Current Dissertation Projects

Raphael Amato
SLOWING DOWN TO SPEED UP: AN EXPLORATION OF LEADERSHIP AND RELATIONAL REFLEXIVITY

I will explore the notion of leadership in this thesis; more particularly I will explore how the use of relational reflexivity can facilitate leadership.
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Roberto Asistegui
The Critic of Social Construction to the Meta theory of  Psychology ,from the point of view of the thesis of Indeterminacy of Translation.

This thesis considers the critic and the alternative to the meta theory of cognitivism developed by Gergen (1994,2001) from the point of view of the thesis of indeterminacy in convergence with the Pragmatic Conception of Language (Wittgenstein II, Quine, Rorty, Gergen).
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Gita Baack
PROSPECTIVE TITLE:  BURDENED CHILDREN:  THE SUBJECT AREA
A social construction of resilience by children of survivors of the holocaust – “how to get on in life”
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Ginny Belden-Charles

Ginny's dissertation focus began seventeen years ago when she and two colleagues met around her kitchen table to discuss the challenges they faced as women leaders. They formed a 'practice lab' to apply, in both life and work, emerging principles in the fields of social construction, leadership, women's studies and organization behavior.
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Glenn E. Boyd,. D.Min., LPC, LMFT
The tentative title of my dissertation project is “It Takes a Community:  A Study of Supervision in the Our Lady of the Lake University-Houston M.S. in Psychology Program.” Our Lady of the Lake University-Houston (OLLU) is an extension campus of Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas, a historic Catholic university with a time-honored commitment to training helping professionals.
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Dr Jonathan Cabiria
Working Title: Identity Construction and Online Social Networks
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Kristina Brajovic Car
Working title of dissertation: Social construction of autonomy in Transactional analysis tradition
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Carlos Cruz, MD
Stress: Context and meaning

Summary:
The purpose of my thesis is to make a critical reflection about the concepts of stress, adaptation, crisis, illness, search for support and stress handling Stress is a worthy concept as to its originality and synthesis.
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Patricia DaSilva

My research aims to assess how culture, defined here as a set of behaviours and beliefs, as well as language, religion, law and morality systems that are passed down from generation to generation, impact Angolan women’s ability to adopt safer sexual behaviours, including behaviours that might prevent them from contracting the HIV virus. More specifically, my research will attempt to answer the question: What are the collective cultural resources that can be adopted by women for safer sexual practices in the face of HIV/AIDS?
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Karen Dawson
A Leadership Development Program as Agent of Social Change
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Christine Dennstedt
is currently working as a Family Therapist in a co-ed residential substance misuse program for young persons in Vancouver, BC. She has been working collaboratively alongside young people and women for the past 10 years in a variety of settings.
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Jann Derrick, M.A., R.M.F.T.
ONEN KIWAHI: THE ABORIGINAL WORLDVIEW AS THE FOUNDATION IN A PRACTICING FAMILY THERAPY MODEL. This dissertation reflects the past and current clinical research of my family therapy practice as a person of Mohawk and European heritage.
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Jeff Fifield

Working title: Exploring Appreciative Pedagogy: Ingredients, Instances, and Practices throughout a School
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Roosevelt Finlayson and Michael Diggiss
are working together on A STUDY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FESTIVAL IN THE WORKPLACE CONCEPT.
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Ulrich Emanuel Gysel
Working Title: Developing and Nurturing a Knowledge Sharing Culture in Virtual Organizations
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Larry Espe and Lesley Lahaye
Working Title of Dissertation: What is the potential impact of Appreciative Inquiry on systems change in public education?
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Vicki Hammel
Appreciative Philosophy:  The Emerging Context and the Transformative Power of Co-creation
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Lorraine Hedke

Proposed Title of Project:  Exploration of group experiences and personal narratives, aimed at developing remembering conversations after the death of a loved one.
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Jody Jacobson
Taos / Tilburg PhD Program Dissertation Synopsis
Transforming “Accidental Adversaries” to Conscious Collaborators at Work
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Randy Janzen
From War to Peace: The Transition Experience of Guatemalan Ex-Combatants: A Grounded Theory Inquiry
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Frank Kashner

