After analysing the major theoretical contributions to health and development, the author develops a dialectical materialist approach. Health, both physical and mental, is defined as a movement of energy that is simultaneously conserved and expanded. It is reality in movement. It is the vital ingredient of labour power and the capacity to create. Fundamental to humanity's health, both on a personal and public level, is productive activity. The relations and forces of production are the main determinants of public health. The relative power of the oppressed and the contemporary means of production affect both the type and spread of disease. In the specific historic Investigation of health and development in the Maltese Islands, the prevalence of contemporary diseases is appraised with reference to the balance of forces between nations, classes and the sexes. The particular significance of imperialism, merchant capital and religion is discussed. Examination of three major diseases, cholera, undulant fever and cancer, between 1837 and 1987, is the empirical basis of the thesis. The transition from high mortality rates to high morbidity rates in the past forty years reflects Malta's late and uneven development. Health policy to overcome disease is limited because health and disease are manifestations of the mode of production. Health in developing countries is placed in the dialectic of imperialism and development, chauvinism and development and, essentially, the dialectic of capitalism and development.

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There is a notable gap in empirical studies on Black women’s lived experiences in the UK in general and of violence in particular. This thesis explores lived experiences of violence and abuse for nine African and Caribbean heritage women, including seeking help and receiving support, legacies for the body and encounters in public spaces that leave feelings of discomfort. Fifteen participants were interviewed in total: six formed a sample of experts who work in violence support services, research and health services; and nine victim-survivors participated in a two or three stage life history interview process. The expert participants were given three case studies prior to taking part in semi-structured interviews to explore issues for African and Caribbean heritage women. During life history interviews research participants were invited to bring along personal photographs to assist with speaking about past experiences of violence and abuse, drew maps of their routes to seeking help, annotated diagrams of how they have related to their bodies over the years and produced photographs of spaces, places and objects of current importance to them. The thesis mapped ways in women’s potential for participation in social life was delimited by violence and abuse, how their survival was premised on their skill in managing embodied burdens and through daily acts of self-renewal. The contribution to knowledge of this thesis are through the conceptual terms: ‘felt intensities‘; ‘a continuum of oppression’; ‘liminal displacement’; ‘a nugatory self’; ‘racialised gendered shame’; and ‘exhausting liminal rumination’ that describe the embodied burdens carried by African and Caribbean heritage women as knowers and to suggest meeting their needs within the everyday spaces they inhabit. Further explorations are required into the intersectional features of women’s lives to explore whether African and Caribbean heritage women have voice and visibility in policy, whether and how their needs are met and for this to influence the commissioning of services.

The aim of this research study is to add the voices of African- Caribbean British female victim-survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) to existing knowledge(s) on childhood sexual victimization. In so doing the study will examine whether racialisation, racism and cultural identity and cultural factors have had any bearing on African Caribbean British women’s 'space to speak' of childhood sexual abuse. The study also explores Black British feminist activism on CSA from the late 1970s- mid 1980s in order to further explore the issue of spaces to speak. The thesis presents findings from 5 in-depth interviews with Black British feminists (Experts); a partial content analysis of British feminist periodicals from 1980s onward; 7 in-depth interviews with African-Caribbean British victim-survivors of CSA and a survey examining Black, Asian and Minority, Ethnic service provision (BAME) in 13 Rape Crisis Centre’s in England and Scotland.

Studies of the survival and revival of the Liberal Party after 1945 have focused on the Party's strength in the UK's Celtic fringe, its efficacy as a vehicle for protest voting, and the role played by the Party's leaders, particularly Jo Grimond. The reasons why the Liberal Party's constituency associations continued in being and activists continued to be recruited to the Party after a series of disastrous general election results, and the factors explaining the Party's revival in local government have, so far, been overlooked. This thesis draws on a number of new sources of information, including the records of Liberal constituency and district associations and interviews with ordinary Liberal activists from the 1945-64 period, to provide new perspectives on the survival and revival of the Party. It shows how the independence and self-sufficiency of Liberal associations, the recruitment of Liberal activists during the 1945-50 period, and the Party's strength in local government in Yorkshire and north west England were important reasons for the Party's survival. A new wave of recruitment after 1955, inspired by the leadership ofGrimond and the new policies he and others devised and popularised, facilitated the Liberal revival, but a key factor previously unidentified was the development of early forms of community politics by Liberal activists in a number of towns and cities in England and Scotland. Decisions by activists to concentrate on local elections led to an explosion in the number of Liberal councillors, particularly in suburban areas, and drew more activists into the Party. This change in the Party's strategy, which has influenced the development of Liberal politics since 1964, was derived from grass-roots activists rather than the Liberal leadership, although the Party's Local Government Department had an important role to play after 1960.

