This dissertation examines the rhetoric employed by Wollstonecraft, Cugoano, and Godwin who devise a top-down/bottom-up dialectic of social-justice writing which can be read as grassroots advocacy. The authors write with two constant goals in mind: from the top down, they decry systemic forms of injustice; and from the bottom up, they make the experiences of victims visible. Scholarship on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, and Things as They are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, has often focused on assessing the degree to which each text concerns itself with democratic equal rights. By contrast, this project explicates how the writers collectively define social injustice for the late eighteenth century. The writers simultaneously voice their indignation against those moral and socio-economic wrongs; deconstruct assumptions of natural inferiority and social disrespect; demand extensive change to social foundations; assert the humanity of women, workers, and slaves; and empathize with other oppressed populations across their traditionally conceived genres of vindication, slave narrative, and novel. Ultimately, my work incorporates a lexicon of political philosophy, political theory, and grassroots advocacy into literary studies to show how Wollstonecraft, Cugoano, and Godwin not only recognize corresponding patterns of oppression but also utilize strikingly similar literary devices and rhetorical strategies by which to combat injustice. All three authors share the same fundamental aim— to transform the dismal existence of the oppressed groups they represent.

This study emanates from a concern about social injustice. I believe that a number of people in our society, by virtue of their race, gender or class, are disadvantaged in the distribution of wealth and privilege. Some people have suggested that schools contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of this situation because, in various ways, they replicate inequitable social, political and economic arrangements. I accept this claim and argue that any attempt to improve schooling must focus on the social, economic and political outcomes of education, as well as on curricular, pedagogical and administrative concerns. In this study one recent attempt to improve Australian education, the move to school-level curriculum evaluation, is examined to ascertain if it represents a challenge to existing school practices and the beliefs and assumptions which underpin these. Dominant ideological orientations to improvement are examined and their key features and assumptions delineated. Because I believe that these exclude any consideration of the relationship between school knowledge and the distribution of power and privilege within society, an attempt is made to reconceptualize school-level curriculum evaluation in a way that will permit teachers to unpack what schools do socially, politically and economically. Theories of cultural and economic reproduction and the work of Freire are drawn on to help with this task. Evaluation policy statements and guidelines and examples of evaluation practice are then analysed in terms of dominant and reconceptualized notions of evaluation. What emerges is that although many of these are engulfed by dominant and limiting ideologies, school-level curriculum may be reconceptualized in a way that will permit the penetration and contestation of dominant practices and beliefs and thereby will offer educators a possible means of addressing problems of social injustice.

This dissertation explored the relationships among social injustice, social dominance orientation, aggression, and cyberbullying across Chinese and American populations. Direct effect and mediation models were proposed to test the explanatory power of perceived social injustice on the likelihood of cyberbullying. Twelve hypothesized social injustice scenarios written with first person perspective and based on three types of perceived social injustice (distributive, procedural, interactional), two social settings (pay, power), and two levels of injustice (high, low) were created to test four groups of hypotheses on the relationship between social factors and cyberbullying. Data were collected from an online survey site. A total of 639 Chinese participants and 484 American participants were randomly assigned to one of the 12 scenarios and then instructed to complete the survey based on the way they were treated in the scenarios. Participants were asked to report the level of their social dominance orientation, perceived injustice based on the scenarios, level of aggression, and likelihood of cyberbullying. Demographic characteristics of the participants were also recorded. Results revealed that (a) perceived distributive injustice positively predicts likelihood of cyberbullying among both American and Chinese participants, (b) perceived interactional injustice positively predicts the likelihood of cyberbullying only among Chinese participants, (c) the level of proactive aggression mediates the effect of perceived distributive injustice on the likelihood of cyberbullying, (d) the level of reactive aggression mediates the effect of perceived procedural and interactional injustices on the likelihood of cyberbullying, and (e) social dominance orientation negatively predicts three types of perceived social injustice and positively predicts the likelihood of cyberbullying. The theoretical and practical contributions of the dissertation are discussed. / Media & Communication

