City Profile: Erbil

Erbil (Hawler in Kurdish), is the capital and the largest city of Iraqi Kurdistan. Having been continuously inhabited for about 6000 years, the city has recently been regarded by UNESCO World Heritage as one of the world’s oldest urban settlements. The city is witnessing remarkable urban growth and rapid spatial expansion compounded by a dramatic increase in population due to emigration from the countryside and rural areas over the last three decades. Following the changing geopolitical landscape of post-war Iraq, urban changes and socio-political transformation are largely driven by Erbil’s growing autonomous status as the capital of northern region of Kurdistan since 2003. This paper explores the layers of historical, spatial and social developments of the contemporary urban context of Kurdistan in general and of Erbil in particular as a reflection of the changing status of the city, as well as the polarization of Iraq and the emergence of neoliberal urbanism. The tension between the global and modern from one side and traditional and authentic from another is ever present and evident in everyday challenges in the planning of the city. In large part, Erbil’s built fabric embodies the dichotomy of identity and contests between its past and future, in which the present remains a transition between two disconnected realities.

Prioritisation of citizen centric information for disaster response

In the aftermath of a disaster event, and in the absence of trained professionals, many responsibilities are taken on by uninjured citizens who are willing and able to help, such as care of the injured or search and rescue. These citizens are constrained by communications and logistics problems but are less equipped to deal with them as most often they are cut off from any coordinated assistance. The method proposed in this study would increase the survivability of those injured or trapped by a disaster event by providing a facility to allow citizens to coordinate and share information among themselves. This is facilitated by the proposed deployment and the autonomous management of an ad hoc infrastructure that liaises (OK?) directly with survivors without central control. Furthermore, as energy concerns present critical constraints to these networks, this research proposes a system of categorising information elements within the network to ensure efficient information exchange.

Regulatory Change and Capital Adjustment of US Credit Unions

We investigate the determinants of US credit union capital-to-assets ratios, before and after the implementation of the current capital adequacy regulatory framework in 2000. Capitalization varies pro-cyclically, and until the financial crisis credit unions classified as adequately capitalized or below followed a faster adjustment path than well capitalized credit unions. This pattern was reversed, however, in the aftermath of the crisis. The introduction of the PCA regulatory regime achieved a reduction in the proportion of credit unions classified as adequately capitalized or below that continued until the onset of the crisis. Since the crisis, the speed of recovery of credit unions in this category following an adverse capitalization shock was sharply reduced.

Max Weber and the First World War: Protestant and Catholic living standards in Germany, 1914-1919

We assess informal institutions of Protestants and Catholics by investigating their economic resilience in a natural experiment. The First World War constitutes an exogenous shock to living standards since the duration and intensity of the war exceeded all expectations. We assess the ability of Protestant and Catholic communities to cope with increasing food prices and wartime black markets. Literature based on Weber (1904, 1905) suggests that Protestants must be more resilient than their Catholic peers. Using individual height data on some 2,800 Germans to assess levels of malnutrition during the war, we find that living standards for both Protestants and Catholics declined; however, the decrease of Catholics’ height was disproportionately large. Our empirical analysis finds a large statistically significant difference between Protestants and Catholics for the 1915–19 birth cohort, and we argue that this height gap cannot be attributed to socioeconomic background and fertility alone.

Max Weber and the First World War: Protestant and Catholic living standards in Germany, 1915-1919

We assess informal institutions of Protestants and Catholics by investigating their economic
resilience in a natural experiment. The First World War constitutes an exogenous shock to living standards since the duration and intensity of the war exceeded all expectations. We assess the ability of Protestant and Catholic communities to cope with increasing food prices and wartime black markets. Literature based on Weber (1904, 1905) suggests that Protestants must be more resilient than their Catholic peers. Using individual height data on some 2,800 Germans to assess levels of malnutrition during the war, we find that living standards for both Protestants and Catholics declined; however, the decrease of Catholics’ height was disproportionately large. Our empirical analysis finds a large statistically significant difference between Protestants and Catholics for the 1914-19 birth cohort, and we argue that this height gap cannot be attributed to socioeconomic background and fertility alone.

