Thesis advisor: Larry H. Ludlow / Higher education has renewed its focus on civic engagement due to a growing recognition of the distinctive opportunities for students to internalize civic values during college. This unique role has become increasingly important in context of the shifting trend in American youth away from traditional political participation towards increasing involvement in civic life. Past research in higher education and youth civic engagement has suggested connections between participation in and attitudes supportive of civic engagement across both civic and political realms. To further investigate this relationship, this dissertation looked at how students' civic engagement involvement and attitudes develop over time, tracking how participation levels in civic, political, and expressive activities impact the acquisition of a comprehensive set of civic attitudes during students' undergraduate tenure. The specific attitudes of interest in this study were students' self-efficacy through community service, politics, and civic involvement, commitment to civic accountability, and tolerance of diversity. This dissertation utilized data from two cohorts (N=137) of a multi-year study at a single institution as its main data source, with data from a nationally-representative sample of college students used for scale development and anchoring. A mixed-method three-factor within subjects design was used to explore the development within and between students' civic engagement involvement and attitudes across their four years at college by gender and minority status. Through the Rasch rating scale model, repeated measures analyses of variance, and repeated measures analyses of covariance, students' longitudinal commitment to civic engagement was shown to be much more complex than expected. Canonical correlation analysis was then used to address the connection between students' involvement and attitudes within their freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years. While the results of this study were typically non-significant with regard to students' development of civic engagement involvement and attitudes, these findings provided valuable insights into the relationship between participation in specific types of activities at certain stages of students' college experiences and the acquisition of particular civic engagement attitudes. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation.

Thesis advisor: Lisa Dodson / Service learning has emerged as one of the most popular mechanisms to promote and teach students about civic, moral, and political responsibility in American colleges and universities. This dissertation offers a critical exploration of the potential and limitations that engagement in service activities, and service learning in particular, can offer. The research was designed to explore how individual long-term volunteers attach meaning to their service experience, as well as how these meanings are constructed. In other words, what is the process by which students come to make sense of the volunteer work in which they are engaged? Of particular interest are the potential connections between these constructed meanings and a sense of politics or a sense of social change strategies. To explore the ways in which volunteers attach meaning to their service experience, I conducted participatory observation, in-depth interviews, and focus groups with a number of college students currently participating in a structured long-term service learning program; along with staff members of this program and of community partner organizations; and a group of comparison volunteers. This research provides an overview of the relationships, roles, responsibilities, benefits, challenges, and overall structure and design of a long-term service learning program. Participation in a structured service learning program shapes the ways in which students think about their service as it relates to a sense of politics and social change. However, the connection between service and political engagement is often complicated by a lack of political opportunities, a perceived lack of civic skills or political knowledge, and views of politics as divisive and ineffective. This dissertation also contributes to a greater understanding of the ways in which collective identity can develop among student service learners, and how this collective identity may impact their work. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

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In deeply divided societies political parties that attempt to reach across that divide, by definition, form the exception. Indeed, in post-settlement contexts where institutions have been designed to accommodate communal identities, non-ethnic parties are broadly cast in the literature as marginal actors. Nevertheless, in a number of segmented societies, civic parties and movements have emerged and seized space in the political system. This thesis probes the puzzle of these actors’ existence and endurance in power-sharing frameworks by comparatively analysing the experiences of civic parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland. It explores the constraints and opportunities these parties encounter in such settings and how they navigate those structures. This thesis seeks to advance understanding of this critical topic, contributing comparative findings on which broader theoretical work can build. Standing at the juncture of the theories of consociational democracy and civic mobilisation in divided societies, this research examines this problem comparatively in the selected cases. Taking a qualitative, interpretive approach it draws primarily on evidence from elite interviews, as well as a limited number of focus groups with voters and analysis of party documents. This thesis has found that civic parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland, in varying ways, meet with severe barriers in the formal and informal structures of their consociational settings, but that they also find critical openings therein. These opportunities, however, can incentivise non-ethnic actors to assume roles and pursue strategies that conflict with their longer term goals and challenge their legitimacy as civic parties. In fighting for survival on the centre ground in divided polities, civic parties are faced with strategic dilemmas that they must carefully negotiate. These findings demonstrate the centrality of institutions for the type of politics and political actors that ensue following peace settlement and bear potential implications for institutional design and party strategy in such contexts.

