Citizens of nowhere? asymmetrical displacements in Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente, Florianópolis, 2010Este estudo discute os deslocamentos assimétricos de uma mulher branca ocidental e de um homem negro oriental no romance O Engate de Nadine Gordimer. Os personagens são analisados em relação ao processo de cruzamento de fronteiras entre Ocidente e Oriente dentro da perspectiva da globalização. Os resultados demonstram que a mulher branca ocidental é uma turista em conflito com seus próprios privilégios enquanto o homem negro oriental luta para se libertar de seu enquadramento histórico - esses resultados confirmam minhas hipóteses de que o deslocamento está relacionado à mobilidade social e que produz assimetrias sócias entre os dois personagens do romance.This study discusses the asymmetrical displacements of a white Western woman and a black Eastern man in Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup. The characters are analyzed in their process of border crossing between West and East taking into consideration the perspective of globalization. The findings demonstrate that the white Western woman is a tourist in conflict with her own privileges whereas the black Eastern man is the exiled who struggles in order to release himself from his historical framing - which confirms my hypotheses that displacement is related to social mobility and that it produces social asymmetries between the two main characters

Bolivia during the global crisis 1998-2004: towards a ‘macroeconomics of microfinance

The macroeconomic role of microfinance appears to have varied enormously between country cases, as notably exposed by the recent wave of macro-economic crises. For example, in Indonesia in the late 1990s microfinance appears to have played a notably counter-cyclical role, whereas in Bolivia, the main focus of this paper, its role was in most cases to intensify rather than restrain the crisis. We find part of the explanation for this in the behaviour of government towards microfinance (much more conciliatory towards defaulting debtors in the Bolivian case) and in the structure of demand (unfavourable, in Bolivia, to the distribution and service sector which is the main market for microenterprise). However, closer examination of the Bolivian case suggests that institutional design also played an important role. In particular, those organisations which provided savings, training and quasi-insurance services bucked the trend of rising default rates and falling lending through the crisis and did particularly well, whereas the new breed of consumer-credit microfinance organisations did particularly badly and in several cases went out of business. This experience suggests,in particular, that it may be appropriate to call into question the fashionable´ minimalist´ (credit-only) model of microfinance, as certainly in Bolivia it was principally the credit-plus institutions which proved more financially disciplined and more resilient to crisis

The desire to blame Greece for the eurocrisis ensures that the Greek people pay the price, while the elites responsible get away free

In the first of two articles on the Greek crisis as a ‘trope’, Daniel M. Knight writes that Greece now finds itself subject to a narrative of blame from the countries of the European north, with the Greek people portrayed as the cause of the eurozone crisis, rather than as victims. He argues that this narrative, alongside new waves of austerity, is helping to create a tangible sense of destitution and persecution among the Greek people

The impact of an intervention to introduce malaria rapid diagnostic tests on fever case management in a high transmission setting in Uganda: A mixed-methods cluster-randomized trial (PRIME).

Rapid diagnostic tests for malaria (mRDTs) have been scaled-up widely across Africa. The PRIME study evaluated an intervention aiming to improve fever case management using mRDTs at public health centers in Uganda. A cluster-randomized trial was conducted from 2010-13 in Tororo, a high malaria transmission setting. Twenty public health centers were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to intervention or control. The intervention included training in health center management, fever case management with mRDTs, and patient-centered services; plus provision of mRDTs and artemether-lumefantrine (AL) when stocks ran low. Three rounds of Interviews were conducted with caregivers of children under five years of age as they exited health centers (N = 1400); reference mRDTs were done in children with fever (N = 1336). Health worker perspectives on mRDTs were elicited through semi-structured questionnaires (N = 49) and in-depth interviews (N = 10). The primary outcome was inappropriate treatment of malaria, defined as the proportion of febrile children who were not treated according to guidelines based on the reference mRDT. There was no difference in inappropriate treatment of malaria between the intervention and control arms (24.0% versus 29.7%, adjusted risk ratio 0.81 95\% CI: 0.56, 1.17 p = 0.24). Most children (76.0\%) tested positive by reference mRDT, but many were not prescribed AL (22.5\% intervention versus 25.9\% control, p = 0.53). Inappropriate treatment of children testing negative by reference mRDT with AL was also common (31.3\% invention vs 42.4\% control, p = 0.29). Health workers appreciated mRDTs but felt that integrating testing into practice was challenging given constraints on time and infrastructure. The PRIME intervention did not have the desired impact on inappropriate treatment of malaria for children under five. In this high transmission setting, use of mRDTs did not lead to the reductions in antimalarial prescribing seen elsewhere. Broader investment in health systems, including infrastructure and staffing, will be required to improve fever case management

