This research investigates and documents the nature of the challenges faced by men upon their release from federal incarceration in the Province of Saskatchewan. Due to the high number of Aboriginal peoples incarcerated in Saskatchewan, this research necessarily investigates the differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ex-prisoners. A qualitative approach is employed in order to understand post-incarceration from the perspectives of those who have experienced what it is like to return to the community after prison and those who work with men making this transition. This thesis fastidiously describes parole board hearings, the difficulties related to integrating into society as perceived by ex-prisoners, and the role of the service providers and agencies in Saskatoon that assist former inmates. It is shown that there are certain difficulties common among ex-prisoners, such as finding employment and housing and accessing appropriate support resources. The particular difficulties of Aboriginal ex-prisoners are highlighted, revealing that the difficulties experienced by all ex-prisoners appear to be amplified for Aboriginal ex-prisoners. Racism and the overall disadvantaged position of Aboriginal peoples in Canada are identified as significant barriers to Aboriginal ex-prisoners attempting to integrate into the community.

This research investigates and documents the nature of the challenges faced by men upon their release from federal incarceration in the Province of Saskatchewan. Due to the high number of Aboriginal peoples incarcerated in Saskatchewan, this research necessarily investigates the differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ex-prisoners. A qualitative approach is employed in order to understand post-incarceration from the perspectives of those who have experienced what it is like to return to the community after prison and those who work with men making this transition. This thesis fastidiously describes parole board hearings, the difficulties related to integrating into society as perceived by ex-prisoners, and the role of the service providers and agencies in Saskatoon that assist former inmates. It is shown that there are certain difficulties common among ex-prisoners, such as finding employment and housing and accessing appropriate support resources. The particular difficulties of Aboriginal ex-prisoners are highlighted, revealing that the difficulties experienced by all ex-prisoners appear to be amplified for Aboriginal ex-prisoners. Racism and the overall disadvantaged position of Aboriginal peoples in Canada are identified as significant barriers to Aboriginal ex-prisoners attempting to integrate into the community.

The aim of this thesis is to define factors that are influential in the ethnic identification process of Crimean Tatars, Russians and Ukrainians in Crimea. To better understand the current ethnic situation in Crimea, Soviet nationality policy as well as Soviet ethnos theory are reviewed. The divergence of the definitions in Soviet and Western traditions is shown. Crucial historical events that took place in Crimea are examined from the viewpoints of Russian, Ukrainian, Crimean Tatar, Soviet and Western historiographies. The influence of the historical myths on shaping ethnic boundaries of these ethnic groups in Crimea is shown. Main factors such as the cultural, political, economic, and global ones which are shaping the ethnic self-consciousness of Crimean Tatars, Russians and Ukrainians in Crimea are studied. Therefore the thesis helps us to understand the meaning of being a Russian, an Ukrainian and a Crimean Tatar in Crimea.

This thesis examines how Soviet psychiatry took the particular form that it did and how it had a historically specific relationship to the state. Psychiatry in the USSR was used by the state against those who opposed the regime. In particular it was used after the death of Stalin against a dissident intelligentsia. Chapter One examines the position of the Soviet psychiatric patient with relation to the political economy of the USSR. The legal position of the psychiatric patient was a precarious one because the absence of private property meant there was no basis for law. It was possible to co-opt doctors as repressive agents of the state because they were dependent on it in a way which their counterparts in the West were not. Chapter Two examines the historical development of Russian and Soviet psychiatry and assesses the importance of its development under tsarism. The point at which Soviet psychiatry became differentiated from world psychiatry is located in the Stalin period. Chapter Three examines the role played by Soviet psychology and the supposed influence of Marxism-Leninism in shaping psychiatry in the USSR. It is argued that Soviet psychology owed nothing to Marxism but that it was distorted in a similar way to other branches of science. Chapter Four discusses the defective nature of Soviet psychiatry and shows how Soviet political economy led to archaic practice in psychiatry. All Soviet medicine was similarly defective and this had serious consequences for the Soviet population as a whole. Chapter Five examines the role that psychiatry played in repressing the dissident movement in the 1960s and 70s. Psychiatry was used as an ameliorated form of the labour camp at a time when mass killings and labour camps were less useful to the elite. Psychiatry played this role from about 1953 until 1988 and was used mostly against the intelligentsia.

