Citizenship Education in a Fragile State: NGO Programs for Democratic Development and Youth Participation in Haiti

This research centres on NGO citizenship education programs in Haiti to better understand youth experiences, outcomes, and perceptions of democracy. The findings from this study illustrate how programs from Western-based NGOs with liberal democratic traditions typically construct citizenship education in relation to the individual agency of the learners, whereas youth living in the context of fragility note the prerequisite for stable social structures as a foundation for citizenship. Through multi-dimensional analyses, this article highlights the importance of historical perspectives, the value of comparing disparate societies, and the necessity to explicate social locations in cross-cultural research. The concluding proposition states that not only does context matter in international research, but illustrates specifically how context affects youth participants subject to curriculum emanating from competing ideological environments. The issues explored here are among the key concerns for the future of comparative and international research in a globalizing and diverse world

Youth Participation in Internationally Supported Programs of the Post-Earthquake Haitian Reconstruction

This thesis explores how youth participation was socially constructed and conceptualized during an internationally dominated reconstruction of Haiti following the earthquake of 2010. Grounded within critical, constructivist, and post-colonial theoretical perspectives, this research uses mixed methods to analyze youth programs and conceptualizations of participation within them. Among its frameworks is a theoretical lens of social spaces for participation that juxtaposes binary qualities such as international and local origins, market and social orientations, and invited and claimed spaces for participation.In the first phase this research uses conceptual mapping and cluster analysis techniques to survey and plot the landscape of youth programs operating in Haiti after the earthquake. Of the programs surveyed, a relatively equal distribution emerged between those with local and those with international origins. However, a comparatively large group of those programs with local origins also had a curriculum with a primary social orientation.In the second phase it draws on qualitative and ethnographic methods to examine social constructions of participation in three case study programs with activities ranging from rural farming and entrepreneurship, to democratic education and debate competitions, to human rights and radio broadcasting. The findings suggest that geography and language have a bearing onPh.D