This thesis explores young children's constructions of social identities and the implications these may have in young children's everyday lives at nursery. One of the unique elements of this thesis is the multiple and intersectional approach that it adopts while exploring very young children‘s social identities and peer relations. It also explores the links between children's experiences and views with educators' social justice and equity pedagogies. Recent attention has been given to the importance of early childhood and young children's rights and participation in theory, research and policy. In the field of social identities, there has been a growing need for further research to explore the contextual, fluid, complex and intersected nature of young children's social identities, moving away from 'static' and 'fixed' notions of identity. Particular gaps have also been identified in relation to exploring age as part of social identity, to exploring cultural aspects of ethnicity and lastly to exploring multiple understandings of parts of social identities (e.g. multiple 'masculinities' and 'femininities') in early childhood. There has also been a need for further research to explore how young children‘s intersected social identities may impact on pedagogies. This thesis, therefore, seeks to explore the above, basing the analysis on a one year ethnographic and participatory approach which was conducted in two nursery settings in Scotland, one predominantly white and one multi-ethnic. It draws on a plethora of rich and in-depth conversations and experiences with young children, educators and parents/caregivers to suggest the complex, dynamic, context-specific, fluid but also 'experientially fixed' and intersected nature of children's social identities and relationships, and to acknowledge the challenges that are raised both for early childhood practice and policy. It suggests that children construct multiple and complex social identities which are both fluid and experientially 'fixed', engage in dynamic social relationships and express complex and multiple implicit/explicit discriminatory attitudes, which educators are unaware of or choose to disregard. In most cases, age and gender were part of an overt and explicit identification, and were explicitly and overtly discussed as factors of exclusion by both educators and children. In contrast, ethnicity involved a much more complex process. Although ethnicity was often part of an 'ethnic habitus', variations occurred in relation to the extent to which children developed a strong, explicit and overt ethnic identification. Ethnicity was also considered a rather 'taboo' subject of reference regarding exclusion. Moreover, this thesis suggests that discourses of ‗sameness‘, ‗normalities‘ and difference linked to constructions of social identity were salient in children's lives. Common social identities often promoted positive feelings of belonging and reinforced positive feelings of group membership and self identities between children. Strong and positive feelings of self and group identity and difference, or else ‗the other‘, although not exclusively, were very much considered the basis for exclusion and discrimination. However, complexities arose when the concept of the ‗other‘ changed, depending on the context. Difference was seen more positively by children when it constituted part of what was considered 'norm' or dominant. Traditional developmental approaches and children‘s rights-based approaches seem to influence educators‘ practice; however, irrespectively of the educational approach, educators tend to disregard implicit/explicit discrimination that is evident in children's lives. 'Too young to notice' and 'no problem here' attitudes seem to dominate educators‘ practice and raise limitations in dealing adequately with social justice and equity issues. Firstly, this thesis suggests the need to move away from 'dualistic' and oppositional dichotomies that seem to have dominated contemporary research and theory, both in relation to theorising children‘s social identities (e.g. 'fixed'/fluid) and theorisations of childhood (e.g. agents and mature / interdependent and immature). Secondly, there is a need for early childhood pedagogies, practices and policy to 'listen' more actively and closely to young children and to engage with the complex and dynamic nature of their social relationships. It is thus suggested that current early childhood practice should actively promote children-rights based approaches. At the same time, this thesis considers whether we should be moving towards a children‘s human rights-based approach, which promotes children‘s rights and goes beyond children's participatory rights, engaging more actively with issues around fairness, unfairness and respect. This thesis also argues for proactive, anti-discriminatory, reflexive and interventionist social justice and equity approaches in early childhood. Thirdly, there is a general challenge both in policy and practice regarding balancing between universalism (collective identities) and specificity (diversity).

This thesis is about justice between people born at different times: the way in which they interact and the extent to which those interactions can be a matter of justice. Its principal aims are: to present certain theories that describe what justice over time might look like; to present certain theoretical problems for this subject; and to understand the impact of these problems upon these theories. The thesis draws mainly upon: the work of David Hume, John Rawls and David Gauthier as sources of certain social contract theories; and the work of Wilfred Beckerman, Gustaf Arrhenius and Derek Parfit for certain problems faced by these theories. The central argument of the thesis is that the theoretical obstacles to the application of justice thrown up by the temporal dimension are not as significant as they might appear. In particular, there are good reasons to believe that social contract theories are more susceptible to intertemporal extension and less encumbered by temporally-related problems than previously thought. The conclusion of the thesis is that, issuing from a clearer view of certain theoretical obstacles to their inclusion, there is significant potential for future people to be considered within the scope of justice over time as described by certain social contract theories and that present people have self-interested reasons to take this project seriously.

In Luke-Acts, Luke intentionally describes the early Jewish-Christian community in accordance with Isaiah’s prophecy for an ethical restoration of social justice in Israel. This thesis accomplishes this argument in three chapters. First, it explores Isaiah’s program of restoration and argues that it includes social justice through the Davidic Messiah and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Secondly, an argument is made that Luke’s presentation of Jesus accords with the Isaianic picture of a socially just Davidic king empowered by the Spirit, who works to bring social justice through his reign. Lastly, the events of Pentecost and Acts 2:42–47 with insight gathered from Acts 4:32–37, are considered. Here the argument is presented that Luke draws Isaianic themes together from his gospel to demonstrate that, in Acts, Jesus’ exaltation and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit result in Isaiah’s vision of a Jewish community restored to fruitfulness as a socially just society.

This thesis is about social class and economic inequality, using the Goldthorpe class schema. It tests theories claiming that social class is increasingly irrelevant to inequality and people's life-chances with data on incomes and material living standards from the British Household Panel Survey. It covers the period over which the survey ran, i.e. 1991-2008. During this time many prominent social theories dismissed class analyses while others sought to retain the class concept but dismissed its economic foundations, seeking to ground it in culture instead. Economic inequality has not figured highly on the agenda of class analysts, at least not those working with the Goldthorpe class schema. There is a substantial body of work on mobility, voting behaviour, income poverty and material deprivation, but inequality in a broader sense has for the most part been neglected. This thesis is a step towards rectifying this situation. Thus it provides new information about within-career social mobility as well as income inequality within and between classes, on whether income mobility reduces class inequalities over time, and cast light on class inequalities in material living standards. The findings suggest that class is far from irrelevant to economic inequality. Class differences in incomes are persistent, between class inequalities contribute more to inequality overall than within-class inequalities, and while income mobility does reduce class inequalities over time it is not to the extent that supports the hypothesis that class is irrelevant to people's economic fortunes.

This dissertation develops a new theory of specific and overall socio-political freedom and discusses its role in normative political theory. The aim is to dissolve some of the conceptual confusions that have often beset previous discussions and to develop a theoretical framework with which to approach questions of public policy. This dissertation consists of three parts. In the first part, I develop a new account that specifies under which conditions a person is specifically free and when she is unfree to do something. It is shown that republican accounts of freedom are unsatisfactory and that a trivalent liberal account that equates freedom with ability is most plausible. A new analysis of unfreedom is defended according to which a person is made unfree (as opposed to merely unable) to do something only if she would have this freedom in a better and available distribution that another person could have foreseeably brought about. In the second part, I discuss how to move from an account of specific freedom and unfreedom to a measure of overall freedom. I develop a new and simple aggregation function and argue that the measurement of overall freedom requires both quantitative and evaluative factors. In the third part, I then discuss what role freedom should play in a theory of distributive justice. Instead of freedom deontologically constraining the reach of distributive justice, freedom should be one of its distribuenda. I will first discuss how best to distribute freedom across a person’s lifetime and how this impacts on discussions of paternalistic policies. It will then be shown that we ought not simply maximise freedom between persons, not aim to give everyone enough freedom nor aim at equal freedom. Instead, distributing freedom requires a principle that combines maximisation with a concern for fairness.

This thesis provides an account of the work of Canadian organizations that took part in the global anti-apartheid movement and then continued political advocacy work in South Africa post-1994. My central research question is: What explains the rise and fall of international solidarity movements? I answer this question by exploring the factors that allowed the Canadian anti-apartheid network to grow into an international solidarity movement and explaining how a change in these factors sent the network into a period of decline post-1994. I use two organizations, the United Church of Canada and CUSO, as case studies for my analysis. I argue that four factors were behind the growth of the Canadian solidarity network: the presence of large CSOs in Canada willing to become involved in solidarity work, the presence of radical spaces in these organizations from which activists could advocate for and carry out solidarity work, the frame resonance of the apartheid issue in Canada and the political incentives the apartheid state provided for South African activists to encourage Northern support. Post-1994 all of these factors shifted in ways that restricted the continuation of international solidarity work with South Africa. Accordingly I argue that the decline of the Canadian network was driven in part by specific South African factors, but was also connected to a more general stifling of the activist work of progressive Canadian CSOs over the 1990s. This reduction of capacity was driven by the ascent of neo-liberal policy in Canada and worldwide. Using examples from a wide swath of cases I outline this process and explain how all four factors drove the growth and decline of Canadian solidarity work towards South Africa.

This dissertation aims to defend an egalitarian conception of global distributive justice. Many hold that the scope of egalitarian justice should be defined by membership of a single political community but my dissertation will challenge this view. I begin by considering three distinctive arguments against the ideal of global equality. They maintain that egalitarian obligations of justice apply only to those people who are subject to the same sovereign authority which coerces them to abide by its rules; or to those who contribute to the preservation of each other’s autonomy through collectively sustaining a state; or to those who belong to the same nation. The first three chapters deal with these arguments respectively. Central to these arguments is the assumption that the domestic and the global contexts are different in some morally relevant way so egalitarian principles of justice apply to the former but not the latter. After rebutting these anti-egalitarian arguments I turn to the more constructive task of developing a form of global egalitarianism that is grounded in the value of equality as a normative ideal of how human relations should be conducted. I argue in Chapter 4 that relational equality—that is, standing in relations of equality to one another (rather than relations characterized by domination or exploitation)—is a demand of justice in the global context. This ideal of relational equality has distributive implications. In Chapter 5 I try to spell out these implications by defending a set of principles of global distributive justice that would follow from our commitment to global relational equality. In the sixth and final chapter, I discuss what responsibilities we have in relation to global injustice, how to distribute the burdens associated with these responsibilities, and whether they are excessively demanding on complying agents.

My hypothesis is that social contract theory does not satisfactorily explain why we owe a serious concern or respect to profoundly mentally disabled individuals (PMD). This is a problem for social contract theories if we assume, like I do in this dissertation, that the PMD possess a robust moral status (RMS). My dissertation will explore the main strategies deployed by contractarian and contractualist theorists to bring the PMD within the purview of the social contract, in order to clarify why some aspects of their claims are promising but why they nonetheless fail to fully explain the robust moral status of the PMD. I notably find that they leave morally important dimensions of human relations out of the contractual frame, which means that they exclude the PMD from the scope of justice and morality when they claim that this contractual frame offers the only valid explanation to be a subject of justice and a moral patient. I do not conclude that this requires us to reject social contract theory altogether, nor do I count it as a reason to question whether the PMD have a robust moral status. In my concluding chapter, I will rather suggest a theoretical frame that has the potential of incorporating both contractual and non-contractual relations within the spheres of morality and justice, because both kinds of relation vehicle important intuitions about what is of value in human life. This dissertation will contribute to orientate future research on the moral and political grounds for the rights of profoundly mentally disabled people, as well as question or curtail the breadth of certain key assumptions of social contract theories.

This thesis explores the significant contribution Walter Rudnicki (1925-2010) made to the pursuit of social justice for Indigenous people in Canada through his use of archival records. Rudnicki took on the role of archivist by acquiring, organizing, disseminating, and keeping records that document government-Indigenous relations. Totaling 90.25 metres in extent, the Walter Rudnicki fonds at the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections is an impressive private collection amassed in order to make injustice visible. As a federal public servant working to develop innovative government policies with Indigenous people between the 1950s and 1970s, Rudnicki had bitter personal experience with document creation and access to records practices in the Government of Canada that thwarted Indigenous aims. Thereafter, he stressed that accessing and archiving records play an indispensable role in protecting Indigenous peoples’ interests. He spent the rest of his life creating and employing an archive that would be used in advocacy for Indigenous rights. / October 2016

In accordance with structural theory and distributive justice theory, this study investigates if Americans' personal encounters with the opportunity structure and their existing reward conditions will influence their perceptions toward distribution outcomes in the U.S. I argue that higher-status individuals possessing various "attributes of structural privilege" will exhibit less support for regulating income inequality in society than lower-status individuals. Upward mobility should also be negatively related to support for restoring greater equality in allocation outcomes. However, the effect of mobility on justice perceptions should vary by class status, since class has been known to be a reliable predictor of these attitudes. The study employed a sample of 438 American adults from the GSS 2000 dataset, and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was applied in the analyses of the data. Two of the three above hypotheses received partial confirmation, that is, there were class, race, and gender differences in distributive justice perceptions. Class also interacted significantly with occupational mobility in altering distributive justice perceptions.