This study has the aim to analyze what impacts land grabbing in Rift Valley, Kenya, has on rural poor, as it is perceived from a gendered perspective. Land acquisitions, or land grabbing, is a growing global phenomenon, where companies and states (foreign and domestic) are claiming land for investments, to secure the growing demand for food and biofuels, with neg-ative impacts on the rural population. Most exposed are the rural poor women. The gender issue is however not analyzed in a proper way in the debate, which is why study is important.In Rift Valley, Kenya the situation is slightly different with domestic actors standing behind the grabs. The consequences are nonetheless felt by the rural poor population, especially by the women. Through field studies and interviews with women exposed to the phenomenon I have found that even though legislation exists to provide human rights, these are often violat-ed on the ground. Women’s experiences are examined and together with other first- and sec-ondary sources these are analyzed with the theoretical lens of post-colonial feminism and the capabilities approach, leading to the conclusion that women are more vulnerable for land grabs but are capable actors fighting to make their lives better.

This paper conducts a comparative case study of how gender discourse in Igbo society has evolved from pre-colonial, colonial to post-colonial periods, more so, how this evolution contributes to the debate on cultural imperialism. It claims that an historical understanding of gender relations in Igbo society could provides an understanding of national cultural imperialism from a political perspective. With the assumptions of cultural imperialism, it reviews how the effect of colonialism contributes to the evolution of gender discourse in Igbo society. According to some earlier researches, gender equality in Igbo society has been on a constant slide from what was obtainable in the pre-colonial era. This trend as it is analyzed, collaborates the assumptions of national cultural imperialism; thereby disentangling the congested concept of cultural imperialism.

This thesis examines how digital mediations of art and performances can contribute to shaping new memories and perceptions about the Danish colonization of the U.S. Virgin Islands. By analyzing six pieces of art and performances that engage critically with Danish colonialism and slavery, this study aims to expand the limits of how Danish colonization is traditionally perceived in Danish authoritative representations. Based on theory about visual art, mediatization and digital memory, this study has found that art as an aesthetic tool can revise and challenge traditional ways of engaging with the past and representing it. Art and performances can promote new ways of understanding the complexity of colonialism and bring attention to underrepresented views and voices. Contemporary media plays a key role in how we socially construct memory, as processes of mediatization have changed traditional methods of retrieving and storing knowledge. It is found that digitizing art and publishing it on the archive of the Internet, creates a foundation for potential dialogue, reflection and reconsideration of Denmark’s former role as a colonial power. The Internet allows for access to various, manifold perspectives and memories of the Danish past. Thus digitizing and publishing works of art and performance online, adds a dimension of shaping a ‘social network memory’ where viewers and artists are involved in processes of sharing and reflection that allow for discussions about Denmark’s colonial past.

This dissertation examines social, political, and cultural dimensions of displacement, resettlement planning, and climate change adaptation policy experimentation along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. I draw upon four years of ethnographic research alongside Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal leaders, during a period just before and after their resettlement plans garnered $48 million in federal financial support. Through participant observation and interviews with Tribal leaders, their allies, media-makers who covered the Tribe’s experiences, and state planners tasked with administering the federal funds, I examined social encounters produced as the Tribe’s resettlement plans were embraced, circulated, and transformed throughout international media and policy. My analysis points to a number of tensions expressed as Tribal community-driven efforts to address historically produced vulnerabilities collided with government efforts to reduce exposure to coastal environmental hazards. I describe how policies, planning practices, and particular constructions of disaster and community encumbered Tribal leaders’ long-standing struggle for recognition, self-determination and sovereignty, land, and cultural survival. Ultimately, I argue that the state’s allocation of federal resettlement funds has reproduced a colonial frontier dynamic whereby redevelopment is rested upon the erasure of Indigenous histories; identities; and ongoing struggles for self- determination, land, and cultural survival. Using ethnography to interrogate the social encounters produced through adaptation may inform policies, planning processes, and activism in solidarity with those already regenerating social and ecological relationships threatened by racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and climate change. / Anthropology

