Magister Educationis - MEd / There is a continual reaction to educational systems by other social groupings. To a large extend education is determined by persons other than educationalists. The social context has a definite influence on a system of education. In South Africa the different political groupings are reacting to the present educational system. These political groupings each has different political aspirations and expectations. As political aspirations relate closely to educational aspirations, it follows that these political groupings will have different educational aspirations. The political groupings recently exerting the most influence in the educational field in South Africa have been the National Party (NP), the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Azanian People's Organization (AZAPO). In this research attention is given to the role and influence of these groupings, their educational aspirations, and the degree to which their aspirations are educationally sound. At the outset an attempt is made to determine certain criteria for an educational justifiable educational system. These criteria are used throughout as the standard in terms of which the different aspirations are evaluated. Thereafter each of the groups, the NP, the UDF and AZAPO, is examined individually. To ascertain the educational aspirations of each in the correct perspective, the role each of these groups plays in the educational the political arena is examined. Subsequently aims resulting from the political aims are examined. An extensive literary study was undertaken to inform the research. As education is very topical at present, newspaper reports, magazine and journal articles, as well as relevant research reports and other primary sources have been used in the study. Finally the conclusion is reached that each of the educational aspirations has its strengths and deficiencies and an attempt is made to set a vision for the future.

Masters in Public Administration - MPA / Grassroots participation in the domain of public policy is assuming global significance particularly in the fields of welfare and development. Revived by the United Nations' resolution in the 1970s, many governments both in developed and underdeveloped countries have endorsed the grassroots participation ideals as contained in the United Nations' policy statements and resolutions. Accordingly, many governments have declared their support for grassroots participation and in number of cases, grassroots participation has featured conspicuously in their national development plans. A late arrival on the grassroots participation discourse, grassroots participation and civil society's involvement have also featured predominantly in the national development plans of the new South African government. The new democratically elected government pronounced in various policy documents and on public platforms, a commitment towards grassroots participation. Although many governments have employed the rhetoric of grassroots participation in their national·. development plans, there is however an accumulative literature which points to the fact that grassroots participation endeavors have· often been undertaken in a top-down fashion, with marginalized groups of communities often excluded. The central objective of this study has therefore been a critical evaluation of the manner in which the Western Cape Provincial Department of Social Services has implemented its grassroots approach in the context of policy . formulation and implementation and service delivery. An evaluation of the Department's grassroots approach has been attempted by assessing the grassroots structures, which the Department has established as vehicles for grassroots participation in its policy processes and service delivery. To this end, of Fourteen District Committees established by the Department throughout the Western Cape province,. four have been evaluated. Through reviewing literature Oh grassroots participation, the project's findings highlighted a discrepancy between the Department's prevailing rhetoric of grassroots participation and the reality of the grassroots participation as operationalized through these committees. The findings indicated that the grassroots participation through these committees is far from the ideal of authentic grassroots participation as discussed in Chapter Two, as it is replete with elements of unrepresentativeness of the marginalized groups, co-option, political manipulation, centralized and top-down decision-making styles. The study also attempted to provide recommendations tailored to bring the Department's grassroots participatory process closer to the ideals of authentic grassroots participation.

The aim of this thesis is to observe how media and activism can be a part of the post-conflict peace building in Bosnia as well as to highlight the work and importance of NGOs in the country. This thesis will focus on how these NGOs work with media and activism in order to contribute to the post-conflict peace building. Further, it will analyze elements of civic activism as well as grassroots activism to see how the organizations implement these in their work. Eight interviews have been conducted with two participants from four NGOs in the country. The result shows that whilst ethnic divisions still largely characterize the contemporary Bosnian society, there are instances where ethnic differences have been disregarded. Further, the result shows that the everyday work of these organizations showcase a great example of how ethnic divisions can be combated and how social change can be achieved.

