Browsing by study line "Globaali kehitystutkimus"

This master's thesis is an empirical case study of Mahahual, Quintana Roo. With tourism ranking as the second-largest contributor to Mexico's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), this research seeks to unravel the nuanced dynamics surrounding the sector's substantial water consumption, tourism governance, and water governance. The study argues that by not acknowledging the tourist sector's dependency on and the massive use of water resources in water governance, Mexico creates and supports water extractivism. In this sense, water is used as a natural resource to create economic benefits from tourism. At the same time, tourism-related harms, both social and environmental, are seen as unintended consequences of tourism as an economic activity, causing unequal access to water as a resource and heightening local resistance.

South Africa as a country has been portrayed as an exception when it comes to protecting LGBT rights in Africa. In previous research on South Africa, sexuality, gender and race have been found to be crucial components of oppressive structures. However, the discursive practices and sedimented orders governing queerness, a substructure of normative sexuality and gender, have not been thoroughly examined. In this thesis it was questioned, how queerness has been made governable in South Africa through time. An additional centre of interest was to examine, how an influential non-profit organisation Gender DynamiX has recently tried to these orders. The thesis contributes to the efforts of queering development. Informed by intersectional feminism, Africana womanism, queer theory, post-colonialism, as well as Critical Discourse Analysis and Qualitative Content Analysis, the orders of discourse governing South queerness, as well as Gender DynamiX’s dominant discursive practices to change these orders, were analysed. The material analysed in the thesis consisted mainly of academic literature, and publications that the organisation has produced independently or in co-operation with other actors It was found that the historically moulded orders of discourse governing the field of South African queerness, a discursive substructure addressing deviance from the hegemonic South African system of normative sexuality and gender, is being produced and reproduced in contemporary South African society. These discriminatory orders of discourse have been made to support the colonial enterprise, the white apartheid state, and more recently black and religious identity politics. Thus, various actors have discriminatorily used queerness in a utilitarian manner to demarcate a line between us and them, between natural and unnatural, godly and ungodly, and more contemporarily the ones who tolerate and ones to be tolerated. However, it was found that these orders of discourse have been under transformation since the end of apartheid and the birth of the democratic nation. The discursive practices of gay and lesbian activists were crucial in changing these orders of queerness, and there has been some success in institutionalising and popularising the rights of sexual minorities. However, the issue of trans and gender non-conforming rights remains largely neglected in these moderately changed orders of queerness. Additionally, in the case study it was found that Gender DynamiX has pursued to affect these orders of discourse with an attuned and innovative discursive practice. More concretely, it has pursued to present especially racialised queers as active knowing subjects in different ways. This innovative discursive practice has the potential in dismantling the racialised hierarchical system of orders of normative sexuality and gender and the utilitarian orders that govern queerness in South Africa. More research on the development of Gender Dynamix’s discursive practice and the orders of queerness in South Africa would be beneficial to conduct.

This thesis is a spatiovisual photographic investigation of Singapore. It links to the discussion of human ecology. The thematic object of the thesis is that of human-nature relationship. Its primary produce is the empirical data collected which is described and analysed. Foundations and possibilities of such an endeavour are discussed and affirmed when the positionality of the researcher is contemplated. The complexities and details of those cities that are seen as examples need to be studied, a vision shouldn’t be simply moved from a context to another.