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This thesis examines Flora Krauch’s use of Progressive Era social reform methods to develop and expand infants’ and children’s merchandise departments in American department stores and specialty shops. Krauch used the pages of the industry’s first trade journal, The Infants’ Department, to wage her battle against the commercialization of these departments, and to urge the use of mother education and child welfare as their foundation. At the turn of the twentieth century, retailers began to demonstrate their civic leadership in socially responsible ways. By 1916 independently owned department stores faced new forms of competition which led them to build alliances with individuals who highlighted the significance of scientific management methods and commercialization. The Retail Research Association and Harvard Business School spearheaded these merchandising shifts. The effects of these trends are apparent in children’s departments. To explore how Krauch rejected commercialization, this thesis analyzes all available newspaper and journal articles Krauch wrote from 1909 to 1940, as well as primary sources from the U.S. Children’s Bureau and Harvard Business School. Krauch was a leading force in the effort to challenge commercializing forces through the professionalization of women in retail buying and sales, and through the education of mothers about the health and safety of infants’ and children’s merchandise.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / It was John Malcolm Forbes Ludlow (1821-1911) who conceived of English Christian Socialism and convinced many contemporaries of its value. He was responsible for establishing the Christian Socialist producer co-operatives of 1849-50 in accordance with ideas gained in France from the socialism of Louis Blanc and Benjamin Buchez. With F. D. Maurice, John Ludlow shares the credit for founding a college for the education of working men (still in existence as the Working Men's College of London). As a lawyer, Ludlow acted as constant legal advisor to the great 19th century organizations of self-help: labor unions, friendly societies, and co-operatives. [TRUNCATED]

It is the purpose of this study to make an examination of critical comment on humanistic philosophy, and, thereby, get a response that will answer some of the questions which arise in the minds of those who are made conscious of intellectual wonder or curiosity within themselves.

This thesis is a social psychological approach to youth empowerment and social change in urban African contexts. Over a period of 22 months, 39 young people from Dar es Salaam and Soweto participated in a community‐based initiative called Shooting Horizons. The aim of the project was to engage young people in a process of critical consciousness and social action to represent themselves and their communities through their own words and images using Photovoice methodology. Six Photovoice workshops, involving a total of 23 young women and 16 young men, took place in multiple sites, two youth centres in Dar es Salaam and one in Soweto. The data was collected through multiple methods, including a series of 37 photo‐stories, 6 focus groups on development and social change, a record of daily discussion groups, and 1 focus group and 10 individual interviews post‐project. Emerging from the narrative positions of the participants, the project affirms the different directions for living envisaged by young people and promotes alternatives to the stigmatization of young people and their communities by the grand discourses and practices of development. Through a social psychological lens, I explore the impact that stigmatizing representations of development have on individual and social identities in order to make sense of the contradictions and ambiguities that it presents for enacting social change. I argue that a community empowerment framework, supported by an agenda of resistance to the exclusionary discourses and practices of development, can overcome some of the complex mechanisms of power that lead to oppressive social stratifications. The analysis observes the politics of knowledge and recognition in constructing social identities and building social capital to open up spaces for alternatives within the limitations of these particular contexts. The findings of this study consistently refer to how ‘difference’ is imbued in the narratives of young people and the need to address the gendered and racialized beliefs that contribute to participants’ internalized and victimising perspectives and that constrain processes of social change. Recommendations include practical, concrete, and innovative methods for urban African youth to engage in initiatives that suit their own development interests within a social psychological approach to empowerment that redefines community as a space of inbetweens, a citizenry of people sharing common interests and different agendas.

