L'étude de l'atmosphère de la planète Mars repose sur la compréhension de sa structure thermique et du cycle de ses aérosols (poussière minérale et glace d'eau). Pour cela, une méthode de choix est l'utilisation d'un modèle de climat général, comparé aux observations satellite. Dans cette thèse, j'emploie le modèle de climat du Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD), en incluant tout d'abord un schéma de microphysique de la glace d'eau, ce qui permet de mieux reproduire les observations satellite du cycle de l'eau martien. Je poursuis cette étude en mettant en place un schéma d'assimilation de données pour le modèle du LMD. L'assimilation de données est une technique permettant d'estimer l'état atmosphérique grâce à une combinaison optimale d'un modèle et d'observations. L'objectif est d'assimiler des observations de profils verticaux de température, poussière, et glace de l'instrument Mars Climate Sounder avec une méthode de filtre de Kalman d'ensemble. L'assimilation de la température seule montre la nécessité d'estimer la présence et la quantité de poussière au moyen des covariances de l'ensemble pour diminuer le biais entre modèle et observations. L'assimilation conjointe des profils verticaux de température, poussières, et glace d'eau montre que les limitations de l'assimilation sont dues aux biais du modèle : phasage de l'onde de marée thermique, observations de variations diurnes inexpliquées de la poussière, mauvaise prédiction sur l'emplacement des nuages de glace d'eau, et un biais froid du modèle sous le niveau de 100 Pa. Toutefois, l'estimation de la poussière permet une prédictibilité du modèle jusqu'à plus d'une dizaine de jours dans cas les plus favorables. / The study of the atmosphere of Mars is based on the understanding of its thermal structure and the cycle of its aerosols (airborne dust and water ice). To do so, one preferred method is the use of a global climate model, compared to satellite observations.In this thesis, I employ the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD) global climate model, first including a microphysical scheme of water ice clouds, resulting in a better reproduction of satellite observations of the Martian water cycle.I continue this study with the setup of a data assimilation scheme for the LMD model. Data assimilation is a technique that estimates the atmospheric state using an optimal combination of a model and observations. The goal is to assimilate observations of vertical profiles of temperature and aerosols from the instrument Mars Climate Sounder with an ensemble Kalman filter technique. The assimilation of temperature only shows the necessity to estimate dust using the ensemble covariances in order to decrease the bias between model and observations. The joint assimilation of vertical profiles of temperature, dust, and water ice shows that the assimilation performance is limited due to model biases: an incorrect phasing of the thermal tide, unexplained observed dust diurnal variations, a wrong prediction of water ice clouds location, and a model cold bias for temperatures below 100 Pa. However, dust estimation makes possible the predictability of the atmosphere, up to around ten days in the most favorable cases.

In 1991 a private town for Afrikaners was established on the bank of the Orange River, in the semi-desert of South Africa’s Northern Cape Province. As a deliberately Afrikaans, and thus white, community, the town’s aims and existence are controversial, but both its principles and practicalities are not unique. Endeavouring to build an Afrikaner homeland in multiracial South Africa seems incongruous, signalling a retreat from social heterogeneity as a fact of the contemporary world. It raises questions about what people do following a social, political and economic paradigm shift, and about what is occurring within a country with multiple and contradictory accounts of history and a traumatic recent past. It also means resisting the pressure to deal with the past, and therefore the present, in a certain way. Consequently, the frequent question of whether or not the town as an enterprise, or its residents, are racist, reveals instead a complex ordering of society. Life in Orania is filled with ordinary everyday activities of earning a living, raising and educating children, socialising, and practising religion in a town where Christian principles are explicit, each combining elements of intentionality and contingency. Once superficial similarity between residents can be taken for granted, the focus shifts to the differences between them, which rise and fall in importance, highlighting the circumstantial nature of group solidarity. This raises the question of what the differences within the community are, how deeply they reach, and where fundamental commonalities lie that prompt them to choose to build a future together. For the few hundred people involved in the enterprise, Orania is the only way they think they will have a recognisable future: they fear the demise of Afrikaners as an ethnic group through cultural assimilation or dispersal, emigration, and population decline. Their position of victimhood and vulnerability, shaped by the past, shapes their present actions in turn. Afrikaners’ interpretation of themselves as victims is easily supported by the popular historical narrative that Afrikaners have always struggled against outside authorities to be self-determining. This ethnographic study reveals that Orania is a concrete response to the fear that there may not be a place for Afrikaners in South Africa’s future, in the country to which they feel they belong and where their identity is rooted.

This is a multi-method research which consists of four studies. The first examined the influence of cultural values and ethnic identity on collective self-esteem, acculturative stress and attitudes toward seeking psychological help among 117 Saudi students living and studying in the UK, 20 of them were interviewed in the second part of the study in order to examine their acculturation strategies and their attitude toward seeking psychological help. The measures used were: Asian Values Scale (AVS), Male Arab Acculturation Scale (MAAS), Male Arabic Ethnic Identity Measure (MAEIM), Attitudes toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help-Short Form (ATSPPH-SF), and Collective Self-Esteem (CSE-R). The study sample was divided into two groups: 49 (Junior) newly arrived students and 68 (senior) students who had spent more than one year in the UK. Also, gender and marital status were considered as variables. Interviews were conducted to examine the questionnaire's findings in depth. Results supported the hypothesis that adherence to original cultural values is a positive predictor of collective self-esteem. Also it was found that there was a difference between new and senior students in the scores on the following scales: AVS, CSE, SAFE, ATSPP, and MAAS Int. Results also supported the hypothesis that ethnic identity is a positive predictor of collective self-esteem. However, no relation was observed between adherence to original cultural values and students‟ attitudes towards seeking psychological help, acculturative stress, and communication styles. Also, ethnic identity did not correlate with acculturative stress. Regarding gender and marital status, findings suggest that they are not significant predictors of the research‟s dependent variables. In the third part of the study: the researcher examined and measured the effect of providing counselling sessions for a sample of 12 Saudi students during their stay in the UK using a pre- and post- Culture Shock Questionnaire, and results were compared with a control group of 12 Saudi participants who were not engaged in the counselling sessions. Results were statistically significant for the experimental group which indicated a positive effect of providing counseling services for Saudi students. In the fourth part of the study: the researcher measured the effect of reverse culture shock on students who returned home using a modified version of the Home-comer Culture Shock Scales (HCSS) and inviting view participants to take part in un formal interview. The thesis will be concluded with an explanatory conclusion which might lead to further studies.

The treatment of minorities by different states gains scholarly attention in the recent years. This thesis attempts to define the necessary criteria for a state to have in order for its treatment of minorities to be acceptable by the international society. There are three major parts of the thesis. It starts with a thorough investigation of legal dimension of minority rights. The thesis formulates the criteria that a state should meet in the field of national and international law regarding minority rights. The second part investigates the political dimension of the issue. The analysis of political dimension describes the interaction of governments with minorities and the factors influencing the success of minorities in achieving their demands. In the final part of the thesis, the criteria formulated in legal and political dimensions are applied to the case of the Kurdish minority in Turkey. The position of Kurdish minority in the society is unique because of the Turkish state's assimilationist policies towards ethnic minorities till very recent years. The minority rights defined by international society were, therefore, not recognized in Turkey. However, the situation has recently changed. The current government ruled by Justice and Development Party has applied numerous democratization reforms that normalize the position of minorities. The Kurdish minority is not discriminated against as much as it was in the past. In addition to the analysis of the current state of minority rights in Turkey, the thesis proposes opportunities for improvement in the future.

Using ethnographic methods, namely in-depth interviews and participant-observation, I examined the everyday experiences of fifteen female Japanese students during a nine-month study abroad. I attempted to investigate (1) the nature of cultural learning in the participants of this study during their sojourn and (2) how different social networks in the sojourn context affected the processes of their cultural learning and adaptation to the host environment. I employed models of cross-cultural adaptation based on a perspective of cultural learning / social skill acquisition as a theoretical framework. During the first few months in Canada, students without previous international sojourn experiences seemed to be physically and emotionally vulnerable. Some students experienced emotional upheaval which was consistent with previously published accounts of the characteristics of the sojourner adaptation process. A close association of the Japanese within their group throughout their sojourn resulted in the formation of an ethnic enclave in the dormitory community. This provided a support network for most of the Japanese students, but at the same time, caused interpersonal conflicts in the group. The strong group solidarity also negatively affected the relationship between the Japanese students and their Canadian peers in the dormitory. The Japanese students in this study not only had to adapt to the socio-cultural characteristics of the host environment, but also to the norms and values of their own group which reflected their cultural heritage. Although they encountered a number of challenges while in Canada, the process of overcoming difficulties and absorbing new experiences enabled them to grow personally and intellectually. Towards the end of their sojourn and after returning to Japan, the students recognised positive changes in their attitude and behaviour which they attributed to the different experiences they had through their study abroad. While several findings of the study indicated that the participants' adaptation to the new cultural setting reflected theoretical propositions in the cross-cultural adaptation literature, the study also showed how the unique nature of the students' sojourn environment had a significant impact on their adaptation process. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

This research examines the life pathways of 1.5 and second generation Haitian immigrants in South Florida. The purpose of the research is to better understand how integration occurs for the children of Haitian immigrants as they transition from adolescence to adulthood. Building upon a prior study of second-generation immigrant adolescents between 1995 and 2000, a sub-set of the original participants was located to participate in this follow-up research. Qualitative interviews were conducted as well as in-depth ethnographic research, including participant observation. Survey instruments used with other second-generation populations were also administered, enabling comparisons with the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS). The results indicate that educational and occupational achievements were markedly below the participants’ original expectations as adolescents. Gender figures prominently in participants’ familial roles and relationships, with men and women distinctly incorporating both Haitian and American cultural practices within their households. Contrary to previous research, these results on the identification of participants suggest that these young adults claim attachment to both Haiti and to the United States. The unique longitudinal and ethnographic nature of this study contributes to the ongoing discussion of the integration of the children of immigrants by demonstrating significant variation from the prior integration trends observed with Haitian adolescents. The results cast doubt on existing theory on the children of immigrants for explaining the trajectory of Haitian-American integration patterns. Specifically, this research indicates that Haitians are not downwardly mobile and integrating as African Americans. They have higher education and economic standing than their parents and are continuing their education well into their thirties. The respondents have multiple identities in which they increasingly express identification with Haiti, but in some contexts are also developing racialized identifications with African Americans and others of the African diaspora.

No description available.

The economic assimilation of immigrants is one of the main topics of the migration economic literature. The United States, the United Kingdom, or even Canada, are usually chosen to lead such studies. We have decided to observe the differences in immigrant’s economic assimilation between two host countries which are less studied in empirical papers and very similar in terms of geography and language: Germany and Austria. The country of origin for the immigrants observed in this study is Turkey because Turkish immigrants are highly represented among the immigrant population in the both host countries. We have found that both female and male Turkish immigrants assimilate faster in Germany than in Austria. This faster assimilation could be partly due to the implementation of less restrictive migratory policies in Germany compared to Austria

The goal of this thesis is to provide a detailed description and analysis of vowel-consonant interaction in Mandarin. Vowel-consonant interactions in Mandarin have been described and analyzed in the literature, but there is little agreement on the exact nature of the interactions, and no acoustic studies have been done to confirm impressionistic transcriptions. The data and analysis in this thesis show that vowel-consonant interaction is extensive in both Northern and Southwestern Mandarin, but the nature and degree of the interactions varies based on vowel, context (onset vs. coda), and dialect. In this thesis, I provide an acoustic analysis and a theoretical account of vowel-consonant interactions in two different dialects of Mandarin that vary in their degree of interaction: the Northern dialect of eastern Hebei (similar to the Beijing dialect) and the Southwestern dialect of northeast Sichuan. The data analyzed was collected from native speakers of both dialects at Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu, and the analysis focuses on comparisons of the F1 and F2 of vowels in various onset and coda contexts. The theoretical account attempts to determine whether vowel-consonant interaction in Mandarin is best classified as a phonological process (e.g. assimilation) or a phonetic process (e.g. co-articulation). I explore possible analyses of the data under multiple theoretical frameworks, including serial rule-based phonology and Optimality Theory (OT), and compare the effectiveness of these analyses to a co-articulation account. Traditionally, sound change phenomena are assumed to be either phonological or phonetic in nature. However, a detailed examination of the data collected reveals an unexpectedly large variety of vowel-consonant interaction effects. The effects range from subtle coarticulatory adjustments that can only be detected instrumentally to large magnitude differences that can be represented by a change in phonological features. The results of this study show that vowel-consonant interaction in Mandarin is even more extensive than previously documented, and that the line between phonetic and phonological processes may be more arbitrary than we like to believe.

Detta är en kvalitativ undersökning om debatten om böneutrop med fokus på hur den tar sig uttryck i en lokalpolitisk debatt. Syftet med studien är att med hjälp av ideologikritisk analys (även kallad kritisk analys) genomföra en djupgående analys av debatten om böneutrop på lokal nivå. Undersökningen försöker dels svara på om partierna följer partilinjen på lokal nivå men intresserar sig även för de olika partiernas språkbruk. Genom att använda ideologikritisk metod undersöks attityder och förhållningssätt i debatten genom en fördjupad samhällskritisk analys. Studien undersöker om partierna lägger olika värderingar i ord i debatten såsom böneutrop, muslim, religionsfrihet och integration. Slutsatsen är att partierna i stort följer den nationella partilinjen, det enda partiet som avviker ifrån partilinjen är Kristdemokraterna. Det visar sig också tydligt att partierna har olika attityder till ord som används och att deras respektive syn på orden påvisar värderingsskillnader sinsemellan partierna, som också kan kopplas till deras ideologi.