Walkability is desirable for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, walkability is desirable because it is the only available or affordable transportation modal choice. Urban form and transportation infrastructure can be hostile to pedestrians because cars are prioritized first, and pedestrians often face unsafe situations and a lack of pedestrian facilities. This analysis explores a spatial distribution of pedestrian access to opportunities in Austin, TX, and examines the locations of households of different income levels relative to areas of high pedestrian access to opportunities. To achieve results that are equally precise across the study area, this analysis employs GIS analysis and U.S. Census 2000 data, and analyzes the study area using a ½ square-mile grid system. High pedestrian access areas are defined as locations where residential parcels have pedestrian network access to multiple types of opportunities and above average number of opportunities. This analysis finds that low income households are more associated with high pedestrian access areas in Austin, TX, than moderate and high income households. If lower income households are consistently shown to rely more on pedestrian infrastructure than moderate or high income households, it may be important to allocate funding to high pedestrian access areas with low income populations in such a way that is socially equitable, and that will result in more use of the pedestrian facilities. / text

The aim of this study is to problematize social support at online communities for unwanted childlessness by analyzing the discourses of the unwantedly childless and unwanted childlessness at a Swedish online community. This with the purpose of relating online social support to the societal norm for having children. The study is conducted by doing a Critical Discourse Analysis from a Relational- Cultural and Intersectional perspective on a Swedish online community sub-forum called “LESS på ofrivillig barnlöshet? Skriv av dig!” The results show that the social support becomes a paradox. The unwantedly childless themselves view the social support as fostering connection and belonging. In the meantime the social support is reinforcing the societal norm for having children by creating a collective identity of hope and an individual identity of emotional and physical failure. The norm for having children is further reinforced by the relations outside the online community leading to feelings of social exclusion.

Although there is a growing literature on non-climatic drivers of vulnerability to climate change, there are only a few empirical case studies that demonstrate the process through which vulnerability is produced. Moreover, existing climate literatures offer very limited insights on the linkages between governance and vulnerability to climate change. Within the governance framework, this dissertation tends to contribute to the current body of knowledge by exploring the role of governance in producing vulnerability to climate change. Using southwest coastal Bangladesh as an example, this study addresses three specific research questions: (1) how mastaanocracy, a form of uneven power relations shapes vulnerability to climate change; (2) the impact of corruption, particularly bribery and extortion on livelihoods in the face of climate change; and (3) the linkage between social exclusion and climate change vulnerability. Findings suggest that unequal power relation and corruption reduces the ability of the population to cope with the stresses of climate change. Social exclusion adds an extra burden to already vulnerable segments of population. On the other hand, climatic change pushes marginalized community further away thus exacerbating social exclusion. Based on the findings, I argue that it is difficult to build resilience and achieve successful adaptation without addressing the structural factors of power and inequality.

Social exclusion is the restriction of participation in one’s community; it is the denial of access to rights, services, dignity and respect. Youth who are homeless experience social exclusion on numerous fronts, as they are marginal to the social, economic and civil worlds of Canadian society. This dissertation is a qualitative, participatory project on youth homelessness that prioritizes voice by employing a “methods from the margins” approach (Kirby & McKenna, 1989). During this project I worked with youth who have experienced homelessness (ages 16-25), first in focus groups (n=13) and, then, through interviews (n=30), to explore their views on topics connected to social exclusion. The youth guided the topics that I explored, which I connected to the features of social exclusion outlined by Silver and Miller (2003). Results of this study highlight that youth who are homeless do not describe their experiences in terms of social exclusion. The results of this work question the homogeneity of experiences of the youth in the age bracket of 16-25, and review findings through three specific age categories of youth being “not yet adults,” “new adults” and “adults.” My findings indicate that youth who experience homelessness perceive themselves to be more independent and mature than youth who have not experienced homelessness, questioning dominant constructions of both “youth” and “homelessness.” Youth respondents also mentioned a number of other difficulties they experienced because of homelessness, including discrimination and limited opportunities for education and conventional employment and access to housing. This highlights the multidimensionality of social exclusion. At various points in the thesis I discuss youths’ views on rights and social citizenship, pointing to the impacts of limited rights and social safeguards in a neo-liberal state. Recommendations are made for reducing the social exclusion of youth who experience homelessness through “housing-first” approaches to addressing homelessness.

