A dissertation of limited scope submitted to the Faculty of Arts in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the course-work Postgraduate Diploma in Recreation and Tourism in the Centre for Recreation and Tourism at the University of Zululand, 2003. / The study was conducted in the light of the background that there is a rising concern from the government that the companies should give socio-economical benefits to the local communities. In the aspect of recreation and tourism the Department of Sports and Recreation (DSR) is expecting the reserve to give the socio-economical benefits to the local communities in a very participatory way. The reason above led to the initiatives to explore at the local reserve, which is Shongweni Resources Reserve whether it co-operates with what have been said in the white paper. For example the White Paper (1994:35) said Recreation development should be demand driven and community based. It also said communities must be empowered to participate in the planning, implementation and evaluation of recreation programmes. The people responsible for looking at that realised that there was poor relationship between the Shongweni Resources Reserve and local communities. It was from that perspective that there was a need for someone to conduct a study that would look at their relationship and the reasons and motives behind that relationship. The study had specific objectives to be explored, which are: • To determine the relationship between the local communities and the reserve. • To establish whether the communities are being involved or participate in the reserve activities. • Investigate whether there is any development initiative the reserve is offering to the local community. • Find out whether the local people are aware of the kind of socio- economic development they can get from the reserve. All these four objectives have been met because the whole study was formulated around these objectives. The study looked at the relation between local communities and the reserve and found that it is not healthy. It also looked at the communities whether they are involved or not, and found that they are very participating. The development initiatives the reserve is offering to local communities have been also explored and the findings showed that there are development initiatives the reserve is offering to the communities. The issue of whether the local people are aware of the kind of socio-economic development they can get from the reserve was also looked at, and found that the local people are not aware of the type of socio-economic development. There are also expectations that have been formulated as guidelines for the study. There were four expectations that had been formulated, and out of those four expectations half of them have been proven correctly and half of them have been proven wrong. The expectations that have been formulated are: • That there is poor relationship between the local communities and the reserve. • That the local communities are less involved in the activities of the reserve. • That there are inadequate recreation and tourism development initiatives offered to the local communities. • That the local people are not aware of the socio-economic development benefits for them in the reserve. There were different findings that were found. Most of the people considered development as medium and the community members are prepared to take the responsibilities of the development of the Shongweni Resources Reserve. They are fairly involved in the management and maintenance of the reserve. The involvement of communities in participating for the recreation activities is happening. This has happened by considering the period and the frequency of their participation, which have positive responses. The communities are also allowed to use recreation activities found in the reserve. When considering the socio-economical aspects, the reserve is giving very less economical aspects to the local communities. They are not allowed to sell their crafts and to cut wood for carving, and there are very few local employees. There are various factors that were found to be the cause of bad relationship. One of them was the communities were not clear about community benefits they should get from the reserve. The recommendations that have been surfaced are that the reserve should be transparent, socio-economical improvement, and to conduct the future study that would involve the Shongweni Resources Reserve staff to include their perspectives.

Belly dance classes have become increasingly popular in recent decades in the United States. Many of the predominantly white, middle-class American women who belly dance proclaim that it is a source of feminist identity and empowerment that brings deeper meaning to their lives. American practitioners of this art form commonly explain that it originated from ritual-based dances of ancient Middle Eastern cultures and regard their participation as a link in a continuous lineage of female dancers. In contrast to the stigmatization and marginalization of public dance performers in the Middle East today, the favorable meaning that American dancers attribute to belly dance may indicate an imagined history of this dance. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on the West Coast of the United States and Morocco in 2008-2009, I explore American belly dance utilizing theoretical contributions from feminism, Foucauldian discourse analysis, and postmodernism. I argue that an anthropological investigation of American belly dance reveals that its imagery and concepts draw from a larger discourse of Orientalism, connected to a colonial legacy that defines West against East, a process of othering that continues to inform global politics and perpetuates cultural imperialism. But the creative identity construction that American women explore through belly dance is a multi-layered and complex process. I disrupt the binary assumptions of Orientalist thinking, highlighting the heterogeneity and dynamic quality of this dance community and exploring emergent types of American belly dance. Rather than pretending to be the exotic Other, American belly dancers are inventing a new exotic Self. This cultural anthropological study contributes to a greater understanding of identity and society by demonstrating ways that American belly dancers act as agents, creatively and strategically utilizing discursive motifs to accomplish social and personal goals.