The transformation of cities through gentrification and the commodification of culture and green space are central problems in Urban Studies. This thesis investigated how cities like Stockholm can move forward from this gentrification. The perspective of relational placemaking was taken, as this can occur both top-down via actions of urban planners and bottom-up by the organization of local residents. The SoFo neighbourhood on the island of Södermalm in central Stockholm is a rich example of gentrification and hipster urbanism. This research investigates the meaning of SoFo today, over 20 years after it was first named. The analysis was organized using the relational placemaking framework of Pierce and colleagues. To summarize, the problem or conflict was gentrification and this was illustrated for SoFo using data. Gentrification occurred after 2001 and the rapid rise in property value, a 20% turnover of people and the Swedish middle class demographics each confirm the gentrification noted by others. With this problem established, theplace frame of the current identity of SoFo was what the actors interacted around and what was considered as the response to gentrification. The initial placemaking of SoFo rested on a strong identity that was both radical and carefree and respondents tended to look back with nostalgia to the 90s when the area was the centre of the Stockholm music scene. The brand of SoFo was mainly produced grassroots through local residents and businesses without specific top-down actions from the city government. The two actors explored were real estate and small businesses. Real estate could encourage gentrification through the discourse in the ads and selective marketing to wealthy gentrifiers that appreciated quality and could afford it. Looking at final sale prices from abehavioural perspective, people were willing to pay for living in SoFo and paid more to be near areas like Nytorget with its liveliness. However, realtors claimed that SoFo also offers relaxation or peace and quiet, which rebrands away from the established carefree identity. Looking then at the small businesses, evidence was provided that indicated a strategy against gentrification. Many businesses focused on small scale handicraft or providing places for their friends and local community. Some were even not interested in a profitable business plan and acted on purpose to make their place uncool, to avoid attracting trendy hipsters that would displace their clientele. Small businesses were also rebranding SoFo, expressing that the carefree and relaxed identity is there if one looks away from trendy Nytorget. The defensive strategy of the small businesses was subtle and unusual and led the author to the following, somewhat informal analogy: SoFo is playing dead until the bear of gentrification moves on to another neighbourhood. This strategy understands theinterconnectivity of trendy, authentic shops, raised rents and gentrification.

Covering the issue of climate change is not always talking about what we as humans can do to save the planet. For many people in the Global South, it is about climate injustice – how the marginalized become the most affected people by climate crisis, yet they contribute to so much less emission compared to the people in the North / Western countries. Adding the concept of Anthropocene to that shows a larger problem of inequality. Applying postcolonialism perspective towards environmental issue means questioning the idea that the knowledge that Western countries produced are the absolute truth. This thesis builds on case studies of organizations in Jakarta and Bali and their grassroot approach, from experience and challenges to be in their line of work, to listen to the voice of the practitioners as it shapes the field of communication for development and social change. Postcolonial critique concepts from McEwan (2018) are used to analyze the practices of environmental communication towards their target and the public, but also to highlight structural and external challenges that they may face in doing their work. Result of the interviews identified the notions of 1) Indonesian postcolonial identity, 2) Neoliberalism tendency, 3) Power relations, 4) Knowledge produced in the ‘West’, and 5) Non-inclusive development practices / Representation issue. This thesis highlights several identified challenges, from how certain local and cultural practices are sometimes overlooked within sustainable development practices, how foreign concepts and the use of English poses problems within the communication process, international project-based development approach presented problems for the local environmental organization, and how the slogan ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’ that are popular within environmental discourses should be rethought to shift the paradigm that global environmental issues are not as global as certain people might think.

This thesis aims to contribute to the knowledge gap on religious peacebuilding. Previous research on the role of religion has, to a large extent, focused on its destructive potential as a cause of conflict and religious strife. At the same time, there are examples of when religious actors have drawn from religious values to promote peace and reconciliation between conflicting parties. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is to explore in what ways religious peacebuilding promotes conflict transformation between different religious groups during intra-state conflict. By further examining the methods and initiatives used by local religious actors at the grassroots in the Moluccas in Indonesia, the thesis aims to analyze the effects on the peace process. The research method for the study is an instrumental case study analysis, and the thesis applies a combination of two theoretical frameworks focusing on conflict transformation and success factors linked to religious peacebuilding to analyze the empirical material. The results suggest that religious actors used a wide range of methods and initiatives for peacebuilding in the Moluccas, and they made significant contributions to the de-escalation of conflict and opportunities for building sustainable peace. Through the lens of the theoretical framework, it is possible to acknowledge that the methods and initiatives clearly relate to explanations linked to conflict transformation, as well as success factors in religious peacebuilding. The thesis concludes that religious peacebuilding was essential for the peace process in the Moluccas, and that local religious actors showed great capacity in constructively using religion to build peace.

