While the strict boundaries and ideal measurement of prediabetes remain contested internationally, health officials and private donors in the health sector in Mexico have promoted its diagnosis and treatment as a key strategy in the nation’s fight against diabetes. This dissertation examines the circumstances under which officials have come to view prediabetes diagnosis as a feasible strategy for the Mexican context and the implications of treating individuals, situated across deep lines of social inequality, who are not yet sick, but deemed at risk of developing disease. Set against Mexico’s chronic disease crisis, where diabetes was declared a national sanitary emergency in 2016 and where experts suggest up to 40% of adults likely have prediabetes, this dissertation engages the prediabetes diagnosis as a lens through which to illuminate the social forces, values, and assumptions currently at work in Mexican health politics. The project foregrounds the dilemmas raised by highly medicalized and clinic-based approaches to chronic disease prevention and mobilizes the case of prediabetes in Mexico to illustrate the broader convergence of the fields of biomedicine and public health. Centered in Mexico City, field research for this project was carried out over 30 months, employing multi-sited ethnographic methods, including 106 in-depth interviews (47 of which were with individuals diagnosed with prediabetes and their families), observations of 382 medical exams, and attendance at 71 scientific, community health, and activist-hosted events. Alongside the powerful influence of the pharmaceutical industry, my findings bring to the fore a new set of actors and circumstances involved in the circulation of predisease diagnosis to this developing country context. These include (1) the epistemological limits imposed by “projectification” in global health science, (2) the influence and ideologies of an elite-mega philanthropist and his Foundation’s conviction that technological innovation will foster better health, and (3) local and global imaginaries that endorse the power of Big Data analytics to solve a plethora of development challenges. Further, in tracing the enactment of the prediabetes diagnosis across public and private clinics, I show that the pre-disease condition that economic elites experience when they are diagnosed contrasts sharply with that experienced by working class and low-income patients—I argue that in practice, prediabetes is multiple and its diagnosis amplifies existing social inequities. I also show that the emotional and ethical responses to the diagnosis among patients can differ substantially, particularly across socioeconomic divides. I argue that in Mexico, increased access to risk knowledge does not foster a spirit of “optimization” among the majority of Mexicans, but rather an alternative ethic, which I term “strategic preservation.” Finally, I show that many health experts in Mexico share a common set of values and norms in thinking about diabetes risk. On a macro level, they discursively link the looming threat of prediabetes, diabetes risk, and diabetes itself to the nation’s potentially disastrous macroeconomic future, effectively charging individuals with the responsibility to mitigate this threat through behavior and lifestyle modification. Health experts in this arena also frequently communicate the notion that the Mexican body itself is a key source of diabetes risk. I point to other elites in Mexico who, relying on a similar conception of the Mexican body, are investing in molecular technologies to better detect embodied diabetes risk, and to expand the reach and precision of medicalized prevention strategies in the future. These findings have implications for developing countries globally, which now bear the highest burden of chronic disease. Developing countries are already or will soon grapple with a similar epidemiological crisis and, as this occurs, Mexico’s strategies and experience will set precedents and establish key paradigms for public health action globally. With this in mind, I call for the disentanglement of expertise between the fields of biomedicine and public health and for a turn toward more structural, indeed socially radical, policies for chronic disease prevention at the population level.

