No description available.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Communication

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This dissertation argues that urban neoliberal programs currently formulating in the Global South are unprecedented in historical México as well as in examined practices of gentrification and globalization. In this dissertation I specifically focus on the Programa de Rescate – an urban policy being amassed in México City’s Centro Histórico as a nexus of processes of gentrification, neoliberalization, and globalization. This work re-theorizes how gentrification functions when it is implemented in the Global South – as the neoliberalization of space.

Since the 1980's, few have included sub-Saharan African in worldwide comparative discussion of complex societies. This exclusion is at the expense of challenging embedded notions of the development of complexity. The trading polity Bosutswe (700-1700 AD) at the eastern edge of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana and its surrounding region provide a perfect example of why this is important. In the Bosutswe region, complexity was not be driven by external factors, elites, or the core, but arose from local actors and out of localized contexts. During its occupation, Bosutswe became increasingly involved with long-distance trade in the Indian Ocean exchange network, linking trade from the African coast to the interior. At Bosutswe, glass beads associated with long-distance trade and local ostrich eggshell beads attest to a strong local economy supported by cattle herding, subsistence farming, and iron and bronze manufacture. This trade with Bosutswe peaked from 1200-1450 AD, when social stratification at Bosutswe became spatially and materially evident. This dissertation focuses on Bosutswe's trajectory through the point of view of two nearby settlements, Khubu la Dintša (1220-1420 AD) and Mmadipudi Hill (~550-1200 AD), to reconstruct the local economy and landscape. Expanding the concept of the polity to one situated in a landscape of human and environmental interchange provides a key comparative insight to other studies of complex societies and variable trajectories of societal development. The Bosutswe landscape and by extension Iron Age southern Africa can be conceptualized as a patchwork of landmark hilltop polity centers on a scrub desert landscape of agropastoral activity surrounded by smaller hilltop and ground sites. The local dynamic may have involved strategies by Bosutswe to mitigate environmental characteristics of low rainfall, opportunistic hunting and herding opportunities for the surrounding communities, and alliances between these communities for security in a politically unstable era. Everyday life would have involved issues about land use, as over time herders and farmers exhausted pastures, soil fertility, and firewood. Treating these early polities as landscapes of human, animal, and environmental relationships will help revise the way early complex societies are conceptualized: not as individual sites, but as local landscapes of power. / text

2006 Dozier Award Winner / Agent-based models can provide paleoanthropologists with a view of behavioral dynamics and site formation processes as they unfold in digital caricatures of past societies and paleoenvironments. This paper argues that the agent-based methodology has the most to offer when used to conduct controlled, repeatable experiments within the context of behavioral laboratories. To illustrate the potential of this decidedly heuristic approach, I provide a case study of a simple agent-based model currently being used to investigate the evolution of Plio-Pleistocene hominin food sharing in East Africa. The results of this null model demonstrate that certain levels of ecological patchiness can facilitate the evolution of even simple food sharing strategies among equally simple hominin foragers. More generally, they demonstrate the potential that agent-based models possess for helping historical scientists act as their own informants as to what could have happened in the past.

What do people need to live functional and flourishing lives in today’s global society? They require sophisticated socio-economic skills and the prowess of political and cultural participation to undertake duties as world citizens. Can schools in the United Kingdom, adequately prepare all young people for these challenges? Data published by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF, 2009b) show that two in five children do not acquire key literacy and numeracy skills before leaving primary school. Some young people leave the education system altogether with no qualifications and limited understanding of their rights and responsibilities as global agents. Most of the young people in this category have multiple and sometimes complex disadvantages; they may live in poor and deprived neighbourhoods, experience poor physical and mental health or lack the support of adults who are able to model successful, flourishing and capable citizenry. Sen (1992) argues that the instruments needed for individuals to flourish are “capabilities”. These are the “potentials to be and do”. This study examines the means by which voluntary organisations improve the capabilities of vulnerable young people. It focuses on three major vulnerable groups: young people who have been excluded from mainstream education, those in cared for by the State and young people with learning difficulties. The research uses a mixed methods approach, skewed in favour of qualitative methods to analyse diverse trajectories of vulnerable young people towards capability. It relies on the capability approach to investigate the methods used in Voluntary Organisations which support the participants’ transformation to functional individuals. Organised as communities of learning, Centres of non-formal education provide the space, expertise and pedagogies for transformative learning processes to take place. The study shows vulnerable individuals need to combine and convert specialised capabilities in specific suites to enable them make the transition to capability successfully.

