[...]Finalisant cette recherche, l’on entrevoit un long parcours à suivre, qui peut se structurer, parmi d’autres, autour des questions suivantes qui restent ouvertes : Comment garantir juridiquement, d’une manière efficace, les droits sociaux aux minorités en accord avec les particularités culturelles de chacune d'entre elles ? ; Comment harmoniser les systèmes juridiques autochtones avec celui de l’État en vue de favoriser des relations justes parmi tous les citoyens ? Comment développer légalement les droits des minorités sans tomber dans un gigantisme immaîtrisable ? et, Comment promouvoir les droits de l’homme au-dedans des mêmes communautés minoritaires sans tomber dans le péril de porter atteinte à leur identité et autonomie ? Dans ce contexte une chose est certaine, seulement a travers une véritable démocratie pluraliste, engagée avec le respect et promotion des droits de l’homme, est possible arriver à une paix durable en Colombie. / [...]Finalizing this research, it sees a long route to follow, which can be structured, among others, on the following questions which remain open: how to ensure legally the social rights to minorities in accordance with the cultural characteristics of each of them; How to harmonize indigenous legal systems with that of the State in order to promote a fair relationships among all citizens?; How to develop legally the rights of minorities without falling into a complex Gigantism? and, how to promote the human rights within the same minority communities without the risk of interfering with their identity and autonomy? In this context one thing is certain, only through genuine pluralistic, committed democracy with respect for and promotion of the rights of man, is possible to reach a lasting peace in Colombie.

Throughout the last twenty years, following accession to the European Union (EU), legal economic migrants (and their families) have the right to live and work in European member states. Economic migrants who are European citizens of member states now assume immigrant status and co-exist in countries with pre-existing immigrant communities that have affiliations to the former British Empire. With demographic composition changes of immigrant communities in Europe, difference and discrimination of populations from diverse cultural backgrounds has become a focal issue for European societies. A new, multi-ethnic Europe has thus emerged as one context for understanding cultural uncertainties associated with youth and migration at the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty first century. These uncertainties are often associated with the impact of new nationalisms and xenophobic anxieties which impact mobility, young people, and their families (Ahmed, 2008; Blunt, 2005). In this dissertation I seek to examine young peoples’ experiences of migration and school exclusion as they pertain to particular groups of immigrant and minority ethnic groups in England. In particular, the study explores the perceptions and experiences of two groups of diverse young people: British ‘minority ethnic’ and more recently migrated Eastern European ‘immigrant’ youth between the ages of 12-16. It provides some account of the ways in which migrant youth’s experiences with both potential inclusion and exclusion within the English educational system, particularly in relation to the comparative and temporal dimensions of migration. Young people’s opinions of inclusion and exclusion within the English educational system are explored in particular, drawing, in part, upon the framework of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and other theoretical positions on ethnicity and migration in order to paint a picture of contemporary race relations and migration in Buckinghamshire county schools. The methodological approach is ethnographic and was carried out using qualitative ethnographic methods in two case secondary schools. The experiences and perceptions of 30 young people were examined for this research. Altogether, 11 student participants had Eastern European immigrant backgrounds and 19 had British minority ethnic backgrounds (e.g. Afro Caribbean heritage, Pakistani/South Asia heritage, and African heritage). The methods used to elicit data included focus groups, field observations, diaries, photo elicitation, and semi-structured interviews. Pseudonyms are used throughout to ensure the anonymity of participants and to consider the sensitivity of the socio-cultural context showcased in this dissertation. Findings of the study revealed that Eastern European immigrants and British minority ethnic young people express diverse experiences of inclusion and exclusion in their schooling and local communities, as well as different patterns of racism and desires to be connected to the nation. The denial of racism and the acceptance of British norms were dominant strategies for seeking approval amongst peers in the Eastern European context. Many of the Eastern European immigrant young people offered stories of hardship, boredom and insecurity when reflecting on their memories of post-communist migration. In contrast, British minority ethnic young people identified culture shock and idealised diasporic family tales when reflecting on their memories of their families’ experiences of post-colonial migration. In the schooling environment both Eastern European immigrants and British minority ethnic young people experienced exclusion through the use of racist humour. Moreover, language and accents formed the basis for racial bullying towards Eastern European immigrant young people. While Eastern European immigrant youths wanted to forget their EU past, British minority ethnic young people experienced racial bullying with respect to being a visible minority, as well as in relation to the cultural inheritance of language and accents. The main findings of the research are that British minority ethnic young people and Eastern European immigrant young people conceptualise race and race relations in English schools in terms of their historical experiences of migration and in relation to their need to belong and to be recognised, primarily as English, which is arguably something that seems to reflect a stronghold of nationalist ideals in many EU countries as well as the United Kingdom (UK). Both of these contemporary groups of young people attempted both, paradoxically, to deny and accept what seems to them as the natural consequences of racism: that is racism as a national norm. The findings of this study ultimately point towards the conflicts between the politics of borderland mentalities emerging in the EU and the ways in which any given country addresses the idea of the legitimate citizen and the ‘immigrant’ as deeply inherited and often sedimented nationalist norms which remain, in many cases, as traces of earlier notions of empire (W. Brown, 2010; Maylor, 2010; A. Pilkington, 2003; H. Pilkington, Omel'chenko, & Garifzianova, 2010).