A "TOP" Action Research Project
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Kara Kaufman
teaches history at Salem State College in Massachusetts; however, is she a historian? What is history? Who are historians? Why has there been a racial and gender imbalance in the field’s history? What is it like for a woman or person of color to be a historian? What do historians do? What should they do? How do/should they write about and profess the past? Is there such a thing as “pure” history, or is the field innately interdisciplinary? Should historians introduce other disciplines’ ideas into the field? Why do most students dread history class?
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Ronit Kurz
has been practicing as an Organizational Psychologist for over 20 years. Her strongest interest, for a long period of time, has been the opportunity, will and journey of individuals to grow and develop as human beings at all levels – mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually.
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Steve Lawler
Title: “Making a Difference - Postmodern Autoethnographic Confessions”
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Joachim Lee
Clinical Supervision as Transformative Dialogue: A Co-Creation of Meaning for Personal Development
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Halcyon Liew
A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATION IN NEW MEDIA JOURNALISM AND ONLINE CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
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Kon Kornelio Madut

The quest for employment and process of integration into the Canadian labour Market has been one of challenging transitions shared by majority of ethnic minorities’ immigrants’ communities in the City of Ottawa in particular, and Canada in general.
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Rodney L. Merrill
Working Title: Personifying the World: A Social Study of Personal Narrative Writing Practices
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Bonnie Milne
is currently an instructor in the School of Business at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. She spent five years teaching at a local college in the United Arab Emirates where she learned the personal and social benefits, not to mention the joy, of work life balance.
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Ellen Murphy
The field of school psychology is united around the conversation of finding what gets in the way of kids learning, within the structure of our present delivery system. As a profession we primarily look at the child, his/her behavior, cognitive abilities and performance within this context, try to determine the problem, and then attempt to remediate within this existing structure. Traditionally the child's abilities and behaviors are measured and potentially diagnosed based on standards and norms for behaviors of typical children in their respective age ranges. The dominant conversation is one of looking for intra-personal psychological processes and/or cognitive deficits that get in the way of inputting, integrating, and expressing information within a systematic structure of knowledge exchange. It is a conversation that is deeply rooted in the history and traditions of diagnostic language, focusing in, on the individual mind. It has been, and continues to be, largely a "describe and explain" discourse.
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Jerry Nagel

Working Title: A comparative analysis of Social Constructionist Theory and Theory U
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Ottar Ness
Ottar Ness works as a family therapist at Trondheim Family Counselling Service in Norway.

Working title: Therapeutic conversations beyond binaries: a collaborative learning project based on shared learning experiences. My dissertation examines a collaborative learning project based on the shared experiences of five family therapists at Trondheim Family Counselling Office, including myself.
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Neil Olonoff
Organizational Knowledge: The Relational Dimension
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Rev. Elaine Beth Peresluha

Managing change is the one of the most stressful issues for individuals and institutions. The amount of energy expended in managing change and its physical, emotional and spiritual challenges often depletes vital resources necessary for personal and institutional growth. My Ph.D. project will define the relationship between positive management of change and institutional development with particular focus on the pastoral church to program church transition.
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Teresa Quintana Püschel
Working title: Singularity and Social Constructionism
The purpose of this thesis proposal is to explore the contribution of the specificity and singularity emerging from the neurophenomenological perspective to the field of relational dialogue.
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Margaret Rahn

is at the beginning stages of her doctoral work. She is working to make a study, via an introductory literature review, of three fields including dialogue, leadership and organizational change, and appreciative inquiry and social constructionism. Then, I will interview organization leaders who employ dialogue effectively within their organizations. Via their stories I hope to gain insight into how dialogue and social constructionism is at work within organizations to effectively support relationship building, change, growth and creativity. My goal is to identify common elements and complementary connections among the four sources.

