Browsing by Subject "inequality"

By exploring touristic practices around particular forms of West African dance and music cultures, this study discusses how structures of global inequality are enacted on a micro-level. The study aims to understand the social relations and subjectivities embedded in them in the context of dance and music workshops for tourists in southern Senegal. A focus on dance and music allows to ask, whether these artistic endeavors provide some progressive or transformational potentials often ascribed to them, whereas the perspective of tourism enables to simultaneously consider the social and material relations of production in the context. This study is an attempt to explore the maintenance of as well as ways of challenging the inequality producing ‘social structures’ by combining postcolonial perspectives, certain ideas from ANT tradition, and theorizations of affects and emotions as productive and hence, political. This study applies an ethnographic approach. The fieldwork was conducted in southern Senegal, in December 2016 and January 2017, on touristic dance and music workshops. The research material consists of 11 thematic interviews with workshop tourists, organizers, and artists, participatory observation, background interviews and document material. The researcher’s long-term participation in the field is also reflexively considered as a source of research material and a tool for analysis. The context was understood through relations of work and dependency, yet also alternative translations and subjectivities were enabled. The context’s social relations were also informed by a desire for the Other, intensive circulation of positive affects, and reproduction of stereotypes of Africa. Disruptive affects stemming from asymmetric power structures were dealt with techniques of individualization. The research shows how the context is profoundly entangled with asymmetric and historical relations of power and inequality, and that these relations are naturalized by certain techniques of concealment. Yet, the context retains enabling possibilities as well. The study shows how affects are productive in the context, suggesting that they firmly attach subjects to problematic structures. Though the complexity and ambivalence of the maintenance of inequality producing structures is a theoretical starting point, this study points to the endurance of these problematic structures by exploring their affective extents. The study adds to a body of research on cultural tourism and shows the importance of looking outside the traditional spheres of developmental and political action in order to understand the complexities of global inequality. The study also gestures that further attention should be given to the relevance and possibilities of such concepts as affects and emotions in the field of development studies, too.

The aim of this study is to examine parents’ learning-related mindsets and parental praise in two different neighbourhoods. The framework for this study comes from Carol Dweck’s (1999, 2006) mindset theory which proposes that people hold different implicit beliefs about the malleability of human attributes, such as intelligence and giftedness. The characteristic of human nature is the capability to change and grow. A person with a growth mindset believes that qualities are malleable and can be developed over time, but having a fixed mindset, core qualities are perceived as built in and fixed by nature. This research context centres around the findings of increased social segregation and differentiation in education across families, and hence concern about educational equality. Mindsets develop in the environment where people grow up, most notably at school and home. Previous research has established that parents’ implicit beliefs about learning play an essential role in child’s development, and parental praise is a significant vehicle to support the implicit beliefs of children and improve learning. The data of this quantitative case study (N = 693) was collected with a questionnaire during the years 2016–2017 as part of a Copernicus research project. K-means clustering was used to form intelligence and giftedness mindset groups and differences between groups were analysed using Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis -tests. Based on exploratory factor analysis, the different ways of parental praise were compared with Mann-Whitney U tests and linear regression analysis was utilized to identify how given feedback is related to parents’ mindsets. Cronbach alpha was used to evaluate the internal reliability of the sums of variables. The results indicated that there were significant differences between the mindsets that caregivers hold and groups of fixed, growth and mixed mindset were found. Intelligence is perceived as a more malleable trait than giftedness among parents. This study also revealed gender and socioeconomic differences in mindsets. Four ways of parental praise were discovered: neutral, process, person and luck praise. The parents were more likely to adopt neutral and process praise, but differences between schools were also found. Parents’ growth mindset indicates at least partially given process praise and luck praise is explained by fixed mindset. Findings suggest that parents might not know how to actualize their growth mindset in process-focused praise.

