Disruption to the life narrative is a common long-term experience following acquired brain injury. It can lead to barriers in being able to fulfil roles and engage in daily activities and occupations. Disruption occurs not only for the person who sustains the brain injury, but is also an experience for significant others in their lives. This narrative study gathered participants’ personal ‘sense making’ of life events following such disruption. Extended narrative interviews were combined with a photo-elicitation technique for six people with acquired brain injury and six people who had a significant other in their life with an acquired brain injury, all living in a rural area. It involved discussion around the patterning of their daily activities and roles both pre and post injury. Narrative analysis led to individual case studies of barriers and opportunities to lives impacted by brain injury. Issues were highly individualised and whilst the rural context presented an advantageous place to live for some due to tranquillity, it was less advantageous for others. However, synthesis of findings across cases considered the narrative form produced by the twelve accounts. This revealed that individuals drew on attributes of previous roles and careers to construct meaning and manage their lives, even when they could no longer engage with past roles and careers. Approaches to self-management post injury appeared to follow a pattern of drawing on internal schema underpinned by values, skills and meaning of previous roles and careers. This constitutes a form of capital built up from life pre-injury that is being utilised to achieve health and wellbeing, which I have called ‘embodied occupational capital’. An opportunity to work with individuals whose lives are affected by acquired brain injury has been offered, by way of focusing on this ‘embodied occupational capital’ to empower them to make positive change.

This dissertation examines how the three western Allies used sport to rebuild western Germany during the occupation and early years of the Federal Republic. The Allies believed that the sports in which Germans chose to participate before 1945, in particular fencing and gymnastics (Turnen), helped define ones Germanness through demonstrations of militarism and hyper-masculinity. The development of Directive 23 on the Limitation and Demilitarization of Sport within the quadripartite Allied Control Authority imposed on sport the goals of the Potsdam Declaration: denazification, demilitarisation, decentralisation, and democratisation. By using sport as a vehicle to examine the achievement of western Allied goals, this dissertation demonstrates the centrality of sport to occupation policy. Sport became a highly effective instrument of public diplomacy because of its broad appeal and also because it allows for a public display of national capabilities. By encouraging competition with athletes from other countries, the western Allies fostered a transformation of German sport from defining individual characteristics to supporting broader, group-oriented ideas of democracy. The problems of creating national sport organisations mirrored the geo-political situation as the western occupation zones merged to form the Federal Republic. The debate over the structural organisation of sport provided the Germans with an opportunity to demonstrate the democratic ideals learned from the western Allies but also allowed them to use these same ideals to gain autonomy. Germans used the internationalism of sport to regain a position within the international community because international sport federations lay outside official state control. Examining unofficial international football matches and West Germanys reacceptance by the international federations illustrates how sport provided a place for Germans to participate in the international system when no formal German state existed. The division of Germany forced the worlds sportsmen to address the political realities of Germany even though they considered sport separate from politics. This dissertation demonstrates how the western Allied efforts to dissociate sport and politics instead created the environment which enabled sport to assume a place of primacy during the Cold War, making the use of sport to democratise West Germany an ironic continuation of the politicisation of sport within Germany. / PhD

U.S. American literary and creative artists perform the work of developing a discursive response to two critical moments in Haitian history: the Revolution (1791-1804) and the U.S. Marine Occupation (1915 to 1934), inspiring imaginations and imaginary concepts. Revolutionary images of Toussaint Louverture proliferated beyond the boundaries of Haiti illuminating the complicity of colonial powers in maintaining notions of a particularized racial discourse. Frank J. Webb, a free black Philadelphian, engages a scathing critique of Thomas Carlyle’s sage prose “On the Negro Question” (1849) through the fictional depiction of a painted image of Louverture in Webb’s novel The Garies and their Friends (1857). Travel writing and ethnographies of the Occupation provide platforms for new forms of artistic production involving Vodou. Following James Weldon Johnson’s critique of U.S. policy (1920), others members of the Harlem Renaissance provide a counter narrative that reengages particular U.S. readers with Haiti’s problematic Revolution through the visual and literary lens of the Occupation experience. The pseudo journalism of William Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929) serves as the poto mitan (center point) around which other creative works produced after the Occupation appear. Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, and Maya Deren followed in Seabrook’s wake. Literature, performances, and film, as well as complementary ethnographic records for each follow from Dunham (Dances of Haiti, 1983), Hurston (Tell My Horse, 1938), and Deren (Divine Horsemen, 1953). The artistic production of these significant cultural producers may better represent their experience of fieldwork in Haiti following the Occupation. Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Dunham’s exposure of Haitian dances across the world stage, and Deren’s experimental films better capture the reciprocal effect of the ethnographic process on each in their continued presentation to contemporary audiences. Literature directly related to their production appears later in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Arthur Flowers’s Another Good Loving Blues (1993), Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), and Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads (2005). These productive literatures and art forms actively engage in creating the transnational ideal of diaspora as we understand it today. All dance delicately with spirit.

This thesis attempts to examine the political and economic role of the trade unions and associations in the Gaza Strip 1967-1993. The main theme of analysis is based upon the assumption that these indigenous organizations showed a high degree of politicization. The thesis discusses the unstable socio-economic-organizational- political-and legal setting in the Gaza Strip under the Israeli occupation which constituted a limit on the overall performance of the Palestinian organizations. Within this volatile setting, three main actors interacted: the trade unions and associations, the Israeli occupation authorities, and the Palestinian political factions. The study gives a general review of the associations and non governmental organizations working in the Gaza Strip and it examines the genesis of the Palestinian trade unionism and the trade unions in the Gaza Strip. These organizations constituted a Palestinian institutional- organizational national response and worked parallel to the occupation apparatus. The thesis goes on to analyse the political role of the trade unions and associations in the Gaza Strip through discussing : the nature of their relationship with the Israeli authorities; their relationship with the Palestinian political movements; their positions towards the uprising (intifada); and their attitudes towards the peace process. The study argues further that the economic role of the trade unions and association was very limited compared to their political role. The loan programmes and economic activities of two lending organizations working the Gaza Strip are examined. The lending capacity of the credit organizations was less than US$10 million (the GDP of the Gaza Strip was about US$250 million in 1993). Most of their loans went to finance services, consumptive, and non-productive projects.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, 2006. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographic references.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Charles N. Morris. Dissertation Committee: Jean Pierre Jordaan. Includes bibliographical references.

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