Bibliography: leaves 52-54. / This thesis critically reviews thoughts and experiences that arose out of a nine-week internship and post-internship volunteer work at Street Universe, a local Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) working with 'street children' living in Cape Town's city centre and surrounds. It touches on two main topics, 'street children' and the NGO. Although I did not work exclusively with the 'street children', I interacted with them on a daily basis and therefore part of this thesis touches on issues pertaining to their lives. My main focus is the inner workings of an NGO and the context within which it strives to achieve its goals. I explore methodological and ethical aspects of doing fieldwork in an NGO setting, which coalesce with the problem of positionality, of situating myself as a researcher within webs of fluid interpersonal and professional relationships. Grounding my research in the day-to-day work of Street Universe allows me to identify how internal organisational matters affect the presentation and implementation of the organisation's aims. My aim is to link the two topics by showing how organisational matters are ,enacted in the relationship between 'street children' and Street Universe as a whole.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-79). / By bringing together survivors of the genocide with released prisoners to discuss trauma, healing, and trust, Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities (HROC) in Rwanda may help people to broaden their networks of support and rebuild everyday life. ... After 1994, Rwandans, particularly in Gisenyi, found that many neighbours were strangers and members of "the other side". Few Rwandans are able to meet their daily needs without accessing relationships of reciprocity, so how are such relation- ships established after genocide? In this thesis I argue that restoring relationships of reciprocity is critical to the restoration of the everyday in Rwanda. The genocide in 1994 was unarguably a traumatic experience for the population in Rwanda, and it damaged common modes of social interaction. But for those I spoke to, forgiveness was important to the process of healing...

Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-73). / In the context of rapid urbanisation and growing numbers of informal settlements in peri-urban areas of Cape Town, South Africa, a development project was undertaken by the municipality, to provide Kosovo Informal Settlement with a new communal water and sanitation system that uses vacuum sewerage technology. This ethnographic study sought to establish the level of social acceptability of the new infrastructure postupgrade; to monitor how residents used the new and old water and sanitation systems; and to identify any other social or institutional barriers to providing water and sanitation services in similar contexts. It was found that the development project was a complete failure. This dissertation describes the ways in which the municipality engaged with residents and other stakeholders and shows how they contributed to the project's failure.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-83). / In the context of rising unemployment, an NGO called Men on the Side of the Road (MSR) was established to provide men who stand by the side of the road waiting to be offered jobs with job opportunities and skills. The purpose of the ethnographic study described here was to assess members‘ experiences and attitudes towards the work or income-earning opportunities introduced to members by MSR. The overall goal of the report was to assess why a large proportion of the work opportunities introduced to members were not taken up with great enthusiasm. After completion of the study, the researcher found that the day-labourers used three different labels ('locals', 'networking workers' and 'struggling foreigners') to describe themselves and other roadside workseekers.

Thesis--Lehigh University. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-129).

Thesis--Lehigh University. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-129).

In this thesis, I explore a number of epistemological issues concerning the relations between knowledge, belief and practical matters. In particular, I defend a view, which I call credal pragmatism. This view is compatible with moderate invariantism, a view that takes knowledge to depend exclusively on truth-relevant factors and to require an invariant epistemic standard of knowledge that can be quite easily met. The thesis includes a negative and a positive part. In the negative part (Ch. 1-4) I do two things: i) I critically examine some moderate invariantist accounts of the intuitive influence of practical factors on knowledge ascriptions, and ii) I provide a criticism of the idea that knowledge is the norm of practical reasoning. In Chapter 1, I provide a general overview of the issues that constitute the background for the views and arguments defended in my thesis. In particular, I provide a thorough discussion of two aspects of the relation between knowledge and practical matters: one is constituted by the practical factors' effects on knowledge ascriptions; the other is the intuitive normative role of knowledge in the regulation and assessments of action and practical reasoning. In Chapter 2, I consider and criticize Timothy Williamson's account according to which an alleged failure to acknowledge the distinction between knowing and knowing that one knows generates the intuition that knowledge ascriptions are sensitive to practical factors. In Chapter 3, I argue against the idea that practical reasoning is governed by a knowledge norm. The argument generalizes to other candidate epistemic norms of practical reasoning. In Chapter 4, I criticise a number of accounts which explain effects of practical factors on knowledge ascriptions in terms of the influence of practical factors on belief. These include the accounts of Brain Weatherson, Dorit Ganson, Kent Bach and Jennifer Nagel. In the positive part of the thesis (Ch. 5-6), I develop and argue for credal pragmatism, an original account of the nature and interaction of different doxastic attitudes and the role of practical factors in their rational regulation. On this view, given a certain fixed amount of evidence, the degree of credence of an adaptively rational agent varies in different circumstances depending on practical factors, while the threshold on the degree of credence necessary for outright belief remains fixed across contexts. This account distinguishes between two kinds of outright belief: occurrent belief, which depends on the actual degree of credence, and dispositional belief, which depends on the degree of credence in normal circumstances. In Chapter 5, I present the view and I show how credal pragmatism can explain the practical factors' effects on knowledge ascriptions. In Chapter 6, I develop a fallibilist account of several features about knowledge ascriptions including i) why in folk epistemological practices knowledge is often taken to be a necessary and sufficient epistemic condition for relying on a proposition in practical reasoning; ii) concessive knowledge attributions and related data; and iii) the infallibilist intuition that knowledge excludes error possibilities.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1918. / Typewritten. "Abstract": 9 leaves at end. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This thesis adds a new contribution to the tradition of empirical theology, concerned with individual differences in young people’s attitudes toward religion and values. This thesis explores the correlates of attitude toward Christianity (assessed by the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity) among 5,199 13- to 15-year-old students in England and Wales who participated in the Young People’s Values Survey during 2002 to 2010.The Young People’s Values Survey was designed to draw together two independent strands of research within the tradition of empirical theology, the first concerned with charting the correlates of individual differences in attitude toward religion (operationalised originally by the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity), and the second concerned with individual differences in young people’s religion and values (operationalised originally by the Teenage Religion and Values Survey). This thesis reports on findings generated from the Young People’s Values Survey, the first study within the Teenage Religion and Values Survey series to include the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity. This thesis comprises main two parts. Part one locates this study within the tradition of empirical theology by collating, reviewing and assessing the two bodies of knowledge (or strands of research) on which it builds. Part two presents new empirical analyses exploring the correlates of young people’s attitudes toward Christianity during the first decade of the twenty-first century. These analyses explore first, the psychometric properties of the short-form Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity and second, the relationship between attitude toward Christianity and: sex differences, purpose in life, suicidal ideation, immortality beliefs (belief in life after death), and implicit religion (attachment to Christian rites of passage). This thesis concludes by discussing how the findings of this study may shape future empirical research within the tradition of empirical theology concerned with assessing young people’s attitudes toward religion and values.

The fundamental premise of this work is that the meaning of a Biblical text is the history of its meaning. The interpreter must take note of the experience in which a text originated, and the settings in which it has been encountered. This essay surveys the ‘history of effects’ (Wirkungsgeschichte) of the Lord’s Prayer from the time of Jesus Christ until the beginning of the third century. In the beginning chapters, significant attention is devoted to the context of prayer in first-century Palestine and the continuity between the Lord’s Prayer and Jewish tradition. Subsequent chapters survey the presentation of the Lord’s Prayer in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the Didache, and Tertullian’s De oratione. Each stage of interpretation is evaluated in the light of its continuity and discontinuity with its anterior history of reception. This work concludes with an evaluation of how the notions of diachronic creativity and synchronic continuity illuminate the progressive interpretations of the Lord’s Prayer during the period under consideration.