Violence against Women Policy and Practice in Uganda - Promoting Justice within the Context of Patriarchy

The goal of this study was to understand how and whether policy and practice relating to violence against women in Uganda, especially Uganda’s Domestic Violence Act of 2010, have had an effect on women’s beliefs and practices, as well as on support and justice for women who experience abuse by their male partners. Research used multi-sited ethnography at transnational, national, and local levels to understand the context that affects what policies are developed, how they are implemented, and how, and whether, women benefit from these. Ethnography within a local community situated global and national dynamics within the lives of women. Women who experience VAW within their intimate partnerships in Uganda confront a political economy that undermines their access to justice, even as a women’s rights agenda is working to develop and implement laws, policies, and interventions that promote gender equality and women’s empowerment. This dissertation provides insights into the daily struggles of women who try to utilize policy that challenges duty bearers, in part because it is a new law, but also because it conflicts with the structural patriarchy that is engrained in Ugandan society. Two explanatory models were developed. One explains factors relating to a woman’s decision to seek support or to report domestic violence. The second explains why women do and do not report DV. Among the findings is that a woman is most likely to report abuse under the following circumstances: 1) her own, or her children’s survival (physical or economic) is severely threatened; 2) she experiences severe physical abuse; or, 3) she needs financial support for her children. Research highlights three supportive factors for women who persist in reporting DV. These are: 1) the presence of an “advocate” or support 2) belief that reporting will be helpful; and, 3) lack of interest in returning to the relationship. This dissertation speaks to the role that anthropologists can play in a multi-disciplinary approach to a complex issue. This role is understanding – deeply and holistically; and, articulating knowledge generated locally that provides connections between what happens at global, national and local levels.

Catalyst: Architecture for Change and Social Justice

In major cities today, there are neighborhoods that have been continually underserved and as a result are in decay. Private investors and developers turn to these particular neighborhoods, propose large developments that gentrify these areas, displacing communities and with them their social, political, and economic issues. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze South West, Baltimore, a community composed of 8 neighborhoods on the verge of being gentrified, by incoming development. Through investigating the key issues present in this community for many years, this thesis will attempt to develop a catalytic environment, which will facilitate change within the community by providing a place for its members to help tackle these issues, improving their circumstances, and the circumstances of the neighborhoods they form part of.

Integrating Environmental Justice and Social-Ecological Resilience for Successful Adaptation to Climate Change: Lessons from African American Communities on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay

This research concerns the conceptual and empirical relationship between environmental justice and social-ecological resilience as it relates to climate change vulnerability and adaptation. Two primary questions guided this work. First, what is the level of resilience and adaptive capacity for social-ecological systems that are characterized by environmental injustice in the face of climate change? And second, what is the role of an environmental justice approach in developing adaptation policies that will promote social-ecological resilience? These questions were investigated in three African American communities that are particularly vulnerable to flooding from sea-level rise on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, I found that in all three communities, religious faith and the church, rootedness in the landscape, and race relations were highly salient to community experience. The degree to which these common aspects of the communities have imparted adaptive capacity has changed over time. Importantly, a given social-ecological factor does not have the same effect on vulnerability in all communities; however, in all communities political isolation decreases adaptive capacity and increases vulnerability. This political isolation is at least partly due to procedural injustice, which occurs for a number of interrelated reasons. This research further revealed that while all stakeholders (policymakers, environmentalists, and African American community members) generally agree that justice needs to be increased on the Eastern Shore, stakeholder groups disagree about what a justice approach to adaptation would look like. When brought together at a workshop, however, these stakeholders were able to identify numerous challenges and opportunities for increasing justice. Resilience was assessed by the presence of four resilience factors: living with uncertainty, nurturing diversity, combining different types of knowledge, and creating opportunities for self-organization. Overall, these communities seem to have low resilience; however, there is potential for resilience to increase. Finally, I argue that the use of resilience theory for environmental justice communities is limited by the great breadth and depth of knowledge required to evaluate the state of the social-ecological system, the complexities of simultaneously promoting resilience at both the regional and local scale, and the lack of attention to issues of justice.

Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990

This study, "Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990," offers a new perspective on the historical origins of the modern prison industrial complex, sexual violence in working-class culture, and the ways in which race shaped the prison experience. This study joins new scholarship that reperiodizes the Civil Rights era while also considering how violence and radicalism shaped the civil rights struggle. It places the criminal justice system at the heart of both an older racial order and within a prison-made civil rights movement that confronted the prison's power to deny citizenship and enforce racial hierarchies. By charting the trajectory of the civil rights movement in Texas prisons, my dissertation demonstrates how the internal struggle over rehabilitation and punishment shaped civil rights, racial formation, and the political contest between liberalism and conservatism. This dissertation offers a close case study of Texas, where the state prison system emerged as a national model for penal management. The dissertation begins with a hopeful story of reform marked by an apparently successful effort by the State of Texas to replace its notorious 1940s plantation/prison farm system with an efficient, business-oriented agricultural enterprise system. When this new system was fully operational in the 1960s, Texas garnered plaudits as a pioneering, modern, efficient, and business oriented Sun Belt state. But this reputation of competence and efficiency obfuscated the reality of a brutal system of internal prison management in which inmates acted as guards, employing coercive means to maintain control over the prisoner population. The inmates whom the prison system placed in charge also ran an internal prison economy in which money, food, human beings, reputations, favors, and sex all became commodities to be bought and sold. I analyze both how the Texas prison system managed to maintain its high external reputation for so long in the face of the internal reality and how that reputation collapsed when inmates, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, revolted. My dissertation shows that this inmate Civil Rights rebellion was a success in forcing an end to the existing system but a failure in its attempts to make conditions in Texas prisons more humane. The new Texas prison regime, I conclude, utilized paramilitary practices, privatized prisons, and gang-related warfare to establish a new system that focused much more on law and order in the prisons than on the legal and human rights of prisoners. Placing the inmates and their struggle at the heart of the national debate over rights and "law and order" politics reveals an inter-racial social justice movement that asked the courts to reconsider how the state punished those who committed a crime while also reminding the public of the inmates' humanity and their constitutional rights.