This dissertation is about pastoral care and counselling to elderly people to keep them visible within our faith communities. The research is a reflection and a re-telling of the lives of five elderly people who shared their stories with me. I heard them talk about ageing as an ongoing journey that is not always smooth. To grow older includes a lot of changes and a reassessment of lifestyles and goals as well as the danger of becoming invisible to others. Visibility cannot be maintained without communities of support, and care within communities of shared prophetic mission. A pastoral therapist must convey the Christian message of care by healing and caring solidarity, co-constructing new narratives of hope, and bringing back visibility to the elderly. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / M.Th. (Specialisation in Pastoral Therapy)

In the north-western corner of inner-city Pretoria, South Africa, the business district of Marabastad stands as a prime example of the lack of humanised public space making in marginalised urban areas. Amidst the vibrant and spontaneous local community the open spaces in this urban landscape are left derelict and insufficient in providing for the needs of their users. In response to the obvious and unseen deficiencies of the area, this landscape architectural study aims to shape platforms of opportunity to support the struggling local community by building on existing social networks and, formal and informal, economical practices. The investigation and subsequent design of this dissertation are focussed around the making of an urban square that will encourage interaction between individuals as well as between the individual and his/her surroundings. / Dissertation (ML(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Architecture / unrestricted

The current context of offender health in England and Wales indicates that offenders re-enter their communities with limited pre-release preparation for the continuity of access to healthcare and an increased risk of release with a health condition and very little support to cope in the community. This study was aimed at mapping the ex-offender health pathway towards identifying ‘touch points’ in the community for the delivery of a nurse led intervention. The study was a qualitative case study underpinned by ‘The Silences Framework’ which enabled it to gain theoretically by situating power with offenders, thus, aiding their ‘Silences’ to be heard, explored and brought to light. Participants meeting the study inclusion criteria were quantitatively ranked on the basis of poor health with those scoring the lowest and confirming their ranking through a confirmation of a health condition selected as cases and interviewed over the course of six months. These interview narratives were confirmed by interviewing individuals in the professional networks of offenders. The study identified the site of post-release supervision as the ‘touch point’ where a nurse led intervention could be delivered. With regards to the delivery of the health intervention, the study indicated that the nurse led intervention be provided as an advisory and signposting service structured on a drop-in and appointment basis. Furthermore, the study indicated that pre-release, offenders were not prepared in prison for the continuity in access to healthcare in the community on release. On-release, offenders’ on-release preparation did not enquire as a matter of procedure on whether offenders were registered with a GP or had the agency to register self with a GP practice in the community. Post release, the study uncovered a disparity between services which address the physical health needs of offenders and those which address their mental and substance misuse health needs.

The multiple components of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR), promotes women’s wellbeing and rights to a life free from discrimination and violence. Gender-based violence (GBV) is a matter closely related to SRHR and affects women globally on daily basis. South Africa is estimated to score one of the highest rates of GBV in the world. This thesis aims to gain an understanding of how civil society organisations (CSOs) working with SRHR-related issues, approach South African state institutions with regard to strengthen strategies against GBV. A qualitative content analysis is adopted to analyse the CSO’s documents that frame their advocacy work against GBV and how they approach state institutions in South Africa. The results from the analysed documents are thereby examined through theoretical approaches, mainly targeting CSOs ability to translate universal human rights into local contexts, and contributions to social justice. The analysed documents reveal that the selected CSOs mobilise their advocacy against GBV through different media platforms. Moreover, the CSO’s advocacy is presented through evidence-based research, policy briefs, articles and campaigns. Through their approaches to state institutions, the CSOs demand the state to recognise that inequality and patriarchal structures cause GBV and negatively affect women’s wellbeing. Furthermore, the selected CSOs demand fair distribution of resources that ensures women’s safety in the public sphere. In addition, the CSOs demand implementation of educational programmes with gender perspectives in all aspects of society. Finally, the CSOs demand South African state institutions to include all sectors of society in decision-making processes of strategies against GBV. Thus, state institutions can unsure proper implementation of preventative methods against GBV.

Technological advancements and affordability enable voicing of social injustice, feelings of deprivation, and oppression. Spatial barriers no longer pose obstacles to connecting with like-minded (or dissimilar) others to define and refine ingroup and outgroup. Some scholars anticipate that the internet liberates the discussion of opinions, others claim social networking platforms play a role in the polarisation of the public by creating echo chambers. However, it is recognised that ideas, ideologies, and social movements spread across the internet at an unprecedented pace. Connecting with others with whom one shares deprivation in a support network offers a sense of belonging. Broad scholarly literature addresses opinion polarisation and potential radicalisation in online social media platforms. However, quantifying radicalisation trajectories in fringe online communities like the misogynist incels are still to be done. In this thesis I study the online presence of the incel community. Incels are mostly young men who feel stigmatised and need to hide their incel existence. Incels voice their feelings of deprivation of a relationship and sex with a willing partner. This unfulfilled masculinity and sense of entitlement to sex cause frustration and anger which are vented in online forums blaming primarily women and feminism. Calls for action to social change, even for violence is common. However, incels do not unanimously consider violence a solution, many demonstrate the tame side of the so-called blackpilled mindset, the acceptance of powerlessness, and nihilism. Regardless, some scholars view the community as potentially dangerous to society, labelling them as terrorists. This study investigates whether participating registered users of the Incels.is website display increasing tendency toward expressing utterances with the themes of misogyny, harassment, nihilism, and moral outrage in their posted messages, and whether users gradually become more aligned with the general perception of incels in previous scholarly work. In other words, this work tests whether active participation increases the frequency of utterances of misogyny, harassment, and moral outrage, thus demonstrating a radicalisation tendency or increased nihilism. To answer the research question, I first scraped the Incels.is website, and retained ~5.38M posts published over 4 years for analysis. Next, a subset of posts was manually labelled to train a supervised text classification model (BERT). Finally, the results of the classification task were complemented with Ordinary Least Squares regression (n = 4623). The analyses uncover temporal user-level radicalisation trajectories, and increased nihilism. More specifically, the duration of active participation (in days) and the number of posted messages positively predict the count of moral outrage, misogynistic, harassing, and nihilistic content.

" Dwelling at the Margins" is an exegesis of the short film Boundaries. Boundaries is a journey into the world of marginalised young people in inner urban Brisbane seen through the eyes of a the female main character with an eye for gentle beauty. The film forms the first part of the research and in the exegesis the ideas unfold that were behind the making of the film and that emerged further through its production and audience reception. The exegesis discussion centres on the major aspects of the film which are visual representations, female narratives and the themes of home and dwelling. Boundaries is a political film that looks from the edges of society. The exegesis seeks to explain the ideas behind this intention.

Environmental justice, a new but rapidly developing concept in international environmental law, arose in the United States of America during the Environmental Justice Movement of the late 1970s and 1980s. It starkly highlighted injustices faced by people of colour and low-income communities as regards racially skewed environmental legal protection and allocation of environmental risks. The movement radically changed the meaning of ‘environment’ from its conventional green overtones to include issues of social justice at the core of environmental thinking. I critically examine the concept of environmental justice in the Kenyan context by highlighting the injustices, and the formulation and application of laws and policies that significantly impact on environmental regulation and equitable distribution of social services. / Private Law / LL. M.

Cette thèse traite de la question des enfants des rues au Mexique, de son histoire, de sa construction en enjeu social et de l’expérience des jeunes aux marges des villes de Mexico et de Tijuana. Symbole de « l'enfance délaissée » dans les pays en voie de développement, cette catégorie sociale a été l'une des « priorités officielles » du premier gouvernement élu démocratiquement à la tête du pays en 2000. La thèse montre comment se configure le monde des enfants des rues en analysant les acteurs de l’intervention sociale auprès des jeunes mais également la façon dont se déploient les existences de ces jeunesses urbaines marginales dans un pays traversé par d’importantes reconfigurations politiques et sociétales. Par une approche sociohistorique de 1880 à nos jours, cette thèse se penche en premier lieu sur l'émergence de cette catégorie dans l’espace public et sa mise en problème qui s'articulent aux transformations sociopolitiques du pays. L’analyse de plusieurs supports iconographiques et documentaires révèle une tension constante entre les figures de la victime et du délinquant qui va de pair avec les angoisses que produit l’important développement urbain du Mexique. L'enquête ethnographique réalisée à Mexico et Tijuana entre 2003 et 2010 montre la pertinence de l'étude à l'échelle de la ville pour comprendre comment s'articulent les politiques, les représentations et les expériences sociales. L'analyse met au jour les spécificités de ces deux villes dans l'appréhension et le traitement du problème, mais également dans les modes d’individuation et les trajectoires biographiques de ces jeunes : si un « effet de frontière » est observé à Tijuana, la dynamique du monde des rues à Mexico se caractérise plutôt par un « effet de capitale ».Finalement, l'analyse par le genre met en évidence les tensions à l'œuvre entre la traduction du langage des droits dans les pratiques quotidiennes des organisations qui travaillent avec cette population et la permanence d'un imaginaire de la famille sexué et hiérarchisé, qui s'articule au récit national. / This thesis deals with the history and construction of the social problem of Mexican street children and with the actual experience of marginalised youth in Mexico City and Tijuana. Symbol of the issue of “abandoned children” in developing countries, this social category has become one of the priorities of the first democratically elected Mexican government in 2000. The thesis examines how the world of “street children” is shaped by analysing the actors of social intervention and the effects of the country’s deep political and societal changes on these marginalised urban youth.Through a socio-historic approach from 1880 to nowadays, this thesis firstly studies the emergence of this category within the public space and its construction as a social problem, embedded in the socio-political transformations of the country. By exploring iconographic and documentary supports, the analysis identifies a constant tension between the figure of ‘victim’ and of ‘delinquent’, a tension which goes hand in hand with the anxiety produced by the tremendous urban development of Mexico.This ethnographic research, carried out in Mexico and Tijuana between 2003 and 2010, demonstrates the relevance of observing at city level in order to understand how the policies, representations and social experiences articulate. The analysis brings to light the specific features of these two cities in their perception and treatment of the problem as well as in the resulting individualisation modes and biographies of these young people. In Tijuana, a “border effect” is observed, whereas the streets dynamics in Mexico City are characterised by a “capital effect”. Finally, the gender analysis demonstrates the tensions between the appropriation of a law terminology in the everyday practices of the organisations working with this population and the traditional image of a sexualised and hierarchic family, embedded in the national narrative.

Despite South Africa’s constitution being demonstrably one of the most progressive in the world, there remains a divide between legislation and women’s lived experiences of violence and inequality. In this context, marginalised women, in particular, are often wrongly perceived of as lacking in power and agency. In an attempt to understand how marginalised women articulate their agency under conditions of direct and structural violence, the aim of my study is to examine how women perform everyday resistance to violence at and between different sites, including the home, community and state-controlled institutions, and to examine the process of undertaking this research, using a critical reflexive approach. My research is structured around four studies. In Study I, I examine how a group of marginalised women perform everyday resistance in relation to state-controlled institutions. In Study II, I consider how a group of marginalised women do everyday resistance in relation to constructions of home. Study III offers an analysis of how the Thembelihle Women’s Forum functions as an invented space of resistance, and everyday resistance is a relational practice. Finally, in Study IV, I do a critical reflexive reading of psychosocial accompaniment as method, elucidating the complexities, tensions and trade-offs inherent to the method. When considered against my study’s broader theoretical framework (i.e., liberation psychology, feminist geopolitics and affective economies), the findings of these four studies present a complex examination of the enactment of everyday resistance. Each of the studies demonstrates a number of strategies for everyday resistance, including becoming a willful subject, refusal and withdrawal, quiet encroachment, collective storytelling, affective reimagining, collective conscientisation, de-ideologizing reality, social solidarity, coping mechanisms, tactics of survival and acts of reclamation. Methodologically, I demonstrate the messiness inherent to how power dynamics are reproduced and resisted during the research process. My research seeks to deepen our understandings of the flow of power within the research process, and the dynamic and shifting imperatives of our research practice. / Psychology / D. Phil. (Psychology)

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 171-177) / The study is an investigation into nation building through the national anthem in Zimbabwe. It takes a sociolinguistic dimension where the languages used to sing the national anthem in Zimbabwe are interrogated. The impetus behind the study is that Zimbabwe introduced a new language policy through the constitution where sixteen languages are officially recognised. While citizens look forward to the use of their languages, national symbols such as the national anthem still exist in dominant languages, at least officially. The study therefore sought to find out the views and language choices of citizens when it comes to singing the national anthem. This purpose was fulfilled by eliciting data through questionnaires which were distributed to four areas where marginalised languages are spoken. Participants were drawn from Plumtree, Gwanda, Hwange and Binga. Apart from questionnaires, focus group interviews were conducted with language activists who participate in language associations. Individual interviews were conducted with academics in the area of language. The conceptual framework of the study is nation building which is underpinned by four tenets, while the theory that guided the study is Bourdieu’s theory of social practice. The conceptual framework and theoretical framework were chosen to allow the study to investigate nation building in relation to the sociopolitical context which determines the use of languages in different spheres in Zimbabwe. The study extricates that language is politically malleable and at the same time has the potential to make or break the nation. Respondents were of mixed views concerning the non-use of their languages in the national anthem, bringing out the hegemonic tendencies. The findings of the study show that language is a form of identity and a strong tool of nation building. However, language policies which are not clear tend to confuse the citizens and there is need for the political elite to be involved in the implementation of such policies. The study hence advocates for marginalised languages to be accorded the status they need in order to be used for national symbol expression. / African Languages / D. Phil. (African Languages)