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The thesis analyses the provision of "Aid for Trade" as a specific form of state building intervention (SBI) in Laos and Vietnam, two countries that have received trade-related assistance as part of their global economic integration. The thesis uncovers how global economic and institutional reform agendas related to trade integration are accepted or contested within both states, as part of a highly political process characterised by strategic agency and structural selectivities of various actors involved. The thesis employs a theoretical framework to help analyse how global trade governance programmes intervene within targeted states, and how local socio-political contestation shapes the outcomes of such programmes. Drawing on Marxist state theory, SBIs are understood as contested processes which open up strategic opportunities for social forces to shape the transformation process and thereby to stabilise or challenge existing power relations. Special attention is directed towards the state as an arena of conflict in order to understand the specific forms and varying results that these interventions take. This framework allows us to grasp how dominant social forces within the Laotian and Vietnamese forms of state are able to modify or circumvent external reform imperatives, resulting in highly selective changes in trade governance, which often departs from the intention of "Aid for Trade" project managers. The thesis thereby changes conventional technocratic assumptions that believe that aid interventions are a matter of best practice and contributes to a growing research agenda which analyses development interventions within the wider political economy of the targeted state.

Abstract: New Orleans, Baltimore, and Charlottesville are reevaluating the presence of Confederate statues in their built environment. Known as the Capital of the Confederacy, Richmond’s cultural landscape is visible through the connection of two historical spaces, Monument Avenue and Shockoe Bottom. Both serve as a powerful case study for how the commemorative narrative of these spaces is contested today and how barriers that exist influence urban planning processes and outcomes.

In the United States alone, disability touches the lives of a tremendous amount of people. An increased prevalence of chronic illness, coupled with an aging population means it is likely and perhaps inevitable that everyone will experience disability in one way or another over the course of their lifetime. However not everyone who is disabled is recognized as such. Culturally, the narrative of “the healthy disabled person,” – or someone who is healthy, permanently, predictably, and visibly disabled renders many people with chronic and episodic pain, fatigue, and illness as unrecognizable as disabled. Even though increasing numbers of disability scholars have begun to acknowledge that the embodied experiences of disability are far more fluid than the theoretically static divisions between healthy or ill, abled or disabled allow for, there has been little research that explores the experiences that exist in between these spaces In this dissertation I use narrative analysis to examine “who counts” as disabled in the United States, and why by exploring the interconnected narratives of disability at the cultural, institutional, and personal levels of society. In the first of three substantive chapters I examine cultural narratives about contested illness published in The New York Times between 1999 and 2016. I argue that stigmatization of episodic illness and disability occurs when the reality of lived experiences contradict the cultural assumptions and expectations; namely that health and illness, disability, and ability are natural, discrete, and static states of being for physical bodies. In the second chapter I examine institutional narratives of disability as they are told in town hall meetings for the Americans with Disabilities Amendment Act. I argue that these narratives serve to distinguish between morally good people with disabilities who deserve to be protected and accommodated in the workplace, and those who would use disability as an excuse to take advantage of their employers. In the final substantive chapter, I examine how women with chronic and contested illness reconstruct their identities through narrative in an online forum. I argue that these online spaces are an important site from which these women are able to counter the stigmatization and isolation that results from the dominant narrative that portrays them as morally corrupt. In each of these three chapters I find that the shifting and unpredictable reality of bodies that appear normal, healthy, and abled sometimes, and periodically ill, impaired, and disabled others are at best culturally unrecognizable as disabled and at worst, subject to disbelief and hostility regarding their claims as such. I argue that in order to overcome the stigmatization and disbelief of invisible and episodic disability, we need a cultural reorientation towards the story of disability; one that moves away from the belief that it is something that only happens to a small number of people in society, and towards an understanding of disability as an inevitable experience for the majority of the population; and in doing so works towards a more inclusive society that is designed to meet the needs of an ever changing and diversifying population.

