This paper describes my research project and body of work, which investigates social inequalities through the different language and functions of everyday objects. The research moves on from my previous Honours research project on the dou ble nature of caravan parks in NSW and looked at the changing demographics of these locations. I noted the increase of semi-permanent, residential 'homes' for low income earners and the unemployed, in these holiday locations. This paper examines broader social issues of homelessness and social inequalities within our society. I look at the complexities in the definitions of homelessness and the ways in which people find themselves in the position where they rely on welfare agencies and government support. I also investigate different representations of homelessness by artists and other social commentators, ranging from the hopeless victim to the vagrant. This section locates my social concerns with the context of theoretical debate and artistic representation. I have used everyday and mundane objects in my artworks to discuss these social concerns. Everyday objects posses a language and commonality that is familiar to all members of society. This language is developed from the different historical, cultural and functional qualities that everyday objects possess. I discus this in relation to the development of the everyday object in artistic practices from the early 20th century to today. Of specifically importance to my practice is the influence of contemporary German artists and their manipulation of objects to make works with political and social content. Throughout this paper I have discussed individual art works which illustrate my social concerns and the practicalities of the everyday. Revealing how I juxtapose certain objects to question the uneven nature of travel and home, with regards to possessions and mobility. Additionally I challenge the normal functions of objects to reveal new absurd possibilities of use.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2008. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

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This dissertation offers a study of everyday relations between residents and the state on a post-industrial council estate in England. Drawing upon historical and ethnographic data, it analyses how, often under conditions of sustained exclusion, residents rely upon the state in their daily struggles for security and survival. My central ethnographic finding is that residents personalise the state alongside informal networks of support and care into a local sociality of reciprocity. This finding can be broken into three interconnected points. First, I argue that the reciprocal contract between citizens and the state emerged in the post-war years when the residents on the newly built estates negotiated their dependence upon the state by integrating it into their on-going social relations. A climate of relative material affluence, selective housing policies, and a paternalistic regime of housing management all created conditions which were conducive for this temporary union between residents and the state. Second, however, I argue that with the decline of industry and shifts towards neoliberal policies, residents increasingly struggle to hold the state accountable to its reciprocal obligations towards local people. This becomes manifest today both in the material neglect of council estates as well as in state officials' reluctance to become implicated in social relations with and between residents. Third, I argue that this failure on the part of the state to attend to residents' demands often has onerous effects on people's lives. It not only exacerbates residents' exposure to insecurity and threat, but is also experienced as a moral affront which generates larger narratives of abandonment and betrayal. Theoretically, this dissertation critically discusses and challenges contrasting portrayals of the state, and of state-citizen relations, in two bodies of literature. On the one hand, in much of the sociological and anthropological literature on working class communities, authors have adopted a community-centred approach which has depicted working class communities as self-contained entities against which the state emerges as a distant or hostile entity. I argue that such a portrayal is premised upon a romanticised view of working class communities which neglects the intimate presence of the state in everyday life. On the other hand, the theoretical literature on the British state has adopted a state-centred perspective which has seen the state as a renewed source of order and authority in disintegrating communities today. My suggestion is that this portrayal rests upon a pathologising view of social decline which fails to account for the persistence of informal social relations and the challenges that these pose to the state's authority from below. Finally, moving beyond the community-centred and state-centred perspectives, I argue for the need to adopt a middle ground which combines an understanding of the nature and workings of informal relations with an acknowledgement of the ubiquity of the state. Such an approach allows us to recognise that, far from being a hostile entity or, alternatively, an uncontested source of order, the state occupies shifting positions within an overarching sociality of reciprocity and its associated demands for alliances and divisions. I refer to such an approach as the personalisation of the state.

Does banning opposition candidates from ballots increase the risk that they will turn to bullets instead? Globally, since the end of the Cold War, blatant election rigging tactics (such as ballot box stuffing) are being replaced by 'strategic rigging': subtler procedural manipulations aimed at winning while maintaining the guise of legitimacy in the eyes of international observers. In particular, incumbents (in regimes stuck between democracy and authoritarianism) are turning to 'electoral exclusion', neutralizing key rivals by illegitimately banning certain candidates, in turn reducing the need for cruder forms of election day rigging. I used mixed methods - combining insights from an original global dataset with extensive elite interviews conducted in five countries (Madagascar, Thailand, Tunisia, Zambia, and Côte d'Ivoire) - to establish that electoral exclusion is an attractive short-term election strategy for vulnerable incumbents that produces a much higher chance of victory but comes with high costs in the longer-term. Global probit modeling (using electoral exclusion as an independent variable and coups d'état and civil wars as separate dependent variables) suggests that, since the end of the Cold War, excluding opposition candidates from the ballot roughly doubles the risk of a coup d'état or quadruples the risk of civil war onset. In spite of these risks, incumbents fall into this 'exclusion trap' because of the shortened time horizon that frequently accompanies competitive multi-party elections. Vulnerable incumbents worry more about the short-term risk of losing an election than the long-term but ultimately unknown risk that political violence will ensue after the election. Finally, the inverse corollary of these findings is that inclusion of opposition candidates during multi-party elections can be a stabilizing factor. Though it may seem counterintuitive, fragile 'counterfeit democracies' - and so-called 'transitional' regimes - may be able to stave off existential threats to regime survival by extending an olive branch to their fiercest opponents. These findings combine to form the overarching argument of this dissertation: when opposition candidates are excluded from the ballot, they become more likely to turn to bullets by launching coups d'état and civil wars.

