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This thesis looks at the conceptual history and embodied narratives of a concept called suboptimal health (亚健康) and the way it is defined and utilized by different actors, including Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the health food industry, the Chinese government, as well as lay people in their everyday life. Subhealth was championed as 'a new concept of the 21st century' that 'troubles the majority of the world population' by TCM professionals, which was initially fuelled by the commercial development of health foods in the 1990s in China. Since then, there have been different attempts to standardize what is meant by suboptimal health, and numerous efforts to objectively, capture, define measure, and t to treat it. Drawing on data ranging from documentary data, multi-sited ethnographic data at a TCM clinic, two TCM conferences, and on Chinese social media, as well as interviews with visitors to the TCM clinic and interviews with Chinese people, this thesis looks at the negotiations and embodied narratives of subhealth. Utilized as a vague diagnostic category that mediates between biomedical classification and traditional Chinese medicine classificatory systems, this concept is one possible way people might be granted permission to be ill (or rather to be unhealthy) in the absence of illness. It allows lay people to talk about their unhealth, opening up narratives about here and now, although this permission of being ill seems to also come with the responsibility to look for possible biological explanations and exhaust those possibilities.

My dissertation looks at the connections between Lacan’s four discourses and the sexuation graph in order to claim that sexuation is discursive and that, as Lacan presents it with the phallus as its quilting point, the sexuation graph is a narrative based on patriarchal hegemony, which is one of many possible narratives. I argue that through the hysteric’s discourse and a removal of the phallus as the Symbolic-Imaginary quilting point, we can begin to formulate new narratives of sexuated subjectivities. The textual objects I use for this project are literary and filmic works where women are the central topic or figure, and the works are all created and developed by men. Following Kristeva’s focus on the semiotic, in particular men’s avant-garde writing, I choose these works as illustrations of the ways in which the depiction of women has shifted in the wake of at least half a century of feminist and queer scholarship and activism. Grounded in Lacan’s claim that “Woman does not exist,” I explicate Woman as metaphor as an Imaginary construction of masculinist logic in order to develop a theory of Woman as metonymy that collapses the oppressive, Imaginary constructions and proliferations of Woman. Finally, I read closely Lacan’s sexuation graph, specifically turning it sideways and replacing the phallus with the general, empty master signifier to show the ways in which we can construct new meanings of subjectivity.

Contemporary federal education policy discourse from A Nation at Risk to the Race to the Top program has promoted and extended neoliberal discourse from the national level to the level of the school and its personnel. This study highlights the persistence of neoliberal discourse within federal education policy and the consequences this persistence holds for critiques of current policies and practices. Analyzing reports published by the United States Department of Education and contemporary United States education policy starting from A Nation at Risk, moving through America 2000, Goals 2000, and No Child Left Behind, and ending with the Race to the Top program, I use rhetorical tropes to provide a method of analysis for education policy. Due to the novelty of this project for the field of education policy studies, I bring in concepts from rhetorical studies and discourse analysis to produce an interdisciplinary approach to policy analysis that fills a particular gap in existing analyses. At present, there exists no framework within the traditional analyses of education policy that offers a theoretical account of how a discourse maintains and propagates itself through policy. This dissertation offers a new method of policy analysis that examines how a discourse stabilizes and perpetuates itself through education policy. Specifically, an analysis of these policies and reports demonstrates how neoliberal discourse uses the tropes of metaphor, where two objects are identified with one another, and synecdoche, where the part is made to represent the whole and vice-versa, to ground and naturalize its growing presence in education policy and practice. Through the tropological analysis of the above cited texts, the co-operation of metaphor and synecdoche, what I term “organic identification,” accounts for the persistence of neoliberal discourse through its identification and integration with federal education policy discourse specifically through the constitution of places, e.g., the nation and the school. The conclusion suggests the critical potential for considering the role of tropes in the discursive constitution of place by mapping the persistence of a discourse and providing a critical distance from which contradictions and alternative trajectories can be forwarded.

