Är alla organisationers öde att utvecklas mot oligarki även då syftet är att de ska drivas demokratiskt och huvudsakligen på frivillig basis? Robert Michels, i sitt kända arbete från 1911 om organisationer och demokrati – Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie – talar om oligarkins järnlag. En växande organisation ökar behovet av anställda - organisationen professionaliseras. Anställda får ett kunskapsövertag gentemot de frivilligt arbetande vilket genererar en handlingsfrihet och ett maktövertag. Medlemmar betraktas som mindre kompetenta vilket gör det legitimt för ledningen att dominerar, styra och ta egna beslut. Vid konflikter väger ledningens ord tyngre – organisationen har utvecklats till ett fåtalsvälde. Michels studie genomfördes för snart hundra år sedan. Idenna uppsats undersöks en av agensfrivilligorganisationer – Förbundet djurens rätt.Genom deltagande och reflekterande observation, intervjuer,genomgång av dokument samt egen erfarenhet av organisationen prövas om oligarkins järnlag fortfarande kan sägas råda också i en frivilligorganisation som Förbundet djurens rätt i dag.

Grounded theory was used to collect and analyze data from a literature review and the lived experience with First Nations participants, a non-First Nations caseworker, and an Indigenous scholar in order to answer questions related to permanency for Aboriginal children-in-care. Assumptions underlying this study were the difference in child-rearing philosophies between First Nations and Western society – specifically as to what practice each culture considers to be in the best interests of the child. Also, negotiating “best interest of the child” lengthens the time it takes for children-in-care to find permanent homes, which may prevent them from achieving the self-confidence that comes from healthy identity formation. Research resulted in identifying effective practices, along with questions for further study. Some effective practices include ensuring the focus of care is on the child, reinforcing the importance of parenting; developing cross-culturally enhanced social work practices; cultural planning; open and custom open adoption; facilitating cross-cultural connections; and the importance of language in cross-cultural understanding.

Access to potable water has been on the forefront of the international agenda for almost three decades. The international community has been working together in developing potable water management programs and improving potable water access. This thesis examines how the nature of rural communities influences water usage and rural potable water projects in Nicaragua. Factors such as proximity to urban environments and exposure to nongovernmental organizations are demonstrated to play a role in shaping community expectations and satisfaction with potable water projects. The author proposes approaches for addressing urban influence focused on improving flexibility of project consultation processes, strengthening project monitoring, and enhancing the level of community knowledge with respect to available potable water systems. The author briefly explores how this case study is transferrable to other communities in developing countries.

This thesis is about exploring and theorizing about the contemporary meanings and (re)production of El Güegüense, a politically charged ancient Nicaraguan dance-drama. The ethnographic affair revolves around the researcher’s experiences learning the Güegüense tradition at the Nicaraguan Academy of Dance in Managua. Utilizing “the apprenticeship” as methodology, which has perhaps most effectively been teased out in Loïc Wacquant’s (2004) Body and Soul, the researcher fleshes out under what circumstances one becomes a practitioner of the Güegüense tradition, what it means to be a cultural performer, and whether this ancient physical tradition still demonstrates and embodies its anti-colonial themes. After conducting interviews with leading practitioners, the author utilizes the performance as a vector of knowledge and speaks not only to how the performance culturally manifests but also to how contested its meanings truly are, as well as the recent depoliticizing of the performance, which it is argued is a direct result of the state becoming involved with this ancient physical tradition. / Thesis (Master, Kinesiology & Health Studies) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-21 08:53:02.248

