Spotting good ageing: using welfare theory of health to frame the agency of older adults with immigrant backgrounds to attain good ageing

Care providers for older immigrants in Sweden find themselves in a paradox. Individuals and associations call for culturally sensitive elderly care. However, implementing this comes at the risk of over-culturizing needs and behaviours, drawing a negative picture of 'the problem of immigrants' that needs to be solved with special interventions. To find a balance in this paradox, we applied the welfare theory of health to grasp a new understanding of the phenomena and draw a holistic picture of a person's needs and resources available to achieve good ageing, reaching beyond the cultural paradox. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with older adults with immigrant backgrounds in Sweden. The interviews were analysed using content analysis. Combining welfare theory of health with immaterial capital theories offered a holistic theoretical approach to good ageing. This took its departure from the agency of older adults, mitigating the gap between their vital life goals and available resources to reach these goals. Although informants wanted caring interventions from close family, we identified distinct responses to mitigate the diminished trust older adults had in the capability of welfare institutions to provide adequate elderly care

Kinship care in Chile: experiences of grandparents and grandchildren

In Chile, grandparents make up by far the largest proportion of foster carers. Research on the topic is mainly from Western countries and it has been predominantly quantitative. Research carried out in Chile is about children in formal kinship care placements, and little is known about those in informal arrangements. Research on children’s perspectives of kinship care is also scarce. This thesis aims to explore the experiences of grandparents and their grandchildren, living in both formal and informal kinship care arrangements in Chile. In-depth qualitative interviews were carried out with grandparents and their grandchildren, separately, in two Chilean locations. The sample included 18 families comprising grandparents (N= 20) and grandchildren between 7 and 16 years of age (N=21). To facilitate the interviews with children, visual methods and interactive approaches were used. Thematic and narrative analysis were used as a complementary way of analysing the data The thesis applies concepts of care as a social process. Grandmothers are the main carers of the children, and they had to negotiate the normative positions of being both parents and grandparents. They expressed positive feelings about being their grandchildren’s carers and saw it as a second chance to do things differently and make up for their previous parenting mistakes. Grandchildren mainly felt positively about their lives with their grandparents. They felt thankful to their grandparents for taking care of them. However, they also showed their concerns about the future and felt anxious about the grandparents’ health. With time and through practices of care and love the grandparents become their grandchildren’s parents, and grandchildren become their grandparent’s children. These processes of becoming created conflict and contradictions for the grandmothers and the grandchildren, especially in relation to the place of the birth mothers in these children’s lives

Is There a Latin American Economic Sociology?

Note from the editors Is there a Latin American economic sociology? by Aldo Madariaga and Felipe González The social fabric of a debt economy: Mexican immigrants in the 2008 mortgage crisis by Magdalena Villarreal Financial repertoires in the making: Understanding the US dollar's popularization in Argentina by Mariana Luzzi and Ariel Wilkis Debt management by young couples from Santiago, Chile: From family networks towards the financial system by Lorena Pérez-Roa Banks in the Brazilian favela: A study of the relations between bank branches and residents of an urban region targeted by "pacification" policies by Lúcia Helena Alves Müller Book Reviews PhD Project

Lived History of a Transformative Leader with a Disability: An Evocative Autoethnography for Social Justice

Despite legal advancements recognizing the rights of individuals with disabilities, societal barriers are still arising from the medical model of disability. These obstacles have resulted in marginalizing and isolating practices, in turn leading to the underrepresentation of individuals with disabilities in the workforce and, by extension, in leadership positions. Grounded in the frameworks of critical pedagogy and critical disability studies, this autoethnographic study examines, using my personal experiences as contextual evidence, the determining factors underlying the struggle for equity and leadership, within the hegemonic society that people with disabilities must navigate. The study further explores the issue of empowerment and raised consciousness among people with disabilities, as afforded by blending the tenets of critical pedagogy with a critical social model of disability. Based on the autoethnographic analysis, the study proposes future research and makes recommendations for inclusion of individuals with disabilities, educators working with people with disabilities, and institutions committed to inclusiveness of leaders with disabilities

Pathways to Homelessness of Homeless Women in Chile:

Thesis advisor: Shanta PandeyThesis advisor: Paulette LandonHomeless women in Chile live in high-risk situations; however, little research exists about how they face homelessness. This dissertation helps address this information gap through the inquiry into the question about what are the pathways to homelessness of homeless women in Chile? For this, a mixed-method research design has been used. The quantitative data were obtained from the Annex Questionnaire for homeless people of the Social Registry of Household, Government of Chile, updated to March 31, 2019, while the Qualitative information was obtained by conducting in-depth interviews with 4 homeless women and professionals who have worked with them in the context of their participation in social programs. The findings showed three main results: (1) The paths to homelessness for women in Chile begins with residential instability and individual adjustment to deal with it. (2) Residential instability transforms into homelessness through an extended accumulation of disadvantages and loss of significant resources and social networks. (3) Women's homelessness, even though it may become permanent or chronic, is cyclical with many entries and exits within a permanent context of residential instability.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work.Discipline: Social Work