Crafting Modern Design in Italy, from Post-War to Postmodernism

The years between 1945 and the early 1980s are the most celebrated in Italy’s design history. From the rhetoric of reconstruction to the postmodern provocations of the Memphis design collective, Italy’s architects played a vital role in shaping the country’s encounter with post-war modernity. Yet as often as this story has been told, it is incomplete. Craft was vital to the realisation of post-war Italian design, and an area of intense creativity in its own right, and yet has been marginalised and excluded in design historiography.

Perceived positive and negative consequences after surviving cancer and their relation to quality of life

Surviving childhood cancer has multiple implications on both physical and psychological domains of the individual. However, its study and possible effects on health-related quality of life (HRQoL) outcomes of adolescent survivors has been understudied. The objective of this study was twofold; to assess positive and negative cancer-related consequences (psychosocial and physical) in a sample of adolescent cancer survivors and to explore their relationship with HRQoL outcomes. Forty-one participants answered two questions about positive and negative consequences in the aftermath of cancer and filled in the KIDSCREEN-52 self-reported version. Data were analysed using mixed methods approach. 87.8% of the sample identified positive consequences and 63.4% negative consequences in survivorship. Four positive categories and five negative categories with regard to cancer-related consequences were found. Changed perspectives in life narratives seem to be the positive consequence more related to HRQoL (physical well-being, mood & emotions, autonomy, social support & peers), followed by useful life experience (physical well-being, autonomy, social support & peers). Psychological impact was the most referred negative consequence with a significant detrimental effect on social support and peers HRQoL dimension. Even if the majority of survivors reported benefit finding in the aftermath of cancer, concomitant positive and negative consequences have been found. However, findings only reveal a significant relationship between positive narratives and HRQoL, and negative consequences do not seem to have a significant influence on overall HRQoL in survivorship.

Embracing difference and the deferral of self-government: a critical analysis of the framing and practice of contemporary peace building

This thesis analyses how dominant policy approaches to peacebuilding have moved away from a single and universalised understanding of peace to be achieved through a top-down strategy of democratisation and economic liberalisation, prevalent at the beginning of 1990s. Instead, throughout the 2000s, peacebuilders have increasingly adopted a commitment to cultivating a bottom-up and hybrid peace building process that is context-sensitive and intended to be more respectful of the needs and values of post-war societies. The projects of statebuilding in Kosovo and, to a lesser extent, in Bosnia are examined to illustrate the shift. By capturing this shift, I seek to argue that contemporary practitioners of peace are sharing the sensibility of the theoretical critics of liberalism. These critics have long contended that post-war societies cannot be governed from ‘above’ and have advocated the adoption of a bottom-up approach to peacebuilding. Now, both peace practitioners and their critics share the tendency to embrace difference in peacebuilding operations, but this shift has failed to address meaningfully the problems and concerns of post-conflict societies. The conclusion of this research is that, drawing on the assumption that these societies are not capable of undertaking sovereign acts because of their problematic inter-subjective frames, the discourses of peacebuilding (in policy-making and academic critique) have increasingly legitimised an open-ended role of interference by external agencies, which now operate from ‘below’. Peacebuilding has turned into a long-term process, in which international and local actors engage relationally in the search for ever-more emancipatory hybrid outcomes, but in which self-government and self-determination are constantly deferred. Processes of emphasising difference have thus denied the political autonomy of post-war societies and have continuously questioned the political and human equality of these populations in a hierarchically divided world.

Reflections on conducting research on the ‘war on terror’: religious identity, subjectivity and emotions

In recent years there has been an increase in literature which has explored the insider/outsider position through ethnic identities. However, there remains a neglect of religious identities, even though it could be argued that religious identities have become increasingly important through being prominent in international issues such as the ‘war on terror’ and the Middle East conflict. Through drawing on the concept of subjectivity, I reflect on research I conducted on the impact of the ‘war on terror’ on British Muslims. I explore the space between the insider/outsider position demonstrating how my various subjectivities – the ‘non-Islamic appearance I’, the ‘Muslim I’, the ‘personal I’, the ‘exploring I’, the ‘Kashmiri I’ or the ‘Pakistani I’, the ‘status I’ and the ‘outsider I’ – assisted in establishing trust, openness and commonality. I conclude by demonstrating how the ‘emotional I’ allowed me to manage my own emotions and participants emotions.

