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Education harbours some of the most pervasive contradictions in contemporary India. While it produces world famous human capital enhancing the country's rising competitiveness as a global ‘knowledge economy', millions of children still lack access to basic education. In Kerala, a state famous for the success of its educational achievements, the benefits of education that can be gained by those in the lower strata of society continue to be marginal regardless of policies of positive discrimination. Focusing on youth at the higher secondary school level (grades 11-12), ‘the primary bottleneck in the education system today' (World Bank 2012), this thesis seeks to understand the social processes that go into making education a key resource to the (re)production of inequalities. Based upon a year's ethnographic fieldwork in and around two schools in Ernakulam, South India, this thesis examines the ways in which two distinct groups of youth – one attending a top end private English medium school at the heart of a city and the other educated in an institution at the bottom of the schooling ladder – inhabit their final year of schooling and generate future projects and aspirations. I located their experiences at the intersection of the two educational sites par excellence: the school and the house. In the city, middle-class schooling and parental regimes attempt to orient youth's lives towards the acquisition of multiple competences aimed at enhancing their individual prospects towards becoming competitive professionals, depicted as garnering maximum amounts of wealth and prestige in today's globalised economy of paid employment and migration. At the fringes of middle-class urban life and the quest for professionalism, youth are becoming subject of an increasing ghettoisation: only the educationally, financially and socially poor are left to attend their school. In that stark scenario, education emerged as central to both youth performances of class, status and gender. They constructed and embodied identities based on education and more generally with ideas of competence. This creative work revealed an overtly hierarchical field formed of distinctive peer groups engaged in overt practices of exclusion and inclusion according to imagine futures: mostly elusive fantasies that reveal the youth marked by uncertainties in a time shaped by rising expectations and increasingly intricate and unequal paths leading to them.

This study explores the relationship between language learning strategies and learner variables of Sri Lankan learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) with special reference to their personality types to examine what implications these associations have for the teaching of ESL in the Sri Lankan sociocultural context. In order to investigate the above, a large and representative sample of the ESL population was chosen. The sample taken for analysis comprised 886 subjects from six secondary schools which operate under the Ministry of Education in the Sri Lankan government. These subjects belonged to three distinct subcultures as demarcated by their first language (L1), Religion and Ethnicity in Sri Lanka. Data were collected using two questionnaires - a language learning strategy inventory and a personality assessment questionnaire, between April 2002 and June 2002 in Sri Lanka. Two statistical tests were used to measure the associations between the learner variables and language learning strategies: Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) and Univariate Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The findings show differences in strategy use or rather the ways the three groups learn the target language indicating that these strategy choices are closely correlated to their personality type, gender and religion/ethnicity. The findings also indicate that these variables affect the strategy choices both as collective and individual forces and when working as collective forces there is a complex interplay between these variables. While this study clearly demonstrates the association between learner variables and language learning strategies, it acknowledges the possible dangers in discussing these associations in cross-cultural comparisons. It also suggests the need for more ethnographic research to further elucidate the findings obtained in the current study. Based on these findings in the current study, this thesis strongly argues that ELT pedagogy cannot be independent of the Sri Lankan sociocultural context. It is therefore strongly suggested that ELT pedagogies should: (1) develop within the socio -cultural contexts of the learners; (2) be orientated to the culture of speakers of a Sri Lankan variety of English; (3) incorporate teaching material based on rhetoric indigenous to their culture. The study also shows the complexities of ESL instruction in the Sri Lankan socio-cultural context where its history, different cultures, first languages, ethnicities and religions all make a significant contribution to the learning/teaching of the target language. The challenge for teaching ESL in Sri Lanka is even higher given that all languages come with their own cultural, historical and ethnic trappings.

