This thesis investigates the activities of two secondary schools in relation to their duty to promote community cohesion (intercultural understanding and cohesion within communities) and their engagement in global educational partnerships and international activities. In particular this study seeks to ascertain if there is a relationship between community cohesion and global educational partnerships –whether the activities and outcomes from one could inform the other in relation to intercultural understanding. There is little research on the relationship between these two initiatives. The research explores the understanding and experiences of staff involved in these initiatives in the two schools and that of pupils in Key Stages 3, 4 and 5 (11-18 years). Data is generated through semi-structured interviews and document analysis, providing a rich description of participants’ understanding and whole-school activities. What has emerged from the findings is a complex and subtle picture of two schools and their interpretations of their duty to promote community cohesion, engage in international activities, and the relationship between the two. Effective practice is identified such as developing inclusive perspectives through pupil peer-led teaching. However, barriers to effective practice have also been identified and include how cultural diversity is understood and presented through binary perceptions of ‘Other’. Such perspectives, alongside complex paternal power relations evident in educational partnerships with schools in the global South, are identified as problematic in the promotion of intercultural understanding and cohesion. The dominant political discourse, guidance for schools and the role of the schools’ inspection framework (Ofsted) are also influencing factors. Postcolonial Theory is used to interrogate policy and practice and presents alternative perspectives, and these, it is contended, can offer new ways forward in creating a ‘third’ space for intercultural understanding through global educational partnerships and community cohesion.

This project utilized a form of arts based educational research described as analog hypertext to develop interpretative material representing multiple critical, theoretical, and disciplinary perspectives on objects in a university art museum’s object study gallery. Drawing on scholars’ recommendations for postcolonial interpretation of non-Western art, the project created a web of information, which simultaneously revealed and critiqued the underlying ideologies and power structures shaping the museum’s display in an effort to change existing interpretive practice. The project developed five color-coded thematic self-guided tours—art as commodity, spiritual practice, technology and cultural evolutionism, mortuary rituals, and postcolonial perspectives—presented to the public as an interpretive exhibition invited visitors’ contributions. This paper explores how the analog hypertext functions as both a research tool and a content delivery device for the representation of multiple critical perspectives, fostering interdisciplinary perspectives and visitor meaning-making in the process.

<p>The Subaltern Clinic explores a certain legacy of unreason that Sigmund Freud identified throughout the course of his writings as the "death drive," or the compulsion to repeat. In Freud's work, the death drive is often thought as the opposite of the pleasure principle, which situates the pleasure-unpleasure binary at the center of psychoanalytical thinking and Freud's conceptualization of the psyche as well as morality, ethics, and civilization. The Subaltern Clinic traces a legacy of the death drive and a series of thematic concerns that emerge from it, specifically the instability of the pleasure-unpleasure binary that ostensibly upholds the "principle of reason," through a colonial-postcolonial archive. In doing so, the dissertation attends to those subaltern figures who are constituted as the "unreason" of society, particularly the mentally ill, women, and homosexuals. </p><p>In particular, the dissertation looks to the intersection of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, specifically to Jacques Derrida's engagements with Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," to argue that deconstruction needs to be thought of as a marginal and politicized form of psychoanalytic thinking, the stakes of which emerge through Derrida's readings of Freud's death drive. The dissertation follows the thread of these readings to consider the problems of difference, violence, sadism and masochism, and anxiety in the work of colonial and postcolonial practitioners of psychoanalysis as well as postcolonial artists and novelists. The Subaltern Clinic makes the argument that an attention to the legacy of the death drive in the postcolonial archive allows for a more robust critique of postcolonial reason, which would attend to questions of ethics and aesthetics.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation examines how certain epidemic outbreaks become "global threats", that is, diseases that become the focus of international regulations and organized responses while others do not. To answer this question, this dissertation draws upon archival data collected at the World Health Organization (WHO) archives in Geneva, the Western Cape Archives in Cape Town, the British Library, British National Archives, the Wellcome Library Archives in London, and twelve qualitative interviews with senior global health actors in order to analyze five cases when disease threats were prioritized internationally as well as how these constructions patterned responses to outbreaks. I begin by exploring the formation of the first international disease controls in the 19th century, the International Sanitary Conventions, created to prevent the spread of three diseases- plague, cholera and yellow fever. I probe how these earliest conventions patterned responses to diseases covered under them and limited responses to those beyond their scope. Examining how these conventions transformed, I explore why the same disease priorities were maintained by the WHO in their International Sanitary Regulations of the 1950's. Finally, I analyze the transformation of the International Health Regulations in 2005 and its effects on the assessment of disease threat. This dissertation shows that three factors structure the construction of disease threat: epidemic orientalism, economic concerns and field dynamics. Epidemic Orientalism, a discourse motivating the construction of disease threat that first emerged in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, positioned the colonized world as the space from which Europe and the Imperial powers needed to be protected. This orientalist gaze prioritizes the control of diseases emanating from colonial sites that threaten international trade and commerce and has been re-inscribed in all past and present regulations. These factors explain how and why plague, cholera and yellow fever came to be maintained as the primary diseases of international concern until the 21st century. As the WHO has recently been challenged in its authority to manage disease threats, these two factors are also mediated by the WHO's manipulation of symbolic power within a new field of infectious disease management which conditions responses to outbreaks today.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD (Women and Gender Studies) / Events in the last few years on the global stage have heralded a new era for domestic workers, which may afford them the voice as subaltern that has been silent until now. Despite being constructed as silent and as subjects without agency, unionised domestic workers organised themselves globally, becoming more visible and making their voices heard. This culminated in the promulgation of the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) Convention No.189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers (or C189) in September 2013, and the establishment of the International Domestic Workers' Federation (IDWF) in October 2013. This broadening of the scope of domestic workers' activism has not yet received sufficient attention in academic research. These two historic events on their own have the potential to change the dominant discourse around domestic workers, by mobilising workers with agency to challenge the meaning of the political ideologies informing their identity positions of exploitation and subjugation.