Grounded in previous research on academic engagement and resilience, this study presents a clear conceptualization of re-engagement, defined as students' ability to bounce back from everyday academic challenges and setbacks, as a process of everyday resilience in school, and examines how teacher support can promote it. Data from 1018 third through sixth grade students and their 53 teachers were used to examine the extent to which teacher autonomy support and involvement (individually and in combination) predicted changes from fall to spring of the same school year in students' re-engagement (behavioral and emotional). Overall, correlational results provided consistent support for study hypotheses. In terms of unique effects, teacher autonomy support (both student- and teacher-reported) was a unique predictor of both behavioral and emotional re-engagement, whereas involvement (both student- and teacher-reported) was a unique predictor for behavioral but not emotional re-engagement. In terms of predicting change over the school year, student perceptions of autonomy support predicted changes in both behavioral and emotional re-engagement, but teacher-reports predicted changes only in behavioral re-engagement; teacher-reported involvement showed the same pattern of effects. When both involvement and autonomy support (student-reported) were used as predictors of changes in re-engagement, both made unique contributions, although teacher-reports did not, due to multi-collinearity. Students' perceptions of teacher support were more closely related to their re-engagement than was teacher-reported support, and those perceptions acted as mediators between the teacher-reported support and students' re-engagement, partially mediating the relationship between teacher-reported support and students' behavioral re-engagement, and fully mediating the relationship between teacher-reported autonomy support and emotional re-engagement. The relationships between teacher support and student re-engagement played out similarly for students at all grades and both genders, with the exception that student perceptions of teacher autonomy support were more important predictors of behavioral re-engagement for boys than for girls. This study has implications for the conceptualization of re-engagement within a larger motivational model, for the importance of considering both teachers' and students' perspectives when studying teacher-student interactions, and for next steps in conceptualizing the construct of re-engagement as potentially encompassing separate behavioral and emotional components.

This dissertation includes three papers examining financial long-term care planning among low-income aging adults and the consequences of Medicaid policies like estate recovery. Paper one considers Medicaid estate recovery and its impact on Medicaid enrollment and homeownership among low-income adults age 65 and older. Paper two examines the estate planning and wealth transfer behaviors of a cohort of older adults newly enrolled in Medicaid. Finally, paper three presents a case study of Medicaid estate recovery in North Carolina. Collectively, these three papers find that Medicaid policies that target older adults may be having disparate effects depending on socioeconomic status, race, and rurality and exacerbating disparities in intergenerational transfers of wealth while recouping little for state Medicaid programs.

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This dissertation explores the nexus of joy and power in the lived experience of the ancient rabbis of Roman Palestine (first to fourth centuries CE). The study brings together affect theory and history of emotion to reimagine a phenomenological approach to classical rabbinic texts, a phenomenology that is historically and philologically grounded and attuned to embodied aspects of emotional experiences. By applying this method, this work situates the rabbis of Palestine within the “imperial economy of emotions,” in which provincial subjects utilized a surplus or shortage of collective emotions to assert or resist their place within the dominant political system of the Roman empire. It argues that, within this economy, the rabbis’ engagement with public joy—construed as a somatic and relational experience —was key to their negotiation of Roman imperialism. The dissertation thus makes three chief contributions to the study of ancient Judaism, cognate areas of research, and the field of Religious Studies more broadly. First, it demonstrates how joy, an emotion that is habitually thought of as politically inert, was a potent force in the world of the rabbis and other provincial subjects of the Roman empire. Second, through the case study of the ancient rabbis, the dissertation shows that the minority-majority interface in asymmetric power systems must be understood not only in terms of discourse and ideology but also as a product of the affective forces of daily life. Third, by performing a historically grounded phenomenology of joy, “Affect in Power” pushes back on the wholesale rejection of “experience” as an analytical category in contemporary scholarship.

Ecological restoration has the potential to provide a multitude of benefits, such as conserving biodiversity and supporting natural-resources dependent livelihoods. Tropical dry forests (TDFs) occur in densely populated human-modified landscapes in the tropics and are susceptible to degradation, making them an important biome to restore when degraded. TDFs are also socio-ecological systems, where local people rely on the forest for subsistence and livelihoods and effectively manage them for desire outcomes. People’s reliance on TDFs necessitates restoration projects to take into account more than biophysical and abiotic considerations when they are designed. In this decade of restoration, while there is the much-needed impetus to restore degraded land, to achieve enduring and just outcomes at large spatial scales, restoration projects need to more intentionally address local considerations, such as traditional land tenure systems and livelihood strategies, and goals such as socio-economic development. At the same time, to guide restoration efforts and realistically forecast the consequences of these efforts in the future, there is a need for rapid and accurate assessment tools to quantify the impact of restoration on biodiversity and people at several time steps. In Chapter 1, I use India, a country with high biophysical potential for restoration, as a case study to demonstrate a people-centric approach for identifying restoration opportunities. I find that there is a large overlap between areas of high biophysical restoration potential and high poverty, indicating potential and need to pursue restoration in a manner that addresses both ecological and social goals. In Chapter 2, I study a commonly adopted livelihood strategy, seasonal migration, in forest-dependent communities in India. I find that households in more agricultural and prosperous districts experience lower rates of migration but are more sensitive to climatic variability than households in poorer districts. In Chapter 3, I examine the impact of ecological restoration of a tropical dry forest in central India (CI). I find no significant difference in the cumulative number of bird species detected, but a significant difference in bird communities across the sites. In the lower frequencies dominated by birds and insects, I find that restored sites were positively associated with acoustic space occupancy in comparison to unrestored and low Lantana density (LLD) sites. In Chapter 4, I study the combined socio-ecological outcomes of restoration in the same sites in CI. I find that in the absence of alternative, people rely on Lantana camara, an invasive shrub, for subsistence and livelihoods, in the form of firewood and farm boundaries. I do not find any significant effect of restoration or LLD on people’s perception of ease of forest use, except for the distances covered for grazing, an important indicator of restoration success in this landscape. Finally, I also find that restoration is not associated with any significant changes in soundscapes in the higher frequency ranges dominated by insects and bats. Taken together, my chapters contribute to a greater understanding of the potential for restoration to meet social and ecological goals, the vulnerability of the livelihoods of people living on forest-fringes of TDFs to climate variability and expected and unexpected socio-ecological outcomes of restoration.

Social media influencers are online content creators who seek audience support, form relationships with their audiences, and shape audience interests, opinions, and behavior. Not only is the influencer economy a cultural market in its own right, but it is also increasingly shaping other cultural industries as influencers serve as cultural gatekeepers who filter cultural products for their audiences (Hirsch, 1972). As social media influencers become powerful gatekeepers and producers, the relational nature of their activities and performance is reshaping norms in cultural industries overall. Lay audiences gain more influence and agency as their evaluations and support are critical for influencer survival and success. Then how has the evaluative landscape in cultural industries changed, and what are the broader social implications of these changes? In this dissertation, I outline the rise of social media influencers both as gatekeepers and producers in cultural markets and argue that scholarship in management and sociology must examine the unique ways in which these influencers’ activities differ from their predecessors’. Chapter 1 defines social media influencers and describes their activities and market dynamics by comparing and contrasting them to their traditional counterparts. Chapter 2 examines the relationship between influencer-audience relational interactions and performance outcomes, focusing on influencers’ role as cultural gatekeepers. Chapter 3 looks at the effects of race and race-based social movements on influencer-audience interactions, highlighting influencers’ role as cultural producers. In all three chapters, the focus is on the sociological theory of relational work, which is the process through which economic actors balance the transactional and social components of their relationships (Zelizer, 2012; Bandelj, 2020). Social media influencers serve as an ideal type to demonstrate how relational work contributes to market value and performance, given the tight balance between their relational and transactional activities. I use mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze channel-, video-, and comment-level data on 1,167 BookTubers (YouTube influencers who evaluate books). I find that social media influencers indeed serve as trusted gatekeepers for their audiences, and that audiences demand not only evaluative content, but also intimate relationships with influencers. Influencers use audience interactions as relational work efforts to build trusting relationships with audiences and gain their support, but this effect is moderated by the perceived trustworthiness of the influencer. The effectiveness of influencer relational work also varies by race, and relational work thus reproduces racialized logics that underlie cultural markets. In sum, this dissertation not only highlights the rise of an important new market actor, but also contributes to theories on how relational work shapes and is shaped by inequality.