This thesis assesses the potential of Venezuela’s technical water committees (mesas técnicas de agua, MTAs) to address governance and logistical challenges for improving sanitation in the barrios (low income settlements) of Caracas. The MTAs are a radical experiment in urban planning whereby beneficiary communities map their own water and sanitation needs and help to plan infrastructure development, which is financed by the state. In addition to improving services, the MTAs aim to promote “popular” or “citizen power” as part of a broader political transformation, the Bolivarian Process (1999-present). Based on Hickey and Mohan’s (2005) four criteria for “transformative participation,” the paper argues that the MTAs have opened spaces for citizen empowerment and improved services in the barrios; however, participation at the local scale cannot resolve many of the challenges for improving sanitation such as institutional overlap and the financing gap, especially given that sanitation is the least profitable form of service provision in terms of economic and political payoffs.

Almost daily emotional worship pours from a warehouse-sized evangelical church in the small rural community of Santa Cruz, Costa Rica. Within twenty years an evangelical presence has gone from virtually non-existent to standing alongside the Catholic Church in the area’s religious landscape. Scenarios like this are going on throughout Latin America as evangelical faith has become firmly rooted in the region. In this thesis I provide another ethnographic research context to the growing body of literature focused on Pentecostalism/evangelicalism in Latin America. Like others addressing this dynamic, I explore the factors and motivations that lead people to become evangelical. I approach these questions with particular emphasis on the characteristics of evangelical faith as it is constructed and practiced during church services. Through participant observation during church services and interviews with practicing evangelicals in and around Santa Cruz, I highlight the relationship between the characteristics of an evangelical faith and the factors and motivations that lead people to seek it. To be religiously active in the manner of my informants requires deep commitment and is not a faith adopted and practiced lightly. Those who become evangelical and sustain the demanding practice are likely to seek it for spiritual solutions to difficult life situations.

In the past decade, mobile communication services such as cell phones and other types of hand-held devices have become relatively cheap, affordable and accessible, especially in developing countries, including Peru. The applications of mobile devices in health, or mHealth, are surfacing and have the potential to improve the delivery and quality of health by eliminating the distance barriers; permitting the availability and retrieval of data in a timely manner; educating the public on prevention; supporting the management of diseases, and promoting patient empowerment to the population, including those that are socially stigmatized. Equally important, in conjunction with technology, training is another important factor to build a critical mass of professionals to develop and evaluate mHealth strategies. In order to take advantage of the technology at hand, health professionals must be able to know how to use these tools that are available to them. The purpose of the study is to explore the research and training, and mHealth strategies being developed in Peru. The study has the following aims: • To examine the process, progress and lessons learned of a) the mobile health initiatives of Peru through the lens of the Cell-POS project, and b) the training initiatives on mHealth in Peru through the lens of the QUIPU project; • To discover how people with HIV can achieve patient empowerment and involvement in managing their own health through the use of cell phones. For the mobile health project (Cell-POS) both quantitative and qualitative data collection was gathered, which resulted in an in-depth research analysis evaluating the efforts and initiatives of mHealth solutions in Peru, with a focus on how the use of mobile technology can help people with HIV feel empowered. In addition, it was explored how mobile health is being positioned in the area of training through the lens of the QUIPU project. A two-day expert meeting which took place on March 26 and March 27, 2010 in Lima, Peru resulted in insightful discussions of the problems and necessities regarding training in Biomedical and Health Informatics; specific issues about the curricula and the level of multidisciplinary were also discussed. Through the QUIPU project it was found that the challenges and needs are very similar across Latin America; however, through collaboration and partnerships, global health initiatives are on a rise. The Cell-POS project examined the feasibility, acceptability, perceived ease of use, and usefulness towards mHealth in relation with patient empowerment. The primary finding was that participants were satisfied and accepted the Cell-POS platform quickly and without difficulty. After six months of use, the results demonstrated that the participants perceived that the messages were clear, effective, and understandable and it was easy to incorporate the Cell-POS system to their daily activities. Most participants perceived that Cell-POS enhanced their knowledge related to HIV treatment and improved their ability to take their medications correctly and on time. Through proper planning, research initiatives and collaborative work, a successful project can be achieved. Peru has great potential, which is already starting to show through the research and work that is currently taken place. This study examines selected mHealth initiatives in the context of research and training of mHealth in Peru. / Graduate

En el marco del proyecto "Pluralidad de discursos" hemos incluido esta investigación donde elaboramos una serie de conceptos generales para el teatro que nos permite, además, analizar e interpretar el teatro latinoamericano en un contexto transcultural y transdisciplinario, para así superar tanto barreras ideológicas, esencialistas o hegemónicas y demostrar que fenómenos culturales no conocen fronteras, sino sólo diversas concretizaciones.

