L’intégration en Saxe des minorités allemandes d’Europe centrale et orientale expulsées à la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale se déroule sous autorité soviétique, pendant la construction du socialisme est-allemand. Le réfugié devient officiellement un « Umsiedler » et son intégration se construit entre exigences idéologiques et contrainteséconomiques.L’étude des sources aux différents échelons administratifs et politiques rend possible une différenciation des parcours d’intégration notamment selon les catégories sociales (femmes, enfants, personnes âgées, prisonniers de guerre, etc.). La typologie des réfugiés révèle leurs possibilités variées d’intégration : certains groupes apparaissent comme des « laissés-pour-compte » tandis que d’autres profitent des opportunités politiques du nouveau régime. Elle présente également les limites de l’intégration qui se réalise parfois dans un climat de violence et de résistances.Cette étude d’un Land prend place dans une historiographie plus générale de l’intégration des expulsés dans les deux Allemagne. Le contexte de l’après-réunification et la confrontation des mémoires soulèvent aujourd’hui pour les victimes des expulsions des enjeux mémoriels et pour la communauté scientifique des débats / In Saxony, the integration of the German minorities of Central and Eastern Europe expelled at the end of World War 2 took place under Soviet authority during the establishment of East German socialism. The refugees were officially called “Umsiedler” and their integration was constructed between ideological requirements and economic constraints.The analysis of sources on different administrative and political levels facilitates a differentiation of the integration paths, especially of different social categories (women, children, elderly people, war prisoners, etc.). The typology of the refugees shows the variety of integration possibilities: certain groups appear to have been completely neglected while others took advantage of political opportunities in the new system. But the limits of integration are also demonstrated by this typology, since this integration sometimes took place in an environment of violence and resistance.This study of a German Land takes place in a more general historiography of the integration of German expellees in the two Germanies. Today, the post-reunification context and the confrontation of the memories raise memory issues for the victims of expulsion and are a cause for debate in the scientific community

Aidai Idinova Abstract The thesis will look at the how effective human rights protection can be, and especially regarding the Roma population in the Czech Republic. As there is a huge number of human rights, this thesis will focus on the right to education. Moreover, the case study of this thesis is the Roma population in the Czech Republic, therefore the rights and livelihoods of the Roma population will be analysed, examined and evaluated in this country. The thesis will also look at four hypotheses and try to find out if there really exists discrimination in the country, and to what extent; whether religion has an effect towards perceptions towards Roma; whether longer education changes one's attitudes towards Roma; and whether a communist past correlates with greater discrimination. But most importantly, this thesis will look at the right to education and the access to education for Roma students. Education is such an important human right as it has long-term effects in Roma's employment, health care and housing opportunities. Therefore, the Czech educational system will be analysed in regards to the socially disadvantaged group of the Roma population.