This thesis is an investigation of landscape as boundary: a study of its formation, inhabitation, and symbolic meaning. The study is situated in a valley located south of Jerusalem’s Old City walls; known as both Gei Ben-Hinnom and Wadi al- Rababa, it is an ethnic, cultural, socioeconomical, and mythological boundary. In the ethnically polarized Jerusalem, valleys often act as boundaries between Jewish and Palestinian populations. For nineteen years an official no-man’s-land divided the Hinnom/Rababa Valley, a result of an armistice agreement between Israel and Jordan. Since the 1967 annexation of East Jerusalem to Israel, the valley has transformed into a boundary between the two populations. Responding to this boundary, the thesis addresses an urgent need for a wastewater treatment facility, proposing new infrastructure as a vehicle to explore the ability of architecture to embody multiple narratives. By documenting built form, geology, hydrology, history, and mythology, the thesis illustrates the Hinnom/Rababa Valley as the space of the in-between, neither east nor west, bridging the urban hilltops with the underworld. The boundary partakes in both and neither sides simultaneously. Building on its multiplicity of meanings – of its ‘stories so far’ – the thesis attempts to re-imagine a new relationship to the ground.

Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, three American astronomical observatories in Arizona and Hawai'i were transformed from scientific research facilities into mountains of controversy. This dissertation examines the histories of conflict between Native, environmentalist, and astronomy communities over telescope construction at Kitt Peak, Mauna Kea, and Mt. Graham from the mid-1970s to the present. I situate each history of conflict within shifting social, cultural, political, and environmental tensions by drawing upon narrative as a category of analysis. Astronomers, environmentalist groups, and the Native communities of the Tohono O'odham Nation, the San Carlos Apaches, and Native Hawaiians deployed competing cultural constructions of the mountains--as an ideal observing site, a "pristine" ecosystem, or a spiritual temple--and these narratives played a pivotal role in the making of contested landscapes in postwar American astronomy. / History of Science

This thesis is an investigation of landscape as boundary: a study of its formation, inhabitation, and symbolic meaning. The study is situated in a valley located south of Jerusalem’s Old City walls; known as both Gei Ben-Hinnom and Wadi al- Rababa, it is an ethnic, cultural, socioeconomical, and mythological boundary. In the ethnically polarized Jerusalem, valleys often act as boundaries between Jewish and Palestinian populations. For nineteen years an official no-man’s-land divided the Hinnom/Rababa Valley, a result of an armistice agreement between Israel and Jordan. Since the 1967 annexation of East Jerusalem to Israel, the valley has transformed into a boundary between the two populations. Responding to this boundary, the thesis addresses an urgent need for a wastewater treatment facility, proposing new infrastructure as a vehicle to explore the ability of architecture to embody multiple narratives. By documenting built form, geology, hydrology, history, and mythology, the thesis illustrates the Hinnom/Rababa Valley as the space of the in-between, neither east nor west, bridging the urban hilltops with the underworld. The boundary partakes in both and neither sides simultaneously. Building on its multiplicity of meanings – of its ‘stories so far’ – the thesis attempts to re-imagine a new relationship to the ground.

Elections are seldom covered in detail below the level of the national contests. Regional, district, and local elections often appear to be too provincial to be worth the time and effort to research and analyze in any detail."Taking the Fifth" is about a contested congressional race that was in dispute between various local and forces longer than any other House race on record.The Fifth District of Indiana leaned Republican, but it swung to the Democrats about once a decade. The 1960 election broke that historic pattern.Since 1960 was a pivotal election year for both political parties, and since the U. S. Congress was divided by various regional and philosophical factions, it is the contention of the dissertation that the Indiana Fifth District took on more importance than it would have under normal circumstances.Pursuit of power by local and national figures became inextricably involved with the struggle of the candidates in the Fifth District of Indiana. Intraparty grudges between district and state Democratic leaders, scars from Republican battles for congressional leadership posts, Dixiecrat versus urban Democrats maneuvering for dominance on key congressional committees, and an energetic young President and his allies -- bent on making a lasting mark on history -- all influenced the outcome of the race.As the gap widens between election day in Indiana and final settlement of the contest, the two candidates fade into secondary roles, and eventually appear to be little more than pawns for the congressional and national figures who had pre-empted the contest for their own political purposes.