In March, 1877, the radical worker Pëtr Alekseev gave his speech at the ‘Trial of Fifty,’ contributing to the social-revolutionary movement one of the founding documents in Russia’s fledgling, working-class history. In the decades that followed, many others of the workers’ circles of the 1870s would compose and contribute their own stories to this revolutionary, ‘workers’ history.’ It was understood that, for workers to ‘speak for themselves’ was one step towards a workers’ revolution, carried out by and for the working people. The ‘workers’ voice’ had been borne by Alekseev in 1877, and was shared by worker-memoirists and other worker-writers through the early twentieth century. Individual workers were called represent, embody, testify to and speak for the mass, or the working-class as a whole. Thus, the notion of the ‘workers’ voice’ tied together the propaganda, the historiography, and the philosophy of the Russian social-revolutionary movement. A study of the ‘workers’ voice’ in history and historiography reveals the connections between these areas of revolutionary thought and practice, and provides a better understanding of the role of individual workers - as activists and as writers - in the Russian socialist movement. Revolutionary historiography developed alongside and in concert with political theories of the social revolution, mass action, social law and social determination, individuality, and consciousness. For a small number of radical democrats-turned-‘rebels,’ anarchists, and social-revolutionaries – most, if not all, born into the educated elite, a few to the families of the high, landed nobility - adherence to the narodnik tenet that ‘the emancipation of the working class should be conquered by workers’ themselves’ made their own, committed or conscious choice of the ‘cause’ over the existing system of things marginal to the historical and social forces driving Russia towards revolution. The ‘going to the people’ movement was aimed at bringing ‘workers themselves’ into their movement. By developing certain working people into carriers of the socialist message, the movement hitherto limited to students, publicists, and the wayward sons and daughters of state officials, merchants and clergymen would become the ‘a working-class matter.’ Thus, a special place was allotted to the ‘self-educated’ or ‘self-developed’ workers who, like the self-styled ‘intelligentsia,’ were consciously committed, synthesising ‘consciousness’ with their own class experience and the social necessity behind it. The political and historical valorisation of the ‘workers’ voice’ extended this idea into the documentation and the history of the popular and workers’ movements. Just as the workers would have to ‘emancipate themselves,’ so too would they speak for themselves and write their own history. This history, it was thought, would eventually belong to the workers by right. Thus, historical writing and the documentation of a workers’ history, informed by judgments regarding individuality, society, class, history, and their relationships, became politically significant for the revolutionary movement as working people began to enter it and ‘speak for themselves.’ Late in the nineteenth century, the worker-revolutionaries of the 1870s began to write their own memoirs of events. Entering the documentary record as individuals, it was their task to testify to working-class experience. Thus, at the point where working people became ‘individuals’ for history and for future historians, marking themselves as different from the mass by leaving their own writings, and stories, and memoirs, they were also tied inextricably to a political viewpoint that identified every and any worker as practically identical. As political figures, ‘conscious’ radicals who had taken responsibility for their own actions, their lives were historically definite; as ‘working men,’ sharing in a victimhood that was common to millions, their lives were indefinite, unhistorical, alienated. In the attempt to explain one part of their lives by the other, in the juxtaposition of class experience with political experience, in the light of a political function that had workers become witnesses rather than writers, the worker-revolutionaries reproduced in their political and historical writings the class categories that their radicalism had contradicted. The awkward position of worker-intelligent – in one half unique, conscious, definite, historical, active, by the other: plural, instinctive, indefinite, and passive – was stamped into ‘workers’ writings.

This is an analysis of the nature and political significance of Russian messianism: the idea that the Russian people or the Russian State is the `chosen people' or the `chosen instrument'. I outline the genesis of the theory of Moscow, the Third Rome and discuss the ideas and activities of the nineteenth-century Slavophils, the pan-Slavists, Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovyov. I examine the influence of messianism on Russian Communism, considering Berdiaev's views. The main part of the work investigates the rebirth of interest in Russian messianism in the Brezhnev period. I try to investigate the links between this cultural movement and the Russian nationalist elements within the political éite. My main sources for this are samizdat journals and articles, in particular the journal Veche, cultural journals such as Novyi mir, Molodaia gvardiia and Nash sovremennik, Party documents and éigré/ journals. I find that Russian messianism has been especially important at times when the country is in crisis: Russia is in Golgotha, but where there is suffering there is also redemption, not only for Russia but for humanity. It has by no means been always dominant in intellectual thought. It has had little influence (under either tsars or Communists) on the fields of nationality policy, policy towards religion or foreign policy. Today, as in the nineteenth century, its adherents can be opponents or supporters of the existing State structure. The growth of non-Russian nationalism under Gorbachov, combined with glasnost', has fuelled Russian nationalism. This is unlikely to be co-opted into the official ideology, because it would increase the dissatisfaction of the non-Russians.

