本文環繞香港都市的一個邊緣社區，探討深水埗居民的生活。從當地人的角度，研究後工業社會的弱勢居民，怎樣體驗，應對及理解他們的生活情況。透過了解居民的日常生活，本論文旨在探究在社會結構與文化進程的互動下，如何令深水埗成為香港中心的邊緣社區。研究顯示在香港不斷轉變的政治經濟環境下，深水埗的地區性發展、低成本經濟、居民的組合，以及居民的心態和行為，都是構成邊緣社區的重要因素。 / This is an ethnographic study of a marginal neighbourhood of Hong Kong, Sham Shui Po. It focuses on the everyday lives of Hong Kong's urban poor in Sham Shui Po. By taking an insider's point of view, this study examines how underprivileged residents experience, manage and think about their lives in post-industrial urban Hong Kong. This study seeks to understand the social structures and cultural processes that contribute to Sham Shui Po's marginality in the centre of Hong Kong by exploring the lives and livelihoods of underprivileged residents. I show how Sham Shui Po's regional development, low-cost economy, residential composition, as well as the mindset and behaviour of its residents all contribute to making of a marginal neighbourhood in the context of post-industrial Hong Kong. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Christopher Cheng. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 139-155). / Abstracts also in Chinese. / Chapter CHAPTER 1 --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Sham Shui Po as a marginal neighbourhood in Hong Kong / Poverty / Marginalisation / Reproduction of poverty / Neighbourhood / Methodology / Fieldwork / Limitations and ethical concerns / Thesis organisation / Chapter CHAPTER 2 --- THE SETTING --- p.22 / Central position yet marginal character / Living in a tong⁴ lau⁴ / Geographies of centrality and marginality / Sham Shui Po and the modernisation of Hong Kong / Neighbourhood characteristics / Chapter 1 --- The tong⁴ lau⁴ streets / Chapter 2 --- Street markets and the leftover effects of yesteryears / Chapter 3 --- Low-cost economy and residents / Chapter 4 --- Community service agencies / Sham Shui Po as a unique setting / Chapter CHAPTER 3 --- SIX POOR FAMILIES --- p.46 / Introducing six Sham Shui Po families / Case 1 Uncle Leung--An earlier generation Chinese migrant / Case 2 Ms. Tang Yuk-yip--A Mainland welfare mother / Case 3 Uncle Mok--An elderly Hong Kong man / Case 4 Uncle Kwok--A remarried Hong Kong father / Case 5 Patrick Lau--A low-income Hong Kong father / Case 6 Makala Sariwa--A Filipina single parent seeking asylum / Variations in social marginalisation / Hidden in society: Unfulfilled promises, shame and social debt / Chapter CHAPTER 4 --- SURVIVAL STRATEGIES --- p.72 / Survival strategies / Strategy 1: Low-cost lifestyle / Strategy 2: Initiatives of a marginal neighbourhood / Strategy 3: Sharing and mutual exchange networks / Strategy 4: Institutional services / The relationship between the different strategies / Surviving in Sham Shui Po / Chapter CHAPTER 5 --- POVERTY AS LIVED EXPERIENCE --- p.101 / Becoming poor / Fate and situational determinants of poverty / Being poor / Celebrations / “Being poor may do you some good!“ / Shame, guilt and loss of face / “We aren’t that poor!“ / Aspiring to overcome poverty / Valuing educating / Moving on / Explaining and challenging the notions of inequality / Chapter CHAPTER 6 --- CONCLUSION: A MARGINAL NEIGHBOURHOOD --- p.123 / Chapter 1 --- Historical development / Chapter 2 --- Low-cost economy / Chapter 3 --- The people of Sham Shui Po and the making of a “mixed place“ / Chapter 4 --- Marginal lives, marginal livelihoods / Chapter APPENDIX 1 --- REFLECTIONS ON FIELDWORK --- p.130 / Chapter APPENDIX 2 --- SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MY INFORMANTS --- p.132 / Chapter APPENDIX 3 --- SUPPORT SERVICES & ORGANISATIONS --- p.134 / BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.149