This thesis examines party-based Euroscepticism across four different national contexts in the period 2011-3 by bringing into focus right-wing populist parties. Understanding Europeanization as a label for the impact of engagement with the EU and its practical and normative influences on statecraft, policy-making, and the wider society, the thesis looks into the Europeanization of narratives of national identity, minority rights issues, immigration and citizenship. It discusses the way in which the impact of engagement with the EU is perceived as well as the nature of the arguments made against the EU’s involvement in associated policy processes. There has been a recent upsurge in Euroscepticism due to a combination of economic and political factors, on both the popular and party level in EU countries, as well as the increased blurring of the boundaries between mainstream and fringe Eurosceptics. Hence, it is important to analyze the precise reasons behind this phenomenon. The discussion focuses on “soft Euroscepticism” – the thesis is generally not interested in pondering the generic arguments against a country’s membership in supranational entities or shedding light on those parties who oppose the underlying values on which the EU project rests. The thesis therefore probes the attitudes of parties that – with the recent and partial exception of the PVV in the Netherlands – tend to emphasize relatively specific issue-areas as sources of concerns. This work is primarily based on qualitative methods - 32 elite interviews with nationalist-populist politicians including key figures such as party leaders (Rolf Schlierer, Gheorghe Funar), European Parliament representatives (Barry Madlener) and members of the National Parliament as well as of the general party councils (Ventsislav Lakov) in addition to detailed analysis of policy documentation and books authored by party representatives – and highlights and deconstructs these parties’ grievances attributable to nationalistically-oriented concerns. It includes a detailed literature review that clarifies the EU’s impacts and country-specific historical and contemporary differences in the four domains affected by “Europeanization” (Chapters 1-3) and then in Chapters 4-6 uses original empirical data to compare the attitudes of the four parties – Ataka, PRM, REP, and PVV – with regard to the issues already introduced. The thesis utilizes theoretical approaches drawn from several disciplines ranging from political science to sociology, though it mostly confines itself to those pertaining to core group or minority/ethno-regionalist nationalist mobilization, ethnic vs. civic nationalisms in Eastern vs. Western Europe, as well as the different role played by EU conditionality in relation to the political landscape on the two sides of the continent. Extrapolating from this body of research, it develops hypotheses and projections regarding the expected disconnect in viewpoints between Eastern and Western parties. The study finds that attitudes towards “Europeanized” issues areas diverge greatly and do not necessarily correlate with the extent to which EU membership as a whole is opposed by the party. In line with previous research findings, the EU’s capacity to create a super-order nationalism that could challenge conventional readings of patriotism is generally not conceptualized as a significant threat. However, the interviews did reveal that pre-existing transcendent identities – like Latin identity in the case of Romania or the Slavic one in Bulgaria - – are perceived as threatened or as being tacitly degraded due to assumed cultural biases within the EU. At the same time, the reduced salience of such identities among the members of the Western populist parties does not make them more sympathetic to Pan-Europeanism. EU effects on immigration are predictably rated as manifestly detrimental by the West European parties, because they distrust the professionalism of EU agencies and networks, dislike the Eastern Europeans’ increasing involvement in making higher-level decisions and perceive the EU as more liberally inclined than the national government in this realm (with the latter two points especially applicable to the PVV). However, it was interesting that the East Europeans also expressed some disquiet due to the EU’s supposed culpability in encouraging emigration of their own citizens and the presumed unwillingness of the EU organs to offer them the necessary financial means for combating immigration into Bulgaria across the Turkish border. However, contrary to theoretical expectations, the study suggests that there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to the populist party’s proclivity to regard the EU as an ally of “minority lobbies”, with the PVV (the most Eurosceptic party) assessing the relevancy of this aspect as minor, while it is gauged to be of fundamental importance by Ataka (less Eurosceptic than the PVV). Among CEE populists, the thesis shows how “privileged minorities” like Hungarians and Turks are viewed with alarm due to supposedly making use of the EU level in order to advance their secessionist ambitions (Hungarians in Romania) or improve their socio-economic prospects at the expense of the majority (Turks in ethnically mixed regions of Bulgaria). In short, the thesis establishes that there is still a strong dividing line between Eastern and Western populist parties in relation to the assessments made with regard to the impact of the EU on European identity, migration issues and majority-minority dynamics.

