Browsing by Subject "Zambia"
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Item Bordering State and Society: Community Schools in Zambia(2019-08) Bamattre, RichardAmidst an international push for education for all, people in Zambia began building their own schools most notably in the 1990s. These so-called community schools make up a significant portion of the country's primary school system and potentially represent fundamental changes in the border between state and society in providing education. In this dissertation, I question: why community schools exist in Zambia and continue to operate; how they have been rationalized by the state and public; what learning outcomes result from a bordering between government and community schools. Using a mixed methods framework grounded in critical realism, I analyzed policies, interviews, public opinion surveys, and literacy and numeracy assessment data. I found that community schools existed prior to the 1990s, but in a politically different way. After 1991, these schools grew organically nationwide, amidst an economic crisis, structural adjustment policies, and an unprecedented drop in education financing. In the following decades, the Zambian state promoted different borderings between itself and society, from promoting an explicit neoliberal view of parental responsibility in education to supervising a parallel system of state and community schools. While I find evidence that state and community schools serve similar populations, students who attend community schools have significantly lower learning outcomes even after controlling for factors that should explain the difference. At the same time, there are additional inequities in this parallel system related to the location of schools and the household socio-economic status of students. Findings are significant for both theory and practice: among other implications, this study points to the opportunities for mixed methods research in education, and highlights how conceptions of state and society in schooling – whether made explicit or not – can have political and practical consequences.Item Essays in Applied and Theoretical Microeconomics(2017-04) Kitsuki, AkinoriThis dissertation consists of three essays that contribute to both applied and theoretical microeconomics. The first two essays provide a theoretical framework, empirical evidence, and an empirical strategy for a better understanding of the seasonality of food insecurity in developing countries, with a special focus on seasonal price changes of staple foods. More specifically, the first essay constructs a theoretical model to analyze how seasonal price changes of a staple food affect farmers' seasonal consumption in developing countries, where storage of the staple food can be used to smooth consumption. Crucially, sharp increases in the price of the staple food just before harvest can be viewed as a high return to savings, and this has important implications for interpreting the consumption and savings behavior of poor rural households. Then, the second essay addresses whether and how farmers smooth their consumption within a crop year, using three years of weekly household panel data from rural Zambia. Given seasonal price changes of the staple food, maize, some farmers buy it when prices are low and store it for consumption during the hunger season, while others run out of the staple food before the next harvest, and so buy it when prices are high. Results indicate that the former group successfully smooths its consumption, while the latter group reduces consumption during the hunger season in response to a negative harvest at the end of the previous crop year, and the effect of these negative harvest shocks produces an inverse U consumption pattern during the crop year, especially for farmers with few assets. These farmers reduce their consumption of non-staple foods and thus reduce their food diversity to maintain consumption of the staple food in the hunger season in spite of its price hike in that season. The third essay proposes an empirical strategy (the network approach) to analyze complex interactions among several agents, and illustrates how this approach works by applying it to the analysis of soccer games. By using a longitudinal data set of all soccer players in the top German league (the Bundesliga) over the course of ten seasons (2000/01-2009/10), causal peer effects during soccer games are identified. This unique identification strategy is applicable for other studies to analyze complex interactions without simplifying the structure of those interactions.Item Undermining the urban present: Struggles over toxicity and environmental knowledge in Zambian mining cities(2019-10) Waters, HillaryThe crux of this dissertation is twofold: first, I investigate Mopani Copper Mine in Mufulira and the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mine’s (ZCCM) Kabwe lead mine to analyze how state and corporate actors evade responsibility for industrial contamination and its associated environmental and human destruction. Second, I think through how to understand, legitimize, and value in one kind of ‘minor’ knowledge, which I have termed embodied knowledge. The first section of the dissertation analyzes how Mopani, ZCCM, and the Zambian government produce an abstract regulatory apparatus, a particular way of framing, measuring, and legitimizing knowledge about the environment that silences its critics. This is done by manufacturing ignorance, telling simple fictions, and promoting enumerations that mean very little about what actually matters. This in turn compels residents of adjacent mining Townships to wait amidst life-threatening toxicity, despite their valiant efforts. The second section of the dissertation re-thinks what it means to wait in this instance, arguing that residents are not passive but are instead constantly moving and furious. The final section builds the concept of embodied knowledge, which I define as a way of knowing and claiming expertise through a sustained connection between bodies and place. Embodied knowledge arises from sensing, emplacement, and recounting. Finally, I argue that this knowledge—acquired while enduring the quasi-event of toxicity—has the potential to upend the apparatus by questioning its legitimacy.