Clientelistic dynamics in programmatic settings. Evidence from Chile

What explains that programmatic parties sometimes combine their policy offers with clientelistic dispensation, relying on a hybrid linkage strategy? Prevailing knowledge suggests that parties diversify linkages, targeting their program at wealthier voters while providing particularistic inducements to poorer ones. However, these theories fail to explain the variety of strategies used by politicians to connect with voters at the more micro-municipal level, where voters’ socioeconomic status is less likely to vary, and levels of electoral competition are constant. I argue that programmatic parties engage in clientelism at the municipal level as a result of a demand-driven process. Leveraging evidence from 97 in-depth interviews across 73 different local groups, participant observation, and shadowing conducted during multi-year fieldwork in three Chilean municipalities governed by parties of different ideological persuasions, this dissertation explains why and how programmatic parties outsource the cost of clientelism to neighbourhood associations in exchange for targeted distribution. First, I explain how, at the municipal level, politicians and leaders of local groups share mutually beneficial interests that drive clientelism. Politicians require the organizational capacity of local associations to mobilize voters, while local leaders depend on municipal resources to address the demands of their group members. Second, I explain why politicians are only inclined to engage in clientelism with certain local associations. I provide evidence that local authorities cultivate a quid-pro-quo relationship with neighbourhood associations possessing a vertically integrated structure, originally designed for collecting neighbours’ demands. By contrast, groups like sports clubs, seniors’ clubs, and mothers’ clubs lack this type of organizational capacity due to their distinct community purposes. Without this organizational capacity, these groups are less likely to be involved in clientelism with local politicians. Third, I show that while some neighbourhood leaders solve members’ problems through clientelistic deals, others avoid such exchanges. The thesis therefore also explains why despite sharing the same organizational capacity and urgent needs, some leaders reject clientelism and instead diversify their sources of assistance. By doing so, local groups reduce their dependency on municipal resources, avoiding cooptation by local politicians. The dissertation makes three key contributions. By demonstrating that clientelism in programmatic-oriented settings is demand-driven, the study highlights associativity as an unexplored factor that accounts for the variety of strategies parties employ to connect with voters. Furthermore, I argue that class alone does not explain why parties rely on a mix of linkages. Instead, I suggest that the interaction of demand-making and organizational capacity explains why programmatic parties include clientelism as an electoral strategy. Finally, I challenge the prevailing assumption that parties exclusively segment linkage strategies due to top-down party elite commands. I show that, in programmatic settings, clientelism is propelled by the heterogeneity of citizens’ demands

An egg production method for estimating spawning biomass of pelagic fish: Application to the northern anchovy, Engraulis mordax

Fishery scientists engaged in estimating the size of free-swimming populations have never had a technique available to them whereby all the parameters could be estimated from a resource survey and where no parameter values need to be assumed. Recognizing the need for a technique of this kind, the staff of the Coastal Fisheries Resources Division of the Southwest Fisheries Center (SWFC) devised an egg production method for anchovy biomass assessment. Previously, anchovy biomass was estimated by approximate methods derived from a long-time series and anchovy larval abundance, which required about 5 ma of shiptime each year to integrate the area under a seasonal spawning curve. One major assumption used in the larval abundance census method is that there is constant proportionality between larval numbers and spawning biomass. This has now proved to be erroneous. (PDF file contains 105 pages.

Columbia Chronicle (10/25/2010)

Student newspaper from October 25, 2010 entitled The Columbia Chronicle. This issue is 44 pages and is listed as Volume 46, Number 8. Cover story: Columbia honored at White House Editor-in-Chief: Spencer Roushhttps://digitalcommons.colum.edu/cadc_chronicle/1797/thumbnail.jp

THE DEVELOPMENT OF GLOBAL EDUCATION POLICY: A CASE STUDY OF THE ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF EL SALVADOR'S EDUCO PROGRAM

The Education with Community Participation (EDUCO) program began in El Salvador in early 1991, near the end of the twelve-year civil war. It not only represented an extreme form of decentralization in that it transferred the responsibility for hiring, firing and supervising teachers to rural communities, but it was also the first reform of its kind in Latin America. During the ensuing 20 years, the program has received tremendous attention. Indeed, within the country it became the central program through which the education sector was rebuilt and expanded in the post-war era of the 1990s and 2000s. Internationally, the program has been widely recognized as a successful and desirable example of community-level education management decentralization. In fact, the program has become a "global education policy" in that it has been and continues to be recognized, promoted and adapted around the world. To date, however, the majority of research on this program has been a-historical in nature and has focused narrowly on whether the program "worked" - statistically speaking and with regard to such outcomes as student achievement. In contrast, in this dissertation, I analyze the dynamics of how the policy was developed. I shed new light on the trajectory of the EDUCO program by focusing, from an international political economy framework, on how the program was developed, scaled up, and internationally promoted. In so doing, I am able to highlight relevant political economic structures that impinge on education reform, as well as the various mechanisms of transnational influence that contributed to its advancement within and beyond El Salvador. In a number of different ways, international organizations are central to the policy development process. Methodologically, I focus not only on the process of development itself, but also on the ways in which actors and forces from multiple levels (local, national, international) interact and intersect in that process. Theoretically, by choosing to analyze EDUCO's origins, I attempt to contribute to our understanding of how (i.e., through which mechanisms of transnational influence) and why certain policies come into existence and subsequently go global