Urban First Nations and Inuit older adults are aging in a Western-centric sociopolitical environment that is experiencing significant social change due to population aging and urbanization. Consequently, urban communities are facing increasing pressures to respond to the needs of the growing older adult population. As a result of these pressures, older adults are urged to “age well” to reduce their “burden” on society; however, older adults do not all define aging well in the same way and they do not all have the same opportunities to age well. Through my research, I aimed to address a gap in the academic literature concerning urban-dwelling First Nations and Inuit older adults and aging well. Ultimately, my goal was to identify how First Nations and Inuit older adults living in Ottawa could be supported to age well in ways that reflect their urban Indigenous identities, cultural perspectives, and life course. My specific research questions are four-fold: 1) Are Indigenous older adults marginalized through dominant aging well frameworks?; 2) how do community-dwelling First Nations and Inuit older adults (aged 55 years and over) living in Ottawa, Canada, define and negotiate aging well in an urban environment?; 3) what community-level factors contribute to First Nations and Inuit older adults (aged 55 years and over) feeling supported to age well in the city of Ottawa?; and 4) how do community stakeholders in Ottawa produce understandings of supporting urban Indigenous older adults to age well? Informed by a postcolonial theoretical framework, I conducted this research using a community-based participatory research (CBPR) methodology in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, in partnerships with the Odawa Native Friendship Centre and Tungasuvvingat Inuit. To address my research questions, I conducted semi-structured interviews with nine First Nations older adults, focus groups with 23 Inuit older adults, and photovoice with two First Nations older adults. Additionally, I conducted 13 semi-structured interviews with community stakeholders (i.e., decision-makers and service providers. My doctoral research makes novel contributions to the fields of kinesiology and gerontology by expanding postcolonial theory to issues related to aging research with urban Indigenous older adults; contributing to the emerging literature that brings diverse perspectives into conversations on aging well; challenging assumptions related to urban Indigenous populations and aging well; illustrating the tensions within aging well initiatives that intended to be available for all older adults; and revealing the tensions within efforts to address reconciliation with Indigenous older adults.

While development cooperation largely consists of policy advice, the suggestions and inputs on development that policymakers in the Global South receive from donors and other international actors, little research exists on what makes policy advice useful to these policymakers. The aim of this study was to find out why policymakers in the Global South find some advice useful and some not. This was done through a field study in Kenya, using interviews with 23 policymakers and advisors. The analytical framework that was applied to the material reconciled the SCL model of analysing policy advice in terms of its content, with a critical postcolonial perspective which regarded the delivery of advice. The study showed that  the usefulness of policy advice for Kenyan policymakers is as dependent on the delivery of the advice as it is on its content, unlike what has been implied previously by Western research on think tanks. The study also concluded that not only is it possible to merge the two theoretical perspectives of policy advice and postcolonial theory, despite the difference in abstraction levels, applying a postcolonial perspective can be crucial in order to examine the full scope of what makes policy advice useful to policymakers in the Global South.

