The purpose of this study is to identify key factors that have led women to enter higher education on a large scale in Iran. My research will analyse the social, political, economic and cultural contexts which have provided an opportunity for women to take up more than 65% of places in Iranian universities, in a society which is unequal in many other respects. The rationale for a focus on women's share of higher education on such a scale is that education is considered to be a key social development indicator for measuring women's status and condition in any country. Tertiary education is seen by many commentators as a provider of greater opportunities for women's economic and social development. Education is one of the most significant means of empowering women with the knowledge and skills they need in order to play a greater role in the process of economic and social development. This research will also cover the historical background of women's issues since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. I will then explore the rise of female participation in social movements, which have been followed by government repression. The role and solidarity of women with different political views in reformist movements and specifically the role of women in the Green Movement of 2009 will be discussed. This study will also examine the role of the Iranian diaspora in general, and specifically the role of women in the diaspora, in social and cultural change. The impact of social media im mobilising people not only to support their demands inside Iran but also to serve as a strong tool for communication with the outside world will be important issues to discuss. New Social Movement theory will be the main theoretical framework discussed in this research. Qualitative multi-methods were used to gather data based on existing resources in English and Farsi, and interviews were conducted in Iran and abroad with sixteen women activists. In addition, a Facebook page was designed to collect more information from other sources. A brief comparison of the situation of women in education and employment in Iran and that of women in the region more widely has also been conducted. This research sims to address gaps in the existing research and provide suggestions and recommendations for future research on the women's movement in Iran. Finally the research aims to discuss how educated Iranian women's journeys can make an impact on social, political and cultural development in contemporary Iran.

abstract: Many global development initiatives focus on improving access to safe and affordable water. Governments and infrastructure in rapidly urbanizing cities struggle to meet the increased demand for water, especially in peri-urban and informal settlements of sub-Saharan Africa. The private sector, in the form of small water enterprises (SWEs), plays an increasing role in satisfying demand for water, but their greater effects have seldom been investigated. This research explores how SWEs affect access to household water in a peri-urban settlement of Accra, Ghana and investigates their social, economic, and environmental impacts in the community. This research also examines how SWEs influence security and sustainability goals within the framing concepts of the US Army’s Stability doctrine and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The methods employed in this study were interviews, observation, and review of existing literature and case studies. Results of this qualitative analysis reveal that while SWEs increase and diversify local access to clean water, provide economic opportunities and jobs—especially to women—they also present environmental and health concerns when unregulated and unaddressed by educators, city officials, and community leaders. Further, in cases where municipal governments cannot provide safe and consistent access to clean water in the given location, results show that SWEs enterprises can work in cohesion with both the SDGs and the US Army stability goals. Moving forward, city officials, development programs, and US Army stability doctrine should consider supporting SWEs to increase water access and improve other developmental outcomes, while working to avoid potentially negative environmental and health outcomes. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Sustainability 2019

No description available.

This work examines Swedish literature published during the 2000s in the context of larger debates about individual and collective belonging in Scandinavia. In each of three chapters, I describe a broad thematic domain in which I situate and compare works of poetry, prose and plays by authors such as Jonas Khemiri, Alejandro Wenger, Johannes Anyuru and Marjaneh Bakhtiari. In the first chapter, I examine the domain of Homogeneity/ Heterogeneity, describing a transition from monolithic to multiple, overlapping belongings. The second chapter concerns the domain of Transparency/ Opacity, and the legibility or opaqueness of bodies, language and clothing as markers of identity. The third and final domain, Center/Periphery, contains articulations of the public sphere at two different extremes of Swedish geography: the historic center city and the post-war suburbs. In my conclusion, I summarize how these literary works have both reflected and refracted discussions of national belonging in a time of global migration and increased cultural diversity in Northern Europe.

