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The purpose of this dissertation is to evaluate the current state of literature surrounding childhood and child agency, and how dominant notions of these concepts result in practical implications pertaining to the nature of the participation of former child soldiers in post-conflict reintegration programmes. As the literature and practice surrounding children in post-conflict environments currently stands, there is a recurring preoccupation with traditional notions of childhood which uphold notions of innocence, vulnerability, and dependency, with only minimal attempts to conceptualise child agency as a crucial factor once the guns have been put down. This ultimately results in former child soldiers being dealt with as objects to be secured, as opposed to fully-fledged participants and agents in their own reintegration processes. This research thereby seeks to answer the question: “How would the formulation of a normative framework of child agency alter the orientation of post-conflict reintegration programmes in the future?” The researcher will engage the matter of child agency in post-conflict reintegration through a critical lens, both in terms of the literary and conceptual foundations contributing towards current narratives, as well as the current state of reintegration programmes as they target former child soldiers in northern Uganda. The qualitative approach of a critical literature review, followed by a critical analysis of the case of northern Uganda, will be employed as the key methods of this research. The literature to be used will be purposively sampled secondary sources. This mini-dissertation upholds the position that, in order for post-conflict reintegration programmes to be successful in their endeavour to reintegrate former child soldiers, children should not be rendered as peripheral actors in these processes. Rather, they should be present as key participatory agents in their own right. / Mini Dissertation (MSS)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Political Sciences / MSS / Unrestricted

Homelessness is a complex problem replete with profound social distress and suffering, but with few adequate solutions. The homeless are a marginalized population particularly vulnerable to structural forces and policy decisions, including lack of affordable housing, unemployment, systemic inequalities, and lack of adequate social safety net. Perspectives of homeless people are understudied in anthropological scholarship which tends to focus on service providers, with comparatively less attention on homeless people themselves who are commonly subjected to medicalizing and criminalizing discourses. Using ethnographic research methods, including participant-observation and interviews with homeless people who pursue food pantry services at Hope Helps NGO in Oviedo, Florida, this paper examines the experiences of homeless people in Florida, where the issue of homelessness has been acute and is often depoliticized in public discourses. Specifically , it focuses on coping strategies of homeless people in Oviedo, and ways in which they understand their life circumstances and secure necessary services. Findings demonstrate that the Florida homeless view reasons for their homelessness as primarily economic, but rarely critique policies behind low wages or unaffordable housing. The narratives also show that the homeless in this study obtain resources through networking, and despite use of assistance services, view themselves as independent, active agents. Results of this research have potential to improve the way social services for the homeless are structured, and to inform policy relevant to homeless in Florida. Furthermore, this research brings attention to a marginalized problem and population, and considers how particular discourses function to maintain a structurally inadequate system.

Technological advancements have resulted in highly automated systems that are featured in many kinds of tools and devices, such as self-driving cars, autopilot in airplanes, and much more. Such systems have enabled tools to plan, decide, and act autonomously. This breakthrough resulted in a new manner of interacting with tools, known as "Human-Robot Joint Action" or "human-AI interaction," in which people and automated tools share control over the tasks that must be performed. However, little is known about the impact of such interactions on people and their sense of agency (SoA) as well as how much autonomy to grant to tools. As a result, the objective of this systematic review is to investigate and understand how automated tools affect human SoA, and if tools with different levels of automation affect our SoA differently. A search in two databases, Scopus, and MEDLINE EBSCO was conducted, and 8 articles were included. The findings suggest that the more automated the tool is, the less SoA participants experience, and that varied levels of automation may impact human SoA depending on the nature of the task. However, this topic is still in its infancy and more research is needed.

