published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Philosophy / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Master / Master of Philosophy

<p> A recent wave of advanced technologies for collecting and interpreting data offer new opportunities for laypeople to contribute to environmental monitoring science. This dissertation examines the conditions in which building knowledge infrastructures and embracing data &ldquo;cultures&rdquo; empowers and disempowers communities to challenge polluting industries. The processes and technologies of data cultures give people new capacities to understand their world, and to formulate powerful scientific arguments. However, data cultures also make many aspects of social life invisible, and elevate quantitative objective analysis over situated, subjective observation. This study finds that data cultures can empower communities when concerned citizens are equal contributors to research partnerships; ones that enable them to advocate for more nuanced data cultures permitting of structural critiques of status-quo environmental governance.</p><p> These arguments are developed through an ethnographic study of participatory watershed monitoring projects that seek to document the impacts of shale gas extraction in Pennsylvania, New York, and West Virginia. Energy companies are drilling for natural gas using highly controversial methods of extraction known as hydraulic fracturing. Growing evidence suggests that nearby watersheds can be impacted by a myriad of extraction related problems including seepage from damaged gas well casing, improper waste disposal, trucking accidents, and the underground migration of hydraulic fracking fluids. In response to these risks, numerous organizations are coordinating and carrying out participatory water monitoring efforts.</p><p> All of these projects embrace data culture in different ways. Each monitoring project has furthermore constructed its own unique infrastructure to support the sharing, aggregation, and analysis of environmental data. Differences in data culture investments and infrastructure building make some projects more effective than others in empowering affected communities. Four key aspects of these infrastructures are consequential to data culture formations and affordances: 1) the development of standardized monitoring protocols, 2) the politics of data collection technologies, 3) the frictions of database management systems, and 4) the power dynamics of organizational partnerships that come together around water monitoring efforts. Lessons from this analysis should inform future efforts to build infrastructures that address problems of environmental pollution in ways that also generate long-term capacity for empowering at-risk communities.</p>

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Perceptions of greed permeate the popular business and management environment, yet the scholarly literature in these areas has given scant attention to greed and perceptions of greed. In three laboratory studies, I investigated both the antecedents and consequences of perceived greed. Contrary to a number of literatures' treatment of greed as simply a synonym for selfishness, I proposed that the three antecedents of perceived greed are distributive injustice, inference of a selfish motive to acquire, and relative deprivation. I then explored four key outcomes of perceived of greed: personal anger, moral outrage, punishment behaviors, and social distancing behaviors. Results demonstrated that perceptions of greed are formed when an individual experiences a distributive injustice, combined with an inference of a selfish motive to acquire, and that each of personal anger, moral outrage, punishment behaviors and social distancing are consequences of perceiving others as greedy. Relative deprivation contributed to perceptions of greed, but in a manner different from the hypothesized model.

Using a critically oriented qualitative interpretivist approach, this research describes how principals conceptualize social justice and social justice dilemmas and how these understandings influence their practices. Focusing on the context of social justice from the perspective of two participant groups of five principals each from public and Catholic schools in a large urban centre in Western Canada, reflective discussions of professional practice occured through two semi-structured qualitative interviews with each participant and a series of three group dialogue sessions. This research is framed within the theories of social constructivism and situated learning as well as the concepts of educational leadership theory, social justice in education, identity and agency of school leaders, and reflective practice. As a contribution to a growing research base, this study offers a process for principals to explore social justice within the complexities and tensions of the dilemmas and decision-making of their practice. Discourse and dilemma analysis were used to render the findings from this study, which highlight normative practices of school leaders as manifested in individual actions focused on relationships and positional agency. However, this conceptualization obscures the power of historical, cultural, and ideological authority that is unconsciously replicated in the norms of schooling. Furthermore, principals see social justice within their own actions but do not connect it with activist aspirations to challenge social inequities. There are theory, practice, professional development, and research implications of this study which emphasize the need for a hybrid model of individual and collective leadership for social justice, hinged on collective curiosity, knowledge building, equity discourses, open cultures, and change visions to challenge the norms and politicization of schools as status-quo enhancing institutions.

