Brazil was once a model country in terms of government support for sex worker rights organizations and its solidarity based approach to HIV prevention. In the early 2010s, however, political setbacks in these areas raised important questions regarding the limits of state sanctioned activism. Using the extended case method approach, I conducted an ethnography of sex worker activism and the complex bureaucratic field in which this advocacy took place. I explored the following questions: What motivates the state to defend sex workers in some contexts and not in others? Why and how do sex worker organizations attract or deflect the state’s attention? What are the most effective and sustainable forms of activism? What can be learned about state and civil society relationships more broadly through the lens of Brazil’s sex worker movement? I conducted field work over a thirty-six month period from November 2011 through October 2014 in three Brazilian cities: Corumbá, Belém and Rio de Janeiro. Research included archival research, participant observation, twenty-one life histories with activists at three sex worker rights organizations and forty-four in-depth interviews with members of government, social service agencies, NGOs, and security officials (i.e. police) who regularly interacted with sex workers. My results suggest that the difficulties sex worker activists faced are related to a broader pattern of how the Brazilian state has historically structured its relationship to prostitution. I argue that state action and inaction in prostitution contexts is purposefully ambiguous and flexible. This allows state actors, through their diverse and non-unified mechanisms, the autonomy to shape the inclusion/exclusion of sex workers into government policies and programs that align with current sexuality politics and neoliberal agendas. I conclude that sex worker activists produced new meanings of prostitution and activism through what I term “puta politics.” By using the body and cultural forms as sites of resistance, they celebrated and made visible what is commonly perceived of as transgressive and/or immoral. In doing so, sex worker activists challenged gender and sexuality norms and disrupted hierarchies and divisions between institutional structures and the street. Such activism permitted several of the organizations at the center of my research to survive, though not unscathed, the deleterious effects of institutionalization and bureaucratization.

This dissertation deals with the understanding of policies and interventions that foster human development, with a focus on children and youth, and to build a link between human development and a learning society by using an interdisciplinary approach. This thesis studies how individuals develop their learning capabilities as well as their creative, entrepreneurial, and socio-emotional skills. The dissertation is structured in three main chapters in addition to this brief introduction. The first chapter, "Affective Neuroscience meets Labor Economics: Assessing Non-Cognitive skills on Late Stage Investment on at-Risk Youth,” studies the role of a program designed to foster entrepreneurial and self-confidence through learning by failure using insights from micro-econometric, behavioral economics and applied neuroscience. The second chapter, "How Much Should We Trust Self-reported Measures of Non-cognitive Skills?,” explores the relation between transient emotional states and self-ratings on self-reported measures of socio-emotional skills using a behavioral and a neuro-physiological experiment. This chapter also works as a “proof of concept” of the methods —e.g. emotion-detection theory and lab-in-the-field experiments implemented on chapter 1. The third chapter, “Can Art-based Programs Nurture Human Capital? Evidence From Public Schools in Chile,” studies the impacts of an art-based program in high school in Chile following a quasi-experimental design using propensity score matching techniques.