<p>This thesis is concerned with the efforts to bring about a greater degree of local community participation in the use and management of Sri Lanka's coastal land and natural resources. Through the application of the Special Area Management (SAM) strategy in geographically distinct areas along the coast, the aim is to create collaborative arrangements - partnerships - that will enable coastal communities and local governments to work together with the Sri Lankan state and share responsibility and authority over the management of coastal land and natural resources. </p><p>Using a political-geographical perspective that highlights the political and spatial dimensions of this shift in forms for governing the coast, the thesis seeks to identify and discuss factors that can have a bearing on the participatory dimension of collaborative coastal management in Sri Lanka. The thesis focuses particularly on factors influencing the role played by the local communities and the degree to which they actually come to share authority with respect to the use and management of coastal natural resources as envisioned in the SAM strategy. </p><p>The thesis illustrates that, despite an ambition to bring about a sharing of authority and control in costal management, this has not quite worked out in practice. Due to circumstances relating both to the SAM strategy itself and to the context in which it is implemented, the degree to which coastal communities have gained any degree of influence with respect to the management of coastal land and resources remains questionable. </p><p>The study is carried out prior to the tsunami that hit the Sri Lankan shores in December 2004. However, given the major reconstruction of Sri Lanka's coast that currently is ongoing and the controversy that surrounds it, the issues raised in this thesis are highly relevant.</p>

The recognition that women are not in a fixed position but are dynamic and active in any of the processes of migration and post-migration adjustment helps us to see the complexity of women's participation in migration. Using life history interviews, three Sri-Lankan womens' migration experiences are examined for the ways in which personal networks were utilized in various phases of the migration process and how social and human capital was transformed in the post-migration adjustment process. Though in some instances the data did not fully support Boyd's (1989) predictions of the ways in which personal networks affect migration, overall, both Boyd's and Kopijn's (1998) statements that social capital is transmitted and transformed in the migration process are supported. The analysis indicates that all three women were successful in their post migration adjustment in that they were able to retain a strong sense of identity while adopting new practices in the United States. / Graduation date: 2004

This thesis is concerned with the efforts to bring about a greater degree of local community participation in the use and management of Sri Lanka's coastal land and natural resources. Through the application of the Special Area Management (SAM) strategy in geographically distinct areas along the coast, the aim is to create collaborative arrangements - partnerships - that will enable coastal communities and local governments to work together with the Sri Lankan state and share responsibility and authority over the management of coastal land and natural resources. Using a political-geographical perspective that highlights the political and spatial dimensions of this shift in forms for governing the coast, the thesis seeks to identify and discuss factors that can have a bearing on the participatory dimension of collaborative coastal management in Sri Lanka. The thesis focuses particularly on factors influencing the role played by the local communities and the degree to which they actually come to share authority with respect to the use and management of coastal natural resources as envisioned in the SAM strategy. The thesis illustrates that, despite an ambition to bring about a sharing of authority and control in costal management, this has not quite worked out in practice. Due to circumstances relating both to the SAM strategy itself and to the context in which it is implemented, the degree to which coastal communities have gained any degree of influence with respect to the management of coastal land and resources remains questionable. The study is carried out prior to the tsunami that hit the Sri Lankan shores in December 2004. However, given the major reconstruction of Sri Lanka's coast that currently is ongoing and the controversy that surrounds it, the issues raised in this thesis are highly relevant.

Twentieth-century Indian and Sri Lankan literatures (in English, in particular) have shown a strong tendency towards conceptualising the rural and the village within the dichotomous paradigms of utopia and dystopia. Such representations have consequently cast the village in idealized (pastoral) or in realist (counter-pastoral/dystopic) terms. In Chapters One and Two, I read together Mohandas Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1908) and Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and argue that Gandhi and Woolf can be seen at the head of two important, but discrete, ways of reading the South Asian village vis-à-vis utopian thought, and that at the intersection of these two ways lies a rich terrain for understanding the many forms in which later twentieth-century South Asian writers chose to re-create city-village-nation dialectics. In this light, I examine in Chapter Three the work of Raja Rao (Kanthapura, 1938) and O. V. Vijayan (The Legends of Khasak, 1969) and in Chapter Four the writings of Martin Wickramasinghe (Gamperaliya, 1944) and Punyakante Wijenaike (The Waiting Earth, 1966) as providing a re-visioning of Gandhi’s and Woolf’s ideas of the rural as a site for civic and national transformation. I conclude by examining in Chapter Five Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) as emblematic of a recent turn in South Asian fiction centred on the rural where the village embodies a “heterotopic” space that critiques and offers a conceptual alternative to the categorical imperatives of utopia and dystopia. I use Michel Foucault’s notion of the “heterotopia” to re-evaluate the utopian dimension in these novels. Although Foucault himself under-theorized the notion of heterotopia and what he did say connected the idea to urban landscapes and imaginaries, we may yet recuperate from his formulations a “third space” of difference that provides an opportunity to rethink the imperatives of utopia in literature and helps understand the rural in twentieth-century South Asian writing in new ways.

