The Farming of Bones is Edwidge Danticat’s novel about Amabelle Desir, a Haitian migrant in the Dominican Republic during the 1937 Haitian massacre. The Massacre is a historical fact presented through a fictional text that acts as a testimonial. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate how Danticat, in her role as an activist, urges readers to become social justice seekers and enter the discourse of race. Through an examination of Carl Jung’s and Vodou’s shadow theories in regards to the construction of a racial identity by Haitians and Dominicans, I uncover the racial narratives in place from Haiti’s colonization and independence to our current time. Danticat, through the novel, moves the reigning racial paradigm out of the shadow and thus allows readers to reflect on its effects. Thus it is not only the characters in the novel that must confront the shadow, but the readers themselves.

If we understand development as an emergent property of a complex system, then effective development assistance needs to adapt and evolve in-context. This thesis explores how learning and adaptation practices might help aid organizations apply complexity thinking to improve their effectiveness. Based on a new framework of organizational practices, this study uses a mixed methods approach to assess the extent to which 12 small and medium international aid organizations in Haiti learn and adapt. The study supports the assumption that learning and adaptation contribute to effectiveness, and finds that organizations vary significantly in their learning and adaptation practices. It finds that development organizations employ more learning practices than humanitarian assistance organizations, and that organizations are generally better at collecting information and adopting learning attitudes, than they are at establishing the structures and processes they need to be truly adaptive. The research also finds that the barriers that make learning and adaptation more difficult for organizations are largely structural and related to aid system dynamics, while organizations benefit from enablers that are largely attributed to individual agency. This thesis argues for the important role that aid organizations can, and must play in making aid more effective – at the project, organization, and aid system levels. However, the aid system itself does not encourage learning. International aid organizations will therefore need to actively engage in learning if they are to play an effective role in development, and be a meaningful part of the system-level aid effectiveness dialogue.

My master's thesis deals with a form of soft power and foreign policy, the development aid. In the three chapters I provide an analysis of the potential impacts of such financial flows in the particular case of Haiti. This country has become an exemplar of the fact that even billions of dollars do not have to contribute to improving the economic and living conditions, on the contrary, aid in combination with incorrectly set policies can become an instrument of destruction. Using econometric models and policy analysis I examine the impact of official development assistance on the political, economic, environmental and social sector. At the end of the work I list recommendations for the future, which could contribute to improving the situation.

Using a discourse analysis, the thesis will examine the impact of the postcolonial condition and the desire for integration in the institutional framing of human development reports, policies and programs. Three levels will be used to contextualize the Caribbean expression of human development. First, the international level will be represented by the UNDP, central organ of the international development engine to provide the context of the international discourse. Then, regional and national levels with a case study of Barbados and Haiti will be investigated and evaluate to what extent does the postcolonial condition and identity enable the regional integration into the international development discourse. The paper seeks to verify empirically the Postcolonial criticism of development and produce IR Postcolonial empirical research on discourses to voice the Caribbean experiences. I argue that the region does not produce a counter-discourse to development and reject the claim that the postcolonial condition/subjectivity is an obstacle the use of the international development framework in the postcolonial Caribbean. To support my position, the notion of identity will be assessed highlighting the references to a regional identity put forward the unity of the region. The thesis will conclude that the attempt to foster a regional Caribbean identity is weaken by the ambivalence of the postcolonial subjectivity and the desire for integration.

Magister Legum - LLM / In societies emerging from segregation or division based on the biological factors of race and/ or colour, the centrality (or lack thereof) of race and colour within those legal systems plays a critical role in the progression and transformation of such societies. South Africa is one such society where race was the dividing criterion which saw the population ‘be[ing] turned into races through social practices [during] apartheid….’1 The post-amble to South Africa’s Interim Constitution2 states that the document was to form a: [H]istoric bridge between the past of a deeply divided society…and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour [and] race…. Le Roux asserts that the late Didcott J in Azapo v The President of the Republic ofSouth Africa3 believed that the metaphor of this bridge ‘implied an absolute break between the old and the new’, a transformation that was meant to be achieved by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).4 Established by section 2 of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act5 (PNURA) the TRC was mandated with ‘promot[ing] national unity and reconciliation…which transcends the conflicts and divisions of the past ….’6 This, as it was envisioned, would facilitate the transition that the Republic was making [from parliamentary sovereignty] into ‘democratic constitutionalism’.7 However, the failing of the TRC in achieving this has not only been seen in scholarly articles to that effect, but also within the argument that the ‘new’ constitutional dispensation is nothing more than the continuation of the previous regime masked only with a different face.8 The retention of racial classification gives prima facie credence to this belief. Adopted into the legal system through the Populations Registration Act of 1950 (PRA), racial classification would thenceforth play a decisive role in the lived experiences of ordinary South Africans.9 The PRA would ‘establish race as a domain of knowledge independent of any particular training or expertise, based on the ordinary experience of racial difference, which ranked whiteness as its apex.’10 This lack of knowledge associated with racially classifying people has resulted in what has been coined the ‘common sense’ approach.11 This approach deems it common sense that one can automatically classify what race another belongs to without having any pre-existing knowledge on how to classify or what the blood lineage of the person being classified was. Initially the categories comprised of ‘White’, ‘Native’ and ‘Coloured’ (with Indians being deemed a subset of the latter)12 however, with the passage of time the categories now reflect as ‘White’, ‘Black’ (or ‘African’), and ‘Coloured’, with ‘Indian’ now being a separate category.13 There has also been the inclusion of the category of ‘Other’14 with ‘Asian’ making intermittent appearances. With the advent of the new constitutional dispensation which focused on achieving national unity and the reconstruction of society,15

