Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Feminist research'
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1
Desjardins, Pat. "Theories and methods in feminist research." Thesis, University of Essex, 1991. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.280813.
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Moloney, Molly. "Feminist Social Research: Epistemological and Methodological Implications." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 1996. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1316199216.
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VanEvery, Joanne. "Anti-sexist living arrangements : a feminist research project." Thesis, University of Essex, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.386026.
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Davids, Leila. "Muslim women in Cape Town : a feminist narrative analysis." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/7993.
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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-151).Given the amount of literature on Islam in South Africa, very little has been written about the roles of Muslim women and their contributions to the development of Islam in this country. In addition, there is a dearth of academic work on the ways in which Muslim women in South Africa identify themselves. Of the writing that does exist, there is an almost exclusive focus on a binary distinction between modern and traditional women, which limits the multiplicity of expressions available to these women. This thesis examines through the analysis of narratives, the diversity of experiences and the fluidity of subjectivities for Muslim women, without conforming to binary divisions for analysis. Instead, the range of identities and the shifting processes of gender constructions are prioritised.
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Berggren, Kalle. "Reading Rap : Feminist Interventions in Men and Masculinity Research." Doctoral thesis, Uppsala universitet, Sociologiska institutionen, 2014. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-229518.
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The present thesis explores how masculinity is constructed and negotiated in relation to race, class and sexuality in hip hop in Sweden. Theoretically, the study contributes to the increasing use of contemporary feminist theory in men and masculinity research. In so doing, it brings into dialogue poststructuralist feminism, feminist phenomenology, intersectionality and queer theory. These theoretical perspectives are put to use in a discourse analysis of rap lyrics by 38 rap artists in Sweden from the period 1991-2011. The thesis is based on the following four articles: Sticky masculinity: Post-structuralism, phenomenology and subjectivity in critical studies on men explores how poststructuralist feminism and feminist phenomenology can advance the understanding of subjectivity within men and masculinity research. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, and offering re-readings of John Stoltenberg and Victor Seidler, the article develops the notion of “sticky masculinity”. Degrees of intersectionality: Male rap artists in Sweden negotiating class, race and gender analyzes how class, race, gender, and to some extent sexuality, intersect in rap lyrics by male artists. It shows how critiques of class and race inequalities in these lyrics intersect with normative notions of gender and sexuality. Drawing on this empirical analysis, the article suggests that the notion of “degrees of intersectionality” can be helpful in thinking about masculinity from an intersectional perspective. ‘No homo’: Straight inoculations and the queering of masculinity in Swedish hip hop explores the boundary work performed by male artists regarding sexuality categories. In particular, it analyzes how heterosexuality is sustained, given the affection expressed among male peers. To this end, the article develops the notion of “straight inoculations” to account for the rhetorical means by which heterosexual identities are sustained in a contested terrain. Hip hop feminism in Sweden: Intersectionality, feminist critique and female masculinity investigates lyrics by female artists in the male-dominated hip hop genre. The analysis shows how critique of gender inequality is a central theme in these lyrics, ranging from the hip hop scene to politics and men’s violence against women. The article also analyzes how female rappers both critique and perform masculinity.
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Rodriguez, Castro Laura. "Towards De(s)colonial Research in the Global Rural: A Feminist Feeling-Thinking Study with Rural Women in Colombia." Thesis, Griffith University, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10072/376823.
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This dissertation is a feminist de(s)colonial study with rural women in Colombia. It documents and validates the lives, labour and agency of rural women by re-signifying place as a site of resistance and negotiation within a neoliberal context. Descolonialism is not a concrete theory. It is a process that is alive, emphasising the openness of identities, the entanglement of ways of thinking and the notion of feeling-thinking. It is an approach that opens up spaces to think from the localities and social spaces of activism and research. In using descolonialism as the epistemology for this thesis, I implemented a feminist participatory visual methodology, collecting data from two case studies in the towns of Toca and Minca. The case studies involved focus groups that included photo-elicitation interviews with campesina women, as well as the collaborative organisation of two photographic exhibitions where further informal interviews were conducted with the community. Data for the thesis were also generated through in-depth interviews with women activists involved in social movements and organisations focused on rural women in Colombia. Collectively, the data demonstrate that rural women are agents in place, resisting colonial practices such as the impact of climate change, agroindustries, machismo and exploitative tourism. While campesina women experience social inequality, they enact resistance in places such as the home, vereda, and the city, and contest violence against their territories bodies-lands. As such, rural women in Colombia challenge their positioning by hegemonic feminisms and neoliberal projects as lacking agency and in need of saving. The research demonstrates the importance of feminist, feeling-thinking, place-based research to conceptualising the countryside as an embodied relational space constituted by multiplicities and histories. In calling for alliances that trouble neoliberal projects (including academia) I conclude this thesis by stating that there is an urgent need to support autonomy struggles in Colombia, in the context of the critical historical moment after the peace accord signature with the FARC-EP in 2016. Overall, this thesis contributes to the growing literature emerging from the Global South that makes visible and supports the progressive politics and new paradigms that question the colonial bias of hegemonic feminisms and neoliberal projects.Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
School of Hum, Lang & Soc Sc
Arts, Education and Law
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Beddoes, Kacey. "Practices of Brokering: Between STS and Feminist Engineering Education Research." Diss., Virginia Tech, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/77992.
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This project documents my efforts to publish STS- and gender theory-informed articles in engineering education journals. It analyzes the processes of writing and revising three articles submitted to three different journals, aiming to shed light on the field of engineering education, gender research therein, and contribute to feminist science studies literature on the challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary work across women's studies and STEM fields. Building upon Wenger's concept of brokering, I analyze how I brought previously underexplored STS and feminist theory literature into engineering education journals. In producing this dissertation, I aim to illuminate some of the efforts and challenges of bringing STS and Women's Studies (WS) topics into engineering education journals – thus producing an account of brokering practices and an example of scalable scholarship.
The first chapter introduces engineering education research (EER) as a field of inquiry, situates my project with respect to current feminist science studies, summarizes the framework of brokering that informs my analyses, and describes my methodology. The second chapter describes my initial attempts at brokering by identifying and bridging differences and the preliminary brokering practices that emerged through writing and revising the first of my three articles. It discusses an article published in Journal of Engineering Education that analyzes the uses of feminist theory in EER and argues that further engagement with a broader range of feminist theories could benefit EER. The third chapter describes how some of these practices were reinforced, but also supplemented, while writing and revising the second article. It discusses an article published in International Journal of Engineering Education that analyzes problematizations of underrepresentation in EER and argues that further reflection upon and formal discussion of how underrepresentation is framed could benefit EER. The forth chapter describes how the established brokering practices guided writing the third article, making the process easier as I had become more comfortable with the requirements and challenges of brokering. It discusses an article submitted to European Journal of Engineering Education that analyzes feminist research methodologies in the context of EER, using data from interviews with feminist engineering educators. The fifth chapter concludes by summarizing the brokering practices and discussing their respective challenges, discussing the implications of this project for STS and WS, and, finally, by discussing other implications for peer review engineering education. The Appendix contains aims, scope, author guidelines, and review criteria for the three journals.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 each begin with a narrative recounting of the practices of brokering that went into producing and revising each article. The narratives describe processes of writing and preparing to submit the articles, reviews received, and subsequent revision processes. The published or submitted articles appear after the brokering narrative.Ph. D.
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Shaw, Barbara Ann Carleton University Dissertation Geography. "Ecodevelopment and local action: feminist participatory research in Goa, India." Ottawa, 1992.
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Swart, Marthane. "Piecing the puzzle : the development of feminist identity." Thesis, Link to the online version, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10019/1345.
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Barr, Jean. "Women, adult education and really useful knowledge : an essay concerning feminist pedagogy, epistemology, research, etc." Thesis, University of Stirling, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/2183.
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The thesis offers a post hoc account of three pieces of research relating to women's adult education which were camed out by the author over a penod of about fifteen years. In the process the thesis engages with a number of themes and issues in and around feminist theory and practite and adult education theory and practice. Radical traditions in adult education - particularly femimst-inspired traditions - are examined as spaces for the democratic production of "really useful knowledge". Changing meanings of feminist research and radical adult education are explored, as is the relationship between abstract knowledge and everyday knowledge. Developments in feminist epistemology are drawn on and related to a social justice agenda for adult education Through a critique of my own practice. I suggest that feminists and adult educators are well-placed to pursue a democratising project geared to including previously excluded groups in the production of legitimated knowledge. The thesis argues that we need to develop an understanding of our practices which combines historical, contextual understandings with an appreciation of what changed social and cultural conditions mean for the pursuit of any democratic knowledge-producing project.
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Hamm, Jean Shepherd. "We Can't Die Without Letting Them Know We Were There: Oral Histories of Konnarock Training School Alumnae and Faculty." Diss., Virginia Tech, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/27358.