Das Ziel meines Beitrags im Rahmen der Ringvorlesung ist ein doppeltes: zunächst die Beschreibung und Interpretation von Repräsentationsformen der Andersheit im Kontext von Hybriditätsprozessen und im Kontext der Formen und der Auswirkungen der Globalisierung in Lateinamerika; und zweitens die Herausarbeitung von Hybridisierungsstrategien, von semiotisch-anthropologischen Entwürfen eines altaritären und differenten Kulturmodells, das für eine kulturelle Region im Zeitalter der Globalisierung Bedeutung hat. Es geht also um translatologisch-kommunikative Strategien, wobei Translation nach Gómez Peña rekodifizieren beziehungsweise "borderizing" bedeutet – und nicht übersetzen. Denn die großen permanenten und unaufhaltsamen Migrationen gepaart mit der Globalisierung ergeben eine zunehmende Verflechtung zwischen dem sogenannten "Eigenen" und dem sogenannten "Fremden", werfen Fragen über die Legitimität und Adäquatheit, ja zeitliche Angemessenheit dieser Konzepte auf und erzwingen eine Revision und neue Bestimmung von weiteren Konzepten wie Differenz, Identität, Nation und Kultur. Das Oppositionspaar, das "Eigene" und das "Fremde", kann und soll nicht mehr so stehen bleiben, denn es ist epistemologisch, historisch und kulturell Kind eines kolonialen und imperialen Zeitalters, welches schon unwiderruflich vergangen zu sein schien.

This thesis is a work of theory; it is also historical. It attempts to provide a critique of the categories through which the phenomena of agricultural development and land reform are habitually grasped. It is divided into three parts. In the first part three main theoretical orientations to the study of capitalist agrarian development are discussed, both abstractly and with reference to their accounts of Latin American rural society in the 1960's. It is argued that all three are unable to explain adequately the process of social and agrarian change. This inability is traced to the fact that all three reduce social totalities to two or more distinct sub-entities or sub-totalities. The author calls this general position the social problematic of dualism. Its inability. to account for social change is, he argues, traceable to the fact that the existence of the sub-entities into which social totalities are divided, is posited as theoretically prior to the relations which connect them. These points are pursued in the second and third parts of the thesis. In the second part an alternative to dualism' with particular reference to its variants of the separation of a realm of industry from a realm of agriculture, and of the separation of a realm of the economic from a realm of the social, is provided through a detailed theorisation of capitalist social relations. It is argued that the existence of distinct realms of agriculture, industry, economy and society is a real effect of the essential relations of capitalist society, and that these divisions must be transcended through an elucidation of the character of such relations. This is done by distinguishing three forms of capitalist development which are produced by these essential relations. Further examples of a dualist analysis in contemporary theorisations of petty commodity production, the world economy and the articulation of modes of production are discussed. In the third part the author returns to an examination of the Latin American context through a discussion of the case of Chile. The theoretical insights developed in the earlier parts are systematically applied to various aspects of Chilean history from the conquest of Latin America to the 1960's, and to the processes of land reform which covered the decade 1962-1973. It is suggested that the agrarian social transformations which this country experienced are only explicable in terms of a position which systematically transcends all dualist assumptions.