Missionary zeal in Washington, D.C. was at its height during the two decades following the opening of the Civil War. Religious organizations and their affiliates descended upon the city as its black population swelled from 10,983 in 1860 to 48,377 in 1880 - one of the largest urban black populations in the United States. Ten years after the first missionaries of the American Missionary Association (AMA) began evangelizing in the District of Columbia, AMA teachers initiated the instruction of contraband, freedmen, and free blacks in the fundamentals of education. The mission was to retool and prepare blacks in the transition from slavery to freedom. Given the numerous milestones in understanding missionary work (labor) in the rural south, little has been said about missionary activities in urban/metropolitan south by historians whose foci has been the deep south, aspects of missionary duties, and notable personnel. This study focuses on one missionary organization that significantly contributed to the urbanization of blacks in Washington, D.C. - to determine the outcome of its work in the life of free men and women in the city and to understand the origins of its historical legitimacy and legacy. At the center of this study were more than five thousand American Missionary Association (AMA) digital frames of papers which provide a clear understanding of what took place during this critical period. From such papers, personnel, ideas, and occurrences can be closely followed to reconfigure the organization's past. Additionally, records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands provided a more concise view of the AMA's effects on the black community of Washington. Combined with more traditional sources, those materials have broadened the way to a better understanding of the nature of the black experience and the factors which shaped that urban experience in Washington, D.C. after the Civil War. The enormity of the challenge was so great that a few missions and mission workers folded soon after they began - leaving those who most needed to be rescued to fend for themselves. For most missionaries, the call to mission work had a deeper meaning that was displayed in the inner sanctum of the organization's relief - in their efforts to normalize the lives of the freedmen and freemen with traditional institutions such as the schools, churches, and work. The inability of the AMA's mission work among the black community in Washington to make greater social, economic, and religious strides by the end of the Reconstruction Era, is tied to the uniqueness of Washington, D.C. and the organization; the shear size of the migration and nature of the city left an overwhelming void that was impossible to fulfill. Ultimately, it was those who were first responders that failed to provide comprehensive aid in the transition from slavery to freedom - to bring a permanent program that lifted blacks in Washington out of lower class bondage. The combination of staffing issues, poor administration, high mindedness, a burgeoning missionary field, and Republican influence did not allow the American Missionary Association to commit fully to lasting change among Washington, D.C.'s black population. Thus upon the exodus of missionaries and benevolent associations, those who made it to the "promised land" were left with nothin' but `ligion.

Immigrants from Western Europe to the United States are commonly assumed to be racially white. Almost no attention has been paid, however, to recent changes occurring within the composition of the Western European immigrant population: individuals who were born in Western Europe but whose families have origins outside of Western Europe have been migrating to and settling in the US in growing numbers. This study examines the growing diversity of this migratory stream, investigating seven groups of immigrants from Western Europe to the US. I analyze data from the European Social Survey, the US census, the American Community Surveys, the Migrant Integration Policy Index, the UN database, and the World Bank database. First, this study analyzes these origin groups' economic and social characteristics' within Western Europe. I show that while immigrants within Western Europe present an improvement in economic indicators over time and generations, they show no improvement in social indicators. Furthermore, immigrants from less developed regions report on higher rates of being socially excluded, which, in turn, correlate with lower economic achievements. Furthermore, I disentangle the economic `ethnic penalty' of minorities in Western Europe by dividing it into four components: individual characteristics, country characteristics, the social environment in host country, and the policy environment in host country. Then, I analyzed the 'educational penalty' of minority youths in Western Europe and its nature. I show that only intercultural policies help in advancing minorities in Western Europe, due to the poor social acceptance they experience. Given this background on the condition of minorities within Western Europe, I turn to investigate the move that some of them make to the US. I show that immigrants from Western Europe of non-European descents carry a higher `ethnic penalty' when they come to the US, but most of them advance faster economically than the majority of Western Europeans who migrate to the US. I test three plausible explanations for this phenomenon, finding that the level of discrimination experienced by a given ethnic group is the most determinant factor. Minorities who experience a higher discrimination level in Western Europe integrate faster in the US. Social differences between Western Europe and the US, therefore, appear to affect immigrants and their integration patterns. This phenomenon represents a new type of migration: `social migration'. While immigration has been understood overwhelmingly in terms of the two fundamental categories of economic and political (refugee) immigration, the new category of social migration is now emerging between them. I end with examining the far-reaching implications of this new development.

