Zugl.: Berlin, Humboldt-Universiẗat, Diss., 2006.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 315-339). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Regional organisations have often played a catalytical role in developing regional ocean regimes that directly pertain to the peculiar needs and circumstances of a given region. As a response to the challenges imposed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the island States of the South Pacific region established the South Pacific Forum Fisheries Agency, with the specific mandate to assist them manage the enormous tuna resource of the region. The thesis seeks to ascertain the extent to which those needs have been satisfied. The thesis begins with the hypothesis that the Forum Fisheries Agency has in fact fulfilled those needs. The analysis is based on inferences which are drawn from the functions and responsibilities of the Forum Fisheries Agency, and certain significant legal developments it has helped spawn. The thesis does not engage in a cost/benefit evaluation of the Forum Fisheries Agency because that is an issue best left to the purview of individual member States to determine. Two conclusions are drawn from the analysis. First, the Forum Fisheries Agency has met the needs of the island States. Secondly, through the Forum Fisheries Agency, the island States are implementing the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. / Law, Peter A. Allard School of / Graduate

This thesis examines images of women shopping in the art of Kenneth Hayes Miller and Reginald Marsh during the 1920s and 1930s. New York City's Fourteenth Street served Kenneth Hayes Miller and Reginald Marsh, respectively, as a location generating the inspiration to study and visually represent its contemporaneity. Of particular interest to this thesis are relationships between developments in shopping and the images of women shopping in and around Fourteenth Street that populate the paintings of Miller and Marsh. Although, as Ellen Todd Wiley has shown, the emerging notion of the New Woman helped to shape female identity at this time, what remains unstudied are dimensions that geographically specific, historical developments in shopping contributed to the construction of female identity which, this thesis argues, Marsh and Miller related to, by locating in, the department store and bargain store.

Multi-Layered Predictors of ESE Policy Adoption: A growing number of K-12 public school districts in the United States have begun to embrace the whole-school approach to environmental and sustainability education through the implementation of simultaneous efforts to green their facilities and provide related educational programming. This article explores the breadth of this critical approach in the 200 largest school districts in the country. In examining policy predictors at the district, municipal, and state levels, the study combines National Center for Education Statistics data and information from a systematic web scan of school district and municipal websites. Using logistic regression, the analysis reveals four main findings. First, school districts under mayoral control are more likely to have a policy. Second, the study underscores the interconnectedness of these policies with the sustainability efforts of the municipalities they are located in. Third, school districts located in large cities are more likely to have a policy. Fourth, support from state educational agencies plays a role in advancing a policy. The Case of New York City Public Schools: Within an educational system increasingly focused on test-based accountability, how can a local education authority adopt a holistic environmental and sustainability education (ESE) policy? What local and global factors and actors shape and inform the creation of such a policy? In answering these questions, this article examines the formulation of ESE policy in the New York City Department of Education. Based on an analysis of archival documents and 20 expert interviews, the study draws on the Advocacy Coalition Framework and extends its application by adding global and social movement perspectives. In doing so this study finds that external events enabled the initial enactment of the policy in 2009, while the practice and local pilots of ESE programs substantially informed the reformulation of the policy in 2012. Taking the Expected Path vs. Forging Their Own: ESE Policies at DPS and PWCS: How do similar environmental and sustainability education policies unfold in fundamentally distinct locations? This article compares and contrasts environmental and sustainability education policies in two school districts: Denver Public Schools and Prince William County Public Schools. Although the districts are similar in size and education governance (elected school board), the locale of the school district, public opinion, local sustainability efforts, and the support at the state level for environmental and sustainability education are quite different. Grounded in an extended Advocacy Coalition Framework, the study contextualizes the different global, state and local factors and explores the agency of actors that shape policy change over time. The research finds that the policy at Denver Public Schools is following an expected path influenced by external factors such as the city’s sustainability plan, public opinion, and state support in the form of an Environmental Literacy Plan. In contrast, gubernatorial influence, and joint action of the sustainability team, parents and students forged a pathway to an unexpected policy at Prince William County Public Schools. The study strengthens empirical research of subnational environmental and sustainability policies and shows how different pathways are possible.

