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This thesis addresses the question of educating for democratic development from the perspective of women leaders in community development organizations. The goal of this study is to expand our current understanding of education by giving voice to women's insights and experiences while considering their philosophical and practical contributions to the field. / Education is first considered in its traditional form as a static phenomenon which promotes hierarchy and perpetuates the status quo. The deconstruction of oppression is then addressed in order to develop a theoretical framework of critical, feminist and engaged pedagogies. This framework offers insight into a reconstruction of education as an instrument for promoting social responsibility and social action. / Nine women leaders in social action are interviewed using qualitative and phenomenological research methodologies. Their motivations, philosophies and organizational practices, and ideas are considered in the context of education. As a result, the insight that these women offer to the field of education is revealed and illustrated.

This thesis develops a multidisciplinarily grounded account of the cultural causes of environmental problems discussed as a question in philosophical and sociological theory of social action. The approach is articulated by an original reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Part 1 of the thesis critically discusses a prominent view of the cultural causes found in environmentalism and environmental history with significant popular appeal. In this view, labelled the ideological approach, the human nature relationship is characterised essentially by our culture's alleged disrespectful, manipulative and materialistic attitude to nature that is said to have been internalised by the modern human being and to fundamentally drive our ecologically consequential activities. An alternative organisatory approach is suggested based on the view that due to division of labour of culturally and geographically dispersed masses, as well as the everyday character of activities in terms of which we collectively cause environmental problems in global industrial market society, no general ideological source of social action can plausibly be posited. An organisatory approach to the human environmental burden as a function of the collective performance by masses of a shared organisation of activity on a recursive, everyday basis is a more realistic account of the intensity of human environmental impact. Part 2 argues that the ideological approach in environmentalism and beyond can be seen to imply a form of collectivism also found in many classics of Wittgensteinian philosophy and social theory, an important common denominator being their ontological focus on the mental source of social action in shared conceptual schemes, normative orientations and the like. By contrast, in the Wittgenstein reading developed in this thesis, his perspective was non-ontological, viewing social activity as developing processes not defined by their mental source in shared conceptions but by their organisation. Social life is viewed as being based on agreement in form of life, that is, in organisation of human activity. The thesis is a rare and original attempt to make philosophy relevant in the discussion of a pressing contemporary problem that also advances Wittgenstein-scholarship to a novel area.

Using a multimodal approach to literacy, this thesis explores student dialogue and responses from viewing wordless and image-rich books to answer the following questions: What impact does visual literacy instruction have on students’ learning and achievement in reading and viewing comprehension? What are grade five students’ perspectives on being involved in reading and viewing wordless and image-rich books in the classroom? Action research methodology is employed by the teacher researcher in a grade five classroom. Qualitative data sourced from whole class observations, small group reading interviews, student work samples, a colleague’s observational notes, and quantitative data from reading assessments reveal insights into the affordances of presenting visually rich texts to students. The author focuses the discussion on reading comprehension strategies, visual elements, and the experience of reading wordless and image-rich books. He concludes that students are able to use deeper level reading comprehension strategies and articulate their understanding while viewing images.

Människor upplever ånger dagligen, och beroende på vilka beslut som fattas kan vissa beslut ångras mer än andra. Därför undersöktes skillnader i typer av ånger med hjälp av webbenkäter som delades via Facebooks PM funktion. 80 deltagare ingick där de fick beskriva två saker som de ångrade mest att de hade gjort samt två saker som de ångrade mest att de inte hade gjort. Dessa skattades sedan på hur mycket de ångrade det samt hur pass viktigt/allvarligt de upplevde det. En signifikant skillnad upptäcktes där saker som de ångrade att de inte hade gjort skattades som viktigare/allvarligare än det som de ångrade att de hade gjort. Inom kategorierna kärlek/sex/äktenskap och familj/vänskap ångrade deltagarna mest saker som de hade gjort respektive inte hade gjort. De omkringliggande faktorerna kan vara det som påverkar upplevelsen av ånger oavsett om det är pågrund av en handling eller icke-handling.

Sub-Saharan Africa entered the 1980s faced with a crisis of unprecedented proportions. The economies of the region which were already in decline by the late 1970s, were in danger of collapse. The severity of the crisis was also reflected in rising indebtedness, social decay and political instability. To tackle it, African leaders met at an extraordinary economic summit in Lagos in 1980 and adopted a common strategy which became known as the Lagos Plan of Action. The crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa is part of a general world-wide economic recession stemming from a period of economic decline in the leading industrial economies. As a result, the leading industrialised countries and international institutions designed strategies to tackle the crisis both at the global level and in the developing countries such as those in Sub-Saharan Africa. For Africa, the strategy adopted by the World Bank and the IMF was that of structural adjustment. The orthodox approach of the World Bank generated controversy as to its suitability to the African situation. This disagreement was a reflection of conflicting political interests as well as power relations both internationally, and within African states. This thesis analyses the impact of the politics of structural adjustment programmes in Africa, with special reference to Ghana and Nigeria between 1983-1990. The arguement is that orthodox structural adjustment has failed to reverse the decline in Africa largely because of continuing disagreement between African governments and international institutions over the content and direction of adjustment. The study is presented over eight chapters. The introductory chapter sets the agenda. Chapter one covers the international dimension of the African crisis, while chapter two looks at the internal dimension. Chapter three contains a detailed analysis of the international politics of structural adjustment. Chapters four and five discuss the adjustment programme in Ghana and its impact on the country's political economy. The Nigerian experience is similarly examined in chapters six and seven. The conclusion, chapter eight, addresses the issues behind the failure of orthodox adjustment in Africa and makes recommendations.

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When you want to pick up an object, it is usually a simple matter to reach out to its location, and accurately pick it up. Almost every action in such a sequence is guided and checked by vision, with eye movements usually preceding motor actions (Hayhoe & Ballard, 2005; Hayhoe, Shrivastava, Mruczek, & Pelz, 2003). However, most research in this area has been concerned about the sequence of movements in complex “everyday” tasks like making tea or tool use. Less emphasis has been placed on the object itself and where on it the eye and hand movements land, and how gaze behaviour is different when generating a perceptual response to that same object. For those studies that have, very basic geometric shapes have been used such as rectangles, crosses and triangles. In everyday life, however, there are a range of problems that must be computed that go beyond such simple objects. Objects typically have complex contours, different textures or surface properties, and variations in their centre of mass. Accordingly, the primary goals in conducting this research were three fold: (1) To provide a deeper understanding of the function of gaze in perception and action when interacting with simple and complex objects (Experiments 1a, 1b, 1c); (2) To examine how gaze and grasp behaviours are influenced when you dissociate important features of an object such as the COM and the horizontal centre of the block (Experiments 2a, 2c); and (3) To explore whether perceptual biases will influence grasp and gaze behaviours (Experiment 2b). The results from the current series of studies showed the influence of action (i.e., the potential to act) on perception in terms of where we look on an object, and vice versa, the influence of perceptual biases on action output (i.e. grasp locations). In addition, grasp locations were found to be less sensitive to COM changes than previously suggested (for example see Kleinholdermann, Brenner, Franz, & Smeets, 2007), whereas fixation locations were drawn towards the ‘visual’ COM of objects, as shown in other perceptual studies (for example see He & Kowler, 1991; Kowler & Blaser, 1995; McGowan, Kowler, Sharma, & Chubb, 1998; Melcher & Kowler, 1999; Vishwanath & Kowler, 2003, 2004; Vishwanath, Kowler, & Feldman, 2000), even when a motor response was required. The implications of these results in terms of vision for Perception and vision for Action are discussed.