This research is about Ukrainian women who have been displaced by the russian invasion and are now living on Gotland. The primary objective of this study was to create a platform where they could express their experiences, thoughts, and emotions. We intended to value their voices and were committed to maintaining a human-centered and open approach in our research, prioritizing their authentic narratives over theoretical considerations.  In this exploratory study, we discovered the power of cooking and sharing food to foster connections and intimate conversations. Inspired by feminist scholar Heldke (1988), we recognized the undervalued significance of cooking in philosophical discourses and the need for a more inclusive way of thinking about knowledge. Employing cooking as inquiry as a research method allowed for a holistic exploration of personal experiences with new cultures. With Borshch as our chosen meal, we found that its traditional slow-cooking process created a safe and familiar space for meaningful conversations.  By applying Allen et al. (2021) Integrative Framework for Belonging, we sought to shed light on narratives that arise from the accounts of Ukrainian women displaced by the russian invasion. We discovered that our contributors' experiences extended beyond the boundaries of the framework. Our findings explored various narratives – from struggling to belong to reclaiming belonging, including living through war, liminality, keeping children safe, competencies, opportunities, motivations, and perceptions to belong. Through this exploration, we gained insights into their complex narratives and the dynamic nature of belonging.

abstract: Depression has been found to be a major problem for young adults in college, with multiple studies indicating high prevalence rates for this population. College students struggling with depression suffer from various consequences, including academic impairment and suicidal ideation, with suicide being a leading cause of death for people in the typical age range for undergraduates. Grounded in cognitive behavior theory and humanistic theory, this study examined the intra and interpersonal factors related to depression among undergraduates. Specifically, the interrelations between friend social support, sense of belonging to the college, mattering to friends, hope, and depressive symptoms were explored. Sex and number of close friends were controlled for, as the literature also showed evidence of their significant relations to depression. The sample consisted of 177 undergraduates between the ages of 18 and 25 from a large southwestern university. Participants responded to an online survey. While participants represented a diverse range of ethnicities, the majority were White. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that hope and sense of belonging to the college negatively predicted depressive symptoms. Furthermore, through zero-order correlations, it was found that friend social support, sense of belonging to the college, mattering to friends, and hope were all positively correlated with each other. Implications for prevention and clinical practice include the roles that counselors, college personnel, and students play in the battle against depression. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Counseling 2021

No description available.

Ascending Mango Hill is a collection of work that represents me. The intention is to connect with readers by depicting protagonists who are unable to fit in, a theme most readers can relate to. Many times the protagonist must find the courage to confront a situation rather than remain quiet. The collection is separated into two sections: The Essays and The Short Stories. The essays detail my own experiences at being an outsider while exploring the topics of family and personal growth. In the stories, characters must overcome unresolved childhood issues, recognize unhealthy relationships, and decide when to set off on new journeys. I bring the sections together by using my travel experiences as the setting for several stories. Aspects of who I am show up in the stories through character motivation and characterization. Ultimately, Ascending Mango Hill is a reflection of the girl I was, the woman I hoped to be, and the woman I have become.

With more people in the United States renting now than at any point since 1965, there is an amorphous temporality in the dwellings of many Americans (Cilluffo, Fry, 2022). This provides flexibility and thus, more freedom for upward mobility, an enticing attribute for younger people living on their own for the first time. However, this lack of permanence can create challenges in establishing a “sense of place”. When residents don’t feel a strong connection to their spaces, they can feel as if they don’t belong. This issue is especially prevalent in dormitories, where a feeling of belonging is vital to student success (Strayhorn, 2019, p.217). These obstacles present a formidable design opportunity for architects to alter their existing planning and design of dormitories. This thesis explores the inherent power struggles dormitories present, as well as the shifting definition of “home” as both a space of belonging and a set of qualities imbued into a space. The goal of this project is to establish an understanding of the role of placemaking in temporary dwellings and discuss the difficulty one can face with creating a sense of “permanence”. and ultimately, to create a framework for designing student housing with a particularly strong “sense of place”. With a focus on housing solutions for university students who are currently experiencing both a shortage of on-campus housing, this thesis offers a set of guidelines for effectively designing student housing with a strong sense of place, with an emphasis on creating a sense of permanence in temporary dwellings.