Introduction: A Global practice of civil disobedience -- Decency, the right to disobey, and non-domination -- Undocumented disobedients as a special class of civil disobedients -- Institutionalizing the human right of the undocumented to be domestic political participants -- Unfair terms of global cooperation and the fair equality of liberty between peoples -- Executive prerogative and disobedient disclosure of government secrets -- Disobedience as an expression of global solidarity and redefining disobedience in a global perspective. This book explores a hitherto unexamined possibility of justifiable disobedience opened up by John Rawls' Law of Peoples. This is the possibility of disobedience justified by appeal to standards of decency that are shared by peoples who do not otherwise share commitments to the same principles of justice, and whose societies are organized according to very different basic social institutions. Justified by appeal to shared decency standards, disobedience by diverse state and non-state actors indeed challenge injustices in the international system of states. The book considers three case studies: disobedience by the undocumented, disobedient challenges to global economic inequities, and the disobedient disclosure of government secrets. It proposes a substantial analytical redefinition of civil disobedience in a global perspective, identifying the creation of global solidarity relations as its goal. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1124/thumbnail.jpg

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This thesis examines the work of nonprofit organizations collaborating with communities to build civic capacity in North Highland Park, a neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia. Place-focused planning strategies during the twentieth century diminished civic capacity in the community and fostered isolation. Today, collaborative community work in Highland Park is incorporating the assets, resources and knowledge held in the community into strategies to improve quality of life using collaborative learning. A case study approach closely analyzes community engagement and revitalization processes in North Highland Park between 2011 and 2017. Nonprofit organizations mobilized and led a group of community-based collaborators, including nonprofit staff members, government officials, nonprofit funders, and residents. In Highland Park, nonprofit organizations collaborate with communities, emphasizing shared ownership and collaborative learning, to build civic capacity in the community.

Lack of engagement in public service awareness education programs, coupled with reduced funding to implement a diversion system such as 311 systems or 10-digit phone numbers, contribute to 911 misuse. Many local governments have invested in alternative systems, but research regarding community members' use of 911 or alternatives relative to civic engagement is lacking. Guided by Gordon's conceptualization of civic engagement, this phenomenological study bridged the gap in knowledge by exploring community members' civic involvement and their use of 911 between 2012 and 2015 in a county in the state of Georgia. A snowball sampling strategy was used to select 5 community members who had used 911 to call for service. Data were collected through semistructured interviews. These data were inductively coded and then subjected to thematic analysis. Findings indicated that participants were not aware of the problems associated with 911 misuse, and they had limited knowledge of 911 call system practices and procedures from an operational standpoint. Participants believed that more awareness and education is necessary to educate and make community members aware of problems associated to 911 misuse and to inform community members of the nonemergency number. Positive social change may be achieved through local governments implementing public awareness campaigns about appropriate 911 use. These efforts may result in improvements to public safety through better response to critical emergency events.

Suburbs in Melbourne present to us a unique context with which a new approach towards urban form can be devised using the existing conditions and opportunities found with infrastructural developments. This thesis contains the investigations on the various 'pathologies' of the urban fabric specifically on the potential use of 'Spaces Left-Over After Planning' as by-product to infrastructural development in relation to the reinvigoration of Melbourne suburbs under the influence of current and future metropolitan growth pressures. The contents of the research aims to demonstrate the potentials for urban diversification followed by densification using the already inherent characteristics of the selected suburbs (Oakleigh, Waverley and Broadmeadows) to facilitate the metropolitan expansion of Melbourne with the intention of encouraging ways in which suburban fabric can reach its maturity along with new infrastructural developments to foster community engagement.

Young people in the Western world demonstrate that they have little connection to democratic processes through their increasing absence from the polls at election time. This trend is evidenced in New Zealand where the secondary school curriculum has little content concerning electoral and political processes. Low voter turn-out is particularly prevalent in the triennial local body elections where only a small proportion of all eligible voters participate.This research is based within two North Shore City secondary schools and has two objectives. The first to establish the current understanding of Year 13 students of the local authority, its activities, governance and decision-making processes and the second to assess the effect of this information on the election activity of the participants. Following the provision of this information to the selected classes and after 2004 local authority elections, the same classes completed questionnaires to ascertain whether their participation (voting and non-voting) in the elections was affected by this intervention. A post-election focus group of non-school-based newly eligible voters enabled some qualitative inquiry into rationale and attitudes.The findings indicate a wide degree of ignorance and reinforce the current political situation where young people see no relevance to them of local authority politics. The research highlights the need to engage young people in civic matters and increase their ownership of and involvement in the democratic process.