Land and housing practices in Namibia: cases of access to land rights and production of housing in Windhoek, Oshakati and Gobabis

As in many other places, socio-spatial production in modern Namibia has been a top-down practice approached in professionalised and standards-oriented ways, focused on outputs. 'Participation’ or involvement of 'beneficiaries’ has over time been added to the repertoire of such practices, but this remains driven by a one-dimensional definition of what’s 'better’. Even when the modernist and centrally-controlled practice of Apartheid is generally condemned, its ways with regards to spatial production remain largely unquestioned and, by consequence, preserved and expanded. At the same time, the urban transformation that Namibia has seen in recent decades has been astonishing. These changes expose the limits of previous approaches and at the same time lay bare new openings for socio-spatial production. There are various practices that have been part of this urban transformation, but they remain largely undocumented. Furthermore, even when they are approached, they tend to be assessed in terms of their outcomes; relegating the ways of the process as a matter of lesser importance. My research accounts for three practices of socio-spatial production in three urban areas in Namibia today. These spaces have been the result of a considerable number of iterations, and have been made possible through the contribution of a wide array of participants; many of them performing beyond their 'main’ role. I have documented these practices from their beginnings up to the point in which they are today. My research is structured as a case study. Within it, I have undertaken semi-structured qualitative interviews with participants, and also employed maps, official documents, and photographs to triangulate the accounts. I have then brought these together with debates on co-production and autogestion, exploring whether the practices can be understood in these terms. Other subsidiary debates fundamentally related to these two are those on state and civil-society divisions; the nature of grassroots associations ('social movements’); and on-going and long-standing debates on land and housing. My analysis suggests that, while the way in which the practices take place varies greatly, they can be considered the sites of various kinds of innovation. I have also found that the 4 ways of the grassroots, while having legitimacy and equality as strong values, show new options in terms of representation. I have found that co-production, as understood in the more recent literature, is a useful way to understand the practices, particularly if a variety of strategies is recognised. Autogestion is a useful term to keep in mind, and although such term has some overlaps with the recent concepts of autogestion, only some understandings of the term stemming from practice enable a reading of the cases I document. The division between civil society and the state today consists of a constellation of parties not necessarily fitting in these two categories. The practices stand also as the more recent evidence within a trajectory of production of space undertaken through a social process involving the grassroots in Namibia, one in which visibility and participation are no longer the only aims, but where negotiation and some degree of autonomy is sought. Lastly, land ownership (real or perceived) emerges as a powerful force in making the process collective and enabling socio-spatial development. Land rights are exercised throughout, often irrespective of the degree of de jure tenure at stake. Housing becomes a devise for savings and resource mobilisation, as well as an income-generating activity sometimes enabling further livelihoods. My study adds to on-going debates on co-production, and to some extent to those on autogestion. For the first, it expands on earlier observations that brought the term to the socio-spatial realm and provides new openings for the term to establish bridges to other debates. It also contributes to the archive of socio-spatial practices in Namibia, and to the pending project of a socio-spatial history of the country. It provides new insights for those engaged in socio-spatial production of what are the experiences and the openings for a new kind of practice that moves away from the assumptions that have placed us in the urban crisis that characterises our times

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Book Review of Gaya Makaran and Pabel Lópe

Contributions (possible) of lacanian psychoanalysis to the non-essentialist feminist theorization

With the aim of contributing to the theory of feminist emancipation policy, the work supports five confluences of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalyst's approaches to non-essentialist feminisms. For this, a review is carried out that systematizes the Lacanian developments in four theoretical waves, the same ones that are located in the critical tradition to the approaches on women proposed by Sigmund Freud, tradition exerted from feminism and from psychoanalysis. On this basis, and without ignoring the different discursive and political nature of Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism, five contributions are proposed that constitute both starting points for a theorization to come: the relations between subject and emancipation, the objection to identity essentialisms, criticism of the gender-gender distinction, the relationships between woman-body-motherhood; and, finally, the possibilities of retaking and developing irrevocable Freudian approaches about the unconscious, the drive (Trieb) and the civilization and its discontents

The strong gravitational field regime of compact objects beyond General Relativity

