The Islamic legislative drafting methodology is meant to bring the family law of Islamic countries into line with current conceptions of gender equality found not only in the West but in Islamic law (the shari’a) as well. The methodology involves identifying the fundamental principles of shari’a and recognizing that they must be adapted to the socio-economic conditions in which they are to be applied.

Once known only as Bodybuilding and Women’s Bodybuilding, the sport has grown to include multiple competition categories that both limit and expand opportunities for female bodybuilders. While the creation of additional categories, such as Fitness, Figure, Bikini, and Physique, appears to make the sport more inclusive to more variations and interpretation of the feminine, muscular physique, it also creates more in-between spaces. This auto ethnographic research explores the ways that multiple female competition categories within the sport of Bodybuilding define, reinforce, and complicate the gendered experiences of female physique athletes, by bringing freak theory into conversation with body categories.

The methodological approach used to tell the Smith sisters’ story is first and foremost a case study of women in the nineteenth century and the gendered categories that were constructed to define women. The story will be told through a biographical narrative, which will allow Hannah, Julia, and Abby Smith’s to tell their story in their own voice. Also, included within the biography is an examination of the nineteenth-century theories that defined women’s lives, and what effect, if any, these theories had on the Smiths. Each chapter is layered with three different narratives in an attempt to unravel the world that women lived in the nineteenth century. First, the chapter provides a description and analysis of the specific theories such as Republican Motherhood and cult of domesticity to ground the Smith women in the discursive world in which they lived. Then the chapter closely examines the practice or the way the Smith women lived their lives and what they thought about their world. Lastly, each chapter explores the secondary sources that have been written about each subject, such as the new female seminaries that opened in the nineteenth century. By combining these approaches, I hope to avoid some of the shortcomings that dominate the study of women today. First, the theoretical models and the study of real lives of women actually leave women out of their own stories. Second, historians tend to evaluate women’s lives from the past based upon their own political agendas and their own beliefs of what freedom and rights mean completely discarding what it might have meant to women in their own time period.

Family law regulates the formation of marriage, divorce, marital property rights, child custody, inheritance, and spousal duties. This study aims to demonstrate how family law formation in the Middle East and North Africa reflects the struggle among social and political forces to capture the state and assert authority. The balance of power between competing social forces impacts both the timing (short-term versus long-term struggle) and type (progressive or regressive) of family law after independence. The ability of one of two competing forces, broadly categorized as traditionalist versus modernist, to capture the state is necessary for codification and is predictive of family law content. Case studies reveal that systemic shocks (e.g. revolution, social unrest, or foreign intervention) tip the balance of power in favor of traditional or modernizing forces in the post-independence state-building process and facilitate the successful consolidation of power and the codification of family law.

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The following study explores the relation between psychosocial work environment and individual health. The purpose is to examine how female employees in the occupational health sector experience their own psychosocial work environment, focusing on different influencing factors in both the workplace and their private life regarding the employees own health. The study applies a hermeneutic approach in which qualitative interviews constitute the empirical data. Previous research on this particular subject has focused on the following themes: the combination of work-family life, demand/control model and flexibility in the workplace in relation to health and stress. The theoretical framework used in this study integrates relevant concepts, specifically SOC, poor leadership and flexibility. The main findings of this study are three fundamental themes prevalent in the employees experience of health and stress: meeting the demands of the psychosocial work environment, the psychosocial work environment related to balance in everyday life  and the managements role of the psychosocial work environment. One major contribution on the research on psychosocial work environment and work-life balance is that the results presented underline the importance of a female perspective on welfare and individual wellness.

Avund bland anställda är en negativ emotion som drivs av att anställda jämför sina kvaliteter och prestationer med varandra. Syftet med studien var att undersöka om känslor av avund, såväl att avundas som att bli avundad, är associerade med uppfattningar om psykosociala faktorer på kvinnodominerade arbetsplatser. Undersökningens deltagare bestod av 127 kvinnor inom vårdsektorn i Mellansverige. Deltagarnas uppfattningar om psykosociala faktorer i arbetslivet mättes med mätinstrumentet QPSnordic. Deltagarna fick även besvara åtta påståenden ur Workplace envy som mäter två dimensioner av avund. Studiens resultat visade att flera faktorer i den psykosociala arbetsmiljön är associerade med avund. Att vara avundad på arbetet kan höja arbetstillfredsställelsen medan att avundas en kollega kan minska motivationen och sänka skickligheten att utföra sitt arbete, då relationer kan påverkas negativt.

This thesis analyzes the National Adaptation Programs of Action (NAPA) that aredeveloped for the least developed countries within the United Nations FrameworkConvention of Climate Change. The NAPAs are developed to help the least developedcountries to deal with the challenges that are likely to occur due to climate changeissues. Within the United Nations there is strong consensus that gender mainstreamingmust be a part of all of the strategies implemented within the UN.By analyzing the NAPAs concerning food security and energy using gender theory anddiscourse analysis it is clear that gender is often overlooked when creating solutionsfor future issues that are likely to be caused by climate change. The energy sector inparticular overlook the needs of women in rural areas and have a clear male bias. In theNAPAs concerning food security women’s participation is slightly more present, butthere is a clear lack of gender mainstreaming in the documents.

Media in Nairobi is segmented when it comes to news and information; different media target different audience groups in the society through their preferred channels in search of news and information.     In Kibera, the biggest slum area in Nairobi and in whole East Africa, the urban slum community radio station Pamoja FM only works for the citizens living within Kibera. We aimed to find out how the youth in Kibera perceive the efficacy of the radio station as a viable source of news and information. We wanted to establish how important this radio station is to them as a tool of empowerment and knowledge to the youth.   Through semi-structured interviews with the youth in Kibera we carried out a qualitative research study during ten weeks, from October until December in 2011. We walked the field in Kibera to gather as much data as possible, and our findings were very interesting.   Key theories used in this study included the participatory communication model, the media dependency model and the uses and gratifications model.   The findings indicated that Pamoja FM has a great influence in the community as it is considered the most important source for news and information for the youth in this slum, and provides a platform that meets their needs as active participating audiences to the content supplied by the radio station. The radio is accredited to have changed the citizens´ way of thinking about tribalism since the post-election violence in 2007; the young women have assertively declared their space by playing a more proactive role in the community and audiences are empowered with home-grown problem solving skills that have bettered their lives and in pursuit for peace.

<p>This study was performed during the period March – May of 2007 in Kampala and Gulu district, Uganda, and it was made possible due to a scholarship from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). The main focus of the study is to examine and analyse the peace process taking place in Juba (the Juba talks), southern Sudan, with the goal to solve the 20 year old conflict in northern Uganda between the government of Uganda and the rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army. I am doing this by, first; identify the actors involved by using John Paul Lederach’s pyramid which includes three levels of actors, second; study different methods for peacebuilding and thereafter identify which methods have been used in the Ugandan case and third; discover to what extent the civil society and more specifically women’s organisations have contributed to this process.</p><p>The data collected consist of qualitative literature studies, analyses of articles dealing with the peace talks and interviews with representatives from different levels of the Ugandan society.</p><p>The analyse of the material shows that all levels of the society have been involved to some extent, but that the peace process is mainly characterized by the top-down approach to peacebuilding, with the top level leaders as the main actors. I also found that women’s organisations in Uganda want to engender the peace talks, for example by bringing women to the negotiation table and let them participate in high level decision-making. Finally, the civil society has in general contributed to a large extent to the negotiations in order to bring peace, yet with different results.</p>