This is an ethnographic description and investigation of life on a Scottish council estate. It is based on five unemployed one-parent life histories focusing on their experiences, knowledge and emotions in and around a local community centre. The study's expressed focal point is the Gentleman Robber community centre, within the hardtown community in the city of Dundee. The study touches on locally important representations and key issues such as: work, morality, boredom, kinship, spatiality and violence. At the tables in the community centre, the local narrative montage often focused on the enjoyment of violence or the negative marginal stigmatism faced, while, for example, collecting one's social benefits or attending the local doctor. It reflected a dichotomy of Us/Them relations linked to a local fragmentation of identity and issues of deservingness. I found that in a daily emphasis of their own exclusion the Hardtowners often voiced a feeling and embodiment of opposition through local story telling. It is a fragmented and stressful everyday life, with individual skill and network connections deciding individual status in the community. Links and networks last for as long as they are deemed useful and flexibility in trading, cooperation, networking and violence is one of the local guiding lights for success. The ethnographic narrative is described though a fragmented, contextually faithful discourse, with cinematic influences. This imparts a slice of daily experientialism found in the fragmented and stressful lives of the individuals born into and living on benefit in a Western European welfare society.

Environmental justice, a new but rapidly developing concept in international environmental law, arose in the United States of America during the Environmental Justice Movement of the late 1970s and 1980s. It starkly highlighted injustices faced by people of colour and low-income communities as regards racially skewed environmental legal protection and allocation of environmental risks. The movement radically changed the meaning of ‘environment’ from its conventional green overtones to include issues of social justice at the core of environmental thinking. I critically examine the concept of environmental justice in the Kenyan context by highlighting the injustices, and the formulation and application of laws and policies that significantly impact on environmental regulation and equitable distribution of social services. / Private Law / LL. M.

Cette recherche porte sur les mécanismes d’ajustement des différentes urbanités en présence à Casablanca, principale métropole du Maroc, par le biais de l’étude de l’appropriation d’espaces publics par des pratiques déviantes. La question des rapports mutuels entre les citadins déviants et l’ensemble des acteurs de la ville (citadins ordinaires et acteurs institutionnels de l’aménagement), incarnée dans le processus d’aménagement urbain du centre-ville à partir de 2002, permet de mettre en évidence l’importance de la visibilité de la transgression des normes sociales. Ces projets contraignant les citadins déviants à réadapter leurs lieux de vie à l’injonction à une urbanité policée sont analysés au regard des limites des compétences des citadins en situation de vulnérabilité et interrogent l’aménagement dans sa capacité à intégrer toutes les composantes sociales de la ville. Dans une démarche de type ethnographique, explorer l’articulation du lien social à la morphologie urbaine permet de comprendre les transformations des valeurs à l’oeuvre dans des situations de déviance, révélatrices de changements affectant les formes familiales et l’ensemble de la société marocaine, pour les hommes et les femmes en quête d’individuation. / This research is a study of the adjustment of different urbanities present in Casablanca, Morocco’s main metropolis, where public spaces are appropriated by city-dwellers for their deviant practices. The issue of mutual relations among the city-dwellers and all the city stakeholders (ordinary city-dwellers and institutional players involved in planning) embodied in the urban planning process of the city center since 2002 highlights the importance of visibility of the transgression of social norms. The development projects, which force deviant city-dwellers to readjust their living places to a constraining civilized urbanity, are analyzed in terms of the limitations of the competencies of these city-dwellers, who are in a vulnerable situation. The projects also call into question urban planning in its ability to incorporate all the social components of the city. Using an ethnographic approach to explore the relationship of social ties with urban morphology helps to understand the transformations of values at play in situations of deviance, which reveal changes in family structure and the entire Moroccan society for men and women in search of individuation.

En analysant les interactions entre pratiques sociales quotidiennes et espace urbain à La Havane entre 1878 et 1921, cette thèse démontre combien l'émergence et la diffusion socio-‘raciale’ de nouvelles façons de pratiquer la ville contribuent alors à une ré-invention du quotidien, c'est-à-dire à la reconfiguration de l'expérience journalière que les Havanais ont de leur ville et à l'actualisation de la façon dont ils y font société.Enclenchés entre 1878 et 1895 puis consolidés après 1898, l'essor de transports en communs urbains à La Havane et leur appropriation progressive par les couches populaires favorisent un renouvellement des pratiques sociales quotidiennes de l'espace urbain, synonyme d'une entrée définitive des Havanais dans l'ère des transports urbains de masse. Atypique de par sa précocité et sa rapidité, ce processus est également remarquable par ses répercussions sur deux des formes structurantes de la convivance havanaise. Dès avant l'Indépendance, le régime appliqué à la marginalité havanaise s'en trouve désarticulé, à un moment où, la contestation de l'ordre colonial gagnant, le contrôle social devient un enjeu crucial pour les autorités. Sur l'ensemble de la période d'étude, le renouvellement des pratiques sociales quotidiennes œuvre à une redéfinition de la géographie résidentielle havanaise : il est à la base d'une diffusion des couches populaires dans l'ensemble de La Havane, qui entrave et contredit le projet élitaire de capitale républicaine.En « faisant les poches à l’histoire », en étudiant de nombreuses archives inédites ou peu valorisées et à partir de la constitution d'une base de données géo-référencée et d'un important matériel cartographique, cette thèse pose donc, entre lecture alternative de la chronologie canonique et complexification de la trame historique, un regard autre sur l'une des périodes charnières de l'histoire de La Havane et de Cuba. / By analysing the interactions between daily social practices and urban space in Havana between 1878 and 1921, this thesis demonstrates how new ways of moving through the city emerged and spread both socially and racially, thus contributing to reinventing everyday life, that is to say reorganising its inhabitants' daily experience of the city and updating the way they socialised. The development of public transport in Havana and the working class's growing use of it began between 1878 and 1895 and boomed after 1898, which fostered a renewal of daily social practices of urban space and allowed the people of Havana to enter the age of mass urban transport. This precocious, swift, therefore atypical process was also remarkable because of its repercussions on two of the structuring forms of convivance. Already before the Independence, government's treatment of social outcasts started to dislocate, precisely at a time when protest against colonial order was spreading and social control was becoming a crucial issue for the authorities. Over the period under study in this thesis, the reinvention of daily social practices led to redefining the residential geography of Havana: it made possible a wider diffusion of the working class throughout the city, which hampered and challenged the republican capital's project of the elite. By “emptying out history's pockets” and studying numerous unpublished or little valued archives, this thesis, which involved constituting a georeferenced database and a body of cartographic material, offers a different insight into one of the turning points in the history of Havana and Cuba through an alternative analysis of the conventional chronology and a complexification of historical framework.

Uma mentalidade de indiferença em relação à desigualdade, à violência e à exclusão é comum em um país como o nosso. Vive-se como se fosse natural tanto a opulência em meio à pobreza quanto as regalias de poucos em meio às dificuldades de tantos. Existe uma cultura de aceitação de tais situações, que acredita ser possível conciliar ideais libertários e democráticos com uma estrutura social absolutamente injusta. O trabalho tem como enfoque central as Prédicas Dores de Maria, que constituem a primeira parte do manuscrito de Antônio Conselheiro, publicado por Ataliba Nogueira. Concluímos que o movimento de Canudos, que teve a religiosidade como força motriz, foi liderado por um homem de profunda religiosidade, que acima de tudo sobrepujou tradições ambíguas e reavivou as que estavam latentes. Dessa maneira o trabalho visa valorizar a experiência religiosa que se refletiu na pregação e atuação do líder/beato como resposta às formas situacionais daquela época. Pois ao que se sabe a trajetória de Antônio Conselheiro em sua Canudos e a sua luta foram muito mais por justiça do que supuseram muitos estudiosos: o Conselheiro não foi um louco, fanático, beato ou qualquer outra das interpretações que a ele foram dadas, foi um líder religioso inteligente e sensível. A metodologia utilizada para o desenvolvimento do trabalho foi a análise do conteúdo. A análise do conteúdo dessas prédicas foi um caminho para interpretar as situações de injustiça então existentes em Canudos / A mentality of indifference to inequality, violence and exclusion is common in our country. It seems as if the presence of opulence and wealth of the few was natural. A culture of acceptance of such situations exists, and it believes that it is possible to conciliate democratic ideals and liberties and with a thoroughly unjust a social structure. Our study focalizes on the Sermons, Pains of Maria which constitute the first part of the manuscript of Antônio Conselheiro, published by Ataliba Nogueira. We conclude that the movement of Canudos had religiosity as the driving force and was led by a man of great religious motivation. He received an ambiguous tradition but revived the potentialities in it. In this way our study seeks to value the religious experience which is reflected in the preaching and career of the leader /beato as a reply to the historical and social context. It is well known that the life of Antônio Conselheiro in Canudos was much more concerned for social justice than scholars have assumed. Antônio Conselheiro was not an insane person, fanatic, beato or any another derogatory name given to him. He was an intelligent leader. The methodology of our study is an analysis of the sermons. Such an analysis helped us to interpret the social injustice then existing in Canudos