States of the Disorderly...

Late last year, an arduous process of research and writing culminated when my Masters thesis was submitted.

My thesis, studied at Murdoch University (Australia), specifically investigated the influence of popular culture texts on the subjectivities of young people and argued that critical pedagogical practices need to be further deployed by English teachers to interrogate popular culture texts in the classroom. My data analysis synthesised information born of a quantitative survey and in-depth interviews with secondary English students.

Although the thesis will predominately interest researchers in the fields of education and cultural studies, I believe it also offers something unique in terms of the autoethnographic-styled narratives which punctuate its structure throughout. In many ways, the four narratives are more enlightening than the data itself, in terms of explicating the personal process of 're-birthing' which I endured as a result of delving into the theories therein. Academic work is too often stripped of individuality in the seemingly futile process of attempting an 'objective account'; and these narratives certainly 'fly in the face' of traditional edicts.

The thesis was examined by Jane Kenway (Monash) and Michael Kehler (Western Ontario) and published early 2007, but now the time feels right to put it up on this site. You can download the abstract, the entire thesis, or the individual narratives (see below, all in PDF form).

Alternatively, the full thesis is also available via this link, as a part of the Murdoch University Digital Theses Project.

A distillation of my research will be published in an article in Discourse - Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, in March 2008. I will post the abstract closer to the date of publication.

Regards,

Glenn