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From 1924-1959, the United Lutheran Church of America operated a girls" boarding school in Southwest Virginia. When Konnarock Training School opened, there were few educational opportunities in the isolated mountains, especially for girls. Students from five states came to Konnarock, with some receiving eleven years of education there. Konnarock Training School recruited faculty from throughout the United States and at least one teacher from Europe. These individuals lived in the Virginia mountains, taught academic classes, and engaged in extensive community outreach. A unique level of cooperation existed among church, public schools systems, and government agencies during the school's existence.
The mission of Konnarock Training School was to help women reach their potential and to become leaders in their families, their church, and their communities. Students were taught, by example and by word, that they had a place in the church, that women did not have to accept prevailing social and economic circumstances, and that they could make decisions about their own lives. The day-to-day examples given to the students became a scaffold for social change; KTS encouraged the women to become authors of their own lives.
This research is essentially a case study using a feminist oral history methodology. A total of twenty-three interviews with eight women alumnae and faculty of KTS provides the basis for the study. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using the constant comparative method. In addition, extensive archival material provided data for analysis.
The central argument presented is that KTS was a community embodying both Christian and feminist ideals, one that looked toward the vision of a just, equitable world but that persisted in the real and imperfect world. Overlapping themes leading to a view of the school as an example of feminist theology in practice are Family and Friends, Community, Identity, A Tradition of Leadership, and An Eschatological Focus. The role that memory plays in the telling of one's oral history is also considered.Ed. D.
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Farquhar, Jean Clare. "Lesbian sexual health : deconstructing research and practice." Thesis, London South Bank University, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.298022.
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Björkman, Christina. "Crossing Boundaries, Focusing Foundations, Trying Translations : Feminist Technoscience Strategies in Computer Science." Doctoral thesis, Karlskrona : Blekinge Institute of Technology, 2005. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-00296.
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In this thesis I explore feminist technoscience strategies in computer science, starting in “the gender question in computer science”, and ending up in communication and translation between feminist technoscience research and computer science educational practice. Necessary parts in this work concern issues of boundary crossings between disciplines, and focusing on the foundations of computer science: what it means to “know computer science”. The point of departure is in computer science (CS), in particular CS education. There are at this starting point two intertwined issues: the gender question in computer science (often formulated as “what to do about the situation of women in computer science?”) and the foundation question: “what does it mean to know computer science?”. These are not primarily questions looking for answers; they are calls for action, for change and transformation. The main focus and goal of this thesis concerns how to broaden the meaning of “knowing computer science”; to accommodate epistemological pluralism and diversity within the practices and among the practitioners of CS. I have identified translation as fundamental, to make feminist research and epistemological perspectives communicable into the community of computer science practitioners. In this, questions of knowledge and how knowledge is perceived and talked about are central. Communication and translation also depend on the ability and willingness to cross boundaries, to engage in “world- travelling” (Lugones). Additional issues of importance are asking questions open enough to invite to dialogues, and upholding critical (self) reflection. An important goal for feminist research is transformation. Because of this, interventions have been part of my research, interventions in which I myself am implicated. The work has been based in feminist epistemological thinking, where the concepts of positioning and partial perspectives (Haraway) have been of particular importance. After an introduction, the thesis consists of three parts, each part relating to one of the three issues in the title, issues identified as important for feminist technoscience work in computer science. In part A, I investigate and discuss what it means to be simultaneously an engineer/computer scientist and a feminist technoscience researcher. What boundary crossings, challenges, conflicts, negotiations and issues of being inside and outside are involved? This part also focuses on what the implications of these boundary crossings and different “mind-sets” are for transformatory work in science and engineering education, as well as a discussion of what feminist technoscience research can be and how it can be used for interventions and transformations. Part B focuses on foundations of computer science. This part consists of studies of texts, which I critically read and query from a feminist technoscience perspective, in order to challenge existing approaches and concepts within computer science. The texts are about the gender question in computer science; foundational topics of “what is computer science”, as well as epistemological questions concerning approaches to knowledge in computer science: “what does it mean to know computer science”? Part C deals with a concrete intervention project aiming at establishing conversations with computer science faculty. In this project, the issues of communication and translation appear as central. The focus in this part is communication between computer science educational practice and feminist technoscience research, language as a carrier of epistemology, and a discussion of translation.
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Távara, Vásquez María Gabriela. "“Reclaiming Our Hands”: Feminist Participatory Action Research With Andean Women of Peru." Thesis, Boston College, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:108124.
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Thesis advisor: M. Brinton LykesDuring the last two decades of the 20th century the Peruvian internal armed conflict affected thousands of Quechua-speaking campesinos [peasants], including those in the community of Huancasancos. The pre-existing socioeconomic conditions strongly informed the conflict’s origins and help us to understand how its legacies have unfolded. This feminist participatory action research (PAR) dissertation was conducted with Andean women knitters from Huancasancos. Through this process the participants and I explored how organizing through a women’s knitting association could be one way to identify and face challenges in their community, including the social and emotional legacies of the armed conflict as well as ongoing structural gender and racial violence. Through participatory workshops we collectively analyzed topics related to the research focus, and the knowledge that we co-constructed was the primary dissertation data. These collective reflections were subsequently analyzed using a constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2014) and were complemented by 16 individual interviews and field notes. The major findings of this dissertation reflect the urgency that Andean women feel about confronting material poverty. Also prevalent were Andean women’s experiences of gender racialized violence, experiences that limit their capacity to face their material poverty and improve their living conditions. Finally, these findings also confirm that the concept of “organizing-as-women” has been introduced into rural Andean towns by outsiders. As ideas from outside of the community, they typically fail to incorporate ways of organizing that already exist in these communities. Similarly, transitional justice and its mechanisms are experienced as having been introduced from outside the community and as disconnected from Andean people’s lived experiences of the armed conflict and its wake. The findings of this study yield important implications for professionals interested in working in transitional justice settings, particularly those working in cultural contexts different from one’s own. The study has additional implications for those who work with Andean and other indigenous women who have experienced the violence of armed conflict and continue to experience ongoing gender and racial marginalization
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018
Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education
Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology
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Rath, Jean. "Getting smarter? : inventing context bound feminist research/writing with/in the postmodern." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1999. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/109755/.
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This thesis is a contribution to the debates about the impact of ‘postmodernism’ on qualitative research practices. It is a performative discourse on the invention of feminist research methods with/in the postmodern (here, related to the pedagogy of Rape Crisis volunteer counsellor training). It addresses how feminism acting with/in postmodernism may experiment with the invention of a ‘new’ method hyper-textual electronic bricolage, which 1 name from my readings of Gregory Ulmer’s re-readings of Jacques Derrida. The research takes into account the enframing limits of technologies to argue that the theory and practice of electronic data analysis has been modelled to fit with/in existing notions of reading, writing, and the culture of qualitative research practice. It asserts that to invent a feminist research practice with/in the postmodern requires that we use hypertext not to do the work of print but to facilitate an alternative way of knowing materials. The thesis attends to the possibilities of electronic scripting as invention, and to the production of a print text arising from this. This electronically generated method bears the same relation to current CAQDAS (computer aided qualitative data analysis) techniques as the ‘new’ evocative ethnographic writings bear to the traditional ethnographic text. The thesis tells a reflective story of carrying out feminist inspired empirical work with/in the postmodern. It shows how, if feminism acting with/in the postmodern conceptualises research as an enactment of power relations between constituted subjects, the nature of our research conceptions and practices changes. It includes a multi-linear layered ‘collective story’ arising from the electronic hypertext generated from qualitative interview materials. This scripts some of the common themes that are important in forging an understanding of women’s experiences of Rape Crisis counsellor training, yet always retains an awareness of the significant differences between these tales. Finally, the thesis suggests that, if we are to develop feminist research methods with/in the postmodern that take into account the enframing limits of our technologies, we need to attend to the re-mapping of validities as we move from print to electronic ways of doing/knowing research.
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Jester, JuliaGrace J. "A feminist social psychological study utilizing theatre of the oppressed methods to explore issues of women's voices." Oxford, Ohio : Miami University, 2003. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=miami1059074145.
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Cobb, H., and Karina T. Croucher. "Assembling Archaeology: Teaching, practice and research." Oxford University Press, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10454/17951.
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NoAssembling Archaeology provides a radical rethinking of the relationships between teaching, researching, and practicing as an archaeologist in the twenty-first century. At its heart, this book addresses the marketization of higher education, demonstrating how this fundamentally impacts contemporary archaeological practice. The book proposes a solution which is grounded in a theoretical rethinking of archaeological teaching, training, and practice. Archaeology is currently undergoing a material turn which sees the revaluing of artefacts, objects, and the non-human in understanding the world. Drawing upon this, Cobb and Croucher approach the discipline as a subject of investigation and offer a new perspective founded upon the notion of learning assemblages. The holistic approach they propose challenges traditional power structures and the global marketization of the higher education system. The issues addressed here are global and applicable wherever archaeology is taught, practiced, and researched. This book is therefore valuable to all archaeologists, from academics to those in Cultural Resource Management, from heritage professionals to undergraduate students, and provides significant insights for educators throughout higher education.