This Master’s Thesis discusses the politicization of social movements through the case study of the Chilean university student movement between the years 2011 and 2017. The main objective of this research is to identify the effects of the politicization of the national university movement on the educational reforms carried by the government from 2014 onwards. The term politicization shall be related to the movement’s levels of embedded autonomy across time and is assumed to be essential to the changes taking place at the political dimension. The research was carried through an extensive analysis of both primary and secondary data, including more than 170 news articles; books written by two former student leaders; organizational and governmental reports; public and private statistics; and six reform bills. The collected data was examined through a diachronic incorporated comparison and a temporal qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). This Master’s Thesis main theoretical framework is aligned with Markus Kröger’s Theory of Contentious Agency and his notion of embedded autonomy within the state. Through a temporal qualitative analysis of five contentious mechanisms that define the level of embeddedness of social movements, it was possible to analyze the strategies used by the Chilean university student movement on a yearly basis, since 2011, and relate it to their overall influence on the national educational agenda. The findings presented point out to the embeddedness of the university student movement within the State – and therefore its politicization - from 2014 onwards, mainly as a result of the mobilization space and efforts from the previous years. I assume that the effects of the politicization of the Chilean university student movement, in line with its embedded autonomy post-2014, can be verified through the approval of four educational reform laws that addressed some of the students’ main demands, including: increasing public spending on higher education and strengthening public universities; implementing new criteria for access to public universities; gradual universal gratuity in higher education; criminalization of profit in the education system; recognition of education as a right; and progressive advancements on students’ participatory rights in state-controlled universities.

This thesis has focused on Afro-Peruvian adolescents’ perceptions on education and future in the context of the poor and violent urban neighbourhood of La Victoria, Lima. The objectives of the study were to find out how the subjective experiences of the adolescents and their thoughts on social reality are directing the formation of values and practises and what factors affect their views, actions and decision-making. The study is based on 13 semi-structured interviews with the adolescents. In addition I have used participant observation, background interviews, lectures and seminars to complement my data. As a theoretical framework I applied Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and capitals combined with intersectionality – a concept borrowed from feminist studies that allowed me to look for relationships and differences of race, class, ethnicity and gender, and to explore the interconnections between different factors that can be found in the background of the adolescents’ decision-making processes. The factors producing inequalities in La Victoria are multiple. In the context of the study, poverty and social class have more significance for the adolescents than ethnicity. Poverty can be seen both as a concrete and a structural obstacle, whereas ethnicity is more structural and therefore invisible. Through habitus one learns to make choices that appear obvious, although they have been learned socially and culturally. Therefore, social structures become visible through people’s individual choices and actions. Poverty among the adolescents appears as socio-cultural poverty that places them in a marginal. It limits their possibilities to access capitals and to make adequate choices and decisions regarding their life and future. In many of the cases poverty can be seen as reproduction of a certain culture, a set of assumed values, attitudes and forms of behaviour that create a lifestyle ruled by maintaining survival strategies. The interviews demonstrate that the adolescents’ perceptions about education and future opportunities are constructed on the basis of multiple interconnections between social class, ethnicity, age and place. In their perceptions, class and place seem to be important producers of power that limit the possibilities to act and make decisions regarding education. The general attitude of the adolescents and the tone of voice remain fairly positive. However, it can be concluded that there is a big contrast between dreams, speech and actions. The adolescents believed to have better opportunities than their parents, but did not always transform this attitude into concrete actions. They recognised the adverse aspects of the socio-economic context, but thought that their will and motivation were exceeding them.

The majority of the people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in Finland are outside the labour market, even though their constitutional rights are the equal to those of a non-disabled person. There are a multitude of prejudices towards disability, and specifically towards people with IDDs. Those prejudices impact the way a person with IDD can carry out their working life citizenship in the way they want to. This paper focuses on the Finnish disability pension system and if the system in itself limits the self-determination of a person with IDD. The paper utilises two sets of data. Documents of law preparation and laws themselves are looked into. In addition, 10 interviews have been conducted, consisting of eight interviews with experts by experience and two organisation experts. Thematic analysis was used in both sets of data, and it is done in two parts. Document analysis handles the institutional change within the last 50 years and the interview analysis consists of how people with IDD themselves see the disability pension system. Slightly prior and especially after the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the Finnish lawmaking has been more inclusive of people with IDDs, although the grounds on which the laws are built on seem to stay similar over time. The disability pension system is seen as a functioning safety net, but also as a somewhat restrictive. The experts by experience were often unsure when the decision regarding their pension had been made, and they felt that their possible entry to labour markets is not discussed enough with them, even if they were motivated to join the labour markets. Even as the disability pension system creates a sense of safety for one’s income, the current form of the system also restricts the self-determination of people with IDDs. The restrictions are specifically apparent in the lack of choice. The weaknesses of the current system should be recognized, and the future political decision-making should focus on unifying the disability pension system and the quality of the support net.