Two-sided matching markets are a cornerstone of modern economics. They model a wide range of applications such as ride-sharing, online dating, job positioning, school admissions, and many more. In many of those markets, monetary exchange does not play a role. For instance, the New York City public high school system is free of charge. Thus, the decision on how eighth-graders are assigned to public high schools must be made using concepts of fairness rather than price. There has been therefore a huge amount of literature, mostly in the economics community, defining various concepts of fairness in different settings and showing the existence of matchings that satisfy these fairness conditions. Those concepts have enjoyed wide-spread success, inside and outside academia. However, finding such matchings is as important as showing their existence. Moreover, it is crucial to have fast (i.e., polynomial-time) algorithms as the size of the markets grows. In many cases, modern algorithmic tools must be employed to tackle the intractability issues arising from the big data era. The aim of my research is to provide mathematically rigorous and provably fast algorithms to find solutions that extend and improve over a well-studied concept of fairness in two-sided markets known as stability. This concept was initially employed by the National Resident Matching Program in assigning medical doctors to hospitals, and is now widely used, for instance, by cities in the US for assigning students to public high schools and by certain refugee agencies to relocate asylum seekers. In the classical model, a stable matching can be found efficiently using the renowned deferred acceptance algorithm by Gale and Shapley. However, stability by itself does not take care of important concerns that arose recently, some of which were featured in national newspapers. Some examples are: how can we make sure students get admitted to the best school they deserve, and how can we enforce diversity in a cohort of students? By building on known and new tools from Mathematical Programming, Combinatorial Optimization, and Order Theory, my goal is to provide fast algorithms to answer questions like those above, and test them on real-world data. In Chapter 1, I introduce the stable matching problem and related concepts, as well as its applications in different markets. In Chapter 2, we investigate two extensions introduced in the framework of school choice that aim at finding an assignment that is more favorable to students -- legal assignments and the Efficiency Adjusted Deferred Acceptance Mechanism (EADAM) -- through the lens of classical theory of stable matchings. We prove that the set of legal assignments is exactly the set of stable assignments in another instance. Our result implies that essentially all optimization problems over the set of legal assignments can be solved within the same time bound needed for solving it over the set of stable assignments. We also give an algorithm that obtains the assignment output of EADAM. Our algorithm has the same running time as that of the deferred acceptance algorithm, hence largely improving in both theory and practice over known algorithms. In Chapter 3, we introduce a property of distributive lattices, which we term as affine representability, and show its role in efficiently solving linear optimization problems over the elements of a distributive lattice, as well as describing the convex hull of the characteristic vectors of the lattice elements. We apply this concept to the stable matching model with path-independent quota-filling choice functions, thus giving efficient algorithms and a compact polyhedral description for this model. Such choice functions can be used to model many complex real-world decision rules that are not captured by the classical model, such as those with diversity concerns. To the best of our knowledge, this model generalizes all those for which similar results were known, and our paper is the first that proposes efficient algorithms for stable matchings with choice functions, beyond classical extensions of the Deferred Acceptance algorithm. In Chapter 4, we study the discovery program (DISC), which is an affirmative action policy used by the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) for specialized high schools; and explore two other affirmative action policies that can be used to minimally modify and improve the discovery program: the minority reserve (MR) and the joint-seat allocation (JSA) mechanism. Although the discovery program is beneficial in increasing the number of admissions for disadvantaged students, our empirical analysis of the student-school matches from the 12 recent academic years (2005-06 to 2016-17) shows that about 950 in-group blocking pairs were created each year amongst disadvantaged group of students, impacting about 650 disadvantaged students every year. Moreover, we find that this program usually benefits lower-performing disadvantaged students more than top-performing disadvantaged students (in terms of the ranking of their assigned schools), thus unintentionally creating an incentive to under-perform. On the contrary, we show, theoretically by employing choice functions, that (i) both MR and JSA result in no in-group blocking pairs, and (ii) JSA is weakly group strategy-proof, ensures that at least one disadvantaged is not worse off, and when reservation quotas are carefully chosen then no disadvantaged student is worse-off. We show that each of these properties is not satisfied by DISC. In the general setting, we show that there is no clear winner in terms of the matchings provided by DISC, JSA, and MR, from the perspective of disadvantaged students. We however characterize a condition for markets, that we term high competitiveness, where JSA dominates MR for disadvantaged students. This condition is verified, in particular, in certain markets when there is a higher demand for seats than supply, and the performances of disadvantaged students are significantly lower than that of advantaged students. Data from NYC DOE satisfy the high competitiveness condition, and for this dataset our empirical results corroborate our theoretical predictions, showing the superiority of JSA. We believe that the discovery program, and more generally affirmative action mechanisms, can be changed for the better by implementing the JSA mechanism, leading to incentives for the top-performing disadvantaged students while providing many benefits of the affirmative action program.