This study offers a transhistorical reading of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, Sylvester Judd’s Margaret, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. I identify how each novel addresses the need for social reform in nineteenth-century New England by tracing the root of social injustice to the Puritan ideological legacy. These novels address social injustices by not merely using New England’s past as a catalyst, but in identifying their origin in New England’s Calvinist, Congregationalist past. These novels furthermore reflect the theological debate between Calvinists and their Unitarian and Transcendentalist opponents in the early nineteenth century. Each novel offers a challenge to the Calvinist view of humanity with one that perceives humanity as morally improvable and fully capable of discerning what is moral independently of socially-imposed moral concepts. Ultimately, these novels suggest the vital role a society’s perception of human nature has in its ability to enact and ensure justice for its constituents.

Migrant Child is a poetry collection about injustice in the United States of America and the international community. The purpose of the collection is to humanize social injustice in the present, so as to show the reader that discrimination still happens in the United States in 2016. To that end, the collection draws on comparisons from civil rights movements of the 1960s and from present day. It is also meant to reflect injustices the author experiences in his own life. The poetry collection was created after the author spent six months volunteering throughout the State of Florida. The poems in the collection center around Hispanic communities in the United States, refugees seeking asylum, individuals living HIV and AIDS, male rape, and familial abuse. Several poems are written in the epigraph format, so as to place the reader in the author’s desired mindset for that particular poem. In addition, multiple poems in this collection have been inspired by the poets Yusef Komunyakaa, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Allen Ginsburg. In present day, discrimination and prejudice are still experienced by minority communities in the United States, and Migrant Child is not by any extent an exhaustive list of all communities that are, in the present, experiencing social injustice.

In England, social choice in education faces trade-offs between equity and efficiency. The scope of these trade-offs ranges from the introduction of choice to correcting 'market failures' to reduce inequalities and restrict social injustices. The article analyses the English school education system and its relationship with social preferences. The authors argue that the moral and legal need for non-discriminatory education supersedes perceptions of cost-effectiveness and utilitarianism. They consider that the current system has failed owing to inappropriate processes within social and public choice and that a reformed system based on a social democratic imperative will allow closer social integration on the basis of ability rather than privilege.

Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Versesis one of the most controversial postcolonial novels, which among a plethora of themes seems to mainly focus on the notion of hegemonic power. The Satanic Verses can partly be read as a denunciation of the British hegemony in which social injustice, racial discrimination and violence, in its different forms, exerted upon marginalized and stigmatized people (such as non-European expatriates) are legitimized by the dominant group and understood as something conventional and normal by the subjugated people. Moreover, this novel encourages the readers to criticize religion as a political tool with the help of which the dominant group can make groups of people subservient to authority. This part of my essay is related to the criticism of hegemony as such. Employing Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony, this paper begins with an investigation of the relationship between the figure of a migrant, violence and cultural hegemony inRushdie’s Britain. In the second part, the link between dream scenes and the ways through which they contribute to the overall argument about hegemony is studied. Finally, the last part of this essay revolves around religious hegemony. Hence, what links all these three sections together is the concept of hegemony and the ways through which hegemonic power is achieved and implemented in this novel.

