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This qualitative study examined the meanings ascribed to the construct "home" by 208 youths defined by mainstream society as "homeless". Youth narratives on the topic of home ranged across a continuum with home as state at one end (i.e., home is a state of mind, comprised of one's friends) and home as place at the other (i.e., home as a physical dwelling). Youths employing the former meanings had typically been on the street for longer periods and identified with counterculture-type ideologies. For youths who defined home as place, home was constructed in direct opposition to street experiences. For both of these groups, control emerged as a central theme in their narratives. The implications of these findings for engaging youth and goal setting regarding exiting the streets are described.

"Over the past three decades, relations between African emigrants and their home-states have been changing from antagonism to attempts to embrace and structure emigrant behaviors. This transformation in the conception of emigration and citizenship has hardly been interrogated by the growing scholarship on African and global migrations. Three of the most contentious strategies to extend the frontiers of loyalty of otherwise weak African states, namely dual citizenship or dual nationality, the right to vote from overseas, and the right to run for public office by emigrants from foreign locations are explored. Evidence from a wide range of African emigration states suggests that these strategies are neither an embrace of the global trend toward extra-territorialized states and shared citizenship between those at 'home' and others outside the state boundaries, nor are they about national development or diaspora welfare. Instead, they seem to be strategies to tap into emigrant resources to enhance weakened state power. The study interrogates the viability and advisability of emigrant voting and political participation from foreign locations, stressing their tendency to destabilize homeland political power structures, undermine the nurturing of effective diaspora mobilization platforms in both home and host states, and export homeland political practices to diaspora locations."

"This paper examines the construction of transnational social spaces among Latin American migrants living in the UK in relation to their multiple connections with homelands and other European countries, especially Spain. Drawing on Bourdieu's forms of capital approach, it explores how transnational practices underpin the functioning of these spaces in relation to how civic, economic, institutional cultural and social capital are mobilized, converted and depleted. It highlights the need to move beyond conceptualizations of negotiating capitals across simple home-destination connections and instead acknowledge that transnational social spaces comprise complex linkages among migrants across more than one border with evidence of important linear moves via intermediate countries on their way to their destination."

""Home" to more than 150,000 children from the 1870s until 1996, the residential school system was aimed at "killing the Indian in the child" and assimilating First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children into white settler society. It was, in short, a genocidal policy, operated jointly by the federal government of Canada and the Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian Churches. Children as young as four years old were torn from their families and placed in institutions that were chronically underfunded; mismanaged; inadequately staffed; and rife with disease, malnutrition, poor ventilation, poor heating, neglect, and death. Sexual, emotional, and physical abuse was pervasive, and it was consistent policy to deny children their languages, their cultures, their families, and even their given names. While some children may have had positive experiences, many former students have found themselves caught between two worlds: deprived of their languages and traditions, they were left on their own to handle the trauma of their school experience and to try to readapt to the traditional way of life that they had been conditioned to reject. Life after residential school has been marred for many by alcohol and substance abuse, cycles of violence, suicide, anger, hopelessness, isolation, shame, guilt, and an inability to parent. First Nations leader Phil Fontaine catalysed the struggle for redress in 1990 when he stunned Canada by speaking about his residential-school experience. The second major catalyst was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) of 1991-1996, which broadly exposed the horrors of residential schools to Canadians and called for a public inquiry. By the early 2000s there was a growing number of lawsuits, most notably the Cloud and Baxter class actions. In 1998, following RCAP, the federal government issued a "statement of regret" for physical and sexual violations and established the Aboriginal Healing

"Immigrant integration is currently a prominent issue in virtually all contemporary democracies, but countries in which the historic population itself is deeply divided - particularly those with substate nations and multiple political identities - present some interesting questions where integration is concerned. The existence of multiple and potentially competing political identities may complicate the integration process, particularly if the central government and the substate nation promote different conceptions of citizenship and different nation-building projects. What, then, are the implications of minority nationalism for immigrant integration? Are the added complexities a barrier to integration? Or do overlapping identities generate more points of contact between immigrants and their new home? This article addresses this question by probing immigrant and non-immigrant 'sense of belonging' in Canada, both inside and outside Quebec. Data come from Statistics Canada's Ethnic Diversity Study. Our results suggest that competing nation-building projects make the integration of newcomers more, rather than less, challenging."

