Discourses of friendship between heterosexual women and gay men:mythical norms and an absence of desire

Gay men and heterosexual women may share some common interests in critiquing hetero-patriarchy. However feminism and gay liberationist politics do not always coincide and the role of individual subjectivities in recognising oppressive discourses of normativity remains debated. Interviews were conducted with seven friendship dyads of heterosexual women and gay men. Transcripts were subjected to discourse analysis, which suggested extensive management of heterosexist norms in the friends' accounts of friendship. The analysis highlighted ambiguity over the 'male' status of gay men, a concern with constructing the friendships as legitimately asexual, and the use of parody in the face of homophobia to disrupt normative assumptions. Although we primarily considered the role of heterosexist discourses, there is also evidence that other dimensions of non-normativity (for example, gender and ethnicity) are implicated in friendships constructed around shared otherness and mutual non-normativity. © 2010 SAGE.

Resistance and symbiosis : Québec discourses of resistance in the context of postcolonial theory

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Restorative Justice and Political Forgiveness: A Comparative Study of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

This research project involves a comparative, cross-national study of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) in countries around the world that have used these extra-judicial institutions to pursue justice and promote national reconciliation during periods of democratic transition or following a civil conflict marked by intense violence and severe human rights abuses. An important objective of truth and reconciliation commissions involves instituting measures to address serious human rights abuses that have occurred as a result of discrimination, ethnocentrism and racism. In recent years, rather than solely utilizing traditional methods of conflict resolution and criminal prosecution, transitional governments have established truth and reconciliation commissions as part of efforts to foster psychological, social and political healing.

The primary objective of this research project is to determine why there has been a proliferation of truth and reconciliation commissions around the world in recent decades, and assess whether the perceived effectiveness of these commissions is real and substantial. In this work, using a multi-method approach that involves quantitative and qualitative analysis, I consider the institutional design and structural composition of truth and reconciliation commissions, as well as the roles that these commissions play in the democratic transformation of nations with a history of civil conflict and human rights violations.

In addition to a focus on institutional design of truth and reconciliation commissions, I use a group identity framework that is grounded in social identity theory to examine the historical background and sociopolitical context in which truth commissions have been adopted in countries around the world. This group identity framework serves as an invaluable lens through which questions related to truth and reconciliation commissions and other transitional justice mechanisms can be explored. I also present a unique theoretical framework, the reconciliatory democratization paradigm, that is especially useful for examining the complex interactions between the various political elements that directly affect the processes of democratic consolidation and reconciliation in countries in which truth and reconciliation commissions have been established. Finally, I tackle the question of whether successor regimes that institute truth and reconciliation commissions can effectively address the human rights violations that occurred in the past, and prevent the recurrence of these abuses.

Resistance and symbiosis : Québec discourses of resistance in the context of postcolonial theory

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Opening discourses of citizenship education : a theorization with Foucault

We argue two major difficulties in current discourses of citizenship education. The first is a relative masking of student discourses of citizenship by positioning students as lacking citizenship and as outside the community that acts. The second is in failing to understand the discursive and material support for citizenship activity. We, thus, argue that it is not a lack of citizenship that education research might address, but identification and exploration of the different forms of citizenship that students already engage in. We offer a fragmentary, poststructuralist theorization oriented to explore the contemporary limits of the necessary', drawing on specific resources from the work of Michel Foucault and others for the constitution of local, partial accounts of citizenship discourses and activities, and exploration of their possibilities and constraints. We argue this as a significant tactic of theorization in support of an opening of discourses of citizenship and in avoiding the discursive difficulties that we have identified. Our theorization, then, is significant in its potential to unsettle discourses that confine contemporary thought regarding citizenship education and support exploration of what might be excessive to that confinement.

Chicano identity and discourses of supplementarity on Mexican cinema: from ‘The Man Without a Fatherland’ (Contreras Torres: 1922) to ‘Under the Same Moon’ (Riggen: 2008)

A radical change took place in Mexican narratives of belonging during the 1990s, when NAFTA was first negotiated. Narratives of migration drastically changed the status of Mexican migrants to the US, formerly derided as ‘pochos’, presenting them as model citizens instead. Following Derrida, I argue the role of the migrant became that of a supplement, which is, discursively, at the same time external to and part of a given unit, standing for and allowing deeper transformations to take place in the whole discourse of bilateral relations and national identity more generally. I use Derrida’s concept of the supplement to discuss changing representations of Chicanos in Mexican cinema, and to assess the extent that they have succeeded in reframing the discourse on national identity, with a focus on gender.

