The Significance of Critical Theory for Restorative Justice in Education

Restorative Justice (rj), a distinctive philosophical approach that seeks to replace punitive, managerial structures of schooling with those that emphasize the building and repairing of relationships (Hopkins 2004) has been embraced in the past two decades by a variety of school systems worldwide in an effort to build safe school communities. Early studies indicate rj holds significant promise, however, proponents in the field identify that theoretical and evidence-based research is falling behind practice. They call for further research to deepen the current understanding of rj that will support its sustainability and transformative potential and allow it to move from the margins to the mainstream of schooling (Braithwaite 2006; Morrison & Ahmed 2006; Sherman & Strang 2007).

Diversity Discourse and the Ontario Educator: The Understandings of Race and Whiteness Among New White Ontario Teachers

As a recent teacher education graduate, I have been left with more questions than answers about how to create and maintain an equitable and antioppressive classroom. These complicated questions of equity laid the groundwork for this study, which explored how new teachers understood diversity, specifically whiteness, and how they connected these perceptions to their course-related experiences in their teacher education program. Using a qualitative approach, this study problematized the lack of critical discussions around diversity taking place in Ontario teacher education courses. Through purposive, homogenous sampling, 7 new Ontario educators participated in a semistructured interview that focused on their experiences as teacher candidates and new teachers and their understandings and ideas regarding diversity, race, and more specifically, whiteness. The findings suggest that the greater Canadian discourse surrounding multiculturalism impacts the everyday diversity talk of the participants, and that problematic ideas of acceptance and tolerance are common. The findings also show a strong discomfort and unfamiliarity among the participants with the terms whiteness and white privilege. Finally, the results also revealed that new teachers have limited experience in their teacher education to discuss and learn about diversity, particularly critical discussions about race and privilege. Through this investigation, I aimed to bring attention to the necessity of having these critical, albeit difficult, discussions around diversity and whiteness in order to support new, predominately white, teachers.

The illuminist discourse of the digital divide: a critic to the Post-Fordist Informatic Mundaneum from Knoxville, Tennessee

This article discusses the project of the Information Society and the discourses that undergo it, as part of a political and ideological conception universalized by those countries that created and dominate computer technology, which is in turn is aligned with the Post-Fordist industrial capitalist order and its emphasis on economic accumulation and consumerism. We explain how information technology creates routines and legitimate social orders, taking for analyzes the case of the Clinton-Gore policy in the United States, when the discourse of the computer society was associated with the development and social welfare. This association is revealed in the speech made by Clinton in the city of Knoxville in year 1996. There we see the beginnings of the concern about the Digital Divide as a new form of "social disease" that prevents the passage to a better world, focused on productivity, accumulation and consumption in information-dense societies. This generates a clash between the industrial-graph-centric world and the oral-pre-industrial communities, as a result of attempting to transplant the institutional forms of the developed West. We explain the pillars of the new computerized order, and how they replaced previous epic narratives creating techno-deterministic or techno-phobic discourses in prejudice of more critical approaches. We identify the effects such deterministic discourses that connote the association between the Information Society, welfare and development, questioning the urgency of deploying this system at global level without profound critical discussion, clear goals focused on the benefit of the human beings, and the open participation of the users of the system.

Transgressive sporting bodies - A theoretical and critical dicourse analysis of the representation of Caster Semenya in Swiss print media

A debate about Caster Semenya's female sex began shortly after the South African runner won gold in the women’s 800m final at the 2009 Athletic World Championships held in Berlin. Her victory was disputed through questions about her right to compete as a ‘woman’, with the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) announcing she would be required to undergo a gender verification test before her victory could be confirmed. Using the theoretical frame of social constructionism (Berger & Luckmann), poststructuralism (Foucault), gender- and postcolonial theories (Butler; Hall; Spivak) and the methodology of critical discourse analysis (Jaeger), the paper explores the way the possible intersexuality of Caster Semenya was contextualised in mainstream Swiss German-language print media. The analyses will firstly look at the way in which Caster Semenya was constructed as a ʻfallen hero’ and stigmatised as a double-dealer and unacceptable deviant body. The rumours amongst athletes and commentators became news in the media, which focused on descriptions of her habitus, her muscular body and her deep voice. Through theoretical discussion the paper argues that the media response to Caster Semenya exemplifies Butler’s claim that the discursive framework of gender constructs and naturalises sex. A key question is therefore whether the designation of deviant bodies to a ʻfield of deformation’ (Butler) works to pluralise the field of gender, or rather, as Butler suggests, it tends that those bodies might call into questions. The final part of the paper discusses how gender, ethnicity and sexuality combine to constitute the black female sporting body as a spectacle of otherness. It is evident that this otherness is made manifest through the function of those bodies as a site of transgression, as the boundary between male and female, and often as the boundary between culture and nature (Hall). Using the example of the controversy surrounding Caster Semenya, this paper aims to demonstrate how the post/colonial white female body is reproduced by western norms of gender, sexuality, beauty and sporting behaviour, in the sense of a feminine sporting genderperformance. The media controversy will be also read through the lens of the globalisation of certain ideas of normative bodies, sex, ethnicity and gender and the challenge of changing stereotypes through transgression. Keywords: gender- and postcolonial theories, discourse analysis, print media, Caster Semen-ya, deviant body, ethnicity, intersexuality

Transgressive sporting bodies - A theoretical and critical dicourse analysis of the representation of Caster Semenya in Swiss print media

A debate about Caster Semenya's female sex began shortly after the South African runner won gold in the women’s 800m final at the 2009 Athletic World Championships held in Berlin. Her victory was disputed through questions about her right to compete as a ‘woman’, with the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) announcing she would be required to undergo a gender verification test before her victory could be confirmed. Using the theoretical frame of social constructionism (Berger & Luckmann), poststructuralism (Foucault), gender- and postcolonial theories (Butler; Hall; Spivak) and the methodology of critical discourse analysis (Jaeger), the paper explores the way the possible intersexuality of Caster Semenya was contextualised in mainstream Swiss German-language print media. The analyses will firstly look at the way in which Caster Semenya was constructed as a ʻfallen hero’ and stigmatised as a double-dealer and unacceptable deviant body. The rumours amongst athletes and commentators became news in the media, which focused on descriptions of her habitus, her muscular body and her deep voice. Through theoretical discussion the paper argues that the media response to Caster Semenya exemplifies Butler’s claim that the discursive framework of gender constructs and naturalises sex. A key question is therefore whether the designation of deviant bodies to a ʻfield of deformation’ (Butler) works to pluralise the field of gender, or rather, as Butler suggests, it tends that those bodies might call into questions. The final part of the paper discusses how gender, ethnicity and sexuality combine to constitute the black female sporting body as a spectacle of otherness. It is evident that this otherness is made manifest through the function of those bodies as a site of transgression, as the boundary between male and female, and often as the boundary between culture and nature (Hall). Using the example of the controversy surrounding Caster Semenya, this paper aims to demonstrate how the post/colonial white female body is reproduced by western norms of gender, sexuality, beauty and sporting behaviour, in the sense of a feminine sporting genderperformance. The media controversy will be also read through the lens of the globalisation of certain ideas of normative bodies, sex, ethnicity and gender and the challenge of changing stereotypes through transgression. Keywords: gender- and postcolonial theories, discourse analysis, print media, Caster Semen-ya, deviant body, ethnicity, intersexuality

The Vernacular Discourse of the "Arab Spring:" An Analysis of the Visual, the Embodied, and the Textual Rhetorics of the Karama Revolution

The Vernacular Discourse of the "Arab Spring" is a project that bridges the divide between the East and the West by offering new readings to Arab subjectivities. Through an analysis of the "Arab Spring" through the lens of vernacular discourse, it challenges the Euro-Americo-centric legacies of Orientalism in Western academia and the new wave of extremism in the Arab world by offering alternative representations of Arab bodies and subjectivities. To offer this new reading of the "Arab Spring," it explores the foundations of critical rhetoric as a theory and a practice and argues for a turn towards a critical vernacular discourse. The turn towards critical vernacular discourse is important as it urges the analyses of different artifacts produced by marginalized groups in order to understand their perspectives that have largely been foreclosed in traditional cultural studies research. Building on embodied/performative critical rhetoric, the vernacular discourses of the Arab revolutionary body examines other forms of knowledge productions that are not merely textual; more specifically, through data gathered in the Lhbib Bourguiba, Tunisia. This analysis of the political revolutionary body unveils the complexity underlining the discussion around issues of identity, agency and representation in the Middle East and North Africa, and calls for a critical study towards these issues in the region beyond the binary approach that has been practiced and applied by academics and media analysts. Hence, by analyzing vernacular discourse, this research locates a method of examining and theorizing the dialectic between agency, citizenry, and subjectivity through the study of how power structure is recreated and challenged through the use of the vernacular in revolutionary movements, as well as how marginalized groups construct their own subjectivities through the use of vernacular discourse. Therefore, highlighting the political prominence of evaluating the Arab Spring as a vernacular discourse is important in creating new ways of understanding communication in postcolonial/neocolonial settings.

Building Blocks : Children's Literature and the Formation of a Nation, 1750-1825

«Building Blocks: Children’s Literature and the Formation of a Nation, 1750-1825» examine la façon dont la littérature pour enfants imprègne les jeunes lecteurs avec un sens de nationalisme et d'identité nationale à travers la compréhension des espaces et des relations spatiales. La thèse étudie les œuvres d’enfants par Thomas Day, Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, Richard Lovell et Maria Edgeworth, Charles et Mary Lamb, Sarah Trimmer, Lucy Peacock, Priscilla Wakefield, John Aikin, et Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Les différents sujets thématiques reflètent la façon dont les frontières entre les dimensions extérieures et intérieures, entre le monde physique et le domaine psychologique, sont floues. En s'appuyant sur les travaux de penseurs éducatifs, John Locke et Jean-Jacques Rousseau, les écritures pour les enfants soulignent l'importance des expériences sensorielles qui informent l’évolution interne des individus. En retour, la projection de l'imagination et l'investissement des sentiments aident à former la manière dont les gens interagissent avec le monde matériel et les uns envers les autres afin de former une nation. En utilisant une approche Foucaldienne, cette thèse montre comment la discipline est inculquée chez les enfants et les transforme en sujets réglementés. Grâce à des confessions et des discours, les enfants souscrivent à la notion de surveillance et de transparence tandis que l'appréciation de l'opinion publique encourage la pratique de la maîtrise de soi. Les enfants deviennent non seulement des ébauches, sensibles à des impressions, mais des corps d'écriture lisibles. Les valeurs et les normes de la société sont internalisées pendant que les enfants deviennent une partie intégrale du système qu'ils adoptent. L'importance de la visibilité est également soulignée dans la popularité du système de Linné qui met l'accent sur l'observation et la catégorisation. L'histoire naturelle dans la littérature enfantine renforce la structure hiérarchique de la société, ce qui souligne la nécessité de respecter les limites de classes et de jouer des rôles individuels pour le bien-être de la collectivité. Les connotations religieuses dans l'histoire naturelle peuvent sembler justifier l'inégalité des classes, mais elles diffusent aussi des messages de charité, de bienveillance et d'empathie, offrant une alternative ou une forme d’identité nationale «féminine» qui est en contraste avec le militarisme et le nationalisme patricien. La seconde moitié de la thèse examine comment la théorie des « communautés imaginées » de Benedict Anderson devient une possibilité à travers le développement du goût national et une compréhension de l'interconnexion entre les individus. Le personnage du barde pointe à la centralité de l'esprit communautaire dans l'identité nationale. Parallèlement à la commercialisation croissante de produits culturels et nationaux durant cette période, on retrouve l’augmentation de l’attachement affectif envers les objets et la nécessité de découvrir l'authentique dans la pratique de la réflexion critique. La propriété est redéfinie à travers la question des «vrais» droits de propriété et devient partagée dans l'imaginaire commun. Des cartes disséquées enseignent aux enfants comment visualiser des espaces et des frontières et conceptualisent la place de l’individu dans la société. Les enfants apprennent que des actions disparates effectuées dans la sphère domestique ont des répercussions plus importantes dans le domaine public de la nation.

The child and the letter: Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

This essay engages with the question of childhood in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Despite narrating a conflict concerning child custody, childhood is a subject rarely broached by the critics of the text. Indeed, the only instance of the child being addressed in criticism grants it the power to enclose potentially subversive narrative. This is a function attributed to the framing structure of the novel by other critics. This essay returns the child to Brontë’s text as a disruptive rather than containing force. Through a detailed close analysis of the novel I track such disruptions, and the extent to which these point to wider theoretical or methodological difficulties in critical accounts of childhood and absence in literature. The essay makes interventions into psychoanalysis, childhood studies, and the discourse of ‘framing’ within C19th literature.

Anti-Slavic imagery in German radical nationalist discourse at the turn of the twentieth century: a prelude to Nazi ideology?

