This thesis investigates the question of how East Asian universities have engaged in urban processes as spatially grounded variegated social processes from the colonial era to recent decades by adopting a comparative urbanism approach. Historically, universities in the US and Europe have been influential urbanisation actors in their hosting cities, having occupied a substantial amount of land. The relationship between a university and its hosting city was often defined as ‘Town and Gown’; that implies an adversarial link, but this traditional relationship has changed. Universities in East Asia have also participated in urbanisation processes in diverse ways since their birth, but the dynamics behind this multi-faceted process has rarely been addressed. Using research data collected mainly from fieldwork in Singapore and South Korea, including 42 interviews and archival records, this thesis highlights the relationship between universities and cities in East Asia, focusing on three distinctive periods: the colonial, developmental, and postdevelopmental eras. In all these enquiries, land ownership by universities acts as a thread that weaves the diverse facets of the role of universities into different periods. The findings of this thesis can be summarised as follows: Firstly, colonialism has been influential in the university-urbanisation relationship. During the colonial era, the East Asian university emerged as a symbolic and political institution in the city. Various colonial and local actors surrounded the colonial universities to promote or fight against the ideology of imperialism, which demonstrates the diverse aspects of colonialism in cities of East Asia. Such legacies of colonialism are still found today. Secondly, the East Asian developmental state is a variegated concept. The university plays an important role in society, but the way in which the university engages with the developmental state has varied across geographies. The developmental state attempted to utilise universities to support rapid economic and urban development, but such efforts were not always successful. This finding challenges the conventional understanding that assumes a homogeneous conceptualisation of the East Asian developmental state. Lastly, the entrepreneurial character of East Asian universities has become increasingly evident while the presence of the state is still visible. Thus the role of East Asian universities in urban processes has also become more diverse and dynamic in the postdevelopmental state since the 1990s. While the entrepreneurial university has a long history in East Asia, the globalised and financialised interests are penetrating the university more actively through various urban development projects. This thesis concludes that there is an emerging need to recognise East Asian universities as land-based institutions playing an influential role in diverse and uneven urban processes. Investigating universities also provides an opportunity to identify linkages between their colonial legacies and contemporary urban processes in East Asia.

This thesis explores Chinese older people’s perception and experiences of ageing and age care in an urban neighbourhood in Beijing China. It is informed by a growing body of theoretical and empirical research regarding ageing and also draws upon research that has made linkage between ageing and place. However, little research has investigated older people’s experiences of ageing in a rapid changing urban neighbourhood and how these environmental changes affect their day to day lives in China. Thus, by conducting 34 in-depth interviews, participant observation in three urban neighbourhoods in urban Beijing and photography produced by the researcher, this study took a social constructionist stance and ethnographic research design to explore older people’s ageing experience in a rapidly changing environment, in this case, the role of the neighbourhood outdoor places in their day to day lives. The findings from this study demonstrate that the Western understanding of AIP is not sufficient to apply to the current social, economic and cultural context in urban Beijing. As the nascent concept of Ageing in place (AIP) has been embedded within broad socio-cultural institutions, numerous institutional legacies and socio-cultural factors directly and indirectly related to AIP serve as the discursive resources that shape and inform individuals’ disputant discourses. These factors not only frame their basic logics, vocabularies and moral reasoning but also shape their structural positions on housing access, pension rights and later-life care. Participants in these three neighbourhoods have been constantly constructing and reconstructing their understanding of ageing and AIP with the wider economic, political, social and cultural influences. These interesting perceptions of and attachment to neighbourhood engagement invite further theoretical reflections, as ageing and age care for older people in China have been greatly influenced by existing cultural norms, as well as new social trends, in a far more complicated and ambivalent fashion than commonly assumed and observers have envisioned.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

This thesis consists of four independent chapters on urban and development economics. Chapter 1 looks at the issue of distance and labour outcomes in urban areas of a developing country. It studies the effect of a housing relocation program on the labour supply and living conditions of low-income households across major cities in South Africa. For this, I use four waves of panel microdata collected between 2008 and 2014, and I exploit the arbitrary eligibility rules of the policy with a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to obtain causal estimates. In the short-term of two to four years following relocation, I find that the labour supply of recipient households decreases by one standard deviation, driven mostly by a decrease in female hours. I find evidence of a large increase in distance (km) to economic opportunities. This is likely to be an important factor behind the decline, directly or indirectly through within-family shifts in livelihood strategies. Evidence is limited regarding improvements in housing and neighbourhood quality. Chapter 2 examines how neighbourhoods where children grow up can play a significant part in shaping their opportunities later in life. It provides unique evidence in a developing country context by using the random allocation of households to ethnically segregated residential areas during apartheid in South Africa. The main observations come from a panel of young adults aged 14 to 22 at baseline and residing in the city of Cape Town. It covers 5 periods of their life between 2002 to 2009. I focus on black children in families living in former black-only residential areas. I find compelling evidence of neighbourhood effects on labour and educational outcomes in adulthood across deprived neighbourhoods. The differences are more marked for young women, suggesting a stronger hold of social norms and institutions for young men. Location, both in terms of access to jobs and access to higher quality public amenities (schools), social networks and the underlying human capital composition of the neighbourhood are positively correlated to having better socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood. Chapter 3 moves beyond socioeconomic outcomes, to study the relationship between extreme weather events and disease in developing cities. As climate change is making extreme weather events more frequent around the world, urban residents in developing countries have become more vulnerable to health shocks due to poor sanitation and infrastructure. The chapter empirically measures the relationship between weather and health shocks in the urban context of sub-Saharan Africa. Using unique high-frequency datasets of weekly cholera cases and accumulated precipitation for wards in Dar es Salaam, we find robust evidence that extreme rainfall has a significant positive impact on weekly cholera incidence. The effect is larger in wards that are more prone to flooding, have higher shares of informal housing and unpaved roads. We identify limited spatial spillovers. Time-dynamic effects suggest cumulated rainfall increases cholera occurrence immediately and with a lag of up to 5 weeks. Chapter 4 addresses questions related to the local impact of economic policies in developing countries. Specifically, I provide evidence on the local effect of a popular trade policy: export processing zones. The chapter examines the impact of their establishment on the levels of per capita expenditure across Nicaraguan municipalities for the period 1993 to 2009. Using the time and cross-section variation of park openings in a difference-in-differences framework, I find that on average consumption levels increased by 10% to 12% in treated municipalities. Yet, average effects mask significant disparities across the expenditure distribution. The results suggest that the policy benefited the upper-tail the most: expenditure levels increased by up to 25% at the 90th percentile. At the opposite end of the distribution, only the bottom decile registered a positive increase in expenditure levels of close to 10% across the period.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of urban development in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork, this manuscript explores the way that the city of Colombo is increasingly being re-imagined by policymakers, developers, government officials and elite residents as a “global city” similar to Singapore or Dubai. As my multi-sited project demonstrates, however, these visions of the new Colombo are far from being the current reality. Through chapters exploring diverse corners of Colombo including: a suspended Chinese-funded waterfront development project; a coastal fishing enclave; a new marketplace opened under the former government; and the city’s luxury apartment buildings, this thesis offers insight both into the varied forms of dispossession faced by the urban poor and working class as well as the aspirational projects designed to appeal to the Colombo elite. I argue that the primary principle governing Colombo’s urban development is the idea of “hubness,” an aspirational trope which emphasizes connection and mobility, especially across the Indian Ocean region. Rather than taking its island geography as a sign of insularity, many Sri Lankans hope to leverage what is now framed as the country’s “strategic location” to boost its appeal and transform Sri Lanka – and by extension, Colombo – into a major global hub connecting Asia, Africa and the Middle East. I argue that hubness as an ideal is both a spatial and temporal claim. Rather than being a self-evident statement of geography, hubness discourse is also a specific understanding of futurity. These complex entanglements of spatiality and temporality are present in each site. The ethnographic findings presented in this thesis point to the need to reconsider global city making as a process suffused with uncertainty, rather than as a straightforward, linear evolution. Global cities, I suggest, are not fixed or static entities, but contingent urban forms which are actively created as material and symbolic entities through various forms of dispossession and aspiration.

No description available.

Social networking services (SNS) like Facebook are used by an increasing number of people worldwide for social exchange. Given the amount of time that is spent on these online services, they are likely to have an impact on how individuals interact with each other. On this note, anecdotal examples emphasize both positive (i.e., expanding or strengthening relationships) and negative effects (i.e., bullying, feelings of disconnectedness). To shed more light on this issue, scholars from various disciplines have started to investigate the significance of social networking services on interpersonal relationships and on how individuals might experience benefits on the one hand, or face challenges through the use of online services on the other hand [1, 2]. One research interest that has gained significant attention in recent years is the analysis of effects that social networks may have on the quantity and quality of interpersonal online social support in different contexts. [... from the introduction]

This thesis challenges established scholarship on fan cultures—based on foundational assumptions of fandom as an ‘imaginary community’ (Hill, 2016) bounded off from the mainstream—on a theoretical and methodological level. It traces these assumptions to canonised theoretical frameworks of Bourdieu’s (1984) economistic concept of cultural capital and to a lesser extent Foucault’s (1966) heterotopic spaces of otherness, and breaks with this tradition by placing fan/scholar practices in relation to the overarching socio-cultural structures and ideologies they remain part of. By synthesising a new theoretical framework from Bourdieu’s (1977) system of dispositions (habitus) and Foucault’s (1977) disciplinary notion of the panoptic sort (Gandy, 1993), I shift focus from mapping fandom to exploring scholarly sorting practices and the dispositional attitudes they serve. This not only explores naturalised fan scholarship practices, but also provides a means for scholars to move away from them. I then examine two academic case studies, analysing scholarly discourse of the BBC’s Sherlock and Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, chosen for their cultural omnipresence and abundance of scholarly discourse. Each case study is contrasted with over 400,000 words of discourse collected from 400 participant accounts through the transnational, multi-sited, ethnographic ‘Views on Fandom Project’. Through this triangulation, I demonstrate that scholar-fans implicitly draw from established brand, media, and fannish discourses, resulting in accounts that uncritically reproduce established, neoliberal value systems as the natural order of things. Through new theoretical pathways opened up by the framework of disposition and panoptic sorting—Sloterdijkian (2009) spherology and the Archerian (2012) reflexive imperative—I theorise the absence of scholar-fan reflexivity regarding these practices as attempts to maintain dispositional security. Additionally, I demonstrate that by focusing on fan/scholar dispositions, scholarship can break with this tradition of implicitly reproducing established discourses based on assumptions of fandom as bounded and different, and move on to critically analyse the complex relationships between fan cultures and the mainstream.

This thesis questions the use of the 'voice' metaphor in contemporary Irish cultural studies in order to examine the ways in which gendered identities are constructed in some Irish Catholic communities in twentieth-century Ireland. With reference to novels by Brian Moore and John McGahern as well as to Judith Butler's theories of performativity and citational practices, it argues that gendered identities are constructed through the repetitive citation of hegemonic cultural discourses. This thesis focuses on the ways in which gendered identities are produced and maintained through the citation of the official discourses of the Catholic Church and the State as well as the more mundane discourses related to popular nationalism and the family. The first two chapters concentrate on novels whose protagonists are trying to construct powerful identities in urban Irish society through the manipulation of gendered discourses. The discussion of Moore's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne identifies some of the strategies through which conventional Irish women's voices are constructed and questions the validity of the category of 'authentic' women's voices. In the chapter relating to McGahem's The Pornographer, the powerful, abstract male voice is exposed as a performative construct which is sustained only through the abjection of those elements which disrupt the narrator's performance of masculinity. The remaining chapters concentrate on the use of idealised images such as those of the 'woman-as-nation' and the iconised mother in novels by Moore and McGahem. Moore's The Mangan Inheritance provides the basis for a discussion of whether or not voices attributed to women in texts by Irish men can be read in ways that disrupt the apparent authority of Irish men's voices. This thesis discusses the issues raised when men participate in the deconstruction of idealised images of Irish women. The final chapter examines the processes through which conventional identities are discursively constructed and maintained in two novels by John McGahem: The Dark and Amongst Women. This thesis contends that through the strategic redeployment of those voices attributed to idealised images of Irish women, voices which are conventionally regarded as silent, patriarchal gendered identities can be destabilised or displaced.

Despite increased academic focus on knowledge management, the creation and management of knowledge within organisations has received limited attention. Whilst a considerable body of international literature exists on the role of communities of practice in managing knowledge in organisations, the South African literature is largely silent on communities of practice as a means of managing knowledge and thus represents a gap for further research. The objective of the research is to assess which critical success factors identified in the academic literature are rated as being most relevant to members of communities of practice in a single organisational context, being Multichoice. Further, the research assesses whether critical success factors vary by type and life cycle phase of communities of practice at Multichoice. A deductive, quantitative approach within the positivist paradigm is employed. Specifically, the descriptive survey questionnaire approach is adopted. The research reveals a strong resemblance between the critical success factors identified in the literature and those rated by members of communities of practice at Multichoice. In addition, the research demonstrates that critical success factors vary – albeit marginally - with both the type, and stage in the life cycle, of communities of practice at Multichoice. All the factors identified, with the exception of two factors, are rated as `critical’ to the success of communities of practice at Multichoice. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted