Why do seventy percent of Canadian Aboriginal students drop out of school? Although the literature focuses on reform to schools, school systems, and to the formal relationships that govern Aboriginal education, there is, as yet, a lack of empirically-based evidence from the perspectives of the people who have dropped out. The research was conducted in an adult education centre located in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and combines semi-structured interviews with an innovative Bead Workshop field-tested in other areas of identity conflict. The study asked 22 Aboriginal people how they make sense of their education experiences, inquired about why they dropped out of school, and invited them to share their hopes for the future. The trans-disciplinary nature of peace and conflict studies offers a new analysis when data were applied to Lederach’s (2003) conflict transformation framework. The findings showed that the participants quit school in the midst of very difficult and strikingly similar life circumstances, and they did not attribute dropping out to inadequacies in education or schooling, or to the effects of colonialism. The study expands the peace and conflict literature into the Canadian Aboriginal context while establishing a new research design and methodology. The study respects Indigenous research principles and combines them with conflict transformation principles to provide empirical evidence about why Aboriginal students drop out of school, and then extends the theoretical literature with a framework for exploring the role of deeper beliefs like love, courage, and hope in personal conflict transformation. Future research can be undertaken with larger groups of Aboriginal people to better understand their experiences in education and in other important areas of life, and to inform and advise Aboriginal policy and practice.

Can the success of the Sunni Awakening in Iraq be applied to other counter-insurgency conflicts, or is it an exemplary case? Using case studies including Iraq and Afghanistan, it will be examined whether or not militias can be can be used to fight counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and generally to other conflicts. It may not work in Afghanistan, and certainly presents a Catch-22 situation, but it may be applicable in certain situations in other conflicts under certain conditions.

Increasing M&A activity has during recent years shown no indication of slowing down. Contrastingly the success rate of the M&A’s are still low, accordingly an increased frequency of demergers is a likely outcome. The demerger phenomenon has yet to reach the gaze of the academic community, where little is known surrounding the subject. This study takes a qualitative approach to try to understand the underlying reasons that drive a demerger process, and the factors that determine the success of a demerger process, through the lens of M&A literature. Our findings provide indications that the planning and execution of the disintegration and communication within a demerger correlates to demerger success. Furthermore, our contributions give indications that building employee commitment is an essential driver that enhances the possibility of a successful demerger.

The objective of this study was to explore the link between school climate and bullying behaviour through a case study of two high schools. Grade 10 students received the two day Cross-Cultural Conflict Resolution (XCCR) Module initiated by YOUCAN. Phase I of this study involved the development of an XCCR Logic Model, which aimed to clarify the objectives and key elements of the XCCR Module. Phase II involved the in depth analysis of the XCCR Module through an 84-item survey and qualitative semi-structured interviews with school and program staff. Data from this study did not indicate any changes in bullying behaviour or school climate between pre-and post-implementation. This study highlights a need to incorporate measures for program adherence and program fidelity in future studies. The results of this study provided two practical contributions, an XCCR Logic Model and information about bullying and school climate for the participating schools.

Partnering between municipalities within a city-region is not an easy task. Often there are challenges in the partnering process especially in relation to balancing planning and governance. This research examines how city-region partnerships can move beyond conflict to position themselves to be more successful, both locally and globally. The Calgary Regional Partnership (CRP) serves as the main case study. Located in one of Canada’s fastest growing regions, both in terms of population and resource development, the Calgary region is struggling to move forward as a city-region partnership. The struggle appears to be rooted in past regional planning conflicts that have never been adequately resolved. Based on CRP experience, the project examines how city-regions in Canada can move beyond such conflict and associated challenges with particular interest in: the role of planners, the case for collaboration, and the pursuit of a ‘new regionalism’ approach.

<p>At every moment in life we are receiving input from multiple sensory modalities. We are limited, however, in the amount of information we can selectively attend to and fully process at any one time. The ability to integrate the relevant corresponding multisensory inputs together and to segregate other sensory information that is conflicting or distracting is therefore fundamental to our ability to successfully navigate through our complex environment. Such multisensory integration and segregation is done on the basis of temporal, spatial, and semantic cues, often aided by selective attention to particular inputs from one or multiple modalities. The precise nature of how attention interacts with multisensory perception, and how this ramifies behaviorally and neurally, has been largely underexplored. Here, in a series of six cognitive experiments in humans using auditory and visual stimuli, along with electroencephalography (EEG) measures of brain activity and behavioral measures of task performance, I examine the interactions between attention, stimulus conflict, and multisensory processing. I demonstrate that attention can spread across modalities in a pattern that closely follows the temporal linking of multisensory stimuli, while also engendering the spatial linking of such multisensory stimuli. When stimulus inputs either within audition or across modalities conflict, I observe an electrophysiological signature of the processing of this conflict that is similar to what had been previously observed within the visual modality. Moreover, using neural measures of attentional distraction, I show that when task-irrelevant stimulus input from one modality conflicts with task-relevant input from another, attention is initially pulled toward the conflicting irrelevant modality, thereby contributing to the observed impairment in task performance. Finally, I demonstrate that there are individual differences in multisensory temporal processing in the population, in particular between those with extensive action-video-game experience versus those with little. However, everyone appears to be susceptible to multisensory distraction, a finding that should be taken into serious consideration in today's complex world of multitasking.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis aims to address the challenges faced by immigrants to Canada from countries in conflict, namely Turkey and Israel. Through the use of a conceptual framework, this research study identifies how context, conflict and identity impact upon each other and are expressed through insightful narratives. Data collection was conducted in Toronto and Ottawa, Canada, using semi-structured interviews and reflective journals. Findings indicated that regardless of physical proximity to conflict in one’s homeland, it can continue to have an effect – in many cases through familial (sentimental) attachments rather than concern for the country. As well, identity should be considered permeable but also overlapping; emigration does not necessarily entail disengagement from the homeland (or its conflicts). Ultimately, this study examines the interconnected nature of conflict and identity, in both personal and social ways, through immigrants’ perceived engagement in homeland conflict, once in Canada. / Graduate / 0617 / anna.press@gmail.com

The hospitalization of childbirth and maternal care in Sweden is from an international perspective quite unique. It was implemented already in the beginning of the 20th century and fully mainstreamed by the 1960’s. This essay examines the professional discussions of midwives and doctors as depicted in their union’s membership papers, during the hospitalization period. The hospitalization of childbirths presented a shift in responsibility and power from the midwives to the doctors, which has lead previous research to analyse this development as a clear conflict of professional interest. I will argue however that the professional frictions came later, as the midwife profession grew stronger as a collective, and were not so much present in the actual making. This essay investigates why, and touches upon class and gender divergences as explanatory factors. My findings are in part that the overtaking was more elaborate from the doctor’s point of view than the midwives. Through undermining the midwives professional competence, denying them necessary resources and advocating their superiority in the midwives internal debates, the doctor’s managed to steer the development of hospitalization and establish the hierarchy that followed. Today’s lively and sometimes infectious debate on the organization of childbirth and maternal care highlights the necessity for a deeper historical understanding and background to the indeed different positions midwives and doctors take in this regard.

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