This treatise explores the Matatiele boundary demarcation dispute and, in particular, the role that unmet basic human needs play in this dispute. The subject of identity is also explored. In 2006, the government of South Africa decided that Matatiele should no longer be part of the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN) and instead should be incorporated into the province of the Eastern Cape. This decision divided the community of Matatiele into two groups; one was pro-KZN and the other, pro-Eastern Cape. In 2008, violence broke out between these two groups. The government’s decision and the resulting violence have created a situation of protracted conflict in the community of Matatiele with rivalries and antagonism being part of the fabric of the society. This treatise attempts to analyse this conflict and link it to the theory of basic human needs as advocated by conflict theorists such as John Burton and Johan Gultang. Human needs theorists hold the view that unmet psychological and physical needs are sources of social conflict and can lead to protracted conflict. This treatise also explores the efficacy of problem-solving workshops and referendums as conflict-resolution techniques for boundary demarcation disputes. The data were collected from unstructured, in-depth interviews with a sample of eleven respondents. The data indicate that there is a nexus between this conflict and the theory of basic human needs and that community-identity concerns are central to this dispute. The findings of this study suggest that the conflict is multi-faceted and that the underlying causes can be attributed to unmet human needs. The data was analysed using the grounded theory approach. This allowed the key causes of the conflict to be identified and subsequently informed the recommendations presented in the conclusion of this treatise.

This paper is an attempt to explore some of the linkages between national and international political systems through an application of a modified version of Rosenau's pre-theory to the Sino-Indian and Sino-Burmese border disputes. The Indian and Burmese cases presented contrasts on some of the variables considered in Rosenau's theory along with marked differences in the consequences of policy outputs. The case studies revealed important differences in the foreign policy making processes that could be linked to Rosenau's variables and to outcomes and consequences. Concepts developed within the field of foreign policy analysis, the study of international political systems, and the theory of bargaining can readily be encompassed within the model. The model, however, presents some problems of definition and problems in causal analysis. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

Polycrystalline materials are widely used for industrial applications. These materials are highly anisotropic with different responses under different loading conditions. This dissertation uses a crystal plasticity scheme in the finite element framework (CPFEM) to study deformation mechanisms in alumina, aluminium and stainless steel – all polycrystalline. Four research cases in this dissertation have been presented in the form of manuscripts for publication. When possible, modelling predictions have been compared against various experimental techniques such as Diffraction Contrast Tomography (DCT), Neutron Diffraction (ND) and Electron Back Scatter Diffraction (EBSD). After an introduction (Chapter 1) and a literature review (Chapter 2) on plastic deformation and modelling techniques, the methodology and results are presented and discussed (Chapters 3 and 4). Measurements of elastic strains for individual grain families (ND) and local rotations (DCT and EBSD) are compared against corresponding predictions by the model following different loading modes. Each study reveals different degrees of agreement between predictions and measurements. The individual conclusions to each study are presented in Chapter 4. Some overall conclusions and suggestions for further work are presented in Chapter 5.

My dissertation is an inquiry into issues of home and belonging. For many people, the struggle to create a home in a "new" country, and the oscillation between a past "there" and present "here" have become ways of existence. Displacement challenges and raises questions regarding one's roots, affiliations, loyalty and belonging. The yearning for a place such as home becomes a site of inquiry for communities of displaced people. Destined to live between languages, cultures and national affiliations, im/migrants construct their homes in the particular place of "border." Acknowledging Home(s) and Belonging(s): Border Writing is "homeward" journeying through the discursive landscapes of nation, ethnicity, diaspora, and "race." It explores how border interrupts/initiates a discourse of home. I am an im/migrant researcher. The word "migrant" connotes impermanence, detachment and instability. From this positionality I introduce a slash into the word "immigrant" to transform these connotations into a permanence of migration. As autoethnographic and conversational inquiry, I explore im/migrant experiences from the position of "I," rather than "We." However, "I" is not a position of isolated individual(istic) exclusiveness, but a position of the personal articulation through the relationships with/in community. My research includes conversations with: theorists, colleagues from different disciplinary backgrounds, members of the "ethnic" communities to which I belong, and my daughter. I construct these conversations as borderzone arriculations where a "third space" emerges. The word dissertation stems etymologically from Greek dialegesthai, to converse, to dialogue; whereby dia- means "one with another," and legesthai means "to tell, talk." My dissertation endeavors to recognize - to know again, to know anew these deep layers of border as dialogue and conversation. As an im/migrant inquiry, my dissertation intends to create a different, mother knowing and culture of scholarship that broaden and deepen the space of academic researching/writing. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