The American Revolution and its aftermath posed the greatest challenge to the institution of slavery since the first Africans landed in Jamestown. Revolutionary defenses of the natural equality of man provided ammunition for generations of men and women opposed to racial subordination while the ideological strains of the struggle sounded the death knell for slavery in Northern states and led significant numbers of Southerners to question the morality and safety of slaveholding. Most importantly, the bloody and chaotic war in the South provided an unprecedented opportunity for slaves to challenge their bondage as tens of thousands of black men and women fled to the British, the swamps, or the relative anonymity of the cities. In examining the “reconstruction” of Southern slavery in the post-Revolutionary decades, Merging social, military, and economic history, "Origins of the Old South" examines how, in the attempt to rebuild their society from the ravages of war, black and white Southerners together created the new and historically distinct slave society of the “Old South.” The first two chapters of the dissertation demonstrate how the struggle to contain the disorders of a civil war amongst half a million enslaved African-Americans transformed the Southern states—the scene of the war’s bloodiest fighting after 1778—into a crucible in which men, land, and debt melted into capital. State governments redistributed thousands of slaves and millions of acres of land to purchase supplies and raise troops from within a weary populace; the estates of many of the South’s most important planters, comprising roughly ten percent of the region’s real and personal wealth, were confiscated and sold at auction at a fraction of their value; and wartime prestige coupled with the departure of prominent loyalists allowed a legion of “new men” to come into control of the new state governments. The result was the ascendance of a new class of merchant planters, who pushed the locus of Southern development inland, and major changes in the contours of black life in the region. The remaining three chapters of the dissertation examine these twinned consequences of the Revolution over the following three decades. Chapter three follows the experience of enslaved men and women after the war, tracing their movement throughout the Atlantic World and across the boundary between slavery and freedom during the conflict. Chapter four then looks at the impact of the region's ill-fated antislavery push during and immediately after the war, while chapter five shows how early national state governments drove slavery's expansion and closed the revolutionary moment in the process.

This dissertation examines the relationship between a clinical classification (autism) and the sociocultural and institutional contexts of its application. Historically in Morocco, as in many other global contexts, the autism label has not been widely used, and the professional disciplines typically charged with diagnosing and treating it (i.e., child psychiatry and special education) are relatively new there. Children have long been described and treated as majnun (“possessed”), mo’aq (“disabled”), hmaq (“crazy”), f shkel (“weird”) – but not typically as tawahhudi (“autistic”). Beginning in the 1980s, and then intensifying after 2000, Moroccan parent-activists have been working together with foreign and local experts to change that. Drawing on an Anglo-American neurocognitive behavioral model of autism diagnosis and treatment – in direct opposition to a French psychoanalytic one – they have been training a new cadre of experts, raising autism awareness, lobbying government agencies, and constructing an infrastructure to identify and educate children as autistic. This dissertation follows the category autism as it circulates with increasing speed and intensity across Morocco by way of nongovernmental parent associations operating special classrooms for disabled children and adolescents. It tracks the ways the category – as well as its attendant practices and concepts – reshapes local moral worlds and everyday domestic life. Drawing on philosopher Ian Hacking’s work on “making up people” and “the looping effect of human kinds” (2007), it seeks to understand how and to what extent activists and experts are making autism into a viable category, and thus a viable way to be a person in Morocco. In other words, what makes the category “stick” – or not? How does it gain traction in local worlds? How does it become alive and meaningful to Moroccan families? And in turn, how does the label autism itself – its meanings, definitions, uses, enactments – change and respond to complex processes initiated by its introduction to quotidian contexts of Moroccan social life? Through 26 months of fieldwork in family homes, a child psychiatry clinic in a public hospital, a parent-run classroom for disabled adolescents, 17 autism associations across the country, as well as several sites of vernacular healing, this dissertation provides an important ethnographic complement to Hacking’s work and extends his theoretical insights by focusing on the everyday practice of autism therapies. The first half of the dissertation examines the consequences of autism activism for the category itself. It shows how the histories of local institutions for the disabled, lexicons of disorder, and colonial encounters all shaped the prototypical image of the autistic child in Morocco. Further, it shows how novels institutional forms and mundane therapeutics practices lend the category a certain sense and vitality for parents. Drawing on life histories, it also demonstrates how the diagnosis “stick” (or become a durable identity) – or not – for a variety of economic, pragmatic, and sometimes idiosyncratic reasons. The second half of the dissertation examines the consequences of autism activism for the people involved. It shows how new styles of parenting circulate along with the category and it identifies a particular style of prosaic activism through which parents work to reframe understandings of autism by becoming experts on their own children and building “prosthetic environments” for them (Holmes 1990). Further, it situates autism activism in relation to highly publicized neoliberal development projects, showing how a complex triangulation between the Moroccan monarchy, state, and civil society creates novel expectations, aspirations, and exclusions. Through a close analysis of one family’s experience of attempting to implement autism behavioral therapies in their home, it also demonstrates the tensions internal to autism activism and examines struggles over the ethics of autism therapies. By detailing the dynamic ways in which the category autism interacts with and responds to the social, political, and institutional contexts of its application, this dissertation offers a novel perspective on international health activism and the globalization of psychiatric categories.