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Hawaiian sugar industry rose from economic insignificance to become one of the world’s most efficient and productive sugarcane plantation systems. "Planter's Paradise" traces the transnational environmental history of cane planting in Hawaiʻi, from Polynesian settlement to the early twentieth century, to explore how an export-based mono-culture plantation system eclipsed diversified farming, how cultural encounters between indigenous and Euro-American groups influenced agriculture and natural resource use, and how the politics of planting contributed to the rise of American hegemony over the islands. With research grounded in plantation records, agricultural association publications, popular media, and personal correspondence, I address sugarcane planting as a point where ideas about nature, methods of converting nature into commodities for consumption in distant markets, and nature itself influenced each other within the context of U.S. imperial expansion. I argue that the ascendance of Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry was the result of cultural encounters, economic relations, and environmental conditions at the local level, but cane planting also connected the archipelago to particular transnational networks of economic, ecological, and cultural exchange. Sugarcane planting introduced to Hawaiʻi foreign ways of relating to the natural world, a host of alien organisms, and advances in agricultural science and technology that impacted all of Hawaiian society. These introductions contributed to planters' power. By the early twentieth century, Hawaiʻi had become a planter's paradise: a society and environment transformed for the industrial cultivation of sugarcane. / History

In 1972, a flood tore through Rapid City, South Dakota, killing 238 people. Many whose lives and homes were destroyed lived in a predominately Native American neighborhood known as “Osh Kosh Camp.” This dissertation asks: why did those people lived in that neighborhood at that time? The answer lies at the intersection of the histories of race and environment in the American West. In the Black Hills region, white Americans racialized certain spaces under the conceptual framework of Indian Country as part of the process of American conquest on the northern plains beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The American project of racializing Western spaces erased Indians from histories of Rapid City, a process most obviously apparent in the construction of Mount Rushmore as a tourist attraction. Despite this attempted erasure, Indians continued to live and work in the city and throughout the Black Hills. In Rapid City, rampant discrimination forced Native Americans in Rapid City to live in neighborhoods cut off from city services, including Osh Kosh Camp After the flood, activists retook the Indian Country concept as a tool of protest. This dissertation claims that environment and race must be understood together in the American West. / History

This work addresses the following question: How has the prominent scholarly literature on the Cayman Islands promoted a discourse that serves to undermine the acknowledgment of African contributions as well as African self-identification in the country? Utilizing an Afrocentric inquiry, the method of content analysis was employed to interrogate selected texts using location theory. It was found that the majority of literature on the Cayman Islands, as well as the dominant ideology within the Caribbean has indeed undermined the acknowledgement of African contributions as well as African self-identification in the country. More scholarship is needed that examines the experiences of African descended people living in the Caribbean from their own perspective, and critically engages dislocated texts. / African American Studies

The imposition of European borders in North America has given rise to a need to inquire into the impact of the overlay of colonial borders upon earlier ideas of geographical boundaries, and upon indigenous border nations and their connections to places and ways of being. Here, we look to delineate a tentative approach to further such inquiries into indigenous border nations who have found themselves on or near an international border by examining the relationship with ancestral lands. A thematic analysis will be conducted in the framework of a case study research design. Two cases are discussed, which suggest the relationship with ancestral lands is often discussed in transboundary terms. The discussion further illustrates cross-border mobility enacts indigenous understandings of borders, governance, land, and selfhood, and has led to negotiations over the rights which flow from these. For the future, this suggests attention to transboundary indigenous nations is necessary.

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of rapid urban growth and intensive changes to rural Indian geography through the construction of irrigation project to increase agricultural output. The work of several key researchers at this time demonstrated that these projects could lead to an increase in malaria prevalence. However, this period was also the site of a complicated entanglement of environmentalist and bacteriological thinking, which sometimes resulted in a disconnect between the research and the fieldwork that impacted the quality of research and the message malaria researchers were trying to send to the British administration in India. / Graduate

In September 2022, the state murder of Jîna Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, by the Islamic Republic's morality police in Tehran sparked a nationwide uprising, the largest since the 1979 revolution. With a central point of the movement in Kurdistan, this study aims to determine whether the Islamic Republic of Iran's (IRI) methods constitute a continuation of colonial practice. The study employs case studies and content analysis using the "internal colonialism" paradigm from the limitations of a time frame of 2022 to 2023. Findings highlight a colonial relationship between IRI and Kurdistan, which plays a heavy role in the case of Jîna Amini and the Jîna Uprising. The attempts to subjugate Amini's Kurdishness and Kurdistan discloses the institutionalized racial hierarchy within IRI. The disproportionate use of force, as observed in cases of heavy militarization, securitization, arrests, brutal treatment of protesters and prisoners, sexual violence, and the killing of Kolberis, all point to colonial structures. Essentially, this study provides a critical reassessment of the human rights violations perpetrated by IRI through colonial methods.