A discursive analysis of children's recreational adult-organized sport : when do children get to play?

Adult-organized children's sport attracts millions of participants in Canada and the United States each year. Though there is a great deal of research that considers children's sport, little of it focuses on recreational or house league sport and less of it offers a deep examination of children's experience of their participation. Using observations, interviews, and focus groups involving ten participants in mixed-gender recreational basketball, this qualitative research project examined their experiences. With Foucault's concepts of correct training and the panoptic gaze in mind, I used discourse and deconstruction analyses to consider the children's descriptions along with my observations of their basketball experience. I was particularly looking for prevalent discourses on sport, childhood, and gender and how they affected their experiences. Despite the league's discursive emphasis on fun, participation, fairness, and respect, that was not necessarily what the children experienced. While most stated they enjoyed their season many also expressed serious disappointments. Size and particularly skill very much determined who was most involved in the action and thus actually played baskethaW. Gender also played a significant role in their sport experiences. My findings invite questions about what genuine sport participation actually is and how it might be alternatively imagined.

Revisiting the Jewish American princess : Jewish girls, the J.A.P. discursive stereotype, and negotiated identity

This qualitative exploratory research investigates how Canadian Jewish girls understand the discursive stereotype of the Jewish American Princess (JAP), and how they take up these understandings of the J AP in relation to their identities. Three focus groups and six interviews were conducted with girls attending Jewish high schools in Toronto, Canada to explore these questions. From a third wave Jewish feminist perspective, and taking a mediated action approach to identity, two analyses were conducted. A thematic analysis of peer relations, gender, community, and religious understandings demonstrates how aspects of individual identities mediate interpretations of the JAP. A series ofpor t rai t s of JAP-related identity were constructed to analyze how the JAP discursive stereotype also functions as a cultural tool that is taken up by the participants to mediate expressions of their identities. These findings establish the contradictory ways these Jewish girls describe, interpret, and utilize the JAP discursive stereotype, and the complex roles it plays in their social worlds.

The Midnight express phenomenon : a historical materialist approach to the reception of the film Midnight express /

This thesis examines the Midnight Express phenomenon focusing on the film's reception by audiences in Europe, North America, and Turkey between 1978-2003. Using and enhancing the "historical materialist approach" to film reception developed by Janet Staiger, the thesis considers the historical determinants of the film's nationally and culturally differential readings in different periods and of the transformations in those readings. The thesis argues that while Midnight Express was most likely read in the late 1970s as an attempt to reaffirm American social identity by projecting Turks as an instance of the negative Other, there has been an important shift in the reception of the film in the West during the 1990s due to the changes in the discursive contexts in which the film has been circulating. One does not observe any specific reference to Turkish prisons as a part of the issue of human rights violations in Turkey in the initial reception of the film by European and American critics, whereas these issues appear to be important constituents of a particular reception of the film in the West in the present. The thesis explains this shift by pointing to the constitution of a particular discourse on human rights violations in Turkey after 1980, and especially throughout the 1990s, which has become a part of the discursive repertoires of the Western audience. Therefore, the thesis argues that today, Midnight Express functions as a more legitimate political statement about Turkey in the eyes of some Western audiences than it had been in the 1970s. On the other hand, parallel to the increasing desire of Turkey to connect itself to the West, particularly to become a member of the European Union, one observes an immense increase in the belief in and defense against the negative effects of Midnight Express on Turkey's international representation since the 1990s. The historical and current discourses that audiences, both in Turkey and abroad, bring into play suggest that these audiences engage with Midnight Express by assuming or denying not only the subject positions constructed by the film text but also certain history-specific extra-filmic subject positions produced by other social and discursive formations.

Marginal/minority popular music : the concept of the "third space" and the case for "hybridities" of cultures/identities /