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Lennie, June. "Troubling empowerment: An evaluation and critique of a feminist action research project involving rural women and interactive communication technologies." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2001. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/18365/1/June%20Lennie%20Thesis.pdf.
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Participatory research methodologies and the use of interactive communication technologies (ICTs) such as email are increasingly seen by many researchers, including feminists, as offering ways to enhance women's inclusion, participation and empowerment. However, from critical and poststructuralist perspectives, some researchers suggest the need for greater caution about claims that participatory methodologies and certain communication technologies automatically enhance inclusion and empowerment. These researchers argue that issues of power, agenda and voice in the research context require greater attention (LeCompte, 1995).
The major argument made in this thesis is that feminist researchers need to adopt a more critical and rigorous yet pragmatic approach to evaluating women's empowerment, inclusion and participation, and that this approach needs to include an analysis of diversity and difference, macro and micro contexts, power-knowledge relations, and the contradictory effects of participation. The outcomes of this study suggest that this approach can create new knowledge and understanding that will enable the development of more effective strategies for women's empowerment and inclusion.
To explore and support this argument, findings are presented from a detailed evaluation and critique of a major feminist action research project that involved women in rural, regional and remote Queensland, Australia and elsewhere, a university research team and several government and industry partners. The project made extensive use of ICTs, including email and the Internet, and aimed to be empowering and inclusive.
Given the many contradictory discourses of empowerment that currently circulate, empowerment is seen as a problematic concept. The multiple meanings and discourses of empowerment are therefore identified and considered in the analysis. With the increasing importance of communication technologies in rural community development, this study also evaluates the effectiveness of ICTs as a medium for empowering rural women.
The 'politics of difference' (Young, 1990) that underpins attempts to include a diversity of rural women in feminist research projects presents many challenges to feminist praxis. Chapters 1 and 2 propose that, in evaluating such projects, researchers need to take diversity and difference into account to avoid reproducing stereotyped images of rural women, and to identify those who are included and excluded. This is because of the complex nature of the identity 'rural woman', the multiple barriers to women's participation, and the diverse needs, agendas and ideologies of participants and stakeholders. The concept of seriality (Young, 1994) is used in this study to avoid reproducing 'rural women' and feminist researchers as women with a singular identity.
Chapters 1 and 2 argue that a comprehensive and critical analysis of these complex issues requires an eclectic, transdisciplinary approach, and that this can be fruitfully achieved by using a combination of two feminist frameworks of theory and epistemology: praxis feminism and feminist poststructuralism. While there are commonalities between these frameworks, the feminist poststructuralist framework takes a much more cautious and critical approach to claims for empowerment than praxis feminism. The praxis feminist framework draws on feminist theories that view power as social, cooperative and enabling. Women's diverse needs, values, issues and experiences are taken into account, and the analysis aims to gives voice to women. The purpose of this is to better understand the processes that meet women's diverse needs and could be empowering and inclusive for women (or otherwise). In contrast, the feminist poststructuralist framework uses Foucault's (1980) analytic of power as positive and strategic, exercised in all our interactions, and intimately connected to knowledge. The power-knowledge relations, and the multiple and shifting discourses and subject positions that were taken up in various research contexts are identified and analysed. The purpose of this is to highlight the contradictions and dangers inherent in feminist practices of empowerment that often go unnoticed.
To achieve its practical and critical aims, this study uses two different, but complementary, research methodologies: participatory feminist evaluation and feminist deconstructive ethnography, and multiple research methods, which are outlined in Chapter 3. This eclectic approach is argued to provide maximum flexibility and creativity in the research process, and to enable the complexity and richness of the data to be represented and understood from a diversity of perspectives. Triangulation of the multiple methods and sources of data is employed to increase the validity and rigour of the analysis.
Assessing how well feminist projects that use ICTs have met the aim of including a diversity of women requires an analysis of a wide range of complex social, economic,cultural, technological, contextual and methodological issues related to women's participation. Analysing these issues also requires giving voice to a diversity of participants' and stakeholders' assessments and meanings of 'diversity' and 'inclusion'.
The results of this analysis, set out in Chapter 4, suggest that differences in perceptions of diversity and inclusion are strongly related to participants' and stakeholders' political and ideological beliefs and values, and their degree of commitment to social justice issues. The evaluation found that a limited diversity of women participated in the project, and identified many barriers to their participation.
Feminists argue that women-only activities are often more empowering than mixed gender activities. The evaluation findings detailed in Chapter 5 suggest that the project's women-centred activities, particularly the workshops and online groups, were very successful in meeting the multiple needs of most participants. However, contradictory or undesirable effects of the project's activities were also identified. This analysis demonstrates the need to consider the various groups of participants and their diverse needs in assessing how well feminist methods and activities have met women's needs or are empowering.
Chapter 6 identifies various forms and features of empowerment and disempowerment and categorises them as social, technological, political and psychological. A model is developed that illustrates the interrelationships between these four forms of empowerment. Technological empowerment is identified as a new under-theorised form of empowerment that is seen as increasingly important as ICTs become more central to women's networking and participation. However, the findings suggest that the extent to which participants want to be empowered needs to be respected. While many participants were found to have experienced the four forms of empowerment, their participation was also shown to have had various disempowering effects. The project's online group welink (women's electronic link), which linked rural and urban women, including government policy-makers, was assessed as the most empowering project activity.
The discourse analysis and deconstructions, undertaken in Chapter 6, identify competing and contradictory discourses of new communication technologies and feminist participatory action research. The various discourses taken up by the researchers and participants were shown to have both empowering and disempowering effects. The analysis demonstrates the intersection between empowerment and disempowerment and the shifting subject positions that were taken up, depending on the research context. It was argued that the discourses of feminist action research operated as a 'regime of truth' (Foucault, 1980) that regulated and constrained the discourses and practices of this form of research.
An analysis of a highly contentious welink discussion challenges feminist assumptions that giving voice to women will lead to empowerment, and suggests that silence can, in some circumstances, be empowering. This analysis highlights the intersection of voice and silence, the limitations of the gendered discourse of care and connection, and how this discourse, and other factors, regulated the use of more critical discourses.
Critical reflections on the study are made in Chapter 7. They include the suggestion that an 'impossible burden' was placed on the project's feminist researchers who used an egalitarian feminist discourse that produced expectations of 'equal relations' between participants and researchers. However, these relations had to be established in the context of a university-based project that involved senior academic, government and industry staff.
Drawing on the new knowledge and understandings developed, this study proposes several principles and strategies for feminist participatory action research projects that seek the inclusion and empowerment of rural women and use ICTs. They include the suggestion that feminists need an awareness of the limits to the politics of difference discourse when power-knowledge relations are ignored. A further principle is that there is value in adopting a Foucauldian analytic of power, since this enables a better understanding of the complex, multifaceted and dynamic nature of power-knowledge relations in the research context. This approach also provides an awareness of how processes that attempt to empower will inevitably produce disempowerment at certain moments. Principles and strategies for undertaking participatory feminist evaluations are also suggested.
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Lennie, June. "Troubling empowerment: An evaluation and critique of a feminist action research project involving rural women and interactive communication technologies." Queensland University of Technology, 2001. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/18365/.
