Volunteer tourism has been regarded to provide an authentic and mutually beneficial relationship between volunteer tourists and residents based on volunteering. By exploring volunteer tourists' emotional solidarity with residents, the researcher aims to uncover the social relations between volunteer tourists and residents in practice. This exploratory study was conducted in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica during November 2012 to January 2013. Based on the two months of ethnographic field research, this research suggests that volunteer tourism may not be superior to so-called “mass tourism” in terms of building harmonious relationships between volunteer tourists and resident. In this study, volunteer tourists’ feelings of closeness were merely feelings which boosted the identity of volunteer tourists from “tourists” to “volunteers”. This article contributes to the growing body of literature on volunteer tourism by exploring the volunteer tourism experience from the perspectives of international volunteers.

This dissertation seeks to recover the relational quality of the Holy Spirit who is the Lord and the Giver of life as enshrined in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381). Neo-Scholastic theology had utilized the conceptual categories of Aristotelian metaphysics with its orientation to foundationalism and immobility in a manner destructive of difference, plurality, and the relational language of the Spirit as witnessed in the Bible. One of the upshots became the totalizing bent of Western epistemology which eventually found concretion in colonialism and the slavery of Africans among others. This dissertation utilizes the category of "relationality," a core tenet of West African Weltanschauungen, as an organizing and interpretive device for reinterpreting the creedal affirmation in a way that allows for new understandings of the Spirit. In our world in which there is an increasing awareness of the simultaneity of the dialectic of differences and interconnectedness due to the process of globalization, we are compelled to seek ways of living together without subordinating difference to the regime of sameness. The thesis is that relational pneumatology provides template for negotiating an other discourse on the Triune God which recognizes and respects equality-in-difference. To develop this thesis, I utilize an anthropological, interdisciplinary, critical, and descriptive approach. I argue that relational pneumatology invites that subalternized epistemic potentials be foregrounded and legitimized in a manner that fosters "solidarity of others." I also draw the implications of this perspective for the Nigerian church with regard to ecclesial structures and authority, interreligious dialogue, and the question of holistic liberation that fosters justice and peace. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts / Theology / PhD / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-06, Section: A, page: 2379. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 263-273).

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2008. / Department of Philosophy, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Jason T. Eberl. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-68).

The field of bioethics originated from failures in medical research and provided a framework for medical decision-making and research ethics with the advent of its four core principles (justice, autonomy, non-maleficence, and beneficence). However, these core principles often overlook more complex issues related to health. In this thesis I take a critical look at traditional bioethics to demonstrate why more specific fields of bioethics, like public health ethics and urban bioethics, are necessary. I then look at the origins of urban bioethics to better understand the necessity for the field and the principles necessary for its implementation. Solidarity and agency are established principles of urban bioethics, and I will argue the need to add respect for community to the urban bioethics toolbox. Based on these principles; I argue the urban bioethicist has to understand the context of individuals and communities to properly apply agency, solidarity, and respect for community. The most appropriate way to build this context is through qualitative research. Qualitative research is uniquely suited for this task based on the nature of the field and the information it offers related to each of the principles of urban bioethics. / Urban Bioethics

Family Systems Theory provides a framework for examining how values are transmitted between family members, and the overall impact transmission has on familial well-being. While familial emotional closeness has been linked to older-adult well-being, there is still a lack of research investigating the influence of ideological agreement between family members. This study examined grandparent-child and grandparent-grandchild dyads to assess the extent to which level of agreement on religious and political ideological beliefs moderates the relation between perceived intergenerational emotional closeness and well-being in grandparents. Affectual solidarity ratings among the generations, as well as religious ideological differences between grandparents and grandchildren, were found to influence well-being in grandparents. Model fit was excellent for both moderation models. These findings suggest that emotional closeness is a predominant factor in predicting well-being in grandparents that may not be as heavily influenced by the level of agreement on ideological beliefs, as is often assumed.

A small island nation near Australia was invaded and occupied by the Indonesian military regime in 1975, which lasted until 1999. This dissertation examines the global solidarity movement, whose success was due to the skill of its leaders, the collective agency transnational mobilization, effective social movement framing, which helped to create, act upon, and transform important critical junctures throughout the conflict. The East Timorese resistance movement against the Indonesian occupation took an ethnically and politically fragmented society and transformed it into a powerful transnational resistance movement that brough together military, clandestine, diplomatic, and global civil society actors together in supporting East Timor’s right to self-determination. Social movement frames punctuate the severity, immorality, and injustice of conditions. However, existing accounts on claims-making, framing trajectories, and outcomes tend to downplay the influence of contingency and indeterminacy in social movements. Indeed, as social constructionists contend, collective constructions are historically produced and culturally contingent. As claims-makers advance public claims developed within institutional realities, this underscores the range of contingencies and uncertainties actors manage in mobilizing their agendas. With East Timor's case, this sandwich thesis contends that understanding social movement framing and trajectories requires keeping institutional, discursive, and geopolitical contexts intact. Movements are embedded in histories, institutions, or fields that shape the outcome of framing trajectories and the outcome of social movement claims-making. However, social constructionists help us understand that resources, frames, and opportunities are perceived and constructed by actors. Therefore, the theoretical perspective provides substantial credence to the roles of contingency and human agency in social movement mobilization. Ultimately, objective structures, such as political/discursive opportunities or legal texts, are not enabling but generate social movement action insofar as moral agents perceive them. Often, this work is discursively constructed. This reality underscores the dimension of contingency in social action and social movement framing and mobilization because objective structures do not automatically determine what actors will select as a specific course of collective action or framing strategies. Frame and framing trajectories are particular to, and instantiated in, the contexts and develop over time as moral agents mobilize meaning by interacting with targets, sensitive to local conditions, emergent contingencies, and competing interests. By focusing on the social framing process, I show how framing or collective action frames emerge and are diffused in different ways across national contexts. The emphasis is not to address the broader institutionalized logics, such as political/discursive opportunities and geopolitics, but to understand how these aspects are incorporated in the framing practices of moral agents as strategic action as “endogenous to a field of actors” (Lounsbury et al., 2003:72), whose interests and national, not only transnational, but embeddedness also influence the interactional dynamics of their framing actions and trajectories. In this way, framing practices can be understood as struggles over audiences' minds and hearts, where actors compete in moral politics to secure symbolic power and political legitimacy. The macro-level logic indeed impacts the structure of frames. The diffusion and acceleration of claims within historically contingent events depend simultaneously on pre-existing, strong cultural framing and an influential social movement culture rooted in the abstract ideals of human rights that are transnationally dispersed but integrated. Strategic framing choices depend on various logic. Firstly, expanding political and discursive opportunities is crucial in accelerating mobilization. Moreover, the diffusion of frames and public claims can further propel mobilization and help to build convergences across sociopolitical allies. Agency and structure are often interpenetrating. Namely, depending on the choices made by actors at specific ‘critical junctures,’ they can either propel the social force of mobilization or hamper it, depending on perceived choices (agency). Social movements, especially transnational advocacy networks, prove more effective in frame diffusion when they build solidarities around shared meaning and international norms (human rights) that allow them to converge effectively around shared purposes and sustain collective mobilization across extended periods. Transnational networks of solidarity (the global solidarity movement) harnessed collective mobilization at the global level by converging the diffusion of their frames and claims around human rights talk. The thesis also considers various logics such as path dependency, contingency, historical events, and geopolitics in shaping the national and global movement mobilization and claims-making field. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No description available.

Yes / In this paper, we respond to academic critiques of resilience that suggest an inherent affinity with neoliberalism and/or the incompatibility of resilience and critical agency. Drawing on the reflections of people who have found ‘resilience’ a helpful conceptual tool that has informed their engagement with a challenging and unsettling context, we suggest that ideas of resilience, solidarity and agency intersect in complex and interesting ways. Following a brief discussion of our methodology, we begin with an overview of how respondents to an online survey and a series of related conversations conceptualise resilience. We go on to explore how these conceptualisations might relate to critical analysis of the status quo, and to engagement with solidarity and agency. We conclude that there is potential to link these concepts, and that thoughtful engagement with this potential, and with the tensions and questions it raises, might make valuable contributions to both theory and practice.

Thesis advisor: C. Shawn McGuffey / This study examines the conversations female college students have surrounding women’s health and how these interactions may be perceived as a form of feminist solidarity. Previous research has provided many definitions to the term “feminist solidarity” and has shown the effectiveness of friendships in accessing sexual and reproductive healthcare. For this study, 17 undergraduate students at a Jesuit university were interviewed and asked questions relating to feminist solidarity, peer interactions, and experiences surrounding conversations about birth control, abortion, and menstruation. To allow for the analysis of how feminist discourse differs between women of different races, the women were separated into focus groups by race (White, Black, and Asian). The findings supported literature about a feminist solidarity which is rooted in collective action and literature which has shown how friendships are important sources of reproductive and sexual health advice. Moreover, the identity of Asian and Black women were found to be key factors in how they engaged with and perceived feminism. In particular, the experiences of Asian women in this study have contributed to filling the information gap regarding the navigation of feminism and women’s health by women of Asian descent. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Morrissey School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology. / Discipline: Departmental Honors.