Using the World Bank Public Expenditure Tracking Survey (PETS) 2004 data, propensity score matching is utilized to infer a causal impact of private tutoring on the numeracy, literacy, and total outcomes for fourth grade public school students. This research finds that students who self-report that they participate in private tutoring everyday as compared to their peers who never participate in private tutoring scored higher in literacy, numeracy, and total scores. A small Matthew Effect was found as the statistically significant variables used as predictors aligned with socio-economic status. This alignment depicts that the rich become academically richer while the poor become academically poorer. The hybrid public-private education system in Cambodia may be exacerbating inequity for the most marginalized populations.

This dissertation examines New York Puerto Ricans’ identifications as part of a Hispanic collectivity that saw itself as a permanent and integral sociocultural group of New York City between the years 1931 and 1951. It argues that a New York Latino identity emerged at this time across ethnic, racial and class lines through Spanish-speakers’ strategic appropriations of the era’s transnational frameworks, including proletarian fraternalism (chapter one), Pan-Americanism (chapter two), cosmopolitan aestheticism (chapter three) and anti-colonialism (chapter four). Whereas the coordinates of present-day Latino identities are generally traced back to the ‘invention’ of a Hispanic category in order to create voting or consumer blocs in the late twentieth century or, conversely, to the political and cultural ‘awakening’ of Hispanics during the countercultural decades of the sixties and seventies, this dissertation upsets these timelines by showing how a New York Latino identity materializes earlier than previously thought. Specifically, it explores how the sociopolitical conjuncture of the 1930s and 1940s, with the sweeping reforms of the New Deal, the unprecedented influence of socialist ideas on American culture, the antifascist fight and world war, and the consequent emergence of anti-colonial movements, provided a grammar for New York Puerto Ricans’ self-definitions as part of a pan-ethnic minority that was “here to stay” in New York. In so doing, this dissertation challenges depictions of early New York Puerto Rican communities as isolated or self-contained spaces, and inquires into the ways localized ethnic identities are modulated by national and international events. Reading works by New York Puerto Rican authors like Jesús Colón, Pedro Labarthe, Pedro Caballero, and Guillermo Cotto-Thorner, and drawing from historical documents and New York Spanish-language periodicals such as Artes y Letras, La Voz, Eco Antillano, Pueblos Hispanos and Liberación, this dissertation weaves sociocultural analysis, literary criticism and archival research to begin to redress the relative lack of scholarly attention given to the cultural productions of New York Hispanic communities prior to midcentury and thus provides historical moorings for the cultural expressions of Latino New York.

“Sovereignty in the City” contributes to the historiography of African-American and African Diasporic life an account of how twentieth century black migrant communities’ practices and politics around place shaped the social geography of Philadelphia—a primary testing ground for urban policies, sociological and historical inquiry, and social experiments of reform up through the twenty-first century. The manuscript charts a history of alternative land stewardship and governance in Philadelphia’s black working class communities from 1941 to 1991, which I set in contrast with the urbicidal practices of reformers who worked to enhance the profitability of the region at the expense of black and working class neighborhoods and communities. I name these two very different visions of social affiliation and obligation sanitized citizenship and black vitality respectively. Building on methods and practices that Progressive social reformers, eugenicists, and sociologists co-produced, local housing reformers sought to enforce the normative patriarchal family as the ideal of health and order. This in turn, shaped their assessment of black migrants as potential vectors of biological and social contagion and justified segregation before federal policy insured it. On the other hand, from the margins black working class communities articulated new modes of sociality from within cordoned-off communities, which they refitted to the metropolis from their collective history in the agrarian and mill town South. Although otherworldliness and the tendency to participate in non-normative or queer social affiliations outside the home, often marked working class black migrant communities as criminal or odd, being out of time with the logics of patriarchy and racial capitalism also represented an important, if underappreciated, basis for envisioning a different city and world. In place of dominant conceptions of the normative family as an anchor of orderly governance and investment, black migrant communities re-imagined human belonging and practiced new modes of radical inclusivity in the city. I make the case for a landscape approach to black history, there and in the wider diaspora, in order to bring the methods developed by social, environmental, and architectural historians as well as geographers, to bear in excavating histories of black social activism, in turn, elaborating an idiom of urban ecology in which practices of place and belonging, which are often dismissed or invisible, call into question the notions of urban life and health organized around the individual and the normative patriarchal family.