Feminist geographic debates have drawn attention to the multi-scalar role of borders as processes of social differentiation that are reproduced and inscribed on the bodies of migrant workers in everyday life. This thesis explores these questions in the context of Singapore’s global city-state where the increasing visibility of low-wage foreign workers in local residential areas has become a subject of tense neighbourhood frictions that frequently bring borders into sharp relief. Using the case-study of a recent public furore surrounding the proposed location of a foreign worker dormitory in Serangoon Gardens, one of Singapore's well-known middle-class estates, it examines the ways that migrant exclusions in local residential areas are informed by border anxieties and practices that mark out the labouring bodies of foreign workers as alien and “out of place.” The Serangoon Gardens incident exhibited a moment of tension whereby gendered, racialised, and class-based meanings attached to specific forms of flexible labour (particularly foreign construction and domestic work) were inserted into wider debates about nation, community, and the socio-spatial preservation of middle-class identity and belonging. Insofar as Singapore’s growth remains undergirded by the systematic in-flow of low-wage foreign workers to service its infrastructural and social reproductive labour needs, a study of borders helps illuminate the inherent contradictions and barriers of mobility within the global city as an exclusionary landscape. This thesis argues that the deeply marginalised place of foreign workers in society stems predominantly from the constitutive role of the state’s managerial migration regime in shaping everyday social meanings and practices that construct these workers as unassimilable subjects within the city-state. The outcome of these multi-scalar forms of bordering practices has been to produce a transient, depoliticised, and governable migrant population in the interests of security and economic prosperity in Singapore’s global city-state. / Thesis (Master, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2010-05-11 15:31:12.683

This research presents empirical work which grounds the discourses of socially inclusive 'communities' in a 'global information society'. The empirical work focuses on a specific group of young people aged 11 to 25 living in one of the most ethnically diverse and poorest boroughs of London, Newham. The thesis explores the ways in which the group construct their 'online' community (Newham Young People Online) and how their identities as young people are re-produced through the interplay between their everyday and their technocultural lifeworlds. Key to the work is how the group is using and shaping ICTs and cyberspace(s), which are central to a 'global information society', in different ways: to explore creativity, to find diverse ways of self-expression, to understand 'difference' and to discover other spaces of learning and education against a background of social exclusion.

Within the framework of urban communication, this thesis attempts to "read" the urban space of West Kabul in Afghanistan, as a social and cultural text in order to understand the social exclusion of the Hazara people, a socially and politically disenfranchised ethnic group who predominantly inhabit that area. Based on data gathered through documentary research and non-participant field observations, this thesis argues that the urban space of West Kabul is the spatial manifestation of a systematic exclusionary process, through which, the Hazara people have been deprived from access to political, economic and cultural resources, services and opportunities. It interprets the city planning, distribution of resources, urbicide, streetscape, architecture and the body as the main sites where the social exclusion of the Hazaras in West Kabul is exercised. This study also provides a discussion about the historical evolution of West Kabul as an ethnic ghetto, as well as the various forms of conflict which led to spatial and social division in Kabul city.

Ο ορισμός και η ανάλυση της έννοιας του κοινωνικού αποκλεισμού και συγκεκριμένα των διαφόρων παραγόντων που συντελούν στο φαινόμενο αυτό. Η καταγραφή των μεγάλων συγκοινωνιακών έργων που έχουν ολοκληρωθεί και εκείνων που είναι υπό κατασκευή και πως εκείνα έχουν βοηθήσει στην καταπολέμηση του συγκεκριμένου φαινομένου στη περιοχή της Δυτικής Ελλάδος και συγκεκριμένα στο νομό Αιτωλοακαρνανίας / --