<p>This dissertation offers an account of precarious neoliberal subjectivity by examining the suffering of the privileged as it relates to the practice of Western yoga in California's Silicon Valley. Yoga culture underlines creating connections and community. But my research, based on twenty-seven month fieldwork in an epicenter of the global high-tech economy, reveals that yoga practitioners actually seek to experience and create "space." I suggest that yoga practitioners often cultivate an interiority aimed at giving themselves room from the judgment and expectations of others. </p><p>This dissertation portrays the complicated lives of people who are more privileged than most. In so doing, this study questions the separation between "real" and "privileged" suffering; and it explores the ethical and political implications of the problems of the well-off. I suggest that the destructive aspects of neoliberal capitalism and late modernity do not hurt only the marginalized traditionally studied by anthropologists, but also--albeit in very different ways--those who supposedly benefit from them. The social scenes of modern yoga are sites of ambivalently embodied neoliberal logic, where clusters of promises and recipes for an "art of living" are critical about aspects of capitalism while enjoying its comfort. Even though the yogic ethic and politics do not adhere to the anthropological ideals of political action, Western yoga is often an ethical practice that does not simply reproduce neoliberal logic, but also shifts it slightly from within. By creating disruption of subjectivity and gaining space from old and habitual ways of being, yoga sometimes opens up a new territory of change and reflection.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation examines the conjuncture of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and migrant social life in the urban space of Beijing as a problematic of what Foucault called biopower, where distinct logics of market and state power deploy techniques of civil society and culture in the form of public-private partnerships. The unique effect of this conjuncture is an expanding logic of power that obfuscates lines of antagonism between capital and labor, requiring new theoretical and methodological insight into how power, resistance, and antagonism might be conceived in the biopolitical era. </p><p>Drawing on recent work on biopower and new theories of antagonism and subjectivity, I argue (following Badiou's work) that both power and resistance must be articulated in their divided tendencies, which allows us to work through how certain tendencies may be contradictory and complementary, and to redraw the lines of antagonism at the level of subjectivity in terms of these divided tendencies. These lines of antagonism don't fall between public/private, market/state, or civil society/state, but along a process by which subjectivities are produced and sustained at a "distance" from the logic of their placement in society, or integrated into power by various strategies of civil society and culture. The practices and theoretical productions of one migrant cultural organization in Beijing, whose project centers on the production of new migrant subjectivity and culture in the transformation of self and society, provides insight into how we might conceive of politics as new forms of "distance" from the logic of biopower.</p><p>Through over twelve months of intensive fieldwork from 2010-2011 and follow up trips the following year on the intersection between Corporate Social Responsibility and migrant social life in Beijing, I trace the techniques by which antagonistic subjectivity is intervened upon. First, I examine the surrounding discourses, logics, and conditions of knowledge production on culture that inform the projects of migrant subjectivity from a historical perspective, and reveal a theoretical impasse in the displacement and disavowal of revolutionary culture to grapple with how to re-think antagonistic contradictions in the pervading market logic of difference. The continuation of this impasse into the biopolitical era is brought into focus through the state and market turn to "culture industries" that include, mirror, and delimit migrant social life in Beijing. Problematizing the rise of self-articulated migrant subjectivity and migrant culture amidst these public-private projects, I then turn to the practices of one migrant organization whose project draws upon a legacy of struggle for self-organized and self-run migrant collective practices to successfully confront and block a situation of forced demolition and displacement. Analyzing how elements from state, market, and "civil society" interacted through public-private partnerships in the situation of daily migrant struggles, I identify the importance of the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility in the urban space of Beijing and the growth of biopolitical practices of intervention upon the migrant issue. I argue that the effect of the diffusion of Corporate Social Responsibility as a social practice is to enroll migrants as active participants in a social life that makes their subjectivities and productive activities visible to the public sphere. Lines of antagonism can thus be drawn by taking up distinctions between subjectivities oriented toward "the public," "self-governance," and the CSR "community," versus collective self-organizing. I conclude by arguing that if biopower seeks to mirror practices of resistance and power by drawing upon the self-activities of cooperative subjects, then thinking about the self-organized and self-run migrant organization as a new form of "distance" may shed light on how antagonism and political struggle might be redefined today.</p> / Dissertation

