For over two decades, development practitioners, scholars, and institutions have celebrated microfinance—broadly defined as the provision of small-scale financial services to the world’s poor—as an effective tool for poverty alleviation and local economic development. Critics of microfinance, however, suggest that there is little clear evidence to support the claims that microfinance lifts the poor out of poverty and fosters local economic development. In this thesis, I explore some of the challenges to microfinance in northern Nicaragua by exploring a case study of a group of borrowers who have confronted microfinance and exposed some serious problems. Since 2008, thousands of microcredit clients in Nicaragua have expressed their extreme frustration with microfinance and its detrimental effects in their lives. In this case, Nicaraguans caught up in the microfinance scheme risk losing their homes and livelihoods and falling into greater poverty. These borrowers, organized as El Movimiento de Pequeños Productores, Comerciantes y Microempresarios del Norte (the Movement of Producers, Merchants and Small Business Owners of the North), demand new terms on their microcredit debts and new client protections. I explore the reaction and the demands of these borrowers and their direct and indirect critiques of the microcredit sector, its practices and its alleged goals. I argue that the resistance of the MPCN reveals the political and economic rationale and neoliberal ideology behind microcredit as a poverty alleviation intervention, and their contestation challenges its underlying logic. These critiques and demands provide us with a foundation for rethinking the prevailing market-oriented approaches to development. / text

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In this thesis, I examine the ways in which a growing number of Indigenous artists in the United States and Canada are using hip hop not only as a form of artistic expression, but also to vent frustration about and to draw attention to contemporary issues affecting their communities. These artists participate in a tradition of politically conscious performance that has influenced and been influenced by Indigenous social movements across North America. Indigenous hip hop serves to affirm and redefine twenty-first century Indigenous identities, disrupting and reinterpreting stereotypical representations of Native Americans in a process which I describe as an “authenticity loop.” By utilizing artistic choices and strategic representations of indigeneity, the artists I examine have firmly established that they along with their communities are not remnants of the past, even as they maintain a continuity between previous generations and the present day.

This dissertation examines Coxey’s Army of 1894 and the subsequent impact the organizers and march had on American politics. A handful of monographs have examined this march on Washington D.C. but all of them have focused specifically on the march itself, largely examining the few weeks in 1894 when the march occurred. By extending the period study to include the long life and activism of Jacob Coxey what historians can see is that although the march was an expression of anger and concern over general inequality in American society, Coxey’s Army was also protest for specific demands. These two demands were specifically a program of public works and a desire for fiat currency for the United States. By examining the life Jacob Coxey we see that both of these demands grew out of longer issues in American social politics and reflect Coxey’s background in the greenback labor movement.<br><div><br></div><div>The question over currency— whether the economy should rely on a gold, silver, or fiat standard— has largely been untouched by historians, yet reflects one of the most interesting aspects of the march, namely that it was an instance in a broader movement to drastically change the U.S. state and establish a socialistic commonwealth, or commonweal, for American society. Coxey fit into this broader project by arguing specifically that the U.S. should maintain a market-based economy but do so through a kind of socialistic currency backed by the state. By organizing various marches throughout his life, Coxey attempted to achieve this goal by direct organizing of the masses and in so doing contributed to the long history of American social reform movement’s various efforts to reshape and redefine the concept of “the people.”<br></div><div><br></div><div>This dissertation makes four major arguments. First that the concept and phenomena of American Populism is a broad based, elastic movement with no essential political character. Attempts to define Populism as either reactionary or radical miss the broader issue that Populism could take on various political flavors depending on how it positioned itself in opposition to various actors in the state, economy, and civil society. Second, Coxey’s Army shows how the first march on Washington D.C. was part of a longer legacy of direct political action, and that although this march did make a contribution to the overall political debate of the time, it was not as a communicative act that the march was most significant. Instead Coxey’s Army was significant in the way it led to a reconceptualization of “the people” and therefore reimagined what legitimate democratic action entailed. Third, the concept of the commonweal, although largely taken for granted in previous historiographies, was part of a much deeper and intellectually rich fight between various activists and thinkers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At stake in how a movement or party conceptualized something like the commonweal was what type of social, economic, and political order should be fought for and advanced by organizations of working class people. In this regard the currency question, far from being simply a side issue, was in fact central to how activists envisioned the role of the market and state in a more equitable society. Finally, this dissertation looks at the understudied career of Coxey after the march, specifically his short tenure as mayor of Massillon, Ohio. His failure as mayor raises further questions for historians to think about the promise and limitations of American Populism as both a protest movement and political force.<br></div>

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This thesis is the culmination of my work as a graphic artist thus far. I chose to investigate the use of type and image in the production of social protest art, as it relates to historical and contemporary art as well as my own. Methods used in gathering the data include references from books, periodicals, websites, and hands-on application of the artistic process. Conclusions found within this paper suggest that using type and image within a multimedia process, serves to communicate important messages and attempts to educate the viewer on important political and social matters. Protest art has and will continue to be a viable and important form of art. This thesis is significant in presenting my artwork as it fits into the mosaic of protest art in the past, along with discussion of design elements and graphic processes.