This thesis is about the renegotiation of Russia’s Far Eastern and Northwestern borders as political and economic spaces. The disintegration of the Soviet Union was accompanied by the opening of these formerly closed borders which provided Russia’s border-regions with opportunities to develop links within the post-Soviet, as well as international political and economic landscapes. From 1992 onwards, their ability to cope with unfolding economic crisis and political uncertainty, which characterized the process of transition in Russia, was considered to be tied to establishing economic and political cross-border links with neighbouring European and Northeast Asian countries. Using the Republic of Karelia and Khabarovskiy kray as case studies, their development and that of their borders as political and economic spaces is analysed, applying the analytical framework developed in this thesis, according to which the complexity of borders can be best grasped by assessing the activities of border actors and institutions at all levels of governance, as well as the interaction of factors pertaining to the border’s spatio-infrastructural, economic, political and socio-cultural dimensions. The findings show that both regions’ borders have been renegotiated to different extents, but that neither the Republic of Karelia nor Khabarovskiy kray have been able to utilise their borders as opportunity structures to the extent originally anticipated. Main problems have been the distinct lack of scope for regional and local state and non-state actors to get sufficiently involved in the governance of their borders as well as the imbalance between the Asian and European vectors in Russian policy-making. The thesis concludes by proposing a system of multi-layered, heterarchic political and economic governance on both regions’ borders with the development of border-spanners and border-spanning institutions at the centre of such a strategy.

In both the 1936 and 1977 USSR Constitutions conscientious labour in socially useful activity was decreed to be a "duty and matter of honour" for every Soviet citizen. This study examines the various approaches adopted by successive Soviet leaderships in their determined efforts to reinforce that ethos. It focuses, in particular, on the so-called "anti-parasite" laws dating back to 1957, when as a part of Khrushchev's attempt to revive popular justice, several smaller republics experimented with enactments that permitted peer justice institutions in the form of amorphous social assemblies to exile "parasites" via a procedure which bypassed the existing court system. Special attention is devoted to the criticism lodged against the laws (during their adoption and spread to the other union republics in 1961) by members of the legal profession, who complained that the wide punitive given to the extra-judicial bodies and the attitudes and behaviour encouraged in them would erode the respect for "socialist legality" which they had been charged with enhancing in the minds of the mass public. Although as a result of such criticism, the Khrushchev regime modified the peer justice institutions in the early 1960's, and even though his populism was absorbed by or subordinated to the normative sector of social control in Brezhnev's legal policy, the study highlights the fact that complaints of abuses and inconsistencies in anti-parasite proceedings continued to be levelled against the prosecution process. This, it is contended, was due in large part to the extreme vagueness of the notion of social parasitism itself, although the lack of a precise and consistent definition of this peculiar offence (and of the key elements which were deemed to constitute it) was actually seen as necessary and even desirable since it allowed the authorities to use the anti-parasite legislation as a weapon of suppression against a broad spectrum of socially, politically, and economically inconvenient groups within Soviet society.

This exploratory study examined the individual and organizational effects of formerly homeless employee inclusion on members of the homeless shelter community, including shelter directors, formerly homeless employees, professional employees, and shelter residents. The effects of formerly homeless employee inclusion on shelter residents' vicarious self-efficacy were specifically examined. A qualitative case study design was used to gather interview data from six homeless shelters in North Carolina. The interviewees included five shelter directors, three formerly homeless employees, and seven shelter residents. Professional boundary development was correlated with the impact of formerly homeless employee inclusion within the shelter community. There are more benefits than challenges to formerly homeless employee inclusion in homeless shelters. The challenges generally affected the formerly homeless employees themselves, sometimes to the point of addiction relapse. Formerly homeless employee inclusion provides the benefits of self-efficacy, tough love, and understanding and helping for shelter residents. Additional benefits were found for the formerly homeless employees. Benefits and challenges for professional employees were anecdotal and therefore not trustworthy. There are several major implications for professional practice resulting from this study. Shelter residents in the present study consistently viewed formerly homeless employee inclusion as positive. This positive experience may contribute to improved client engagement, retention, and outcomes. The challenges presented were infrequent, and considered manageable by the shelter directors. These findings may encourage other shelter directors to employ formerly homeless individuals, thereby benefitting others who are either experiencing or working to alleviate homelessness. Formerly homeless employee inclusion is also consistent with strengths-based practice and the social justice principle of the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics, as it provides meaningful opportunities for indigenous participation. Future research should focus on further understanding the correlation between formerly homeless employee inclusion and shelter resident outcomes and the effects of formerly homeless employee inclusion on professional shelter employees. / text

The purpose of this development project is to create a model for working with a high school project in Electrical and Energy Program. It should be conducted in a form like companies do according to the goals from The Swedish National Agency for Education. In order to fully perform this we use the concept of Young Entrepreneurship.   The model is created according to the new conditions from The National Electrical Safety Board. There is now an exception saying that a student during education is released from the demand of employment that is the normal procedure where you are under supervision from a certified electrician. During the project there has been theoretical and practical examinations in order to clear out the advantages and disadvantages using this model, but also to examine whether it is useful in the future and to what extent it can be used.   The result indicates that the model is useful and fulfills the goals from The Swedish National Agency for Education but that the model has its limitations and difficulties. In a future implementation of the model it should be conducted in a small scale with a few students. The result also shows that a project according to this model set high demands on the tutor (supervisor) that the students need from the branch. Voices from the teachers and the principal during the evaluation say that "the model is exciting and very good since it is for real".