<p>Young people in Japan contend with shifting understandings of family and friends, insecure jobs, and changing frames around global and national identities. The category of youth itself is unsettled amid a long period of social and economic change and perceived widely as crisis. Within contested social categories of youth, how do young Japanese people use the city, media, and body practices to create flexible, meaningful sociality across spaces of work, education, and play? What do youthful sociality and practices reveal about globally oriented connections and how do they inform conceptions of the future, kinship, gender, and pluralized identities? In short, what is the embodied and affective experience of being young as the category itself is increasingly unstable and full of risks? These questions shape the contours of this project.</p><p>This dissertation considers youth through its becoming, that is, the lived enactment of youth as energy, emotion, and sensibility always in motion and within range of cultural, spatial, bodily, and technological forces. Three groups of young people in this layered latitudinal study demonstrate various relations to the city street, visual media, globalized identities, contingent work within affect and cultural production, and education. The three groups are distinctly different but share surprising points of connection. </p><p>I lived alongside these three groups to understand the ways young people are innovating within the shifting form of youth. I skated with male skateboarders in their teens to early 30s who created Japan's most influential skate company; I taught kids attending a specialized cram school for kikokushijo (children who have lived abroad due to a parent's job assignment); I observed and hung out with young creative workers, the photographers, web designers, and graphic artists who produce the visual and textual content and relationships composing commercial "youth culture." </p><p>My project examines how these young people redefine youth through bodily practices, identities, and economic de/attachments. The skaters' embodied actions distribute/dissipate their energies in risky ways outside formal structures of labor. The kikokushijo children, with their bi-cultural fluency produced in circuits of capitalist labor, offer a desirable image of a flexible Japanese future while their heterogeneous identities appear threatening in the present. The creative workers are precariously positioned as "affective labor" within transglobal (youth) cultural production, working to generate visual and textual content constant stressful uncertainties. All three groups share uneasy ground with capitalist practices, risky social identities, and crucially, intimate relations with city space. In attending to their practices through ethnographic participation and video, this dissertation explores questions concerning youthful relations to space produced in material contacts, remembered geographies of other places and imaginary urban sites. </p><p>The dissertation itself is electronic and non-linear; a formal enactment of the drifting contact between forms of youth. It opens up to lines of connection between questions, sites, events, and bodies and attempts an unfolding of affect, imagination, and experience to tell stories about histories of gender and labor, city life, and global dreams. It asks if the globalized forms of Japanese youth avoid the risks of the impossible secure for the open possibilities of becoming and thus refuse containment by crisis?</p> / Dissertation

(Agro)pastoralism in Sahelian Niger, as elsewhere, operates through household enterprises. Katsinen-ko’en (Fulбe) households, interconnected within kin and community networks, utilize a range of flexible strategies to manage a variety of ecological and economic risks. This dissertation argues that (agro)pastoralist households and communities maintain or improve viability in risky environments first by employing various mobility patterns, among other strategies, and relying on the tightly knit interdependence between household and herd. Secondly, households that most successfully sustain a cooperative integrity (i.e. partnerships between husband and wife, or wives, and parents and children) to negotiate decisions and strategies best withstand adversities such as droughts. The continuance of vital links between household and herd helps the household enterprise more easily weather difficult times and profit during advantageous times. Thirdly, the transfer of endowments from parents to children of ecological, economic and political knowledges and socio-economic networks ensures the continuity of family livelihoods. This dissertation analyzes a range of household/herd mobility patterns on a livelihood continuum from sedentary agropastoralism to exclusive pastoralism, and the household decisions that lead to those mobilities. In this way, it adds to a growing body of literature that examines household strategies employed in very uncertain natural environments, contributing to pastoral studies and environmental anthropology. By folding household economics and political ecology into household ecology, it analyses resource and asset transfers within and between households, all under the influence of the natural and political-economic environments. Contributing to development anthropology, I argue that the most important buffer against the risks of unpredictable environments is a stable, undivided household, migrating with and managing its own herd. I conclude by showing how development research and projects should support household/herd integrity to enhance livelihood security. When government or development agencies institute policies and projects that remove children from the household, or separate households and herds, they endanger the integrity of the household and the reproduction of livelihoods that make essential contributions to national economies. Rather than urging pastoralists to modify their livelihoods to fit images held by ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION administrators, these organizations and agencies should help pastoralists to build on adaptations that already facilitate their management of risky environments.

<p>"Harm reduction," or services aimed at reducing the negative effects of high-risk behavior, like drug use, is a fledgling social movement and relatively new type of service provision in the United States. Although it contains guiding principles, it also has many different manifestations. The varying ways in which harm reduction can be implemented reflect the numerous ways in which it can be defined, and this has been a major point of critique in recent literature. Although many sources speak about its definition, very few explore how harm reduction workers actually define their work, and I would argue that harm reduction is actually defined on a daily basis by those performing it. This study explores how service providers both define and practice harm reduction in their everyday activities at a syringe exchange program facility. </p>

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