Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, May 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

D.Litt. et Phil. (Sociology) / The proportions which family problems have assumed in South Africa, led to an increased demand for research on variables related to the development of marital and family integration. The aim of this study is to conceptualise and operationalise the term commitment to marriage, and to investigate its relation to marital integration. Using a countrywide random sample of white married couples in a combined telephone postal survey, it was found that the term commitment to marriage is a multi-dimensional concept, referring to a long-term perspective, involvement in growth of the relationship, and conformity to underlying values. It was found that commitment to marriage makes a statistically significant contribution towards the explanation of marital integration.

Mindfulness has woven through American education for decades as an enduring concept aimed at reforming teachers, students, and classrooms. Signified as a quiet revolution in media and education policy today, our youth have been rebranded and schools remarketed as A Nation at Hope, with promises of mindfulness and contemplative Social Emotional Learning (SEL) strategies. Yet, competing discourses of mindfulness incite youth across various goals and subjectivities. While the predominant global and national mindfulness discourse in education marks out students with preferred characteristics from those deemed insufficiently prepared to experience wellness, connectedness, and success, counter-narratives construct mindful students as transcending dominant social norms and movement toward collective freedom. In considering how such highly politicized discourses are mobilized in SEL curricula, this study problematized the decontextualized circulation of mindfulness discourses in the construction of a silenced and mindful subject. As a White teacher attending to the development of a critical lens that questions curriculum and policy, this study disrupts the researcher’s position as a former SEL trainer in a diverse school district. A critical whiteness studies lens established that several commonly used mindfulness-based interventions apprised a construction of students that works better for mass schooling systems rather than for distinct sociocultural identities. This inquiry provided a different lens on curricular decision- making by working from a local schooling context where stakeholders collaboratively decide on students’ social, emotional, and behavioral needs. In drawing on a conceptualization of discourse communities that recognizes how language and agency are mobilized in advocating for community goals, this interpretive case study inquired about community decision-making alongside stakeholders grappling with concepts and power relations to legitimize their work. The case was theoretically bound by critical discourse analysis, which traced the meaning-making of this community across individual andcollective texts. Thus, a collaborative study of individual and collective stakeholder discourse was read alongside the school’s curricular materials for a translocal comparison of discourse across individual and collective responses. This study may explain some ways that anti-racist discourse(s) figure in negotiating mindfulness and SEL for marginalized youth and how practitioners navigate toward humanizing, race-visible responses to mindfulness practices in their communities.

In the years approaching President F.W. De Klerk’s announcement in 1990 that South Africa’s policies would be reformed a number of the right wing groups realised that apartheid would come to an end. This dissertation deals with one response, by the Boere-Vryheidsbeweging (Boer Freedom Movement). By setting up a settlement styled as a ‘growth point for Afrikaner self-determination’ in Pretoria’s eastern hinterland, in 1992, the movement hoped to avert what its numbers saw as eventual black majority rule. The aim of this study is to probe what has become of this settlement roughly 20 years after the transition to full democracy in 1994. The following questions were used as a guideline to this end: (i) On what legal basis has the settlement’s property been occupied?; (ii) Who are the people who moved to the settlement over time?; (iii) How have they generated the capital with which to develop the settlement?; (iv) What is the character of their relationship with each other?; and (v) How have they dealt with external authorities such as the state, province and local municipality? The findings of this study show that the settlement of Kleinfontein has been kept as a set of undivided properties and that none of the residents have individual title. They occupy the settlement by internal agreement alone, and there is no acknowledgement by either the state or private institutions of the internal divisions that have been made. Over time, the founders of the settlement managed to attract two categories of people to live there. The first comprised relatively old lower middle-class people who moved in because of the settlement’s affordability and peacefulness. The second consisted of working age middle-class people with professional jobs who moved in for reasons to do with the ideology of Afrikaner self-determination. As the movement of the second category of people into the settlement accelerated, internal disagreements developed between them and the first category of people, and the settlement as a whole eventually became so paralysed by the conflict that few people have chosen to move there since. The disagreements mainly revolved around the fact that the professionals wanted to transform the settlement so that it meets the middle-class standards found in major South African cities. The lack of consensus eventually resulted in several conflicts with the state, placing a question mark over the settlement’s continued existence in post-apartheid South Africa. / Dissertation (MSocSci)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / tm2015 / Anthropology and Archaeology / MSocSci / Unrestricted