La montée en puissance d’une philanthropie élitaire privée est l’un des principaux faits saillants des deux dernières décennies. Évoluant de plus en plus dans une logique de partenariat avec les États et les groupes communautaires, cette philanthropie, dont le principal avatar est la « philanthropie d’investissement », est un acteur majeur dans l’émergence de la « gouvernance du social ». À partir du cas de l’organisme communautaire Harlem Children’s Zone à New York et de la Fondation Lucie et André Chagnon au Québec, cette étude comparative analyse comment la philanthropie d’investissement reproduit à l’intérieur de la gouvernance du social l’ascendance du donateur, comment les groupes financés parviennent à faire preuve d’une capacité d’action leur permettant de dialoguer et de négocier avec les bailleurs de fonds, et comment les relations triangulaires entre les acteurs philanthropiques, communautaires et publics affectent le développement des politiques sociales. Mots-clés : Philanthropie élitaire - Philanthropie d’investissement – gouvernance du social – politiques sociales. / The rise of an elite private philanthropy is one of the main highlights of the past two decades. Evolving more and more in a partnership logic with governments and community groups, philanthropy, and most specifically "investment philanthropy", is a major player in the emergence of "social governance". From the cases of the Harlem Children's Zone, a non-profit organization in New York and the Fondation Lucie et André Chagnon in Quebec, this comparative study analyzes how investment philanthropy replicates the donor’s influence within social governance, how funded groups manage to demonstrate some forms of agency allowing them to discuss and negotiate with the donors, and how the triangular relationship between philanthropic, community and public actors affects the development of social policies. Keywords: elite philanthropy; investment philanthropy; social governance; social policies.

The current neoliberal education system often positions bilingual youth as deficient or lacking in skills. The discourse from some academic research paradigms tends to also take up this deficit orientation, focusing on the issues and needs of Latinx bilingual students, or the pedagogical strategies to “close achievement gaps.” The NYC Department of Education has attempted to address gaps in achievement by offering increased access to college and career readiness programs, positioning access as synonymous to equity. However, access alone does not lead to equity when the systems and norms that prioritize assimilation to the dominant white culture are not being challenged; moreover, increased access will not lead to equity if the voices and experiences of marginalized youth experiencing the transition to college are not amplified. This project will add to the growing body of scholarly work that aims to subvert deficit discourse around bilingual students by inviting them to author their own stories about their experiences in the transition to college. These narratives bring up various aspects of the transition to college: how first-generation Latinx bilingual youth navigate cultural and linguistic expectations in college, how they navigate the white, western, and patriarchal institutional norms of the college going process, sources of support in their educational journeys, what factors influenced their college choices, and how they have experienced college in the context of a global pandemic. This research recognizes bilingual students’ experiences and knowledges as truths, positioning them as knowledge creators. The purpose of this study is to document and explore how first-generation Latinx/ bilingual students experience the transition from high school to college, and how they navigate and question spaces in high school and college fraught with linguistic and cultural erasure. Employing Chicana Feminist epistemologies and post-positive realist perspectives of identity, this study will use pláticas to better understand the experiences of Latinx students as they transition to college, what educators can do to support their transition, and to think about how educators can work alongside Latinx students to fight erasure.

In this dissertation project, I make three separate contributions to the study of the political economy of automation which center the agency of workers and society over technological change. The papers presented here each take a historical approach, both to contextualize modern debates over new technologies and to describe political responses that may have fallen out of contemporary awareness. In the first paper, I examine the origin of the term “automation” to reveal the ways that this concept has been shaped by social and political imperatives. I then propose a new definition and conceptualization of automation which respect this reality and open new avenues for research into this form of technological change. In the second paper, I examine the role played by the occupational structure of unions in determining their responses to automation. Drawing on a comparison of the cases of 1) the AFL-CIO and its Industrial Union Department and 2) New York Typographical Union No. 6 from approximately 1950–1975, I show that industrially-organized unions are more receptive of automation than are unions organized along craft lines. In the final paper, I examine the role that the different approaches to labor force control adopted by craft unions play in shaping both their responses to new technologies and their inclusion or exclusion of women workers. Through a comparison of the histories of the typographical unions in the United States and the United Kingdom over 150 years, I show that unions adopting an apprenticeship-based system of labor force control are both more resistant to new technologies and more exclusionary of women than are unions adopting a strategy of incorporation. Taken together, these papers show that workers and unions have been neither helpless cogs nor implacable wrenches in the machinery of technological change.