Marginalized and vulnerable groups have always existed in societies. Such groups have always needed protectors of their rights. In democratic countries institutions have had to be established to ensure that the rights of these groups are protected. National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) are part of these institutions. NHRIs are important and vital as they 'serve as independent bodies for the protection and promotion of human rights‘. / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2010. / A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Law University of Pretoria, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Law (LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa). Prepared under the supervision of Dr. Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua, Faculty of Law, University of Ghana, Ghana. 2010. / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/ / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

With the adoption of neo-liberal policies and the decline in social welfare, non-profit organizations have been increasingly integrated into public service provision. Such changes raise questions regarding formal policies and access for marginalized populations, no more so than in disaster settings as formal disaster management of sexual health services are still vague. This study identifies the role of non-profit organizations in providing public health and social services through the lens of sexual health commitments following the September 2010 Darfield Earthquake and subsequent major aftershock during February 2011 in Christchurch, New Zealand. The primary goals of this study were three fold, to delineate i) aspects of non-profit organizational culture and agency connections that contributed to the resilience of non-profit organizations by maintaining and adapting access to sexual health and associated wellbeing services over the transition from response to recovery ii) integration pathways of non-profit organizations into disaster risk reduction and iii) appropriate geographic representations of temporal vulnerability change impacting the commitments of non-profit organizations. Mixed methods were used for this study. Data were collected over a two-year period between 2013 and 2015. Data collection techniques included: i) archival research ii) surveys iii) focus groups and iv) semi-structured interviews. Quantitative data were derived from census records and qualitative data from surveys, focus groups, and interviews with non-profit and civil society practitioners. A total of thirty-six non-profit organizations, civil society partners, and agency connections participated. Results show that sexual health needs of youth, families, and migrants arriving for the rebuild, fluctuated following the earthquakes. Sexual health non-profits absorbed the shifting demands for services and supplies by leveraging government partnerships and non-profit agency connections to account for fluctuations in presenting populations, adjust service delivery methods and continue advocacy campaigns. Also, as a result of functional redundancy amongst migrant support groups and their respective agency connections, strategies of long-term advocacy commitment, co-location, and relationship building with diverse ethnic groups benefitted migrants and refugees in maintaining or accessing adequate health and wellbeing support into the recovery phase. By developing programs to increase public awareness of resources, creating engagement opportunities in vacant spaces, and bringing a united voice to authorities, non-profits captured increased social cohesion to address emergent and compounded vulnerabilities of marginalized populations. However, as the recovery progressed, some collective energy was lost. Findings indicate that non-profits operating in Christchurch prior to the earthquakes with flexible organizational structures and those that emerged after were most successful in the emergency response and early recovery. The ability to capture social cohesion resulting from the shared experience of the earthquakes and build bridges with non-profit connections or incorporate emergent populations into service delivery facilitated successful operations into recovery. Non-profits that partnered with the government were better suited for long-term recovery, when interagency collaboration returned to a more competitive state and reliance on co-production of services was reestablished as the preferred method of service delivery, based on their capacity to maintain and build linkages with civil society partners. This research adds to disaster literature and the understanding of organizational behaviors by suggesting appropriate means to assess the potential resilience of non-profit organizations post-disaster. Further, pathways of integration with disaster management are identified for various types of non-profits that contribute to sexual health and related community support services. Methods used to identify vulnerabilities of wellbeing focused non-profit organizations and model integration of culturally appropriate service delivery options into recovery planning and disaster mitigation can be applied to other high-income nations with burgeoning non-profit sectors that experience variety of hazards, in particular on the United States’ West Coast as the health care debate in the United States continues.

In my work I am dealing with the value inclinations of Czech journalists from the newspaper Mladá fronta Dnes, the tabloid Blesk (including the Sunday issue Nedělní Blesk) and the magazine Reflex. I have focused on the articles written about socially marginalized squatters in the years 2000, 2008 and 2009. I am interested in the values present in this discourse and what position will these values take towards squatters. In the theoretical part I explain concepts like hegemony, binary us-them, moral panics and body discipline, which will help me in my analysis. Recognized values are put into categories and subcategories according to their content. I describe the development of values within categories in different years. Finally I compare the values of the analyzed media.

In this paper, a study was conducted to explore social sustainability in HCI. The study focuses on people in destructive relationships and uses the notion of research through design to gain and share knowledge using design patterns. The study focused on creating methods for working more practically with social sustainability in HCI and used several design methods such as story share and capture to gain and share knowledge on the user group which was then presented in a pattern, consisting of a total of eight different patterns. The patterns was later tested with designers who suggested designs which users were then to rate from best to worst. The study show that design patterns can successfully be used to share knowledge, however the study also show some variation in how well design patterns are understood based on experience. Experienced designers tend to create better designs with the pattern than inexperienced. However, designers with the pattern designed better solutions than designers without regardless of experience.

