A study of first generation Chinese youth and their parents who have immigrated to Houston, Texas reveals that identity for this group (Chinese youth in particular) emerges from the opposition of the submissive connection to the authority of networks, and the dominant American (United States) individualism which promotes private self-interest and, hence, tends to sever communal relations. Identity is thus a consideration of opposition/contingency and same/different. An examination of identity requires recognizing that cultural inheritance impacts one's determination and ability to function within the given world. For the Chinese in this study, "ghosts" of their past remind and connect them to their cultural inheritance; they take with them what they remember leaving behind. Yet, whereas an established history and sanguinal traditions are advantageous to perpetuate facts and myths, an evolving culture which is creating new identities with and within each new generation is unfolding beyond, even in spite of, the established Chinese traditions. Furthermore, the Chinese in this study group lack the amphibolic, unstable footing characteristic of liminars who straddle two cultures, producing in themselves hybrid positioning, generating for themselves ambivalence and alienating identification. Rather than assimilate to the Western milieu, the Chinese accommodate themselves and live as a paracommunity with the dominant culture of their host city. Chinese parents' most apodictic means of countering Western influence on their children is with Chinese language schools, having the youth participate in Chinese community events, encouraging the younger Chinese to develop a network of Chinese friends, and insisting that the youth retain the Chinese values they have exemplified for them at home. By applying linguistic considerations, particularly functionalism, to create meaning, clearly there is space within the appetite for dialectics of immigration to this country (and others) and the cultural processes which ensue to resist lumping all diasporic people as liminars and hybrids.

This thesis looks for ways that architects can reassert their presence in America's urban centers. Through a series of investigations, the research phase examines both the architectural semiotics of the late 20th Century city and the languages of the streets, particularly rap music. The architect's role in the upper-class's current sociological agenda is called into question. The design phase proposes a new direction for architectural input by seeking out ways to empower the architect and, through him, establish a level of social equality. By acting on his own agenda, the architect attempts to restore importance to the downtown area and all of its inhabitants.

Bunyore, like the rest of present-day Western Province of Kenya, came under British administration as part of the Eastern Province of the Uganda Protectorate between 1890 and 1895. The argument of this thesis is that if this development drew the AbaNyole into the world capitalist nexus, it also created conditions within which an expanding nineteenth-century social field of action was confronted with new diseases and ideas about these diseases that were extremely important in the transformation of the 'Nyole medical landscape during colonialism. This transformation took place within the framework of a British colonial medical science that defined itself within and above 'Nyole cosmology, and a British racial temperament that defined Bunyore as an epidemiological landscape. Both were normal requirements for colonial self-definition, cultural positioning, and boundary-marking between 'science' and 'tradition', 'culture' and 'nature'. This is why discourses on disease and medicine during the first two decades of colonialism revolved around the idea of nature, an idea that was a rendering of not just the physical, natural characteristics, of the colony, but also of the colony's inhabitants. Based on a bifocal address and the prevalence of argument by negative contrast, the image of the 'natural' was used to not only constitute the intellectual domain within which knowledge, strategies, policies, and justifications for domination were fashioned, but also expropriate AbaNyole's capacity to narrate their own bodily experiences. This was a dual process that created fertile grounds in which ideas about Western biomedicine and its technologies were nurtured and debated by the AbaNyole. The outcome of these debates, together with contradictions within colonial medical policies, led, from the mid 1930s onwards, to the systematization of the Health Center as an arena in which a new object of knowledge, Bora Afya (Good Health), and field of intervention, the African home, were constituted. This was a transition from preventive to curative medicine, political to social medicine.

A small group experience is analyzed from a hermeneutic stance for members' use of metaphor in construction of the emergent group culture. Metaphor is described as a process rather than a product of language. As process, metaphor is primarily an invitation to others to co-create, within a particular context, the objectifications and typifications that will come to represent the shared experience. As an extension of this concept, metaphor is thought to assume and invite intimacy by eliciting exposure of cognitive constructions used in the formulations of a constructed reality. Second, metaphor is described as an integrative device capable of incorporating and illuminating, within a single utterance, multiple aspects of the situation, and of facilitating the group's progress through developmental stages. The discourse used in this study was produced by nine members and a consultant of a self-study experiential group as they struggled to understand the nature of their task, the multiple roles they took in production of the event, and their interdependent relationships as they constructed the social reality of the experience. Metaphor both described and became the group's dynamics as it integrated contextual elements and identified member's fears and fantasies, thereby contributing to the development of the collective. In the first metaphoric instance the tension created by cameras and film crew, anonymity and job security, were addressed through an analogy about film ratings. Further analogies of guns, firing squads, sitting ducks, shipwrecks and desert islands, a Greek chorus, and even God, were developed as violence, aggression, power and competition, safety and rescue, alternated as dominant themes in the discourse. In each case, metaphor filled an important role in the group's dynamics. A brothel became the metaphoric vehicle for expression of underlying sexual aggression, directly alluding to the difficulty experienced by both men and women in their attempts to validate and legitimize individual roles in the group. The mechanisms by which this analogy developed and the consequences for the group are discussed.