For six years, under the informal leadership of a few professionals committed to fostering the healthy social and emotional development of infants and young children in Tennessee, a group of passionate individuals and agencies came together on a bimonthlly and subsequently quarterly basis for the purpose of building relationships, identifying existing resources and opportunities, and beginning to identify what is needed to address the mental health needs of the birth through age 5 population. From the initial meeting of 25 or so individuals, the attendance and agency representation steadily grew and the group’s identity as a valuable initiative was established. In this presentation, the expansion of this informal grassroots initiative into a formal non-profit corporation receiving funding from the Tennessee Department of Health to support developing the capacity and quality of the early childhood workforce will be described. The presenter also will describe the current work of the Association of Infant Mental Health in Tennessee (AIMHiTN), including the implementation of the Infant Mental Health (IMH) Endorsement® for Culturally Sensitive, Relationship-Focused Practice Promoting Infant Mental Health (IMH-E®), an internationally recognized credential.

The dramatic increase of type-2 diabetes within the Latino community is of great concern in the U.S., especially among Mexican im/migrant farmworkers. Anthropological scholarship shows that health issues within im/migrant groups in the U.S. are poorly understood from a sociocultural and local perspective. In Indian River County, Florida, farmworker leaders created a community garden in response to health problems in this community. This initiative was launched to educate families about the health and economic benefits of growing their own food. The Indian River County Health Department and the local leaders are working collaboratively to inform the community about the risks of type-2 diabetes by providing educational lectures about health, food, and nutrition, in an effort to engage the farmworkers to actively participate in community gardens. However, little engagement to this initiative has been observed within the farmworker community. This ethnographic investigation examines the challenges of involving Mexican im/migrant farmworkers in community-based solutions to health problems. Based on participant observation, survey, and interview data with farmworkers and key informants from the Farmworkers Association of Florida, this project examines the perspectives of health concerns and the role of grassroots initiatives in addressing health needs. Specifically, it analyzes barriers to healthy eating and explores how community gardens can improve health outcomes in farmworker communities. This research contributes to the understanding of Mexican im/migrant farmworkers' health in Indian River County, and it has the potential to guide health-related policies pertaining to im/migrant communities in general.

As developed throughout the dissertation¿s chapters, I combined a number of different and interconnected agendas with the overall goal being to strengthen and revitalize the field of conflict resolution and peacebuilding research in a number of ways. First, I critiqued the past and current peacebuilding literature in order to present its theoretical, methodological and substantive gaps and inadequacies. Second, I argued for a recognition of the interconnectedness of methodology, reflexivity and knowledge/power in general, and more specifically within the peacebuilding literature. Third, my theoretical and methodological framework constituted a distinctive exemplar for conflict resolution and peacebuilding that begins to ground our research questions, methodologies and discourses as situated knowledges within relations of power. Fourth, I argued academic peacebuilding discourses and practices are not neutral but inherently involved in larger social relations. Fifth, I presented the critical narratives from the locality of Indigenous and non-Indigenous grassroots activists in order to shift the spotlight of peacebuilding discourses and practices onto the transformative possibilities of grassroots community-based peace building. I continued with a reformulated theorization of grassroots community peacebuilding as alternative geographies of knowledge, place-based practices and counter-narratives, important in themselves, and as part of a glocality of bottom-up transformative change. Finally, I conclude with a call for a renewing of the field of Conflict resolution and Peacebuilding based on social justice and community-based praxis.

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