The care and education of pre-school children presents a perfect storm of conflicts among the needs of women, children, and states, particularly in societies that maintain a sharp barrier between the private and public spheres such as the United States and Britain. American and British policymakers attempted to address these tensions in the early 1970s by proposing universal child care programs. In the U.S., the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CDA) of 1971 passed both the House and Senate by overwhelming majorities but was vetoed by President Richard Nixon. Going further than any proposal before or since to establish a national public child care program, it would have made public child care centers universally available on a sliding-scale basis: free for children of the poor but available for a fee to middle and upper class children. The British Department of Education and Science, led by Secretary Margaret Thatcher, published a White Paper in 1972 calling for nursery expansion, but it was never fully implemented. It proposed a dramatic expansion of public nursery education, so that it might be available within a decade to all families with three and four year old children who chose to utilize it, with funds being made available first to local areas designated as most in need. My dissertation presents an in-depth account of the political bargaining that occurred during this period in both countries, and addresses the factors that contributed to the failure of these universal child care proposals. Although neither child care program was implemented (or fully implemented, in the British case), the proposals raise important questions about the relationship between the state and the family. It also analyzes the aftermath of these policies’ failure through to the end of Thatcher and Reagan administrations. It then turns to the mid-1990s which represent a key divergence in the two nations’ paths, as Britain returned to its earlier nursery education initiatives for all children and the United States further entrenched its reliance on the private market for the provision of care. The passage in 1997 of the British National Child Care Strategy, a central component of New Labour’s War on Child Poverty, included a free and universal preschool provision for all three and four year old children. In the U.S., by contrast, the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act expanded child care subsidies only for eligible low income children below the age of five, thus continuing the American reliance on the free market to provide this necessary service for most families. I argue that conflicting visions of child care as an educational intervention versus a welfare service—and as a universal provision benefitting all children and families versus a means-tested program targeted to low-income families—explain the differences between these two countries’ policy developments in the 1990s. Specifically, my dissertation examines how British and American conceptions of motherhood and child-rearing compare, and how policymakers viewed the role of the state in intervening with parental responsibilities. In the United States, Republicans balked at the idea of public child care provision for the nonpoor, yet British politicians of both major parties supported universal public interventions in the early years at various points across the period.

City governments across the United States are struggling to keep housing and services affordable for lower-income households as neighborhood conditions improve in previously disinvested areas. Despite considerable fiscal and political constraints, numerous cities are tackling this challenge through policy tools that protect the stock of low-cost housing and support lower-income residents’ ability to remain in place when reinvestment raises the threat of displacement. Drawing on a framework informed by theories of equity planning, the Just City, and redistributive policy action, this study examines how cities are mitigating displacement in neighborhoods at risk of gentrification and analyzes the conditions that motivate, facilitate, and shape their policy responses. Data were collected through an original survey of housing, planning, and community development officials, a systematic review of policy documents, and semi-structured interviews with city officials and community advocates. Through sequential quantitative and qualitative analyses, I show that although city governments possess and are using diverse tools to create more equitable outcomes in neighborhoods at risk of gentrification, their tendency to delay action until market appreciation is advanced, dependence on market-based tools amid fiscal constraint, and need to balance neighborhood-based and city-wide goals weaken their capacity to tackle displacement. This study concludes that proactive approaches that address reinvestment and long-term affordability concurrently would minimize the tensions associated with the timing, form, and scale of intervention. Cities’ demonstrated responsiveness to community organizing suggests one key channel through which such a policy shift could be activated.

Given the growing population of undocumented Latina/o/x immigrants who came to the United States as children, there is a need for research that explores the risk and protective factors of their experiences growing up in the United States. As they transition through adolescence, they emerge as adults in a very different world. No longer protected from deportation, they must take more serious risks with employment. Without access to federal financial aid, they face the reality that they may never be able to utilize their college education in the United States. Against these odds, and with the temporary protection of DACA, an increasing number of undocumented childhood arrivals are civically engaged in the immigrant rights movement. Employing a qualitative method based on constructivist and feminist frameworks called Consensual Qualitative Research, this study sought to explore the impact of activism in Latina/o/x DACAmented immigrants’ thwarted transition to adulthood, highlighting the ways in which Latina/o/x cultural values mitigate the impact of activism. The sample consisted of 12 Latina/o/x DACAmented activists, eight women and four men, ages 18-32, from Mexico (n = 10), Guatemala (n = 1), and Dominican Republic (n = 1). The findings in this study not only suggested that protective migration factors, DACA-related privileges, and strong coping skills contributed to Latina/o/x DACAmented immigrants’ decision to become activists, but they also noted that activism has been a protective factor in and of itself. The results also showed the ways in which Latina/o/x cultural values helped them make sense of their unique experiences and were consistent with the values within their activist communities. Existing clinical recommendations, resources, and research methods were highlighted as ways in which mental health providers can apply these findings in their clinical, training, and research practice.