This qualitative study examined the impact and implications of resegregation on students of color by capturing and analyzing the lived experiences of school principals leading high poverty and low poverty schools where resegregation was occurring. Despite the growing concern for resegregation, little has been down to reverse the adverse affects of this phenomenon. The body of research that has explored the essence of resegregation has in small volumes acknowledged the perception of school principals. A much clearer portrait of the impact resegregation was having on schools as perceived by school principals offered an in-depth understanding of the way in which policy and practices affect schools undergoing resegregation. Hence, this study used the hermeneutic phenomenological methodology in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding and meaning of the complex experiences of resegregation from the perspective of school principals. The data was explicated by using Hycner’s (1999) five step process. The findings and conclusion of this study were intended to inform policy alternatives and practices through aggregating collected and analyzed perspectives of school principals of high poverty and low poverty schools. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Orientador: Maximiliano Martin Vicente / Banca: Murilo Cesar Soares / Banca: Cristina Gonzáles Onãte / Resumo: O objeto de estudo desta dissertação é a representação das pessoas com deficiência no jornal brasileiro Folha de S.Paulo, em sua versão impressa. A fundamentação teórica se dá a partir da Escola de Frankfurt, segundo Jürgen Habermas, e da semiologia de Roland Barthes. Também a principiologia dos Direitos Humanos é empregada nesta pesquisa. Metodologicamente, pautado na análise de conteúdo, delimitam-se para estudo as publicações feitas entre janeiro de 2015 e dezembro de 2015. O problema inicial de pesquisa é resumido na seguinte questão: "Como é a representação midiática, na Folha de S.Paulo, sobre as pessoas com deficiência na atualidade?" A hipótese inicial é de que tal representação ainda se mostra insatisfatória em três aspectos básicos: terminológicos, políticos e individuais. Tal hipótese é confirmada pelos resultados desta pesquisa, pois a parte estudada da grande mídia atual cede um espaço raro e insuficiente para as pessoas com deficiência (aspectos políticos), continua empregando termos inadequados para se referir a elas (aspectos terminológicos) e, em algumas situações específicas, que servem de contraponto nesta discussão, como no caso do astrofísico britânico Stephen Hawking, que tem deficiência física, os textos da mídia de massa estudada criam um discurso deformado e mitificador (aspectos pessoais). / Abstract: The object of study of this dissertation is the representation of people with disabilities in the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, in its printed version. The theoretical basis is from the Frankfurt School, according to Jürgen Habermas, and the semiology of Roland Barthes. Also the principles of Human Rights are used in this research. Methodologically, based on content analysis, the publications made between January 2015 and December 2015 are delimited for study. The initial problem of research is summarized in the following question: "How is the media representation, in Folha de S. Paulo, about people with disabilities today?" The initial hypothesis is that such representation is still unsatisfactory in three basic aspects: terminological, political and individual. This hypothesis is confirmed by the results of this research, since the studied part of the current mass media gives a rare and insufficient space for people with disabilities (political aspects), continues to use terms that are not appropriate to refer to them (terminological aspects) and, in some specific situations, which serve as a counterpoint to this discussion, as in the case of the physicist Stephen Hawking, the mass media texts creates a deformed and mystifying discourse (personal aspects). / Mestre

This qualitative practitioner research study examined a ninth-grade young adult (YA) queer book club curriculum and culturally relevant pedagogy. Students read two out of nine queer-themed YA novels paired with a collection of nonfiction and media on topics that ranged from rethinking gender norms in society to historical issues that impact people with intersectional queer identities. The author collaboratively designed, planned, and taught the 6-week unit at the center of the study, Disrupting Dominant Narratives and Queer Book Clubs, using a critical queer pedagogy framework. The findings illuminated the ways in which pedagogy that nurtures and prizes student voice, critical reading, discussion, and humanizing classroom discourse work to situate students as empathic critical readers and writers of the world. The findings suggest that analyzing queer- themed literature moves students to build empathy, disrupts oppression, and humanizes people of all identities, thus empowering youth as producers and consumers of knowledge that facilitates their growth and supports queer and questioning youth. In addition, students found common experiences as teenagers with the queer characters across the novels, therby affirming the decision to use exclusively YA fiction for the book club and serving to aid in disrupting dominant discourses about queer youth. The study concludes with a suggestion for seven implications for practice and a call for further research that aims to advance culturally relevant queer pedagogy.

This dissertation seeks to identify why some local governments succeed at incorporating minority populations while others fail. I do this by looking at three distinct areas of political life: elections, policy implementation, and legislative responsiveness. In the first paper I investigate when and how party information affects minority electability. With nonpartisan ballots are used in more than three-quarters of local elections, studies tend to overlook the importance of party in election outcomes. However, after coding newspaper articles about mayoral elections across the U.S., I show that party information is often a central feature of partisan and nonpartisan contests alike. The importance of this finding should not be understated as the data reveals that an increase in voter access to party information substantially weakens the effect of an African American candidate’s race on their electability. The second paper uses the case of Secure Communities to argue that partisanship is not sufficient for explaining variation in local approaches to immigration policy. Using a novel dataset that combines county-level deportation rates, policing budgets, and data on contracts between local prison facilities, private corporations, and federal agencies, I find that local compliance is explained by resource capacity first and political orientations second. Given the opposing positions of Republicans and Democrats on immigration enforcement programs, this result demonstrates that even when dealing with a particularly partisan issue there are other forces that can moderate the extent to which partisan influence matters. The final paper tests whether legislators are responsive to minority-based interests using the case of E-Verify – an employment verification system that nearly half of all state legislatures have implemented. Assessing both state-level variation in E-Verify adoption and the roll call behavior of individual legislators, I show that legislative bodies and their members are responsive to sub-constituencies with the strongest preferences on E-Verify: agribusiness and the foreign-born community. However, responsiveness only occurs if that group is a constituency that the legislator would normally cater to. In other words, Republicans are willing to break with their party position and vote against E-Verify, but only if they represent districts with large agribusiness interests. Likewise, Democrats are responsive to their foreign-born constituents, but not farm owners. The implication of this is that the interests of minorities in Republican districts may suffer when they are not aligned with aggregate opinion or another sub-constituency that holds substantial influence over Republican lawmakers.