21st-century Neo-anticolonial Literature and the Struggle for a New Global Order explores the twenty-first-century fiction of five writers and investigates the ways in which their works engage the legacy and evolution of empire, and, in particular, the expansion of global capitalism to the detriment of already-subjugated communities. Taking up a recent call by Postcolonial scholars seeking to address the contemporary challenges of the postcolonial condition, this project traces out three distinct forms of engagement that function as a resistance in the texts. The dissertation introduces these concepts via a mode of analysis I have called Neo-anticolonialism, a counter-hegemonic approach which, I argue, is unique to the twenty-first century but rooted in the anticolonial work of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. Building on a foundation laid by those activist scholars, this project argues that Neo-anticolonialism necessitates the bridging of discourse and activism; thus, the dissertation delineates the utility of Neo-anticolonialism in both literary scholarship and practical application. Through a close analysis of the fiction of the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jamaican Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, a South Asian writer, African American writer Edward P. Jones, and Black British writer Caryl Phillips, the project offers a Neo-anticolonial reading of several twenty-first-century texts. In doing so, I explain the depiction of these instances of resistance as Neo-anticolonial Refractions, literary devices which function as prisms that cast images thus exposing the perpetuation of inequality in the twenty-first century and its direct link to the past epoch. Moreover, each chapter, through an explication of the refractions, reveals how resistance occurs in the face of the brutal reality of oppression and how this cadre of writers engages with the history of empire as well as with its contemporary permutations.

My dissertation combines a critical history of the Indian diaspora’s political and intellectual impact on the development of African nationalism in South Africa with an analysis of African/Indian racial dynamics in Natal. Beginning in the 1940s, tumultuous debates among black intellectuals over the place of the Indian diaspora in Africa played a central role in the emergence of new and antagonistic conceptualizations of a South African nation. The writings of Indian political figures (particularly Gandhi and Nehru) and the Indian independence struggle had enormous influence on a generation of African nationalists, but this impact was mediated in complex ways by the race and class dynamics of Natal. During the 1930s and 40s, rapid and large-scale urbanization generated a series of racially-mixed shantytowns surrounding Durban in which a largely Gujarati and Hindi merchant and landlord class provided the ersatz urban infrastructure utilized by both Tamil-speaking workers and Zulu migrants. In Indian-owned buses, stores, and movie theatres, a racial hierarchy of Indian over African developed based on the social grammars of property, relationship with land, family structure, and different gender roles. In such circumstances, practices integral to maintaining diasporic identities—such as religious festivals, marriage, caste (jati), language, and even dress and food—became signifiers of ranked status and perceived exclusion. Despite the destruction of this urban landscape by forced removals beginning in the late 1950s, these social relationships powerfully shaped African and Indian identities in Natal, the popular memory of different communities, and the later politics of the anti-apartheid struggle. Although a few recent publications have attempted to break down the bifurcation that characterizes Natal’s historiography, the majority of academic writing on the province employs a race-based framework that focuses on either Indians or Zulu-speaking Africans. As a result, Natal’s African/Indian racial dynamic plays, at most, a secondary role in most scholarship on the region. In turn, Natal itself generally appears in histories of the anti-apartheid struggle as either an exception or a momentary interruption to a “national” narrative overwhelmingly centered on events, organizations, and individuals in the Transvaal. Rejecting a “race relations” approach that hypostatizes coherent racial groups, my dissertation examines how segregationist policies, African and Indian political organizations, and everyday social practices continuously reproduced an “African/Indian divide” despite both the enormous heterogeneity of each group and the quotidian intimacies of urban life. At the same time, it explores the ways in which this division shaped the development of the anti-apartheid struggle in Natal and the consequences of Natal’s politics for South Africa as a whole.

Jane Austens <i>Mansfield Park</i> has earned a reputation as a difficult text for its politically-charged negotiations of ethics and unsatisfactory heroine. Since Edward Said presented the novel as an example of British literature that contributed to an expanding imperialist venture (95), scholarly attention has shifted to focus on the extent to which the novel critically engages with macrocosmic power structures and hegemonic discourse. That is, how does Mansfield Parks description of power dynamics at home reflect slave-related issues in the foreign atmosphere? Austens interest in and familial connections to slave-related issues, contemporary cultural awareness of abolitionist sentiment, and textual allusions to the slave trade all contribute to the novels counterpoint between domestic and foreign spaces: the Bertram family is economically dependent on a slave plantation in Antigua. A microcosm of plantation life, Mansfield Park represents the dilemmas of marginalized women who are presented with choices to rebel against or submit to patriarchal authority. In order to preserve her own physical, emotional, and psychological safety, Fanny Price bids for patriarchal favour. While others are punished severely for their rebellion, Fanny is rewarded for her submissive choices and enjoys an elevated social status. However, she inspires no reformation and remains an unsatisfactory heroine. Like the grateful Negro of contemporary plantation tales, Fanny functions to stabilize the status quo through her gratitude and loyalty, reinforcing societys tightly-controlled boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Mansfield Parks revelatory strength is that it exposes the mechanisms by which power is produced and maintained in domestic and imperial spaces.