The topic of this thesis is marginaVminority popular music and the question of identity; the term "marginaVminority" specifically refers to members of racial and cultural minorities who are socially and politically marginalized. The thesis argument is that popular music produced by members of cultural and racial minorities establishes cultural identity and resists racist discourse. Three marginaVminority popular music artists and their songs have been chosen for analysis in support of the argument: Gil Scott-Heron's "Gun," Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" and Robbie Robertson's "Sacrifice." The thesis will draw from two fields of study; popular music and postcolonialism. Within the area of popular music, Theodor Adorno's "Standardization" theory is the focus. Within the area of postcolonialism, this thesis concentrates on two specific topics; 1) Stuart Hall's and Homi Bhabha's overlapping perspectives that identity is a process of cultural signification, and 2) Homi Bhabha's concept of the "Third Space." For Bhabha (1995a), the Third Space defines cultures in the moment of their use, at the moment of their exchange. The idea of identities arising out of cultural struggle suggests that identity is a process as opposed to a fixed center, an enclosed totality. Cultures arise from historical memory and memory has no center. Historical memory is de-centered and thus cultures are also de-centered, they are not enclosed totalities. This is what Bhabha means by "hybridity" of culture - that cultures are not unitary totalities, they are ways of knowing and speaking about a reality that is in constant flux. In this regard, the language of "Otherness" depends on suppressing or marginalizing the productive capacity of culture in the act of enunciation. The Third Space represents a strategy of enunciation that disrupts, interrupts and dislocates the dominant discursive construction of US and THEM, (a construction explained by Hall's concept of binary oppositions, detailed in Chapter 2). Bhabha uses the term "enunciation" as a linguistic metaphor for how cultural differences are articulated through discourse and thus how differences are discursively produced. Like Hall, Bhabha views culture as a process of understanding and of signification because Bhabha sees traditional cultures' struggle against colonizing cultures as transforming them. Adorno's theory of Standardization will be understood as a theoretical position of Western authority. The thesis will argue that Adorno's theory rests on the assumption that there is an "essence" to music, an essence that Adorno rationalizes as structure/form. The thesis will demonstrate that constructing music as possessing an essence is connected to ideology and power and in this regard, Adorno's Standardization theory is a discourse of White Western power. It will be argued that "essentialism" is at the root of Western "rationalization" of music, and that the definition of what constitutes music is an extension of Western racist "discourses" of the Other. The methodological framework of the thesis entails a) applying semiotics to each of the three songs examined and b) also applying Bhabha's model of the Third Space to each of the songs. In this thesis, semiotics specifically refers to Stuart Hall's retheorized semiotics, which recognizes the dual function of semiotics in the analysis of marginal racial/cultural identities, i.e., simultaneously represent embedded racial/cultural stereotypes, and the marginal raciaVcultural first person voice that disavows and thus reinscribes stereotyped identities. (Here, and throughout this thesis, "first person voice" is used not to denote the voice of the songwriter, but rather the collective voice of a marginal racial/cultural group). This dual function fits with Hall's and Bhabha's idea that cultural identity emerges out of cultural antagonism, cultural struggle. Bhabha's Third Space is also applied to each of the songs to show that cultural "struggle" between colonizers and colonized produces cultural hybridities, musically expressed as fusions of styles/sounds. The purpose of combining semiotics and postcolonialism in the three songs to be analyzed is to show that marginal popular music, produced by members of cultural and racial minorities, establishes cultural identity and resists racist discourse by overwriting identities of racial/cultural stereotypes with identities shaped by the first person voice enunciated in the Third Space, to produce identities of cultural hybridities. Semiotic codes of embedded "Black" and "Indian" stereotypes in each song's musical and lyrical text will be read and shown to be overwritten by the semiotic codes of the first person voice, which are decoded with the aid of postcolonial concepts such as "ambivalence," "hybridity" and "enunciation."

A minor theory of the transit of materiality into discourse, Via Campesina.

In this thesis I explore how the material properties of plant seed enter the political discourses of the international peasant coalition the Via Campesina and coalition member the National Fanners Union of Canada (NFU), querying how this process might be employed as a resource for a transformative eco-social politics. I employ several post-structural theoretical constructs, configuring them together as a "minor theory". This minor theory provides the basis for a "minor" reading of three sets of Via Campesina and NFU texts. The aim of these readings is to track the movement of seed from a local agricultural concern to a transitive political one, across both the material and discursive registers. In surfacing the presence of the seed's physical properties in the three texts, I highlight the distinctions between the constraining seed of corporate industrial agriculture, and the social and agroecological opportunities resulting from what I call a "Seed Event".

Will the "fight" ever end? : a critical reading of the metaphors and discourses that construct HIV/AIDS in an African context

In this thesis, I critically examine the discourses that inform how we conceptualise HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa as they are produced in a sample of Canadian news articles, two nonfiction texts - Stephanie Nolen's 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa and Jonathan Morgan and the Bambanani Women's Group's Long Life ... Positive HIV Stories - as well as two literary texts - John Le Carre's popular fiction novel The Constant Gardener and an anthology of stories and poems from Southern Africa titled Nobody Ever Said AIDS, compiled and edited by Nobantu Rasebotsa, Meg Samuelson and Kylie Thomas. Paying particular attention to the role of metaphor in discursive formation, I have found that military metaphors, usually used in conjunction with biomedical discourses, continue to dominate what is said about HIV/AIDS. However, the use of military metaphors to conceptualise HIV/AIDS contributes to stigma and limits the effectiveness of responses to the pandemic. I argue that accessing alternative metaphors and discourses, such as biopsychosocial discourse, can lead to a more layered - and more beneficial - conceptualisation of HIV/AIDS, encouraging a more active response to the pandemic.