"Queer Things" takes the connections between homosexuality and materiality, and those between literary texts and cultural objects, as major repositories of queer history. It scrutinizes the objects that circulate within the works of Oscar Wilde as well as in the output of high fashion designers and the critics and consumers who engaged with them, in order to ask how gay identities and affiliations are formed and expressed through things. Bringing recent critical interest in the subtleties of nineteenth-century "thing culture" into contact with queer theory, I argue that the crowded Victorian object-world was a crucial location not only for the formation of social attitudes about homosexuality, but also for the cultivation of homosexuality's distinctive aesthetics and affective styles. In attending to the queer pleasures activated by material attachments that have otherwise been deployed or disavowed as stereotypes, my project reconsiders some of the most celebrated works of the gay canon, and inserts into it some compelling new ones. Furthermore, in illuminating the Victorian origins of modern gay style and the incipiently modern gayness of Victorian style, it adds nuance and new substance to our understanding of the elaborate material landscapes inhabited by Victorian bodies and represented in Victorian texts. The first part of the dissertation uses extensive archival research to excavate a history of queer men's involvement in women's fashion in the mid-nineteenth century. In the first chapter, juxtaposing accounts of the famous Boulton and Park drag scandal with a simultaneously emerging genre of overwrought fashion criticism, I argue that an (over)investment in fashionable objects and a detailed knowledge of fashionability became important sites for the develop of gay-effeminate social styles. The second chapter positions Charles Worth, founder of the modern system of haute couture, as the progenitor of a queer species of cross-gendered, non-heterosexual relations between male high-fashion designers and female clients. Though they are not based on same-sex eroticism, I argue that these relations deserve consideration as queer. The second part of the dissertation considers the representational functions of objects in several works across the career of Oscar Wilde. The third chapter presents a reading of De Profundis, Wilde's infamously hard-to-read prison letter, which focuses on how the text interweaves anxieties about the transmission of material objects into its complex affective structure. The fourth chapter considers the effects of the risky but irresistible attractions of that letter's addressee, the widely-loathed Bosie Douglas, on Wilde's aesthetic practice. Juxtaposing Bosie's charms with those of Algernon Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest, and then moving to the little-read letters which document the final post-prison years of Wilde's life, I suggest that the frustrating states of intemperance and indolence become sites, for Wilde, of erotic excitement, artistic innovation, and political resistance.

Mass demographic changes in the ethnic and racial composition of the United States since the 1960s are commonly considered a force driving major transformations in contemporary American politics. In political science, there are longstanding research traditions that examine the political implications of demographic change: how demographic change leads to growing intergroup political contestation over political power and public policies; how demographic changes lead to shifts in the group bases of partisan support; how demographic changes are associated with changes in the demographic composition of politicians and elected officials; and how the changing face of America affects the political responsiveness of elected officials to historically underrepresented but increasingly prominent segments of the population. Despite the proliferation of empirical studies on these topics, numerous causal claims central to broader arguments about the political implications of demographic change deserve greater theoretical and empirical scrutiny. In this dissertation, I make use of novel datasets and methods for descriptive and causal inference to contribute more credible evidence that test these claims and develop new avenues of research.

