Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Recreation Management and Youth Leadership, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 84-91).

This thesis is concerned with a 'problem' in a humanitarian context: an identified gap between the rhetoric and 'reality' of refugee children's participation in their protection and a refugee protection process that is thought not particularly participatory for the child. Through directly engaging with refugee children and humanitarian practitioners - in Kyaka II Refugee Settlement, Uganda - it seeks to explore empirically the extent to which this is the case and whether refugee children's increased participation in refugee protection procedures might produce a better, safer alternative for children. From a theoretical perspective, this thesis engages critically with a significant body of academic literature on the theory and practice of children's participation as well as related literature on the conceptualisation of 'childhood' and 'the child'. It explores the ambiguity and tensions in children's participation, particularly in relation to their protection, and responds to debates surrounding participation, agency and power. It engages with the literature on forced migration, refugee camps and the construction of the refugee (child). Linking these to the debate on children's participation in protection, it explores notions of 'vulnerability' and 'agency' and the transformative potential of participation for a reconstruction of refugee children with consequences for their everyday spaces and lives.

Planning is concerned with understanding and relating to the needs of various segments of the population. Thus it is imperative that planners should comprehend the views of any group which falls within their administrative or regulatory jurisdiction. This study has undertaken to examine the attitudes of mobile home owners toward the park in which their mobile home is located. Responses to a questionnaire by 281 residents living in a total of 31 parks were used as the primary source of information. Utilizing multivariate analytical techniques, the study investigated, first, the dimensions involved in mobile home living and, second, the relationship between resident satisfaction and physical and social characteristics of the mobile home park. Physical park characteristics that were examined included: size and age of the mobile home park; services and facilities within the park; size of lots; location of the park. Social characteristics of the park included resident perception of: differences between conventional single family neighborhoods, and mobile home parks; degree of friendliness of park dwellers as compared to residents of other types of neighborhoods; constraints on social interaction outside the park because of distance from other residential neighborhoods and/or community facilities; constraints on social interaction outside the park due to negative attitudes of non-park dwellers. In addition, information concerning attitudes toward rules and regulations as well as the extent of resident interaction within the park was sought out. A number of conclusions emerged from the study which are considered to be useful to planners in making future decisions concerning mobile home parks. These conclusions indicated: the minimum size for development of a satisfactory park; those park features that account significantly for resident satisfaction; the role of the municipality in the development of mobile home parks; the appropriate location for mobile home parks. Finally, a number of questions were raised that were considered to require further research. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate

This dissertation is an archaeological investigation of a late 20th century homeless encampment in Pelham Bay Park, New York City. This project examines the relationship between aspects of dwelling and the social status of homelessness within an iconic urban setting in the United States. In contemporary public discourse, the meaning of "homelessness" seems self-evident to most people as a condition defined by lack: a lack of permanence in general and of a permanent dwelling place in particular, a lack of personal possessions and personal relations, and most consequentially, a lack of political status. This research interrogates these assumptions by reading homelessness through the material record that people left behind, of what they did have when they inhabited spaces outside the sanctioned institutions for the "homeless," spaces where people intentionally dwelled and created their own structures of home. This project returns us to the most basic questions in the study of homelessness in the United States: what exactly is homelessness, what does it mean to be homeless, and how are people marked or recognized as homeless within our society? In order to answer these questions, this research explores how boundaries defining homelessness manifest and are articulated within our society.

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Proefschrift - Utrecht. / Text in Dutch with summary in Dutch, French, English, and German.

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Amidst increasing academic interest in “post-human” war technologies of surveillance and targeting, my dissertation conversely examines the ramifications of militarizing human beings as cultural technologies in wartime. I claim that “local” intermediaries are hired as embodied repositories of cultural knowledge to produce the soldier as an “insider” within the warzone. I focus on Iraqi former interpreters and contractors during the 2003 Iraq War who currently work as cultural role-players in pre-deployment simulations in the United States. In a new contribution to scholarship on war, my ethnography is staged within mock Middle Eastern villages constructed by the U.S. military across the woods and deserts of America to train soldiers deploying to the Middle East. Among mock mosques and markets, Iraqi role-players train U.S. soldiers by repetitively pretending to mourn, bargain, and die like the wartime adversary, ally, or proxy soldier they enact. Employed by the U.S. military in the post 9-11 “Cultural Turn” as exemplars of their cultures but banished to the peripheries as traitors by their own countrymen, and treated as potential spies by U.S. soldiers, these wartime intermediaries negotiate complex relationships to the referent as they simulate war. In my dissertation, I investigate the epistemological and affective dimensions of this wartime trend, as wartime intermediaries embody culture for training soldiers, but not on their own terms.