"In their studies of online media, political economists of communication have examined how firms like Google enclose users in a web of commercial surveillance, thus facilitating the commodification of their online labor. However, this focus on enclosure tends to overlook the political possibilities highlighted by autonomist Marxist theory-namely, that users, under certain circumstances, can appropriate these applications to contest conditions of exploitation. This article offers an analysis of Blog Cabin 2008, a cable home improvement show, in order to explore this tension between autonomy and enclosure. Our findings suggest that producers indeed used the show's blog to exploit fans' free labor. However, fans also used the blog to form social bonds, to press demands on the show's producers, and to make connections between the show's class politics and the wider financial crisis. A concluding section explores the theoretical and political significance of such unanticipated uses of the show's blog."

This paper investigates the pertinent issues of the arguments on human capital depletion, specifically in the context of the more recent literature that seeks to explain the phenomenon in the context of the English speaking Caribbean Community (CARICOM). It further assesses return migration policies of the region in an attempt to ascertain their practicality in redressing skills depletion or accumulation for member states. Clearly, facilitation policies are essential, but there is no documented analysis on their effectiveness, despite the tendency to speak of their usefulness. The main motivation for having return facilitation policies, emerged out of recognition of the potential of the Diaspora and what they can offer for the development of CARICOM nations. There is a tendency for return facilitation policies to favour life cycle re-migrants or retirees with affinity to their homeland, whatever the reason. From observation the all inclusive nature of the return facilitation policy construct does not present a framework for attracting skilled individuals in their productive age. The problem with this is that the retirement age in most member states does not allow for retirees to reenter the workforce to impart knowledge or skills, outside of investment initiatives. This general weakness in return facilitation policy limits what optimally a re-migrant can offer. The counterfactual that return migrants bring with them networks and links from which their home country can benefit is also potentially restricted by the same token.

This empirical article is based on a study of stigmatization of girls formerly associated with armed forces and groups (AFG) in the eastern Congo, and presents a detailed description of how these girls are perceived when returning home. The study reveals that the society views with suspicion those who are or have been part of an armed force or group. People believe that girls having been with an armed group will attract male soldiers to their villages, they are perceived as violent, thieves, promiscuous, and carriers of transmittable diseases, and they are thought to have a bad influence on the behaviour of their peers. These fears and prejudices are translated into stigmatizing behaviour such as name-calling, rejection, social exclusion, and discriminating treatment. Women are identified as those most actively involved in the stigmatization. The stigmatization the girls formerly associated with AFG experience hampers their reintegration process, and can be likened to a second traumatisation. In its discussion the article identifies some important factors impacting on the degree of stigmatization, and distinguishes between two categories: (1) pre-return factors; and (2) post-return factors that may reinforce or reduce the stigmatization. The evidence in this study supports the view that stigmatization is prevalent and poses a major challenge to the reintegration process of girls formerly associated with AFG. The article concludes that the more empowered and financially independent these girls become the less problems and stigmatization they will face

This essay supplements a growing body of work on domestic television in China by exploring some histories of the screen outside the home. Rooted in Olympic-era Beijing, this discussion converges around three intermedial contexts: (1) contemporary art and exhibition; (2) nondomestic and unhomely space; (3) contemporary cinema. These disparate assemblages reimagine the space of television and the medium's role as a form of social communication. The primary focus is the intersection of television and the city in articulating the social body in transition. Focusing on artists, audiences, state media, and elided spaces of electronics production, the essay develops the notion of "screen postsocialism" to explore the logic of development in contemporary China. In particular, it argues that the Olympic era consolidates a transitional imaginary around outside television forms. This emphasis on a particular technology of reception, moreover, acts to screen out the broader textures of postsocialist cultural and economic production.

