La manière dont un jeune étudiant européen se déplace d'un pays à un autre dans le cadre du programme ERASMUS (European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students), tout dans l'esprit de découvrir ce continent divers, de partager sa culture avec d'autres et de faire fortifier son identité européenne est un enjeu social, économique et politique. La mobilité institutionnalisée a permis à beaucoup plus d'étudiants de partir à l'étranger qu'avant, que ça soit pour un semestre ou une année académique ou un stage de courte durée. Pourtant, la mobilité étudiante aujourd'hui est aussi devenue un atout économique pour la plupart des partis prenantes. En échangeant des étudiants comme s'ils étaient des commodités, les universités cherchent à accroitre leur notoriété, mettant en valeur leurs intérêts économiques avant l'accueil des étudiants étrangers. L'asymétrie des échanges entre les pays de l'Europe Occidentale et l'Europe de l'Est et Centrale pose aussi des problèmes. En outre, L'ECTS (European Crédit and Transfer System) et le Processus de Bologne ont changé la signification d'un séjour à l'étranger - écartant la diversité entre les institutions de l'enseignement supérieur. Dans cette thèse, je fais un bilan du programme ERASMUS. Par la suite, je fais des recommandations concernant l'impact social du programme - et comment faire en sorte que l'idée de partage culturelle reste au sein de sa philosophie.

The photographer discusses the work in Elsewhere, her Master of Fine Arts exhibition held at East Tennessee State University in the Reece Museum, located in Johnson City, Tennessee. The exhibition is displayed from March 1 through March 31, 2016 and consists of 17 color photographs and 3 videos representing a body of work that visually communicates the photographer’s interest in transient lifestyles. The influence and research regarding the concept is communicated by a focus on artists, literature and art historical knowledge that pertain to Law’s work. The artists included are Rineke Dijkstra, Jocelyn Lee, Lise Sarfati, Stephen Shore, Robert Frank, Rania Matar, Gregory Crewdson, and Walker Evans, as well as Edward Hopper, Lucian Freud, and Rachel Whiteread, and the poet Charles Baudelaire, among other writers referenced and other topics concerning aesthetics of travel and space. Images of the photographer’s work and a catalogue of the exhibition is included.

In 2009 the sovereign debt crisis started in the European Union. Every member state was involved in the financial turmoil, in particular Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain. Why were these countries effected more so? Were they still committed to core ideas of the European Union? This paper will review this topic through the perspective of Portugal. Being a former colonial power, once having an authoritative government, and now a full-fledged member of the European Union, Portugal has a unique story to tell about the crisis at hand. This paper will evaluate different European Union principles involving gender equality, tertiary education, politics, and economics while comparing how Portugal ranks in Europeanization to the European Union specifically during the sovereign debt crisis. This paper will conclude by summarizing these topics, analyzing triumphs and setbacks, and hypothesizing Portugal's future in regard to their Europeanization of European Union standards and the current sovereign debt crisis the country faces today.

Located 127 miles from the shores of Sicily and only 70 from Tunisia, the island of Lampedusa is home to a population of 6000. Residents are largely reliant on a centuries-old fishing economy, a booming tourism industry and, most recently, the sustainment of a complex apparatus of border enforcement. Since the early 2000s, with the hardening of the southern border of Italy and the European Union, a multitude of actors have converged to Lampedusa: from migrants, to agents of enforcement, to NGO personnel, along with journalists, researchers and tourists. In this thesis, I center the experiences of island residents to analyze the daily, lived dimensions of Lampedusa becoming a key site for the externalization of enforcement and the production of a border spectacle depicting “migration crisis.” Employing ethnographic methods and drawing from literature in feminist geopolitics, critical border studies and spatial theory, this approach looks beyond the nation state to discuss the everyday construction of borders and geopolitics. In doing so, I focus on the contested and relational nature of bordering on the island, highlighting some of the contradictions and inconsistencies of discourses and policies rooted in the premise of sudden emergency in the Mediterranean.

This thesis presents the findings of a descriptive study of goals of international exchange and how they are perceived in terms of relevance by host family participants in homestay exchange programs. The literature of international exchange was examined to identify goals as established and defined by researchers in the field. Experienced exchange coordinators, host families and others were interviewed for their suggestions of additional goals not discussed in the literature. A survey questionnaire was developed and administered to 69 host family members from Tillamook County, Oregon. They were asked to evaluate the importance and achievement of 14 literature-based and 22 non-literature-based goals represented by 43 two-part questions.

Thousands of youth exit Ontario's Child Welfare System (CWS) each year and perform poorly after returning to the community. However, understanding African Canadian youths' perspectives about their experiences and needs was problematic because no outcome data was available in the Canadian database. Using a phenomenological design grounded in a constructivist framework, the purpose of this study was to explore the meaning(s) that African Canadian youth ascribed to positive outcomes on exiting the CWS. A purposeful sample included 10 participants (6 females and 4 males, ranging in age from 19-24). The data collection method was face-to-face interviews with hand coding used to transcribe the data. Inductive analysis of themes and member checking ensured the trustworthiness of the interpretations. The 9 resulting themes related to concerns about their stay in care, as well as readiness for exiting CWS successfully: in-care instability (multiple foster homes and changes), unpreparedness for the transition, counselling/lack of counselling, behavioral management, education, maintaining motivation homelessness, shelter living, extended care connections, Extended Care and Maintenance (ECM), and Youth Voice in decision making. These themes represented issues that African Canadian youth believed would improve transitioning from CWS to independent living, particularly in negotiating community connections and resources. Social change can occur when policy makers and stakeholders acknowledge the problems and special needs of these youth by implementing the resources, services, and supportive programs to assure continuity of care and more successful outcomes.