This dissertation interrogates the links between immigration, citizenship, and social inequality by exploring temporary migrants' lived experiences of social exclusion in Manitoba. Based within a provincial context that supports temporary migrants' transitions to permanent residency through the Provincial Nominee Program, I examine how the promise of permanent settlement and a two-step immigration process influences migration decisions and the lived experiences that follow. Also, this dissertation highlights the ways in which temporary migrants find ways to exercise agency as they negotiate a complex migration system that is designed to exclude them. Drawing on twenty-six in-depth qualitative interviews and informed by a narrative methodology, I analyze accounts of temporary migrants who work in the hog processing industry in two rural communities. Using a theoretical lens informed by segmented labour market theory and citizenship theories, the dissertation reveals how processes of social exclusion are the outcomes of both labour market positions and legal exclusion from full membership in a nation-state. As a result, temporary migrants are positioned in an uncertain state of partial legal and social belonging. Theorizing the social effects of temporary migrants' location both in the labour market and in the complex matrix of legal statuses demonstrates the nuanced ways that temporary migrants understand how they can and do fit in Canadian society and make decisions based on such understandings. A significant empirical finding from this research is that having options for permanent residency is not a panacea for temporary migrants' unequal and marginalized social locations. In fact, the promise of permanent residency can contribute to an imbalance of power where employers have control over the futures of temporary migrants and their families. Pervasive effects of non-permanent status persist long after transitions to permanent resident status and are compounded by social dimensions such as language, class, gender, and race to shape temporary migrants' ability to engage in Canadian society. My analysis reveals the ways in which government designations (legal status) lack the ability to entirely erase social markers, making it questionable whether such classifications can restructure the social interactions and experiences of temporary migrants. / February 2016

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:24:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2011-10-07Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T18:51:31Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 lima_vma_me_bauru.pdf: 470251 bytes, checksum: 80b697f01583ca46174889b1804fcfbe (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / Esta dissertação tem por finalidade discutir a configuração jornalística da revista Ocas, e suas imbricações com as relações sociais que delineiam o projeto social que a sustenta, a Organização Civil de Ação Social (OCAS). Para atingir tal objetivo a dissertação parte do estudo da configuração do espaço urbano e as contradições e tensões inerentes ao seu desenvolvimento, buscando pontuar o papel da comunicação nesse contexto e a sua relação com as principais características do fenômeno da urbanização. Em seguida, são apresentadas as principais discussões em torno da conceituação de experiências comunicativas que se pretendem críticas ou alternativas no contexto social na contemporaneidade, buscando localizar, dentre os vários conceitos apresentados, o objeto deste estudo. Por fim, utilizando-se os recursos metodológicos da análise de conteúdo, complementada pela análise de enquadramento, são analisadas duas seções específicas da revista Ocas - as reportagens de capa e a seção Cabeça sem teto - nas edições que circularam nos anos de 2009 e 2010. A partir da leitura e descrição dos textos analisados, este estudo faz uma caracterização da prática jornalística em questão, revelando as estratégias que a publicação utiliza para estruturar sua atuação social, cujo principal objetivo é oferecer à população em situação de rua e/ou risco social possibilidades de obtenção de renda e superação da exclusão, além de configurar uma forma de visibilidade para tal conjuntura / This dissertation aims to discuss the journalistic settings in Ocas magazine and its connections with the social relations that shape the social project which supports it - the Civil Organization for Social Action (OCAS). To achieve this goal, we study the urban space configuration and the contradictions and tensions inherent to its development, in order to measure the role of communications in this context and its relations to the main features of the urbanization phenomenon. Then, we present the main discussions on publications that have experienced a kind communication based on criticism, also named alternative, in the contemporary social context, to define, among the many concepts presented, this object of study. Eventually, using the content analysis methodology, complemented by the framework analysis, two specfic sections of Ocas magazine are analyzed - the cover stories and that one named 'Cabeça sem teto' (Homeless Head', in a free translation) - throughout the edition that circulated in 2009 and 2010. From the reading and description of the texts analyzed, this study presents a characterization of the journalistic practices found on them, showing the strategies that the publication uses for structuring its social performance. Its main goal is to offer, to the homeless people and/or people at social risk, opportunities to obtain incomes, overcome exclusion and raise visibility to their situation