This dissertation critically explores the governance of disability, social marginalization, and spatial exclusion in highland Ecuador. Since the 1990s, disabled Ecuadorians have moved from a state of social neglect and physical isolation to wider societal participation, fueled in part by national campaigns aimed at promoting disability rights. Many have joined grassroots organizations through biosocial networks based on the collective identity of shared impairment. However, their incorporation into the labor market, educational systems, and public sphere has been uneven and impeded by underlying spatial and cultural barriers. Based on twelve months of ethnographic research I conducted among people with physical and visual disabilities in the city of Cuenca, this research analyzes narratives of disablement within the local disabled community. I focus on the consequences of living with embodied differences considered to be anomalous within environments designed for nondisabled citizens. The study extends current scholarship on the social context of disability to a Latin American country with significant ethnic and economic hierarchies, exploring disability as an important dimension of social stratification that is both produced and remedied by the state. In Ecuador, the social category of people with disabilities has emerged through historical processes and campaigns that emphasize the prevention of impairment and chronic disease, promotion of equal rights, and inclusive labor markets - all of which are part of a broader aspiration toward modernity. I argue that disability is often an overlooked but important, cross-cutting form of bodily and behavioral difference that creates multiple marginalities. Emphasizing social practices and structural dimensions of disability shifts the attention away from approaches that foreground individual, psychological, or medical aspects of disablement and instead contributes to wider anthropological understandings of disability as socially produced, constructed, managed and enacted. In analyzing disability as a cross-cutting category, this research reframes disability as contingent on local constructions of normativity, highlighting how bodies come to be recognized as "abled" or "disabled" within particular productions of space and systems of un/marked subjects.

The Chinese are the largest ethnic minority in Canada. As a group, they are well-known for not being able to speak fluent English, including those well-educated individuals who immigrated to Canada mainly in the 2000s. There is a rich literature in applied linguistics about immigrants’ second language learning. Nevertheless, studies on second language practice of this particular group of well-educated Chinese immigrants are lacking. This enquiry is aimed at exploring the reasons why well-educated professional Chinese immigrants, who constitute a large portion of the Chinese population in Canada, do not put more effort into improving their English after settling down there, even though a better level of proficiency can bring apparent benefits to their economic and social success in the new host country. Nineteen well-educated professional Chinese immigrants took part in in-depth interviews, the sole method of data collection of this exploratory study which has a conceptual framework capitalizing on such concepts as motivation/demotivation, value, capital, investment, community and identity. The findings reveal that the principal reason for a dearth of efforts is that they do not deem such efforts very necessary and worthwhile. The contribution of this study to knowledge lies in the conceptualization of non-investment, which complements the existing notion of investment by incorporating into it motivational/demotivational factors that the latter dismisses, and which addresses the issue as to what resources an individual depends on when making investment decisions. In addition, this concept is also a contribution to the under-researched area of demotivation. The immigration of well-educated Chinese professionals to Canada is one of the trends in human migration on the global scale which is a part of globalization. Therefore, the comprehension of the rationale behind their second language practice is significant to the applied linguists who work in the realm of globalization.

The concept of accessibility (hereafter “accessibility”) encapsulates the relationships between the availability of opportunities; an individual's ability to access, engage with and ‘benefit' from such opportunities, and; the problem of social exclusion. However, while “improving accessibility” has been a policy objective in the United Kingdom since 1997, an emphasis on economic and environmental considerations at the expense of social considerations has become a cause for concern. This thesis helps address that concern by exploring why and how accessibility should and could be made more directly relevant to people's everyday lives; and by proposing a form of and an approach to the implementation of accessibility that supports the provision of social interventions, irrespective of the origin and scale of the same. Consequently, this thesis critically reviews extant ideas of accessibility and redefines the concept using Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach. It then explores the operationalization of that redefined concept through an action research case study in North-East Scotland. Finally, it examines the potential role of digital information and communication technology (ICT) in managing the accessibility related data needed to support decision taking in providing social interventions. The key findings are: (1) the capabilities approach enables the redefinition of accessibility as a holistic, more socially representative and agent centric concept; (2) that definition could be usefully related to the concept of social exclusion through the notion of risk; (3) this emerging theory and practise of accessibility requires further development to achieve broader acceptance; (4) that notwithstanding the philosophical arguments underpinning action research, the participation of ‘local' people in research can build stronger, more informed and productive (research) relationships, and; (5) the use of digital ICT is central to realising the full potential of accessibility.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 74-81)