In the last two decades, many countries going through transitional justice have established truth commissions. Unlike conventional war tribunals, most truth commissions are established by the local government and local human rights groups. Truth commissions are still a nascent political choice, yet a sizable literature has developed around it, evaluating its potential as a new institution for dealing with the past and moving towards restorative justice. This work examines four major questions debated in the transitional justice literature over truth versus justice: 1) whether or not a truth commission is an valid alternative mechanism to seeking out retributive justice, 2) whether or not truth commissions are the product of political compromise which avoiding justice, 3) if truth commissions can be the agent of new national identity and national unity founded on the principles of universal human rights, and 4) if amnesty can be legitimized. This work aims to determine to what extent the idea itself of truth commissions has been actualized up to now and what lot it may expect in the future, despite incidental political restrictions and difficulties in the political transition. Despite the common assertion that the goals of truth commissions are to bring about official acknowledgment of the past, restore the dignity of the victims, and achieve reconciliation in divided society, this paper does not intend to evaluate the truth commissions in the past based on these criteria; nor does this work intend to argue what truth commissions can resolve in the transitional justice societies. Rather, this paper seeks to uncover what social reaction or human emotions truth commissions in the past have evoked in a divided society. To explore the question, this paper focuses on the distinctive activities and merits of truth commissions from the standpoint of retributive justice and looks into the important implication in the interaction between the victims and the perpetrators, as well as between the audience and those two parties. Roger Errera, a member of the French Conseil d’Etat, stated that “Memory is the ultimate form of justice.” Inspired by the statement, this work argues that justice can be found in the act of pursing truth, remembering it, and responding to those voices from the past.

Manager fairness matters to employees and has important work outcomes. The current research explored whether differences exist in the rate of revision (change) of first impressions of a manager’s interactional and procedural fairness/unfairness. After observing impression-inconsistent information, participants’ initial impressions of interactional fairness/unfairness were hypothesized to exhibit greater amounts of impression revision than impressions of procedural fairness/unfairness. A 2 (fairness type: interactional vs. procedural) x 2 (initial behaviour: fair vs. unfair) x 2 (time of rating: initial vs. revised) experimental design involving 165 participants was implemented. Results show that the rate of change in ratings of interactional fairness over time was significantly greater than the rate of change in ratings of procedural fairness in the unfair initial-impression condition, as predicted. This was not true for the fair initial-impression condition. Unexpectedly, first impressions of fairness in general did not exhibit more revision than unfair first impressions. Implications are discussed.

No description available.

Thomas Pogge has famously argued that the present arrangement of international institutions that allows for human rights violations to occur on an ongoing basis is unjust, and further, that powerful states that create and maintain these institutions are responsible for the resulting human rights violations. By setting the rules of economic and political interaction in the global forum, the world’s rich and powerful stack the deck against the global poor, making sustainable development difficult and making extreme poverty, malnutrition, and premature death common outcomes. Pogge concludes that this implication of responsibility creates a moral requirement for powerful nations to take immediate steps to reform the global institutional order in such a way as to minimize the number of foreseeable human rights violations that occur within it. I believe that Pogge is only partly correct in his analysis. In this paper, I argue that the global institutional order, which is comprised of a complex web of global and regional organizations with both political and economic aims, is not unjust as Pogge suggests. However, even if the maintenance of these institutions does not constitute an injustice, I believe that there remains an important sense in which powerful states that support the present arrangement of international institutions are responsible for ongoing subsistence rights violations. Establishing this responsibility means that states that continue to support present institutions are then also morally responsible for ensuring these human rights violations are remedied as a matter of justice. In his 2007 book National Responsibility and Global Justice, David Miller provides the sort of account of responsibility that I believe is lacking in Pogge’s work. Differentiating between moral responsibility, outcome responsibility, and causal responsibility, Miller shows that what we mean when we determine a party is “responsible” for a particular outcome can depend on several factors, viz., the foreseeability and the justification for harm. I argue that the sorts of remedies that are required in cases of moral responsibility, outcome responsibility, and causal responsibility turn out to be quite different from one another. / Thesis (Master, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-24 23:40:45.915