Keep the Lot: Housing Development on the Peripheries of Cities in Poland, Serbia and the United Kingdom

This article discusses some of the recent findings from a collaborative project between Cracow University of Technology, Belgrade University, and the International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF) that focuses on the transformations in urban form experienced by these two European countries since the significant changes in their political regimes started 30 years ago. As the early years of these transformations have been well documented by Hirt and Stanilov (2009), here we will concentrate on the most recent changes by comparing Cracow and Belgrade with cities in Western Europe in general and in the United Kingdom in particular

FOR THE PEOPLE, WITHOUT THE PEOPLE DECENTRALIZATION AND GOVERNANCE IN BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA

Cities are the distinctive space for humanity. At the end of the twenty first century, more people will live in urban areas of the developing world than are alive on the planet today. By the year 2020, more than 80 percent of Latin America's population will be living in cities, adding significant pressure to already very unstable systems. The tensions resulting from the contradictions between the values of modernity and the practice of exclusion prevailing in the region have been identified as major threats to its political stability and economic development. In order to contribute to the search for appropriate solutions to the aforementioned problems, this dissertation addresses the relationship between decentralization and governance. A comparative political analysis of the process and impacts of implementing a decentralization reform in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia is presented. Three critical variables of good governance are assessed: participation, equity, and efficiency. Decentralizing reforms marked the political life of the region in the latest years of the twentieth century and the awakening of the new millennium; it was a policy championed by all sides of the political spectrum as the appropriate strategy for enhancing democracy andinclusion, and ultimately in good governance. Good governance refers to the capacity of a social and political system to create the minimum consensus required to organize and act based on a collective will. Evidence provided by this study shows puzzling results. There has been definite improvement in democratic governance, which cannot necessarily be attributed to decentralization, as decentralization in Bogota was not a systematic process of public policy implementation and presented many contradictions and inconsistencies. Nevertheless, this case also indicates that, despite limitations and contradictions, change may occur in an unsystematic manner; but also that increasing the constituents' aspirations without providing the means to fulfill them may widen the gap between the citizens and the government. Previous and new forms of governance coexist in tension and the success or failure of the reform in the future depends, fundamentally, on how the system incorporates them. This study is a contribution to the literature on both decentralization and governance

Multicultural Belonging. Individuals across cultures, languages and places

The article-based doctoral dissertation deals with adult individuals in Western societies who were born into multilingual and multicultural families and have parents of different nationalities. The study’s participants grew up outside their parents’ countries of origin and relate to a multitude of bonds that link them across various cultures, languages and places. The study explores the social dimension of cultural belonging and examines diverse approaches that enable the participants to create notions of belonging and identification despite possessing at times contradictory transnational allegiances. The works offers new perspectives on transnational belonging and makes a timely contribution to discussions in the fields of cultural heritage studies, ethnology and transnational studies. The dissertation combines qualitative research methods with an insider perspective. The empirical material is based on semi-structured interviews with fifteen participants, among which are also the author’s siblings. The study addresses the relevance of the author’s personal situatedness and her multi-faceted roles as well as ethical concerns related to the methodological approach of insider research. The social dimension of cultural identities affect both the participants’ identification with their multiple attachments and language use in everyday life. The key research findings present interrelated discussions of the participants’ notion of being a mixture, the importance of family bonds and multilingualism, a specific mixed family lifestyle, the notion of non-belonging and the study participants’ sense of otherness as a means of creating communality with others. The study discusses the participants’ various life strategies of flexible relativising, juggling with multiple affiliations, the approach of “blending in” and their sense of ironic nation-ness for constructing a coherent sense of belonging. The author argues that multicultural belonging is inextricably connected to an association with multiple languages, cultures and places. Multicultural belonging is relational and depends on the context, social relationships and locations. The study proposes that multicultural belonging creates a tolerant understanding of membership and enables experiences of cosmopolitanism and selected notions of allegiance.Artikkeliväitöskirja käsittelee länsimaisissa kulttuureissa eläviä aikuisia, jotka ovat syntyneet sellaiseen monikieliseen ja monikulttuuriseen perheeseen, jossa vanhemmat edustavat eri kansallisuuksia.Perhe on asunut maassa, joka ei ole kummankaan vanhemman synnyinmaa. Lasten monikulttuurinen kasvualusta liittää heidät monin sitein eri kulttuureihin, kieliin, maihin ja paikkoihin. Tutkimuksessa poraudutaan monikulttuurisen elämäntavan sosiaaliseen ulottuvuuteen tarkastelemalla niitä keinoja, joilla tutkimukseen osallistuneet henkilöt luovat osallisuuden- ja yhteenkuuluvaisuudentunnetta ajoittain ristiriitaisistakin monikulttuurisista yhteyksistään huolimatta. Kyse on arjen yksilötason ylirajaisista suhteista, joten tutkimus tarjoaa ajankohtaisen näkökulman erityisesti kulttuuriperinnön, etnologian ja kulttuurienvälisen viestinnän aloille. Empiirinen tutkimusaineisto koostuu eri puolilla läntistä maailmaa asuvan 15 monikulttuurisen aikuisen haastattelusta. Mukana ovat myös kirjoittajan sisarukset. Koska kirjoittaja itse lukeutuu tutkimaansa kohderyhmään, pohditaan sisäpiiritutkijan monia rooleja ja asemaa osana tutkimusta. Monikulttuurisessa elämäntavassa korostuvat perhesuhteiden ja monikielisyyden tärkeys, useista kulttuurielementeistä koostuvan perheen arjen erityispiirteet sekä tunne olla erilainen. Henkilöt käyttävät toiseutta välineenään luodessaan yhteisöllisyyttä muiden kanssa. He luovat arjen strategioita, joitten ytimenä on joustava suhteellistaminen, tasapainottelu eri kytkösten välillä, joukkoon sulautuminen ja kansallistunteen ironisoiminen. Monikulttuurinen osallisuudentunne syntyy useiden kielten, paikkojen ja kulttuurien välisestä suhteesta ja sen voimakkuus riippuu aina kulloisestakin kontekstista ja asioiden välisistä suhteista. Monikulttuurinen osallisuudentunne lisää suvaitsevaisuutta ja sisältää sekä kosmopoliittisia aineksia että valikoivaa kansallistunnetta.Siirretty Doriast

Peer Tutoring in a High School Writing Center: A Phenomenological Study

College-level writing center scholarship is an ever-increasing field of study (Fitzgerald & Ianetta, 2016; Murphy & Sherwood, 2011). Over time, high school writing centers have been established, often based on college-level writing center research (Fels & Wells, 2011). The problem, however, is that there is little, if any, empirical research studying the high school writing center and the experience of tutoring in one. The purpose of this phenomenological study (Moustakas, 1994; Van Manen, 1990, 2017) is to explore the experience of peer tutoring in a high school writing center. This study addresses the following questions: How do high school peer tutors articulate their identities as peer tutors? How do high school students make meaning of the peer tutoring process? How do high school peer tutors perceive the tutoring process within a student-run high school writing center (HSWC)? Writing center theory (Bruffee, 1984/1995; Lunsford, 1991/2011; Vandenberg, 1999/2011) and hermeneutics (Gadamer, 1975) provide a theoretical framework for considering this experience. After a review of the literature surrounding both college- and high school-level writing centers and peer tutoring, the researcher reviews the principles of hermeneutical phenomenology as the study of lived experience as a text to be interpreted (Van Manen, 1990). The researcher collected data through writing protocols, video elicitation, and interviews with participants who volunteered as peer tutors in an HSWC. The researcher’s analysis takes a hermeneutical and phenomenological approach (Gadamer, 1975; Grbich, 2013; Van Manen, 2014), analyzing and coding transcripts of the data sources as texts open to interpretation and containing distinct themes. The findings clarify how much the HSWC peer tutoring experience is comparable to peer tutoring in a college-level writing center, adding a more nuanced understanding of high school peer tutoring as a distinct phenomenon worthy of further study

The VA: A Political Solution to a Societal Problem

Thesis Abstract The thesis of this project is that the United States' Department of Veteran Affairs, the VA, is a political creation, since its foundations were not charitable, economic, faith-based, ethnic, etc. Its foundation was purely on the political wherewithal and expediency that the Federal Government in Washington, DC felt during the interwar years, and the threat to American society that many WWI veterans posed as a result of their being angry at not receiving advanced payments on their bonuses. This is the central thesis, albeit nuanced, that pre­ determined whether the VA had any chance at succeeding at its goals. Secondarily, this paper outlines why the VA has been able to become the relative success that it has been. With regards to the starting point at which many veterans enter into the VA health care system, the results have been nothing less than a minor miracle. This aspect is analyzed and outlined within the body of the paper, and specific examples are given in support. In addition, the VA's health care system is explained, and its organization is presented in the form of maps and charts to expedite the reader's knowledge acquisition. To fully understand the VA's outreach, its organization must be understood. It is important to understand the context in which the VA was created, and the...Department of Political ScienceKatedra politologieFaculty of Social SciencesFakulta sociálních vě

Model-based Evaluation: from Dependability Theory to Security

How to quantify security is a classic question in the security community that until today has had no plausible answer. Unfortunately, current security evaluation models are often either quantitative but too specific (i.e., applicability is limited), or comprehensive (i.e., system-level) but qualitative. The importance of quantifying security cannot be overstated, but doing so is difficult and complex, for many reason: the “physics” of the amount of security is ambiguous; the operational state is defined by two confronting parties; protecting and breaking systems is a cross-disciplinary mechanism; security is achieved by comparable security strength and breakable by the weakest link; and the human factor is unavoidable, among others. Thus, security engineers face great challenges in defending the principles of information security and privacy. This thesis addresses model-based system-level security quantification and argues that properly addressing the quantification problem of security first requires a paradigm shift in security modeling, addressing the problem at the abstraction level of what defines a computing system and failure model, before any system-level analysis can be established. Consequently, we present a candidate computing systems abstraction and failure model, then propose two failure-centric model-based quantification approaches, each including a bounding system model, performance measures, and evaluation techniques. The first approach addresses the problem considering the set of controls. To bound and build the logical network of a security system, we extend our original work on the Information Security Maturity Model (ISMM) with Reliability Block Diagrams (RBDs), state vectors, and structure functions from reliability engineering. We then present two different groups of evaluation methods. The first mainly addresses binary systems, by extending minimal path sets, minimal cut sets, and reliability analysis based on both random events and random variables. The second group addresses multi-state security systems with multiple performance measures, by extending Multi-state Systems (MSSs) representation and the Universal Generating Function (UGF) method. The second approach addresses the quantification problem when the two sets of a computing system, i.e., assets and controls, are considered. We adopt a graph-theoretic approach using Bayesian Networks (BNs) to build an asset-control graph as the candidate bounding system model, then demonstrate its application in a novel risk assessment method with various diagnosis and prediction inferences. This work, however, is multidisciplinary, involving foundations from many fields, including security engineering; maturity models; dependability theory, particularly reliability engineering; graph theory, particularly BNs; and probability and stochastic models