Happiness is consistently cited as one of the things that people consider most important in their lives and yet is a slippery concept about which it is difficult to establish a shared understanding. There is increasing agreement that Gross National Product (GDP) is not a sufficient indicator of progress and that alternative measures may need to include the subjective aspects of wellbeing, or happiness. However, if policy makers and development workers are to seriously consider happiness, clarity is required about what it means to different people and such clarity must be grounded in the everyday experiences of the people whose lives social and development polices aim to improve. Despite increasing interest in the concept of happiness within Laos, academic research focusing upon positive subjective experience is limited. Young Lao people who volunteer with Non-Profit Associations (NPAs) in Vientiane occupy a unique position at the crossroads of a country that continues to be affected by a complex political legacy, a rapidly modernising capital city and a newly visible civil society. The findings from the current research provide rich data from 18 months of ethnographic and participative fieldwork with this specific group of young people in Vientiane. The research addresses the following questions:  What do the ways that young Lao volunteers in Vientiane express happiness tell us about the ways that they conceptualise happiness?  What do young volunteers in Vientiane say makes them happy?  What beliefs do young volunteers in Vientiane have about happiness?  How do these beliefs about happiness fit with young volunteers’ expressed experiences of happiness? This thesis identifies three key conceptual models that research participants used to express happiness including ‘Being Happy’ (happiness is a present moment choice), ‘Becoming Happy’ (happiness is something to be achieved) and ‘Happy Being With Others’ (happiness is located in relationships between people). Further, three culturally constructed ‘happiness scripts’ that research participants share are outlined and discussed. The three scripts are: “The way to be happy is to be a good Lao person”, “I will be happy if I have the things that I need to be comfortable and to have an easy life” and “I am happy when I follow my heart”. These scripts each combine a conceptual mode of happiness with a focus on specific aspects of their lives that research participants say make them happy and a set of shared beliefs about happiness. These three scripts offer normative accounts of different pathways that research participants believe will lead to happiness. The research demonstrates, however, how research participants hold multiple scripts simultaneously and looks at the interactions and tensions between the scripts and between the scripts and participants’ lived experiences. The research concludes that the socially constructed nature of the happiness scripts and the multiple conceptual models of happiness used by the research participants emphasise the need for self-awareness and transparency in conversations about happiness. Any consideration of happiness at policy level must include open and critical discussion about the happiness script that is being promoted. At the individual level participants valued positive opportunities to become aware of and challenge their own assumptions about the things that are most important in their lives were beneficial to their happiness. The thesis, therefore, recommends a shift in policy focus from solely measuring happiness to promoting positive conversations about happiness at policy, community and individual levels. Happiness is both an important experience and a slippery concept. It is both critical that we consider it and vital that we remain critical of it.

This thesis is an analysis of the under-researched subject of disability in Trinidad and Tobago and presents an understanding of the concepts and contestations of disability as it is lived and experienced by disabled people in T&T. In it disability is explored in the context of identity construction, power relations and self-empowerment, and takes into account the ways in which that identity is shaped by historical events, cultural relations, social interactions and political structures. It identifies the relationships between disability and local social issues through an analysis of the everyday cultural paradigms of religion, kinship, beliefs, rituals, customs and values of the people, and gives particular attention to discrimination within the context of heterogeneity, and the effects that has on disabled people’s contribution to society. The possibilities and limits of claiming a disability identity, and the role of state policy in framing understandings of disability are also explored, as are some of the impacts of those policies on the lives of disabled people. The research took a broadly qualitative approach, drawing on narrative, semi-structured and formal interviews, focus groups, observations and documentary analysis. The research findings and analysis add to the existing disability scholarship by exploring the cultural impositions and social structures that impact on disability experiences in a country of the Global South, and pinpoint some of the limitations present in hegemonic Western discourse when applied in these settings. It highlights the importance of the legacies of colonialism and challenges assumptions that systems of Western modernisation and development can be easily transferred to countries of the South without considering whether or not they are socially or culturally appropriate. The data results have illustrated that disability in T&T is a social construct which diverges in important ways from the dominant Westernised theorisations of disability and in particular, identifies the significance of religion and spirituality in shaping models of reality and value systems, which must be taken into account more fully in disability scholarship, activism and policy in the country.

