Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1984.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1985.

In the past several decades, social movements have spread all across Latin America, sparking hope for change. This thesis analyzes the well-organized mobilizations of the indigenous people of Bolivia and how they have been able to incorporate themselves in state apparatuses, including the election of its first indigenous president, Evo Morales of the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) party. The case studied her provides insight into the processes if how political representation was achieved by Bolivia's indigenous people who were for centuries excluded from the political, social and economic arena. It also analyzes the outcomes of Morales' policy changes from 2006 to 2009 as a way to examine how they have impacted the marginalized status of the indigenous people. Ultimately this thesis will trace the use of social movements, especially MAS, and how they transformed the Bolivian society from below.

This dissertation explores how spatial processes of race shape Afro-Nicaraguan women’s political subjectivity, activist practice, and lived experience by studying their community-based organizing in the Caribbean coastal city of Bluefields, Nicaragua. Specifically, it analyzes the political responses they are developing to address the devastating impacts of neoliberal economic reform, gendered state violence, structural racism and the politics of gender justice that have emerged from their participation in place-based struggles for racial and regional justice. My dissertation research brings together critical race theory, Latin American social movements, African Diasporic feminisms, and the critical interventions of cultural and political geography to study Creole women’s community activism. I suggest that Creole women’s participation in what Harcourt and Escobar (2005) term the “politics of place” reflects the ways in which larger processes of anti-Black racism, gender subordination, and economic inequality have historically been and continue to be articulated through the idiom of place. I demonstrate how the politics of place shapes local, regional, and national histories of race and alterity and informs Creole women’s political practice and vision in ways that differ markedly from the mainstream women’s and feminist movements in Nicaragua. Through their place-based activism and focus on regional struggles that seem to be separate from an explicit feminist politics, Creole women have brought greater attention to the particularly gendered ways in which processes of state violence, structural adjustment, and economic exclusion impact their communities. Their political participation is concentrated around several key areas: urban land conflicts; women’s work in the regional and national economy; and the struggle for racial justice and full citizenship in Nicaragua. Through their participation in these social movements, Afro-Nicaraguan women are gendering and reshaping local and national struggles for racial equality. I argue that this model of community and place-based activism suggests that scholars of Latin American and Caribbean women’s social movements might more fruitfully analyze these movements not by searching for the ideal feminist subject or narrowly defining the terms of feminist politics but rather by understanding how women’s engagement in the politics of place creates space for them to interrogate intersecting processes of racial, gender, and economic subordination. / text

This dissertation examines the reconfiguration of popular environmental politics in the context of so-called sustainable mining development in Ecuador. Progressive governments in Latin America herald sustainable mining initiatives as the lynchpin to development capable of generating revenues to finance social welfare programs and protecting the environment. If this is so, my dissertation asks, then why has a proposed sustainable gold mine provoked such bitter opposition from dairy farmers in the parish of Victoria del Portete? My dissertation follows a group of indigenous and mestizo dairy farmers in the southern Ecuadorian Andes to understand why they oppose gold mining in their watershed and traces the cultural and political transformations that followed from their activism. I make four key arguments in this dissertation. First, I argue that sustainable mining plans place a premium on local water resources and have the effect of rearticulating local water disputes. Whereas owners of small and large dairy farms have historically disputed local access to water resources now they have created a unified movement against the proposed gold mine project. Second, I argue that knowledge practices and political discourses enabled farmers with varying claims to ethnic ancestry and socio-economic standing to establish connections with each other and with national indigenous leaders, Catholic priests, artists, and urban ecologists. Together they have formed a movement in defense of life. My analysis extends common understandings of the nature of human agency and political life by examining the role that non-human entities play in shaping contemporary environmental politics. Third, as a result of the mobilizations, new socio-environmental formations have emerged. The watershed has become a sacred place called Kimsacocha, which is venerated by farmers through new cultural practices as the source of life. Finally, the mobilizations in defense of life have re-centered indigeneity in unexpected ways. Farmers with and without indigenous ancestry as well as their urban allies are now claiming an indigenous identity. Unlike previous understandings of identity in the region, indigeneity does not denote a shared racial, cultural, or class position but refers to a particular way of understanding and relation to the environment. / text

My thesis analyzes the role of narratives in the consolidation of a Dreamer identity and movement for undocumented youth. The Dream movement, which initially pushed for the DREAM Act, a bill that would grant undocumented youth a pathway to residency and citizenship, has evolved into a collective effort to protect and fight for rights-enabling legislation for the entire undocumented population. This investigation uses narratives to promote an understanding of the Dream movement, taking into account a long-standing strategy of Dreamers: Stories of self lead to a collective story of us that celebrates individual experiences of a common struggle to belong in spite of a lack of papers. This story of us, in turn, leads to a story of now, a narrative of mobilization and advocacy that speaks to Dreamers’ public quest for legal recognition. The articulation of narratives allows for a sense of belonging among Dreamers who, because they are not conferred citizenship, have struggled to find acceptance and recognition as members of the United States. In spite of not having citizenship, Dreamers have been conferred benefits, such as the right to a free K-12 public school education under the 1982 Supreme Court Plyler v. Doe decision and the right to work and remain in the country for a renewable two years under President Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) directive. These benefits, utilized by Dreamers to show that they are important members of the national polity, are important elements of their narrative. By adopting a Dreamer identity, undocumented youth have realized that lack of papers is not an impediment to civic and political engagement, even if they are not given the right to vote. Dreamers, in mobilizing and advocating, exercise rights such as the ability to testify and lobby that oftentimes the average citizen does not utilize. By becoming so engaged, undocumented youth have made an important claim to citizenship that has given them a newfound visibility and recognition as rights- bearing individuals. / text

Urban social movements become one of the major forms of participation of urban governance of the public in recent years. Social values changed dramatically after the handover that people started to concern their right to the city. They demand for more power and influence in the formulation of urban policies and development strategy. However, urban governance in Hong Kong did not change with the time and resisted changes. This thus widened the gap of urban meaning between the formal government and the public. The conflict of their urban meanings thus led to urban social movement which aim to transform the urban governance. This also reinforce by the presence of new media in the mobilization of the movement. This dissertation aims to investigate how the changes of social values affect the conflict of urban meaning between urban actors and the impact on the urban governance in Hong Kong through analysing the framing of activists and urban managers. Choi Yuen Village Incident is chosen as case study to examine how different urban actors frame the issue and the implied urban meaning in the framing. This would reveal the conflict of urban meaning and the root of the occurrence of urban social movements in Hong Kong. / published_or_final_version / Urban Planning and Design / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

Much of the research done on religious gays and lesbians has focused upon the cognitive strategies they employ in order to negotiate conflicts experienced between their religious and sexual identities. In contrast to taking a psychological approach, this study focuses upon the role of social context in helping gay and lesbian Catholics to successfully negotiate their religious and sexual identities. Using participant-observation data of a small gay and lesbian Catholic community, the Holy Cross Community (HCC), as well as from interviews with ten of its members, I examine the role of the interpersonal context in identity processes. I outline the way that members create a community of inclusion, a community of affection, and a community of shared responsibility, which helps HCC's members in successfully enacting both their religious and sexual identities within a social context. In the discussion, I explain how HCC provides a place where members experience a sense of normalcy and where they worship in an environment that does not challenge their identities. From a social movements perspective, this in turn has a diminishing effect on the impetus for HCC's members to effect change on their behalf.

Well-developed bodies of research exist in the separate areas of religious identity and social engagement, but only a small selection of recent work is devoted to understanding their intersection. This dissertation adds to this selection by exploring the connections between religious identity and social engagement. More specifically, this work focuses on understanding the role that individual and collective interpretations of religious identity play in shaping the socio-psychological processes that influence whether, and in what capacity, individuals and groups devote themselves to social change. This work attempts to achieve four goals: 1) to explore the multilevel nature of religious identity within society; 2) to evaluate the effects of religious identity on social engagement; 3) to show the usefulness of quantitative methodologies to social movement research; and 4) to add to the body of research in the field of religion and social movements. I find that the relationship between religious identity and attitudes and behaviors related to social engagement is more complex than current approaches acknowledge.

This dissertation offers an ethnography of motorcycle taxi drivers: Bangkok's most important and informal network of everyday mobility. Drawing on over eight years of experience in the region, six months of archival research, and 24 months of fieldwork, I analyze how the drivers, mostly male rural migrants, negotiate their presence in the city through spatial expertise, bodily practices, and social relations. Their physical mobility through traffic, I argue, shapes their ability to find unexplored routes in the social, economic, and political landscapes of the city and to create paths for action where other urban dwellers see a traffic jam or a political gridlock. My narrative builds up to the role of these drivers in the Red Shirt protests that culminated in May 2010 and analyzes how their practices as transportation and delivery providers shape their role in political uprisings and urban guerilla confrontations. My main finding is that when the everyday life of the city breaks down the drivers take advantage of their position in urban circuits of exchange to emerge as central political actors in contemporary Bangkok by blocking, slowing down, or filtering the circulation of people, goods, and information which they normally facilitate. Owners of the Map proposes an alternative view of contemporary urbanism in which the city is constructed day after day through the work of connection and mediation, its frictions and failures, the tactics adopted to resist them, as well as the political tensions that emerge from these struggles. / Anthropology