Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 2000. Graduate Programme in Sociology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 357-369). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ59144.

Zugl.: Erfurt, Univ., Diss., 2008

Zugl.: Duisburg, Essen, Univ., Diss., 2008 u.d.T.: Racherbäumer, Kathrin: Hochbegabte Schulanfängerinnen

To study the decision-making model behind how physicians making prescribing decisions, we studied the effects of the introduction of Medicare Part D in 2006 on numbers and characteristics of medications prescribed by physicians. We identified a significant increase in overall number of medications prescribed due to Medicare Part D but did not find any effects on the number of antibiotics. The result suggests there exist factors distinguishing antibiotics from other medications that led to a change in incentives to prescribe antibiotics, such as costs of antibiotics resistances. . We also identified the heterogeneity responses to Medicare Part D with respect to physician’s employment status, primary care relationship and patient’s gender and diagnostic categories.

In this archival study, I explore reasons why India's economic takeoff into marketization in 1991 failed to meet the same success as China in 1979 when it made the same transition. I analyze the impact of education and healthcare on development and how investments in both sectors can yield significant returns privately and socially. The research in this paper seeks to answer the following question: Why was the Indian economy unable to meet the same success as China when developing a global, open market economy? In order to answer this question, I begin by proving a solid relationship between education, healthcare, and development. Then, I set out to undercover education and healthcare reforms enacted by China that helped contribute to the overall success of the new economy. After, I look at the holes in the education and healthcare sectors of India that contributed to the weak transition into the new economy, as well as new mandates that seek to repair these issues so that the economy can grow and prosper at a more favorable pace. The results of this study reflect that India was unable to meet the success of China when transitioning to a global market economy because poor social preparedness prevented the Indian people from reaching their full potential. With poor education and a major lack of healthcare, the population could not contribute to the growth of the new economy because they either did not understand how to stimulate it, or were simply too sick.

In May 2008, at the High Court of Bangladesh, a ‘community’ that has been ‘stateless’ for over thirty five years were finally granted citizenship. Empirical research with this ‘community’ as it negotiates the lines drawn between legal status and statelessness captures an important historical moment. It represents a critical evaluation of the way ‘political space’ is contested at the local level and what this reveals about the nature and boundaries of citizenship. The thesis argues that in certain transition states the construction and contestation of citizenship is more complicated than often discussed. The ‘crafting’ of citizenship since the colonial period has left an indelible mark, and in the specificity of Bangladesh’s historical imagination, access to, and understandings of, citizenship are socially and spatially produced. While much has changed since Partition, particular discursive registers have lost little of their value. Today, religious discourses of ‘pollution’ and ‘purity’ fold into colonial and post-colonial narratives of ‘primitivity’ and ‘progress’ and the camp draws a line in contemporary nationalist space. Unpicking Agamben’s (1998; 2005) binary between ‘political beings’ and ‘bare life’, the thesis considers ‘the camp’ as a social form. The camps of Bangladesh do not function as bounded physical or conceptual spaces in which denationalized groups are altogether divorced from ‘the polity’. Instead ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen, 2008) occur at the level of everyday life, as the moments in which formal status is transgressed. Until now the space of citizenship has failed to recognise the ‘non-citizens’ who can, through complicated accommodations and creative alliances, occupy or negotiate that space. Using these insights, the thesis develops the concept of ‘political space’, an analysis of the way in which history has shaped spatial arrangements and political subjectivity. In doing so, it provides an analytic approach of relevance to wider problems of displacement, citizenship and ethnic relations.

The Canadian residential school system, which operated from the 1880s until the 1970s, was a church-state enterprise designed to assimilate Aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian culture and was characterized by poor sanitation and widespread abuse. Recently, it has been the object of the most significant and most successful struggle for redress in Canadian history. However, for most of its long history, the many failings of the residential school system went unacknowledged by the organizations formerly involved in its operation. In this thesis, I seek to explain why. In doing so, I provide a framework for further study on the residential schools and on comparable cases. To resolve my question, I conduct a comparative historical analysis of the Anglican Church of Canada, which was formerly an important partner in the operation of the residential schools. My data is drawn from a wide range of archival material. My analysis is framed by a meaningcentred approach to social behaviour referred to as the Strong Program. In sum, I argue that the initial meaning of the school system as a sacred enterprise hindered acknowledgement of its failings. For the church to acknowledge the failings of the residential schools, such a meaning needed to be replaced with a new meaning emphasizing the tragic consequences of the school system. This could only occur once the balance of social power had shifted away from the defenders of the sacred meaning and towards its detractors.