In the current study, we aimed to explore the relationship between perceived stress, spirituality and self-esteem and how they are related to psychological QOL. We found that our overall model accounted for 58% of the total variance in psychological QOL (adj. R2 = .58, F(10, 136) = 21.79, p < .001) with stress (β = -.37, p < .01) and self-esteem (β = .45, p < .01) as the significant predictors. Additionally we found that spiritual beliefs and practices moderate the relationship between stress and QOL (adj. R2= .49, F(11, 135) = 13.88, p < .001). Lastly, we conducted a principle component analysis (PCA) on our three variables of interest and outcome variable to determine whether the proposed structure of our measures holds true for our sample (i.e., LGB populations).

Rebellion and repudiation of the mainstream recur as motifs throughout Christopher Isherwood's novels and life, dating back to his early experience of the death of his father and continuing through to the end of his own life with his vituperative rant against the heterosexual majority. Threatened by the accepted, by the traditional, by the past, Isherwood and his characters escape to the margin, hoping to find there people who share alternative values and ways of living that might ultimately prove more meaningful and enlightened than those they leave behind in the mainstream. In so doing, they both discover that the margin is a complicated place that is more often menacing than redemptive. Consistently, Isherwood's fiction looks at margins and the impulse to flee from the mainstream in search of a marginal alternative. On the one hand, these alternative spaces are thought to be redemptive, thought to liberate and nourish. Isherwood reveals that they do neither. To explore this theme, the dissertation focuses on three novels, The Berlin Stories (The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin), A Meeting by the River, and A Single Man, because ach of these novels corresponds to marginal journeys of Isherwood--namely, his sexual and creative exile in Berlin from 1929 to 1933, his embrace of Hindu philosophy, and his life as a homosexual. Each of these novels positions characters outside of the mainstream in order to subvert a redemptive message and depict the margin as a very dark and dangerous place. Chapter 1 focuses on the period from 1929 to 1933 when Isherwood lived in Berlin and on the collection entitled The Berlin Stories, which includes The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin. That fiction tells of the variegated landscape that was Weimar Berlin. In that landscape, Isherwood discovers and examines others who, like himself, seek alternatives to the mainstream: the bohemian Sally Bowles, the Landaurer family, who as Jews fear the rising Nazi tide, and the politically ambiguous Mr. Norris. His portraits of these people and the world they inhabit expose not only the darkest corners of mainstream Berlin, but also the futility of attempts to flee from the mainstream to more satisfying alternatives. Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to Vedanta, one of the six schools of Hindu thought that would become central to Isherwood's life from July of 1939 until he died in 1986 and that is at the heart of Isherwood's final novel, A Meeting by the River (1967). In that work the margin and the mainstream are juxtaposed throughout. Rhetorically, the novel is rich and clearly one of Isherwood's finest. One approach to the novel emphasizes the redemptive power of the margin. The monastic life and all that it entails spiritually free one from the burdens of the material world. A compatible approach to the novel emphasizes the power of self-discovery as a bonding agent between the brothers. I argue for an alternative reading of the novel, one that emphasizes Patrick's journey and the implicit peril of the moral relativism endorsed by Vedanta. Patrick is nothing more than a con artist. And finally, Chapter 4 examines Isherwood's finest novel, A Single Man, the story of George, who is left alone after the death of his lover, Jim. Isherwood's homosexuality asserts itself both covertly and overtly throughout the novels, though today many of the positions reveal themselves as nascent attempts to understand sexual identity in personal, social, and political terms. A Single Man is Isherwood's most sophisticated and probing look at what it means to be a homosexual. The militantly political is ever present. And yet, the novel is in many ways a contemplative piece, one of stunning beauty that grows out of the simple fact that George's lover of many years has died. In reflecting on the cottage where they lived, George reminisces early on that "they loved it because you could only get to it by the bridge across the creek; the surrounding trees and the steep bushy cliff behind shut it in like a house in a forest clearing. `As good as being on our own island,' George said." In essence, George and Jim cut themselves off from the world. They live unto each other and in a community of like-minded people. Together on the margin, they are content and fulfilled. And yet, when Jim dies, George is abandoned and adrift. He is deprived of mainstream consolation--public memorials, spousal recognition, and children--and deserted; he is a sobering portrait of isolation and despair.

