The purpose of this thesis is to establish a preliminary foundation of a research method aimed at understanding the social identity, role and function of the university. In this respect, it aims at identifying and articulating a set of issues, concepts, questions, social dynamics and so on, which have to be addressed and investigated carefully, before starting to build such a research method. To this end, the thesis focuses on and analyzes a recent debate on the changing nature of the contemporary social system of knowledge production / a debate constituted by several theses of change, namely, Mode 2, Finalization in Science, Post-normal Science, Academic Capitalism and Triple Helix, and the critiques directed towards these theses. In consequence, the thesis argues that to understand the social nature and function of the university, first and foremost, a versatile conceptual framework is required to capture the phenomenon of the social construction of the paradigm of knowledge/science / a phenomenon which is certainly nonlinear by nature and involves complex interrelations between scientific, political, economic and cultural realms.

This thesis explores the encounter between the Afghan-American community and the U.S. military-industrial complex in the production of cultural knowledge for counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in Afghanistan. It focuses on the narratives mobilized as 'expertise' by Afghan-American contractors from the major diaspora hubs in California and Virginia, who were employed as role-players, translators, and cultural advisors by the U.S. military and defense contractors. I discuss how such narratives gained currency and shaped the perceptions of Afghanistan in the U.S. foreign and security policy communities. The goal of the thesis is to demonstrate the extent to which COIN-centered cultural knowledge production both defined political strategies toward Afghanistan and also reconstituted the Afghan diaspora in America. The thesis contributes to emergent ethnographic studies on militarism by looking at its effect on American society in general and the Afghan diaspora in particular. The broader application of the thesis findings is to move beyond critiques of the troubled connection between anthropology and the military, and to analyze the relationship between citizens and the state in terms of national and biopolitical security.

Magister Educationis - MEd / Following the understanding that incentives influence behaviour both in terms of eliciting and sustaining it, this thesis seeks to explore the link between incentives and knowledge production at the University of Nairobi. Given the backdrop, higher education institutions have a key role to play in economic development through knowledge production; the study seeks to see how academics can be steered to produce knowledge. The principal-agent model primarily informs the study, whose primary argument is that for incentives to attract, motivate and retain employees, these incentives have to be sufficient, fair and consistent. Additionally, the model predicts that a higher sum of monetary incentives triggers higher effort, resulting in higher productivity. Using a single case study approach, the study focused on the University of Nairobi in Kenya. The data for the study was mainly provided by the structured interviews, institutional documents and archival. The findings of this study show that there are several incentives related to research at the University of Nairobi. These include: promotion opportunities, time resources, research funding, and financial allowances for publications and successful supervision of postgraduate students. Multiple principals including the government, national research council and the university itself provide these incentives. The general perception of academics is that, the incentives are weak and do not encourage the maximization of the University’s research goals. In addition, academics are also confronted with other principals who reinforce non-research behaviour. These principals offer significant rewards for consultancies, and incentives for teaching on the full-fee-paying stream by providing additional payments, over and above regular salaries, to academics that teach on these programmes. Given the weak nature of the incentives for research, academics at the University of Nairobi seem to respond more favourably to the nonresearch incentives. Overall, the study confirms the economic principle that individuals, in this case, academics, respond to incentives. However, in the context of competing incentives, the research incentives have to be adequate, systematically applied and continuous to reinforce a vibrant research culture.

University press publishing, while often associated with the promotion of academic freedom, may be situated between the poles of resistance and complicity when considering intellectual responses to apartheid. Yet the history of this form of scholarly publishing has largely been ignored thus far, due to a perception that it had little to tell us about either apartheid or the struggle against it. However, the social history of South Africa’s university presses – at Wits, Natal and Unisa, in particular – provides a new angle for examining academic freedom and knowledge production during the apartheid era. Using a hybrid methodology including archival research, historical bibliography, and political sociology, this study aims to examine the origins, publishing lists and philosophies of the university presses through the lens of a continuum of intellectual responses: ranging from collaboration and complicity, to opposition and dissidence. Results show that, over time, the positions and publishing strategies adopted by the South African university presses shifted, becoming more liberal. It is argued, however, that the university presses should not be considered oppositional or anti-apartheid publishers, in part because they did not resist the censorship regime of the government, and in part because they operated within the constraints of publicly funded, bureaucratic institutions of higher education. They nonetheless produced an important, if under-valued, body of work and provided a platform for a variety of academic opinions. Moreover, the university presses faced a variety of challenges in their struggle to survive over the years, including financial pressures, international competition, and wavering institutional support. But perhaps the greatest challenge was a delicate balancing act: an attempt to promote academic freedom within a climate of political repression, censorship and ideology. The study demonstrates the significance of publishing history for an examination of broader issues of social history, as well as the applicability of a wide range of methodological tools for the field of Book History. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Information Science / unrestricted

While progressive coalitions continue to oppose neoliberal restructuring around the world, organizing on the left remains fragmented and the underlying unity of diverse working class struggles undertheorized. Overcoming these theoretical and practical obstacles is an urgent task in the face of both renewed attempts by states and capital to ensure stability and deepen market penetration into the remaining untouched corners of working-class life, and threats to unity generated within the left by narrow understandings of class and identity. Post-apartheid South Africa is no exception to this ongoing neoliberal restructuring of contemporary capitalism nor to the fragmentation of working-class struggle. In opposition to the maintenance of a neoliberal macroeconomic trajectory following apartheid South Africans have almost continuously organized in their workplaces and communities to realize the better life for all promised to them after 1994. While community protest has intensified over the last decade—with a parallel upturn in labour organizing—it has taken on a less focused and fragmented form relative to earlier mobilizations. Moreover, despite the deep solidarities and alliances formed between unions and communities in the struggle against apartheid, organizing around production and reproduction has remained relatively distinct since its end. There remain, however, concerted efforts to draw together and articulate protests around access to the basic necessities of life with labour and student movements with the explicit goal of uniting the working class to struggle against capitalism. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2019, this dissertation analyzes one instance of this organizing work through a case study of the Housing Assembly, an organization struggling around housing and related services in Cape Town. It asks what role understandings of capitalism and class and their relationship to social relations of oppression play in organizing the working class today. My research explores how the Housing Assembly uses a strategic learning process of organizing to raise critical consciousness and build genuine solidarities and grassroots organization to engage and contest the state and capital around access to housing and water. This learning process starts from the daily lived experience of the working class to build a concrete critique of the political economy of housing and services restructuring which conceives of these struggles around social reproduction as class struggles within a capitalist totality rather than as discrete, bounded, or local. The production and utilization of knowledge by the Housing Assembly plays a key role in this organizing process, linking the subjective experience of everyday working-class life with the relational construction of political, economic and social relations which lie beyond it.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This study critically examines the political, social and institutional settings in which archaeology was introduced in Namibia. I re-examine the idea of archaeology as a scientific and objective discipline that could be practiced without input from the knowledge systems of local communities. Archaeology developed alongside colonialism in Africa. Archaeology became an apparatus for knowing about the strategic resources that could be found in Namibia. Through the processes of recording sites and artefacts archaeology provided information that was useful to the colonial administration.

Though it is often taken for granted with an assumed naturalness, settler colonial sovereignty relies on the settler state’s realization of Indigenous territorial dispossession, and the erasure of indigeneity. More than singular or historical events, dispossession and erasure are ongoing, and are best understood as contemporary, and structural, features of settler governance because of the continued existence of Indigenous nations. As a result, seemingly stable settler states (such as Canada) are in a constant state of insecurity, due to Indigenous nations’ competing claims of authority. As such, settler states are continually working to (re)produce their own sovereign authority, and legitimacy. This text argues that knowledge is central to the (re)production of settler sovereignty, and hence, settler colonialism. Understood this way, knowledge is both produced and also productive. What we ‘know’ is not only framed by the cosmologies and ontologies through which we make meaning of the world, but it also serves as an organizing tool, structuring what interventions we imagine to be possible. Focusing on government policymaking, this text documents the erasure of Indigenous knowledges, cosmologies, and imaginaries from settler colonial governance practices. It does so through an analysis of the Aboriginal Peoples’ Survey, the settlement of, and territorial allotment in, British Columbia and provincial land management policies such as the Forest and Range Evaluation Program. Using this empirical work, it argues that this erasure enables the reification of settler imaginaries over Indigenous territory, which in turn creates the conditions within which settler colonial authority is legitimized and sovereignty continually remade through policy interventions. While the text largely centres on territory in what is today Canada, it also offers a view into the way in which (settler) coloniality more broadly is continually upheld and remade. Indeed, when viewed through the lens of a global colonial order, the continual remaking of settler sovereignty enables the constitution of international and global politics. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / For many, Canada as a multicultural and inclusive country stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, and north to the Arctic circle is taken for granted. However, what we recognize as Canada in 2020 has only existed since the 1999 formation of the Territory of Nunavut, and even the territory that comprises Canada only came into formation with Newfoundland and Labrador’s 1949 entry into Confederation. This is to say that Canada in its current form is not natural. Rather, it was constructed over time through the incorporation and colonization of Indigenous lands and territories. This dissertation argues that despite an official discourse of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and the need to renew settler Canada’s ‘most important’ relationship, colonization remains ongoing. Looking to federal demographic statistics and provincial land use and management policy, it argues that settler authority being continually re-made through the government knowing Indigenous peoples and their territories in ways that legitimize colonization as the normal pursuit of “peace, order and good government.”

No / This commentary surveys some of the trends and gaps in current research on criminal justice reform in Latin America ¿ with a focus on Brazil, and on two specific areas : police and prison/penal reform. It explores two principal themes: the uneven and thin production of knowledge about criminal justice issues ; and the impact this has on policy reforms and on the ways in which these are framed and interpreted in terms of their relative success and failure. Overall it argues that we still know very little about criminal justice institutions and the actors within them. We also need many more finely-grained analyses of the dynamics of reform efforts and of the policy environments in which these take place in order to understand how and why reform initiatives are often derailed or subverted, and, more rarely, flourish and can be embedded and replicated.

Doctor of Philosophy / Today there is scientific consensus that human activity has significantly altered our planet, a condition often referred to as the Anthropocene. The effects of these changes can be hard to understand or predict, however, due to the size and complexity of Earth's biological, chemical, and geological systems. This dissertation argues that one way to better grasp the complex and uncertain effects of the Anthropocene is through a careful comparison with the outcomes of a smaller-scale human-built environment that was meant to mimic Earth's ecosystems: Biosphere 2 [B2]. B2 was an ambitious "Human Experiment" designed to create a self-sufficient 'mini-Earth' inside a glass dome in Arizona. From 1991 to 1993, eight humans and 3,800 other species inhabited this recreation of Earth's biosphere, where the Biospherians grew all their food, recycled their water, and oversaw the production of their atmosphere, as well as conducting scientific research on this novel ecosystem. While the mission ran into unexpected difficulties that led many to label it a failure, this dissertation argues that the project actually succeeded in many ways, and that even its failures can be instructive for understanding today's environmental challenges. Two aspects of the B2 experiment can help us understand analogous aspects of the Anthropocene. First, B2's attempt to create and maintain an ecosystem that could provide everything needed to support life within a tightly enclosed structure reveals how enclosed environments have their own unique characteristics that can lead to unexpected and even disastrous results. I call these characteristics "Logics of Enclosure," and I argue that these same logics apply to the Anthropocene, as we begin to recognize that we, too, live in a world with limited resources and increasingly tight connections between its ecosystems. The dissertation describes various types of Logics of Enclosure and how they can be used to explain the outcomes of B2 and potentially alert us to similar outcomes within our increasingly 'enclosed' Anthropocene. The second unusual feature of B2 is that the Biospherians combined a number of roles that are normally separate within the fields of science, engineering and architecture. The same group of people helped develop the scientific field of Biospherics, designed B2's structural, technological, and biological contents, and then inhabited the world they had created. I refer to this as the knowledge–design–inhabitation trajectory, and I argue that in the Anthropocene we, too, are living in a world that is increasingly the result of our own design, based on our own imperfect scientific knowledge. These two forms of analysis work together: Logics of Enclosure explain how the hybrid built/natural environment has agency to affect human life, while the knowledge–design–inhabitation trajectory explains how we, the human inhabitants of Earth, have agency to better align our actions and technologies with our planet's life-supporting ecosystems. Ultimately, using these lenses to understand B2's outcomes may inform more successful longduration approaches for living within the Anthropocene.

The present study explores the ways in which competing frameworks of knowledge sought to order society in early Islamic Mesopotamia (60–193 AH/680–809 CE). This research examines the conditions under which two frameworks of knowledge came into being; how they tried to maximize their power through forging alliance with the caliphate; how they established the legitimacy of their knowledge; and how they promoted their visions of social order. The first framework of knowledge is associated with the secretaries, as state bureaucrats, who helped transfer ancient administrative methods and practices to the emerging Islamic polity. Their immense assistance in tackling manifold problems of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates consisted not only in offering technical know-how, useful administrative practices, expertise, and political wisdom, but also in addressing the foundational problems of the polity. This research argues that the secretaries' solution to the caliphate's structural problems—particularly the crisis of legitimacy—might have run counter to the social order promoted by Muslim religious scholars (the 'ulamā'). The secretaries' framework of knowledge and its concomitant social order, then, posed a threat to the authority of the 'ulamā' who pursued an alternative framework of knowledge rooted in sacred sources of law. Delving into a number of treatises composed and/or translated by the champions of these knowledge frameworks (e.g., ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd b. Yaḥyā, Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, and Abū Yūsuf), this dissertation concludes that the validation of knowledge and expertise involved more than solving specific problems such as maximizing the government revenues and efficiently collecting taxes from subjects; it rather relied on the ability of knowledge and expertise to offer solutions to the problem of social and political order. / Ph. D.