Sites of Refuge: Refugees, Religiosity, and Public Schools in the United States

In this article the author examines public schools in the United States as sites where immigrants and refugees express their religious identities as part of their integration processes. In particular, the author examines the schools as “sites of refuge” for refugee students. Although public schools provide refugees with opportunity for study without regard to race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion (areas of potential persecution under the 1951 UN Convention Regarding the Status of Refugees), owing to their liberal and secular nature they necessarily put constraints on the degree to which students may exercise their particularistic cultural identities. Religion is an area in which such constraints are often most apparent. The article analyzes Will Kymlicka’s theory of polyethnic group rights as a possible framework for both understanding migrant ethnic cultures and integration processes generally, as well as a defense for providing accommodations for the religious identities and religious expressions of immigrant and refugee students. With conditions, the author believes that, by guaranteeing the right to refugee students’ societal culture, polyethnic rights comprise a viable framework for supporting immigrants and refugees in their integration into the United States. However, the framework works only to the degree that it is consistent with and advances liberal ends, including student autonomy and freedom

Confronting the insider-outsider polemic in conducting research with diasporic communities: Towards a community-based approach

Researchers focusing on diasporic contexts face the difficult task of wearing their “academic hats” while at the same time building meaningful relationships with immigrant communities. This is no more apparent (and important) than with “non-community” (i.e. outsider) researchers. Here diasporic communities, having already experienced the trauma of forced migration, must see the academic researcher as one they can trust and who is invested in their long-term well being. In this paper I address methodological and philosophical concerns related to the insider-outsider researcher distinction and to conducting research as an “outsider.” The principle aims of the paper are to critically examine the distinctions that create and perpetuate the insider-outsider polemic, explore what this polemic “looks like” within diasporic contexts, and consider community-based participatory research as one “vehicle” that might effectively address some of the thorniest problems associated with the insider-outsider distinction

Religion, Forced Migration and Schooling: varying influences of religious capital among Iraqi Christian refugee students in Jordan and the USA

This study is based on focus groups conducted with Christian Iraqi refugee secondary school students in the metropolitan Detroit area, and interviews with staff from volunteer aide agencies, non-governmental organizations, churches, and independent researchers in both Amman, Jordan as well as the Detroit metropolitan area. The article examines varying influences of religious capital among Iraqi Christian students. Examination of the operation of this capital within the context of the two countries’ economic and foreign policy interests including their refugee policies exposes macro-level forces that render religious capital to function in countervailing manners. Iraqi Christian students in both Amman and Detroit experience the reverberating affects of an inverse relationship between their religious capital and their ability to live a stable and secure life in Iraq. Moreover, the ability of Iraqi refugees to wield their religious capital to their advantage in schooling is highly mediated by a dominant ideology within Jordan that positions them as ‘foreigners’, a restricted US refugee policy limiting the numbers allowed in, and a prevailing ideology within the USA that treats migrants from the Arab world as ‘suspect’ and potential threats to public safety and national security

Confronting the Insider-Outsider Polemic in Conducting Research with Diasporic Communities: Towards a Community-Based Approach

Researchers focusing on diasporic contexts face the difficult task of wearing their “academic hats” while at the same time building meaningful relationships with immigrant communities. This is no more apparent (and important) than with “non-community” (i.e., outsider) researchers. Here diasporic communities, having already experienced the trauma of forced migration, must see the academic researcher as one they can trust and who is invested in their long-term well being. In this paper I address methodological and philosophical concerns related to the insider-outsider researcher distinction and to conducting research as an “outsider.” The principle aims of the paper are to critically examine the distinctions that create and perpetuate the insider-outsider polemic, explore what this polemic “looks like” within diasporic contexts, and consider community-based participatory research as one “vehicle” that might effectively address some of the thorniest problems associated with the insider-outsider distinction.Les chercheurs consacrant leurs travaux aux contextes diasporiques sont confrontés à la difficile tâche de porter leurs “chapeaux d’universitaire” et d’établir en même temps des rapports significatifs avec les communautés d’immigrés. Cela est encore moins évident (et important) pour les chercheurs “non communautaires” (c.-à-d., étrangers). Les communautés diasporiques, ayant déjà éprouvé le traumatisme de la migration forcée, doivent percevoir le chercheur universitaire comme quelqu’un en qui elles peuvent faire confiance et qui tient à coeur leur bien-être à long terme. Dans cet article, je traite des problèmes d’ordres méthodologiques et philosophiques liés à la distinction entre chercheur initié et chercheur étranger, et à la conduite des recherches en tant qu’"étranger“. Les objectifs principaux de cet article sont d’examiner de façon critique les distinctions qui créent et qui perpétuent la polémique initié-étranger, d’explorer comment cette polémique est perçue dans des contextes diasporiques, et de considérer la recherche participative communautaire comme un ” véhicule “ qui pourrait traiter de façon efficace certains des problèmes les plus épineux liés à la distinction initié-étrange

A case study in identifying acceptable bitrates for human face recognition tasks

Face recognition from images or video footage requires a certain level of recorded image quality. This paper derives acceptable bitrates (relating to levels of compression and consequently quality) of footage with human faces, using an industry implementation of the standard H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and the Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) recording systems on London buses. The London buses application is utilized as a case study for setting up a methodology and implementing suitable data analysis for face recognition from recorded footage, which has been degraded by compression. The majority of CCTV recorders on buses use a proprietary format based on the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding standard, exploiting both spatial and temporal redundancy. Low bitrates are favored in the CCTV industry for saving storage and transmission bandwidth, but they compromise the image usefulness of the recorded imagery. In this context, usefulness is determined by the presence of enough facial information remaining in the compressed image to allow a specialist to recognize a person. The investigation includes four steps: (1) Development of a video dataset representative of typical CCTV bus scenarios. (2) Selection and grouping of video scenes based on local (facial) and global (entire scene) content properties. (3) Psychophysical investigations to identify the key scenes, which are most affected by compression, using an industry implementation of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. (4) Testing of CCTV recording systems on buses with the key scenes and further psychophysical investigations. The results showed a dependency upon scene content properties. Very dark scenes and scenes with high levels of spatial–temporal busyness were the most challenging to compress, requiring higher bitrates to maintain useful information

Minimally invasive surgery and cancer: controversies part 1

Perhaps there is no more important issue in the care of surgical patients than the appropriate use of minimally invasive surgery (MIS) for patients with cancer. Important advances in surgical technique have an impact on early perioperative morbidity, length of hospital stay, pain management, and quality of life issues, as clearly proved with MIS. However, for oncology patients, historically, the most important clinical questions have been answered in the context of prospective randomized trials. Important considerations for MIS and cancer have been addressed, such as what are the important immunologic consequences of MIS versus open surgery and what is the role of laparoscopy in the staging of gastrointestinal cancers? This review article discusses many of the key controversies in the minimally invasive treatment of cancer using the pro–con debate format

Identification of Novel Genetic Loci Associated with Thyroid Peroxidase Antibodies and Clinical Thyroid Disease

Peer reviewe