The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the potential benefits of affiliation with nature on British and Greek secondary school students’ positive functioning, and the variations in relation to climate and geography conditions. Particular emphasis is given on the role of schools' environmental education programs and activities. Following the contemporary positive psychology theory, we have focused on two main well-being conceptualizations: (i) the hedonic (or so-called subjective well-being), i.e. life satisfaction/happiness, and (ii) the eudaimonic, i.e. personal growth/flourishing life. A wide range of objective and subjective indicators have been used to represent various environmental parameters. The subjective indicators include students’ perceptions about the surrounding environment, their experiential exposure to nature (participation in outdoor sports, excursions to nature, etc.), environmental attitudes, values and knowledge, while the objective indicators assess the local climate and geographical characteristics, such as average annual temperature, wind and precipitation, altitude, distance from sea, rural vs. urban areas, and local environmental conditions, such as air pollution, proximity to heavy industries and airports, and proximity to areas of outstanding natural beauty. The study employs a quantitative survey approach (paper and internet based) to collect cross-sectional data from various lower and upper secondary schools across the two countries. A sample of 3614 students (aged between 14 and 19 years old) from 94 Greek secondary schools and 527 students (aged between 12 and 19 years old) from 15 English secondary schools have been collected during the academic years 2010-2011 and 2011-2012. The statistical analysis is mainly based on OLS and ordered logistic regressions with clustered standard errors, to control for intraclass correlation among the respodents. The findings highlight the significant effect of connectedness with nature on subjective and eudaimonic well-being, and the beneficial role of environmental education in promoting overall life satisfaction, school satisfaction and eudaimonia, either directly or indirectly through the enhancement of connectedness with nature.

This thesis looks at how ‘the Muslim woman’ is produced in social policy discourses in the UK. It is a qualitative study based on interviews, observation and interpretive analysis of policy material. It focuses specifically on initiatives to empower Muslim women in order to combat terrorism which formed part of the UK’s Preventing Violent Extremism Agenda (Prevent). In January 2008 the National Muslims Women’s Advisory Group (NMWAG) was established and Local Authorities were encouraged to fund projects aimed at ‘empowering Muslim women’. The thesis begins by situating the research within a wider policy framework. At the national level it relates to debates on community cohesion, Britishness and multiculturalism; at the global level it relates to the UK’s involvement in the ‘war on terror’. The research examines local inflections in how the initiatives worked in practice, considering the impact of diversity within diversity. A key objective of these initiatives was to ‘give the silent majority a stronger voice’. The thesis considers the extent to which this objective was achieved, particularly in relation to the establishment of NMWAG. Through an analysis of the initiatives overseen by NMWAG it considers how empowerment is conceptualised and, therefore, also by definition, disempowerment. It suggests that empowerment is positioned as individualised in the form of neoliberal meritocratic aspiration. At the same time, however, it is collectivised in relation to religious affiliation; Islam emerges both as a source of disempowerment and as a potential solution. The thesis argues that these initiatives have worked to privilege religion at the expense of other salient axes of difference, particularly those embedded in socio economic and regional variations. Moreover, this privileging constitutes part of a broader gendered anti-Muslim racist rhetoric. Finally the thesis argues that deconstructing the trope of ‘the Muslim woman’ and attending to the differences between Muslim women opens up the possibility of building solidarities across religious boundaries and harnessing an “alternative politics of recognition”.

The aim of my thesis is to investigate the various ways in which globalization is performed in the locus of the South Korean advertising industry. In doing this, I focus upon the practice of creative advertising which is considered as one of the main practices to perform globalization in the locus. Addressing globalization as performativity means that this study rejects the idea of globalization as an objective structure. Instead, it approaches globalization as discursively induced practices and a transitory construction constituted of aggregate action. However, the actions that build globalization are diverse and situated in time and place. It necessitates this study to ‘follow’ the actors who embody narratives of globalization and produce it in their daily performances of those narratives. In this thesis, I follow South Korean advertising creatives who are an embodiment of a particular type of agency which identifies creative advertising with globalization and modernity. In this respect, their practicing creative advertising is simultaneously practicing globalization and modernity. However, their practice of creative advertising is situated in the South Korean advertising industry and takes place in a network of actors who embody different agencies. It makes creatives’ practice of globalization and modernization by way of creative advertising an ongoing struggle and negotiation. I explore the ways in which creatives’ practice of creative advertising transforms when they are connected to other actors in the network, particularly ad firms and clients; and the ways in which this transformation produces different forms of globalization. In this thesis, globalization appears multiple, contingent and mediated. Various narratives of globalization produce diverse subjects but these narratives are locally mediated. . It is the processes of performing the imaginary ‘global’ that is locally defined. Therefore, globalization is essentially a local product in which local agents practice the local on a new platform.