Social discourses about cybersafety -the ways we teach people about protecting themselves from and reporting risks in new media- reveal a heightened focus on the part of those who work with girls regarding their risk in cyberspace. This thesis investigates the concern as part of a reoccurring moral panic towards girlhood, drawing from critical feminist, girlhood and child and youth care theories to inquire into how girlhood is being discursively produced through cybersafety education. Study findings from a small sample of Canadian cybersafety materials suggest the phenomenon of cybersafety is dominated by fears of girls’ exploitation online by strangers, peers, the media, and even themselves. Themes of girlhood invisibility, shaming, blaming and sexualization are identified as prominent in the curricula. Universal, essentialized notions of girlhood and sexual double standards are promoted, simultaneously constructing girls as victims incapable of managing their own risk while also holding girls legally and morally responsible for their experiences with cyberviolence. Discussion considers the influence of neoliberal and surveillance discourses on responsibilizing girls for their choices online, as well as how the focus on girls’ choices negates the systemic nature of cyberviolence and its intersection with issues of homophobia, racism, classism, colonialism and ableism among others. Implications underscore the need for alternative approaches that offer critical pedagogy and tools to challenge gender ideologies in cybersafety work with girls, as well as to consider the needs of girls from marginalized backgrounds. / Graduate / 0453 / 0630 / cbrand@uvic.ca

<p>Medling vid brott är relativt nytt i Sverige. Internationell forskning inom området har bedrivits i ca 20 år men svensk forskning inom området är begränsad. Från och med januari 2008 blir alla Sveriges kommuner skyldiga att erbjuda medling vid brott i fall då gärningspersonen är under 21 år. Medling vid brott har sitt ursprung i filosofin om reparativ rättvisa, men har som fenomen främst utvecklats utan direkt teoretisk förankring. Det övergripande syftet med denna studie var att skildra tre gärningspersoners erfarenheter av medling vid brott, samt att beskriva de filosofier och teorier som stödjer medling vid brott och presentera de lagar som reglerar metoden. En enkät formulerades för att ta reda på om ungdomar mellan 13-18 år kände till medling vid brott. För att få reda på gärningspersonernas erfarenheter av medling vid brott användes semi-strukturerade kvalitativa intervjuer, med frågeställningar om varför intervjupersonerna ställde upp, hur medlingsmötet upplevdes och hur de kände innan samt efter medlingen. För att hitta lämpliga intervjupersoner kontaktades medlingsverksamheter runt om i Sverige vilket resulterade i sammanlagt tre intervjuer. Analysen av intervjuerna gjordes utifrån tidigare forskning inom området samt utifrån teorierna om reintegrative shaming och empowerment. Vårt val av teorin om reintegrative shaming grundades utifrån att vi under studiens gång uppmärksammade att denna teori hade hög relevans för ämnet. Valet av teorin om empowerment gjordes efter att vi läst in oss på teorin om restorative justice, då vi fann att delar i denna filosofi kunde sammankopplas med tankegångar inom teorin om empowerment. Resultatet av enkätundersökningen visade att av 169 tillfrågade hade 46 st hört talas om medling tidigare. Resultatet av intervjuerna visade att alla tre intervjupersonerna fått en annan syn på brottsoffret och brottet efter deltagandet i medlingen och upplevde medlingsmötet som positivt.</p>

Medling vid brott är relativt nytt i Sverige. Internationell forskning inom området har bedrivits i ca 20 år men svensk forskning inom området är begränsad. Från och med januari 2008 blir alla Sveriges kommuner skyldiga att erbjuda medling vid brott i fall då gärningspersonen är under 21 år. Medling vid brott har sitt ursprung i filosofin om reparativ rättvisa, men har som fenomen främst utvecklats utan direkt teoretisk förankring. Det övergripande syftet med denna studie var att skildra tre gärningspersoners erfarenheter av medling vid brott, samt att beskriva de filosofier och teorier som stödjer medling vid brott och presentera de lagar som reglerar metoden. En enkät formulerades för att ta reda på om ungdomar mellan 13-18 år kände till medling vid brott. För att få reda på gärningspersonernas erfarenheter av medling vid brott användes semi-strukturerade kvalitativa intervjuer, med frågeställningar om varför intervjupersonerna ställde upp, hur medlingsmötet upplevdes och hur de kände innan samt efter medlingen. För att hitta lämpliga intervjupersoner kontaktades medlingsverksamheter runt om i Sverige vilket resulterade i sammanlagt tre intervjuer. Analysen av intervjuerna gjordes utifrån tidigare forskning inom området samt utifrån teorierna om reintegrative shaming och empowerment. Vårt val av teorin om reintegrative shaming grundades utifrån att vi under studiens gång uppmärksammade att denna teori hade hög relevans för ämnet. Valet av teorin om empowerment gjordes efter att vi läst in oss på teorin om restorative justice, då vi fann att delar i denna filosofi kunde sammankopplas med tankegångar inom teorin om empowerment. Resultatet av enkätundersökningen visade att av 169 tillfrågade hade 46 st hört talas om medling tidigare. Resultatet av intervjuerna visade att alla tre intervjupersonerna fått en annan syn på brottsoffret och brottet efter deltagandet i medlingen och upplevde medlingsmötet som positivt.

The object of this study was to meet with offenders and victims of crime who recently participated in victim-offender-mediation, in order to explore their experiences and feelings about it. The method of research was individual qualitative interviews with two offenders and two crime victims. The main questions aimed to find out how the participants felt about the mediation process, what experiences they had about the person they had to face during the meeting, and finally what thoughts they had about the crime and its consequences. In helping to analyze the results of the interviews, Reintegrative Shaming Theory and Theories of attribution were used. The former was used to try to explain the feelings resembling shame that emerged during the meeting, while the latter was helpful in order to understand the descriptions the participants used when they talked about the other person. The results showed that both offenders and victims found the mediation to be helpful, mostly because it made them understand the other person better. Most of them also shared the feeling that they had been able to move on and not think about the crime as much as before.

This dissertation calls attention to three important contemporary texts from West Africa that resist the tacit cultural taboo around questions of sexuality to imagine empowering images of female sexuality. Using postcolonial feminist approaches, queer theory, and cultural studies, I analyze two novels and a film by T. Obinkaram Echewa, Frieda Ekotto, and film director Jean Pierre Bekolo to retrieve moments in which women characters turn the tables on denigrating views of their sexuality and marshal its power in the service of resistance. I show how in these texts, women bare their nether parts, wield menstrual cloths, enjoy same-sex erotic acts, sit on men's faces, and engage in many other stigmatized practices in a display of what I call "genital powers." These powers are both traditional to the cultures analyzed here and called into new forms by the pressures of decolonization and globalization. Through more complex representations of female sexuality, these texts chart a tradition in which stale binaries of victims and oppressors, the body as an exclusive site of female subjugation or as a site of eternal female power are blurred, allowing a deeper understanding of women's lived experiences and what it means to be a resisting subject in the postcolonial space. By broadly recovering women's powers and subjectivities, centering on sexuality and the body, I also examine the ways in which this mode of female subjectivity has thus far escaped comprehensive theorization. In this way, my project responds to Gayatri Spivak's call to postcolonial intellectuals to unlearn privileged forms of resistance in the recognition of subjectivity, and to develop tools that would allow us to "listen" to the voices of disenfranchised women - those removed from the channels of knowledge production. However, my study cautions that the recognition of genital powers should not be conflated with the romanticized celebration of female bodies and sexuality, since West African women continue to struggle against cultural, political, existential, and physical assaults. / text

I 1990-talets USA blossade en het debatt upp som polariserade amerikanska mammor i två distinkta och antagonistiska grupper: förvärvsinkomstarbetande mammor respektive hemmavarande mammor, samtidigt som inkomstklyftorna mellan låg-, medel och höginkomsttagare ökade lavinartat i USA. Mödrar från olika samhällsklasser förenades i ställningstaganden för och emot antingen konservativt eller progressivt hållna värderingar och sociala konstruktioner av kvinna och mamma. Konflikternas retoriska natur, som karaktäriseras av utpräglade former av skambeläggning, har namngivit samtidens centrala begrepp för att beskriva det sociala fenomenet, ”Mom shaming”, som i mindre utsträckning struktureras i stabilt polariserade dualistiska antiteser, utan istället karaktäriseras av multifacetterade och instabila motsatsförhållande sinsemellan flera, rådande mammastereotyper. Syftet är att söka nå en djupare förståelse av det sociala fenomenets betydelse och utbredning i Sverige samt identifiera förknippade platser, situationer och sociala institutioner. Med utgångspunkt i observerade interaktioner mellan (främst) kvinnor i diskussionsinlägg på sociala medieplattformar, och med hjälp av informanter söker studien att skildra hur individer upplever sitt moderskap i relation till sina föreställningar om och upplevelser av andra mammor, och vilken inverkan andra mammors föreställningar, handlingar och åsikter har för deras eget perspektiv på mammaroller. / The early 1990’s gave concurrent rise to increasing income gaps between the rich and the poor, low- and middle-income citizens, and to an agitated debate in the United States, that divided moms into two distinctly antagonistic groups: working moms and stay-home moms. Based on shared value sets, moms from all over the socioeconomic spectra could unite in support of and in opposition to either the more conservatively leaning or progressively liberal standpoint on social constructs of mothership and woman. The contemporary term for describing the social phenomena “Mom shaming”, reflects the rhetoric nature of ongoing conflicts characterized by particularly pronounced forms of shaming; manifested to a lesser degree in stable polarizations of dualistic antitheses, but rather in multifaceted, instable contradictions among contemporary stereotypes of mom. The aim is to reach a deeper understanding of its meanings and prevalence in Sweden, and to identify the places, situations and social institutions associated with it. On the premises of observed interactions between (primarily) women in the commentaries of social media platforms and with the help of informants, this study aims to depict individuals’ experiences of motherhood in relation to their conceptions and experiences of other women’s motherhood, and describe how prevailing conceptions, actions and standpoints among moms, influence individuals’ perspectives on motherhood.

Naming and shaming is a widely used strategy by the transnational advocacy network (TAN) to prevent human rights abuses and increase compliance to international humanitarian law (IHL). However, existing research demonstrates controversial results about the efficacy of naming and shaming as a method to increase compliance to IHL. To add new insights to the ongoing IR debate, this paper investigates United Nations’ (UN’s) naming and shaming of children’s rights abusers in conflict. A quantitative analysis of UN’s Annual Reports on Children and Armed Conflict between 2013-2018 provides an assessment of the assumed link between public condemnation of state actors and armed non-state actors (ANSAs) who commit children’s rights violations in conflict, and an increase in compliance to IHL and protection of children. This paper aims to investigate the results of UN’s shaming policy through the theoretical framework of Constructivism and thus provide a critical assessment of the issue. The results of this thesis indicate that there seems to be a convincing link between the number of state actors listed on UN’s “lists of shame” and the number of parties who put in place measures to improve protection of children and increase compliance to IHL. On the other hand, the link seems to be weak when it comes to the number of publicly exposed ANSAs who subsequently commit to UN action plans and increase compliance to IHL.

A set of tools – concepts, guidelines, and engineering solutions – are proposed to help human-computer interaction designers build systems that are ethical with regards to online shaming. Online shaming’s ethics are unsolved in the literature, and the phenomenon can have devastating consequences, as well as serve social justice. Kantian ethics, as interpreted by Christine Korsgaard, provide our analytical methodology. Her meta-ethics invokes Wittgenstein’s private language argument, which also models relevant concepts in human-computer interaction theory. Empirical studies and other ethicists’ views on online shaming are presented. Korsgaard’s Kantian methodology is used to evaluate the other ethicists’ views’ moral acceptability, and guidelines are drawn from that analysis. These guidelines permit shaming, with strong constraints. Technical engineering solutions to ethical problems in online shaming are discussed. All these results are situated in the public dialogue on online shaming, and future research from other ethical traditions is suggested.

The aim of this study is to analyse the emerging discourse of ‘flight shaming’ in the climate change debate in Sweden. A discourse analysis was applied to a selection of translated printed newspaper articles from a variety of Swedish media outlets. The study found that the debate is centred around key themes or elements that help define the discourse on ‘flight shaming’. These were identified as; the ‘Greta-effect’ provoking fear in relation to climate change, the negative delivery of the climate change crisis, complexity attached to shame, metaphoric use of urgency attached to climate issues, passive phrases used to address the social norm of flying, and rhetorical devices of science communication to enhance the validity of the claims within the social context. The characteristic elements alongside the discourse’s identified contributions to the climate change debate in Sweden were also detected as; the bottom-up approach through the use of a social movement, shaming Greta through the use of language surrounding her name, the aviation industry’s effects creating change, the government’s effects triggering political reaction and the metaphors conveying urgency regarding climate change. The implications of this study can contribute to the way in which trending social climate movements can be portrayed by the media and received by the individual consumer, in working towards consideration of actions which can lead to more sustainable ways and results of domestic and international travelling.

Due to new technological affordances, such as the internet and social media, people are more exposed than ever to actions or statements that may be perceived as moral violations. Consequently, moral outrage has become a prevalent feature in the online sphere. While it is well-known how moral outrage arises and what kind of practices it motivates, little is still known in regards to how moral outrage is experienced by the individuals who are at the receiving end of such outrage. The purpose of this study was thus to explore how individuals understand their experiences of being subjected to moral outrage online. Drawing on a theoretical framework comprised by interactionist and symbolic interactionist concepts, the study analysed interviews conducted with twelve individuals who have been subjected to moral outrage online. The findings show that the individuals understand their experience as being characterized by a sense of being in the hands of others once their action or statement had been reframed into a moral violation. The moral outrage is furthermore understood as having wider social consequences that contributed to, solidified or, by contrast, mitigated the experience of becoming an outcast, while also predominantly being understood as having a negative impact on the individuals’ sense of self. Accordingly, by taking these individuals’ understanding of moral outrage online into account, rather than problematizing their actions or statements, the study opens up for a discussion in regards to how moral outrage expressed online may itself be problematic and worthy of critical reflection.