<p> When groups of people are represented in classification systems, potential exists for them to be structurally or linguistically subordinated, erased or otherwise misrepresented (Olson &amp; Schlegl, 2001). As Bowker &amp; Star (1999) have shown, the real-world application of classification to people can have legal, economic, medical, social, and educational consequences. The purpose of this research is to contribute to knowledge organization by showing how the epistemological stance underlying specific classificatory discourses interactively participates in the formation of concepts. The medical and legal discourses in three timeframes are examined using Foucauldian genealogical discourse analysis to investigate how their depictions of gender and epistemic foundations correspond and interplay with conceptualizations of similar concepts in four editions of the <i>Dewey Decimal Classification.</i> As knowledge organization research seeks solutions to manage the paradigm change from assumptions of universal knowledge to instability of knowledge, recognition of epistemological underpinnings of classification systems is necessary to understand the very real consequences of corresponding classifications of gender.</p>

<p> This project explores the constructions of gender, intimacy, and race and the ways these issues are informed by history and the law. The idea of consent, while originally described in texts as a legal concept between citizens, transformed into a way to navigate intimate relationships in the private sphere. This muddied the ways women and men were understood to form relationships and the limits of those relationships. In the same ways that gender was arbitrated through legal language, race is often ensnared in the same processes and institutions. Tolerance has been offered as one approach, but instead of mitigating this violence, it has more firmly entrenched it into the democratic process. Hannah Arendt&rsquo;s description of the social frames an understanding of intimacy and narratives. Arendt&rsquo;s work critically creates a space for the category of the social, something found around but outside of the public and private. Instead of working to make the private seen as a sphere for political action, I will focus on the potential of the social as a method of political action. While Arendt has obvious racial bias, I will use her own response to anti-semitism to develop a different approach to Black politics that allow for identity-based responses. Lauren Berlant&rsquo;s <i>Intimate Publics</i> addresses the potential for coalition building in the social. Using the sorority system as a way of teasing out notions of femininity, discipline, sexual violence, and intimacy, I will describe the ways that a woman subject is produced and how this then works to shape our notions of race. Women&rsquo;s identities, particularly white women, are constructed through an association with race and sexuality, by unpacking this development, its possible to see how this is socially and institutionally enforced. Part of this enforcement will focus on the narratives of sexual violence. Rape is an issue that not only confronts legal questions, but also the nature of a woman&rsquo;s ability to participate in democracy. Tying this together will be the importance of political theory. This serves to define the contemporary issues, solutions that have been offered and new potential approaches to intimate violence.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation traces how eugenics came to underpin discourses pertaining to free love, sex and reproduction in 1920s-1930s China. It shows the eugenic and evolutionist limits to radical or liberal intellectuals' understanding of the role of the individual in the pursuit of sex, free love and birth control. The study examines the scientific view of modernity embodied in eugenics, as well as the challenges to this vision based on humanism and sex aestheticism. Bertrand Russell's visit to China in 1920 with his lover Dora Black led to heated discussions surrounding free love and free divorce, where privacy, the eugenic idea of a "robust individual" and science were key. Meanwhile, translations and the reception of Ellen Key and Havelock Ellis's works on eugenics and love underpinned the reconciliation in Chinese liberal intellectuals' thought between individualism/evolutionary humanism and eugenics, particularly in their debates on sexual and emotional ethics in the 1920s. Margaret Sanger's visit to China in 1922 opened up a debate on the suitability of eugenic birth control to solve China's problems, such as overpopulation and venereal disease. By probing into her interactions with Chinese intellectuals in 1922, this study reveals how her eugenic ideas were received, as well as the political tensions regarding her birth control advocacy. The dissertation demonstrates that the sexual reproductive considerations that had been viewed in the 1920s as a problem of the relationship between the individual and nation/race/society, by the 1930s came to completely subordinate the role of the individual to national and racial regeneration concerns. Sanger's continued correspondence with Chinese medical professionals came to shape the birth control movement in the 1930s in more strictly eugenic terms. This research contends that eugenics was not only influential in discourse, but came to be implemented in practice in the fields of sex hygiene, birth control and VD regulation. The agency of pioneer female gynecologists in the 1930s is emphasized by examining how they brought eugenics in practice in their birth control clinics, how they localized global female experience and theories on birth control and hygiene, either through translation or through their attempts to reach working class women with contraceptive sex education. Lastly I argue that eugenics and social hygiene also functioned as a male oriented ideology in VD policies of various colonial powers: British, American, Japanese, and French as part of an economy of empire. By contrast Chinese Nationalist Hygiene Campaigns and female gynecologists' internalizing of eugenics focused on female health.</p>

The study of intra-state conflict has increased exponentially during the post-Cold War period. This has given rise to a variety of competing approaches, which have (i) adopted differing methodological and social theoretical orientations, and (ii) produced contradictory accounts of the causes and nature of violent conflict. This project intervenes in the debates which have resulted from this situation, and develops a critical realist approach to conflict studies. In doing so it rethinks the discipline from the philosophical ground up, by extending the ontological and epistemological insights which are provided by critical realism into more concrete reflections about methodological and social theoretical issues. In addition to engaging in reflection about philosophical, methodological, and social theoretical issues, however, the project also incorporates the insights of two largely neglected literatures into conflict studies. These are, first, the insights of the gender-studies literature, and second, the insights of decolonial/postcolonial forms of thought. It claims that the discipline is strengthened by incorporating the insights of these literatures, and that the critical realist framework provides us with the philosophical basis which is required in order to do so.

This thesis deals with the way in which the human body was discussed from different points of view in a particular type of medical literature (so called "Family Doctor Books) in the second half of the 19th and early 20th century. The work is based on a premise that body is not only neutral biological foundation made in nature but perception of body and physicality is influenced by society. That's why certain social changes may reflect changes in perception of human body, especially its conceptualization as a female and male body. Since just around sixties of the 19th century both emancipatory activities of Czech women, their rights extension and generally transformation of gender relations in society started to develop. This work examines whether these social changes reflected in the manner in which it was human, and thus male and female, body reported on in a particular medical literature. This work also explores what such conceptions of human body say about gender changes in society.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the effect of Middle East Technical University&amp / #8217 / s Science Centre (METU SC) on students&amp / #8217 / attitudes towards science. The sample (N=251) consisted of 131 males (52.2%) and 120 females (47.8%). The age range of the students varied from 11 to 14 (M=12.71, SD=0.80). The attitude scale was administered before, immediately after, and one week after a visit to METU SC. Because of the limitations on sampling procedure two different research designs were used. Design 1 was a quasi-experimental design (46 students in experimental group, 46 students in control group) and attempted to determine the impact of METU SC on 6th graders&amp / #8217 / attitudes towards science with respect to six constructs of the attitude scale. Design 2 was a weak experimental design (N=159) and attempted to determine the impact of METU SC on students&amp / #8217 / overall attitudes towards science with respect to their gender, grade levels, and science achievement scores. The results of this study suggest that METU SC has high potential on increasing middle school students&amp / #8217 / attitudes toward science in several dimensions. Furthermore, this increase is independent from gender, science achievement, and grade levels. Also considering that this achievement was accomplished in quite a short time (approximately one hour), science centres can be used by educators as an effective way of increasing students&amp / #8217 / attitudes toward science.

This thesis explores the relationship between gender policy, gender culture, and political participation in unified Germany. It investigates the extent to which political regimes shape citizens' attitudes towards gender roles and examines the effect of such attitudes on women's participation in politics. The thesis is divided into three parts: The first part explores the differences in gender regime types between the former German Democratic Republic and Federal Republic of Germany during the Cold War period. Building on existing studies, the analysis considers how generations that were socialised in the divided Germany differ in their attitudes toward gender roles. It finds that citizens from West Germany are more socially conservative than citizens from the East. The second part of the thesis tests the effects of these traditional gender attitudes on citizens' participation, focusing on party membership. The analysis highlights that gender gaps in formal political participation in unified Germany still exist, but that these gaps are smaller in the new federal states. The investigation further shows that traditional gender attitudes exert a negative effect on women’s political engagement beyond the predictive power of socio-economic and demographic factors. The final part of this thesis casts a critical look at the political controversy in Germany over the introduction of a cash-for-care subsidy (the so-called Betreuungsgeld). It explores the normative assumptions and ideas about gender roles that have been promoted by Germany's main political parties throughout the policy negotiation process. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, the research presented in this thesis draws on, and contributes to, studies on gender, welfare states, political socialisation, and political participation.

This thesis explores how burglars and burglary in London were understood in cultural, criminological, legal, political, and economic discourse during the period 1860-1939, demonstrating how the ideas about crime and the criminal circulating in these domains were mutually constitutive. Specifically, it identifies how characterisations of burglary in visual and written forms of media — encompassing legal and criminological documents, as well as those produced by the press and commercial advertising, and in fiction, theatre, and film — cultivated a range of attitudes towards the crime to a greater or lesser extent. Encompassing not only fear-mongering and sympathetic representations, but also those designed to be exciting, to challenge preconceptions, and to entertain, I argue that these conflicting attitudes towards burglary and burglars emerged in response to specific changes in the cultural landscape: the advent of mass literacy and corresponding interest in narratives of crime that reflected the social, cultural, and political concerns of an audience diverse of class, age, and gender; the commercial imperatives of the insurance and entertainment industries as the middle classes expanded, including the development of household insurance and the popularity of the ‘true crime’ genre; debates surrounding women’s increasing social and sexual agency and their alignment with particular crimes; and the evolution of new modes of policing and regulation. The thesis thereby uses the topic of burglary to illuminate a broader range of contemporary preoccupations and experiences with gender relations, class structures and stereotypes, and the moral authority of state and society. By approaching burglary as a focus of interactions not only between police, criminal, and victim, but also between the market, consumers, and the state, this thesis uncovers new terrain upon which crime intersected with everyday lives historically.