This thesis examines the concept of masculinity as it concerns a group of male community leaders from impoverished neighbourhoods of Léon, Nicaragua. In collaboration with the non-governmental organization, Centro de Información y Servicios de Asesoría en Salud (CISAS) and utilizing person-centred ethnography, it explores masculinity in Nicaragua as reflected at the level of the individual. The work proposes that masculinities in Nicaragua are not as simple as some have suggested. Moreover, it relies on a Foucauldian analysis of disciplinary power to explicate the foundations of said conceptions as well as to develop new understandings of the idea of machismo.<p> Following analysis of an interview series and a thorough review of relevant literature, this thesis places Nicaraguan conceptions of masculinity as being discrete according to individuals. Moreover, the work deconstructs the notion of machismo as being nothing more than an individuated subject, most likely imposed on Nicaragua and, by extension, various other Latin American cultures, by forces exogenous to Latin America. Finally, this thesis discusses the tie that masculinity and health have as well as the influence that CISAS has on the personal lives of the research participants as well as their work in their communities.

Reducing health disparities requires intervention on the social determinants of health, as well as a means to monitor and evaluate these actions. Indicators are powerful evaluation tools that can support these efforts, but they are often developed without the input of those being measured and invariably reflect the value judgments of those who create them. This is particularly evident in the measurement of subjective social constructs such as gender equity, and the participation and collaboration of the intended beneficiaries are critical to the creation of relevant and useful indicators. These issues are examined in the context of a study to develop indicators to measure gender equity in the Nicaraguan Fair Trade coffee cooperative PROCOCER. Recent studies report that Fair Trade cooperatives are not adequately addressing the needs of its women members. Indicators can provide cooperatives with a consistent means to plan, implement, and sustain actions to improve gender equity. This study used participatory and feminist research methods to develop indicators based on focus groups and interviews with women members of PROCOCER, the cooperative staff, and external experts. The findings suggest that the cooperative has a role in promoting gender equity not only at the organizational level, but in the member families as well. Moreover, gender equity requires the empowerment of women in four broad dimensions of measurement: economic, political, sociocultural, and wellbeing. The indicator set proposes 22 objective and subjective indicators for immediate use by the cooperative and 7 indicators for future integration, mirroring its evolving gender strategy. The results also highlight salient lessons from the participatory process of indicator development, where the selected indicators were inherently shaped by the organizational context, the emerging research partnership, and the unique study constraints. These findings speak to the need for continued efforts to develop a critical awareness and organizational response to gender inequities, as well as the importance of providing spaces for women to define their own tools of evaluation.

Although Fair Trade provides better trading mechanisms and a set of well-documented tangible benefits for small-scale coffee producers in the Global South, large inequities persist within Fair Trade certified cooperatives. In particular, gender equity and womens empowerment are considered to be integral considerations of this system but visible gender inequities within certified cooperatives persist. Responding to this apparent contradiction, local partners in Nicaragua articulated a need to better understand how gender equity is understood and acted upon and thus this research projectan exploration of implemented gender equity-promoting processes at three different organizational levels (a national association of small-scale coffee producers, a second-tier cooperative, and a base cooperative)emerged. Drawing on feminist and social determinants of health approaches to research, the study was informed by semi-structured key informant interviews and document revision. Both the interviews and the documents revealed that although gender work is being considered at all three levels, each organizations approach and interpretation is unique, which exposes different challenges, tensions, and experiences.<p> Notably, results indicate that there is no clear definition of gender equity amongst the different organizational levels. As a result, these groups appear to be interpreting gender equity, and therefore initiating equity-promoting processes based on different criteria. Interviews also revealed that although there is no evidence of active discrimination or exclusion of women within cooperatives, gender equity work is nonetheless constrained by a constellation of socio-cultural and organizational challenges that women face. Examples of socio-cultural challenges revealed through the interviews include illiteracy, ascribed child-rearing responsibilities, household chores, machista culture, land tenure arrangements and gendered power relations in terms of decision-making, while organizational challenges include the attitudes and influence of leaders, a lack of gender mainstreaming in the cooperatives work and the fact that becoming a member requires an input of resources that most women do not have access to.<p> In eliciting experiences and perspectives from various levels of organizations in the Fair Trade coffee sector, the research revealed numerous tensions between rhetoric and practice. These tensions reflect blind spots in Fair Trade marketing and research wherein existing rhetoric does not reflect the experiences of the women, cooperatives, and organizations shared in this research. The three most predominant tensions that are explored in this study are: empowerment and organizational autonomy versus standardization; the subordination of gender work to commercial interests and; the concentration of power within democratically-organized cooperatives. The study acknowledges that it is not the primary role of Fair Trade to solve gender inequities, but does suggest that through some basic changes, including most notably a stronger consideration of local contexts, Fair Trade and local cooperatives can effectively support local gender work and contribute to womens empowerment and health.