“An Absurdly Quiet Spot”: The Spatial Justice of WW1 Fraternizations

Recent research on WW1 shows that incidents of fraternization across enemy lines took place regularly. However, fraternization remains a taboo in many contexts. The fact that the 2005 film Joyeux Noel by Christian Caron, which explicitly deals with the subject, encountered resistance from the authorities, is an indication of the kind of difficulty associated with the issue. I am drawing my inspiration from the way fraternizations are depicted in the film and in the literature in order to explore the concept of spatial justice. I define spatial justice as the question that emerges when a body desires to occupy the same space at the same time as another body. Defined like this, the question of spatial justice opens up in the dread of No Man’s Land and in particular the exchange of affects, objects and narratives that went on during fraternizations. I trace the movement of spatial justice as one of withdrawal from the asphyxiating atmosphere of the war and the propaganda machine. This withdrawal is not one of unpatriotic stance but of a courageous and difficult detachment from the supposed legality of the war that could only function on the basis of hate and demonization. While fraternizations did not end the war, they allowed for the possibility of spatial justice to emerge, as an opportunity to reorient the space and the bodies within.

O jornalismo português "incorporado": circunstâncias, experiências e percepções

Dissertação apresentada à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Jornalismo.

Voices in search of a reader: the polyphonic writing of António Lobo Antunes

This paper aims at analysing the writing of the Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes, considered one of the major writers in European Literature with 26 books published, by focusing on the strategies deployed in his texts of creating micro-narratives within the main frame, and conveying the elements of individual and collective memory, past and present, the self and the others, using various voices and silences. Lobo Antunes incorporates in his writing his background as a psychiatrist at a Mental Hospital in Lisbon, until 1985 (when he decided to commit exclusively to writing), his experience as a doctor in the Portuguese Colonial War battlefield, but also the daily routines of the pre and post 25th of April 1974 (Portuguese Revolution) with subtle and ironic details of the life of the middle and upper class of Lisbon‘s society: from the traumas of the war to the simple story of the janitor, or the couple who struggles to keep their marriage functional, everything serves as material to develop and interweave a complex plot, that a lot of readers find too enwrapped and difficult to follow through. Some excerpts taken from his first three novels and books of Chronicles and his later novel – Ontem não te Vi em Babilónia (2006) – will be put forward to exemplify the complexity of the writing and the main difficulties of the reader, lost in a multitude of narrators‘ voices. Recently, Lobo Antunes has commented on his work stating: What I write can be read in the darkness. This paper aims at throwing some light by unfolding some of the strategies employed to defy new borders in the process of reading.

A wave of change: Labor market and social security impacts of the EU refugee inflow

The recent massive inflow of refugees to the European Union (EU) raises a number of unanswered questions on the economic impact of this phenomenon. To examine these questions, we constructed an overlapping-generations model that describes the evolution of the skill premium and of the welfare benefit level in relevant European countries, in the aftermath of an inflow of asylum-seekers. In our simulation, relative wages of skilled workers increase between 8% and 11% in the period of the inflow; their subsequent time path is dependent on the initial skill premium. The entry of migrants creates a fiscal surplus of about 8%, which can finance higher welfare benefits in the subsequent periods. These effects are weaker in a scenario where refugees do not fully integrate into the labor market.

The nature of bullying among secondary school students /

The purpose of this research was to determine the prevalence and effect of bullying in a secondary school. Six hundred and fifty-nine student volunteers completed a survey which included a quantitative component of 40 questions and 3 questions which required a written response. The results suggest that approximately 1 student in 10 was involved in a bullying situation either as a bully or a victim. As age increased, physical bullying decreased whereas psychological remained high in the senior years of high school. Boys were involved more in bullying than girls, especially in the junior years. The effects of bullying could be devastating to the point of school avoidance or early school leaving. The results also indicate that much of the bullying was not being reported. The implication for the education system is that more needs to be done to prevent bullying, to encourage the reporting of bullying, and to deal with the aftermath of a bullying situation.

Affidavit of Residency with Niagara for Daniel Shannon- 1819

An affidavit confirming that Daniel Shannon resided in the province and fulfilled loyal service in the War of 1812 as a look out in the Niagara Region. It is signed by Thomas Clark and Thomas Dickson of the 2nd Regiment of the Lincoln Militia.