Examining housing experiences among International Students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK)

As more students from across the world enrol in higher education to take advantage of the opportunities it offers, schools and universities are starting to address a problem that an increasing number of their students are experiencing, namely housing insecurity. With an increase in the number of students due to growing interest in higher education institutions, student housing has become a significant area of concern. More overseas graduate students are pursuing their degrees without regular access to their housing needs due to a lack of inexpensive and accessible housing, high tuition prices, and insufficient financial help. To better understand the distinctive lived experiences of students, this study examines the idea of precarity. It places a particular emphasis on accessibility, affordability, and discrimination, as well as how the fact that these students are international has exacerbated their experiences of housing precarity. The study will examine the difficulties that international students encounter in finding housing and shed light on these students’ experiences and how these differ based on gender, race, and class, among other factors. It will also delve further into some strategies that international students use to assist one another in their search. The study’s conclusion will include recommendations that higher education institutes can employ to ensure more inclusive housing systems

Ghana\u27s petroleum industry: Expectations, frustrations and anger in coastal communities

With much fanfare, Ghana\u27s Jubilee Oil Field was discovered in 2007 and began producing oil in 2010. In the six coastal districts nearest the offshore fields, expectations of oil-backed development have been raised. However, there is growing concern over what locals perceive to be negative impacts of oil and gas production. Based on field research conducted in 2010 and 2015 in the same communities in each district, this paper presents a longitudinal study of the impacts (real and perceived) of oil and gas production in Ghana. With few identifiable benefits beyond corporate social responsibility projects often disconnected from local development priorities, communities are growing angrier at their loss of livelihoods, increased social ills and dispossession from land and ocean. Assuming that others must be benefiting from the petroleum resources being extracted near their communities, there is growing frustration. High expectations, real and perceived grievances, and increasing social fragmentation threaten to lead to conflict and underdevelopment

Neo-liberalism and Resistance in Ghana: Understanding the Political Agency of the Subalterns in Social-historical Context

The dissertation documents distinct elements of the social and historical contexts of Bolivia and Ghana, focusing on underpinnings of differences in political behaviour of the subalterns in an era of neo-liberalism. Unlike their Bolivian counterparts, Ghanaians have not independently resisted the free market policies of a neo-liberal state. The key finding is that a materialist framework of agency in anti-neoliberalism literature does not capture the complexity of subaltern agency and their contradictory political behaviour in the way that a social-historical framework does. In critical theory the term subaltern designates the populations who are outside the hegemonic power structure of the colony.Doctor of Philosoph

Oil-rush, great recession, and ‘development’ implications for Africa: Possibilities, constraints, and contradictions of oil-driven industrialisation in Ghana

The oil peak and the 2007/2008 economic recession are the most recent major global events to destabilise the economies of African countries and to afflict the life chances and social (re) production of the subaltern classes. This paper critically analyses Ghana’s oil and gas industry to illustrate these issues. The paper argues that it is only through the transformation of their economies from commodities frontiers to industrialised economies that African states can minimise the negative impacts of the inherent, cyclical crises of the global capitalist economy on their economies and people. Taking a long, historical perspective of the exploitative insertion of Africa into the global capitalist economy as a commodities-frontier, the paper foregrounds the possibilities, constraints, and contradictions of oil-driven industrialisation of oil-rich African countries such as Ghana. It concludes that, while the Ghanaian state is capable, adept, and ruthless in inflicting the violence of primitive accumulation on its people, it paradoxically protects and enables global capital accumulation by implementing policies that defeat its own industrialisation vision of development

Ocean and land grabbing in Ghana\u27s offshore petroleum industry: From the agrarian question to the question of industrialization

Ghana\u27s petroleum industry is located several nautical miles offshore in the Western Region of the country. Yet, the mechanisms and processes of production and transportation of crude petroleum are accompanied by the dispossessing of the adjoining coastal communities of their means of (re)production both on the ocean and on land. Although the insights of agrarian political economy have been deployed fruitfully to analyse land grabs in Africa, similar efforts are rare when it comes to ocean grabs. With reference to the new development thinking on the ocean economy—or ‘blue economy’—as the new frontier of resource-based industrialization in Africa, we re-frame the agrarian question and apply it to the offshore petroleum industry, expanding agrarian political-economic theory of industrialization beyond its traditional confines of land and agriculture. Our paper makes two main theoretical contributions. First, it contributes to efforts in agrarian political economy to incorporate the ocean and fisheries. Second, we contribute a fresh theoretical framework for analysing offshore petroleum industries and their potential to contribute to industrialization in Africa