This dissertation explored two facets of media activism. It used a Life History research methodology to understand how someone becomes a media activist, and it employed a textual analysis to explain the visual interface choices made by a media activist on the Internet. Throughout, the study is informed by theories of social identity, authorship, visual culture, and agency. The results that emerged offer insight into four areas of media studies: digital resistance, media education, digital aesthetics, and the use of social psychology to understand new media production. / text

The democratic deficit in the U.S. becomes strikingly evident as statistics show that only half of the population actually votes in elections. Seeing that many who do not participate in the electoral processes are also generally members of socially marginalized groups then this is an increasing social issue. The effects of this become deepening socio-economic inequalities, greater marginalization and a weakened democracy. This study argues that social workers can contribute to solve this democratic deficit by using social work to reach and include socially marginalized groups in the democratic process of electoral participation. Focusing specifically on San Francisco and the greater Bay Area, I have used qualitative method to interview representatives from non-profit organizations that provide different kind of social service and academic professors from the disciplines of Social Work and Political Science in order to investigate how social work can include marginalized non-voting groups in the electoral process. The result is analyzed together with a theoretical framework built from research on democracy, welfare research, empowerment theory and theories on community practice. The findings show that social work has an important role in creating belonging among these marginalized groups and to bring them into the political process by using social mobilizing and advocacy social work with an empowerment perspective.

This study explores the ways marginalised groups can be supported in their empowerment process, and specifically how art projects organised by non-governmental organisations can contribute in the process. The focus is on prisoners and indigenous children and adults in Mexico City and San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Mexico who are involved in the organisations’ projects. Results from qualitative interviews with organisations’ staff are presented and discussed covering organisations characteristics and relationship with the clients as factors in supporting the clients in their empowerment. Involvement in art projects influenced participants’ self-awareness, self-confidence, sense of achievement, gender roles and the way they cooperate with each other. The findings also show art projects as a possibility for marginalised groups to tell about their own lives and by doing so change stereotypes about themselves. The discussion focuses on interpreting these effects of working with art projects as empowering factors. It is suggested that working with art and in the non-governmental sector can complement the welfare system and serve as an inspiration to finding other ways of achieving empowerment. A closer look at how the non-governmental organisations work and relate to their clients, shows a more equal relationship than the one within the welfare systems, which opens up for more options of supporting marginalised individuals through their empowerment processes. The results of this research are based on the perception of the organisation’s employees, not the users themselves.Therefore it would be interesting to continue research on this topic, interviewing the users in order to get the marginalized people’s perspective on the issue.

To accurately describe the past, historians strive to learn the cultural ideologies of the time and place they study so their interpretations are situated in the context of that period and not in the present. This exploration of historical context becomes critical when researching marginalized groups, as evidence of their rhetorics and cultural logics are usually submerged within those of the dominant society. This project focuses on how factors, such as rhetor/audience perspective, influence cross-cultural historical interpretation, and how a community history database can be designed to illuminate and affect these factors. Theories of contact zones and rhetorical listening were explored to determine their applicability both to history-making and to the creation of a community history database where cross-cultural, multi-vocal, historical narratives may be created, encountered, and extended. Contact zones are dynamic spaces where changing connections, accommodations, negotiations, and power struggles occur, and this concept can be applied to history-making, especially histories of marginalized groups. Rhetorical listening focuses on how perspective influences understanding the past, and listening principles are crucial to both historians and the consumers of history. Perspectives are grounded in cultural ideologies, and rhetorical listening focuses on how tropes, such as race and gender, describe and shape these perspectives. Becoming aware of tropes-both of self and other-can bring to view the commonalities and differences between cultures, and allow a better opportunity for cross-cultural understanding. Rhetorical listening steers the historian and the consumer of history towards looking at who is writing the history, and how both the rhetor and the audience's perspective may affect the outcome. These theories of contact zones and rhetorical listening influenced the design of the project database and website by bringing perspective to the forefront. The visualization of rhetor/audience tropes in conjunction with the co-creation of history were designed to help foster cross-cultural understanding.

Latinx, or Hispanic/Latino, minoritized groups experience a broad spectrum of mental health challenges, disparities, and risks at a disproportionate rate compared to both their non-White counterparts and compared to other minorized groups in the U.S. (SAMHSA, 2015). They also experience a number of cultural and individual strengths associated with their values, practices, and resiliencies (Leyva et al, 2022; Gennetian et al, 2021; Calzada et al, 2020). However, given the substantial percentage of Latinxs who live in the United States (18.7%), the mental health needs of this minoritized group are not sufficiently addressed in social science literature, as a number of systemic factors limit the inclusion of Latinxs in participant pools (Roberts et al, 2020; DeJesus et al, 2019). Across 13 high-impact journals and three clinical disciplines, a mere 2.5% of all scholarship published focused on Latinxs. Through qualitative content-analysis of key topics, methodology, funding sources, and sample characteristics across 20 years of literature (n = 7, 061), this paper seeks to highlight both the strengths and weaknesses of Latinx representation in the current literature with the hope to better prepare policy makers, program interventionists, and clinical practitioners to competently serve this marginalized population.

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