Opened in 2008, the Lebanon Mountain Trail (LMT) links Lebanon’s North to its South through 470 km of paths and a network of Muslim, Druze, and Christian homestays. Although similar heritage trails exist elsewhere the world, the LMT runs through a landscape fractured by sectarian division and scarred by war. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2019 that included walking alongside Lebanese and international hikers over the trail’s 1,100+ km length, this dissertation explores how the practice of long-distance hiking creates and mediates feelings of national and cultural belonging– feelings of territorial, social and national attachment – under fraught circumstances. This research found that Lebanese hikers developed a new and heightened sense of belonging to Lebanon as nation and to regions of the country where they had previously felt unwelcome. These attachments were produced by bonding experiences along the trail that created a shared ritual frame in which hikers perceived Lebanon as if it were unified and acted as if sectarian differences were not a divisive category. By walking the trail together, hikers constructed and inhabited their own fleeting dreams of Lebanon as they would have wished it to be. They imbued this as if Lebanon with a variety of different personalized meanings, ones that enabled hikers to resolve ambiguities in their own lives. For most participants, these attachments were time delimited and could only be sustained by returning to the dream worlds they enacted on the trail through repeated trekking. For others the experience was so profound that they incorporated elements of the experience into their everyday live. While this research adds to the existing literature on the study of trekking and trails as engines for cultivating belonging, it breaks new ground by examining how this occurs in landscapes where evidence of past wars is ever present and sectarian divisions still unresolved. The ability of the LMT to produce such attachments for Lebanese hikers complicates our understanding of the relationship between walkers and the landscapes they encounter, giving the cultural landscape as much significance as the natural landscape.

Latinos consistently have the lowest degree completion rate throughout the United States (Kurlaender & Flores, 2005). At the same time, Latinos are the fastest growing sector of the U.S. population. Taken together, these facts demonstrate an ongoing and growing inequity in educational opportunities and outcomes for a significant portion of the nation's population. The findings of this study provide additional knowledge regarding how Latino students perceive interaction with faculty and how affirming relationships with faculty can develop Latino students' sense of belonging. In addition, the study identifies three main support sources for Latino student persistence, which include family support, collegiate self-efficacy, and a sense of belonging to the campus. This study presents five recommendations for policy and practice based upon the findings of this study, for campus leaders to address the low number of Latino students persisting in their college journeys. Furthermore, it provides three suggested areas for future research.

No description available.

Many immigrants arrive in Canada from countries with different degrees of gender inequality. While Canada has relatively high levels of gender equality, many immigrant-origin countries are characterized by high levels of inequality between men and women. Studies show that source-country gender inequality negatively impacts immigrant women's socioeconomic outcomes in the host society. However, little is known about how source-country gender inequality impacts social aspects of immigrant adjustment in Canada. This dissertation examines how source-country gender inequality impacts acculturation, structural integration and identification. My analyses of data from the Ethnic Diversity Survey and General Social Surveys find that source-country gender inequality can benefit identification when measured by sense of belonging to Canada. In other cases, it can be a barrier when acculturation is measured by financial decision-making. Further, source-country gender inequality can have little impact on the structural integration of immigrants when measured by sport participation. The results suggest that source-country gender inequality affects immigrant men and women in complex and multifaceted ways. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This master’s thesis research focuses on the experiences of people labelled/with intellectual disability in their current homes and also what they want for their future home. Few studies in Canada have focused on specifically asking this population what their ideal home looks like and acknowledging the gap between this and what their reality is. Advocacy groups in Canada and the United Nations Convention on the Rights for Persons with Disabilities have been calling for years to better address the rights of people with disabilities and their place in the community, yet there has been little progress within Ontario towards this. Using semi-structured interviews and an arts workshop, participants were asked to think about what their life is like now and what their aspirations are for their future. The research is based on a relational model of home as more than just a physical structure and expands the definition to include the neighbourhood, relationships, and support that participants experience, which shape their home and their feelings of belonging inside and outside of it. Findings show that, while there were opportunities for agency within their homes and relationships, there are many restrictions to attaining their ideal home, including funding constraints, long wait lists, and few choices for what type of housing they receive. The findings of this study have important implications for ideas of belonging and processes of home-making within geographic research, as well as for future policy based on housing for people labelled/with intellectual disabilities in Ontario. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)