Vikki Reynolds
This dissertation will explore the question of how therapists can work within contexts of social injustice, marginalization, and trauma in ways that are congruent with their ethics, and how they can collectively experience sustainability and transformation in that work across time.
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Lynne V. Rosen
The Parent-Teen Project: Meeting at the Crossroads: Exchanging Wisdom and Gifts
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Kate Lindley Scheidegger
Restorying our Lives, constructing our Selves through our Relationships – limits and possibilities

My original intention for my Ph.D. was to continue research started in my Master of Psychology studies on the co-construction of knowledge in adult learning training programs.
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Tobias Schueth

Title: The Appreciative Principle in Community Action for Health in Kyrgyzstan

Background:
What interests me is the role of the appreciative principle in work with communities. “Appreciative principle” I will call for now those factors in one’s behaviour that help to build relationships of mutual liking, trust, respect, encouragement and that are constructive (i.e. conducive to human growth and liberation from psycho-social limitations, to opening and widening of possibilities; in sum conducive to hope) as opposed to destructive (i.e. undermining growth, trust and respect, closing and narrowing of possibitlites, increasing barriers and limitations; in sum conducive to cynicism).
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Margery Shelton
is a social worker in private psychotherapy practice.  Through March 2008 she is the Clinical Director of the Southern California Counseling Center in Los Angeles, CA.  She was the Director of Clinical Training Programs at the California Family Counseling Center in the Phillips Graduate Institute in Encino, CA.
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Stephen Shimshock
This dissertation will use an action research approach of inquiry into the development of collaborative communities focused on serving youth in out-of-home care.  The collaborations involve multiple private and public agencies.  For the purpose of this dissertation two existing collaborations have been chosen, one that focuses on Kinship Care and another that focuses on youth transitioning out of foster care into adulthood.
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Rick Strycker
is the Director of Research and Development for JMJ Associates, a management consulting company based in Austin, Texas. JMJ specializes in high performance technologies, with an emphasis in transformational learning. He writes, "The aim of the thesis is to develop a reconstructive postmodern model of leadership, a stage of leadership that is distinguished by its relational, constructivist, developmental and integrative epistemology. The two primary objectives of the thesis are to: 1. Clearly distinguish this stage of leadership from prior stages, 2. Explore and critically evaluate approaches to developing competency in this leadership style."

Siva Subramanien
is a semi-retired senior Public Service Manager who served during most of his career in the Health and Education sectors. He is now the Adviser to the Vice-President of the Republic of Mauritius.

The title of his PhD dissertation is "Rethinking the Well-being and Quality of Life of the Elderly in Mauritius."
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Lisa Sydow
has been practicing solution focused therapy for the past 10 years. For her dissertation, she is doing research in the areas of career development and life meaning for adolescent girls and the value of cross generational dialogue/story telling as a means to developing life direction. She is utilizing Appreciative Inquiry as a resource for designing questions for interviews and will also be incorporating a Participatory Action Research model.

Yosef Tal and Itzchak Lichtenfeld
are currently managing EILAT Ltd., a consulting firm in Israel that specializes in Risk Management in various sectors, especially HealthCare. The working title of their thesis is, Transferring the Aviation Accident Prevention model to Ambulatory HealthCare Organization. "The central goal of the thesis is to analyze the Risk Management Model of Maccabi Health Services (The second largest ambulatory healthcare organization in Israel), based on the principles derived from the Aviation Risk Management model, and to asses whether the model is applicable to other healthcare organizations. Further, the thesis will evaluate the Maccabi project and to formalize lesson learned from transferring a model from one content world to another, sharing some common characteristics.
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Neal Thayer

Title: A Social Constructionist Exploration of Incident Response Management: How is Effective Management Rapidly Constructed?
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Aileen Tierney
is a systemic psychotherapist, in the Clanwilliam Institute, Dublin where she has a clinical practice and is involved in both teaching and clinical supervision of students on the postgraduate training programmes in systemic family therapy. She has been involved with disability organisations for many years. In her research thesis she is broadly interested in exploring the social construction of disability.
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Parashu Ram Timalsina
Appreciative Inquiry for Peace Building: A Case Study of Constitution Making Process in Nepal
Subject: Timalsina, Aristegui, and Liew website submissions
The main purpose of this research is to identify ways of bridging the gaps among and between political parties and public populations so that the new constitution making processes in Nepal will lead towards a sustainable peace in the country.
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Andy Ward
Working Title: Sense Making, Coherence, and Coordination of Action on a College Campus: A Study of Attitudes and Values
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Cara Weston

Department Head of International Education
Selkirk College, British Columbia, Canada
Title: Collaborative Project Development:  Innovations, Challenges and Outcomes
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Jorge Zumaeta
The purpose of this study is to develop a greater level of understanding of the social construction of economic thinking; and to unveil the general benefits that derive from aligning socio-economic development initiatives to dominant economic philosophies.
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