Since its democratic dispensation, South Africa has been striving to find the right economic tool to confront the challenges of poverty, joblessness, widening income gap and lack of job related skills. Numerous methods have been put to trial in an attempt to rescue the rural masses from the scourge of poverty, joblessness and social degradation, but with limited impact. Literature surveys in this regard attest to social intervention programmes failing, due to the absence or little involvement of beneficiary rural communities in the programme establishment. Renewed rural development initiative at Mhlontlo Municipality occurs within this context. The study was then undertaken to evaluate stakeholder participation in the planning, the implementation and the monitoring and evaluation of the pilot programme. This is a study of the rural development pilot programme at Mhlontlo Local Municipality in the Eastern Cape. The statistical population for the study included all institutionalised stakeholder’s organizations, as critical components of engagement to realise the programme setting. The study target participants were 90 adult individuals involve in local stakeholder’s public participation institutions. A self-completed questionnaire was administered to the 90 target participants with 64 returned completely filled. The results were analysed using statistical mean, standard deviation and coefficient of variance and presented as tables and graphs. Findings were that there was more participation in the programme implementation phase, than in the programme planning and monitoring phase. Assessment of programme outputs by respondents was diverse and inconclusive. This was attributed to poor participation by programme stakeholders in programme’s planning. / Thesis (MBA)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

The early 20th century saw the rise of a new constellation of social and cultural elites whose wealth and status was tied to the production and manipulation of symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstractions, drawing from Bourdieu, let us call them symbolic capitalists. From the outset, symbolic capitalists have defined themselves as champions of the desperate, vulnerable, marginalized and otherwise disadvantaged in society. However, as they have grown in affluence and influence, various forms of inequality have not only persisted, they’ve grown. And although symbolic capitalists are among the most likely in the U.S. to identify as antiracists, feminists, environmentalists, or ‘allies’ to LGBTQ Americans, they are also among the primary beneficiaries of systemic and institutional inequalities. Their lifestyles and social position are contingent on exploiting and reproducing many of the social conditions they explicitly condemn. This dissertation seeks to explore the role social justice discourse plays in the political economy of the symbolic professions.

As future holders of power, nurturing a critical consciousness among economically privileged populations is urgently needed as it could encourage them to actively challenge class oppression around them. Egyptian international school students typically belong to this population as they serve as vehicles that push for the interests of global capital in the Global South. Given that they tend to be isolated from the lived realities of most Egyptians, it is important to understand how to craft pedagogies that expose the privileged to the lived and structural realities that maintain class oppression. Given the limited research on this topic, this qualitative study explores means of employing Critical Pedagogical ethos and practices through a collaboratively designed curriculum that attempts to nurture their awareness, accountability, and efficacy. Utilizing interviews, photo elicitation tasks, ethnographic observations and teacher reflections, this study investigates the processes, pushback, and transformations of nine economically privileged high school students in two international schools in Cairo, as their teachers implement a curriculum on the intersection between social class and education in Egypt. Findings suggest that students went through transformations in their awareness of the other, their structural awareness, and imaginaries of action. However, their sense of accountability and recognition of the intertwine between their own positionalities and economic inequality, served as an obstacle against cultivating an analysis of systemic class oppression, causing a state of dissonance. Moreover, teachers’ findings demonstrate a tension between strong content knowledge and real-life interaction due to administrative constraints, and push for rethinking the potential of a critical curriculum by teachers who don’t identify as critical. The findings suggest using the international school as a microcosm of oppressive class dynamics, to help interrogate the self in relation to the other and the structural (both locally and globally), as well as a space to imagine and implementaction. It also has implications on how critical subject matter can be developed to help teachers address class inequality.

Jails play a unique role in the criminal legal system, incarcerating people who are awaiting trial or serving short sentences of less than a year. At midyear 2023, jails incarcerated 664,200 people and admitted 7.6 million people in the preceding 12 months (Zeng 2024). People incarcerated in jail often face several co-occurring hardships, including housing instability, untreated mental illness, and substance use problems, which jails can exacerbate. This dissertation argues jails create and respond to many of these problems associated with poverty, especially problems related to the health of incarcerated people. Across three papers, I demonstrate jails (1) were used as a punitive response to the prescription opioid crisis, especially in rural communities; (2) became a highly infectious environment in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic after failing to enforce many basic preventative measures like masking and social distancing, threatening the health of incarcerated people; and (3) readmit people with mental illness and substance use problems at much higher rates than people in good health. Taken together, these papers demonstrate the complex relationship between jails on the one hand and the health of incarcerated people and the public on the other.