The centre of interest is the discussion concerning development and free trade in Nicaragua. This thesis rests on theories of Wallerstein, Hammarskjöld, Dahl, and Heidenheimer, and its purpose is to spell out opinions on free trade and predict the future development of Nicaragua. With the title “How will free trade affect the development of Nicaragua?” and the starting point in Hammarskjöld’s way of dealing with development, my questions at issue are: • Is there a correlation between free trade and development? • How will the DR-CAFTA (Dominican Republic – Central America Free Trade Agreement) affect democracy and corruption in Nicaragua? Opinions are found in articles on the Internet; chosen by a variant of strategic selection. They are analyzed with Content analysis; quantifying words in a coding frame and highlighting key quotes. The prediction of the future development is done according to Delphi Technique and intends to speak only for the articles included in the investigation. This Bachelor Thesis has come to the following conclusions: • There is a correlation between free trade and development in Nicaragua. • There is governmental belief that the DR-CAFTA will improve democracy and grass root fear that the existing democracy will be out watered. About corruption, it is hard to tell. • Nicaragua is likely to develop economically, as trade and foreign investment will increase. People in general are likely to profit, though unjust. Democracy will probably be strengthened, even though there are deep concerns about the way politics are done today. Corruption and transparency has a 50% chance to improve.

Leishmaniasis is caused by infection with protozoan parasites within the genus Leishmania and, in the New World, is transmitted by the bites of female sand flies within the genus Lutzomyia. The occurrence of leishmaniasis in rodent species, the geographic distribution of sand fly species in Nicaragua, and environmental factors associated with the distribution of human cases of typical cutaneous leishmaniasis were investigated. Three hundred ninety five rodents representing 17 species were collected from 13 localities from August 2001–March 2006 and screened for Leishmania infections. One Heteromys desmarestianus and one Peromyscus mexicanus were found to be positive for leishmanial infections by PCR. This is the first report of Leishmania infections in rodents in Nicaragua. Five hundred fifty six sand flies representing 12 species were collected from 8 localities, including Lutzomyia hartmanni, a new record for this species in Nicaragua. The predominant sand fly species captured in western Nicaragua were Lutzomyia longipalpis and Lutzomyia evansi. The predominant species captured in central and eastern Nicaragua was Lutzomyia cruciata. The geographic distribution of sand flies in this study provides additional support to previouslypublished reports of suspected vectors of Leishmania species that cause typical and atypical forms of cutaneous leishmaniasis in Nicaragua. Distribution data of human cases of typical cutaneous leishmaniasis obtained from the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health, along with GIS and remotely sensed data of elevation, precipitation, temperature, soil types and land use/cover classes, were used to develop predictive logistic regression models for the presence or absence of human cases within 151 municipalities. Mean annual precipitation and land use/cover were determined to be the best environmental variable predictors for the occurrence of typical cutaneous leishmaniasis.