Full textAbstract:
Participatory research methodologies and the use of interactive communication technologies (ICTs) such as email are increasingly seen by many researchers, including feminists, as offering ways to enhance women’s inclusion, participation and empowerment. However, from critical and poststructuralist perspectives, some researchers suggest the need for greater caution about claims that participatory methodologies and certain communication technologies automatically enhance inclusion and empowerment. These researchers argue that issues of power, agenda and voice in the research context require greater attention (LeCompte, 1995). The major argument made in this thesis is that feminist researchers need to adopt a more critical and rigorous yet pragmatic approach to evaluating women’s empowerment, inclusion and participation, and that this approach needs to include an analysis of diversity and difference, macro and micro contexts, power-knowledge relations, and the contradictory effects of participation. The outcomes of this study suggest that this approach can create new knowledge and understanding that will enable the development of more effective strategies for women’s empowerment and inclusion. To explore and support this argument, findings are presented from a detailed evaluation and critique of a major feminist action research project that involved women in rural, regional and remote Queensland, Australia and elsewhere, a university research team and several government and industry partners. The project made extensive use of ICTs, including email and the Internet, and aimed to be empowering and inclusive. Given the many contradictory discourses of empowerment that currently circulate, empowerment is seen as a problematic concept. The multiple meanings and discourses of empowerment are therefore identified and considered in the analysis. With the increasing importance of communication technologies in rural community development, this study also evaluates the effectiveness of ICTs as a medium for empowering rural women. The ‘politics of difference’ (Young, 1990) that underpins attempts to include a diversity of rural women in feminist research projects presents many challenges to feminist praxis. Chapters 1 and 2 propose that, in evaluating such projects, researchers need to take diversity and difference into account to avoid reproducing stereotyped images of rural women, and to identify those who are included and excluded. This is because of the complex nature of the identity ‘rural woman’, the multiple barriers to women’s participation, and the diverse needs, agendas and ideologies of participants and stakeholders. The concept of seriality (Young, 1994) is used in this study to avoid reproducing ‘rural women’ and feminist researchers as women with a singular identity. Chapters 1 and 2 argue that a comprehensive and critical analysis of these complex issues requires an eclectic, transdisciplinary approach, and that this can be fruitfully achieved by using a combination of two feminist frameworks of theory and epistemology: praxis feminism and feminist poststructuralism. While there are commonalities between these frameworks, the feminist poststructuralist framework takes a much more cautious and critical approach to claims for empowerment than praxis feminism. The praxis feminist framework draws on feminist theories that view power as social, cooperative and enabling. Women’s diverse needs, values, issues and experiences are taken into account, and the analysis aims to gives voice to women. The purpose of this is to better understand the processes that meet women’s diverse needs and could be empowering and inclusive for women (or otherwise). In contrast, the feminist poststructuralist framework uses Foucault’s (1980) analytic of power as positive and strategic, exercised in all our interactions, and intimately connected to knowledge. The power-knowledge relations, and the multiple and shifting discourses and subject positions that were taken up in various research contexts are identified and analysed. The purpose of this is to highlight the contradictions and dangers inherent in feminist practices of empowerment that often go unnoticed. To achieve its practical and critical aims, this study uses two different, but complementary, research methodologies: participatory feminist evaluation and feminist deconstructive ethnography, and multiple research methods, which are outlined in Chapter 3. This eclectic approach is argued to provide maximum flexibility and creativity in the research process, and to enable the complexity and richness of the data to be represented and understood from a diversity of perspectives. Triangulation of the multiple methods and sources of data is employed to increase the validity and rigour of the analysis. Assessing how well feminist projects that use ICTs have met the aim of including a diversity of women requires an analysis of a wide range of complex social, economic, cultural, technological, contextual and methodological issues related to women’s participation. Analysing these issues also requires giving voice to a diversity of participants’ and stakeholders’ assessments and meanings of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’. The results of this analysis, set out in Chapter 4, suggest that differences in perceptions of diversity and inclusion are strongly related to participants’ and stakeholders’ political and ideological beliefs and values, and their degree of commitment to social justice issues. The evaluation found that a limited diversity of women participated in the project, and identified many barriers to their participation. Feminists argue that women-only activities are often more empowering than mixed gender activities. The evaluation findings detailed in Chapter 5 suggest that the project’s women-centred activities, particularly the workshops and online groups, were very successful in meeting the multiple needs of most participants. However, contradictory or undesirable effects of the project’s activities were also identified. This analysis demonstrates the need to consider the various groups of participants and their diverse needs in assessing how well feminist methods and activities have met women’s needs or are empowering. Chapter 6 identifies various forms and features of empowerment and disempowerment and categorises them as social, technological, political and psychological. A model is developed that illustrates the interrelationships between these four forms of empowerment. Technological empowerment is identified as a new under-theorised form of empowerment that is seen as increasingly important as ICTs become more central to women’s networking and participation. However, the findings suggest that the extent to which participants want to be empowered needs to be respected. While many participants were found to have experienced the four forms of empowerment, their participation was also shown to have had various disempowering effects. The project’s online group welink (women’s electronic link), which linked rural and urban women, including government policy-makers, was assessed as the most empowering project activity. The discourse analysis and deconstructions, undertaken in Chapter 6, identify competing and contradictory discourses of new communication technologies and feminist participatory action research. The various discourses taken up by the researchers and participants were shown to have both empowering and disempowering effects. The analysis demonstrates the intersection between empowerment and disempowerment and the shifting subject positions that were taken up, depending on the research context. It was argued that the discourses of feminist action research operated as a ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1980) that regulated and constrained the discourses and practices of this form of research. An analysis of a highly contentious welink discussion challenges feminist assumptions that giving voice to women will lead to empowerment, and suggests that silence can, in some circumstances, be empowering. This analysis highlights the intersection of voice and silence, the limitations of the gendered discourse of care and connection, and how this discourse, and other factors, regulated the use of more critical discourses. Critical reflections on the study are made in Chapter 7. They include the suggestion that an ‘impossible burden’ was placed on the project’s feminist researchers who used an egalitarian feminist discourse that produced expectations of ‘equal relations’ between participants and researchers. However, these relations had to be established in the context of a university-based project that involved senior academic, government and industry staff. Drawing on the new knowledge and understandings developed, this study proposes several principles and strategies for feminist participatory action research projects that seek the inclusion and empowerment of rural women and use ICTs. They include the suggestion that feminists need an awareness of the limits to the politics of difference discourse when power-knowledge relations are ignored. A further principle is that there is value in adopting a Foucauldian analytic of power, since this enables a better understanding of the complex, multifaceted and dynamic nature of power-knowledge relations in the research context. This approach also provides an awareness of how processes that attempt to empower will inevitably produce disempowerment at certain moments. Principles and strategies for undertaking participatory feminist evaluations are also suggested.
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Wayne, Katherine. "Re-thinking the research imperative: a critique of ideology and a feminist analysis." Thesis, McGill University, 2009. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=32508.
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Medical research is frequently regarded as not only a laudable, but even an obligatory enterprise. As critics point out, however, the moral foundation for such an obligation is far from clear. Foremost among these critics is bioethicist Daniel Callahan, whose work on this topic remains under-examined. His arguments concerning what he refers to as the research imperative demand careful analysis in order to provoke a rigorous interdisciplinary debate. Central to this project is an understanding of the research imperative's ideological dimensions. I offer a conceptual analysis of ideology before executing a detailed examination of its role in the research imperative, concentrating on Callahan's contributions. I then present a feminist analysis that reveals new concerns—namely the medical research enterprise's influences of androcentrism and medicalization. This attention to the research imperative debate will motivate concrete changes in medical research practice and policy as well as increased feminist scholarship in research ethics.On reconnaît souvent que la recherche médicale est une poursuite non seulement estimable, mais aussi obligatoire. Cependant, comme certains critiques ont noté, les assises morales d'une telle obligation demeurent nébuleuses. Les travaux de Daniel Callahan, qui est parmi les plus importants de ces critiques, demeurent peu exploités. Les arguments qu'il formule autour de son concept de l'impératif de la recherche exigent une analyse attentive afin d'entamer un débat interdisciplinaire rigoureux. Un entendement des dimensions idéologiques de l'impératif de la recherche est au cœur de cœur de ce projet. Je propose une analyse conceptuelle de l'idéologie avant d'entreprendre un examen minutieux de son rôle dans l'impératif de la recherche, tout en me concentrant sur l'apport de Callahan. Je présente ensuite une analyse féministe qui expose de nouvelles difficultés, soit l'androcentrisme et la médicalisation qui proviennent de l'influence de l'entreprise de la recherche médicale. Ce regard porté sur le débat entourant l'impératif de recherche incitera des changements concrets dans la pratique et la politique de la recherche médicale ainsi qu'une augmentation de recherche féministe dans le domaine de l'éthique de la recherche.
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van, Rossenberg Suzanne. "Towards a transdisciplinary model for social change : feminist art research, practice and activism." Thesis, Middlesex University, 2018. http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/24206/.
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While some traditionally underrepresented artists may have recently gained access to recognition and visibility, this has not generally led to broad, diverse representation and participation. Numerous ‘feminist art’ researchers, practitioners and activists working in an interdisciplinary tradition have critically addressed social inequality in the arts. However, even research, practice and activism that challenge dominant norms can serve an economic system that thrives on perpetuating inequality. The production of ‘art’ does not escape, and often contributes to, unwanted socio-political and economic consequences. This thesis argues that combinations of art research, practice and activism can play a critical role in the attainment of social equality inside and outside the arts, building on feminist critiques of dominant aesthetics and feminist efforts to restructure art canons. It recommends that feminist art stakeholders expand their collaborations outside the arts, in order to work with researchers, practitioners and activists from other disciplines. The proposed transdisciplinarity, in which feminist art plays a key part, can help avoid new forms of exclusion and discrimination that can emerge when the multiple, intersectional positions of marginalised individuals remain unrecognised. It is recommended that primary or empirical research is used to help achieve intended outcomes. The thesis presents a novel approach to addressing social inequality, within and beyond the arts, by exploring the transdisciplinary potential of feminist art, contextualising feminist art as a restructuring currency, and calling for monitoring and evaluating the impact of feminist art. Original cartoons are included to illustrate the proposed feminist research reflexivity and transdisciplinarity. The proposed approach can help feminist art researchers better differentiate the multiple values of ‘art’, recognise broader selections of traditionally marginalised artists, and dismantle out-dated ideas of Great Art.
