Facilitating the access of minorities to post-secundari education in the United States. 'Facilitar el acceso a la educación post-secundaria de las minorías'.

No publicada

Neoconservatism in the United States and the institutionalized exclusion of Poor Women

Public Assistance to the poor in the United States was always been reluctant and especially cruel to women. A society that from the outset prized Kantian principles of individual freedom over Rousseau’s notions of social contract and that was dominated by a puritanical morality saw poverty as self-made. If individuals had freedom of choice, bad outcomes were necessarily caused by bad choices. The poor had themselves to blame.

The United States in Southern Africa: Chester Crocker's linkage strategy 1981-1988

Chester Crocker was appointed as Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in 1981. He had criticised the inconsistencies of US African policy and proposed a renewed emphasis on the balance between America's global interests with specific regional priorities. While the focus of Congressmen, journalists and public opinion centred on the issue of apartheid, it was the Namibian War of Independence (South African Border War) that initially drew the attention of the Reagan administration, and it was the resolution of this war that remained the priority for the US government in this region throughout Crocker's time in office.

A participação da United States Agency for international development (USAID) na reforma da universidade brasileira na década de 1960

O presente estudo propôs-se investigar de que forma os acordos assinados com a USAID sobre ensino superior no Brasil fizeram parte da estratégia dos Estados Unidos de construção de regimes internacionais mais amplos que deveriam sustentar a ordem mundial depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial. A hipótese central é a de que esses acordos estavam relacionados com a estratégia de promoção do desenvolvimento econômico e social que tinha, de um lado, a noção de que o desenvolvimento poderia ser planejado e implementado pelos governos e, de outro, uma visão de segurança internacional em que a promoção do desenvolvimento era entendida como fator essencial. Para a realização do estudo foram realizadas análise documental e entrevistas com pessoas que, de várias formas, estiveram ligadas às ações da USAID no ensino superior brasileiro na década de 1960, em especial ao caso de cooperação técnica com a Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. Os dados levantados pelo estudo permitiram confirmar em larga medida a hipótese levantada inicialmente, mas mostraram também que a questão é bem mais complexa. Os acordos da USAID sobre ensino superior no Brasil fizeram parte da estratégia de construção de regimes internacionais, mas representaram apenas uma etapa de um amplo programa de cooperação científica e tecnológica iniciada muito antes.

Leadership of portuguese community schools in the East Coast of the United States and the public policies of education: a multiple case studies

The Portuguese community schools of the United States located in the areas of larger Portuguese population concentration are social organizations that come materializing throughout decades the designs of the educative policies of the Portuguese government in relation to the expansion and preservation of the language, the culture and the history of Portugal. These designs of the educative policies are enrolled in the Constitution of the Republic (1976), in the Basic Law of Educative System (1986) and, over all, in the successive legislative norms (Decree-laws and ordinances) of the successive governments. Portuguese community schools in the United States are structuralized in analogous way to schools of the Portuguese geographic space. For this qualitative study (multiple case), four directors of Portuguese schools of the East Coast of the United States were interviewed; two schools are in the state of Rhode Island and the other two are in the state of Massachusetts. Also, it was administered the questionnaire on practices of leadership “Leadership Practices Inventory” (LPI) of Kouzes and Posner (2002) to collect additional data about practices of leadership on the directors of the schools. The LPI evaluates practices of leadership classifying them in five domains: (a) Model the way; (b) Inspire a shared vision; (c) Challenge the process; (d) Enable others to act; and, (e) Encourage the heart. Results of this qualitative research indicate that the Portuguese Government has not had an educative policy stimulant, coherent and consistent of support, incentive, maintenance and diffusion of the Portuguese language and culture and the directors of the studied schools they have a proactive and serving leadership style in conducting the management of Portuguese community schools. The five practices of leadership are highly practiced by the directors of the studied schools above all the practices “Enable others to act” and “Encourage the heart”.

A collection of documents on economic relations between the United States and Central America, 1906-1956

Includes bibliography

Some considerations on the possible effects of the failure of the United States Congress to renew the ATPDEA

Includes bibliography

Trade relations between Brazil and the United States

Includes bibliography

Trade relations between Brazil and the United States = Relações comerciais entre o Brasil e os Estados Unidos

Includes bibliography

United States certificate programs in technical communication : a feminist-sophistic investigation

Technical communication certificates are offered by many colleges and universities as an alternative to a full undergraduate or graduate degree in the field. Despite certificates’ increasing popularity in recent years, however, surprisingly little commentary exists about them within the scholarly literature. In this work, I describe a survey of certificate and baccalaureate programs that I performed in 2008 in order to develop basic, descriptive data on programs’ age, size, and graduation rates; departmental location; curricular requirements; online offerings; and instructor status and qualifications. In performing this research, I apply recent insights from neosophistic rhetorical theory and feminist critiques of science to both articulate, and model, a feminist-sophistic methodology. I also suggest in this work that technical communication certificates can be theorized as a particularly sophistic credential for a particularly sophistic field, and I discuss the implications of neosophistic theory for certificate program design and administration.

Post-9/11 Terrorism Threats, News Coverage, and Public Perceptions in the United States

Terrorists, policy-makers, and terrorism scholars have long assumed that the mere threat of terrorist strikes affects societies that have experienced actual acts of terrorism. For this reason, most definitions of terrorism include the threat of violent political acts against civilians. But so far research has neither validated this conventional wisdom nor demonstrated how actual and mass-mediated threat messages by terrorists and terror alerts and threat assessments by government officials affect the public in targeted states. This paper fills the gap providing evidence that who conveys such messages matters and that mass-mediated threat messages by al Qaeda leaders and announced alerts and threat assessments by U.S. administration officials had a significant impact on the American public’s threat perceptions in the post-9/11 years.

Assessing the Relevance of Anomie Theory for Explaining Spatial Variation in Lethal Criminal Violence: An Aggregate-Level Analysis of Homicide within the United States

One of the most influential statements in the anomie theory tradition has been Merton’s argument that the volume of instrumental property crime should be higher where there is a greater imbalance between the degree of commitment to monetary success goals and the degree of commitment to legitimate means of pursing such goals. Contemporary anomie theories stimulated by Merton’s perspective, most notably Messner and Rosenfeld’s institutional anomie theory, have expanded the scope conditions by emphasizing lethal criminal violence as an outcome to which anomie theory is highly relevant, and virtually all contemporary empirical studies have focused on applying the perspective to explaining spatial variation in homicide rates. In the present paper, we argue that current explications of Merton’s theory and IAT have not adequately conveyed the relevance of the core features of the anomie perspective to lethal violence. We propose an expanded anomie model in which an unbalanced pecuniary value system – the core causal variable in Merton’s theory and IAT – translates into higher levels of homicide primarily in indirect ways by increasing levels of firearm prevalence, drug market activity, and property crime, and by enhancing the degree to which these factors stimulate lethal outcomes. Using aggregate-level data collected during the mid-to-late 1970s for a sample of relatively large social aggregates within the U.S., we find a significant effect on homicide rates of an interaction term reflecting high levels of commitment to monetary success goals and low levels of commitment to legitimate means. Virtually all of this effect is accounted for by higher levels of property crime and drug market activity that occur in areas with an unbalanced pecuniary value system. Our analysis also reveals that property crime is more apt to lead to homicide under conditions of high levels of structural disadvantage. These and other findings underscore the potential value of elaborating the anomie perspective to explicitly account for lethal violence.