Long overshadowed by the subsequent 1960s ‘Boom’, Cuban novels of the 1950s have been confined to the backwater of literary analysis, often grouped together and dismissed as mere social realism like their Spanish counterparts, or described as inferior. The spatial has been similarly overlooked in literary analysis in favour of a focus on stylistic experimentation, narrative structure, characterisation and the temporal. More recently, however, theorists such as Mitchell (1980) and (1989), and Wegner (2002), have argued that literature has become increasingly spatial, and that a greater focus on spatial analysis is needed. Furthermore, conceptions of space in literature have moved from the static notion of ‘setting’ and identification within a specific location and time, to embrace the function of actual physical spaces, whether exterior or interior, public or private, embedded or liminal, juxtaposed, dynamic, static or fluid. One Cuban novel of the 1950s has already been discussed from a spatial perspective - El acoso (1956) by Alejo Carpentier. Using the two previous studies on spatiality in this novel as a starting point (Stanton [1993] and Vásquez [1996]), this analysis expands on the conclusions made by these studies, stressing the importance of water imagery, and demonstrating that spaces in El acoso are essentially dynamic and female-gendered, arguing that the crisis experienced by the acosado is actually one of masculine identity. Building on the expanded analysis of space in El acoso, three lesser-known Cuban novels of the 1950s are then considered from the perspective of space: Los Valedontes (1953) by Alcides Iznaga, Romelia Vargas (1952) by Surama Ferrer, and La trampa (1956) by Enrique Serpa. The socio-economic, political and cultural backcloth for the novels is set out, before an investigation into theories of space, both literary and non-literary, is conducted. Spaces in Los Valedontes reveal that in the rural domain, sexual identities are stable with conventional masculine hegemony virtually uncontested. Spaces in Romelia Vargas demonstrate that in the urban domain, female sexual identity, albeit historically suppressed, triumphs over the traditionally dominant male norm, whilst a study of spaces in La trampa demonstrates that not only are gangsters, policemen and homosexuals shown to occupy particularly challenged positions, but also that constructions of mainstream Cuban masculinity are under threat. The conclusion compares the function of spaces across all four novels, adding new insights into existing theories of literary space where appropriate. This thesis, therefore, tests the hypothesis that the manipulation of space in these novels constitutes material worthy of study, showing that spaces are dynamic and challenging when female-gendered, and constituting a threat to the hegemony exerted by traditional models of masculinity. Spaces in these novels demonstrate how the early part of the 1950s was a period in which an unpredictable array of contested positions was exposed through cultural, racial, gender and sexual stereotypes, leaving conventional norms of identity open to question.

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This document deconstructs the issue of forced displacement in Colombia, focusing on the period 1992 – 2004, and has two main methodological features. The first is its interdisciplinary approach, which is both sociological and economic. The second is its multilevel orientation, which aims to tackle forced displacement in Colombia on the individual, community and aggregate levels. Given the lack of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to forced migration, I propose a new one, based on bounded rationality from economic theory and using Castles (2003) and Richmond (1988) for the sociology of forced migration. In order to properly characterise the concept of forced displacement as one of the many modalities of migration, my literature review expands on the thesis’ remit, both in time and scope, including studies of internal migration in Colombia, between 1960 and 2004. The review reveals some interesting lacunas and regularities in the study of forced migration in Colombia: the lack of interdisciplinary studies, the lack of consensus about the real dimension of forced displacement in Colombia - as a consequence of the divergent and hence unreliable nature of current statistics - the historic role of violence for flows of migration in Colombia, the importance of land appropriation and illegal economic activities as catalysts for the decision to migrate, and the specific profiles of gender and ethnic backgrounds. These issues are addressed in three chapters: one concentrates on deconstructing the different statistics available for forced displacement in Colombia, the systems devoted to collect them and the subjective reasons that may explain the differences between them: another evaluates the recurrence of specific patterns of ethnic background and gender among a displaced community and the third evaluates he lack of social cohesion as anomie, through applying the scale of Srole (1956) as used by Lipman and Havens (1965) in their study of the anomie among displaced people in Colombia.

This thesis focuses upon the cacicazgo of Gabriel Barrios Cabrera, in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico during the 1920s. It seeks to analysis the extent to which previously identified trends in post-revolutionary regional politics can be applied to this isolated mountainous region. Conclusions are based upon evidence obtained from national, state, municipal, and private archives in Mexico. In addition, a programme of oral history was conducted within the Sierra de Puebla. The study is divided into six main components, each representing a significant aspect of Barrios' cacicazgo. These comprise: local historical precedents of Indian leadership and co-operation with non-Indian politicians; the range of responsibilities and opportunities that Barrios enjoyed in his pivotal role as a federal military officer under Carrancista and Sonorense administrations; the nature of his grass-roots support, his use of cuerpos voluntarios and patronage of municipal officials; Barrios' political affiliations beyond the Sierra and his struggle for political supremacy within the Sierra; the nature and motives of the cacique's regional development initiatives, and an analysis of the contradiction of his apparent pro-campesino, yet anti-agrarian, stance; a case study of the district of Zacapoaxtla, which demonstrates the importance of local factionalism and portrays the practical application of the Barrios cacicazgo at the most local level. After identifying the causes of Barrios' fall from grace in 1930, the thesis concludes by arguing that caciquismo in the Sierra de Puebla was essentially different from models of regional power-broking found elsewhere in postrevolutionary Mexico. While similarities existed, Barrios' style of leadership displayed more of a consistency with local conditions and precedents than any broader ideological tendencies. Continued research at the local level is essential if we are to obtain a clearer understanding of the diversity of experiences endured by Mexicans in the aftermath of revolution.