<p>The centre of interest is the discussion concerning development and free trade in Nicaragua. This thesis rests on theories of Wallerstein, Hammarskjöld, Dahl, and Heidenheimer, and its purpose is to spell out opinions on free trade and predict the future development of Nicaragua.</p><p>With the title “How will free trade affect the development of Nicaragua?” and the starting point in Hammarskjöld’s way of dealing with development, my questions at issue are:</p><p>• Is there a correlation between free trade and development?</p><p>• How will the DR-CAFTA (Dominican Republic – Central America Free Trade Agreement) affect democracy and corruption in Nicaragua?</p><p>Opinions are found in articles on the Internet; chosen by a variant of strategic selection. They are analyzed with Content analysis; quantifying words in a coding frame and highlighting key quotes. The prediction of the future development is done according to Delphi Technique and intends to speak only for the articles included in the investigation.</p><p>This Bachelor Thesis has come to the following conclusions:</p><p>• There is a correlation between free trade and development in Nicaragua.</p><p>• There is governmental belief that the DR-CAFTA will improve democracy and grass root fear that the existing democracy will be out watered. About corruption, it is hard to tell.</p><p>• Nicaragua is likely to develop economically, as trade and foreign investment will increase. People in general are likely to profit, though unjust. Democracy will probably be strengthened, even though there are deep concerns about the way politics are done today.</p><p>Corruption and transparency has a 50% chance to improve.</p>

Diss.--Berlin--Technische Universität, 2000. / Bibliogr. p. 1431-1505.

This dissertation explores how spatial processes of race shape Afro-Nicaraguan women’s political subjectivity, activist practice, and lived experience by studying their community-based organizing in the Caribbean coastal city of Bluefields, Nicaragua. Specifically, it analyzes the political responses they are developing to address the devastating impacts of neoliberal economic reform, gendered state violence, structural racism and the politics of gender justice that have emerged from their participation in place-based struggles for racial and regional justice. My dissertation research brings together critical race theory, Latin American social movements, African Diasporic feminisms, and the critical interventions of cultural and political geography to study Creole women’s community activism. I suggest that Creole women’s participation in what Harcourt and Escobar (2005) term the “politics of place” reflects the ways in which larger processes of anti-Black racism, gender subordination, and economic inequality have historically been and continue to be articulated through the idiom of place. I demonstrate how the politics of place shapes local, regional, and national histories of race and alterity and informs Creole women’s political practice and vision in ways that differ markedly from the mainstream women’s and feminist movements in Nicaragua. Through their place-based activism and focus on regional struggles that seem to be separate from an explicit feminist politics, Creole women have brought greater attention to the particularly gendered ways in which processes of state violence, structural adjustment, and economic exclusion impact their communities. Their political participation is concentrated around several key areas: urban land conflicts; women’s work in the regional and national economy; and the struggle for racial justice and full citizenship in Nicaragua. Through their participation in these social movements, Afro-Nicaraguan women are gendering and reshaping local and national struggles for racial equality. I argue that this model of community and place-based activism suggests that scholars of Latin American and Caribbean women’s social movements might more fruitfully analyze these movements not by searching for the ideal feminist subject or narrowly defining the terms of feminist politics but rather by understanding how women’s engagement in the politics of place creates space for them to interrogate intersecting processes of racial, gender, and economic subordination. / text

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Nicaragua has undergone several major upheavals in the last three decades that have fundamentally shaped and reshaped society. The Sandinista government (1979-1990) ended with the election of Violeta Chamorro in 1990 that ushered in 16 years of neoliberal government. In 2006 former president and leader of the current Sandinista Party, Daniel Ortega, was reelected to the presidency. At every step, education has been an essential component of the struggle to shape the state according to certain ideological precepts. Each administration has produced its own educational reforms that are ostensibly in the name of improving quality, but more precisely about developing schools consistent with the philosophy of the ruling classes. In this study, I seek to examine the Nicaraguan educational system as a site of multiple global and local processes that interact to produce lived experiences for teachers and students in and out of the classroom. In examining the most recent iteration of educational reforms and their effects in the communities of San Marcos, Estelí and Bluefields, I ask the questions: What role or function does education play in society? How does it “work” to (in most cases) normalize certain values, ideas and beliefs? And what forms do resistance and acquiescence to these processes take in an educational system like that of Nicaragua that has numerous internal and external forces attempting to condition it in contrasting ways? Major themes that emerge from the research include the prominence of social, historical and geographical factors that people use to fashion their language and perceptions of the world and the dominant influence of local power relations in conditioning people’s behaviors and actions. Analysis of responses to the current educational reform efforts demonstrates that local social connections and networks are paramount to studies of ideology and hegemony. The overriding message from Nicaragua is that chronic underfunding and constant reform have weakened the ability of the educational system to disseminate ideas, beliefs and values, particularly when they run counter to those of other powerful institutions in society. / text