Research on the communication of grief and loss has overlooked the stories told by adults who have lost one or both of their parents. This research applies narrative analysis to the stories told by twenty orphaned adults in search of narrative form and function. Three sets of narrative coding revealed consistencies among the narrative events, people, and themes. Most notably, the story form consisting of seven narrative constructs appears to serve the function of managing a guilt-innocence dialectic providing the narrator with a restorative story end. Conclusions suggest that the form and function of these loss narratives of orphaned adults might be compared to other loss narratives as researchers seek to identify a universal loss narrative schema.

This thesis reports on a UK-based video ethnography of academic x-ray image interpretation training across two undergraduate courses in radiology and radiography. By studying the teaching and learning practices of the classroom, I initially explore the professional vision of x-ray image interpretation and how its relation to normal radiographic anatomy founds the practice of being ‘critical’. This criticality accomplishes a faculty of perceptual norms that is coded and organised and also, therefore, of a specific radiological vision. Professionals’ commitment to the cognitivist rhetoric of ‘looking at’/‘pattern recognition’ builds this critical perception, a perception that deepens in organisation when professionals endorse a ‘systematic approach’ that mediates matter-of-fact thoroughness and offers a helpful critical commentary towards the image. In what follows, I explore how x-ray image interpretation is constituted in case presentations. During training, x-ray images are treated with suspicion and as misleading and are aligned with a commitment to discursive contexts of ‘missed abnormality’, ‘interpretive risk’, and ‘technical error’. The image is subsequently constructed as ambiguous and that what is shown cannot be taken at face value. This interconnects with reenacting ideals around ‘seeing clearly’ that are explained through the teaching practices and material world of the academic setting and how, if misinterpretation is established, the ambiguity of the image is reduced by embodied gestures and technoscientific knowledge. By making this correction, the ambiguous image is reenacted and the misinterpretation of image content is explained. To conclude, I highlight how the professional vision of academic x-ray image interpretation prepares students for the workplace, shapes the classificatory interpretation of ab(normal) anatomy, manages ambiguity through embodied expectations and bodily norms, and cultivates body-machine relations.

Citizen Cyberscience Projects (CCPs) are projects mediated through the Internet, in which teams of scientists recruit members of the public (volunteers) to assist in scientific research, typically through the processing of large quantities of data. This thesis presents qualitative ethnographic case studies of the communities that have formed around two such projects, climateprediction.net and Galaxy Zoo. By considering these social actors in the broader contexts in which they are situated (historical, institutional, social, scientific), I discuss the co-shaping of the interests of these actors, the nature of the relationships amongst these actors, and the infrastructure of the projects and the purposes and nature of the scientific work performed. The thesis focusses on two relationships in particular. The first is that between scientists and volunteers, finding that, although scientists in both projects are concerned with treating volunteers with respect, there are nevertheless considerable differences between the projects. These are related to a number of interconnecting factors, including the particular contexts in which each project is embedded, the nature of the scientific work that volunteers are asked to undertake, the possibilities and challenges for the future development of the projects as perceived by the scientists, and the tools at the disposal of the respective teams of scientists for mediating relationships with volunteers. The second is amongst the volunteers themselves. This thesis argues that volunteers are heterogeneous, from disparate backgrounds, and that they sustain their involvement in CCPs for very different purposes. In particular, they seek to pursue these through the way they negotiate and construct their relationships with other volunteers, drawing on particular features of the project to do so. This thesis contributes to two fields. The first is to Citizen Cyberscience itself, with a view to improving the running of such projects. Some social studies have already been conducted of CCPs to this end, and this thesis both extends the analysis of some of these pre-existing studies and also problematizes aspects of CCPs that these studies had not considered. I discuss the significance of my findings for those involved in setting up and running a CCP, and present some recommendations for practice. The second field is Science and Technology Studies, in particular studies of public engagement with scientific and technological decision- and knowledge-making processes. The modes of engagement found in CCPs differ in key ways from those that have already been documented in the existing literature (in particular, different power relationships) and thus offer new ways of understanding how the public might be engaged successfully in such processes.