This dissertation considers a neglected legacy of the long 1960s (1959-1975): the struggle to form lasting connections across seemingly irreparable social divides. Through a comparative analysis of North American novels by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Linda Hogan, Tim O'Brien and Susan Choi, I identify a common story their works all share: the narrative of affiliation. These novels of affiliation, I argue, represent the creation of lateral bonds of attachment among individuals of different races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities and classes. As a transgressive and unruly form of interpersonal relationship, affiliation works to bridge divisions by joining together the contradictory feelings of erotic desire and friendship. Defining an overlooked sub-genre of the post-1960 North American novel of development, this project illuminates the heterogeneous bonds of solidarity that undoubtedly arose during the sixties, yet have been continually silenced by national discourses of identity and multiculturalism. In the wake of neo-liberalism, 1960s collective projects for social change, including the New Left, the civil rights movement, Black Nationalism, feminism, and the Asian American movement, among others, appear historically and ideologically separate, and even antagonistic. In stark contrast, this dissertation illuminates the common ethics of affiliation that aligned these disparate movements and was built from collaborative, immanent and provisional attempts at repairing suffering and disparity. Positioned not within, but alongside the fraught history of the sixties, this project offers a new portrait of the subterranean modes of experimental living that animated the era.

This dissertation examines the emergence of queer personhood among black publics and medical cultures in South Africa over the past century. Based on more than two years of fieldwork in South Africa, it contains both a historical and an ethnographic component. The historical research was comprised of archival research and 16 life history interviews exploring how black South Africans reference multiple cultural fields of sexual and gender identities to elaborate composite formations of sexual subjectivity and personhood. In the ethnographic component, I conducted participant-observation and 70 in-depth interviews among various groups, including a number of queer, non-governmental organizations and two global health, HIV-focused clinical sites. In these settings, I examined how social actors, in the context of community settings and global health and community development projects, address sexual and gender nonconformity. Existing scholarship on gender and sexuality in South Africa presumes the existence of only one cultural field of gender and sexual identities in this social field. In contrast, my dissertation argues that multiple cultural fields and sexual ideologies have emerged coevally here. One is a liberal field of sexual subjectivity consisting of globally diffuse concepts of sexual personhood that are historically rooted in a psychiatric style of reasoning, such as homosexual, heterosexual, etc.; the other fields are more localized and are based on ethnic cultural fields of sexual and gender identities. However, they have incorporated aspects of, a globally diffuse psychiatric and anatomical style of reasoning about sexuality. Whereas the `global' liberal sexual ideology dictates a strict alignment of sex and gender, and has done so for some time, the ethnic sexual ideologies I examine, until recently, have not. My work explores the interrelationship of these multiple cultural fields. It follows the enactment of composite sexual subjectivities that are produced when social actors call upon multiple cultural fields of meaning about gender and sexuality. The study demonstrates how race and class mediate the co-emergence of these multiple cultural fields, and how they are entwined with political and economic ideologies and global health knowledge systems. The introductory chapter maps the theoretical and empirical terrain as well as the main questions that are discussed and proposed through the rest of the monograph. The second chapter is a historical analysis of gendered and sexual personhood among black South Africans during the twentieth century. Chapter 3 maps how discourses about cultural authenticity are being used to both contest and constitute LGBTQ sexualities as African. As these cultures and sexual ideologies co-emerge, Chapter 4 examines how they have become entwined with particular political traditions and ideologies during the past century. Chapter 5 explores the ways that biomedicine and public health only reference the a liberal sexual ideology when producing knowledge about black queer bodies and populations in the context of global health HIV interventions. Specifically, I explore the enactment of the MSM and WSW epidemiologic risk categories within HIV science. In Chapter 6, the disjuncture between global health knowledge and everyday experiences of gender and sexuality are highlighted through an ethical case study of the implementation of the HIV intervention known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. The case study concretely demonstrates how the symbolic violence enacted by medical cultures, which only reference the liberal cultural field, conditions structural violence in the form of unjust distribution of health resources among queer groups. The analyses presented in this dissertation suggest new avenues for queer and feminist anthropological inquiry throughout the sub-Saharan African region. In particular, this scholarship contributes to a novel understanding of the political economy of global health and sexuality by exploring how knowledge production and circulation about sexuality within global health contributes to gendered health disparities.

