This thesis studies the institutional foundations and micro-mechanisms by which social order is regulated and public goods are delivered in China’s urban grassroots communities. This study is motivated by the seemingly deviant phenomenon that massive internal migration and rapid urbanisation during China’s market reforms have not resulted in chaotic and familiar third world urban diseases. Instead, relatively governed, less contentious, highly dynamic yet ultimately soft migrant enclaves contrast sharply with what often feature most developing countries. Based on the case studies of four urban villages – which categorically housed the majority of China’s 274 million rural migrants – I trace the interplay among the remaining socialist institutions, dominant market forces and various intermediaries in managing migrant contestation and serving state functions. I consider both objective criteria and migrants’ perceptions to explain why China’s migrant enclaves demonstrate distinct characteristics compared with the migrant enclaves in many developing countries. I also consider why China’s migrant enclaves share similar patterns of transformation with its formal cities. The findings contest the conventional approaches that are used to explain China’s structural stability and territorial cohesion despite local disturbances and conflicts, which are mainly attributable to the authoritarian regime, state corporatism or an underdeveloped civil society. Although China’s land, danwei and hukou systems are nationally configured, I argue that these institutions are also conducive to protecting an intermediate realm that comprises residential committees, joint-stock companies and clan associations by providing a safety valve and nurturing localised engagements. I then examine how these intermediaries have adopted coercion, patronage and exit-point mechanisms to deliver public goods, enforce communal order and broker urban renewal through less coercive and predatory means. I further assess the ways in which these engaging but parochial, resourceful but dependent, and exclusive rather than inclusive intermediaries have mediated the boundaries between despotic power and infrastructural power and among state agenda, market forces and grassroots interests. This thesis thus re-visits China’s authoritarian resilience concerning not only how migrant contestation is managed but also what institutions and mechanisms are most effective to articulate multiple interests and ensure social compliance during the processes of urbanisation and decentralisation in the absence of electoral politics.

The problematical notion of the ‘Armenian question’ has become a political and linguistic tool for the official genocide denial ever since the foundation of the Turkish Republic, and has come to stand for the controversy that exists around the denial and recognition of the Armenian Genocide at both national and international levels. This research explores how the ‘Armenian question’ in Turkey opens up a discursive space in which various forms of Turkish nationalism are constructed and reproduced, and addresses multifaceted narratives from members of the Armenian community. By employing this term I aim to challenge the attempt to decontextualize collective acts of violence against Armenians, restricting them to the period of the Ottoman Empire, and indicate how this issue goes far beyond the politics of genocide. The objective of my research is to point out particular production and consumption phases of the Armenian question in Turkey. The production side focuses on three national newspapers in order to unveil overlapping and divergent discursive strategies in their coverage of three recent incidents, namely the assassination of Hrant Dink, the murder of Sevag Balıkçı, and the public protest against the Khojaly Massacre. In contrast, the consumption side embraces the perceptions and experiences of particular members of the Armenian community in Istanbul with respect to past and present occurrences. This research thus uncovers consistencies and contradictions between news discourse and the responses of the Armenian interviewees concerning three particular events and sheds light on the asymmetrical production and consumption patterns of the Armenian question in Turkey. Drawing on data from both a critical discourse analysis of three cases in three Turkish national newspapers and forty-five semi-structured interviews with Armenians, this qualitative study seeks to contribute to the growing body of research on the Armenian question and Turkish nationalism.

The recognition of rights to couples outside the institution of marriage has been, and still is, a contentious issue in Italian Politics. Normative notions of family and kinship perpetuate the exclusion of those who do not conform to the heterosexual norm. At the same time the increased visibility of kinship arrangements that evade the heterosexual script and their claims for legal recognition, expose the fragility and the constructedness of heteronorms. During the Prodi II Government (2006-2008) the possibility of a law recognising legal status to de facto unions stirred a major controversy in which the conservative political forces and the Catholic hierarchies opposed any form of recognition, with particular acrimony shown toward same sex couples. Corriere della Sera and la Repubblica, the two newspapers with the highest circulation in Italy, covered at length the disputes that ensued from the proposal. This thesis focuses on the analysis of the two newspapers and uncovers the ways in which they produced narratives that both sustained the exclusion of those who do not conform and potentially fostered a space for its disruption. In so doing the thesis aims to add a further dimension to the body of work investigating the politics of sexuality in contemporary Italy. A systematic reading of the press coverage reveals how the newsworthiness of the conflicts enhanced the visibility of those who opposed the law in turn sustaining the construction of it as a contentious issue. The close analysis of a selection of texts reveals the media ambivalence in displacing conservative notions of family and kinship and their contribution in fostering narratives that sustain exclusion.

High emigration countries tell a confusing story of how migration cycles can contribute to the sustainable economic development of some poor countries in some ways but hamper it in others. A number of social, economic and political factors – on local, national and global levels – interact to influence success, or lack thereof, in activating diasporas to contribute to the development of their home countries. Various actors – including states, civil society, and minority groups – within the 'transnational social space' impact on migrants' capacity to send 'social remittances' and engage with transnational processes. This study looks at a particular cadre of highly skilled migrants – Nigerian doctors working in the NHS in England – as a lens through which to explore these broader processes. Africa has: 3% of the world's health-workers; 11% of the global population; 24% of the global burden of disease. Yet 28% of sub-Saharan African doctors have left the continent to practice medicine in a handful of OECD countries, with enormous social and economic costs to sending countries. The NHS is highly dependent on overseas doctors – 28% are trained overseas, and 75% of these are from low income countries. Yet there is a long history of discriminatory practice towards overseas doctors in the NHS. Overseas doctors tend to be over-represented in lower grades, and under-represented in senior positions: the higher up the NHS hierarchy you look, the whiter the doctors become. This study traces the migratory trajectories of 32 Nigerian doctors who have studied and/or worked in England, their experiences of professional development within the NHS, and their involvement in community and transnational activities that induce (or hinder) the transfer of skills and resources. Their narratives are connected to broader aspects of immigration policy, structural discrimination, and transnational processes to explore how their place within the transnational social space impacts on their ability to obtain transferable knowledge, and how they use this knowledge to make a contribution to the development of the healthcare sector in Nigeria.

In this thesis, I use mixed methods to present four interdisciplinary essays on education, caste and collective action in rural Pakistan. In the first essay, I undertake a conceptual analysis of the nature of the Pakistani kinship group, locally referred to sometimes as biraderi (brotherhood), quom (tribe, sect, nation) or zaat (ancestry, caste). By systematically comparing the features of the kinship group with modern interpretations of caste, I argue that the Pakistani kinship group is much closer to a caste than is commonly acknowledged in a lot of the research. In the second essay, I document the extent of educational inequalities based on this kinship group, henceforth also referred to as caste. Using a unique dataset that I collected for approximately 2500 individuals from rural Pakistan, I show that low caste individuals on average are 7% less likely to be literate and 5% less likely to attend school than their high caste counterparts. Strikingly, these differences rise to over 20% for certain low caste groups. Even though caste-based inequalities are not statistically significant for the youngest cohort in my sample, my qualitative analysis of over 65 in-depth interviews with key informants confirms that caste remains not only a critical marker of identity, but also an important source of fragmentation in the country. In the third essay, I focus on the fragmentary nature of the kinship group and develop a theoretical framework in which caste fractionalization, land inequality and the imbalance in power between various castes – or what I refer to as caste power heterogeneity – jointly influence the level of collective activity for rural education provision. I test this framework using a blend of quantitative analysis of original data for over 2500 individuals, and qualitative comparative case studies of a total of eight rural communities in Pakistan. The analysis I present both confirms the interdependence of my three proposed dimensions of social heterogeneity, as well as highlights the salience of caste power heterogeneity in predicting the level of collective activity for education provision. In the final essay, I turn to studying the role of social capital in enhancing educational outcomes. I perform statistical analysis of data from over 350 households and combine it with a micro-level comparative case study of social capital and collective action surrounding education in two rural communities from Pakistan. My results in this final paper indicate that there are weak associations between my two parameters of interest. They also highlight the importance of understanding the downside of social capital, and of recognizing that rather than being driven by social capital alone, collective action is often embedded in a wider system of village politics and patronage.

If the financial crisis was an opportunity to challenge and replace free market (neoliberal) capitalism; then why has nothing radically changed? It seemed to me that we might find answers to this question by studying those movements which sought to actually bring change about in the post-crash moment and what foreclosures they faced in resisting the reassertion of neoliberalism. As such, over three summers (2012, 2013, 2014) I interviewed and observed Occupy London, learning about the movement and discussing with activists involved what challenges and problems they faced in attempting to resist the continuation of this system after the crash. Indeed, this seemed particularly important to study in a situation where that ideology which caused the crisis in the first place, appeared to be not only continuing 'by default' and presenting itself as the only 'sensible' way forwards, but also seemed to be dominating society as a set of normative cultural values. I begin by arguing that the tactic of occupation and the collective identity of 'we are the 99%' carried radical potential, insofar as they both indicated an intention to present an organised and symbolically consistent appearance, which aimed to qualitatively stretch their grievances to others. Against that which designated the movement as 'nothing to see here' and as something which should simply 'move along'; occupation also gave an opportunity to make the 'nonsense' idea (that there could be an alternative) appear against its designation as nonsense. However, it is my contention that any possibilities of resistance and change which occupation and 'we are the 99%' suggested, were unable to be capitalised upon by the Occupy movement in London. Firstly, I point to pragmatic issues of pervasive individualism and libertarianism within the movement, which created disorganisation, symbolic inconsistency and a limitation of their ability to extend beyond the movement itself. Furthermore, I also argue against ideas that Occupy was somehow able to create a structureless, open and prefigurative performance of an alternative society which was outside and untainted by wider social structures, instead demonstrating that this created a tendency to overlook inequalities that persisted within the movement. Secondly and beyond these pragmatic issues, however, I also argue that such presuppositions of individualism, libertarianism and prefiguration - as well as the pursuit of authenticity and cynical constructions of power through conspiracy theory - indicated a common framework shared by Occupy London and that which it was attempting to resist. In other words, insofar as these assumptions and givens distributed both the activist's resistance and the post-crash reassertion of neoliberalism, I argue that Occupy unintentionally and counter-intuitively extended the normativity and power of that which it was attempting to refigure and challenge, whilst paradoxically playing into the marginalisation of its own appearance. Rather than a scientific description, or a short sharp characterisation of post-crash resistance (which might either cynically dismiss such movements or romanticise them); the aim of my thesis was instead to trace the foreclosures and the unrealised potentialities of the movement over a period of time, allowing activists to be critical and reflexive through patient analysis.

This thesis examines the factors and forces which contributed to the continued existence of Barbados’ social democratic welfare development model, despite changes in the global economy which favoured neoliberal policies promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This is achieved through an assessment of three World Bank funded education projects which were negotiated and implemented from 1974 to 1994. During this period the Government of Barbados also entered into three stabilisation programmes and a structural adjustment loan with the International Monetary Fund. These periods create the ideal analytical platform to investigate the impact of, and resistance to, the neoliberal ideology espoused by the World Bank and the IMF on Small Island Developing States. The thesis therefore contributes to the dearth of information on the welfare states in developing countries and highlights the importance of understanding the socio-political history, especially the role of colonialism, when assessing the emergence of social policy and planning in the global South. A thorough investigation of this period (1974 to 1994) was conducted, and the data collected from interviews and public archives disclosed that in times of crisis the social democratic welfare state model is challenged but it is the labour unions who strategically organise themselves to confront what they perceive as a movement away from the core principles of the model. They confront both the local policymakers and the international financial institutions. This study therefore demonstrates that even in difficult times some level of agency can still be expressed. This however, in the case of Barbados, did not happen at the level of the technocrats but from the level of organised labour. The case of the labour movement in Barbados, specifically the teachers’ unions (Barbados Union of Teachers and the Barbados Secondary Teachers’ Union) demonstrated that at the height of the neoliberal agenda organised labour was and still is significant in determining the direction of state policy.

A large body of research finds correlations between unemployment and health. This raises the question of whether unemployment benefit programs, which aim to alleviate financial stress associated with job loss, have their own health effects. Although existing studies indicate that receiving unemployment benefits is likely protective for health, most studies do not account for the potentially endogenous relationship between unemployment benefit receipt and individual characteristics. Since not all unemployed people are eligible for, or receive unemployment benefits, estimates of the health effects of unemployment benefits may be biased. This thesis aims to better understand whether unemployment benefits have a causal effect on health by taking advantage of quasi-experimental variations in unemployment benefit programs in the United States. In the first study, I investigate whether the presence of generous State unemployment benefit programs results in fewer suicides during labour market downturns. In the second study, I use longitudinal data to explore whether State unemployment benefit generosity buffers the impact of job loss on self-reported health. The third study examines whether unemployment benefit eligibility expansions lead to greater participation in physically active leisure. Lastly, I use an instrumental variables approach to estimate the self-reported health effects of receiving unemployment benefits. Across all four studies, I consistently find evidence that unemployment benefits have a health promoting effect in the short-term: unemployment benefits are associated with lower suicide rates, better self-reported health and increased physical activity. While the precise mechanisms remain uncertain, I argue that unemployment benefits may positively affect health by subsidizing income and leisure time, both of which can be beneficial for physical and mental health. Although unemployment benefits are unlikely to be a costeffective approach to improve health, the results indicate that policymaker efforts to reduce or limit access to unemployment benefits may lead to unanticipated adverse health effects.

In 2003, UNESCO adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage to officially recognize the value of non-physical heritage. Previously, established conservation standards focused on physical heritage, namely historic architecture, which generally reflected the values of western societies but did not necessarily accommodate other forms of cultural heritage. The adoption of the Convention signified a shift towards a more inclusive approach. My thesis grounds this international discussion in a locality by examining conservation issues and practices in Vancouver, British Columbia. My thesis contains two key findings: (1) Echoing international criticism of established conservation standards, Vancouver’s heritage conservation policies tend to systemically favour aesthetically significant and structurally robust architecture. As a result, certain histories without existing architecture become obsolete, leaving a selective history in Vancouver’s everyday landscape. (2) At the same time, Vancouver has also hosted a number of community history projects. These recent projects have been able to recover fading memories of this landscape through storytelling, a form of intangible heritage, and to reconnect these histories to the locations where they originated (what Pierre Nora (1989) calls milieux de mémoire). My recommendations include a formal integration of intangible heritage projects with the established heritage conservation program and suggest opportunities to achieve this integration. These recommendations hope to encourage a more inclusive approach that recognizes a place’s history contains diverse, coexisting and overlapping narratives, and acknowledges the parts of this history that may be damaged by forces of gentrification, urban renewal and colonization. By approaching the city’s landscape as a palimpsest, inclusive heritage conservation practice can make Vancouver more than a site of residence with aesthetic character, but a place that owns its past. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate

This thesis argues that the reflection of society in Dickens's mature novels is not mechanical, passive or superficial but a creative, critical, and generalising reflection of the essential aspects of everyday social relations within Victorian industrial society, though this is mediated through both class values and literary conventions. The development of the mature novels' social vision from the episodic social criticism of specific abuses in the earlier fiction is related to changes in the social/economic climate of Victorian England and especially to the growth of urbanisation. Dickens's novelistic attitude to the mid-Victorian middle classes is explored in its full complexity, for although Dickens was lionised by a predominantly middle-class reading public and always wrote in accordance with middle-class standards of propriety and delicacy, and despite his utilisation of selected middle-class values as moral positives and structural organising agents within his novels, Dickens cannot be satisfactorily labelled as a 'bourgeois' writer or apologist. Indeed he uses the traditional entrepreneurial middle-class values (characteristic of an earlier stage of English capitalist development) to implicitly criticise the contemporary social/economic experience of the mid-Victorian middle-class itself, towards whom his novels are increasingly hostile. Dickens's complex and uneasy stand in mid-Victorian society resulted in many characteristic tensions and inconsistencies in his novels, and these are explored through a detailed analysis of five of the later novels. This reveals a characteristic lack of resolution between a tragic social vision and the demands of a 'happy' closed plot ending, the latter operating in a mutually reinforcing partnership with an organising framework of middle-class values to make novels which are critical and oppositional to Victorian capitalism acceptable to a middle-class reading public.