This research identifies and examines the circumstances and processes surrounding the migration and racialisation of doctors from the Indian subcontinent to Britain. Theoretically the research will critically evaluate several current debates within sociology and reconstructs a different set of criteria to that which has until recently governed investigations into racism. The research argues that the concept of 'race' is an ideological construction with no analytical role to play in the investigation of racism and discrimination. The real object of analysis is the development and reproduction of racism as an ideology within specific historical and material conjunctures determined by the uneven development of capitalism. Within this context a full explanation of the migration and racialisation of doctors from the Indian subcontinent requires not only an examination of the post-war era, but also an investigation of the origins of that migration and racialisation during the pre-1945 period when India was the subject of British rule. A great deal of contemporary research on migration and racism, has tended to concentrate on unskilled and semi-skilled migrant labour. This study will focus on the neglected area of the 'professions', through an investigation of doctors from the Indian subcontinent and their relationship with the British 'professional' occupation of medicine. Through the exegesis and critique of the 'sociology of professions', the research will demonstrate that doctors from the Indian subcontinent represent a racialised fraction of the new middle class. The main question surrounding the analysis of the relationship between Indian doctors and the British 'professional' occupation of medicine as 'gatekeepers' of the occupation, will focus on the relationship between professionalism and racism. The research will contend that the content of professionalism does not merely define certain occupations as 'professions', but more importantly, professionalism like racism is an ideology. Professionalism not only operates to justify and legitimate the supposed special status of medicine, but it also reinforces racist exclusionary practices in a 'sanitised' form within the occupation. This provides the research with the rare opportunity of analysing the nature and content of two ideologies operating within the same arena: the relationship between racism and professionalism. This will illustrate that the racism which black migrant 'professional' labour is subject to, does not only operate in a functional way for capitalism in providing labour for the less desirable specialisms of medicine, but also operates through the mediation of the occupation of medicine to help reproduce the 'professional status' of the occupation.

This multimedia dissertation, situated in Rhetoric and Composition, Digital Media Studies, and Civic Engagement, articulates a sustainable, agile approach to “wicked problems.” These complex, definition-resistant, interlocking problems (such as racism or climate change) aren’t ultimately solvable; rather than wicked problems being “acted upon,” they can only be creatively and rigorously “responded to” by networks of committed individuals and institutions. This dissertation posits that a wicked problem necessitates a “wicked response”: a sustained, emergent, and fluid strategy that focuses on changing relationships – to people, to space, and to knowledge. In order, to make this argument, I present the case of Mart, a small, formerly prosperous town in East Texas that has been in decline over the last half of a century. Throughout this dissertation, I analyze the ongoing efforts of the Mart Community Project (MCP), a cohort of Mart residents, international artists, and students and instructors from a variety of departments at the University of Texas at Austin. Over the past two years, the MCP has engaged in over twenty-five discrete projects, all with the aim of helping the Mart Community reimagine itself in the face of its primary wicked problem: a lack of civic cohesion. In the first chapter I explore how language fails to define or describe a wicked problem, yet is still necessary in order to transform it. I illustrate this contradiction in part through the Chambless Field mural, a successful MCP community arts project that by “writing community” became a productive response. My second chapter examines service learning and demonstrates how university/community partnerships and “participatory engagement” can be part of a nuanced approach to a wicked problem. Using the work of UT students in design-oriented and civic engagement classes, I demonstrate in the third chapter how “mapping” can be both a savvy pedagogical tool and a key element in reinventing the relationships of people to space and to one another. This dissertation offers up these diverse strategies with the sincere hope that the particulars of the MCP’s wicked response might be productively generalized to aid others participating in similarly challenging civic engagement work on wicked problems.

In Salvador da Bahia's high crime/violence peripheral neighbourhoods, black youth are perceived as criminals levying high social costs as they attempt to acquire employment, enter university, or political processes. Low-income youth must overcome the reality of violence while simultaneously confronting the support, privileged urban classes have for stricter law enforcement and the clandestine acts of death squads. As youth from these neighbourhoods begin to develop more complex identities some search for alternative peer groups, social networks and social programmes that will guide them to constructive life choices while others consign themselves to options that are more readily available in their communities. Fast money and the ability to participate in the global economy beyond ‘passive’ engagement draws some youth into crime yet the majority choose other paths. Yet, the majority use their own identities to build constructive and positive lives and avoid involvement with gangs and other violent social groups. Drawing from Brazil's racial debates started by Gilberto Freyre, findings from this research suggest that while identity construction around race is ambiguous, specific markers highlight one's identity making it difficult to escape negative associations with criminality and violence. The discourse surrounding social capital suggests that such individuals can rely on it to overcome these problems. However social capital is used more often as a tool to spatially and socially segregate and consolidate power and opportunity among the powerful and well-connected. That race does not contribute significantly to the debate misses key elements in how social relationships develop and are maintained. This research was conducted over the period of ten months in a peripheral neighbourhood in Salvador through a community social development programme. The study used a mixed qualitative methodology that was part ethnographic examining social networks and protective factors that assist young people at risk from becoming involved in crime or violence.