<p>This dissertation explores the significance of Africa (both as a literal geographic space and as an imagined or symbolic space) in 19th century American intellectual and literary culture. I argue that when nineteenth-century intellectuals grappled with the institution of slavery, the significance of slave revolt, and the extent of black intellectual capacities, they dealt not only with a set of domestic social and political concerns, but also with a wider epistemological crisis surrounding the very idea of Africa and Africanness. The paradoxical legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, which produced unthinkable dislocation and suffering even as it created new diasporic networks of black affiliation built around a common African origin, forced a reexamination of conventional thinking about history, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, education, and civilization. </p><p><italic>Diasporic Reasoning</italic> traces the impact of the idea of Africa on specific American intellectual outlets, including popular historiography, the novel, and the university. I contend that in each of these cases, the engagement with the idea of Africa enriches the possibilities of thought and leads to a fruitful reframing or refinement of established ideas, genres, and institutions. I begin with an exploration of the different historiographic uses of "representative men" in Ralph Waldo Emerson's <italic>Representative Men</italic> and William Wells Brown's <italic>The Black Man</italic> (Chapter One). I argue that Brown's contribution to the genre of collective biography complicates the apparent "universalism" of Emerson's earlier text, and forces us to rethink the categories of the universal and the particular. In Chapter Two, I continue to examine the impact of the African diaspora upon historical consciousness by arguing that the encounter with the specter of slave insurrection produces cognitive (and in turn, formal) ruptures in two historical novels, Herman Melville's <italic>Benito Cereno</italic> and George Washington Cable's <italic>The Grandissimes</italic>. Chapter Three focuses not on a literary genre, but on the circulation of knowledge through the institution of the modern university. Building from a comparative reading of the educational philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edward Wilmot Blyden, I argue that Blyden's provocative conception of an "African university" draws out and extends upon the implications of Emerson's thinking on education. Finally, in the Epilogue, I look at the syncretic uses of "Ethiopianism" in Pauline Hopkins' <italic>Of One Blood</italic>, J. A. Casely Hayford's <italic>Ethiopia Unbound</italic>, and W. E. B. Du Bois' <italic>Darkwater</italic> in order to explore the new paths that Pan-African and diasporic thought would take in the twentieth century. I argue that these works reflect the degree to which an evolving anthropological understanding of the idea of "culture" and the specific political contexts of anti-colonial struggles across the African continent would complicate the kinds of intertextual possibility available in the nineteenth century. This dissertation thus traces the often-surprising intellectual interrelations of America and the African diaspora, and in so doing, opens up a more nuanced approach to the study of nineteenth-century literary and intellectual culture.</p> / Dissertation

The goal of this study is to explore specialized and popular cultural models of trachoma, and the interaction between the trachoma elimination program and its target audience in one trachoma hyper-endemic intervention community. Eighty four million people worldwide, mainly children, are infected with active bacterial trachoma. For some, this will lead to painful and progressive corneal opacity and eventual blindness. The disease is most commonly spread by person-to-person contact or by flies, and affects very specific populations living in resource-poor areas such as rural Niger, which has one of the highest prevalence rates worldwide. The World Health Organization formed an alliance that is working toward the goal of eliminating blinding trachoma globally by 2020 through a strategy that includes behavior change communication, drug distribution, and surgery. The elimination program has been at work in Niger since the late 1990's. Trachoma prevalence in Niger showed a dramatic reduction during the beginning of the elimination program. However, disease prevalence has again increased and, at the time of this study, was nearing pre-intervention levels. While poverty is closely related to trachoma, the processes by which this economic state becomes translated into health impacts are complex, but rely on behaviors that are directly linked to disease transmission, prevention, and progression. From a social science perspective, these health behaviors can be studied by exploring the influence of both macro- (economics, structural, political), and micro- (cultural, cognitive, meaning-related) level factors. Cultural models are useful in examining the human relationship with infectious disease and how health-related decisions are made. These shared representations are drawn upon to negotiate well-being and disease, and are impacted by the introduction of new ideas or experiences. This study investigates cultural models of illness and the impact of the trachoma elimination program in one high-prevalence community in rural southern Niger. Using an ethnographic approach, which includes observation, in-depth interviews, and household surveys, data were gathered describing popular representations of the program and the disease in the research community. The main findings of this study show that the biomedical model of trachoma supported by the elimination program, amadari, has entered popular knowledge. However, this cultural model is not regularly applied to eye disease actually experienced by study households, which is seen to fit in the more general and more natural category of ciwon ido. Although the new treatments introduced for trachoma have been embraced by the intervention community, the use of the treatments has been modified to fit within popular representations of illness.

<p> Governments have long used language policy as a means of social control. As Frantz Fanon and Ng&utilde;g&itilde; wa Thiong&rsquo;o have argued, language played a key role in supporting colonial rule across Africa and remains part of the colonial legacy. From the late 1920s through World War II, the British colonial governments of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Zanzibar promoted the Kiswahili language as a regional <i>lingua franca</i>, a policy facilitated by the Inter-Territorial Language Committee for the East African Dependencies (ILC). I use published sources, archival records, and qualitative textual analysis of the ILC&rsquo;s published journal to trace the Committee&rsquo;s development from 1930 to 1970. Building on Ireri Mbaabu&rsquo;s work, I argue that the British initially chose to promote and standardize Kiswahili as a way to make their subject societies more legible or, in other words, more efficiently governable but reversed course in the 1940s after realizing Kiswahili&rsquo;s potential as a tool for anti-colonial organizing. The Committee adapted to the British language policy reversal by encouraging East African participation and switching its focus from social control to research. The Tanganyikan nationalists&rsquo; commitment to Kiswahili as a building block for a detribalized national identity allowed the Committee to survive the transition to independence and, as a research institute, continue to contribute to the study and promotion of Kiswahili in postcolonial Tanzania and beyond. My case study of the ILC&rsquo;s transformation affirms the importance of language control for the colonial project and the value of African languages in addressing the ongoing colonial legacy of cultural destruction.</p>

