Blood ties : the labyrinth of family membership in long term adoption reunion : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social Anthropology at Massey University

This thesis reports original research conducted with twenty adoptees, adopted under closed-stranger protocols, who have been experiencing regular post-reunion contact with their birth families for more than ten years. It examines the themes of the mothering role, family obligation and family membership to uncover how adoptees navigate their family membership within and between two families (adoptive and birth family). This study presents the thoughts, feelings and observations of the participants in their own words to convey a deeper understanding of their experiences. Drawing upon in-depth interviews, this study has sought to expand on earlier research focusing on the search and reunion and immediate post-reunion stages to examine the long-term experiences of adoptees in post-reunion. The principal finding is that reunited relationships have no predictable pathways and are approached with varying levels of ambivalence and emotional strain, and that there is no fixed pattern of family arrangements and relational boundaries. While closed-stranger adoptions and the subsequent reunions may eventually cease, this research may assist in understanding the issues surrounding the reunion between gamete (egg) and sperm donor's and their offspring in the future. KEYWORDS: Adoption Post-reunion, Adoptee, Birth Family, Family Membership, Family Relationships, Closed Adoption Reunion

“All May Visit the Big Camp”: Race and the Lessons of the Civil War at the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion

Shaping historical memory means extracting lessons from the past. Those lessons frame the debate about the nature of the present. Just months after the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, the attention of most of the nation focused on the events scheduled to commemorate the semi-centennial of what was by then increasingly viewed as “the turning point” of the Civil War. The reunion at Gettysburg in 1913 constituted the contemporary public exegesis of the status of American memory of the Civil War. In this respect, the reunion in Gettysburg reflected the erasure of the legacy of emancipation and the unfulfilled promise of equality for African-Americans. Yet, almost all the public discourse at Gettysburg reflected no sense of disappointment; rather, the battle now represented a triumph of the American spirit. The presence of AfricanAmerican veterans would have complicated the message of white reconciliation at the reunion. Reckoning with the honorable service of black troops was not something mainstream American society felt comfortable with in 1913. Whether or not black veterans attended the fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg is a small detail which illuminates a profoundly broader pair of subjects: the meaning of the Civil War and the nature of American race relations in 1913. In answering this question of black veterans at the Gettysburg reunion, the broader context of the organization and execution of the reunion, the lessons drawn from the ceremonies in Gettysburg, explicit discussions of race at the reunion and contemporary African-American perspectives must all be explored. [excerpt

Biological control of Rubus alceifolius (Rosaceae) in La Reunion Island (Indian Ocean): from investigations on the plant to the release of the biological control agent Cibdela janthina (Argidae)

The giant bramble (Rubus alceifolius Poir.: Rosaceae), native to Southeast Asia, is one of the most invasive plants in La Reunion. A ten year research program was launched in 1997 with three components: i) genetic diversity, ii) development strategy, and iii) selection of biological control agents. Introduced populations in La Reunion, Mauritius, Mayotte and Australia were clonal and far from the highly variable native populations in Asia, while Madagascar populations appeared intermediate. Seed production is by apomixis in La Reunion Island and by allogamy in the native habitat. Fruit production occurs up to 1,100 m elevation while vegetative multiplication is possible up to 1,700 m. The plant grows in well lighted places, invading forest edges, and all open areas. From surveys of Rubus natural enemies in its native range, the sawfly Cibdela janthina (Klug) (Argidae) was selected as the most promising biological control agent and studied. The first population was thus released in La Reunion in early 2008 with the agreement of the local authorities for the biological control of R. alceifolius. It is now naturalized, spreading and under evaluation

How long delays impact TCP performance for a connectivity from Reunion Island ?

TCP is the protocol of transport the most used in the Internet and have a heavy-dependence on delay. Reunion Island have a specific Internet connection, based on main links to France, located 10.000 km away. As a result, the minimal delay between Reunion Island and France is around 180 ms. In this paper, we will study TCP traces collected in Reunion Island University. The goal is to determine the metrics to study the impacts of long delays on TCP performance

Vicious walks with long-range interactions

The asymptotic behaviour of the survival or reunion probability of vicious walks with short-range interactions is generally well studied. In many realistic processes, however, walks interact with a long ranged potential that decays in $d$ dimensions with distance $r$ as $r^{-d-\sigma}$. We employ methods of renormalized field theory to study the effect of such long range interactions. We calculate, for the first time, the exponents describing the decay of the survival probability for all values of parameters $\sigma$ and $d$ to first order in the double expansion in $\epsilon=2-d$ and $\delta=2-d-\sigma$. We show that there are several regions in the $\sigma-d$ plane corresponding to different scalings for survival and reunion probabilities. Furthermore, we calculate the leading logarithmic corrections for the first time.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Four Flats Correspondence

Bulletin sent to Lois Elkins Harvison promoting a Four Flats reunion concert at the Newberg High School Gymnasium. 2 pages, color.https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/fourflats_papers/1018/thumbnail.jp

All For Honor: Officer Responses to the McConaughy Letters

In Special Collections here at Gettysburg College is a compilation of letters by Civil War officers responding to an invitation to attend the very first reunion of the Battle of Gettysburg. The reunion was initiated by David McConaughy–a lawyer in Adams County, PA who had organized a group of local men to fight for the Union during the war–and was meant to be a time for the officers who had fought here to come together and walk the battlefield. On this walk, they would point out the locations their troops had occupied during the fight so that McConaughy and his committee could put up markers. When I saw this collection, I knew I had to dig in. [excerpt

Non-intersecting Brownian walkers and Yang-Mills theory on the sphere

We study a system of N non-intersecting Brownian motions on a line segment [0,L] with periodic, absorbing and reflecting boundary conditions. We show that the normalized reunion probabilities of these Brownian motions in the three models can be mapped to the partition function of two-dimensional continuum Yang-Mills theory on a sphere respectively with gauge groups U(N), Sp(2N) and SO(2N). Consequently, we show that in each of these Brownian motion models, as one varies the system size L, a third order phase transition occurs at a critical value L=L_c(N)\sim \sqrt{N} in the large N limit. Close to the critical point, the reunion probability, properly centered and scaled, is identical to the Tracy-Widom distribution describing the probability distribution of the largest eigenvalue of a random matrix. For the periodic case we obtain the Tracy-Widom distribution corresponding to the GUE random matrices, while for the absorbing and reflecting cases we get the Tracy-Widom distribution corresponding to GOE random matrices. In the absorbing case, the reunion probability is also identified as the maximal height of N non-intersecting Brownian excursions ("watermelons" with a wall) whose distribution in the asymptotic scaling limit is then described by GOE Tracy-Widom law. In addition, large deviation formulas for the maximum height are also computed.Comment: 37 pages, 4 figures, revised and published version. A typo has been corrected in Eq. (10