This dissertation explored existing tensions between legal structures aimed at achieving justice—specifically, concept of dignity and the concept of equality—and groups not fully recognized under the law (“Liminally-recognized groups”). It approached this tension from a critical perspective on identity, exploring it both in the U.S. and in Israel/Palestine. While not comparative in the traditional sense, the dissertation nevertheless journeyed between both geographies, drawing inspiration from each, and exploring similar questions and their differing (albeit parallel) answers in each locality. It examines the limitations of the concept of equality within anti-discrimination law, stemming mainly from its dependency upon legal recognition. Simultaneously, it similarly explores the perils of dignity-based universal protections, rooted in dignity’s cultural and racial biases. For this purpose, all three chapters center groups in a liminal state of legal recognition—groups that often challenge dominant binaries of sex/race/disability—as a methodological vantage point from which to examine legal systems and orthodoxies. It analyzes law’s ability to see past recognition, and its effectiveness for groups who have yet to meet—and shoulder—the burden of recognition. Simultaneously, it explores the ability of liminally-recognized groups to see past the law, and to seek alternative routes for political power. The first chapter, Coming Out of the Shadows: The Non-Western Critique of Dignity, focuses on the intersection between Mizrahi Jews (i.e., descendants of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries who immigrated to Israel) and the right to dignity, exploring this right’s racialized undertones within Israeli courts. Following a conceptual and cultural exploration of the development of dignity (a universal, status-neutral right) as the antithesis of honor, this chapter questions the strong divide and moral hierarchy between both terms. Applying critical race methodology, methods of close reading, and doctrinal analysis, it analyzes multiple legal cases to explore Western influences on the societal and judicial imagination of Israeli dignity. The chapter concludes by arguing that dignity’s pretense of universality obscures racial biases in its interpretation and application. The second chapter, Whiteness at Work, focuses on U.S. antidiscrimination law and identity groups at the margins of whiteness. The chapter analyzes workplace discrimination cases where whites have sued other whites for racial discrimination. Examining intra-white racial discrimination cases, this chapter demonstrate that they suffer from an under-theorization of whiteness, and from the judicial assumption that race becomes relevant only in instances involving racial minorities. Instead, I argue, courts should recognize instances in which white people police other whites to behave according to racial expectations regarding whiteness as instances of racial discrimination. This could be implemented through Title VII’s stereotype doctrine. Accordingly, discrimination against whites due to their association with people of color, as well as discrimination against poor whites not seen as ‘refined’ or ‘sophisticated’ enough for the workplace, are both instances in which whites are discriminated against for failing to perform their racial identities according to white supremacist expectations. The third and final chapter of the dissertation, Identity at Work, develops a thematic, overarching argument regarding liminally-recognized groups and their place within anti-discrimination law. Following an analysis of various types of liminal recognition under U.S. anti-discrimination law, and the normative case for and against recognition, I examine non-essentializing strategies to promote justice that do not force marginalized communities to leave their narratives of oppression (rooted in sexism, white supremacy, ableism, etc.) at the door, but that also do not force these communities to bind their oppression to a rigid sense of what it means to be who they are. The first strategy focuses on possible readings of anti-discrimination laws that enable recognition of patterns of racism, sexism, etc. without tying them back to specific (recognized) identities. The second strategy highlights the potential rooted in labor law to promote antidiscrimination ideals.

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This study examined the effects of gender, ethnicity, social support, and acculturation on depression-stigma in college communities; specifically targeting the racial groups of African Americans and Whites. Undergraduates of various ages and class standings were given surveys within their demographics pertaining to: acculturation, social support, stigma, and depression. The above factors were compared to ethnicity. The results supported that African Americans have a higher level of depression-stigma overall, especially those who have been enculturated into their traditional culture; none of the additional hypotheses were supported by the research.

International schools have proliferated globally since the second half of the twentieth century to meet the demands of a global mobile community and of families seeking an education in English for young people. While research on international schools has accompanied this growth, few studies have explored gender dynamics at international schools, which bring together diverse students, families, teachers, administrators, and staff. This study explored how four white women teachers at an international school in Morocco read womanhood and gender in different social locations. Employing feminist concepts and theories such as nomadic subjectivity, transnational feminism, and postfeminism, I produced a narrative ethnography of their readings through interviews, journals, and a focus group over the course of the 2020-2021 school year. Individual narratives reveal how the four women teachers engaged gendered discourses divergently, with two participants leaning towards postfeminist ideas of gender equality and individual empowerment and the other two participants highlighting the gender inequities they perceived in their lives. I also looked across all participants to explore their shared experiences as white, foreign-hire women teachers, which included a superficial belonging in Moroccan communities outside of the international school and readings of gender and womanhood shaped by structures such as whiteness and coloniality. This study offers a needed perspective on gender dynamics in international schools as experienced by teachers and also suggests the importance of location and culture in studies on women, gender, and teaching.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri--Columbia, 1999. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.