The maturity of experimental probes of the strong field regime of gravity, both in terms of sensitivity and number of observations, offers hope in discriminating General Relativity (GR) from alternative theories of gravity in the near future. At present, such probes include gravitational-wave observations with ground-based interferometers, 1.3 mm electromagnetic observations with Very-Large-Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) and binary pulsar observations. For these, a prominent role is played by compact objects, which source strong (and in some cases highly dynamical) gravitational fields, and therefore make up the main target of such observations. Most efforts so far have focused on computing strong field predictions for compact objects in GR. However, if one aims to fairly discriminate among them, the same predictions need to be obtained for theories beyond GR. The purpose of this Thesis is to explore various aspects of compact objects in theories beyond GR where strong gravitational fields are relevant. We begin by studying k-essence, a scalar-tensor theory motivated as a viable dynamical explanation for Dark Energy. Derivative self-interactions provide (through a kinetic screening mechanism) the suppression of the extra scalar force needed to satisfy local gravitational constraints. We first explore ways to ensure that the theory admits a well-posed initial-value problem, a mathematical property that is essential for obtaining predictions in the strong field with numerical relativity. We then show how some of the lessons learned for k-essence can also be applied to self-interacting massive vector theories. In addition, we explore the resilience of kinetic screening with different possibilities in which the scalar can couple to the matter sector. We then turn our attention to the question of whether gravity can be constrained with black hole images from VLBI, and whether this can be done in spite of uncertainties in the astrophysical modelling of the system. We present a proof-of-principle demonstration of a theory-agnostic framework to reconstruct simultaneously both the underlying geometry and accretion behind these images. Our framework makes use of a general parametrization for these properties and of a Principal Component Analysis to mitigate the degeneracies linked to the presence of a large number of parameters. Finally, we consider the question of whether quantum gravity can provide a resolution to the issue of singularities inside black holes. We do so in the context of (2+1) projectable Hořava gravity, a Lorentz-violating quantum gravity candidate that has been shown to be renormalizable (beyond power counting) and ultraviolet complete. We obtain all circularly-symmetric stationary solutions and show that, in spite of naive expectations, solutions that reduce to BHs at low energies remain singular in the interior

Football as a cultural product: Review and bibliographical analysis

Dado el interés que encierra el fútbol para el conocimiento del comportamiento humano en sociedad, con el propósito de facilitar la formación teórica de quienes en el futuro emprendan proyectos de investigación, orientados hacia una mejor comprensión de este deporte desde la perspectiva de las Ciencias Sociales, en el presente ensayo revisamos y analizamos una amplia muestra bibliográfica que permite alumbrar el estado de la cuestión del fútbol como producto cultural. Revisión y análisis que ofrecen una visión panorámica sobre el asunto en cuestión en base a cinco apartados: proceso histórico y atención mediática; evolución de los estadios: el factor seguridad; simbolismo y ritual: la exaltación de la identidad; violencia y racismo; y educación en valoresSince the interest that the football/soccer encloses for the knowledge of human behavior in society, with the purpose of facilitate the theoretical training of those which in the future will undertake research projects, oriented towards a better understanding of this sport from the Social Sciences perspective, in this essay we review and analyze a wide sample of literature that leaves us illuminate the status of the issue, of football/soccer as a cultural product. Review and analysis offers a panoramic view about the matter, based on five points: historical process and media attention; development of stadiums: safety factor; symbolism and ritual: the exaltation of identity; violence and racism; and values educatio

Re: Alemtuzumab-Induced Resolution of Pulmonary Noninfectious Complications in a Patient with Chronic Graft-versus-Host Disease

This study investigated the validation of the psychological resilience scale adaptation from youth development module (RYDM) for secondary school. The psychological RYDM is measured by six factors psychological assets was strongly associated with students academic success. A sample of study is 158 seventh grade students from five secondary schools in Singaraja, Bali Province (75 or 47.4% male and 83 or 52.6%  female, with age range 12-13 years). The constructs validation was conduct by exploratory factor analysis (EFA) method, with SPSS 22.0. Five iterations of the EFA reducing 18 original items to 14 items and 6 original factors to 5 factors. Five factors and 14 items produced are consistent with the conceptual basis used in the original RYDM. The stability of new five factors is formed by a split sample analysis method showed the all of the items of factors identified in the earlier testing stable adequacy of forming a common factor in this analysis in the first and second iteration. The results of analysis the item-total correlation on 14 item (n = 158) showed Cronbach's Alpha value of 0.777. Implications the study for guidance and counseling practice in schools is discussed