By applying methods of cognitive metaphor theory, Jaworska examines metaphorical scenarios employed in the discourse of anti-Slavism, which featured prominently in radical nationalist propaganda in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. She does so by analysing metaphorical expressions used to refer to the Polish population living in the eastern provinces of Prussia, in the so-called Ostmark. Her article is based on an analysis of a range of pamphlets and newspaper articles written by some of the leading figures of two nationalist organizations: the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband) and the Eastern Marches Society(Ostmarkenverein). The main research questions it addresses are: What kind of metaphoric scenarios were used to depict the Polish minority, and to what extent were the metaphorical patterns of anti-Slavic imagery similar to those employed in the antisemitic propaganda of the Nazi era? Is there a discursive continuity between the radical nationalism of imperial Germany and the National Socialism of the Third Reich at the level of metaphorical scenarios? Ultimately, Jaworska attempts to contribute to a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying radical and essentially racist attitudes.

Cleverer than we thought: the change in discourse of the Georgian Orthodox Church

This paper will focus on three episodes of contemporary church-state relations in Georgia, in particular, the conflicting interaction between law and religion in the public space. The first episode will be an open confrontation between the church and the state over the law on Registration of Religious Minority organizations (2011) which allowed the religious minorities to freely register; second: the Law on Self-governance (2013) which Georgian Orthodox Church considered “a threat to territorial integrity of Georgia”; and lastly: the Law on Anti-discrimination (2014) which was deemed “legitimization of Sodomic sin”. By reflecting on the three examples where for the first time after the collapse of Soviet Union, the Georgian state openly confronted the church and made a decision notwithstanding its position, I will attempt to argue that the role of the Orthodox Church in influencing the law making process is in gradual decline. However, on the other hand, by presenting the results of an ethnographic study conducted in 23 eparchies and perishes in 7 regions of Georgia in 2014, I will also show that church has adapted to its declining role over policy making, and to regain its political influence it gradually started to employ a civic rather than ethno nationalist discourse on matters of religious freedom while engaging with government. The paper will suggest that both unilateral decision-making of the state and civic shift in the discourse of the church constitute an important change in understanding church-state dynamics in the post-communist Orthodox Christianity dominated society.

Discursive constructions of social and environmental accounting in Brazil: the case of Petrobras.

In the 29 years following \"Our Common Future\" by the United Nations, there is considerable debate among governments, civil society, interest groups and business organisations about what constitutes sustainable development, which constitutes evidence for a contested discourse concerning sustainability. The purpose of this study is to understand this debate in the developing economic context of Brazil, and in particular, to understand and critique the social and environmental accounting [SEA] discursive constructions relating to the State-owned, Petrobras as well as to understand the Brazilian literature on SEA. The discourse theory [DT]-based analysis employs rhetorical redescription to analyse twenty-two reports from Petrobras from 2004-2013. I investigate the political notions by employing the methodological framework of the Logics of Critical Explanation [LCE]. LCE engenders five methodological steps: problematisation, retroduction, logics (social, political and fantasmatic), articulation and critique. The empirical discussion suggests that the hegemony of economic development operates to obfuscate, rhetorically, the development of sustainability, so as to maintain the core business of Petrobras conceived as capital accumulation. Equally, these articulations also illustrate how the constructions of SEA operate to serve the company\'s purpose with few (none) profound changes in integration of sustainability. The Brazilian literature on SEA sustains the status quo of neo-liberal market policies that operate to protect the dominant business case approach to maintain an agenda of wealth-creation in relation to social and environmental needs. The articulations of the case manifested in policies regarding, for example, corruption, which involved over-payments for contracts and unsustainable practices relating to the use of fossil fuels and demonstrated that there was antagonism between action and disclosure. The corruption scandal that emerged after SEA disclosures highlighted the rhetorical nature of disclosure when financial resources were subtracted from the company for political parties and engineering contractors hid facts through incomplete disclosures. The articulations of SEA misrepresent a broader context of the meanings associated with sustainability, which restricted the constructions of SEA to principally serve and represent the intention of the most powerful groups. The significance of SEA, then is narrowed to represent particular interests. The study argues for more critical studies as limited Brazilian literature concerning SEA kept a \'safe distance\' from substantively critiquing the constructions of SEA and its articulations in the Brazilian context. The literature review and the Petrobras\' case illustrate a variety of naming, instituting and articulatory practices that endeavour to maintain the current hegemony of development in an emerging economy, which allows Petrobras to continue to exercise significant profit at the expense of the social and environmental. The constructed idea of development in Petrobras\' discourses emphasises a rhetoric of wider development, but, in reality, these discourses were the antithesis of political, social and ethical developmental issues. These constructions aim to hide struggles between social inequalities and exploitation of natural resources and constitute excuses about a fanciful notion of rhetorical and hegemonic neo-liberal development. In summary, this thesis contributes to the prior literature in five ways: (i) the addition of DT to the analysis of SEA enhances the discussion of political elements such as hegemony, antagonism, logic of equivalence/difference, ideology and articulation; (ii) the analysis of an emerging economy such as Brazil incorporates a new perspective of the discussion of the discourses of SEA and development; (iii) this thesis includes a focus on rhetoric to discuss the maintenance of the status quo; (iv) the holistic structure of the LCE approach enlarges the understanding of the social, political and fantasmatic logics of SEA studies and; (v) this thesis combines an analysis of the literature and the case of Petrobras to characterise and critique the state of the Brazilian academy and its impacts and reflections on the significance of SEA. This thesis, therefore, argues for more critical studies in the Brazilian academy due to the persistence of idea of SEA and development that takes-for-granted deep exclusions and contradictions and provide little space for critiques.