"New educational landscapes have emerged in large systems of schooling around the globe. While these formations are shaped by local conditions and develop regional characteristics, they also bear the marks of neo-liberalism and are responsive to its devices, such as intensified local markets competing for students and the pressure of privatization. Not surprisingly, schools in favourable contexts where there are strong resonances between home and school cultures are more able to accommodate and benefit from these conditions than are schools in challenging contexts where inequitable effects tend to be amplified and more deeply entrenched. This article interrogates the pressures on schools to change implicit in educational policy landscapes that have developed in Australia, and compares these with some examples of design processes that make up the mix of how schools in England and the United States have responded to similar pressures. Long-term reform efforts in two Australian public secondary schools are described in detail. These cases illustrate two commonly adopted designs for improving the pedagogical practice of teachers. The tension between what is rendered possible through locally available resources and what is needed in schools characterized by high levels of poverty and difference is explored in this article through a discussion of a selection of design processes and products, as well as two specific case studies."

"This article considers the relationship between ethnic and racial minority rights and citizenship in Asia. The most ethnically divided and populous region in the world, Asia is home to some of the most contrasting state responses to ethnic minority assertions of diversity and difference. Asia is also awash with wide-ranging claims by geographically-dispersed ethnic minorities to full and equal citizenship. In exploring the relationship between ethnic minority rights claims and citizenship in Asia, this article considers the relevance of certain core assumptions in Western-dominated citizenship theory to Asian experiences. The aim is to look beyond absolutist West-East and civic-ethnic bifurcations to consider more constructive questions about what Asian and Western models might learn from one another in approaching minority citizenship issues."

The black woman's body in the Americas, and in the global South more generally, vexes and makes visible different valences of labor: the production of commodities and the reproduction of bodies that become commodities. Situating her novel, Midnight Robber (2000), in a speculative future space allusively linked to Caribbean histories of maroonage and anti-colonial resistance, Nalo Hopkinson traces the relationship among the black woman's body, reproduction, production, and materiality. The physicality of bodies is productively linked to resistance against the coercive cybernetic strategies of the decentralized artificial intelligence network (the Nanny web) that biopolitically regulates the population on its new planetary home of Toussaint. In a final scene that promises investment in a material economy drawn from local resources and sustained by a proliferation of resistance narratives featuring a creolized figure who combines maroonage and carnival tactics, Midnight Robber imagines a new possibility for living that negotiates between Caribbean localities linked to material production and mobile, inter-planetary networks linked to discursive production.

Mayas living in the western highlands of Chiapas, Mexico are defining a new relationship with the national government. Rejecting paternalistic forms of development and military repression with which the nation in which they live have tried to eradicate their culture, Mayas are now asserting the right to autonomy within regions where they constitute a majority. I argue that the movement for autonomy based on collective norms of Mayan culture is most acute in areas that were the least incorporated in the 1910-1917 Mexican Revolution and have become important because of mineral, water, and genetic biodiversity that are attracting global investors. The strategies for practicing autonomy developed by indigenous municipalities and campesino organizations in distinct regional settings provide them with patterns for organizing themselves as distinct entities and for participating in national and global settings. Gender differences in all these settings influence the interpretation of autonomy as it is practiced in the communities that have declared themselves as autonomous. I shall compare these practices in regionally distinct settings of Chiapas in an attempt to demonstrate how this enters in to the formulation of an alternative model for pluricultural coexistence in the global ecumene.

Reviewing the 22 years that have elapsed since Gifford's 1989 report labelled Liverpool as racist, the authors focus on the fact that in a city which has had a British African Caribbean (BAC) community for over 400 years, there is minimum representation of that community in the city's workforce. The authors investigate two major forms of employment in the city, i.e. the teaching workforce and the city's Council workforce and one major route to employability, i.e. Higher Education Institutions in the city. They set out an evidenced argument which demonstrates the under-representation of the BAC community in two of the city's major areas of employment. The authors hypothesise that this under-representation is grounded in institutional and structural racism.