This thesis examines the politics, plots and strategies of the militant presbyterian radicals of the United Societies, or later Covenanters, in their confrontation with the Restoration regime of Charles II and James VII in Scotland, and with the presbyterian movement between 1679 and 1688. Chapter one analyses the correlation between the Societies’ lay network and the pattern of militant presbyterian dissent. It outlines their core platform defined by their declarations and strict adherence to the Covenants. It discusses the formation of the United Societies out of the fragmentation of the presbyterian movement from the Bothwell debates to the creation of a coherent Cameronian platform and militant network in 1681. Chapter two analyses the Societies’ schisms, persecution and martyrdoms between 1682 and 1684 and argues that the origins of their apocalyptic war against their persecutors lay in their political isolation and persecution from both the regime and their former moderate brethren. Chapter three looks at the Societies’ embassies to England and Friesland which redefined their relationships with other presbyterians factions. It examines their role in the Rye House Plots with English Whigs and argues that they were a turning point which isolated them from the British radical underground. It also explores their contacts with the Nadere Reformatorie in the United Provinces which led to the ordination of James Renwick who hardened the Societies’ platform, and how the handling of the embassy led to the collapse of their European network. Chapter four examines the targeted persecution of the Societies in the Killing Times and the Societies’ role in the Argyll Rising of 1685 that led to further schisms over their separation from the moderate presbyterian ministry which undermined Renwick’s leadership. Chapter five traces the revival in the Societies’ fortunes to 1688. It examines the internal struggles over the Societies’ platform and the broadening of their ministerial cadre to include Alexander Shields and others; their relations with Irish presbyterian militants; their confrontation with moderate presbyterians caused by James VII’s toleration scheme; the context and impact of Renwick’s martyrdom and the reunification of the militant factions. Chapter six surveys the Societies’ world view and their attempts to construct a Calvinist international through their attitudes towards other Calvinists in the Friesland, Bremen and Switzerland, Lutheran Prussia and Sweden, Catholic France under Louis XIV and the Holy Roman Empire, and the Muslim Turks. It also compares their views of the Huguenots, Waldenses of Piedmont and Kurucs of Hungary, and the experiences of those banished to Barbados and the North American Colonies. It concludes that the Societies played a more significant and distinct role in the conflict between the presbyterian movement and the Stuart monarchy than previously thought; that their struggle and militancy were shaped by different political contexts, as demonstrated in their response to the Revolution in Scotland of 1688 to 1689, rather than simply religious conviction; and that the legacy of their martyrs, quickly subsumed into presbyterian tradition, became a justification for the Revolution settlement and a source of contention between radical and reactionary traditions.

Once regarded as a nation central to the development of civil society, associational activity in contemporary Britain is perceived by some authors as fragile. Whereas the urban leadership provided by the middle classes was crucial to the trajectory and character of towns and cities all over Britain in the nineteenth century, it has been claimed that their relocation to suburbia has become synonymous with detachment, disinterest and the decline of the associational sphere. Depicted in literary and historical accounts, as well as in the popular media, as pursuing a suburban lifestyle that was both monotonous and disengaged, the middle classes of the twentieth century were assumed to have relinquished the management of a multitude of municipal and voluntary functions that defined an urban place. Yet such accounts stereotyped middle-class lifestyles, oversimplifying their relationship with the city, and prompting a ‘new wave’ of suburban research in America that has offered a revisionism that stresses diversity and challenges prevailing assumptions regarding middle-class behaviour. Assumptions of suburban detachment are contested in the research that underpins this study. The thesis ‘Semi-Detached Britain? Social networks in the suburban fringe of Leicester and Loughborough, 1950-2005’ provides a detailed analysis of social and cultural networks and reviews the consequences of relocation on civic engagement since 1950. Geographically the middle classes may have distanced their home lives from the urban centre, but through an examination of their participation in the associational sphere of clubs and societies it is evident that suburban living was not synonymous with disinterest and detachment. Furthermore, analysis of cultural changes post 1950, including the issue of conservation, the shifting nature of gender relations, and the process of racial assimilation, reveal how voluntary organisations, and their middle-class membership, continued to shape the physical, spatial and cultural landscape of modern Britain. Through the intricate networks of power developed in local clubs and societies, the middle-classes found a continuing utility in the transference of knowledge and expertise, often working as mediator between the citizen and the state. Far from being disconnected, the new ‘suburbans’ were ‘semi-detached’, demonstrating a vigorous and ongoing commitment to the public sphere that contributed to the stock of social and civic capital in both town and city. In this regard the thesis provides a revisionism concerning the middle classes, suburbanisation, and the construction of civil society in the modern era.

I argue that by understanding lithic technology as a total social fact, that is, as socially, culturally and politically constituted, it is possible to gain some insight into prehistoric social practice. An archaeological examination of the Nii 'ii site (KdVo-5), a prehistoric hunting stand locality in southwestern Yukon Territory, serves as a case study for this argument. Spatial reconstruction of this site indicates the presence of several social actors engaged in face-to-face interaction. Technological analysis of the lithic assemblage demonstrates that the observed variability in tool forms cannot be explained solely in terms of tool function; instead, it appears that the technical choices made by the occupants of KdVo-5 were socially and culturally mediated. I outline a theory of technological practice, based on practice-oriented social theory, in an attempt to understand the importance of these technical choices in the construction of social relationships at Nii 'ii.