Everything in di Dark Muss Come to Light: A Postcolonial Investigation of the Practice of Extra Lessons at the Secondary Level in Jamaica's Education System

Despite the vast research examining the evolution of Caribbean education systems, little is chronologically tied to the postcolonial theoretical perspectives of specific island-state systems, such as the Jamaican education system and its relationship with the underground shadow education system. This dissertation study sought to address the gaps in the literature by critically positioning postcolonial theories in education to examine the macro- and micro-level impacts of extra lessons on secondary education in Jamaica. The following postcolonial theoretical (PCT) tenets in education were contextualized from a review of the literature: (a) PCT in education uses colonial discourse analysis to critically deconstruct and decolonize imperialistic and colonial representations of knowledge throughout history; (b) PCT in education uses an anti-colonial discursive framework to re-position indigenous knowledge in schools, colleges, and universities to challenge hegemonic knowledge; (c) PCT in education involves the "unlearning" of dominant, normative ideologies, the use of self-reflexivity, and deconstruction; and (d) PCT in education calls for critical pedagogical approaches that reject the banking concept of education and introduces inclusive pedagogy to facilitate "the passage from naïve to critical transitivity" (Freire, 1973, p. 32). Specifically, using a transformative mixed-methods design, grounded and informed by a postcolonial theoretical lens, I quantitatively uncovered and then qualitatively highlighted how if at all extra lessons can improve educational outcomes for students at the secondary level in Jamaica. Accordingly, the quantitative data was used to test the hypotheses that the practice of extra lessons in schools is related to student academic achievement and the practice of critical-inclusive pedagogy in extra lessons is related to academic achievement. The two-level hierarchical linear model analysis revealed that hours spent in extra lessons, average household monthly income, and critical-inclusive pedagogical tents were the best predictors for academic achievement. Alternatively, the holistic multi-case study explored how extra-lessons produces increased academic achievement. The data revealed new ways of knowledge construction and critical pedagogical approaches to galvanize systemic change in secondary education. Furthermore, the data showed that extra lessons can improve educational outcomes for students at the secondary level if the conditions for learning are met. This study sets the stage for new forms of knowledge construction and implications for policy change.

The Society of States under siege? An English School perspective on the emergence of global civil society

In this article I critically examine the theoretical and empirical relationship between world society, whereby global civil society is taken to be its physical or empirical counterpart, and the society of states. This relationship is typically portrayed as contradictory or confrontational, and I contend that this mainstream perspective is reliant on a superficial analysis of the relationship. If one examines the deeper dynamics, viewed in their contemporary international normative context, then one can identify the more constructive and permissive aspects of the relationship. Rather than being wholly incompatible I argue that world society and international society are mutually constitutive and mutually dependent regimes, whose relationship is more often marked by cooperation than by conflict. English School theory provides the conceptual framework for this analysis. The relationship between international and world society presents a core ontological tension within this theory, and again they tend to occupy polarised positions. A synthesis of four international theories - pluralist international society theory, solidarist international society theory, critical international theory, and the discourse of global civil society - informs the hypothesis that the relationship can be normatively and empirically reconciled. In order to empirically support this explanation I analyse two phenomena in world politics - transnational advocacy networks and humanitarian intervention - where there is an apparent tension between international and world society.