Masters in Public Administration - MPA / "Sanitation is dignity" as the state has proclaimed while water is life. Yet to date, there are families and communities that are still dreaming that one day their dignity will be restored and they will have access to proper toilets, clean water that are within close proximity including proper houses. In the 24th year of democracy, people in South Africa are still protesting and challenging government to address the inequalities of the past and reset the agenda of change. These persistent protests are about basic needs and service delivery, but increasingly protestors are invoking the concept of relative needs, dignity and human rights and taking protests to the powerful and wealthy. In fact, the idea of the state as sacrosanct has been deflated since protestors throw poo at state officials and vandalise state infrastructure. The “poo wars” that broke out in 2012 with poo dumped at the airport and government buildings continued with the dumping of excrement on the Rhodes statue at UCT shows that the poor can sometimes set the agenda of change and force politicians to listen. Among the defensive responses raised by authorities is that people put their shacks on private land or pieces of land that are not suitable for housing (wetlands). Politically, there are complex issues in the Western Cape, both the Province and the City of Cape Town Metro are Democratic Alliance (DA) run whilst national government is ruled by the African National Congress (ANC). The majority of townships residents are ANC supporters with a few DA Proportional Representative (PR) councillors. This study looks at a qualitative exploration of the complexities in agenda-setting and participation processes in sanitation services in Site C, Khayelitsha between 2010-2013.Residents see agenda setting and engagements as unilateral, as this study found. It is designed into six chapters. The study was designed in a manner that it would reflect the knowledge and understanding the notion of consultation, community participation in decision-making, agenda-setting and implementation of projects or programmes by the people of Khayelitsha-Site C, Councillors, Shopstewards and officials of the City of Cape Town. Over 20 interviews were completed. A key finding is that by taking poo out of its usual place, taking it out of the private into the public domain and to the rich and by invading their space, the issues of the poor are no longer confined to ghetto townships. Boundaries between state and civil society have become porous. Cape Town’s poor residents using portable toilets commonly known as "pota-pota", and also the temporary toilets commonly known as ‘Mshengu’ have argued that these interim services are not only poorly maintained and dirty but are vastly inferior compared to white areas.

This article analyses the roles played by the actors related to religious groups,the way that they rebuild their participation and representation in the publicspace from their involvement in the initiative of social protest about the reclaimand defense of certain civil rights. In this regard, the article addresses the relationship between religion and politics, and furthermore specifically, the way inwhich religious human capital contributes to the process of collective actionsand social mobilization. At the same time, it offers some ideas regarding theway in which religious speech and public practice is shaped by cultural mediatization. / Este artículo analiza los roles que juegan los actores vinculados a los gruposreligiosos y cómo reconstruyen su participación y representación en el espaciopúblico a partir de su involucramiento en iniciativas de protesta social por lareivindicación y defensa de determinados derechos. En este sentido, reflexionaen torno a la relación entre lo religioso y lo político, y más específicamente,el modo como el capital religioso aporta en estos procesos de acción colectivay movilización social, pero al mismo tiempo el modo como el discurso y lapráctica pública religiosa es moldeada por los procesos de mediatización dela cultura.

This thesis consists of four self-contained articles which focus on different aspects of citizens' demand for and governments' supply of social policy in Latin American democracies. The underlying questions that link the four papers are a) do social and economic grievances affect citizens' propensity to protest? and, b) do democratic governments in the region use social policy as an instrument to mitigate social discontent and violent crime? In the first two papers, I use public opinion data in order to examine the determinants of citizens' participation in protest with a special focus on dissatisfaction with the quality of public services, demands for inequality-reduction policies and economic deprivation. The results show that among other factors, protest participation is motivated by citizens' discontent over the quality of basic social services, support for redistributive policies, and relative economic deprivation. The third and fourth papers analyze the "supply side" of social spending in the region focusing on collective protest and violent crime, respectively. The third article argues that under democracy, organized labor is in a better position relative to other groups in society to obtain social policy concessions as a consequence of their collective action efforts. The results show that whereas social security spending increases as a consequence of labor militancy, cutbacks in human capital spending are less likely as peaceful large-scale demonstrations increase. The fourth paper argues that political leaders use education spending as an instrument to mitigate violent crime. It also argues that the effect of violent crime on education spending is larger when leftist governments are in power. The empirical analysis provides support for these arguments.

Between 2010 and 2015, the most important protest cycle in the history of Colombia takes place, organized by leftist social organizations. At the same time, the Polo Democrático Alternativo, the main leftist party, experiences an electoral decline and the fragmentation of its internal tendencies. Consequently, the Colombian left fails to translate the discontent of social protest into electoral results. This article analyzes the disagreement between protests and elections, arguing that it is a result, on the one hand, of structural constraints characteristic of a political system in which electoral politics is not separated from violence and, on the other hand, the inability of the left to generate frameworks of collective action capable of challenging voters beyond the identities that exclude their different tendencies. / Entre 2010 y 2015 tiene lugar el ciclo de protestas más importante en la historia reciente de Colombia, agenciado por organizaciones sociales de izquierda. Al mismo tiempo, el Polo Democrático Alternativo, el principal partido de izquierda, experimenta un declive electoral y la fragmentación entre sus tendencias internas. Por consiguiente, la izquierda colombiana no consigue traducir el descontento de la protesta social en resultados electorales. Este artículo analiza el desencuentro entre protestas y elecciones, planteando que es resultado, por una parte, de constricciones estructurales propias de un sistema político en donde la política electoral no está desligada de la violencia y, por otra, de la incapacidad de la izquierda para generar marcos de acción colectiva capaces de interpelar votantes más allá de las identidades excluyentes de sus distintas tendencias.