International volunteers at a Costa Rican organic farm : sheepish volunteers, proud tourists and unwitting developers

This thesis analyzes the practices and experiences of two groups of Canadian volunteers who visited the organic fanning and "alternative development" project ofFinca la Flor (FLF) in central Costa Rica. Using both participant observation and in-depth interviews with volunteers and other people involved with FLF, I examine volunteers' understandings of their involvement with the fann. I argue that three discursive fonnations are instrumental in shaping this particular volunteering encounter. Specifically, interpretation of these Canadian volunteers' experiences inspires the argument that the emerging practice of international volunteering (or voluntourism) exists at the intersection of discourses of development, volunteering and tourism, all of which both reflect and maintain problematic North-South relationships. The analysis shows that in spite ofFLF's construction as an (alternative / sustainable) international-development project, and in spite of volunteers' initial conceptualization of their trip as "volunteering," volunteers tend to act and describe their time at FLF in ways that look more like tourism than like volunteer labor or international development. Likewise, although FLF claims to principally be focused on alternative development, and merely to open up this authentic development space to volunteers for their participation, the organization in both practice and discourse seems primarily to construct a tourist experience and cater to the needs of foreigners as tourists. Discourses of development and volunteering do infonn the practices offann personnel and volunteers at FLF, but they become subordinated to the more dominant discourse of tourism as the volunteers' and fann management's ideals of development and volunteering capitulate to become focused on satisfying volunteers' (perceived or "real") touristic desires. The FLF participants I studied may have entered the encounter as volunteers, but they departed the site having been tourists.

Global migration : patriarchy, propoganda and the well- being of women and children

This critical analysis explores the conflicted position of women as ''trailing spouses" and the effects on families who relocate globally under the auspices of a multinational corporation, by utilizing a discursive analysis of two contemporary films and available literature. Current portrayals of women and children in contemporary media provide emotional yet conflicting images of the perfect woman, wife, mother, child and family. The basic tenets of a North American patriarchal economic system are being televised around the world. Technological advancements have made it possible to advertise political agendas on a global television screen. Much of what we see is propaganda couched in films and advertisements that are designed to romantic~e the practice of deriving profits from the unpaid labor of woman and invisibility of children and child rearing. I intend to show that the materiality of trailing a spouse globally conflicts with these romanticized images and supports feminist literature that asserts the notion that mothers and children are oppressed and managed for the benefit of capital.

Impact of social constructs on administrator understanding of social justice

Educational administrators are expected to relate social justice considerations to their actions and to the theoretical foundations of their practice. At the same time, social constructs-including those related to administrative practice, social justice, and societal norms-are important in helping administrators understand, frame, and describe administrative issues. Furthermore, as part of socially constructed language, these constructs represent discursive practices and accepted ways of knowing, valuing, and experiencing the world. Drawing on the multidimensional methods of critical discourse analysis as articulated in the writings of Michel Foucault, Norman Fairclough, and Allan Luke, and using deconstruction as a strategic device for reading and interpreting texts, this exploratory qualitative study examined how administrator knowledge, values, and experiences impact their understanding of social justice within the context of delivering social justice for students who experience bullying. Study findings reveal that school administrators interpreted social justice as equitable distribution, action, and results; fairness; and equity. Constructs embedded in these interpretations assumed common things such as universal acceptance of norms of social relations and conveyed administrator intent to secure the kind of social relations that enabled individuals to enjoy greater equality within existing social arrangements.

"All The Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues": [Post]Oedipal Fatherhood And Subjectivity In ABC's Lost

ABC's popular television series Lost has been praised as one of the most innovative programs in the history of broadcast television primarily due to its unique storytelling content and structure. In this thesis, I argue that in spite of its unconventional stances in terms of narrative, genre, and character descriptions, Lost still conforms to the conventional understanding of family, fatherhood, and subjectivity by perpetuating the psychoanalytic myth of the Oedipus complex. The series emphasizes the centrality of the father in the lives of the survivors, and constructs character developments according to Freud's essentialist and phallocentric conception of subjectivity. In this way, it continues the classic psychoanalytic tradition that views the father as the essence of one's identity. In order to support this argument, I conduct a discursive reading of the show's two main characters: Jack Shepherd and John Locke. Through such a reading, I explore and unearth the mythic/psychoanalytic importance of the father in the psychology of these fictional constructs.

Online Anonymity and the Kantian Publicity Principle: Can the Internet Solve the Paradox of Tyranny?

Immanuel Kant’s publicity maxim states that other-regarding actions are wrong if their maxim is not compatible with their being made public. This has the effect of forbidding dissent or rebellion against tyranny, since rebels cannot make their intentions and plans public. However, new internet technologies offer public speech from behind the “shield” of anonymity, allowing dissent to be public but preventing reprisals from tyrants. This thesis examines not only this possibility, but the value of internet-based discursive spaces for politics, their viability as a mode for political communication, and their implications for Classical and Enlightenment approaches to politics and intellectual virtue. Anonymous internet communications favour logos-based reasoning and discourse, which, in the liberal-democratic tradition, is preferable to phronesis and its attendant elitism and chauvinism. These technologies can open new vistas for liberal-democratic politics.