Daisaku Ikeda is the Buddhist leader of one of the most visible religious movements today, the Soka Gakkai International (SGI). In this thesis, the main research question concerns the peace philosophy of Ikeda and its contribution to peace theory. Daisaku Ikeda and the SGI have been the subject of several scholarly studies in the fields of religious history and sociology. The focus of this research is on the significance of Ikeda's contributions in the field of peace studies, where his work has not yet been the subject of systematic investigation. It is argued that the originality of Ikeda's philosophy of peace resides in two main elements. First, the starting point is consistently human life and its potential for peace and happiness, not the omnipresence of conflict. Second, he offers a coherent system linking the individual, dialogical and global levels, which can be represented as a triangle made of three conceptual frameworks, that of Humanistic Psychology (Human Revolution), Communicative Rationality (Dialogue) and Cosmopolitan Democracy (Global Civilization). It is also argued that while being inspired by Ikeda's Buddhist spirituality and his loyalty to his mentor Josei Toda, this secular humanist approach to peace offers an effective and original way for all people to participate in the construction of a better world, regardless of their religious or ideological affiliation, social background or cultural practices.

Throughout history people have sought to prompt social change through theatrical experiences. The theatre has moved the masses in ways that have frightened governments and religious establishments into closing down theatres and banning theatrical material. History proves that theatre which causes change exists and works, but it also proves there is no one definition or formula for this type of theatre. Depending on the culture, time period, issue, resources and people involved Theatre for Social Change takes a variety of forms. However, theatre affecting change does tend to maintain two common threads: the creation of a new work and the pursuit of the uncertain elements which will ensure the work affects change in its audience. With no more than two common threads, where does a young actor, recognizing a social problem and desiring change prompted through a theatrical experience begin his or her journey? How does one create Theatre for Social Change? How does one know the theatrical work has successfully caused change within an audience? If there is no certain definition, no one way to pursue it, what direction should one follow? Following Peter Brook's example as set in his 1966 production of US, I will create my own original work in the form of a one-person show and use it as the canvas to apply Brook's ideas and techniques. I hope to find that in order for an audience to change they must first be willing to participate in a performance, even if it is a performance demanding a harsh confrontation with an ignored social problem. Through this thesis I aim to prove that through an actor's personal journey with a social issue, the actor leads the way for the audience to be willing to participate and take the journey themselves resulting in change. My written thesis will include the findings of my research and preparation, a detailed rehearsal and performance journal, the original script of my performance work Knowing Fires and a reflection on the completed process including audience feedback. All of these elements will hopefully lead to a conclusive and useful approach to creating Theatre for Social Change.

This thesis examines the development of environmental sustainability on 194 of the wealthiest colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. Campus-based environmental organization membership data, organizational profiles, participant observation, and sustainability grades (from the Sustainable Endowment Institutes College Sustainability Report Cards 2009) are used to examine the relationship between campus-based environmental organizations and sustainability of higher educational institutions. Linear regression is used to analyze the overall university sustainability grades as an outcome variable. Overall university sustainability grades are impacted by campus-based environmental activism social movement organizations, high endowment per student, the age of the university, and the presence of state renewable portfolio standards. My findings suggest that the Sustainable Endowment Institute's College Sustainability Report Card might be improved by including indicators of greenhouse gas reports and interdisciplinary courses on sustainability.

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This dissertation examines how Antiochian Greek Orthodox Christians in the Levant and diaspora navigated turbulent political and social upheaval from the late Ottoman era, through the formative years of French colonialism (1920-1946), and into the early postcolonial period of Lebanon and Syria. To highlight communal heterogeneity, I follow a diverse cast of characters, including diplomats, intellectuals, merchants, migrants, journalists, poets, clergy, and political activists to show how sharply Orthodox Christians disagreed about how best to secure a place for themselves in a rapidly changing world of empires and nation-states. I rely on a polyvalent and transnational collection of sources in Arabic, French, and English including colonial reports, consular files, petitions, largely untapped Arabic language newspapers, memoirs, interviews, personal papers, and literature to show how the production of identity is a fluid, historically contingent, and continual process of construction. First, I argue that Orthodox Christians pursued greater autonomy within an Ottoman framework which simultaneously created new expectations of what it meant to belong to a modernizing Orthodox community. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, innumerable religious and lay leaders claimed to speak on behalf of their community and offered different visions of how to protect and advance Orthodox interests during the French Mandate. The lack of a single shared social habitus combined with colonial partition, a fractured church hierarchy, and the intensification of sectarian politics all contributed to intense divisions within the Orthodox community. This, in turn, fueled efforts by Orthodox Christians to transcend social division through various influential political movements from the 1930s to the 1950s.

This dissertation is about the changing imaginations of academic social work in an increasingly entangled world. Broadly, my subject area is the history and philosophy of social work, with an emphasis on engagements with critical social theory. More specifically, my research explores questions of discipline, generation, and critical social theory in the Anglophone Canadian context as a means to better understand how shared perceptions of the possible and the desirable are “situated knowledges” (Haraway, 1988). To do so, I trace and theorize changing perceptions through a survey of educators, and through integrative interdisciplinary and philosophical knowledge work considering various dynamics of disciplines in general and social work in particular. Evoking my own generational standpoint, I raise as a collective disciplinary problematic the canonization of second generation critical social theories, and the need to engage in the collective work of disciplinary reflexivity on, and accountability to, the ways in which the conditions of existence and possibility of critical academic social work are changing over time. Methodologically, I elaborate a reparative historical practice through a slightly different genre or style of writing. This is a feminist strategy, one roughly within the (generational) turn towards showing what one combines and assembles and learns through engaging with the world as a means to invite further speculative and imaginative work. This strategy is also a means to begin to imagine a “post-expert,” “post-good” and “post-progress” social work, not because knowledge and intention do not matter, but because these organizing referents have each achieved a level of saturation in what they can produce in the world. As such, this dissertation contributes some of the conditions of intelligibility necessary for the collective work of imagining and reimagining something akin to justice or improvement through social work after the fall of so many left and liberal progress narratives. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This research explores changing understandings of how social work in the Canadian state context imagines and intervenes in the world. My focus is on academic social work as both educator and knowledge producer, because the university is where some ideas and practices are refined and reproduced so that they can in turn be shared more broadly. Findings include the noteworthy influence of the university on the ideas and initiatives that do gain traction, as well as a generational structural to perceptions of the possible and the desirable. Overall, this research contributes a range of resources—historical, theoretical, empirical and speculative—to the collective work of imagining and reimagining social work for a changing world.

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Abstract: I explore the sources of union decline from 1970-2008, inspecting the shifting prominence of different causes at different points in time. Using a relational approach which views labor and capital as actors that gain or lose power at the expense of each other, I find that U.S. union decline is the result of several institutional transformations that benefitted capital relative to labor. Capital was advantaged and labor was disadvantaged due to: 1) the financialization of the economy in the 1980s, 2) weakening protections of labor policy by the 1970s, 3) the reconfiguration of productive capital in the 1970s and 1980s, 4) an anti-union business offensive gaining momentum in the 1970s, and 5) the failure of unions to sufficiently organize new members throughout the entire period. Combined, this confluence of factors led to a steep decline in union membership. Results highlight the complex nature of temporal dynamics in capital-labor power struggles.