This qualitative research study investigates the perceptions of children, parents, and staff members at a Boston multi-service nonprofit for Haitian immigrants. It is an exploration of how children cultivate their identity, and how a center for immigrants functions in the current sociopolitical climate. There is an evidentiary lacuna of qualitative explorations on children of immigrants’ perceptions and health. The COVID-19 pandemic makes this issue even more temporally relevant, as new data suggests structural factors make marginalized groups, such as people of color and immigrants, more vulnerable to infection and death. This study will contribute to the body of work on children of immigrants’ health by 1) analyzing the unique child perspective, as opposed to focusing entirely on adults or using quantitative child measures, 2) employing qualitative data to create more robust depictions of lived experiences, 3) and situating data in the particular Haiti/U.S. historical, political relationship. This study’s methodology includes ethnographic participant observation during regular visits to a nonprofit organization for immigrants (Fanmi Nou) over the course of several months, semi-structured video interviews with children, parents, and staff members of this organization, and content analysis of documents produced by Fanmi Nou. Through different waves of migration to the United States, children of Haitian immigrants have lived bicultural lives. In the last four years, however, biculturalism and transnationality have come under growing assault. As a reactionary response to overt hostility, parents, staff members at Fanmi Nou, and children themselves, actively promote a Haitian identity in children. Living under an administration characterized by its hostility to immigrants, Haitian American children pick and choose which aspects of American life to welcome and which to reject. Through a multi-service nonprofit organization, these children and their families selectively engage with the U.S. political, educational, and social systems. I argue that these children and this organization strategically support the healthy development of self under these new restrictions.

No description available.

No description available.

Ancestry estimation of skeletonized remains by forensic anthropologists is conducted through comparative means, and a lack of population-specific data results in possible misclassifications. This is especially germane to individuals of Latin American ancestry. Generally, each country in Latin America can trace their ancestry to three parental groups: Indigenous, European, and African. However, grouping all Latin American individuals together under the broad “Hispanic” category ignores the specific genetic contributions from each parental group, which is variable and dependent on the population histories and sociocultural dynamics of each country. This study analyzes the craniometric ancestry of Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti) using the island’s history, along with 190 cranial Computed Tomography (CT) scans (f = 103; m = 87), to determine similarities and differences between the two groups. A total of 12 linear discriminant function analyses produced cross-validated classification accuracies of 75.0 – 83.3% for females, 71.8 – 87.5% for males, and 72.0 – 82.2% for pooled sexes. This study demonstrates that, despite sharing a small island, Dominican and Haitian individuals can be differentiated with a fair amount of statistical certainty, which is possible due to complex socio-cultural, -political, and –demographic factors that have maintained genetic heterogeneity. Moreover, the discriminant functions provided here can be used by the international forensic science community to identify individuals living on Hispaniola.

When natural disasters such as earthquakes happen, there is a need for an efficient method to support humanitarian aid organizations in the decision making process. One such decision is placement of Foreign Field Hospitals to assist with medical help.To support such a decision lots of different information and data needs to be gathered and combined. The main objectives of this thesis are to collect existing data published shortly after the earthquake in Haiti 2010 as well as data published up to two months after the earthquake. The data is then to be evaluated according to adequacy for analysis and the result of the analysis to be compared to the actual placements of the field hospitals after the 2010 earthquake.The method used in this analysis is Multi Criteria Evaluation (MCE). Data regarding population, elevation, roads, land use, damage, climate, water, health facility locations and airport location are collected and weighted relative with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) with weights retrieved from a questionnaire sent out to Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and countries involved in the disaster relief. The result obtained from the MCE is a final suitability map depicting areas that are suitable according to the different factors.The data availability for the thesis project is an issue, due to lack of data published shortly after the earthquake. Some of the data used in the analysis do not have the sufficient detail level. Still, an analysis can be performed where suitable areas are obtained.The suitable locations found in the analysis agree well in most cases with where the actual FFHs are placed, however a few locations are not in proximity to where the suitable areas lie. A few of the locations were located in areas exposed to frequently floods. Even though the data availability and quality leaves things to desire, the analysis method shows promising results for future research. The approach could help aggregating information from different sources and provide support in pre-dispatch organization, already having a set of suitable locations to arrive to.