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Huffstetter, Olivia Claire. "Feminist Pedagogy, Action Research, and Social Media: TabloidArtHistory's Influence on Visual Culture Education." The Ohio State University, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1619043241765287.
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Matzke, Aurora. "Distributed (Un)Certainty: Critical Pedagogy, Wise Crowds, and Feminist Disruption." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1322325613.
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McDermott, Lisa. "An exploration of women's physicalities through physical activity." Thesis, University of Leeds, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.287676.
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Cheers, Rebecca. "Knowing Anne Brennan: Lyric poetry as feminist biography." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2020. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/206891/1/Rebecca_Cheers_Thesis.pdf.
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This practice-led thesis explores the use of lyric poetry as a form of feminist biography through the writing of a poetic biography, No Camelias, on the life of Anne Brennan, a figure of Australian literary history whose life has been sparsely recorded, and whose existing historical profile is marred by misogyny and indifference. The creative manuscript is accompanied by an exegetical essay which analyses poetry by Natalie Harkin and Jessica Wilkinson, two poets who explore marginalised histories through contrasting poetic approaches to archival research. Together, these connected components re-present Anne Brennan’s life through feminist grief, subjectivity and empathy.
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Scruby, Lynn Sharon. "The community health nurse's role in health promotion policy, an interdisciplinary feminist research paradigm." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0020/NQ45137.pdf.
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Rehavia-Hanauer, Dafna. "Disciplinary understandings of anorexia nervosa : art therapy and psychiatric research from a feminist perspective." Thesis, University of Derby, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10545/218258.
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This dissertation explores the constructed nature of the concept of anorexia nervosa in the disciplines of art therapy and psychiatry and considers the ramifications of this on the way women are constructed. This dissertation consisted of three new studies of the construction of anorexia nervosa within disciplinary discourse: 1) a corpus of research articles in psychiatry in 2009; 2) an analysis of the DSM IV and proposed revisions to this document for the future DSM V; and 3) a comprehensive, analysis of the construction of anorexia in all the published research with the field of art therapy. This study offers the first poststructuralist genealogy of the construction of anorexia nervosa in the field of art therapy and the way disciplinary discourse works in that field. Furthermore, this research extended existing poststructuralist studies of anorexia nervosa into the 2ln century by carefully considering psychiatric literature in 2009 and the proposals for the revision of the DSM V. The main findings of this dissertation reaffirm the concept that anorexia nervosa is a constructed term resulting from discursive, disciplinary forces. As found here, the discourse of psychiatry was found to be in a power struggle with other disciplines and have asserted its power through adherence to Neo-Kraepilianian guidelines and the reinvention of the DSM. There was a preference for the medicalization of anorexia nervosa and to see it as natural disease and genetic predisposition as well as an increase in the usage of the categories of cognitive dysfunction and body image distortion. The art therapy literature moved from psychodynamic disturbance and familial pathology to cognitive dysfunction and body image distortion explanations. In addition, for art therapy at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century there was some exploration of socio-cultural context and spiritual explanations of anorexia nervosa. Overall the construction of women in the art therapy literature on anorexia nervosa moved from explicitly negative characterizations of women built upon accusatory narratives and personal flaws to more subtly hidden negative descriptions. In the psychiatric literature of the 21 " century and the proposed revisions of the influential DSM V there is a preferencef or biological and behaviouralu nderstandingso f anorexia that neutralize gender and distance socio-cultural explanations. The gendered and socio-cultural understandingso f anorexia nervosaa re being actively distancedf rom the explanation of anorexia nervosa. This is highly problematic as there is quite obvious and empirically validated evidence positioning anorexia nervosa as a gendered, socio-cultural phenomenon and this way of understanding allows new options for treatment
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Campbell, Nee Kallay Agnes Adama. "Gambian women, violence and its intersection with HIV/AIDS : agency through feminist participatory research." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2017. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/72710/.
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Research has identified a strong correlation between HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence, yet few studies centre the experiential knowledge of HIV sero-positive women and practitioners. This thesis, based on fieldwork conducted in the Gambia, is grounded in data on HIV positive women's experiences of violence and practices of resistance, revealing context specific complexities and challenges. Data collection methods included diaries, focus groups and in-depth individual interviews with a participant group of sixty sero-positive women in six Gambian HIV Support Societies, and twenty field practitioners working in the areas of violence and HIV/AIDS. I argue in this thesis that there are intersecting underlying factors (patriarchy, gerontocracy and structural violence) that contribute to women's experiences of violence and abuse that render them vulnerable to HIV. In addition, that alongside the more visible gendered violences which intersect with HIV/AIDS. Accounts of women living with HIV revealed that stigma is discreditable and discredited attributes. It contends that stigma should be seen as an ‘everyday' practice of normalised violence, which has very harmful emotional, psychological, economic and physical effects. The research also suggests that violence against women in the context of HIV is not limited solely to male perpetrators. In the Gambia there has been limited success in the translation of women's rights agendas into concrete and effective interventions, partly due to a lack of attention to socio-cultural context and the lived experiences of HIV positive women. The thesis concludes that culturally specific, integrated health and social justice approaches are necessary, which are grounded in women's everyday practices of agency and resistance, and which in particular address the fear of dethronement (loss of power, privileges and prestige) amongst men and older members of society.
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Singh, Nicola. "On the 'thesis by performance' : a feminist research method for the practice-based PhD." Thesis, Northumbria University, 2016. http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/36132/.
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This doctoral project challenges the conventions of academic enquiry that, by default, still largely shape the procedures of practice-based PhDs. It has been submitted in the form of a ‘thesis by performance’ - a thesis that can only be realized through live readings that present knowledge production as something done in and around bodies and their contexts. The aim has been to reposition institutional and educational knowledge in an intimate, subjective relationship with the body, particularly the researchers own body. The ideas gathered together in this ‘thesis by performance’ address the body and its context using material that was sometimes appropriated, sometimes invented and sometimes autobiographically constructed. From the start, these approaches and sources were used to directly address those listening in the present, the ‘now’ in which words were spoken. An approach influenced by feminist thinkers in the arts, Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Katrina Palmer and Linda Stupart. The methodological development of the research has been entirely iterative – developed through the making and presenting of performance texts. Each text was presented live as part of mixed-media installations, experimenting with how language and voice can be visualised and choreographed. Consequently, the resulting ‘thesis by performance’ is a doctoral submission unimpeded by a printed script - only an introductory statement and two appendices are available outside of a live reading. In this way the process of performance can inspire new terms of reference in the field of postgraduate practice-led research entirely on its own terms.
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Homer, Robyn L. "In the (Radical) Pursuit of Self-Care: Feminist Participatory Action Research with Victim Advocates." Scholar Commons, 2014. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5242.
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Despite victim advocates' missions of helping survivors of abuse, advocacy work takes a toll on workers. Advocates perform a multitude of tasks in their jobs including care work, emotional labor, and empowerment counseling which may subject them to consequences such as burnout, compassion fatigue, and compassion satisfaction. As such, this thesis details the work I conducted with the Butterfly Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault agency shelter advocates. The purpose of my thesis was to (1) document and review advocates' self-identified work-related needs and to (2) co-construct an educational intervention with the advocates using feminist participatory action research that would help them manage these aspects of their work. I argue that advocacy work impacts the Butterfly advocates across relational and wellness dimensions which inspired advocates' need to implement individual and organizational self-care practices. Furthermore, I contend that the process of feminist participatory action research constructed sustainable individual and organizational self-care interventions with the shelter advocates. The findings have implications for employees in advocacy work and for the larger discourse regarding the relationship between women and care work. Furthermore, findings reveal that creating a culture of self-care may serve as a way to reinforce and resist hegemonic Western notions of work culture in trauma related and non-trauma related fields.
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Crabb, Dawn Nora. "Navigating the Wreck: Writing women’s experience of the Japanese Occupation of Singapore. Salvaged from the Wreck: A novel -and- Diving into the Wreck: A critical essay." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2021. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/2416.
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This thesis is in two parts. The first and major part consists of a historical novel followed, in part two, by an essay. The title of this thesis, “Navigating the Wreck”, refers metaphorically to the Fall of Singapore in 1942, the ensuing human tragedy unleashed on the people of Singapore and Malaya, and the literary and historical processes of exploring, interpreting and depicting the past. The Japanese occupation of Singapore has, to date, been described mostly by Western historians and former prisoners of war who have forged a predominant patriarchal narrative. In that narrative—despite the all-encompassing nature of the occupation and the cataclysmic effect it had on civilians—women are virtually invisible.
The objective of this thesis is to privilege women’s experiences by ethically gathering, analysing and re-imagining the accounts of a group of women of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds—Chinese, Indian, Malay, Eurasian—who lived through the occupation, using historical fiction to engage as broad a readership as possible. As well as literary praxis, research centres on analysis of relevant literature, including eight ethnically diverse published female memoirs and eleven women’s oral histories held by the National Archive of Singapore.
The essay discusses the artefact-centred, pragmatic and self-reflexive bricolage approach of this thesis, its feminist and phenomenological framework and my ethical responsibility and outsider authorial position as a white Australian woman reliant on local witness accounts. Feminist concerns addressed in the thesis are invisibility, plurality and intersectionality and I adopt a critical feminist phenomenology based on five aspects of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to discuss the aims and the research and writing processes of the thesis.
Working within that framework, I summarised and categorised female oral interview data from audio and written transcripts enabling comparison of each woman’s individual experience of the war and the effects that the occupation had on each woman’s life situation, revealing a diverse set of experiences, some of which influenced my literary choices. By immersing myself in the particular remembered experiences of each of the female interviewees and considering their stories against the tapestry of my own extensive lived experience of the physical, cultural and social world of Singapore, as well as an in-depth investigation of other historical data and male and female written memoirs, I identified gaps and silences that needed to be addressed. These include the strategic household, wage earning, food-supplying and charitable role that women played in the dangerous and difficult situation of the occupation as well as the ignored or marginalised active participation of women in Singapore’s pre-war anti-colonial communist movements, support for and armed participation in anti-Japanese activities in China as well as the jungle-based guerrilla militias in Malaya, and the urban anti-Japanese underground in Singapore.
The essay weaves the creative thinking and practical processes of researching and writing the novel through discussion of practice, literature, theory, methodology and craft, retrieving and exposing what is usually submerged in the creative process to indicate a matrix of production.
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O'Shea, Susan Mary. "The art worlds of punk-inspired feminist networks : a social network analysis of the Ladyfest feminist music and cultural movement in the UK." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2014. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/the-art-worlds-of-punkinspired-feminist-networks--a-social-network-analysis-of-theladyfest-feminist-music-and-cultural-movement-in-the-uk(5d20bada-4101-47be-9442-c58cefe18e4d).html.
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Riot Grrrl, Girls Rock camps and Ladyfest as social movements act as intermediaries in cultural production spaces, where music focused artefacts are made, collaborations forged, distribution networks established and reception practices enacted to create new conventions which can be understood as feminist art worlds. The growing literature on gender and cultural production, particularly in music communities such as Riot Grrrl, frequently speak of networks in qualitative narrative terms and very little is known about Ladyfest as a feminist movement and as a distribution network. This thesis offers an original contribution to cultural sociology by: employing a novel participatory action research approach to gathering social network data on translocal feminist music based cultural organisations; exploring how these networks can challenge a gendered political economy of cultural production in music worlds; understanding who participates and why; investigating how network structures impact the personal relationships, participation and collaboration opportunities for those involved. Engaging with Howard Becker’s Art Worlds theory as a framework, this thesis explores how music and art by women is produced, distributed and received by translocal networks. It takes into account contemporary issues for feminist music-based communities as well as the historical and international context of these overlapping and developing social movements. The literature suggests that one of the most pressing tasks for a sociology of the arts is to understand how organisational structures negotiate the domains of production, distribution and reception, with distribution modes being the most the most under-researched of the three. By focusing on UK Ladyfest festivals as case study sites, this research serves to address these gaps. Primary data sources include on-line social media, surveys, documents, focus groups and multi-mediainterviews. Findings indicate that those involved with Ladyfest tend to be motivated by a desire to challenge gender inequalities at a local level whilst drawing on local and international movements spanning different time periods and drawing on the works of feminist musicians. Homophily and heterophily both have important roles to play in the longitudinal development of Ladyfest networks. Participants show an awareness of intersecting inequalities such as ethnicity, class and disability with sexuality playing an important underlying role for the development of relationships within the networks. For some, Ladyfest involvement is a gateway into feminist activism and wider social and cultural participation, and for many it leads to lasting friendships and new collaborative artbased ties.
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Peters, Kathleen, and k. peters@uws edu au. "Misguided hope: a narrative analysis of couples' stories of childlessness despite treatment with assisted reproductive technology." Flinders University. School of Nursing and Midwifery, 2006. http://catalogue.flinders.edu.au./local/adt/public/adt-SFU20061011.123633.
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Abstract
Societal expectations for procreation often result in infertile couples accessing assisted reproductive technology (ART). In the current state of this technology, the successful outcome of the birth of a child does not always occur. This study contributes to nurses' understanding of what it is like for couples to remain involuntarily and permanently childless after infertility treatment has ended, and aims to bring about change in attitudes and practice towards this group. Literature that acknowledges individuality as well as shared experience for couples who remain childless after infertility treatment is scarce. Health professionals may therefore encounter difficulties in providing this group with appropriate support.
This research used a qualitative approach informed by feminist perspectives to gather stories of five couples' experiences of childlessness after accessing ART. Individual conversations with both members of the marital partnership were recorded, transcribed and analysed.
The study found that due to the societal expectation of procreation, and the falsely elevated 'success rates' of ART, couples often delayed decisions about whether they should persevere with treatment, hence reducing the possibility of exploring alternative methods of parenting. As well as highlighting the ambiguity of the term 'success', the study suggests that the hope that technology brings childless couples prolongs decision making and simultaneously serves to compound the sense of failure experienced by these couples. The couples' engagement with ART, as well as their inability to conform to the normative family of parents and their biological children, also contributed to periods of isolation. Following the decision to remain childless, the participants found that setting achievable and challenging goals assisted in re-building their self-esteem, and enhanced the process of adapting to their life without children. Although participant couples expressed obvious grief at remaining childless, they also showed resilience by managing attached difficulties and stigmatisation, and by creating positive future outcomes. For these childless couples, the strength of their relationships was seen as critical in the process of overcoming adversity. This study suggests ART clinics should provide more realistic information to individual couples regarding the likelihood of taking home a baby. Further to this, independent counselling support is recommended for couples prior to and during ART treatment, and when this treatment is ceased.
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Bibars, Iman Mohamed Diaa El Din. "Women in difficult circumstances : an assessment of the impact of social policy and welfare programmes on female heads of households in low-income urban Egypt." Thesis, University of Sussex, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.287158.
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Morris, Karen. "Girl power : the lives and friendships of a group of adolescent girls in a rural area." Thesis, University of Bristol, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.361070.
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Happel, Alison A. "Practicing Gender: A Feminist Ethnography of an All Girls' After-School Club." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2012. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/eps_diss/91.
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The institution of schooling is one of the most formative spaces in which young people learn about gender norms and expectations. Rather than being a biological given, gender identity is achieved through gender practices and gender achievements (Butler, 1990/1999; Nayak & Kehily, 2008). This study was a year-long ethnography during which I observed an all girls’ after-school club. The club included 15 girls who were in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. The majority of the club’s participants were African American girls. This ethnography utilized participant observation and interviews. Club documents were also analyzed during data analysis. My primary research question was: How was girlness conceptualized, perpetuated, and performed in an after-school club for middle school girls? Using critical theory and feminist poststructuralism, I investigated the work that goes into creating and maintaining current binary gender formations, and how this is related to race, class, and sexuality.
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Green, Laura. "'Non-sporty' girls take the lead : a feminist participatory action research approach to physical activity." Thesis, Brunel University, 2012. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/7554.
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This thesis explores the use of feminist participatory action research (FPAR) within women-only youth and community work settings. The project investigated possibilities for flexible sports participation with non-sporty young women. Underpinned by poststructural feminism, the research considers the complex ways that gendered subjectivities are contested and constructed in relation to sporting embodiment and broader power relations. FPAR's, explicit aim is to affect positive social change. It is: participatory; defined by the need for action; and creates knowledge but not for the sake of knowledge alone. FPAR combines the sharing of common experiences of oppression with collective action. By using FPAR within youth and community settings over the course of 12 months, a group of young mums and a group of young women were encouraged to examine their relationship with physical activity and develop physical activity projects that suited their own needs. Research proceeded through three broad phases: interactive group discussion activities; planning of and participating in needs-led physical activity projects; and project evaluations. This project sought to find new ways of understanding young women’s engagement in physical activity and open up safe spaces for them to consider and experiment with new subjectivities and physically active subject positions. The thesis illuminates the highlights and challenges of implementing physical activity through participatory action research in youth work settings. Findings from the study outline the ways in which young women’s ‘non-sporty’ subjectivities are constructed in relation to discursive practices of gender. Young women’s critical reflections of previous experiences of physical activity revealed the workings of conflicting perceptions of valued emotional capital. The participatory projects provided opportunities for cross-field experiences, which shifted the social field of physical activity, and readdressed relations of power.
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Wickramasinghe, Maithree. "Making meaning of meaning-making : a case study of feminist research methodology in Sri Lanka." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2007. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10007500/.