In recent years groups in several cities have attempted to use online media and digital technology to help the members of marginalized communities cover where they live. These initiatives have the potential to improve mainstream coverage, which relies on official sources and typically portrays these communities as deviant. But despite their relative independence, the influence of the culture of journalism itself could potentially lead these initiatives to use routines and frames that replicate the mainstream’s coverage of the marginalized. This dissertation analyzed four case studies, one based in Austin and three in Chicago, to examine this paradox. It investigated how the schools and nonprofits that maintain these initiatives balance participation with professionalism, and how participants relate to other residents, institutions, and officials within their communities and in other communities. It explored the limits of citizen journalism’s attempts to supplement and improve upon professional journalism. These cases were considered in terms of Bourdieu’s concept of the journalistic field, Castells’ network society, and Habermas’ public sphere. This theoretical framework is concerned with whose voices are heard in public discourse and in the culture overall. As Castells makes clear, access to the Internet and facility with online communication is a requirement for participation in public life, including journalism. But as Bourdieu argues, there are cultural aspects as well to the field of journalism that can limit such participation. Each initiative faced a tradeoff between adhering to traditional journalistic practices and standards and attracting participation from members of a community. A combination of elements of journalism culture (having editors and training), community media culture (advocating for communities, covering ongoing issues alongside events), and digital culture (allowing participants freedom to contribute in multiple ways, interaction) seems the most effective way to improve coverage of marginalized communities. Such a mixture would aid the creation of bonding social capital within a community and bridging social capital across communities, and presents an opportunity for the marginalized to use their cultural capital to gain social capital. Yet this hybrid model of journalism is resisted by the societal factors that influence mainstream journalism. / text

This paper explores Mazo de la Roche’s peculiar articulation of the Bildungsroman in the first of Jalna’s sequels, Whiteoaks. It argues that the text’s psychosocially aberrant protagonist, Finch Whiteoak, is a Bildungsheld whose modern coming-of-age process of accommodation and assimilation into a socio-specific norm is not as much a progression toward the centre as it is a simultaneous progression/regression toward a reification of his exemplary marginal status as an other amidst others. This paper further contends that this unique process is made possible only by Finch’s particularly unstable and eccentric otherness—established through his treatment by his family as variously mentally ill rather than disabled—and that this process is both externally regressive in a vein similar to the modern, female Bildungsroman and internally progressive in the vein of the classic, male Künstlerroman. In order to accommodate this duality of publicly typical and privately subversive otherness, Finch must navigate the diegetic realm’s social boundaries and liminal spaces through a series of “double lives,” in which the other is ultimately found within the home context and potentially subversive centralities outside of Jalna are sacrificed for the sake of representative marginalities at home.

This dissertation is concerned with the extent to which the use of information and communication technology can (re-)create social capital and local community in an urban environment. Will the new technologies lead to new forms of social inclusion or to the creation of a digital divide? How have social networks, social support, trust and sense of community been affected by the rapid development of the Internet? In the literature there is disagreement between writers who see the technology as a new basis for social inclusion, social capital and community (e. g. Wellman, 1997; Rheingold, 2000; Lin, 2001) and others who see it as a threat, leading to new forms of exclusion and a decline in face-to-face contacts ( e.g . Slouka, 1995;Stoll, 1995). A combination of qualitative and quantitative data from a study in a relatively disadvantaged area of Stockholm is used to evaluate the impact of two computer projects, a Local Net and an Internet Cafe. Each of the projects was aimed at encouraging digital inclusion and at enhancing social contacts and the sense of community. The findings show that Local Net largely failed to achieve its goals and was abandoned two years after its inauguration. In its place an Internet Cafe was established, which seems to be achieving many of the goals that were set out in its prospectus. Visitors to the Cafe, who include many representatives of disadvantaged groups, have acquired useful computer skills. The IT-Cafe, with is provision of subsidised public access, in formal support and training, makes its visitors feel more included in the Information Society as well as in the wider society. The visitors also have more local friends, express stronger social trust and perceive less tension in the than non-visitors. The Internet Cafd is regarded as an offline as well as online meeting-place with positive impacts on social integration, and Internet use is associated with networking, exchange of support and information seeking.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, August 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-96).

Thesis PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-93).