O impacto que a epidemia da aids vem produzindo sobre a população infantil é particularmente importante, pois, do total de casos notificados no mundo todo, entre adultos e crianças, aproximadamente 10% têm menos de 15 anos de idade, sendo a maioria proveniente dos países em desenvolvimento. A aids confirma a associação, historicamente determinada, entre as condições concretas de vida e a produção da doença. Tomando a expressão da epidemia como objeto do estudo, teve por finalidade oferecer subsídios para a intervenção em saúde coletiva no fenômeno da aids infantil, de transmissão vertical, especialmente, para o aprimoramento do Sistema de Informação em Vigilância Epidemiológica da aids. Adotou-se a como refererencial teórico-filosófico a determinação social do processo saúde-doença e as categorias analíticas exclusão/inclusão social e processo de adoecimento e morte por aids. A fonte empírica de dados foi obtida do Sistema de Informação de Vigilância Epidemiológica da Secretaria de Estado da Saúde do Estado de São Paulo e do Programa de Aprimoramento das Informações de Mortalidade da Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo. A análise dos dados demonstra a gravidade da situação: as crianças já nascem duplamente em desvantagem, têm suas mães e/ou pais acometidos pela doença e encontram pela frente um penoso processo de aprendizagem com a própria soropositividade. Evidenciaram-se situações que denotam exclusão social, na constatação do número de crianças órfãs de mães, na ocorrência de crianças institucionalizadas, na vulnerabilidade programática e no uso de drogas injetáveis pelas mães. No entanto, não ficou explícita a exclusão social como produto das formas diferenciadas de reprodução social dos grupos sociais. Apontou-se a necessidade de transformar a forma de captação da realidade pela vigilância epidemiológica, para superar os modelos multicausais que tornam invisíveis as dimensões sociais da doença. A ausência de visibilidade pública da exclusão social, especialmente no caso das crianças vulneráveis ao HIV/aids, está diretamente vinculada à sua ausência de autonomia, ou seja, à incapacidade do Sistema de Informação em Vigilância Epidemiológica em considerar a criança como sujeito com pleno direito de cidadania. Reconhece-se a necessária e urgente revisão da ficha de notificação, importante instrumento que informa sobre a epidemia, de modo a ser possível a caracterização da exclusão social das pessoas afetadas pelo HIV/aids no caso de crianças. Ao final apontam-se recomendações para a intervenção em saúde coletiva na Cidade de São Paulo frente à epidemia de aids infantil. / The impact that aids epidemic has been producing on the infantile population is particularly important, out of the total number of notified cases in the whole world, among adults and children, approximately 10% is composed of individuals who are younger than 15 years old and the majority comes from countries in development. Aids cases confirm the association, historically determined, between the concrete conditions of living and the disease production. Taking the expression of epidemic as the object of study, our study had as its objective to offer subsidy for the intervention of collective health at infantile aids phenomena, of vertical transmission, especially, to the improvement of Information System in Aids Epidemiological Surveillance. The social determination and the analytical categories social inclusion/exclusion and the process of becoming sick and dying due to aids were adopted as a theoretical-philosophic reference. Data is from the Sistema de Informação of the Vigilância Epidemiológica da Secretaria de Estado da Saúde do Estado de São Paulo (Health State Department of Epidemiological Surveillance Information System from the State of São Paulo) and from the Programa de Aprimoramento das Informações de Mortalidade da Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo (Mortality Information Improvement Program from the Municipality of the City of São Paulo). The data analysis shows the seriousness of the situation: many children are born with double disadvantage, their fathers or mothers already have the disease and they will face a painful learning process with their own HIV positive status. We found some evident situations in which we could notice social exclusion, verifying the number of children without mothers, in institucionalized children, at programmatic vulnerability and the usage of injectable drugs by mothers. However, social exclusion was not explicit as a product of the different ways of social reproduction from the social groups. A need to transform the methodology of data recording by the epidemiological vigilance, to surpass the multicause models that make the social dimensions of the disease invisible. The lack of public ability to be aware and record data about social exclusion, especially in the case of children vulnerable to HIV/aids, is directly linked to the lack of autonomy, or due to the incompetence of the Epidemiological Surveillance Information System in considering the child as a person with rights to citizenship. We consider it urgent to review the notification record, important instrument that informs about the epidemic, in a way that enables health professionals to distinguish social exclusion of the affected people, mainly in case of HIV/aids positive children. At the end, proposals are made for intervention in collective health in the City of São Paulo, in order to better enable health professionals to have other resources to face infantile aids epidemic.