Adults with an opiate addiction have a higher rate of noncompliance with treatment, which limits its effectiveness and increases the burden of care for society. Effective treatment decreases emergency room visits, and overdoses. The tristate area of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio has experienced increased opiate-related arrests and deaths. This study sought to measure the extent to which treatment type (medical treatment (MS) or faith-based component of service (FBS)) predicts compliance when measured by number of clean urine drug screens (UDSs) and number of kept pill count, over and above dual diagnosis, college education, and income. The on-site records of voluntary enrollees in an outpatient facility that used either MT alone or MT with FBS were reviewed. Spearman's rho and multiple stepwise regression revealed that, with respect to clean UDSs or kept pill count, the association between dual diagnosis and college education was not found to be statistically significant. Rather, income explained about 5% of the variance in clean UDSs with a significant f change of .019, while type of treatment did not significantly impact clean UDSs. Dual diagnosis, income, and college education were not found to be significantly associated with the number of kept pill count. According to this study, type of treatment did not significantly impact compliance in the tristate area of Appalachia as measured by clean UDSs or kept pill count. Since MT and FBS are so similar in their relationship to compliance, attendance and participation in treatment may be areas for future study.

Overabundance and scarcity of water are global concerns. Across the world’s low-lying coastal plains, flooding brought on by sea level rise acts as an existential threat for a multitude of people and cultures while in desert (and increasingly non-desert) regions intensifying drought cycles do the same. In the decades to come, how people manage these threats will have important implications not only for individual and cultural survival, but also for questions of justice. Recent research on flooding and flood management probes the histories of survival, and adaptation in flood threatened regions for insights into emergent flood-related crises. However, scholars have thus far overemphasized the technical aspects of how engineered flood control systems functioned, overlooking both the specific social, political, and economic contexts within which past practices emerged and the social worlds that they helped create. This dissertation examines the social, economic, and political histories of flood control projects in the South American country of Guyana in order to understand the long lasting social, political, and environmental impacts of colonial-era projects. To do this, I utilized archival data collected from the National Archives in London, UK, historical newspaper articles collected through online newspaper databases, press release statements from Guyana’s major political parties, and unstructured and semi-structured interviews with residents from coastal Guyana. These data were imported and analyzed using qualitative data analysis software in order to make connections across spatial and temporal scales. The key finding of the dissertation is that, in Guyana, flood control engineering has historically played multiple social, political, and economic roles beyond the functional explanations assumed in many present environmental management discourses. Colonial engineering projects served as a way to protect colonizers from economic crises and social upheaval and were not just a means for protecting the coast from flooding. Additionally, the dissertation found that these projects were key to creating the racial geographies that helped to protect colonialism in its final years and which continue to shape coastal life today. Finally, the dissertation found that, after the end of colonialism, flood engineering projects were incorporated into larger projects of racialized regime survival.

To explore the complexities of refugee labor market integration in Sweden, the research performed a multi-level analysis of refugee labor market integration: from the perspective of civil society (meso-level) and from that of the refugee (micro-level). Sweden was ideal for this task because historically, it has been Europe’s most generous welfare state and during the height of the crisis, received the highest number of refugees of any European Member State (163,000 or 1,600 per 100,000 people). The research was guided by two primary research questions: First, how have the roles of the state and civil society adjusted over time in relation to the process of integrating refugees, especially since the founding of the first integration policy in 1975? Second, how are resources actually provided by each element of society, and accessed by the refugees themselves? Analytically, the research first performed a historical institutional breakdown, separating Sweden’s integration policy by sociopolitical and economically significant junctures: 1970-1990, 1990-2010, and 2010-present day. Subsequently, seventy first-person, semi-structured interviews were conducted with political-elites, civil society representatives, and refugees from different sending countries, who arrived no earlier than 2000. The findings suggest that while civil society is becoming more systematic in its operations, its utility remains under-utilized. Next, meeting human capital requirements (e.g., country specific and post-secondary education and training) does not guarantee employment. Instead, given the alteration of its labor market, it seems social capital may play a more significant role in determining employment outcomes for refugees. In other words, it seems difficulties in accessing employment for refugees are more attached to institutional constraints than they are human capital itself. Finally, given the visible segregation and low refugee labor market participation, the research supports the assumption that a highly accessible and comprehensive welfare state may not be the most efficient socioeconomic orientation for integrating refugees.

China has experienced incredible growth in the number of nongovernmental organizations (NGO) that occupy civil society. These organizations came forth at a time of rapid economic and political change. Instead of being given a supportive legal path for their work, NGOs have had to navigate the supply and demand factors in their specific situation in order to flourish. The demand side factors chiefly consist of matters pertaining to the need an NGO is meeting; and supply side factors pertain to an NGO's ability to create infrastructure to support their organization, including both the space in society to function and the processes necessary to fund their operation. By understanding the supply and demand side factors of the third sector, NGOs are able to achieve effectiveness in a variety of different capacities. In the current regulatory framework, many of these capacities are not entirely legal, but NGOs continue to find ways to make these arrangements work. Intermediary NGOs are a special type of NGO that positions itself to benefit both the donor and the beneficiary and help both overcome some of the challenges presented by the difficult regulatory environment. In doing this, intermediary NGOs fulfill a special role in meeting supply and demand in the third sector and can propose many useful solutions for philanthropy in China today.