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In this research, I aim to present a narrative of the process of nation building in Bahrain - to further analyze it, interrogate it, and capture an aspect of its complexity. By focusing on the years following Bahrain's independence from Britain in 1971, I examine the period in which a constitution was introduced and a short-lived parliament was dissolved after two years of operation. The hypothesis underlying this thesis project is that the dominant historical account, which is provided and sponsored by the government, does not mirror the historical narratives of the various Bahraini communities. The central argument is advanced by examining the state sponsored public articulations of identity, which portray a continuum of exclusions by omitting significant historical episodes. By consulting archival material, oral narratives, and secondary sources, I aim to question the official historical narrative and show the polarized versions of history that can occur when such exclusions take place.

Twentieth-century environmentalist discourse often laid the blame for environmental degradation on Western civilization, and presented the religious traditions of the East as offering an ecocentric antidote to Western dualism and anthropocentrism. Gary Snyder has looked to Chinese and Japanese Buddhism to inform his environmentalist poetry and prose. While Snyder often writes in terms of a dualism of East and West, he synthesizes traditional forms of Buddhism with various Western traditions, and his green Buddhism ultimately undermines more simplistic oppositions of East and West. The first chapter reads Snyder's writing of the mid-1950s alongside several of his West Coast contemporaries - Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac - showing that these writers evoked the natural world together with Buddhist themes before the advent of the modern environmental movement in order to mount a critique of Cold War American culture. Snyder's early interest in Buddhism was motivated largely by translations of Chinese poetry and Chapter Two examines his own translations of the Tang Dynasty poet Hanshan. In Snyder's translations and contemporaneous original poetry, Buddhist poetics mingle with American conceptions of wilderness. Chapter Three shows how Snyder's Buddhism was influenced by Anglophone writers such as D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, and argues that from the late 1960s Snyder aimed to Americanize Buddhism as ideas of localism became more central to his environmentalism. Chapter Four examines Snyder's synthesis of Hua-yen Buddhism and Western scientific ecology in the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter Five examines 'The Hokkaido Book,' an unfinished prose work on environmental attitudes in the Far East in which Snyder considers the relationship between the civilized and the primitive. Chapter Six examines the influence of Chinese landscape painting and Japanese No drama, two forms steeped in Buddhist ideas, on the poems of 'Mountains' and 'Rivers Without End'.

This dissertation compares the effects of progressive social reform on income inequality in the Southern Cone of South America, Scandinavia, and Australasia. These regions faced comparable economic challenges at the start of the 20th century, but experienced different trends of income inequality after they introduced progressive policies in this period. Australasia and Scandinavia converged on a downward trend while the Southern Cone remained comparatively more unequal. The dissertation concentrates on three areas that significantly predict inequality in contemporary research: labour markets, education, and taxation and spending policies. Existing explanations usually focus on supply-side aspects of policy reform: wage regulation, and increased taxation and spending on education and social insurance, are thought to bring inequality down in the long-run. These reforms are seen as the outcome of the relative power of working class groups over elites. Despite institutional variation, the three regions enacted progressive policies to address distributional conflict and protect their economies from global risks. I study the demand-side of policy reform; policies faced considerable collective action problems to promote compliance and cooperation in order to work in the long-time and include populations at large. The fact that most people were motivated to comply meant that labour markets generated formality and standard wages, education increased human capital, and spending became stable as the tax base increased in Scandinavia and the Antipodes. The opposite happened in the Southern Cone as social actors tried to link selectively with the state while state officials neglected the material constraints that limited access to welfare and education. Each chapter spells out the conditions through which policy addressed collective action problems to motivate cooperation with wage agreements, sending children to school, and compliance with taxation and spending policies. Behind comparable aggregate numbers in these areas, the underlying social processes differed as Australasians and Scandinavians fostered cooperation between state and social actors, while the Southern Cone did not.

The 1944 Butler Act laid the legal foundations for a new secondary education system in England, one which would see all children entitled to free and compulsory schooling up to the age of 15. The Act therefore represented a bold step forward in the pursuit of a fairer society: expanding access to training and qualifications, while promoting a more equal distribution of educational opportunities. This thesis explores the process of constructing and delivering secondary education policy in England following the 1944 Butler Education Act. It offers a close examination of two Local Education Authorities- Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire- exploring how they interpreted and implemented 'secondary education for all' after the Second World War. The dissertation is composed of two parts: Part One looks at how selective secondary schooling was developed and operated in the respective areas between 1945 and 1962; Part Two explores the response of both authorities to the prospect of reforming secondary education after 1962. By exploring the process of policy implementation after 1944, Part One of this thesis highlights the problems of delivering secondary education for all in an era of resource constraint. It is demonstrated in this thesis that Local Authority capacity to build new schools was firmly tethered to Ministerial control. The relatively low priority accorded to education created a decade-long delay between the announcement of policy change and its eventual delivery. The implications of this delay at the Local Authority and school level are explored in chapters three and six. Chapters four and seven question how resources were distributed between selective and non-selective school sectors, while chapters five and eight evaluate the treatment of selective education within each authority, asking how policy makers conceived of, and operated, the grammar school and secondary modern sectors. Part Two of this thesis turns to the question of secondary organisation. Debates surrounding the question of comprehensive rather than selective systems of secondary schooling dominated discussions about secondary education policy in the later twentieth century. When it came to comprehensive re-organisation, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire opted for different paths: Oxfordshire adopted comprehensive schooling relatively early with a remarkable degree of county-wide consensus, while Buckinghamshire fiercely resisted external and internal pressure to reform. Chapter ten of this thesis is devoted to identifying the drivers of comprehensive reform in Oxfordshire. Chapters eleven and twelve explore the Buckinghamshire story establishing how and then why this county successfully held-out against wholesale policy change.

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A history of growing up in Vancouver with immigrant Portuguese parents was constructed by interviewing seventeen adults who were teenagers in Vancouver between 1962 and 1980. Sixteen emigrated as children or adolescents from a variety of social and economic backgrounds in the Azores and Continental Portugal and one was born in Vancouver. This thesis examines aspects of their adolescence in the family, at school, at work, in friendship and courtship, as well as at church. Their lives in Vancouver often differed considerably one from another, a diversity that was already apparent in Portugal. In Vancouver, many parents attempted to maintain or even intensify control over their children who resisted to varying degrees. Other parents allowed their children much more social freedom. As adults, many of these subjects retain an interest in Portuguese culture and traditions. Some limited comparison is made with other subjects in Kitimat, Penticton, and Toronto. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

Sociology has always been forced to establish its "scientific" legitimacy, but this need has never been more strongly felt than today. Constant theoretical shifts and disciplinary fragmentation are viewed as symptoms of some fundamental problems. Assuming the precariousness of the present condition of sociology, this dissertation seeks to understand and explain the driving force behind theoretical shifts in sociology, for they are blamed for many of the problems in the discipline. Through a close reading of Michel Foucault's works, I argue that sociology, like many other forms of knowledge, has attempted to shape the modern person as an ethical subject. Pursuant to this objective, early sociologists attempted to establish a balance between two different kinds of orientation within the discipline, one of which was epistemological and scientific while the other was ontological and discursive. This position was in line with the critical attitude of the time and the emancipatory promises of the Enlightenment, which were nurtured by the early sociologists. In other words, the dual characteristic of sociology was due to a critical interest in changing and shaping the modern social subject. However, this duality gave rise to a tension within the discipline that was extremely difficult to manage, if not impossible. This dissertation examines the tension between the two orientations that has shaped the history of sociology. I read classical sociologists such as Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber to show that even these positivistic sociologists' theories can best be understood as a form of critique. In particular, I explain how they sought to manage the tension between the epistemological and the ontological aspects of their theories. I also examine Karl Popper's critical philosophy as a more recent attempt to keep science politically relevant. However, I will show that the dilemmas created in sociology are mainly due to a strong epistemological orientation beyond which most contemporary sociologists are not able to move. Sociology may avoid some of its present dilemmas by shifting its critical interest to an ontological path. To show the possibility and merits o f the ontological approach to politics, I read Karl Marx as a classical sociologist whose theory exhibits a strong ontological tendency. I above all discuss Michel Foucault's work extensively in order to both explain the nature of sociological theories and to explore the possibility and the prospects of the separation of the epistemological and the ontological sociologies more systematically. My aim is to show that while scientific sociology tries to advance without becoming intrinsically political, an explicitly discursive or ontological approach to contemporary political questions can be adopted by interested political actors and sociologists alike. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

Mexican immigration to the United States increased tremendously from 1900-1925 as factors such as the Mexican Revolution and the recruitment of Mexican laborers by American industry drew Mexicans north. A significant number of Mexicans settled in Dallas and in the face of Anglo discrimination and segregation in the workplace, public institutions, and housing, these immigrants forged a community in the city rooted in their Mexican identity and traditions. This research, based heavily on data from the 1900, 1910, and 1920 census enumerations for Dallas and on articles from Dallas Morning News, highlights the agency of the Mexican population - men and women - in Dallas in the first three decades of the twentieth century.