To move through space is to change. Individuals and communities have always moved for change; within and over their own cultural borders. Yet, it is only by not moving, by breaking an ongoing migration, that certain critical advantage may come to a unified people. Such development, economic and cultural, springs from the constructive engagement between a people and their chosen site. Architecture, as an assembly of transitory constructions and spaces, is a primary instrument through which such interaction may occur.

This thesis explores the construction and [re]construction of society on global, national, local, and individual levels. Postapartheid South Africa is in the midst of a transformative nationalist culture project. The extremity of the South African situation facilitates analysis and representation of the problem of [re]construction. [Re]-construction is problematic because it reveals the underlying contradictions of the contemporary cultural condition. Space---both the space of the text and the space of human interaction---are crucial factors in the transformation of society. The analysis of South African [re]construction and [re]spatialization necessitates a new method, and a new thought process---one that re-conceptualizes and integrates discontinuous ideas and experiences. The result is a subversive and re-constitutive text that should be read by all those involved in the study and creation of the human environment.

In order to address problems caused by widespread squatting, the government of Trinidad and Tobago has recently introduced legislation which grants a leasehold title to squatters on State lands, subject to certain conditions. The adoption of such regularization measures rests on the belief that granting squatters legal title to the land they occupy, and thus providing them with security of tenure, will create an incentive for squatters to invest in their dwellings and in their community, and will facilitate access to credit. / This thesis critically examines these assumptions, bringing to bear on this reflection the results of a survey conducted in two squatter settlements in Trinidad. In so doing. it explores the role of law in development and, further, it questions the capacity of law to guide and modify social behaviour.

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<p>This study explored biographicity as the process through which individuals repeatedly shape and reshape their lives to meet their own needs and desires in response to conditions of life in late modernity, a time of rapid social and economic change. The study highlighted the particular issues faced by marginalized populations, and especially urban young adults, who were the focus of the study. </p><p> Using biographical research methodology, the study sought to understand the complex interplay between individuals and the constraints and/or supports of social structures and contexts. Seventeen adults, aged 23 to 32, participated. The participants attended high-poverty urban schools where historically fewer than 50% of students receive a high school diploma. Each was the first in the family to attend college. Participants told their life stories in extended, unstructured interviews, producing their own <i>narrated life</i>. Interpretation of this interview <i>data</i> was an iterative, abductive process that explored the life stories through structural descriptions of the narratives, process structures of the life course, and thematic horizons that emerged from the life stories as told. </p><p> Three thematic horizons (expectations/imagining a different future, suffering, and belonging) formed the foundation for the exploration of patterns of meaning that concluded that certain consistent elements were essential to participants&rsquo; exercise of biographicity. These elements led to a configuration that allows scholars and practitioners to understand biographicity as a complex, organic process that cannot be reduced to simple characteristics or a linear set of variables. The study concluded that learning and biographicity are inseparably linked, forming an <i>enactive ecology of learning</i> in which individuals engage in processes that allow them to interact with their environment across the learning domains of cognition, emotion, and social interaction as well as participatory sensemaking and autonomy/heteronomy. In addition, experiences of recognition are essential to the exercise of biographicity. Biographicity was found to be a continual process of learning from one&rsquo;s life experiences and enacting a desired future as a form of lifelong learning. Finally, these particular participants provided insights that contribute to recommendations for theory, research, and practice that reflect their own experiences of biographicity. </p>

<p> This research is a case study analysis of Downtown Project, a corporate-led redevelopment endeavor currently taking place in downtown Las Vegas. Through private money and public partnerships, Internet retailer Zappos has relocated its headquarters to a neighborhood previously characterized by economic instability, and is actively constructing a concentrated "creative class" community of tech startups, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. By examining Downtown Project, this research seeks to analyze the ways in which corporate-led redevelopment plays a powerful role in the local growth machine, asking who benefits, at what potential costs, and whose interests are served in downtown redevelopment projects. This research situates Downtown Project within the current economic context of Las Vegas, one of the cities hit the hardest by the recession and foreclosure crisis, in addition to placing this endeavor within the historical context of Las Vegas development and the city's "tradition of invention." This research also provides analysis of how this particular development is both similar to and different from other notable U.S. examples of corporate-led redevelopment. This case study draws from physical observations, maps, media coverage, census tract information, financial records, and a series of interviews in order to critically examine the key players and prominent narratives of this ambitious attempt at community building, and ask questions about the social justice and equitable development aspects of such a project.</p>