In this dissertation, I look to contemporary menopause management in the Southwest, United States, as an ideal case study of the 'real world' negotiation of a widespread contemporary conundrum--characterized by discourses of risk, proliferation of information and choice, chronic doubt, and personal responsibility for decision-making. While there have been previous studies of menopause in the US, this circumstantial ethnography seeks to understand contemporary menopause management in an era characterized by a massive shift in the biomedical risk discourses about menopause, the explosion of therapeutic choice in a burgeoning pluralistic health care environment, and the broad expansion of women's identities, body projects, and life priorities over the last several decades.I report on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2007 and 2008 with menopausal women and health care providers in the southwestern US. Research components included ethnographic interviews (N=60) and focus groups (6 groups with 27 participants) with midlife women, interviews with health care providers across a range of therapeutic modalities (N=20), and observation of emerging discourses of menopause in science, media and marketing.This dissertation illustrates that contemporary menopause management is a recursive process characterized by the ongoing re-evaluation of the impact menopause is having on one's life--in context. Participants described the unfolding of the lived-experience of menopause over time--even years beyond the end of menstruation. Risk discourses are not embodied en masse but reflect the concerns most salient in women's lives. While women access various expert and lay resources, they favor personal experts--sources deemed professionally sound and personally relevant--and their own embodied knowledge. For their part, health care providers described themselves as "normalizing" menopause and practicing patient-centered care aimed at empowering women to make their own decisions about how to manage menopause. Lacking an ideal choice, women make provisional treatment decisions that resonate with their current menopausal subjectivity. Despite abundant options, menopause management is increasingly stratified, with some able to access more information resources and afford more extensive decision-support. Among women with severe symptoms, bioidentical hormone therapy--productively positioned between biomedicine and complementary/alternative medicine--has emerged as a popular harm reduction strategy.

This thesis documents the attempts by one Australian State government to manage assumed social and economic risks associated with its transition into a globalised economy and society. The specific research focus is on the policy strategy Queensland State Education–2010 (QSE-2010) developed by the Queensland State government and released in 2000. The thesis adopts a governmentality perspective to develop a policy case study focusing on the formulation of QSE-2010 through to its implementation as set out in the Queensland Government’s 2002 White Paper, Education and Training Reforms for the Future. The research demonstrates how one State education system in Australia was transformed as a result of the spread of global risk rationalities originating in comparative studies conducted by the OECD. The study begins by examining how QSE-2010 was discursively positioned within a policy environment characterised by the transformation of social and economic relations into deterritorialised flows and globally connected networks of the global knowledge economy. Queensland’s future prosperity in this emerging context was articulated as unpredictable and uncertain. The policy discourse of QSE-2010 thus presented the global as a novel problem space requiring intervention by responsible government. This analysis identifies the key policy role of knowledge producing practices such as statistical studies, international comparisons and performance benchmarking in transforming global uncertainty into a form that was conducive to governmental programming in education. In the case of education in Queensland, this involved mobilising specific calculative technologies to transform global economic uncertainty into knowable and calculable educational risk. This was expressed in QSE-2010s principal performance target that required 88 percent of students to complete Year 12 by 2010. This study further traces how Education Queensland’s aspirations to manage globalisation risks were translated into practical programs of social and educational governance. It proposes that the concept of social capital was critical for providing a means of attributing economic value to certain patterns of social interaction within families and between families and communities. Once authorities were able to link particular patterns of sociability to increased levels of educational attainment, it became possible to problematise the social capital of some families as a potential source of risk for educational disengagement of students. Here, the social capital believed to characterise the professional, globally networked middle class family emerged as a model for education authorities in Queensland for re-configuring the social capital of disadvantaged families. Social capital thus became instrumental in Education Queensland’s strategy to govern the relationships between schools and their communities, especially relationships between the home and school. Understanding of the problem of educational disengagement afforded by social capital led to attempts to impose particular forms of social capital on Queensland families. This was achieved by mandating the involvement of parents and students in the process of Senior Education and Training Plans. These plans were formally negotiated education and training pathways that students would follow for the completion of the senior phase of learning and the award of the Queensland Certificate of Education. The study argues that governmental technologies such as social capital are critical determinants of the limits and possibilities for social justice outcomes in education policy because they function to constitute both the problems of government and the scope of legitimate policy intervention. It further argues that these technologies have been instrumental in sustaining neoliberal policy solutions in Queensland education because they render invisible socio-economic explanations for educational disadvantage and structured inequalities in education. The study concludes by exploring alternative policy configurations that are made intelligible by alternative ways of representing the social and economic context of schooling.

This thesis documents the attempts by one Australian State government to manage assumed social and economic risks associated with its transition into a globalised economy and society. The specific research focus is on the policy strategy Queensland State Education–2010 (QSE-2010) developed by the Queensland State government and released in 2000. The thesis adopts a governmentality perspective to develop a policy case study focusing on the formulation of QSE-2010 through to its implementation as set out in the Queensland Government’s 2002 White Paper, Education and Training Reforms for the Future. The research demonstrates how one State education system in Australia was transformed as a result of the spread of global risk rationalities originating in comparative studies conducted by the OECD. The study begins by examining how QSE-2010 was discursively positioned within a policy environment characterised by the transformation of social and economic relations into deterritorialised flows and globally connected networks of the global knowledge economy. Queensland’s future prosperity in this emerging context was articulated as unpredictable and uncertain. The policy discourse of QSE-2010 thus presented the global as a novel problem space requiring intervention by responsible government. This analysis identifies the key policy role of knowledge producing practices such as statistical studies, international comparisons and performance benchmarking in transforming global uncertainty into a form that was conducive to governmental programming in education. In the case of education in Queensland, this involved mobilising specific calculative technologies to transform global economic uncertainty into knowable and calculable educational risk. This was expressed in QSE-2010s principal performance target that required 88 percent of students to complete Year 12 by 2010. This study further traces how Education Queensland’s aspirations to manage globalisation risks were translated into practical programs of social and educational governance. It proposes that the concept of social capital was critical for providing a means of attributing economic value to certain patterns of social interaction within families and between families and communities. Once authorities were able to link particular patterns of sociability to increased levels of educational attainment, it became possible to problematise the social capital of some families as a potential source of risk for educational disengagement of students. Here, the social capital believed to characterise the professional, globally networked middle class family emerged as a model for education authorities in Queensland for re-configuring the social capital of disadvantaged families. Social capital thus became instrumental in Education Queensland’s strategy to govern the relationships between schools and their communities, especially relationships between the home and school. Understanding of the problem of educational disengagement afforded by social capital led to attempts to impose particular forms of social capital on Queensland families. This was achieved by mandating the involvement of parents and students in the process of Senior Education and Training Plans. These plans were formally negotiated education and training pathways that students would follow for the completion of the senior phase of learning and the award of the Queensland Certificate of Education. The study argues that governmental technologies such as social capital are critical determinants of the limits and possibilities for social justice outcomes in education policy because they function to constitute both the problems of government and the scope of legitimate policy intervention. It further argues that these technologies have been instrumental in sustaining neoliberal policy solutions in Queensland education because they render invisible socio-economic explanations for educational disadvantage and structured inequalities in education. The study concludes by exploring alternative policy configurations that are made intelligible by alternative ways of representing the social and economic context of schooling.