Middle East and North African (MENA) nations, including Morocco, are witnessing the largest cohort of young people in their history, which today makes up roughly one-third of their total populations. Influenced by the democracy uprisings in 2011, state, media, and international organization discourses on youth in the Middle East and North Africa have solidified in two directions. One perspective presents the group as a threat to the security and fabric of their nations, potential purveyors of delinquency and extremism, in states of "waithood." The other view, a variant of which is explored here, considers the cohort as a group that constitutes an untapped potential and hope for addressing the ills and flaws of their societies. This accounting depicts Moroccan and MENA youth as passive victims of circumstances while also assuming their abilities to address their life circumstances without considering the complex contexts they confront. While those structural realities are surely real and sometimes paralyzing, youth can and do deploy several tactics, strategies and subversive accommodation to address the conditions they confront. That is, they continuously navigate liminal spaces created as they seek to move from "where they are" to "where they wish to be." This dissertation explores how a sample of young men and women from underprivileged neighborhoods in Morocco exercised their agency in their everyday lives. Addressing their family, education and work, this study draws on the findings from 30 semi- structured interviews focusing on the challenges and agential potentials of young individuals from underprivileged neighborhoods in Casablanca, Morocco, as they described their everyday paths to coming of age in their society. To contextualize their journeys, I present how young people have historically demonstrated individual and collective agency in ways that helped shape Moroccan modern history. I then employ the concepts of bounded agency, liminal space, tactics, strategies and subversive accommodation to demonstrate how young individuals navigated their everyday lives within their families, as well as educational and work trajectories. I argue that young people are not simply passive; they indeed exercise strategies and tactics to navigate and negotiate their daily lives. However, they do so in bounded or limited conditions as they address colonial legacies of social inequality compounded by demographic realities and neoliberal policies that have deepened those conditions. This study challenges mainstream conceptions of youth agency as empowerment, resistance and freedom and instead suggests that the agency of youth as well as their everyday aspirations and struggles need to be contextualized based on the social and material conditions in which they live. Their agency is real, but so too are the structurally difficult and limiting social, political and economic conditions they confront. / Doctor of Philosophy / Middle East and North African (MENA) nations, including Morocco, now have the largest cohort of young people in their histories, approximately one-third of their total populations. State, media, and international organization discourses addressing youth in the Middle East and North Africa have tended to adopt one of two storylines concerning the region's youth; one that views this population as a threat to the security and fabric of the nations, potential delinquents and extremists, and existing in states of "waithood." The other perspective tends to view young people as constituting untapped potential to address long-standing societal challenges. This accounting depicts Moroccan and MENA youth as passive victims of circumstances and assumes their capacity to address their life circumstances without considering the complex situations they confront. While those structural realities surely can act as obstacles or barriers, young people can and do deploy a range of practices to address the conditions they confront. Indeed, they continuously make choices as they seek to move from "where they are" to "where they want to be." This dissertation explores how a sample of 30 young men and women from underprivileged neighborhoods in Casablanca, Morocco exercised their ability to act in their everyday lives. Addressing their family, education, and work spaces, and drawing on the findings of individual semi-structured interviews with those in the sample, it describes their paths to coming of age in their society. To contextualize the life journeys of those interviewed, the analysis also examines how young people have historically demonstrated individual and collective agency in ways that have helped to shape Moroccan modern history. Overall, this study suggests that young Moroccans are not simply passive or in states of waiting; they indeed exercise strategies and tactics to navigate and negotiate the opportunity structures they encounter in their daily lives. However, they do so in limiting conditions that bound the possibilities they may reasonably explore as they address the continuing influence of colonial legacies of social inequality joined by demographic realities and the ongoing, and largely negative, impacts of neoliberal policies.

Groundswell, a New York-based nonprofit community arts organization, creates high quality public art with youth and artists throughout the five boroughs of the City. This study examines how the nonprofit utilizes mural making, a potentially democratic art form, to provide opportunities for individual and collective impact. I undertook key informant interviews and documents analysis to explore the complex model the nonprofit employs to create a collaborative and community-based art process for youth, while also developing a product that can both spark conversation and reflect resident's experiences. Overall the nonprofit's mural making process provided its youth participants with opportunities to reflect and develop personally and professionally. They worked collaboratively to accomplish a goal and learned to think critically about the role of gender and media as they considered their mural subjects. To create their art, youths needed to exercise empathetic understanding as well as creativity to craft a positive message and subsequently design a pictorial representation that reflected the experiences, interests and concerns of the community residents with whom they worked. Not only did Groundswell program participants undertake reflexive and developmental experiences, but the community of Coney Island also gained a mural that serves as a positive affirmation, a sounding board and a symbol of the community's resilience in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. / Master of Urban and Regional Planning

The British Labour Party has spent eighteen years in opposition since 1979. During that time it lost four consecutive general elections to the Conservative Party. In 1997, however, it now looks set to win its first election since 1974. This thesis examines the Labour Party in opposition since 1979, using a theoretical framework informed by Anthony Giddens' structuration theory. Based on a dialectical notion of the structure and agency linkage, a two-tiered framework is constructed which at one level views a political party as consisting of a set of structures which can constrain and enable party leaders in their attempts to make the party electorally successful, and at another level the party is regarded as a collective agent in its own right, which in turn is subject to the effects of larger external structures. By comparing the strategies adopted by the Labour Party and its leaders since 1979, the thesis demonstrates that the apparent recovery in the Party's electoral fortunes has corresponded with an increase in the ability of agents to successfully negotiate structural constraints, whilst taking advantage of enabling structures. However, it is also clear that the transformation of Labour into an electorally viable party in 1997 is not solely the product of agency in the period since the last election; rather, it is the culmination of a longer-term process of party change. / Master of Arts