In their negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between 2011 and 2016, the European Union and the United States of America (U.S.) aimed to not only reduce tariffs but to also establish regulatory coherence. For the U.S. federal states, the proposed comprehensive deal could offer both possibilities to expand transatlantic trade as well as threats to their legislative authority. This study investigates why and how some states represent their transatlantic trade promotion and trade policy interests despite constitutional limitations, why there is variation regarding these two topics of states’ interest representation and what intergovernmental conflicts arise. Based on original qualitative expert interviews, the analysis shows that U.S. states as noncentral governments are viable actors in transatlantic trade and investment relations. It is evident that a small number of mostly progressive state legislators actively engage U.S. federal and European officials to prevent the loss of state regulatory authority. Regarding the proposed trade deal, interest representation is centered around issues of federalism and sovereignty rather than economic growth opportunities. While trade promotion remains the key driver of states’ overall transatlantic activities, these findings expand our view on states’ international affairs beyond economic development.

“Strange Bedfellows” examines how the political economy of Medicaid and hospital provision shaped the social, political, and thus material response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States. By doing so, this study explores the consequences of a decade-plus shift that began in the late 1960s, wherein federal, state, and local policymakers deemphasized epidemic preparedness and acute care in favor of downsized hospitals, increased outpatient services, and more “personal responsibility.” Over the course of seven chapters, the study links the transformation of Medicaid into a welfare medicine program; federal health planning’s shift from the pursuit of equality to cost-cutting; the role that anti-inflation policy played in curtailing subsidies for hospitals and clinics, which reduced access to acute care; the diminution of civil rights protections for quality healthcare; and the effects these developments had on the response to HIV/AIDS. Challenging the notion that the HIV/AIDS epidemic was unforeseen and, thus, impossible to plan for, the study demonstrates how a series of purposeful decisions by presidential administrations, Congress, state legislatures, and city officials led to chronic underinvestment in public and voluntary hospitals that served poor people and people of color. A story of the neoliberal transformation of the Medicaid program and public and voluntary safety net hospitals, this dissertation illustrates how healthcare and welfare politics intertwined from the mid-1960s to the new millennium in ways that confounded the United States’ epidemic preparedness. A healthcare system focused on chronic disease by the 1960s and cost cutting in the 1970s could not cope with an emergent infectious disease like HIV/AIDS.

As the role of cities in addressing climate change has been increasingly recognized over the past two decades, the idea of a low-carbon city becomes a dominant framework to organize urban governance and envision a sustainable urban future. It also becomes a development discourse in the less developed world to guide the ongoing urbanization process. China’s efforts toward building low-carbon cities have been inspiring at first and then obscured by the halt or total failure of famous mega-projects, leading to a conclusion that Chinese low-carbon cities compose merely a strategy of green branding for promoting local economy. This conclusion, however, largely neglects the profound implications of the decarbonization discourse for the dynamics between the central and local governments, which together determine the rules and resources for development practices. The conclusion also hinders the progressive potentials of the decarbonization discourse in terms of introducing new values and norms to urban governance. This dissertation approaches “low-carbon cities” as a part of the decarbonization discourse and employs a discourse-institutional analysis to investigate the relationships between discourse, institutional arrangement, and socio-political resources for development activities. Through an examination of the Shenzhen International Low-Carbon City (SILCC), the dissertation answers three questions: (1) How does the framework of a low-carbon city affect a specific urban development project? (2) What is the role of the state (local/national) in promoting low-carbon development? and (3) What is the influence of the decarbonization discourse on institutions and norms of urban governance? Evidence was gathered during 2014-2017 from three fieldtrips, 39 interviews and the review of government documents and other archives. The dissertation highlights how different levels of government became entangled in developing a local area and how, in doing so, the proponents continuously searched for ways of ‘positioning’ their initiative in discourses that would attract higher level government support, maintain local coalitions, and entice international attention and investment. In this regard, low-carbon cities are a state discursive project. Rather than an established material goal, a low-carbon city is an evolving process in which the decarbonization discourse introduces a new set of values, metrics and governing logics into development practices and redefines the legitimacy and accountability of urban development. Furthermore, the local state leverages the interpretive flexibility within the decarbonization discourse through strategies including carbon labeling, weak carbonization, and carbon exceptionalism. Consequently, the state takes a strategic position to reconfigure the state-society as well as the environment-economy relationships.

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