Narrativas e crônicas das práticas de ensino da Escola Municipal Agrícola de Rio Claro (1986-2006)

Pós-graduação em Educação Matemática - IGCE

Programa um computador por aluno: política pública e políticas de subjetivação

Pós-graduação em Desenvolvimento Humano e Tecnologias - IBRC

Peligrosidad: entre el Trabajo Social y el Código Penal : Prácticas y tensiones

Frente a la necesidad de generar propuestas analíticas que abandonen la perspectiva primordialmente jurídica de la problemática de la inseguridad civil, centrada en el debate por más/menos penas, libertad condicional/ encierro prolongado e incorpore nuevos elementos que enriquezcan la mirada sobre esta problemática, la siguiente investigación se propone dar cuenta del funcionamiento de una Asesoría Pericial, en su contribución específica en la designación de la peligrosidad de los acusados. Si se considera la "cuestión criminal" como una construcción social, cabe preguntarse: ¿quién realiza esa construcción? y ¿dentro de qué marco institucional?, ¿cómo se realiza?, ¿en función de qué criterios o parámetros? El juez o fiscal pregunta al perito si el sujeto es o no peligroso, en función de lo cual debería o no quedar en libertad; en este marco se entrelaza el discurso científico con el discurso jurídico, representante éste por excelencia del poder simbólico, poder de nombrar y designar, poder de establecer la mirada legitima sobre el mundo social. Desde esta posición de poder, se decide sobre el destino de las personas, sobre su libertad, sobre su inocencia o culpabilidad. Se pone en el centro de la mirada institucional al acusado, a su familia, a su medio comunitario y social. ¿En qué consiste y en función de qué criterios se construye la categoría "peligrosidad" en el discurso y prácticas de los peritos Asistentes/Trabajadores Sociales?; ¿Cómo se articulan con el discurso jurídico? ¿Existen tensiones entre estos discursos? ¿Qué lugar ocupa la dimensión interpretativa - valorativa en la construcción de las mismas?

Peligrosidad: entre el Trabajo Social y el Código Penal : Prácticas y tensiones

Frente a la necesidad de generar propuestas analíticas que abandonen la perspectiva primordialmente jurídica de la problemática de la inseguridad civil, centrada en el debate por más/menos penas, libertad condicional/ encierro prolongado e incorpore nuevos elementos que enriquezcan la mirada sobre esta problemática, la siguiente investigación se propone dar cuenta del funcionamiento de una Asesoría Pericial, en su contribución específica en la designación de la peligrosidad de los acusados. Si se considera la "cuestión criminal" como una construcción social, cabe preguntarse: ¿quién realiza esa construcción? y ¿dentro de qué marco institucional?, ¿cómo se realiza?, ¿en función de qué criterios o parámetros? El juez o fiscal pregunta al perito si el sujeto es o no peligroso, en función de lo cual debería o no quedar en libertad; en este marco se entrelaza el discurso científico con el discurso jurídico, representante éste por excelencia del poder simbólico, poder de nombrar y designar, poder de establecer la mirada legitima sobre el mundo social. Desde esta posición de poder, se decide sobre el destino de las personas, sobre su libertad, sobre su inocencia o culpabilidad. Se pone en el centro de la mirada institucional al acusado, a su familia, a su medio comunitario y social. ¿En qué consiste y en función de qué criterios se construye la categoría "peligrosidad" en el discurso y prácticas de los peritos Asistentes/Trabajadores Sociales?; ¿Cómo se articulan con el discurso jurídico? ¿Existen tensiones entre estos discursos? ¿Qué lugar ocupa la dimensión interpretativa - valorativa en la construcción de las mismas?

Peligrosidad: entre el Trabajo Social y el Código Penal : Prácticas y tensiones

Frente a la necesidad de generar propuestas analíticas que abandonen la perspectiva primordialmente jurídica de la problemática de la inseguridad civil, centrada en el debate por más/menos penas, libertad condicional/ encierro prolongado e incorpore nuevos elementos que enriquezcan la mirada sobre esta problemática, la siguiente investigación se propone dar cuenta del funcionamiento de una Asesoría Pericial, en su contribución específica en la designación de la peligrosidad de los acusados. Si se considera la "cuestión criminal" como una construcción social, cabe preguntarse: ¿quién realiza esa construcción? y ¿dentro de qué marco institucional?, ¿cómo se realiza?, ¿en función de qué criterios o parámetros? El juez o fiscal pregunta al perito si el sujeto es o no peligroso, en función de lo cual debería o no quedar en libertad; en este marco se entrelaza el discurso científico con el discurso jurídico, representante éste por excelencia del poder simbólico, poder de nombrar y designar, poder de establecer la mirada legitima sobre el mundo social. Desde esta posición de poder, se decide sobre el destino de las personas, sobre su libertad, sobre su inocencia o culpabilidad. Se pone en el centro de la mirada institucional al acusado, a su familia, a su medio comunitario y social. ¿En qué consiste y en función de qué criterios se construye la categoría "peligrosidad" en el discurso y prácticas de los peritos Asistentes/Trabajadores Sociales?; ¿Cómo se articulan con el discurso jurídico? ¿Existen tensiones entre estos discursos? ¿Qué lugar ocupa la dimensión interpretativa - valorativa en la construcción de las mismas?

Forensic Injustice: Human Rights, Archival Science and Racialized Feminicide in Guatemala

The call to access and preserve the state records that document crimes committed by the state during Guatemala’s civil war has become an archival imperative entangled with neoliberal human rights discourses of “truth, justice, and memory.” 200,000 people were killed and disappeared in Guatemala’s civil war including acts of genocide in which 85% of massacres involved sexual violence committed against Mayan women. This dissertation argues that in an attempt to tell the official story of the civil war, American Human Rights organizations and academic institutions have constructed a normative identity whose humanity is attached to a scientific and evidentiary value as well as an archival status representing the materiality and institutionality of the record. Consequently, Human Rights discourses grounded in Western knowledges, in particular archival science and law, which prioritize the appearance of truth erase the material and epistemological experience of indigenous women during wartimes. As a result, the subjectivity that has surfaced on the record as most legible has mostly pertained to non-indigenous, middle class, urban, leftist men who were victims of enforced disappearance not genocide. This dissertation investigates this conflicting narrative that remembers a non-indigenous revolutionary masculine hero and grants him justice in human rights courtrooms simply because of a document attesting to his death. A main research question addressed in this project is why the promise of "truth and justice" under the name of human rights becomes a contentious site for gendered indigenous bodies? I conduct a discursive and rhetorical analysis of documentary film, declassified Guatemalan police and military records such as Operation Sofia, a military log known for “documenting the genocide” during rural counterinsurgencies executed by the military. I interrogate the ways in which racialized feminicides or the hyper-sexualized racial violence that has historically dehumanized indigenous women falls outside of discourses of vision constructed by Western positivist knowledges to reinscribe the ideal human right subject. I argue for alternative epistemological frames that recognize genocide as sexualized and gendered structures that have simultaneously produced racialized feminicides in order to disrupt the colonial structures of capitalism, patriarchy and heterosexuality. Ironically, these structures of power remain untouched by the dominant human rights discourse and its academic, NGO, and state collaborators that seek "truth and justice" in post-conflict Guatemala.

Mindfulness: An Ancient Wisdom for the Reconceptualisation of Modern Education in the Complex World

Exploring the new science of emergence allows us to create a very different classroom than how the modern classroom has been conceptualised under the mentality of efficiency and output. Working on the whole person, and not just the mind, we see a shift from the epistemic pillars of truth to more ontological concerns as regards student achievement in our post-Modern and critical discourses. It is important to understand these shifts and how we are to transition our own perception and mentality not only in our research methodologies but also our approach to conceptualisations of issues in education and sustainability. We can no longer think linearly to approach complex problems or advocate for education and disregard our interconnectedness insofar as it enhances our children’s education. We must, therefore, contemplate and transition to a world that is ecological and not mechanical, complex and not complicated—in essence, we must work to link mind-body with self-environment and transcend these in order to bring about an integration toward a sustainable future. A fundamental shift in consciousness and perception may implicate our nature of creating dichotomous entities in our own microcosms, yet postmodern theorists assume, a priori, that these dualities can be bridged in naturalism alone. I, on the other hand, embrace metaphysics to understand the implicated modern classroom in a hierarchical context and ask: is not the very omission of metaphysics in postmodern discourse a symptom from an education whose foundation was built in its absence? The very dereliction of ancient wisdom in education is very peculiar indeed. Western mindfulness may play a vital component in consummating pragmatic idealism, but only under circumstances admitting metaphysics can we truly transcend our limitations, thereby placing Eastern Mindfulness not as an ecological component, but as an ecological and metaphysical foundation.