Thesis advisor: Thomas H. Groome / The unprecedented degrees and forms of injustice and inequality found in the world today call for renewed concern to educate for justice derived from critical reflection on the complexities of our present social reality. Responding to this pressing need, this dissertation is built on the premise that the central criterion of Christian living in the contemporary world should be the pursuit of justice; in this pursuit, the role of Christian religious education, in a life-giving way, is more crucial than ever. This dissertation seeks a theological rationale and a pedagogical approach that promote a critical social consciousness and a commitment to work for justice out of compassion as prompted by Christian faith. Grounded in Jesus’s vision of the Reign of God, the Christian faith should attest that compassion and justice are integral to each other; justice must always be realized through compassion, and compassion ever needs to reach into the works of justice. Affirming such compassion-motivated justice in the Christian faith as care for others and commitment to the common good, this dissertation offers a reflective discourse and aims to renew an educational vision of being fully human in terms of the pursuit of justice. Rather than a theoretical delving into the definition of justice as an abstract concept, this dissertation addresses the questions of why justice matters, what justice should be sought in our historical context from a Christian perspective, and what crucial role Christian religious education can play in this quest. Chapter 1 investigates the hindrances to education for justice in faith found both in our sociocultural context and in distortedly shaped Christian faith. The following three chapters explore the constituent aspects of compassion-motivated justice in Christian faith in terms of partiality, emotion, and agency. These are in contrast with three tendencies commonly associated with understanding justice—impartiality, undue rationality, and impersonal principles— respectively. Chapter 2 emphasizes Jesus’ vision of the Reign of God as the foundation for Christians’ pursuit of justice and the contemporary theological attentiveness to the reality of unjust suffering. Chapter 3 discusses the possibility of compassionate anger in the face of social injustice as a constructive force for commitment to the work of justice. Particularly drawing upon John Wesley’s thought, Chapter 4 examines Methodism’s unique understanding of human agency in a dialectic relationship with God’s grace, and with emphasis on a person’s authenticity and integrity in seeking social transformation. Chapter 5 searches for a pedagogical approach to shape Christians’ commitments to the work of compassionate justice by promoting a way of knowing as praxis with which to integrate personal and social transformations in a life of lived Christian faith. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry.

<p> This thesis examines the operations of the Canadian Egg Marketing Agency and its provincial boards and their effects on producers, consumers and the agricultural industry. The variables that were reviewed to achieve this objective were: producer and retail price levels, the stability of producer and retail prices, the price differences between the provinces, the amount of imports and exports, the role of supply and demand in determining price and the producers' share of the consumer dollar. Two techniques were used. One method was the before and after technique which compared two periods, 1961-71 and 1975-82, to identify what changes had occurred since the introduction of CEMA in 1973. The second method was a comparison to the United States which control led for market structure changes. </p> <p> The results of this study are as follows. Producers have benefited from CEMA's operations through greater price stability, a larger share of the consumer dollar and from a higher price level than in the United States. CEMA has affected consumers by stabilizing retail prices and equalizing prices across the country. However, CEMA's actions have redistributed income from consumers to producers. CEMA has had a positive effect on the agricultural industry by increasing exports while import levels have remained the same. </p> / Thesis / Candidate in Philosophy

This thesis investigates the ways in which women’s international migration from Armenia to Turkey is governed by the production and re-production of appropriate feminities and masculinities by macro-level state policies, legal texts and by everyday cultural discourses. Through an analysis of policy documents, legal texts and data collected through interviews with policy makers both in Armenia and Turkey, this thesis shows that gendered norms and rituals are implicated in how states regulate, intervene or simply ignore who are allowed or denied entry. Border regulations are affected and in return discipline the ideas and norms revolving around how the deserving feminine subjects of society should act and think.This thesis demonstrates that in focusing on a South-South migration from the perspective of gender challenges the dominant analysis of International Relations (IR) on migration, which has framed international migration mostly as a question of international security. In contrast, this thesis brings the rich political histories, social contexts and economic concerns – framed by gender, class and racial hierarchies – to bear on the flows of migrant women from Armenia to Turkey. This framework developed here has two important implications for how migration is studied in IR: one, it paints a much more complex picture of state-migrant interactions that goes beyond simplistic security/exclusion claims; and secondly, it allows for a multi-faceted conception of women’s agency. This thesis argues that migrant women develop several methods of managing their identities in order receive acceptance and legitimacy in the context of the gendered regulation of migration by Armenia and Turkey. They actively participate sometimes to challenge their characterization as “illegals”, as immoral mothers and women, and as useless workers. Their relationships with their families, employers, police officers and compatriots are carefully described and analyzed. The findings suggest that migrant women’s experiences are multifaceted and cannot be subsumed under a category of “irregular” migrant. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)