Children’s migration as a household/family strategy: Coping with AIDS in Lesotho and Malawi

This paper examines the diverse ways in which southern African households/families employ children’s migration as a strategy to enable them to cope with the impacts of HIV/AIDS. Based on qualitative research with both guardians and migrant children, it explores how decisions are made concerning where children should live. Such decisions are aimed at both meeting children’s needs and also using their capacities in meeting wider household needs. Hence strategies adopted are often compromises, based on the sense of obligation of individual relatives, household resources and needs, the perceived needs and capabilities of children, and children’s own preferences

Hip Hop Videos and Black Identity in Virtual Space

In this paper, I present an understanding of music videos as useful representations of the dynamism of blackness and black identity and in fact indicative of a post-regional turn in Hip Hop. In order to illustrate, I first examine how blackness is expressed in physical space with the advent of New York City\u27s block parties and the Bay Area\u27s hyphy movement. I then situate the importance of the music video in a contemporary understanding of visualized culture in virtual space. Applying this understanding to the performance and perception of blackness, I use the example of Canadian Hip Hop artist Drake\u27s journey of self-representation and identification, following the trajectory of his career through music video creation. In doing so, I argue that technological innovation serves as the moment and the means to visualise evolving identity as is articulated by Hip Hop and the music video

Identifying ‘Immigrants’ through Violence: Memory, Press, and Archive in the making of ‘Bangladeshi Migrants’ in Assam

This research studies the violent conflict between Bengali Muslims, who mostly migrated from the former East Bengal during colonial times, and the Bodo Tribe, who mostly follow the Bathou religion in the Bodoland region of Assam. This conflict is often seen through the preexisting lens of communal violence between Hindus and Muslims in India. Here, conflict between a religious minority and an ethnic one is investigated in its locality and this investigation highlights the complex history of the region and its part in shaping this antagonism. It does so by looking into the colonial archive which introduced the category of ‘immigrant’ to the region, together with Urdu and English press coverage of four violent events that essentialize the categories ‘Muslim’ and ‘immigrant’, respectively. Defying simple categorization, the Bengali Muslims in the Kokrajhar district have devised their own strategy for narrating time. Through archival and ethnographic research this study shows the shifting meaning of the concept of an ‘immigrant’ and its implication for social and political realities. This research addresses some less studied dynamics of the clash between two minorities and its representation in both the English and Urdu Media

Solutions for Financial Inclusion: Serving Rural Women

This document presents a CaseStudy for solutions for financial inclusion. Using Uganda as a CaseStudy, Women's World Banking set out to better understand the needs of rural women and to use the research and lessons learned there to make recommendations on the design and delivery of microfinance products within Uganda and throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The research highlights the specific gender-based social, cultural and legal barriers that rural women face in accessing and using financial services and examines operational challenges to effectively serving this market

Heritage, health and place:The legacies of local community-based heritage conservation on social wellbeing

Geographies of health challenge researchers to attend to the positive effects of occupying, creating and using all kinds of spaces, including 'green space' and more recently 'blue space'. Attention to the spaces of community-based heritage conservation has largely gone unexplored within the health geography literature. This paper examines the personal motivations and impacts associated with people's growing interest in local heritage groups. It draws on questionnaires and interviews from a recent study with such groups and a conceptual mapping of their routes and flows. The findings reveal a rich array of positive benefits on the participants' social wellbeing with/in the community. These include personal enrichment, social learning, satisfaction from sharing the heritage products with others, and less anxiety about the present. These positive effects were tempered by needing to face and overcome challenging effects associated with running the projects thus opening up an extension to health-enabling spaces debates