Orientador: Ana Maria Fonseca de Almeida / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Educação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-22T10:41:46Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Polaz_KarenTerezaMarcolino_M.pdf: 2767664 bytes, checksum: 4df0c6763ecd05be5e43f24e752c987c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / Resumo: Esta pesquisa investiga os processos de construção de fronteiras sociais pelas famílias de alta renda em relação a outros grupos e como essas fronteiras se mantêm ao longo do tempo. Para tanto, analisou-se as práticas de educação de famílias associadas ao clube mais seletivo, em termos econômicos, de uma grande cidade do interior de São Paulo. Foram focalizados, particularmente, os filhos envolvidos no curso de equitação e nas atividades competitivas realizadas pelo departamento de hipismo. O trabalho de campo consistiu na realização de observações tanto das aulas, quanto das provas realizadas no clube e entrevistas aprofundadas e semi-estruturadas com mães, pais e filhos e, também, alguns funcionários. O clube é visto, neste trabalho, como um dos lugares onde os associados parecem estar "entre si" e onde suas crianças podem ser expostas à aprendizagem dos valores, modos de vida, sensibilidades, habilidades, percepções próprias ao grupo social a que são destinadas a pertencer. Os resultados mostram como as experiências educativas, incluindo a passagem por esse "esporte de elite", contribuem para a constituição de uma maneira de perceber a si e aos outros que pode estar diretamente ou não relacionada às formas concretas de agir sobre o espaço social à sua volta. / Abstract: This research investigates the processes involved in the formation of social boundaries in high income families in relation to other groups and how these boundaries are maintained over the course of time. The educational practices of families associated with the most selective club, in economic terms, of a large city in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo were analysed. In particular, the research focused on the children involved in the horsemanship/equitation course and on the competitive activities carried out by the horsemanship/equitation department. The field work consisted of observations of the classes, as well as of the tests applied in the club and of extensive and semi-structured interviews with mothers, fathers, children and also with some of the staff. The club is seen in this study as one of the places where the associates seem to be among their peers, and where their children can be exposed to the learning of the values, life styles, sensibilities, skills, perceptions appropriate to the social group they are destined to be affiliated with. The results show how the educational experiences, including the passage through this "elite sport", contribute to the constitution of a way to perceive oneself and others, that may be or may not be directly related to the concrete forms of acting on the social environment. / Mestrado / Educação, Conhecimento, Linguagem e Arte / Mestre em Educação

Like many West Indians, mixed-race Jamaican immigrants enter the United States with fluid notions about race and racial identifications that reflect socio-political events in their home country and that conflict with the more rigid constructions of race they encounter in the U.S. This dissertation explores the experiences of racially mixed Jamaicans in South Florida and the impact of those experiences on their racial self-characterizations through the boundary-work theoretical framework. Specifically, the study examines the impact of participants’ exposure to the one-drop rule in the U.S., by which racial identification has been historically determined by the existence or non-existence of black forebears. Employing qualitative data collected through both focus group and face-to-face semi-structured interviews, the study analyzes mixed-race Jamaicans’ encounters in the U.S. with racial boundaries, and the boundary-work that reinforces them, as well their response to these encounters. Through their stories, the dissertation examines participants’ efforts to navigate racial boundaries through choices of various racial identifications. Further, it discusses the ways in which structural forces and individual agency have interacted in the formation of these identifications. The study finds that in spite of participants’ expressed preference for non-racialism, and despite their objections to rigid racial categories, in seeking to carve out alternative identities, they are participating in the boundary-making of which they are so critical.

« Absw-de », « artificielle », « arbitraire » sont les qualificatifs les plus usités pour (dis)qualifier la frontière entre le Sénégal et la Gambie. L'enclave que constitue la Gambie dans le territoire sénégalais semble confirmer cette absurdité. La frontière apparaît a priori comme étant un accident de l'histoire. Une analyse des relations diplomatiques entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne à la fin du XIXe siècle montre que de cette frontière fut tracée à main levée autour d'une table à Paris. Son tracé fut bel et bien arbitraire et déconnecté des enjeux locaux. Pourtant, cette frontière héritée de la colonisation n'a que très peu été retouchée depuis les indépendances et sépare désormais deux États aux trajectoires territoriales et nationales dissociées. L'objectif de cette thèse a été de replacer les populations au cœur des interrogations, de montrer pomment à différents niveaux d'échelle cette frontière a été intégrée comme source d'opportunités plurielles ou comme outil de spéculation. Les pratiques trans-territoriales des réseaux de contrebande considérées comme transgressives au regard des systèmes normatifs apparaissent, en effet, comme l'indice d'une instrumentalisation et d'un jeu sur les distorsions créées à partir des frontières et soulignent un mode d'appropriation du cadre assigné. Les populations frontalières, dès l'époque coloniale, et ce qui est toujours d'actualité, sont fréquemment en demande d'une intervention des institutions étatiques afin de préciser les limites de la frontière car ce sont bien les limites de leur propriété foncière qui sont en jeu. Ce processus de territorialisation par le bas a contribué à générer une différenciation des identités nationales et à enraciner la frontière sénégalo-gambienne qui, aujourd'hui, n'apparaît plus si aberrante que ça. / Absurd", "artificial", "arbitrary" are the most commonly used adjectives to (dis)qualify the border between Senegal and Gambia. The enclave that constitutes Gambia in Senegalese territory seems to exemplify this absurdity. These boundaries appear to be an historical accident. An analysis of diplomaties relationships between France and Great Britain at the end of the 19th century shows very well that these borders we traced freehand around a table in Paris. It was indeed arbitrary and very much disconnected from local issues. However this heritage from colonialism have been barely removed since the independency of both of the countries and now separates to states whose local and national trajectories are dissociated. The main goal of this thesis it was to bring back questionings to show how different levels of scale how those boundaries have been integrated as a source of several opportunities or a tool for speculation. Trans-territorial practices of smuggling considerate transgressive in terms of normative systems appear actually as the evidence of manipulation and a set of distortions created from the borders and highlights some sort of appropriation of the assigned frame. Since the time of colonialism, people of different part of those borders have been asking for an intervention from local institutions from ail part to clearly define the limits because they are actually risking there land title over that ambiguity. This process of territorial issue contributed to dig the pit between those populations and create two national identities. That makes the boundaries even more real than ever at the point they became moral and acceptable for them.

This thesis investigates the myriad of responses and complex relationships residents have to the stigma attached to their neighbourhood, one categorised by the police as socially vulnerable (Nationella operativa avdelningen 2019). This research explores the narrative of place to diffuse some complexity around the multidimensional positions people have to stigma and stigmatising imagery of place. Drawing on qualitative interview material, with past and present residents in Hisings Backa, this thesis explores the narrative of stigmatisation from experiential and temporal perspectives of understanding the place of Hisings Backa. Using a feminist approach, the research highlights the importance of understanding everyday experiences of place and space in the context of locating the wider effects of place stigma.

Two-dimensional van der Waals materials have been a subject of intense research interest in recent years. High thermal conductivity of graphene can be utilized for many thermal management applications. In spite of possessing very high electron mobility, graphene can’t be used as transistors because of the absence of band gap; however transition metal dichalcogenides are another class of two-dimensional van der Waals materials with inherent band gap and show a great promise for future nanoelectronic applications. But in order to tailor these properties for commercial applications, we should develop a better understanding of the effect of extrinsic factors like size, rough edges, grain boundaries, mass-impurities, interaction with substrate etc. on thermal and electrical transport. Most materials exhibit a smooth ballistic-to-diffusive type of thermal transport in which when the sample size is small as compared to mean-free-path of phonons the transport is ballistic, whereas, when the sample size is large as compared to phonon mean-free-path, phonons undergo multiple scattering events and the thermal transport becomes diffusive in nature. However, graphene exhibits an atypical thermal transport behavior where thermal conductivity shows an increasing logarithmic trend even for samples far greater than the mean-free-path of phonons. We show that this anomalous behavior can be attributed to the significant contribution coming from momentum-conserving normal phonon-phonon scattering. Secondly, graphene grain boundaries have been found to significantly reduce thermal conductivity even in the presence of substrates. In spite of numerous studies on the effect of grain boundaries (GBs) on thermal conductivity in graphene, there lacks a complete correlation between GB resistance and misorientation angle across graphene GBs. We show a direct correlation between thermal GB resistance and mismatch angles with low angle mismatch can be captured only by GB roughness, whereas, large mismatch angles will lead to the formation of a disordered patch at the interface and it could significantly deteriorate the overall thermal conductivity even in the presence of substrates. GBs are found to affect electrical transport in two-dimensional systems as well. Owing to the excellent electronic properties and compactness of these two-dimensional materials, high quality 2D heterojunctions are the subject of intense research interest in recent years. Graphene-MoS2 heterojuctions are found to form ohmic contacts and show great potential for future nanoelectronic applications. We show that the interface resistance in Gr-MoS2 heterojuctions can affect the overall resistance of the device if the channel (MoS2) length is small at low carrier densities, whereas, at high carrier densities interface resistance do not play much role in determining the resistance of the entire device. However, if graphene and MoS2 grains are misorientated then interface resistance can play a crucial role in determining the overall resistance of the device. We also show a weak dependence of misorientation angles on GB resistance across MoS2 grain boundaries.

In this work, the relationship between grain boundary crystallography and grain boundary atomic structure is examined, using [1 0 0] - symmetric tilt grain boundaries in nickel. The structural unit model is used as a benchmark to evaluate the atomic structure description capacities of an emerging structural descriptor, the local environment representation, which itself is a refinement of the also-emergent Smooth Overlap of Atomic Positions (SOAP) descriptor. We show that the local environment representation encodes both the information of the structural unit model and additional information, such as distortion in the structural units and the arrangement of the structural units at the interface. The use of the local environment representation permits the use of a visualization tool known as SPRING to represent structural similarities between grain boundaries. With the SPRING representation, we produce objective evidence of a relationship between crystallography and atomic structure, at least for [1 0 0] - symmetric tilt grain boundaries.