O impacto que a epidemia da aids vem produzindo sobre a população infantil é particularmente importante, pois, do total de casos notificados no mundo todo, entre adultos e crianças, aproximadamente 10% têm menos de 15 anos de idade, sendo a maioria proveniente dos países em desenvolvimento. A aids confirma a associação, historicamente determinada, entre as condições concretas de vida e a produção da doença. Tomando a expressão da epidemia como objeto do estudo, teve por finalidade oferecer subsídios para a intervenção em saúde coletiva no fenômeno da aids infantil, de transmissão vertical, especialmente, para o aprimoramento do Sistema de Informação em Vigilância Epidemiológica da aids. Adotou-se a como refererencial teórico-filosófico a determinação social do processo saúde-doença e as categorias analíticas exclusão/inclusão social e processo de adoecimento e morte por aids. A fonte empírica de dados foi obtida do Sistema de Informação de Vigilância Epidemiológica da Secretaria de Estado da Saúde do Estado de São Paulo e do Programa de Aprimoramento das Informações de Mortalidade da Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo. A análise dos dados demonstra a gravidade da situação: as crianças já nascem duplamente em desvantagem, têm suas mães e/ou pais acometidos pela doença e encontram pela frente um penoso processo de aprendizagem com a própria soropositividade. Evidenciaram-se situações que denotam exclusão social, na constatação do número de crianças órfãs de mães, na ocorrência de crianças institucionalizadas, na vulnerabilidade programática e no uso de drogas injetáveis pelas mães. No entanto, não ficou explícita a exclusão social como produto das formas diferenciadas de reprodução social dos grupos sociais. Apontou-se a necessidade de transformar a forma de captação da realidade pela vigilância epidemiológica, para superar os modelos multicausais que tornam invisíveis as dimensões sociais da doença. A ausência de visibilidade pública da exclusão social, especialmente no caso das crianças vulneráveis ao HIV/aids, está diretamente vinculada à sua ausência de autonomia, ou seja, à incapacidade do Sistema de Informação em Vigilância Epidemiológica em considerar a criança como sujeito com pleno direito de cidadania. Reconhece-se a necessária e urgente revisão da ficha de notificação, importante instrumento que informa sobre a epidemia, de modo a ser possível a caracterização da exclusão social das pessoas afetadas pelo HIV/aids no caso de crianças. Ao final apontam-se recomendações para a intervenção em saúde coletiva na Cidade de São Paulo frente à epidemia de aids infantil. / The impact that aids epidemic has been producing on the infantile population is particularly important, out of the total number of notified cases in the whole world, among adults and children, approximately 10% is composed of individuals who are younger than 15 years old and the majority comes from countries in development. Aids cases confirm the association, historically determined, between the concrete conditions of living and the disease production. Taking the expression of epidemic as the object of study, our study had as its objective to offer subsidy for the intervention of collective health at infantile aids phenomena, of vertical transmission, especially, to the improvement of Information System in Aids Epidemiological Surveillance. The social determination and the analytical categories social inclusion/exclusion and the process of becoming sick and dying due to aids were adopted as a theoretical-philosophic reference. Data is from the Sistema de Informação of the Vigilância Epidemiológica da Secretaria de Estado da Saúde do Estado de São Paulo (Health State Department of Epidemiological Surveillance Information System from the State of São Paulo) and from the Programa de Aprimoramento das Informações de Mortalidade da Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo (Mortality Information Improvement Program from the Municipality of the City of São Paulo). The data analysis shows the seriousness of the situation: many children are born with double disadvantage, their fathers or mothers already have the disease and they will face a painful learning process with their own HIV positive status. We found some evident situations in which we could notice social exclusion, verifying the number of children without mothers, in institucionalized children, at programmatic vulnerability and the usage of injectable drugs by mothers. However, social exclusion was not explicit as a product of the different ways of social reproduction from the social groups. A need to transform the methodology of data recording by the epidemiological vigilance, to surpass the multicause models that make the social dimensions of the disease invisible. The lack of public ability to be aware and record data about social exclusion, especially in the case of children vulnerable to HIV/aids, is directly linked to the lack of autonomy, or due to the incompetence of the Epidemiological Surveillance Information System in considering the child as a person with rights to citizenship. We consider it urgent to review the notification record, important instrument that informs about the epidemic, in a way that enables health professionals to distinguish social exclusion of the affected people, mainly in case of HIV/aids positive children. At the end, proposals are made for intervention in collective health in the City of São Paulo, in order to better enable health professionals to have other resources to face infantile aids epidemic.

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