphere, and does so through the application of linguistic methods on a very specific material not commonly looked at from these macro-perspectives. The first part of the analysis identifies which specific social groups that used the press as a channel for self-presentation, focusing on the aspects of gender, marital status, work experience and occupational title. Through establishing this information, we reach an understanding of who can be ascribed an active participation in the public sphere and where to place these individuals along the social scale. Thereafter, the vocabulary of the advertisers is scrutinized and compared to see how strategies to create an air of respectability around yourself may have differed with the personal aspects mentioned above. Conclusively, the results from these enquiries serve as the basis for a larger discussion on whether the assertive self-promotion of the job advertisers can be interpreted as a self-empowerment among a section of London’s labourers, or whether the publication of the adverts rather is to be seen as a consolidation of already existing power relationships. The findings prove that through their strict adherence to the concept of respectability in a desire to win the favour of their social superiors, the linguistic strategies of the adverts cannot be interpreted as an early form of working class-movement with the intention of overthrowing the social order. On the contrary, the hierarchical structure of the 18th century was as present as ever when society moved towards the next centenary and was consolidated even further by the linguistic strategies of the advertisers.

This thesis is an auto/ethnographic venture to explore the politics of bullying inside Bangladeshi classrooms. The thesis explores bullying in the frameworks of affect, anti-oppressive and intersectional gender pedagogy. Using autoethnographic and ethnographic means, the author revisits past encounters of being bullied and collects data from four schools in Dhaka, Bangladesh, drawing connections between narratives and theories. The thesis explores how schools fix and essentialize the identities of bully and bullied in discursive readings, which result in troubling approaches to deal with bullying, such as discipline, punishment and surveillance, which further exclude and other the bully and bullied. The thesis offers an affective reading of bodies inside classrooms, and employs theories of anti-oppressive and intersectional gender pedagogy to address and bring down the binary between bully and bullied, address power relations in classrooms and revise the roles of teachers and students. By acknowledging tensions and disruptions, aiming for self-reflexivity and transgressions, it offers a reading of how to think of transformations and turn the classroom into a ‘risky,’ yet generative space, to start a dialogue about bullying.

I think how easy it is that a society is normalised by surveillance and those in power positions that we today are used to almost always being watched. Furthermore I believe this is also seen in the preschool. The purpose of the study is to investigate recording and documenting in the preschool and in which contexts this limits children’s influence and participation. I will focus on photographing, filming and texts written about the children. I take on the adults’ perspective where I examine the power relations between pedagogues and children. The questions I raise are: In which context is children’s influence and participation limited in documentation? How can the power positions between children and pedagogues be viewed? My theoretical perspective is based on Michel Foucaults thoughts of power and surveillance. I chose a qualitative method for my study. I did interviews with five pedagogues that told me about what they think about children’s influence and participation in preschool documentation, routines and how they work in the setting. The result shows that children’s integrity in preschool documentation is forgotten due to two different matters: lack of time and habits/norms, which effect children’s influence and participation.

This research explores the role of al-Hakkamat rural women poets in the context of armed conflict in Darfur, from 1980s to 2006. Utilising QSR NVivo7 software, the study analyses and interprets qualitatively collected data in the light of the posed research questions. Processes and attributes leading to the identification of al-Hakkamah, such as her singing and composing talents, are explored - from identifying and nurturing to fully constructing her role as a folk singer and agitator as well as a powerful social actor. Her nurtured personal and social identities reconstruct for her gender roles that are found to be both feared and revered by the community and appropriated by the government. She is found to respond effectively to situations ranging from gallantry (lauding), solidarity (lobbying) to downright belligerency (inciting). These roles exhibit robust and proactive gender roles and power relations in Darfur that enable women, not without historical precedence, to exercise their own identity, agency and political influence in an otherwise overwhelmingly patriarchal society. The study also reveals that the conflict of Darfur is rooted in the history of the neopatrimonial domestic politics pursued by the riverine ruling elites, marked by systemic failure to manage resource issues equitably between tribal and ethnic entities in Darfur. In such circumstances, al-Hakkamat agency is either volunteered or enlisted in the attempt to secure an advantage. In either case her agency is verifiably seen to bolster the hypothesis that rural women in Darfur exercise more power than their counterparts in rural northern Sudan.

Reading and analysing different types of texts is a way for teachers to deal with the content of the school's values and mission. The aim of the study is to examine power relations between adults and children from the aspects of adult presence, adult guidance, and children's response, and whether the books follow the discourse of their time as regards power relations between adults and children. By making teachers aware of power relations in children's literature, we hope to be able to conduct a discussion with pupils about whether or not the power relationship complies with the school's values and mission. In the study four children's books are analysed: Bill i klämman, Emil i Lönneberga, Harry Potter och De Vises Sten and Guldmysteriet.The methods of critical discourse analysis and text analysis were used to analyse power relations between the characters in the books. The analysis shows that the two older books do not reflect power relations in keeping with their own historical time, whereas the two modern books do reflect their time. The analysis also shows that power relations between adults and children cannot be generalized, and that it is not always desirable for power relations in children's literature to decpit reality.

L'Allemagne et la France se trouvent en matière d’immigration face à des défis semblables. Les deux pays sont des États-nations dans lesquels la société majoritaire est convaincue que le peuple doit être unifié à travers une langue commune. Cette conception d'État est pourtant fortement contestée par des personnes plurilingues (of Color). L’objectif de la thèse est d’analyser comment la discrimination des enfants plurilingues est construite et légitimée au quotidien dans le domaine de l'éducation de la petite enfance.À cette fin, des entretiens collectifs avec des enseignant-e-s et des parents ont été menés et ont été analysés suivant une approche constructiviste de la « grounded theory ». Les résultats montrent, entre autres, que les enseignant-e-s ne savent pas comment se comporter avec des enfants qui ne parlent pas la langue cible ou se sentent incertain-e-s face à ces enfants. La plupart d’entre elles / eux réagissent face à cette situation en exigeant des enfants de s’adapter et d'apprendre la langue cible par leurs propres moyens à travers une submersion dans cette langue. Les langues «Autres» des enfants et de leurs parents sont relégués au contexte privé et leurs locutrices / locuteurs sont réduit-e-s au silence dans le cadre de l’école maternelle. De cette façon le capital symbolique des enfants parlant une langue « Autre » est exclu de l’institution préscolaire, ce qui contribue à une restriction de leur participation égalitaire aux processus de l'éducation. D'autres enseignant-e-s critiquent ces politiques linguistiques de facto et décrivent en revanche comment ils contribuent à aider les enfants à s’exprimer dans leur(s) langue(s) préférée(s). / Germany and France face similar challenges concerning questions of immigration. Both countries are nation states, in which the majoritarian society is convinced that the people should be unified through speaking a common language. This conception of the nation-state is nevertheless strongly opposed by plurilingual people (of Color). The aim of the thesis is to analyze how a discrimination of plurilingual children is constructed and legitimized in daily life in the domain of early childhood education.To this end, focus group discussions with practitioners and parents have been conducted and analyzed following a constructionist “grounded theory” approach. Findings show, among others, that practitioners do not know or are insecure of how to deal with children who do not speak the target language. Some of them react by expecting children to adapt and to learn the language on their own through "language submersion". The “Other” languages of the children and their parents are relegated to the private context and their speakers are silenced in the ECEC setting. Other practitioners criticize these de facto language policies and describe how they contribute to support children in expressing themselves in their favorite language(s).