Research concerning lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals has, thus far, largely focused on understanding the many ways in which stigma operates to harm their lives (e.g., Hatzenbuehler, 2011; Meyer, 2003). Conversely, little is known about the potential positive consequences of stigma among LGB individuals, and even less is known about the mechanisms that may facilitate the development of such positive consequences. Drawing on the distinct, yet related, literatures of minority stress, stress-related growth, character strengths, and well-being, a conceptual model of stigma-related strengths was developed and examined for the purpose of this study. The specific aims of the current study were designed to examine the various components of the stigma-related strengths model. Specifically, this study had six specific aims: 1) To compare self-identified LGB and heterosexual individuals on character strengths. 2) To identify the possible cognitive, affective, and interpersonal (i.e., social) mediators of the relationship between sexual identity (LGB vs. heterosexual) and character strengths. 3) To examine the relationship between perceived interpersonal LGB-related stigma and character strengths among LGB individuals. 4) To identify the possible cognitive, affective, and interpersonal (i.e., social) mediators of the relationship between perceived interpersonal stigma and character strengths among LGB individuals. 5) To investigate which character strengths serve as mediators of the relationship between perceived interpersonal LGB-related stigma and mental health among LGB individuals. 6) To explore which character strengths may mediate the relationship between perceived interpersonal LGB-related stigma and well-being among LGB individuals. A sample of 718 individuals was recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk to complete an online (i.e., web-based) survey consisting of a set of self-report measures. Of those, 421 (59%) participants self-identified as LGB. In addition to self-identifying as either LGB or heterosexual, eligible participants had to be fluent in English, 18-60 years old, and living in United States. No significant differences in character strengths were found between LGB and heterosexual participants. Among LGB participants, an inverted U-shaped relationship was found between perceived interpersonal LGB-related stigma and five of the 24 character strengths, namely appreciation of beauty and excellence, curiosity, fairness, honesty, and kindness; these strengths were then referred to as stigma-related strengths among LGB individuals. Conversely, prudence and judgment were found to be negatively and linearly associated with perceived interpersonal LGB-related stigma. Cognitive flexibility mediated the relationship between perceived interpersonal LGB-related stigma and the five stigma-related strengths among LGB participants. Brooding mediated the relationship between perceived interpersonal stigma and both kindness and appreciation of beauty and excellence. Furthermore, suppression was found to mediate the association between perceived interpersonal stigma and kindness. Social support mediated the perceived interpersonal stigma-fairness relation. As for prudence and judgment, only cognitive flexibility was found to mediate their relationship with perceived interpersonal LGB-related stigma among LGB individuals. All five stigma-related strengths, as well as prudence and judgment, mediated the relationship between interpersonal stigma and well-being, whereas only curiosity mediated the relationship between interpersonal stigma and mental distress among LGB individuals. The findings demonstrate that moderate levels of stigma are associated with character strengths among LGB individuals. Further, findings suggest that interventions addressing LGB individuals’ engagement in cognitive flexibility, brooding, and social support will facilitate the development of their stigma-related strengths, which in turn, promote their well-being.

The purpose of this dissertation was to create a psychometrically sound measure of asexual prejudice through microaggressions that can be used to document and identify the unique experiences of asexual people (i.e., those reporting a lack of sexual attraction towards others). Asexual prejudice encompasses anti-asexual beliefs and attitudes that stem from sexual normativity which promotes sexuality as the norm while positioning asexuality as deviant (Carrigan 2011; Chasin, 2011; Flore, 2014; Gupta, 2013). Applying Sue’s (2010) description of microaggressions, asexual microaggressions are conscious and/or unconscious daily occurrences of insults and invalidation that stem from implicit bias against asexual people and asexuality. Development of the scale included creating items with content that was derived from close readings of the literature on asexuality and related measures of discrimination, prejudice or bias as well as expert review for clarity and verifying applicability of content. A total of 738 participants participated on-line and half were randomly assigned to Phase 1 for the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) while the other half was assigned to Phase 2 for the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Results of the EFA indicate a 16 item four-factor structure for the AMS that capture expectations of sexuality, denial of legitimacy, harmful visibility, and assumptions of causality as descriptors of the types of microaggressions that occur. The CFA revealed support for the AMS total score with good internal consistency and strong validity as reflected in strong positive relationships with stigma consciousness, collective self-esteem, and another measure of discrimination and bias. Combined, the AMS is a valid and reliable measure of asexual prejudice. Contextualization of these results as well as implications for future research and clinical practice are discussed.