Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1989. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 227-245) / Microfiche. / xvi, 245 leaves, bound 29 cm

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Thesis (MPhil (Journalism))--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / The leading South African media groups are subject to many challenges to their political economic interests as part of the international capitalist profit economy. These challenges coincided with the democratization and transformation of South Africa since 1994, which heralded many changes to the national political economic context within which media companies operate.

The concept of human rights holds a distinctive significance in political practice, yet philosophers remain divided over the nature of these rights. The Orthodox View defines human rights as moral rights possessed by all individuals simply in virtue of their humanity. Proponents of this view claim that the contemporary idea of human rights is a continuation of the natural rights project of the eighteenth century and shares many of its basic philosophical assumptions. This thesis argues that the Orthodox View is no longer an appropriate characterisation of the concept of human rights we find in current domestic and international practice. It also rejects recent alternatives offered by supporters of the Political View, who define human rights by particular functions they serve, specifically their role(s) in acting as benchmarks for the legitimacy of states or triggers of international concern. I propose instead a new 'Political Justification View' of human rights, which states that human rights are demands which challenge unjustifiable political-institutional orders, which are the concern of all people, and which protect the equal standing of individuals in political decisions that affect the collective or individual good. This view better captures the diversity of practices that employ the term 'human rights', whilst also explaining its innovative power as a moral language that enables individuals to challenge the official institutional order under whose authority they live. Finally, I argue that within this broader view of human rights there are two distinct moral concepts which pertain to different parts of human rights practice: Domestic Human Rights and International Legitimacy Rights. Separating these two concepts is helpful in resolving long-standing debates about whether human rights are properly thought of as minimalist moral concerns of legitimacy or broader social goals to be achieved through political institutions.

Thesis (MEd (Education))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2016. / Language is foundational to issues of belonging in contemporary South Africa. The country’s colonial and apartheid history facilitated the differential development and privileging of particular languages alongside the project of racial capitalism (Alexander, 1989). Educational arrangements were affected by these developments because of how black South Africans were economically and socially limited by rudimentary exposure to the primary languages of access (English and Afrikaans). This study argues that this history is what currently influences the movement of black South Africans into the schools they were historically excluded from in former coloured, Indian and white areas, and further that this movement is also encouraged by the promise of greater access to and development in the English language (Fataar, 2015). It suggests that the persisting status of English as lingua franca across state, educational and cultural communications and products requires teaching that is sensitive to the historical relationship of the language to the underdevelopment and undervaluation of local linguistic forms. Moreover, the subject English and its embedded values and norms (included in the compulsory texts and textbook) is a critical area of enquiry for thinking through issues of social cohesion and belonging. Through case studies of three Cape Town teachers, this study argues that a range of influences affect how language and meaning are constructed in English classrooms, and that learners experience these influences to their own identities in different and often conflicting ways.

Political organisations are now using a two-way path of communication thanks to the development of technological platforms that work in-sync with the internet to allow this to happen. Information can now flow across new networks to allow exchanges from the many to the many. This study sets out to explore the use of social media by political organisations as a means of political communication. A case study was conducted which focussed on online communication used by the Democratic Alliance in the 2014 General Elections in South Africa. The social media strategies adopted by the Democratic Alliance was examined. Reference is made to the 2008 Obama Campaign. The study revealed that the DA primarily made use of two-way asymmetrical communication despite the party posting a lot of consistent information and content; however in response to many questions and comments posted on the social media fora by online users, the DA only selectively responded to a handful of these.

This study tests a theory detailing the increased likelihood of conflict following an initial resource discovery in the discovering nation and its region. A survey of prior literature shows a multitude of prior research concerning resources and nations' willingness to initiate conflict over those resources, but this prior research lacks any study concerning the effects of the discovery of resources on interstate conflict. The theory discusses the increased likelihood of conflict in the discovering nation as both target and initiator. It further looks at the increased chance of conflict in the discoverer's region due to security dilemmas and proxy wars. The results show strong support for the theory, suggesting nations making new resource discoveries must take extra care to avoid conflict.

In this thesis, I analyze some of the most important contributions concerning the inclusion of animals in the moral and political sphere. Moving from these positions, I suggest that a meaningful consideration of animals' sentience demands a profound, radical political theory which considers animals as moral patients endowed with specific capabilities whose actualization needs to be allowed and/or promoted. Such theory would take human-animal different types of relationships into account to decide what kind of ethical and political responsibilities humans have towards animals. It would be also based on the assumption that animals' sentience is the necessary and sufficient feature for assigning moral status. I start from the consideration that in the history of political philosophy, most theorists have excluded animals from the realm of justice. I then propose an examination of utilitarianism, capabilities approach, and relational-based theories of animal rights (in particular the works by Kymlicka and Donaldson, and Clare Palmer) and borrow essential elements from each of these approaches to build my theory. I claim that a political theory which attaches high importance to individual capabilities, as well as to the various types of relationships we have with animals, is the most appropriate to tackle the puzzle of human responsibilities to animals.

This dissertation explores architectural building types as critical components of, and unique points of interface with, three infrastructural systems, built or re-built in New York City in the decades after World War II. While contemporary infrastructure is enmeshed in regional and global networks far beyond the administrative bounds of the five boroughs, an architectural focus reveals these systems as inescapably local, tied to political struggles surrounding the siting, design, and construction of buildings; to socio-technical imperatives of density; to material consequences like traffic and air pollution; and to aesthetic effects like beauty, monotony, and monumentality. Three case studies—in food distribution, telephone service, and sewage treatment—explore different spatial techniques involved in the management of commodities, information, and waste. Reading each through the social history of technology, as well as the disciplinary tools of architectural history, brings to light unique aspects of architecture’s participation in the political, social, and technological landscapes of the contemporary city. This dissertation looks closely at the prewar roots and postwar creation of New York’s present-day systems: the adoption of the infrastructural buildings we see today, and the rejection of alternatives in design, values, and policies. It argues that the city’s vital systems, and their architectural manifestations, were largely designed according to the needs of various elite groups, in ways that supported the long-term deindustrialization and stratification of urban existence, though not according to a consistent or coherent plan. Well-studied postwar phenomena such as decentralization, automation, demographic change, and “urban crisis” take on different casts as familiar characters like politicians, property owners and architects are joined by monopoly corporations, technicians, and neighborhood organizers. Granular study of the processes that led to the adoption of particular plans, and the rejection of alternatives, reveals the city’s visual and functional landscape as one shaped by a wide—though far from democratic—range of actors. Today, these same infrastructures, physically durable even as their social use has been redirected or transformed, continue to participate in an ostensibly postindustrial and rapidly gentrifying city. By reexamining the narratives of these systems’ design and construction, the study of infrastructural architecture illuminates this inequitable history, while revealing moments of resistance and supporting calls for the further democratization of urban life by those whose needs have been discounted.

Climate change is an issue rife with economic risk. The physical impacts of global warming, allowed to intensify by halting international climate cooperation, threaten climate-vulnerable industries and communities. Global transitions away from fossil fuels endanger carbon-intensive economic assets. Whereas climate change is often framed as an issue of global collective action and public goods provision, I instead conceptualize it as one of economic risk and decline. How do workers, voters, and governments perceive and manage mounting "climate risks"? How do they cope with losses stemming from realizations of such risks? I interrogate these questions in reference to the political and economic divisions that exist within and across many of the world's most fossil fuel-intensive and ecologically vulnerable countries. The first two papers of the dissertation consider how ethnoracial divisions within states shape perceptions of climate risks and responses to their realization. In the first, I argue that the ascriptive makeup of an industry serves as a heuristic for evaluating its access to state subsidies and ability to weather climate change and decarbonization. Survey experiments on representative U.S. samples indicate that minority Americans see greater downside risk in industries that hire large numbers of Black workers, expecting those industries to be denied government support as climate risks manifest. Conversely, minorities see less risk in industries that mainly employ white workers, believing those industries to have more benefactors in government. In the second paper, I study how migrants, who have long featured prominently in fossil fuel workforces, politically assimilate amid industrial booms and busts. Whereas scholars often contend that industrial decay aggravates ethnocultural animosities and compounds existing group loyalties, I argue that the starkest intergroup divides can emerge in periods of growth, not decline. When an industry is growing, economic optimism and resources flow across ethnic groups concentrated in that industry, bolstering migrants’ confidence in the ability of coethnics to safeguard their welfare and suppressing investments in political assimilation. Gains from concentration in the industry dissipate amid decline, leading migrants to forge ties with outside groups promising access to political rents previously out of reach. I find support for this theory in the case of the early twentieth century U.S. coal industry. The third paper of the dissertation, coauthored with Richard Clark, explores why some international organizations have retrofit themselves to address climate change despite the intransigence of powerful member states on the issue. We link these pro-climate turns to bureaucrats' socialization in climate-vulnerable countries. As bureaucrats rotate between countries and are promoted, climate concerns then diffuse outwards and upwards, gradually sharpening the climate focus of the institution despite the skepticism of powerful principal states. We find support for this argument in the case of the International Monetary Fund, drawing on original data on bureaucrat career paths and Fund attention to climate change.