In response to growing social inequality, environmental crises, and economic instability, sustainability discourse has become the dominant "master signifier" for many fields, particularly the field of urban planning. However, in practice many sustainability methods overemphasize technological and economic growth-oriented solutions while underemphasizing the social dimension. The social dimension of sustainability remains a "concept in chaos" drawing little agreement on definitions, domains, and indicators for addressing the social challenges of urban life. In contrast, while the field of public health, with its emphasis on social justice principles, has made significant strides in framing and developing interventions to target the social determinants of health (SDH), this work has yet to be integrated into sustainability practice as a tool for framing the social dimension. Meanwhile, as municipalities move forward with these lopsided efforts at approaching sustainability practice, cities continue to experience gentrification, increasing homelessness, health disparities, and many other concerns related to social inequity, environmental injustice, and marginalization. This research involves multi-site, comparative case studies of neighborhood-scale sustainability planning projects in Portland, U.S.; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Nagoya, Japan to bring to light an understanding of how the social dimension is conceptualized and translated to practice in different contexts, as well as the challenges planners, citizen participants, and other stakeholders encounter in attempting to do so. These case studies find that these neighborhood-scale planning efforts are essentially framing the social dimension in terms of principles of SDH. Significant challenges encountered at the neighborhood-scale relate to political economic context and trade-offs between ideals of social sustainability, such as social inclusion and nurturing a sense of belonging when confronted with diverse neighborhood actors, such as sexually oriented businesses and recent immigrants. This research contributes to urban social sustainability literature and sustainability planning practice by interrogating these contested notions and beginning to create a pathway for integration of SDH principles into conceptualizations of social sustainability.

This dissertation examines how colonial histories converge with models for capitalist futures in Sierra Leone, framed by ongoing debates around the governance, accumulation and distribution of social goods. It explores how managerial logics of risk, human capital, resilience and corporate social responsibility informed the remaking of the state following a decade of civil war and military intervention. And it attends to the politics of reconstruction pursued in contexts of radical upheaval, examining material infrastructures and subjectivities as sites of transnationally mediated cultural transformation continuous with colonial memory and practice. An ethnographic and historical study based on 18 months of field and archival research in the Western Area (or Freetown Peninsula) of Sierra Leone, the dissertation contributes to debates around care, agency and social value, as well as the fraught relationship between knowledge and expertise in contexts of political, spatial and economic experimentation. Developing an approach that denaturalizes calamity and foregrounds long-term structural violence, chapters trace the growing cognizance of the relation between ecological risk and speculative practices in land and real estate markets in the country, briefly hailed as “Africa’s fastest growing economy” between 2012-2015. Examining the role of financial institutions, humanitarian agencies and contractors from the perspective of numerous stakeholders—including flood survivors and ex-combatants, builders and land brokers, urban planners and architects, World Bank officials and local conservationists—I demonstrate how reconstruction in Sierra Leone intensified dynamics of financialization under conditions of questionable sovereignty, reflecting entrenched hierarchies of rank within global labor and commodity markets and the long-term vulnerability of marginalized citizens to increasingly quotidian forms of harm. The dissertation argues for a methodological shift that understands official demands for citizens to embody their “resilience” as an enduring anticipation of catastrophe, one that has developed in tandem with normative aspirations for the “good life” in Sierra Leone. In contrast with the universal claims of liberal community, democratization and material renewal that accompanied the end of war, I track how manual work involved in excavating the foundations for residential sites in the new suburbs of Freetown coincided with a broader panic around the rising value, obscure origins, and growing scarcity of property, examining moral accounting around the relationship between prosperity and the uneven distribution of social injury. By situating ethnographic material on building, work and wealth alongside debates on global inequality, disaster capitalism, race and the poetics of history, I demonstrate the variety of social factors that sustain the violent futurity of growth. More pointedly, I argue that Sierra Leone reveals a shrinking zone of accountability for the human costs of development “by any means necessary,” as disasters increasingly reflect the retreat of the state in its capacity to protect or preserve human life. Ultimately, the dissertation underscores the contradictions of liberal governance in the wake of empire, new imperial relations in the face of old, and the seemingly premature claim of freedom therein.

