The creative text and its accompanying critical thesis explore how - through the writing of memoirs - ex-members of total institutions justified their acceptance of institutional controls. The critical thesis uses narratives within the sub-genre of apostate memoirs to support a sociological understanding of social dynamics within religious and political total institutions. It draws on theories concerning women’s experiences in new religious movements (NRMs), as well as studies of disaffiliation from NRMS. The creative text is a personal memoir, exploring the author’s experience of living within the Hare Krishna movement. The creative component of this thesis and the exegetical component are a bi-partite entity. Sociological and stylistic theories are informed by the nexus of the memoir writing and analysis of existing memoirs; the creative component is informed by the sociological theories of religion explored in the critical component. Both components address the same research question: Why do members of total institutions accept the controls placed on them? As a subset, additional questions are addressed. These include how a memoirist reveals the stage of disaffiliation they were in at the time of writing the memoir, and whether they can be positioned as apostate or defector. There is a focus on how dyadic relationships are controlled by institutional practices. A feminist perspective is used to understand the ways women in total institutions adopt cognitive justification strategies as coping mechanisms within these patriarchal environments.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:732706 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Gannon, Suzanne |
| Publisher | Lancaster University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds