This thesis presents an in-depth case study of a superdiverse neighbourhood in Glasgow where long-term white and ethnic minority communities reside alongside Roma migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, young professionals and other recent arrivals in traditional tenement housing. It focuses on the nature and extent of social contact and trust and on the role of context in shaping social relations. Employing the concepts of social milieu and intersectionality to identify social differences the research examines the relationships between five broad groupings of residents in the neighbourhood: Nostalgic Working Class, Scottish Asian, Liberal Homeowners, Kinship-sited Roma and Global Migrants. Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in contexts within the neighbourhood, theorised as being potential sites for intergroup contact. Three types of interactions were examined: Group-based Interactions, Neighbour Interactions and Street Interactions. The data comprised documentary evidence, participant and direct observations, in-depth qualitative and walk-along interviews with residents and local organisations. Findings show that rather than individualising and isolating residents, superdiversity can stimulate community activism, yet there remains a preference for interaction within one’s own social milieu. The research has found that the concentration of poverty and material conditions has a more profound effect on social relations than historical diversity and the extent to which diversity is normalised within local discourses. Trust judgements in a superdiverse context may rely more on shared interests, moral outlook and assessments of the context rather than the extent of social contact. The quasi-private spaces of shared residential spaces and community activities can facilitate encounters with the potential to build trust, yet for this to occur cooperation through shared activities may not be sufficient. Interactions may need to move beyond co-presence and conviviality to increased understanding and empathy through dialogue. At an aggregate level, the extent to which superdiversity contributes to social contact and trust within the neighbourhood is strongly influenced by contextual factors and wider economic processes influencing housing tenure mix, private renting, property maintenance, residential churn and environmental conditions. Through examining different types of social contacts, the dynamics of trust as well as contextual influences, this thesis offers insights into the causal processes and factors that influence social relations at a local level.

Magister Philosophiae - MPhil / Traditional leaders were occupying communal political positions sanctified by cultural mores and values who enjoy the legitimacy of particular communities to direct their affairs. Their basis of legitimacy is tradition, which includes the whole range of inherited culture and way of life, a people's history, moral and social values and the traditional institutions which survive to serve those values. As stated by Bennett, the structure of tribes contained no more than a few thousand indivuduals. Members were assumed to be related by a tie of kinship and due to their ancestry, they were a homogenious group. They were three rungs in the hierarchy of traditional leadership, the Kumkani (King), the Nkosi (or Chief, a term the traditional leaders do not like because it is of colonial imposition), and the lowest rung called the Headman or junior traditional leader. Traditional rulers required no special training as they were qualified for office by their ansestry alone; a king is a king because he is born to it. Furthermore, the all inclusive powers of government were not differentiated, in the Western manner, into judicial, administrative and legislative categories. In South Africa the office was hereditary according to the principle of primogeniture in the male line. There was a duty to consult councillors and to act for the benefit of the people. Even though many of the issues of traditional leadership were similar across the country, it must be accepted that traditional leadershipis the expression of different nations. Each African nation had a dirresent system of customary law and different models of traditional societal organisation in which traditional leadership plays diferent roles. If the grip of traditional leaders on the masses of the people were not broken, it would not be easy for colonial powers to get a listening ear from the people and therefore to govern as they saw fit. / South Africa

During the fifties it was not unusual to measure economic growth of a country through the presentation of statistics around its energy consumption. The higher the consumption, the higher the economic growth. However, the unprecedented economic growth experienced in the global village during the 21st Century, is steering the ship in the direction of a disaster, measured from a sustainable energy supply point of view, the massive damage to the environment as a result of the high use of dominating fossil fuels and a lack of the implementation of clean energy strategies. Apartheid, to a large extent, contributed to unacceptable socio-economic conditions in low-income urban communities. The Reconstruction and Development Programme of government from 1994 attempted, inter alia, to mitigate the housing demand for the disadvantaged citizens. However, over the years, poor quality in construction of these houses and other factors impacted negatively on the living conditions of the homeowners. Government realised that it had to change this situation and policy programmes with action plans focussed, inter alia, on the roll-out of solar water heaters (SWH), insulation of ceilings and repairs to the dilapidated houses. This study aims to identify the key factors that influence the successful implementation of clean energy interventions in low-income urban communities in South Africa. The research showed that it is indeed possible to implement such projects successfully, if the key factors are acknowledged, as demonstrated in this study.Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

This thesis explores men’s perceptions and experiences of fathering and fatherhood in China. It is informed by a growing body of theoretical and empirical research regarding fathers and fatherhood and also draws upon research that has made linkages between masculine identities and men’s identities as fathers. However, little research has investigated men’s experiences of fathering and fatherhood in China. Thus, employing the principles of social constructionism and a qualitative research design, this study comprised a total of thirty-one in-depth interviews with Chinese fathers. These men were split into two groups; one group of relatively younger fathers and another group of relatively older fathers. The findings show the complex inter-relationships between fathering and China’s rapidly changing social, economic and political context, including the One Child Policy. The thesis also focuses on aspects of ‘traditional’ fatherhood defined in terms of fathers’ roles as moral guardians, disciplinarians and educators. Finally, the thesis explores aspects of contemporary fathering in China, including the apparent shift to an increasingly involved fathering and the ways in which men reconcile their changing identities as fathers and their identities as men.

This thesis conceptually explores the becoming of transnational subjects. Critical interventions into disciplinary modes of knowledge production on such subjects have long problematised uni-dimensional, essentialist and identitarian approaches, but have had a limited impact on the mainstream(s) they address. In a postdisciplinary move, this thesis reads the literatures on transnational social spaces in migration studies, poststructuralist and new materialist insights on subject formation, intersectional approaches in gender studies and queer theory through one another to propose a queer intersectional approach to transnational subjects. Shifting the focus to the spaces transnationality takes place in rather than normatively defined ethnic and national communities, and interrogating intersectionality’s tendency to mark out particularly gendered and racialised bodies for intersectional analysis allows for exploring heterogeneity and multiplicity within transnational spaces. The queering of intersectionality disrupts the reliance on binary variables of much transnational migration research, towards a situated analysis of the becoming of subjects in and through the transnational space. In doing so, it not only complicates the here/there binarism transnational studies have relied on, but calls heteronormative assumptions underlying gender and transnational migration research into question, and draws attention to the relationship between transnationality, gender, sexualities and the (non-)normative alignments across those and other axes of difference. In an illustrative case study, this queer intersectional approach to the becoming of transnational subjects is then put into critical dialogue with the British South Asian transnational space through an analysis of scholarly representations of British Asians, the Channel 4 dramas Britz and Second Generation, and a Tumblr blog.

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Dissertation (MSc (Botany))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Plant Science / unrestricted

A critically rationalist approach to ever changing environments, the scheme questions current policies that negatively affect locals with regards to a dam development in a remote area of Lesotho. In so, it proposes a framework in which the various communities affected by the dam can utilize new and existing resources to realign their livelihoods to one that ties in with the development. Within this framework, a hotel/lodge is proposed as an income generating initiative that capitalizes on the new dam and the Maluti Mountains as tourist attractions. / Dissertation (MArch(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Architecture / unrestricted

The intent of this thesis is to conduct an empirical study of social capital in a single resource dependent fishing community, Petty Harbour, Newfoundland. The community under study, Petty Harbour, has a 335 year attachment to what was its primary fishery, Northern cod (Gadus morhua). This ended in 1992 when the Canadian government implemented an indefinite moratorium on Northern cod. Historically the community has exhibited high levels of activism aimed for the most part at protectionism of its primary economic mainstay, the fishery. Social capital by definition implies available resources embedded in social structures such as informal networks that can be accessed and mobilized by individuals or groups for either personal or communal gain (Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 2000; Krishna, 2002; Onyx, 2005). High levels of social capital can lead to collective activism, which according to some, is the single most important contributing factor to sustainability because without activism, an outcome of social capital, there maybe no hope for recovery and sustainability. My hypothesis is that the extent to which one is socially connected through network ties to close friends and/or family (structural social capital) and the level of trust in neighbors (cognitive social capital) will positively correlate with their involvement with activism. Leadership and sense of ownership are introduced as additional independent variables to further explore explanations for the community's level of collective activism and stewardship of the resource. Treating activism as a dependent variable, I am going to examine social capital indicators, suggesting network ties (weak, strong) as independent variables that can partially explain the historically high level of activism. I am also going to propose that the independent variables leadership and sense of ownership will also positively correlate with activism. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

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This thesis crosses the research fields of cultural policy and urban design, and examines the policies and political contexts of a new globally significant experiment in creative city development: the Seoul Digital Media City (DMC). The DMC is a newly built urban district, intentionally structured as a creative cluster. This research investigation opens by considering the concept of 'creativity', and the way it has recently animated national policies for urban, economic, as well as cultural, development. Throughout this thesis, the ever-present conundrum of 'East-West' cultural interchange persists, and the thesis attends to the challenges for research in understanding how major Western policy trends (like 'creative city' and 'creative cluster') are received, adapted and implemented, all the while subject to the specific requiremenets of national Asian policy aspirations. The thesis traces the developmental trajectory of the DMC project, and in the context of explaining its rationale, it conveys the various ways in which the DMC articulates a confluence of political ideals. It presents the main discursive influences of the Creative City trend on South Korea and particularly the municipal government of its capital, Seoul. It explains the political and economic contexts on which Creative City discourse has gained traction, along with the significance of the subsequent 'Korean Wave' phenomenon. Largely from an engagement with the literature of the creative city discourse, this thesis articulates fresh criteria for an empirical analysis of the DMC, suitably contextualized by observations on the local contexts of Seoul city urban development and planning. These criteria are used in a case analysis examination of the DMC, which in turn generate further discussion on the implications for adapting Western Creative City policies. The central dimension of the case analysis concerns the assessment of the 'creative' content of the DMC, and the terms by which we can define the DMC as creative. The case analysis, however, demonstrates that 'creativity' in the DMC is both compromised and fraught with conceptual paradoxes, particularly with regard the issues of authenticity and identity. Nonetheless, the thesis suggests ways in which a substantive role for arts and culture could provide pathways for development.