Crafting Partnerships: Exploring Student-Led Feminist Strategies for Community Literacy Projects

Relationships have served as a cornerstone to feminist research in community-based research and service learning sites, as feminist scholars have argued for co-constructing knowledges in these sites, while being attentive to the reciprocal nature of these relationships within any context of and for learning (Bayer, Grossman, & Dubois, 2015; Parks & Goldblatt, 2000; Novek, 1999). These relationships are especially crucial when feminists attempt to create real and sustained partnerships through mentoring in their community-based literacy site (DuBois & Karcher, 2005). We stress the value of cultivating sustained relationships, as oftentimes discourses surrounding service learning exhibit a level of engagement that is not sustained and/or does not adequately expose the workings of power and privilege in a systematic way (Deans, 2002). In light of our feminist motivations, we need to continuously create spaces to foreground the value of experience and take seriously the process of cultivating relationships with students in ways that are both ethical and accountable.https://nsuworks.nova.edu/shss_facbooks/1122/thumbnail.jp

2014-2015 Undergraduate Catalog

https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/g_cat/1027/thumbnail.jp

How Climate Change Comes to Matter

During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility. The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral calls to action. Callison investigates the different vernaculars through which we understand and articulate our worlds, as well as the nuanced and pluralistic understandings of climate change evident in different forms of advocacy. As she demonstrates, climate change offers an opportunity to look deeply at how issues and problems that begin in a scientific context come to matter to wide publics, and to rethink emerging interactions among different kinds of knowledge and experience, evolving media landscapes, and claims to authority and expertise

What happens when the birds are sexting and the bees watch pornography?: Digital sexualities, sexuality education and New Zealand adolescents

The relationships between young people, technology and sexuality are highly contentious. We live in a digital age and young people are fully immersed. Increasingly, their communities are negotiated and formed in cyberspace. This historical moment is viewed as unprecedented, yet many persistent and historical structural inequalities permeate the digital sphere, framed as contemporary problems. This can be seen in cases such as the 2013 ‘Roast Busters’ scandal which I will consider in this thesis. The notion of young people in cyberspace has been considered and reconsidered by academics, the media and popular culture alike. Simplistic interpretations of complex realities have robbed many debates of the richness that they otherwise could have had. This has frequently seen young people constructed as corruptible, at risk, and in need of protection. This thesis examines the diverse and divisive discourses that surround young people’s use of technology, particularly as it is utilised to negotiate their sexualities. Further, it interrogates governmental policy that is enacted to solve the social ‘problems’ associated with young peoples’ (digital) sexualities. I will reveal and dissect anxieties which regard young people and their bodies as problematic. Using a Foucauldian feminist framework, I ask who speaks and why, and locate biopower in the mechanisms and techniques used by the State to subjugate and control young ‘unruly’ bodies. I look specifically at sexuality education in New Zealand, and whether it has adapted to a transformative digital context. I will also contemplate interventions such as the Harmful Digital Communications Act and the relationship education programme Mates & Dates and ask if they simply add to the neoliberal ideologies that prop up decontextualized understandings of sexuality and health, or if they represent progress

How Climate Change Comes to Matter

During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility. The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral calls to action. Callison investigates the different vernaculars through which we understand and articulate our worlds, as well as the nuanced and pluralistic understandings of climate change evident in different forms of advocacy. As she demonstrates, climate change offers an opportunity to look deeply at how issues and problems that begin in a scientific context come to matter to wide publics, and to rethink emerging interactions among different kinds of knowledge and experience, evolving media landscapes, and claims to authority and expertise

Anthropological Engagement in the International Sphere

As anthropologists increasingly embark upon the study of the international sphere, this often builds on different forms of engagement within and around organizations, processes, and institutional corridors. The co-authors, building upon a round table exchange, address the advantages and dilemmas of anthropological engagement in the field of international governance, including humanitarian work, diplomacy, international organizations, the Swiss federal government, NGOs, and multinationals