This dissertation, “Wayward Reading: Women’s Crime and Incarceration in the United States, 1890-1935” illuminates the literary stakes of a crucial, yet overlooked, moment in the history of American incarceration: the development of the women’s prison and the unique body of literature that materialized alongside that development. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the women’s prison became a testing ground for the study of women’s sexuality: social scientists sought to assimilate their “patients” into gendered and racialized citizenship by observing the minutiae of women’s everyday lives and policing their sexual and social associations. Ultimately, this experimental study of women’s sexuality served to reinforce racial stratification: sociologists figured white women’s waywardness as necessitating rescue and rehabilitation into domesticity, and depicted black women’s waywardness as confirming their essential criminality, justifying their harsher punishment and consignment to contingent labor. I argue that women’s imprisonment also sparked another kind of experimentation, however, one based in literary form. A wide range of writers produced a body of literature that also focused on the “wayward girl’s” life trajectory. I contend that these authors drew on social science’s classificatory system and cultural authority to offer alternate scales of value and to bring into focus new forms of relationship that had the potential to unsettle the color line. In Jennie Gerhardt, for instance, Theodore Dreiser invokes legitimate kinship outside the racialized boundaries of marriage, while women incarcerated in the New York State Reformatory for Women exchanged love poetry and epistles that imagine forms of romance exceeding the racial and sexual divides that the prison sought to enforce. Wayward Reading thus draws together an unexpected array of sociological, legal and literary texts that theorize women’s crime and punishment to imagine alternate directions that modern social experience might take: popular periodicals such as the Delineator magazine, criminological studies by Frances Kellor and Katharine Bement Davis, the poetry and letters of women incarcerated at the New York State Reformatory for Women, and novels by W.E.B Du Bois and Theodore Dreiser. To understand how both social difference and social intimacy were reimagined through the space of the women’s prison, I model what I call “wayward” reading, tracing the interchange between social scientific and literary discourses. I draw attention to archives and texts that are frequently sidelined as either purely historical repositories (such as institutional case files from the New York State Reformatory) or as didactic and one-dimensional (such as Frances Kellor’s sociological exploration of women’s crime), as well as to literary texts not traditionally associated with women’s imprisonment (such as W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Quest of the Silver Fleece). Reading “waywardly” thus allows me to recover a diverse set of aesthetic experiments that developed alongside women’s imprisonment, and also to reconsider critical assumptions about the status of “prison writing” in literary studies. A number of critics have outlined the prison as a space of totalizing dehumanization that in turn reflects a broader logic of racialized domination structuring American culture. As such, scholars have read literary texts that describe incarceration as either enforcing or critiquing carceral violence. However, by turning our attention to the less-explored formation of the women’s prison, I argue that authors mobilized social science not only to critique the prison’s violence and expose how it produced social difference, but also to re-envision the relationships that comprised modern social life altogether.

Investment in addressing structural stigma and discrimination against refugees in resource-poor urban areas is both needed, and possible. The large population of refugees residing in resource-poor urban areas is likely to grow, and tensions in a number of settings are now documented. Without interventions to adequately address such tensions, both the protection needs of refugee populations and the stability of hosting countries could be affected. Through qualitative analysis of an urban refugee dataset in Uganda, this dissertation identified community-level drivers of structural stigma and discrimination as safeguarding one’s body and property, defending status, and perpetuating exploitation. The designs of potentially successful programs to address these drivers were then identified though systematic review, and included one or more of the following: 1) the utilization of multiple intervention components; 2) direct information provision (e.g., lecture, role-play, other active engagement) or direct contact with stigmatized groups; 3) cooperative work between community members and stigmatized groups to better livelihoods; 4) popular opinion leaders who have authority to make change, and 5) traditional ceremonies valued by the communities for cleansing and healing. One such design involving an agricultural livelihood program in a resource-poor urban area of the Northeast United States was costed, utilizing a primarily bottom-up approach and a societal perspective in the collection of both financial and economic costs. The unit cost per participating family was significantly lower than government services that provide comparable nutritional support, but did not include components of working with the community to reduce stigma and discrimination. Thus, the studied program provided more services for a lower cost. In addition, it empowered stigmatized refugees to advocate for and support themselves, and engendered goodwill in the community by involving community members to work alongside refugee participants, improving upon a neglected piece of land, and providing fresh produce. Further research is needed to better measure the social and financial dividends of programs to address structural stigma and discrimination, particularly against urban refugees. Such research can only come in tandem with further investment, the imperative and potential of which are compellingly clear.