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While women-related (WR) research has proliferated in Sri Lanka since 1975, research focusing on such literature and on research methodology is limited. My research concentrates on the theoretical frameworks, ontological and epistemological standpoints, methods, politics and ethics that constitute WR research methodology in Sri Lanka. In effect, it considers the ways in which researchers extract I construct meanings to fulfil feminist objectives in research. Consequently, the work covers the epistemological gap in methodology within local Women's Studies; and enriches international research by highlighting the Sri Lankan situation through being generalisable to wider theoretical objectives. Women-relatedness of research is posited as a paradigmatic shift in knowledge-making within which research activism takes place. The umbrella concept and materiality of WR research methodology is case studied through constituent case studies of method, ontology, epistemology, theory, and politics I ethics. This involves conceptualising I engaging with the particularities of Sri Lankan ontological politics; an epistemology of gender that originates from a sense of being I doing; the method of literature reviewing as an epistemic project; theory on methodology as epistemology and feminisms as a form of ethical politics. Maithree Wickramasinghe- Making Meaning of Meaning-Making 2 Sri Lankan women's studies and discourse compose a somewhat abstract ontology for my research purpose, while WR research methodology is captured I constructed in research through the examination of research texts and interviews. My own methodology is founded on the principle of knowledge as a process of both discovery and construction. Analysis of research is from multiple theoretical locations and methodological intersects of positivism and postrnodernism; as well as feminist standpoints, postcolonialism, and reflexivity. The ultimate aim of the study is not only conceptual unity, but also, conceptual contestation.
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Womersley, Gail. "The construction of shame in feminist reflexive practice and its manifestations in a research relationship." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/14618.
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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-77).Despite the psychically toxic nature of shame, and the way in which it manifests so acutely within intersubjective spaces, it has historically been under-researched and under-theorised. However, a burgeoning of literature in recent years has brought an increasing awareness of shame as a pathogenic force. An investigation of this noxious affect is especially pertinent in the context of qualitative feminist research in South Africa, marked by a myriad of class, gender and race differentials between researcher and researched. I therefore consider the significant effect of shame on a specific dialogue which unfolded between myself and a research participant in the course of interviewing rape survivors in Cape Town. The interview is examined through the dual analytic resources of psychodynamic theory and reflexive research practice, with a view to gaining a deeper understanding of the implications of this noxious affect for feminist reflexive research. The analysis reveals the ubiquitous manifestations of shame within the intersubjective space, traceable through the three markers of the affect; namely the content of the narrative, the form or structure of the interaction as well as my own emotional memory of the event. The analysis tracks the shame which arose in such a research context, demonstrating how shame neither belongs exclusively to the self or the other, but is unavoidably generated, exacerbated and maintained within the relational, intersubjective field. A particular exploration of its manifestations on the micro-level of the research relationship through the analytic resource of psychodynamic understanding, highlights the necessity of feminist reflexive practice considering shame. What is highlighted is a need to reflexively locate the emotion within our racialised, gendered and institutionalised research relationships, and to wrestle with the implications this has for meaning-making and embodied subjectivity. Such a consideration would arguably provide invaluable insights for feminist reflexive research and practise as it pays critical attention to positionality, reflexivity, the production of knowledge and the power relations that are inherent in research processes.
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Cusitar, Ena Leanne. "Knowledge and skills in feminist research, the experience of conducting research on work-related violence against women working as street prostitutes." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/MQ32089.pdf.
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Bohannon, Jeanne Law. ""Here in the To-Day, Forgotten in the To-Morrow:" Re-covering and Re-membering the Feminist Rhetorics of 19-Century Actress and Author Adah Menken." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2012. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/96.
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This dissertation project, which recovers the feminist invention of 19th-century actress and author Adah Menken, proves the efficacy of conducting historigraphic recoveries of heretofore forgotten and elided female rhetors. I situate Adah’s visual and written performances within the materiality of Victorian social codes, positioning her as a feminist commentator worthy of inclusion in our remembrances of feminist discourses. I use archival sources including carte de visites (CDVs) and Adah’s letters and poetry as heuristics for gendered critique, to analyze how she resisted the master narrative of Victorian society and its accompanying codes governing public and private feminine behavior. My objectives are three-fold: to use archival recovery as a method to unearth and evaluate what feminist inquiry can accomplish; to argue for the feminist intentions of a previously unknown female writer; and to offer an opportunity to discover cross-disciplinary connections for rhetorical recoveries. Feminist inquiry is itself an exemplar of rhetorical invention, the idea of making a path. In my dissertation project, I illustrate how Adah Menken blazed a path in her personal and public rhetorics. For my principal goal of asserting Adah’s importance as a feminist rhetor, I use primary sources to demonstrate that her invention and resistance provide fertile ground for vital feminist inquiry. As a secondary means of asserting the significance of archival feminist research, I also offer my Adah Menken recovery as a case study for examining ideas of resistance and subversion to dominant master narratives. For this application, I use Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and Michel Foucault’s ideas surrounding the topic of resistance. Ultimately, the convergence of theoretical and practical applications for rhetorical recoveries, both of which I describe in-depth in my dissertation, serve to re-connect fields of inquiry and make them relevant to scholars across the Academe.
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McKew, Melinda. "A Feminist Action Research Project: Creating a Practical Support Program for the Georgia Reproductive Justice Access Network." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2013. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/wsi_theses/31.
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The purpose of this feminist action research project was to produce a practical support volunteer training and manual for the Georgia Reproductive Justice Access Network (GRJAN). Founded in 2011, GRJAN is a grassroots, reproductive justice abortion fund that provides abortion funding and until 2012, practical support (lodging, transportation, and childcare) to low-income individuals seeking abortion services in Atlanta, GA. The resultant thesis is a reflective essay upon the project, documenting and analyzing the successes and failures of the project as well as discussing the limitations of pursuing feminist activist work within the academy.
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Brooks, Barbara A. "Developing women's awareness of violence prevention through feminist participatory research, an education for social change process." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape3/PQDD_0019/MQ53629.pdf.
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Potts, Annie. "The Science/Fiction of Sex. A Feminist Deconstruction of the Vocabularies of Heterosex." Thesis, University of Auckland, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/2292/2331.
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This research conducts a feminist poststructuralist examination of the vocabularies of heterosex: it investigates those terms, modes of talking, and meanings relating to sex which are associated with discourses such as scientific and popular sexology, medicine and psychiatry, public health, philosophy, and some feminist critique. The analysis of these various representations of heterosex involves the deconstruction of binaries such as presence/absence, mind/body, inside/outside and masculine/feminine, that are endemic to Western notions of sex. It is argued that such dualisms (re)produce and perpetuate differential power relations between men and women, and jeopardize the negotiation of mutually pleasurable and safer heterosex. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which sexological discourse deploys such dualisms as normal/abnormal, natural/unnatural, and healthy/unhealthy sex, and produces specifically gendered 'experiences' of sexual corporeality. The thesis examines a variety of written texts and excerpts from film and television; it also analyzes transcript material from individual and group interviews conducted by the researcher with heterosexual women and men, as well as sexual health and mental health professionals, in order to identify cultural pressures influencing participation in risky heterosexual behaviours, and also to identify alternative and safer pleasurable practices. Some of these alternative practices are suggested to rely on a radical reformulation of sexual relations which derives from the disruption of particular dualistic ways of understanding and enacting sex. The overall objective of the thesis is to deconstruct cultural imperatives of heterosex and promote the generation and acceptance of other modes of erotic pleasure. It is hoped that this research will be of use in the future planning and implementation of sex education and safer sex campaigns in Aotearoa/New Zealand which aim to be non-phallocentric and non-heterosexist, and which might recognize a feminist poststructuralist politics of sexual difference.Note: Thesis now published. Potts, Annie (2002). The Science/Fiction of sex: feminist deconstruction and the vocabularies of heterosex. London & New York: Routledge. ISBN 04152567312. Whole document restricted, see Access Instructions file below for details of how to access the print copy.
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Andersen, Amalie. "Pushing the Agenda : Struggles Towards Feminist Approaches to Urban Planning in Denmark." Thesis, Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-42408.
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Lee, Renee Gravios. "Uneasy Tensions in Health Care Delivery in a Rural Appalachian Coal Mining Community: Envisioning Alternative Solutions." Diss., Virginia Tech, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/30555.
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Research consistently supports that some segments of society are at considerably higher risk for illness and death than the national average. While the existence and extent of poor health outcomes for these "vulnerable populations" are well documented, less research attempts to explain why such inequities persist and how they might be resolved. Thus, many vulnerable individuals fail to get adequate health care.
How can health care delivery be improved to better serve those consumers most at risk of poor health? Addressing this issue requires an in-depth understanding of the unique health and social needs of vulnerable consumers and how these needs are being met (or not met) by the health care industry. Based on field research using a variety of methods, this study examined health care delivery to one at-risk population, women in a rural Appalachian coal mining community, with the ultimate goal of envisioning service design and distribution strategies that might better serve disadvantaged populations.