This study focused on five African American Fortune 500 CEOs and their leadership trajectory to becoming a Fortune 500 CEO, their recommendations to emerging leaders, ways in which they define diversity, how they leveraged diversity in their organizations and how if any the racial-social climate impacted how they navigated diversity within their organizations. The researcher identified only 16 African American current and former Fortune 500 CEOs in the history of the Fortune 500. Participants were interviewed either in person or via telephone with the exception of one who opted to submit questionnaire answers electronically. Participants completed a demographic data worksheet along with 10 interview questions. Two findings emerged as a result of this study: 1) All participants (100%) in this study agreed that a Fortune 500 CEOs leadership trajectory should encompass: leadership experience, educational degrees and institutions attended, mentorship and perseverance; 2) All participants (100%) believed they leveraged diversity in their organizations based on their definitions of the term and their methodical approach to incorporating it and; 2a) The majority of the participants (60%) believed that the racial-social climate has impacted their corporate diversity navigation by their actions whereas 40% believed the climate has no effect. This study included recommendations by the participants to aspiring CEOs and other minorities and researcher recommendations to Human Resource Professionals and White Executives. A recommendation by the researcher suggests that a study should be conducted on African American female corporate CEOs and their bouts with leading predominantly white organizations (i.e., critical incidents). The results of the demographic data correlations produced an outline of what characteristics makeup an African American Fortune 500 CEO, see Chapter 4.

Ethnic minority female physical education (PE) teachers who work in predominantly white schools may face multiple forms of marginalization and oppression due to the embodiment of a racialized and gendered identity which is positioned as “other” within PE contexts. A significant gap exists between diversifying teacher and student populations, thus warranting an examination of how sociocultural factors impact a teacher’s identity. Purpose: To explore how race and gender intersect in the embodied identities of ethnic minority female PE teachers in predominantly white schools in the United States. Methods: This study used narrative and visual research methods from a constructivist paradigmatic lens and followed guidelines for narrative-based, semi-structured, and conversational interviews coupled with photo elicitation. Results: The pilot study demonstrated how participants often felt isolated and uncomfortable in their schools, actively seeking out other ethnic minorities to make meaningful connections and validate their embodied identities. The full study indicated that participants enacted colorblind discourses in order to assimilate into their school settings yet also experienced internal conflict over their super-visibility as minority members within white majoritarian schools. Finally, the full study illustrated participants’ self-affirming strategies and resilience in working for social justice within their predominantly white school contexts, and how notions of transformational resistance sustained their commitment to furthering the field of PE towards more inclusive and critical pedagogies. Discussion: This research demonstrated how schools are often sites of continued racialized marginalization for ethnic minority community members and served as an important reminder that future research should avoid enacting a “deficit” or “savior” position when examining issues of racial inequality. Instead, it is imperative that scholarship in the field employ an agentic perspective which recognizes the autonomy of its subjects in reframing their experiences towards empowerment. The agency of “othered” school community members should be centered within the notion of schools as sites of marginalizing pedagogies for research that aims to destabilize dominant discourses and disrupt the resulting oppression embedded within the educational system in the United States.

This thesis focuses on different impacts of an important change in Brazil's child labour legislation. In December 1998, Brazil raised the minimum employment age from 14 to 16 banning from the labour force children who turned 14 just after the law passed. Two year later, in December 2000, Brazil institutionalised an apprenticeship programme aimed at children aged 14 to 17. In chapter one of this thesis I investigate the short run effects of both laws on children's time allocation using a regression discontinuity design technique. I look at the impact of both laws on schooling and labour market outcomes for two cohorts: children just under age 14 and teenagers just under age 16. The second chapter turns attention to the long-term effects of the 1998 ban, comparing the labour market and schooling outcomes of the cohorts who turned 14 before and after the law came into effect. The analysis is conducted for white and non-white males to check how the ban affected individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds. This is the first study that looks at the long-term effects of a child labour ban. The third chapter investigates whether the ban had spillover effects on time allocation of younger siblings and parents. This is chapter covers a broad set of outcomes, exploring family composition and potential liquidity constraints to shed light on potential underlying mechanisms. This thesis contributes to the understanding of the consequences of child labour legislation, looking at immediate impacts on children themselves, long-term effects, and spillover effects on other household members. Its main results show that such legislation may have unintended consequences, long-lasting effects, and affect time allocation of other household members in ways policy makers might not be able to foresee.