Constructing early graduate careers:navigating uncertainty in transition

There has been a growing pressure on higher education to be seen to deliver positive graduate outcomes. The prospects of graduates attract the attention of many commentators including the media, employers, government and universities themselves. Literature about graduate career destinations has tended to draw upon quantitative data about trends while more local and qualitative commentary about the experience of graduates has been scarcer. This study seeks to address this gap by exploring the meaning-making that graduates confer to early careers in an uncertain labour market. The context of this study is the population of one northern university in England. Graduates of Arts, Creative Arts and Humanities and Business and Law are investigated. Data collected included a survey, followed by interviews; research was timed to occur to capture experiences in the first two years after graduation. The study aims for an integrative approach which acknowledges the potential of varied schools of thought (including labour market studies, management, psychology, career guidance and sociology), and has adopted the anthropological theory of Figured Worlds, as a novel lens to consider how individuals author themselves in an economic context characterised by uncertainty. Findings reveal the considerable identity work engaged in by individuals in reflecting upon their situation. Diversity, complexity and contradictions are normal in how graduates confer meaning to their early careers. The space to author selves is influenced by competing discourses about employability, contested notions of what being a successful graduate is as well as various “standard plots” about careers. More expansive and nuanced notions of being a graduate emerge which question public policy which narrowly defines positive outcomes. A new theoretical model which includes both social and individual factors is borne out of the analysis, which contributes to career guidance theory and practice

Same-sex marriage and the sexual hierarchy: constructing the homonormative and homoradical legal identities

This thesis investigates the impact of the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013 in England and Wales on the lived experiences of LGBTQ individuals. The Act, which legalised same-sex marriage in England and Wales, is argued to contribute to a ‘sexual hierarchy’ in which certain forms of sexuality and sexual identity are ascribed value by law and society. This is significant in developing understanding of the law’s role in constructing and regulating sexual behaviour. The thesis contributes to studies in gender, sexuality, and the law, and in family law, in providing a seminal qualitative assessment of the 2013 Act using queer theory. In doing so, it constructs homonormativity and the homoradical as identities existing within the sexual hierarchy. Not only does this thesis investigate the impact of the Act, it also assesses the lived experiences of LGBTQ individuals in relation to the passing of the legislation – including their views on equality, normativity, and sexuality. As such, it significantly adds to existing LGBTQ narratives. Utilising semi-structured interviews with 29 self-identified LGBTQ individuals, the thesis is qualitative in nature. It uses mixed-method sampling to create rich interview data and unique visual data. Applying a queer theory analysis, the study has found that the 2013 Act reinforces the sexual hierarchy in the construction of the homonormative and the homoradical as concurrent LGBTQ identities. In constructing the sexual hierarchy, this study has made visible the ways in which same-sex marriage reinforces and upholds heteronormative institutions. It confirms marriage to be a social and legislative organiser that reaffirms the centrality of the legal regulation of sexuality and the construction of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sexuality. The thesis will argue that consummation requirements should be abandoned as a precursor to further reform to disestablish the sexual hierarchy, thereby advancing social acceptance of LGBTQ identity and non-normative sexuality

Exploring the Space Between: Community Perspectives and Experiences of Child Discipline and the Relationship with the Discourse of Children’s Rights in Northwest Tanzania

In 2011, three-quarters of young people reported experiencing survey-defined physical violence before turning 18 in the Tanzania Violence Against Children Survey (VACS). Physical punishment is, however, legal across all settings of children’s lives on mainland Tanzania. This ethnography focuses on the space between community perceptions and experiences of child discipline and the discourse on children’s rights. The study’s conceptual framework combines a socio-ecological model with the concept of liminality to consider policies, practices and perspectives about physical punishment within a rapidly transforming society. Data were collected April 2016 – May 2017 in a northwest Tanzania peri-urban town, with some Dar es Salaam national-level data also collected. Methods included observation, in-depth interviews, group discussions with teachers, caregivers, and children (8-12 years), and policy and media reviews. As a term, physical punishment proved more consistently understood for discussing children’s experiences of violence than corporal punishment. Physical punishment was common in the peri-urban town and mostly considered necessary. Some national rights translators, adults and children across the socio-ecological model contest the practice. Adults resisted physical punishment’s abolishment using enactments of avoidance, negotiation and/or outright rejection. Multiple childhood realities emerged along class lines with middle-class providing some protection from physical punishment. Children mostly said physical punishments were necessary for maintaining respect and obedience, but also relayed that excessive physical punishment was violence and created fear and stress that could undermine learning. This ethnography demonstrates the value of combined methods in understanding children’s daily realities and the complicated and uncomfortable relativist ethics of researching physical punishment of children. I argue that global rights discourse is not just imposed. Rather, it is resisted, debated and dynamic, occupying a liminal space within broader societal change. Resolution on use of physical punishment has not yet been reached; however, transformations are on-going which considered the best interest of the child