Twentieth-century Indian and Sri Lankan literatures (in English, in particular) have shown a strong tendency towards conceptualising the rural and the village within the dichotomous paradigms of utopia and dystopia. Such representations have consequently cast the village in idealized (pastoral) or in realist (counter-pastoral/dystopic) terms. In Chapters One and Two, I read together Mohandas Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1908) and Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and argue that Gandhi and Woolf can be seen at the head of two important, but discrete, ways of reading the South Asian village vis-à-vis utopian thought, and that at the intersection of these two ways lies a rich terrain for understanding the many forms in which later twentieth-century South Asian writers chose to re-create city-village-nation dialectics. In this light, I examine in Chapter Three the work of Raja Rao (Kanthapura, 1938) and O. V. Vijayan (The Legends of Khasak, 1969) and in Chapter Four the writings of Martin Wickramasinghe (Gamperaliya, 1944) and Punyakante Wijenaike (The Waiting Earth, 1966) as providing a re-visioning of Gandhi’s and Woolf’s ideas of the rural as a site for civic and national transformation. I conclude by examining in Chapter Five Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) as emblematic of a recent turn in South Asian fiction centred on the rural where the village embodies a “heterotopic” space that critiques and offers a conceptual alternative to the categorical imperatives of utopia and dystopia. I use Michel Foucault’s notion of the “heterotopia” to re-evaluate the utopian dimension in these novels. Although Foucault himself under-theorized the notion of heterotopia and what he did say connected the idea to urban landscapes and imaginaries, we may yet recuperate from his formulations a “third space” of difference that provides an opportunity to rethink the imperatives of utopia in literature and helps understand the rural in twentieth-century South Asian writing in new ways.

This paper investigates the relationship between ethnic conflict, electoral systems, and power sharing in ethnically divided societies. The cases of Guyana, Fiji, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Mauritius, and Trinidad and Tobago are considered. Electoral systems are denoted based on presidential versus parliamentary system, and on proportional representation versus majoritarian/plurality. The paper concludes that, while electoral systems are important, other factors like the power distribution between ethnic groups, and ensuring a non-zero-sum game may be as important.

This bachelor thesis is conducted as a Minor Field Study (MFS) in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship between journalism and politics from three questions at issue: 1) What is the role of media according to the journalists? 2) How do journalists work with political reporting in the Sri Lankan print media? 3) How does print media and politics correspond to each other in Sri Lanka?. The theoretical framework consists of theories onmedia systems, democracy models, the notion of the public sphere, media during elections and types of regulations. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 informants, both editors and journalists, at eight different editorial offices. The newspapers at which the informants were employed were either state-owned or privately owned. The qualitative material was transcribed and analysed using thematisation and meaning concentration to reveal patterns, attitudes and opinions. The analysis is divided into two major sections; 'Media's Role in the Society' and 'Media and Politics'. The first section investigates the first question at issue. Informing and educating people are valued as important responsibilities amongst the informants. Media is considered to be powerful in terms of affecting both people and politicians, although, some reservations are made. The second section examines the second and third questions at issue. The ideal execution of political reportage includes notions of neutrality, fairness, balance and unbiased reporting. In reality this is not necessarily accomplished. The state newspapers seem to report on behalf of the government in a positive and uncritical way. Private newspapers consider themselves to be more independent, but political ties and restrictions can disable their independence. Tendencies towards clientelism, political parallelism and instrumentalization are noted in the media environment. Sensitive, political news is often self-censored by journalists due to fear of consequences. In 'Conclusions and Discussion' the questions at issue are connected to each other in an attempt to discuss the complex relationship between journalism and politics in Sri Lanka.