Research demonstrates that Black students deserve teachers who utilize culturallyresponsive pedagogy (CRP) and antiracist pedagogy to offer a high-quality education that is both engaging and affirming of their culture and life experiences. Unfortunately, many Black students are instead forced to navigate schools that do not center their culture or ways of knowing, but rather perpetuate the racism embedded within the U.S. education system. In suburban schools in particular, Black students rarely have access to teachers who represent their racial and cultural backgrounds, and this lack of representation and understanding amplifies the need for CRP and antiracist pedagogy. Further, existing research shows that preservice and current teachers rarely have access to the training and staff development that would prepare them to utilize these pedagogies (Warren, 2018). To offer the field more understanding about how teachers become culturally responsive and antiracist, this study explores the process that suburban public school teachers progress through to adopt these pedagogies, and the factors that inform this process. This study is informed by a theoretical framework that includes critical race theory, BlackCrit, and sociocultural context, and builds on the existing scholarship on Black students’ schooling experiences, teacher-student relationships, and CRP and antiracist pedagogy. Drawing on this existing research, I utilized qualitative data to explore suburban teachers’ perspectives, experiences and sense-making related to the process of becoming culturally responsive and/or antiracist. I conducted one-on-one interviews with 15 teachers who represent different racial/ethnic backgrounds, as well as a range of grade levels (K-12) and academic subjects. The participants all self-identify as educators who are committed to becoming culturally relevant and/or antiracist educators. They currently teach, or previously worked directly with, Black students in public suburban schools in the NYC metro area. The data from this study yielded three major takeaways. First, I found that the process of becoming a teacher who embodies culturally responsive and antiracist pedagogies is a journey that is informed by several factors, including lived experiences, key people that influence growth, and exploration of one’s own racial identity. To offer a clear illustration of how teachers progress through this process, I map the journey by offering specific details about the perspectives and practices that align with the beginning, middle and advanced phases of the journey. Importantly, this journey is nonlinear and unending, as being culturally responsive and antiracist requires continual learning and growth. Second, I find that strong teacher-relationships based in care play a key role in my participants’ journeys to adopting culturally responsive and antiracist pedagogies. I also find that teachers utilize unique approaches when demonstrating care and building relationships with Black students, as the teachers understood that Black students have unique experiences in school settings, especially those in suburban contexts. Further, I found that several factors inform teachers’ relationship-building approaches, with personal experiences and relationships being the most impactful. Importantly, I also find that when teachers work to build strong teacher-student relationships while also progressing through their journeys to adopting CRP and antiracist pedagogy, the relationships and pedagogies reinforce one another. The last key finding from this study explores the barriers that teachers encounter in their journeys to adopting culturally responsive and antiracist pedagogies. While the data demonstrated that several participants have successfully progressed through the journey to the point where they can now effectively implement CRP and antiracist pedagogy, I found that participants also faced two major barriers that impede their ability to effectively implement these pedagogies within their school contexts. The first barrier is the lack of focus on CRP and antiracist pedagogy in both teacher education and professional development sessions, including a lack of focus on the connection between student-teacher relationships and these pedagogies. The suburban contexts that the participants work within pose a second barrier, as the environments are rarely welcoming or conducive to work intended to advance racial equity. This study’s findings point to several implications for the field, including a need for changes to policy and practice, as shifting our schools toward becoming culturally responsive and antiracist requires significant support and resources. The findings also point to several opportunities for future research to further build the field’s knowledge about preparing teachers for CRP and antiracist pedagogy. Once our field knows more about this process, research such as this will help to better prepare teachers to offer Black students a high-quality education.