<p> This integrated literature review compiles past and present literature on the African Holocaust or Maafa to provide a more in-depth understanding of the unique sociopolitical narrative of the enslavement and oppression of Africans and African Americans for half a millennium in the United States. This study integrates historical data, theoretical literature, and clinical research to assess immediate and sequential impacts of the traumatization of the African Holocaust on enslaved and liberated Africans, African Americans, and their descendants. This investigation engages literature on trauma (Root, 1992), historical traumas (Duran, Duran, Brave Heart, &amp; Yellow Horse-Davis, 1998), historical unresolved grief (Brave Heart &amp; DeBruyn, 1998), and multigenerational trauma transmission (Danieli, 1998) to explore claims of slavery and relentless oppression leaving a psychological and behavioral legacy behind to the contemporary African American community (Abdullah, Kali, &amp; Sheppard, 1995; Akbar, 1996; Leary, 2001, 2005; Poussaint &amp; Alexander, 2000; B. L. Richardson &amp; Wade, 1999). By and large, this study provides a comprehensive exploration and critical examination of Leary&rsquo;s (2005) Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome theory (PTSS), which suggests that the traumatization of slavery and continued oppression (i.e., racism, discrimination, and marginalization) endured by enslaved Africans in the United States and their descendants over successive centuries has brought about a psychological and behavioral syndrome prevalent amongst 21st century African Americans. Findings from the critical analysis revealed that in addition to inheriting legacies of trauma from their enslaved and oppressed African ancestors, contemporary African Americans may have also inherited legacies of healing that have manifested as survival, strength, spirituality, perseverance, vitality, dynamism, and resiliency. Clinical implications from this research underscored the importance of not pathologizing present generations of African Americans for their attempts to cope with and adapt to perpetually oppressive environmental circumstances. Further quantitative and qualitative research that directly tests the applicability of PTSS within the African American community is needed to better grasp the representational generalizability of PTSS. Lastly, rather than focus on the repeated victimization of African Americans, the findings from this study suggest that future research should focus on the mental sickness of African Americans' oppressors in addition to identifying and delineating intergenerational legacies of survival, resilience, transcendence, and healing birthed out of the historical trauma of slavery.</p>

<p> This is an interdisciplinary research study in which I investigated some grounds and effects of using fear during some leader-follower exchanges that take place among indigenous societies. One of the reasons I undertook this project was to test the hypothesis that fear is a dimension of leadership and followership among such societies. I drew most of my evidences from Zimbabwe though in view of a southern African setting. My overall goal was to draw on concrete data to use in proposing practical ways for cultural changes for societies where fear is a major source for leadership and followership. </p><p> I employed the tag &lsquo;leadershipfear&rsquo; to describe a &lsquo;fear-driven leadership&rsquo; and a &lsquo;fear-based followership.&rsquo; I used the term &lsquo;panorama&rsquo; as a synonym for &lsquo;setting&rsquo; or &lsquo;context.&rsquo; My research followed an Interdisciplinary research process though leaning towards Qualitative methods. I pursued results by drawing on Primary sources that included some lived experiences of ordinary everyday people, both professionals and non-professionals. I also researched from Secondary sources consisting of literature and various forms of media. My ways of collecting data included interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, oral history, observations done by others on my behalf, snow-balling, BlogSpot, tape-recording, discussions, critical incidents, including different literature and videos. In searching for solutions I employed tools of Complexity Science like Scenario Planning hoping to penetrate some veiled areas especially of the Zimbabwean culture. Toward the end I proposed a leadership theory founded on: an interdisciplinary studies model, an indigenous culture, and some scholarly views.</p>

<p> This qualitative ethnographic collective case-study of two Nigerian Early Childhood Education (ECE) practitioners focused upon the practitioners&rsquo; reflections over a three-day period in February 2014 (and then a 3-month period from February through April 2014) of their first 18-months of implementing constructivist curriculum after participating in a week-long workshop in October 2012 on constructivist education theory and practice. The reflections were framed by seven questions, and their sub-questions, addressing their impressions of the most efficacious sections of the workshop, what worked and did not in their classrooms, their frustrations and successes, and their recommendations for further workshops for additional ECE practitioners. The practitioners responded to the inquiries in three different formats, as follows: the face-to-face discussion of the seven formal interview questions, a three-month journal (from February 2014 through April 2014) with the formal interview questions, and informal afternoon chat sessions that were more free-ranging. A comparison among the answers, mediated by NVivo10 (2012) software thematic sorting, revealed differences in the quantity and emphasis of the answers to the questions, varied by written and verbal responses. The most surprising finding and one that qualifies as a central phenomenon was that without sufficient parent education and support that the smooth transition from the Rote systems to the constructivist curriculum could be slowed down and even halted at the school site, as the parents voiced their concerns that the students were not going to be well-educated under this new curriculum. In further workshops, it is now apparent that parental education and engaged support must be presented and discussed so that ECE constructivist curriculum can be more widely implemented in Lagos, Nigeria and elsewhere.</p>