Consistent with the change-oriented goal of this research, a feminist approach guided this study. Women's everyday experiences in managing their health needs were explored through an analysis of their health care stories. Health care providers were also interviewed in order to explore both sides of the service encounter dyad. The voices of the women and the providers reveal uneasy tensions in health care delivery and illuminate why the current system does not meet the actual health care needs of the women or their community. A variety of solutions are offered to improve health care delivery.Ph. D.
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Dubuc, Tamar. "Considerations on the Representation of Women in Elite Research and Senior Administration Positions in Academe: An Interpretivist-Feminist Perspective." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/42540.
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This dissertation examines the concept of underrepresentation as deployed in
scholarly and gray literature to describe the paucity of women in elite research and senior administration positions in Canadian universities. I explore the meaning of
underrepresentation, drawing from research in organization studies, feminist and gender studies, philosophy, and political studies, to discuss the different ideas and assumptions that converge to define the parameters of women’s underrepresentation. I demonstrate how underrepresentation arises as an unproblematized claim in gender and organization theorizing and holds significant implications for women in its partial and reductive descriptions. This dissertation proposes a conceptual revisioning based on views of representation that allows for a more holistic consideration of women in organizations—in the context of my research, women in elite research and senior administration positions in academe. I adopt a dual-study research design to determine the shape and measure of women’s representation from the field. Using thematic analysis (TA), I review institutional texts pertaining to the Canada Research Chairs program (CRCP) and transcripts from my interviews with women in senior administration roles in Canadian universities. My findings confirm the need to augment the conceptual framework to include views of representation in order to achieve greater alignment between gender and organization theorizing and women’s lived experiences. I conclude that views of representation hold the potential to disrupt the problematic claim of underrepresentation, thus allowing for a more holistic and multifaceted understanding of women in organizations.
My dissertation is an interpretivist-feminist project that exposes a conceptual
problematic for the purpose of producing and advancing theory that is critically constructive rather than critically reactive, rooted in women’s experiences, self-aware and committed to supporting social action in favour of women’s full participation and gender equity across all facets of academic organizational life.
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BONU, Giada. "Affect into action : feminist movements and the production of safer spaces: a comparative research between Rome and Madrid." Doctoral thesis, Scuola Normale Superiore, 2022. https://hdl.handle.net/11384/125204.
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The research explores the production of feminist spaces as safer spaces in urban contexts. How do
feminist movements imagine, produce and preserve safer spaces? To search for an answer, I engaged
with participatory action research (PAR) and constructivist grounded theory method (CGTM). In the
cities of Rome and Madrid, that share general socio-economic, cultural and political features (Kantola
and Lombardo 2017), feminist movements, as well, share similar frames, claims, and repertoires of
actions. In each city, I selected three types of feminist spaces: women’s houses and/or spaces of
equality (Casa Internazionale delle donne in Rome and Espacios de Igualdad in Madrid);
longstanding feminist spaces which host a multiplicity of projects and direct social action (Lucha Y
Siesta in Rome and Eskalera Karakola in Madrid); radical transfeminist, lesbian, and queer
occupations (the space of Cagne Sciolte in Rome and Plataforma Encuentros Bolleros in Madrid).
By searching for the meaning of safety, CGTM drove me to the work on affect and emotions that
takes place within feminist spaces. Affects, as gradients of intensity and vital forces, work as 1) a
channel of mediation between cognition and bodies; 2) a tool for political elaboration; 3) a
competence in action. The confidence with inner feelings (that is usually considered unpolitical)
makes people feel comfortable and at ease. People are not trapped in rituals of interaction and the
performance of social encounters. Emotions can be manifested, elaborated on, transformed into action
(Gould 2009). Affects do not enrich or empower political action, but they are the very matter of it
(Massumi 2015). The capacity to name, negotiate and reverberate affects has transformative effects
(Ahmed 2006), both at the individual and collective level. The work on collective affects allows
feminist spaces to pursue their search for social change, with continuity (Taylor 1989, Whittier 1995),
contention (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001), and innovation (Staggenborg 1989, 1995).
In the empirical analysis, I engage with the concept of affects at three levels. At the macro level, by
investigating how spaces relate with the structure of economic models and institutions, by performing
alternative models and dealing with national, local and collective actors. At the meso level, by
exploring the mobilisation of affects in collective action. At the micro level of actors, by looking at
how individual mobilisation process and long-term political participation are bound up with affects.
By drawing on affect theory, social movement studies and feminist theory, the research argues that
the work on affect and emotions within feminist spaces has transformative effects, by increasing the
potential for collective action.
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McGladrey, Margaret Louise. "CHANGING MINDS OR TRANSFORMING SOCIAL WORLDS? RE-ENVISIONING MEDIA LITERACY EDUCATION AS FEMINIST ARTS-ACTIVISM." UKnowledge, 2018. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/sociology_etds/35.
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This dissertation project seeks to address the sociological processes, dynamics, and mechanisms inflecting how and why U.S. society reproduces a sexually dimorphic, binary gender structure. The project builds upon the work of sociologists of gender on the doing gender framework, intersectional feminist approaches to identity formation, and hegemonic masculinity and relational theories of gender. In a 2012 article in Social Science and Medicine presenting contemporary concepts in gender theory to the health-oriented readers of the journal, R. W. Connell argues that much public policy on gender and health relies on categorical understandings of gender that are now inadequate. Connell contends that poststructuralist theories highlighting the performativity of gender improve on the assumption of a categorical binary typical in public policy, but they ignore the insights of sociological theories emphasizing gender as a structure comprising emotional and material constraints of the complex inter-relations among social institutions in which performances of gender are embedded. According to Connell, it is the task of social scientists to uncover “the processes by which social worlds are brought into being through time – the ontoformativity, not just the performativity, of gender.”
This project explores the ontoformativity of gender in consideration of Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of the four domains of power. According to Collins, matrices of domination are intersecting and interlocking axes of oppression including but not limited to race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, ability, place, and religion that reproduce social inequalities through their interoperation in the cultural, interpersonal, structural, and disciplinary domains of power. West and Zimmerman contrast gender as an axis in the matrix of oppression with site-specific roles, arguing that gender is a master status that is omnirelevant to all situations such that a person is assessed in terms of their competences in performing activities as a man or a woman. The doing gender approach has been accused of theorizing gender as an immutably monolithic social inequality. This project seeks to explicate the dynamics of gender ideology by probing its weaknesses in the interpersonal and cultural domains of power. As Collins and coauthor Sirma Bilge posit, for people oppressed along axes of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, place, ability, and other binaries that constrain their actions in the structural and disciplinary domains of power, “the music, dance, poetry, and art of the cultural domain of power and personal politics of the interpersonal domain grow in significance.”
Each of the three components of the dissertation project addresses a facet of mechanisms and processes of the interpersonal and cultural domains of power in (re)producing the binary gender structure in U.S. society. Paper #1, titled, “Integrating Black Feminist Thought into Canonical Social Change Theory,” explicates how people in marginalized social locations mount definitional challenges to their received classifications in the cultural domain of power by rejecting the consciousness of the oppressor and wielding rearticulated collective identity-based standpoints as contextually attuned technologies of power to recast historical narratives. Paper #2, with teenaged co-researcher Emma Draper, titled “Ordering Gender: Interactional Accountability and the Social Accomplishment of Gender Among Adolescents in the U.S. South,” maps how youth theorize interactional accountability processes to binary gender expectations in the interlocking social institutions of medicine, the family, schools, and peer social networks. Paper #3 is a book proposal comprising an introductory chapter. The book will tell the story of how young feminist arts-activists challenge the binary gender structure through resistance in the cultural and interpersonal domains.
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Dimond, Jill Patrice. "Feminist HCI for real: designing technology in support of a social movement." Diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/45778.
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How are technologies are designed and used tactically by activists? As the HCI community starts to contend with social inequalities, there has been debate about how HCI researchers should address approach this type of research. However, there is little research examining practitioners such as social justice activists who confront social problems, and are using technology, such as mobile phones, blogging, and social media to do so. In this dissertation, I build on this knowledge within the context of a social movement organization working to stop street harassment (harassment towards women and minorities in public) called Hollaback (ihollaback.org). I position myself as an action researcher doing research and building technologies such as mobile apps and a blogging platform to collect stories of harassment and to support activists. The organization has collected over 3000 stories and represents 50 different locales in 17 countries. Through a series of studies, I examined how technology impacts the organization, activists, and those who contribute stories of harassment. I found evidence that the storytelling platform helps participants fundamentally shift their cognitive and emotional orientation towards their experience and informs what activists do on the ground. My results suggest that doing activism using technology can help remove some barriers to participation but can also lower expectations for the amount of work required. I also looked at how different social media tactics can increase the number of followers and how traditional media plays a role in these tactics. My work contributes theoretically to the HCI community by building on social movement theory, feminist HCI, and action research methodology. My investigation also sheds light empirically on how technology plays a role in a social movement organization, and how it impacts those who participate.