This dissertation examines the history of the North American branch of the International Workingmen’s Association, which was active in the United States from 1869 to 1876. Founded in London in 1864, the International Workingmen’s Association was a radical organization that sought to organize the working classes of the world under a common banner. In the United States, the International brought under its wing trade unions and political organizations to form a militant body that intervened in the great struggles of its day. The organization campaigned in favor of the eight-hour day, agitated against unemployment, and raised funds for revolutionary exiles. After the war, and contrarily to major labor organizations such as the National Labor Union, the International recognized social and political equality regardless of “sex, creed, color or condition.” Precisely because the International attempted to build a national presence as seceded states attempted to reenter the Union, the organization’s trajectory was related to the transformation of the American state after the war. This dissertation covers major precursors to the International in the United States beginning in 1848, and closes with a reflection on the end of the International in 1876 and the emergence of “pure-and-simple” unionism through the American Federation of Labor.

Time poverty—the experience of insufficient time for rest, leisure, and self-development—has emerged as a critical issue in modern societies, intersecting with and potentially exacerbating social inequalities. This dissertation explores various dimensions of time poverty in the United States and South Korea. Through three interconnected studies, I examine long-term trends in relative time poverty, the association between time poverty and life satisfaction, and cohort effects on subjective and relative time poverty. The first paper examines time poverty trends among adults in the United States over the last 20 years. Using the 2003-2022 American Time Use Survey, I show long-term trends in time poverty rates for the US adult population, analyzing variations by key sociodemographic factors including gender, family structure, and race/ethnicity. Time poverty rates initially decreased from the early 2000s through the early 2010s, followed by an upward trend starting in 2013, with a brief dip during the 2020 COVID-19 peak and reaching a high point in 2022. Throughout the study period, time poverty was most prevalent among women, adults living with multiple young children, and individuals of Asian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, or Hispanic descent. Logistic regression analyses confirmed that being a woman, having children, and engaging in paid work were significantly associated with higher odds of experiencing time poverty. The second paper investigates the association between time poverty and life satisfaction among working-age adults in South Korea. Using the 2019 Korean Time Use Survey, I conducted descriptive analyses and employed generalized ordered logistic regression to examine the relationship between time poverty and life satisfaction. Time poverty was measured in both subjective and relative terms. Results showed that subjective time poverty was more common than relative time poverty among working-age adults, with both types most pronounced between ages 35 and 44 and more prevalent among men than women. Regression models demonstrated a significant negative association between subjective time poverty and life satisfaction, with the largest effects observed among those reporting severe subjective time poverty. The association between relative time poverty and life satisfaction appeared mostly statistically insignificant. The third paper studies how cohort membership influences subjective and relative time poverty among Korean adults across different age groups and periods. Utilizing four waves of the Korean Time Use Survey data from 2004 to 2019, I employed age-period-cohort detrended models to detect nonlinear fluctuations around linear trends for cohort-specific deviations. Results revealed a general decline in occasional subjective time poverty across cohorts but an increase in chronic subjective time poverty and relative time poverty among those in their 20s and 30s across successive cohorts. Significant variations in subjective and relative time poverty were found across different cohorts, with notable shifts occurring between the 1970s and 1980s cohorts. Subgroup analyses indicated varying effects based on gender, education level, and number of children in the household, with more prominent effects observed for cohorts born in the 1970s. By investigating these aspects across different contexts, this dissertation highlights the complex nature and far-reaching consequences of time poverty on individual well-being and social dynamics. The findings underscore how time poverty reflects changing societal values and structures, particularly in relation to work-life balance, family dynamics, and cohort shifts in time use patterns. This research contributes to our understanding of evolving social inequalities and may inform policies aimed at promoting more equitable use of time across diverse populations, ultimately addressing the broader implications of time poverty in modern societies.