It is necessary to address the barriers experienced by female middle managers in the coal mining industry in order to ensure their retention and personal growth. Mining in South Africa is still a male dominated industry. Prior to 1996, women were not allowed underground until the promulgation of the Mine Health and Safety Act of 1996. It is almost 12 years since women were allowed underground, but very few women are visible in management positions in the coal production environment. A minimum of 35 middle managers in the coal mining industry participated in both the quantitative and qualitative part of the research. The research reveals that human resources department is more masculine characteristic than production, financial and technical departments. The latter three are androgynous. Both male and female managers perceive a “successful manager” as androgynous, a transition from “think manager, think male”. This also contradicts a similar study carried out in European Banks, finding female managers to be masculine. There was no significant difference found in this research between male and female managers regarding their perceptions of what constitutes a “successful manager”. Findings from the research will assist organisations in the coal mining industry to understand barriers affecting the advancement of women in management. The research will also provide recommendations to organisations on how to change their cultures and work environments in order to develop suitable environments for women managers to flourish and achieve their potential. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

This thesis explores the structure, demographics, and history of gangs in British Columbia (BC), Canada, through a social constructionist lens. The purpose of this research is for the reader to consider the current state of gangs in BC as inherently different from other places in the world, to assist in understanding why there may be misconceptions, and to promote the research and implementation of more appropriate context-specific interventions. Building on previous work conducted as a Vancouver Police officer of over 27 years, I participated in field observations with gang units in Toronto and Hobbema, Canada; Chicago and Los Angeles, USA; and London, England. I also examined gang typologies and definitions in academic literature as a segment of the historical context of gang research and highlight how these bodies of literature contribute to the social construction of gangs. A historical review of media-reported gang violence in BC from 1903 to 2012 demonstrates that gang violence is not a new phenomenon, and its history is an essential element in the constructed concept of the gang. As well, I conducted semi-structured interviews with participants who either police gangs, work with gangs, or were former gang members to get their perspectives on the issue. The research findings highlight that gangs in BC are distinct from other locations. Whereas traditional at-risk youth dominate gangs elsewhere, BC has a large number of youth involved in gangs who do not appear to possess the typical antecedents to gang involvement. Because of these differences, it is crucial that anti-gang initiatives and policies be adapted to the BC context to effectively reduce gang activity and ultimately eliminate gangs.

This thesis is an attempt to present certain aspects of Chinese social history in the light of current anthropological theory. It deals with non-kin associations, primarily in the traditional Chinese city, with a view to classifying them. Working with English source materials, I have collected together the available first-hand observations of these voluntary associations. The first major portion of the study deals with mutual aid clubs, clubs for the elite and commercial guilds, and this is followed by a treatment of the hui-kuan, or locality association, in the cities and countryside. It has been suggested that mutual aid clubs and clubs for the elite served many of the functions of the hui-kuan groups, and may have been formed by those individuals in a city who were not eligible to join such groups. The commercial guilds, on the other hand, were significant not only from the point of view of their control over trade and commerce, but also because of the system of indirect rule practiced by officialdom whereby the guilds were left in almost complete charge of the business management of the city. The hui-kuan associations must be considered as separate from the guilds because their basic criterion for recruitment was not common occupation but common geographical origin. The urban social hui-kuan were often clubs for the elite, while the commercial hui-kuan in the cities were mainly for merchants of the same occupation sharing common geographical origins. In general, the urban groups were the result of interregional trade, while the rural associations were the result of interregional migrations. The concentration of both kinds of hui-kuan groups in the central and upper Yangtze provinces can be directly related to the depopulation of that area and the subsequent migration of millions of peasants and merchants in the early Ch'ing period. My basic suggestion is that the hui-kuan associations met the needs of their members that would ordinarily have been satisfied by the kin group at home. In the case of south China in particular, the adaptive and integrative function is clear, as is the similarity between the services offered by the hui-kuan and the lineage, or tsu. Both the urban and rural groups helped the newcomer to adapt to his new surroundings and solve the particular problems he faced. Furthermore, they served as substitute kin groups and provided the means of preserving an individual’s ties with his home lineage. The concentration of hui-kuan groups in the once-depopulated areas of the central and upper Yangtze regions lends support to the argument of Pasternak, who, as opposed to Freedman, believes that in such "frontier" situations immigrants would form associations that cut across surnames and that lineages would not begin to form until conditions stabilized over several generations. Finally, a comparison with certain voluntary associations in modern Africa indicates the unique features of the Chinese non-kin associations: the disdain of officialdom and the system of indirect rule in the case of the guilds, and the preservation of membership in the home kin group in the case of the hui-kuan. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate