Diasporic Mobilisation and Repositioning: The Ukrainian World Congress’ Responses to Critical Junctures and Events

BackgroundWhile attrition from the PhD has been attributed to many high‐level causal factors, such as funding, advisor relationship, and “fit” into a department, few studies have closely examined the mechanisms of attrition or why and how graduate engineering students begin to consider attrition from their doctoral programs.Design/MethodThis study analyzed interviews with current and former doctoral engineering students at research universities across the United States, collected through two closely‐related studies on graduate engineering experiences and attrition consideration. We used critical event analysis as a methodological approach to understand the experiences of a subset of 13 participants, who, at some point in their graduate career, experienced a singular event that caused them to question whether to persist in their PhD program.Purpose/HypothesisThe purpose of the present paper is to investigate how graduate engineering students begin to question whether they should remain in their PhD programs of study.ResultsWe categorized the environments in which critical events occurred into four quadrants along the lines of University and Nonuniversity Settings and Routine versus Unexpected Contexts, mapping critical events and supporting events to themes from prior literature. The findings demonstrate how seemingly mundane experiences for faculty can be cataclysmic in the eyes of the student; how critical events serve to magnify other issues that had been accumulating over time; and how students may not self‐reflect on their rationale for pursuing a PhD until a critical juncture occurs.ConclusionsCritical events are one mechanism by which students may begin considering departure from their engineering PhD programs. Some critical events masquerade within mundane contexts, like conversations or conferences (although, in retrospect, students can identify other relevant features contributing to dissatisfaction). From this work, we provide implications geared toward administrators, advisors, and graduate students on how to address and potentially mitigate critical events or their effects, including engaging in conversations about leaving.

ABSTRACTScholarship on conflict-generated diasporas has identified the need to consider diaspora mobilisations in multiple contexts and how they are affected by local and global processes. I argue that diasporas react with mobilisations to global events that take place not only in host-states and home-states but also in other locations to which diasporas are transnationally linked. I illustrate the theoretical concepts with empirical discussion about global diaspora activism for Kosovo and Palestinian statehood. Two categories of global events, critical junctures, and transformative events, can be distinguished, with effects on diaspora mobilisation depending on the sociospatial context in which diasporas are embedded. Critical junctures can transform international and state structures and institutions, and change the position of a strategic centre from ‘outside’ to ‘inside’ a homeland territory and vice versa. Transformative events are less powerful and can change diaspora mobilisation trajectories. In contexts where diasporas have relatively strong positionality vis-à-vis other actors in a transnational social field, diaspora mobilisation is more likely to be sustained in response to critical junctures and transformative events.

Fatty liver disease (FLD), whether it is alcoholic FLD (AFLD) or nonalcoholic FLD (NAFLD), encompasses a morphological spectrum consisting of hepatic steatosis (fatty liver) and steatohepatitis. FLD has the inherent propensity to progress toward the development of cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. It is generally difficult to distinguish AFLD from NAFLD on morphological grounds alone despite the distinctions implied by these etiological designations. The indistinguishable spectrum of histological features of both AFLD and NAFLD suggests a possible convergence of pathogenetic mechanisms at some critical juncture that enables the progression of steatohepatitis toward cirrhosis and liver cancer. From a pathogenetic perspective, FLD may be considered a single disease with multiple etiologies. Excess energy consumption and reduced energy combustion appear to be critical events that culminate in lipid storage in the liver. Energy combustion in the liver is controlled by peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR)-alpha-regulated mitochondrial and peroxisomal fatty acid beta-oxidation systems and the microsomal omega-oxidation system. PPAR-alpha, a receptor for peroxisome proliferators, functions as a sensor for fatty acids (lipid sensor), and ineffective PPAR-alpha sensing can lead to reduced energy burning resulting in hepatic steatosis and steatohepatitis. Delineation of the pathogenetic aspects of FLD is necessary for developing novel therapeutic strategies for this disease.

Since the 1980s, Britain's two largest political parties have been converging ever closer on the political spectrum, in line with a Downsian model of two party majoritarian systems. While both Labour and the Conservatives have been moving toward consensus, we investigate the extent to which the recent financial crisis, understood as a critical juncture, interrupted this movement. Using a “fuzzy set” ideal type analysis with claims‐making data, we assess whether or not we can detect any signs of this consensus breaking down as a result of the crisis and the events which followed. Our results show that despite this most critical event, consensus was maintained as we found both parties adopting very similar framing and narrating strategies on the economic crisis in their public discourse. The study concludes that the shared discursive framing and narrating between both parties on the crisis demonstrates a continued Thatcherite, neoliberal consensus in British politics.Related Articles in this Special Issue Temple, Luke, Maria T. Grasso, Barbara Buraczynska, Sotirios Karampampas, and Patrick English. 2016. .” Politics & Policy 44 (): 553–576. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12161/abstract Giugni, Marco, and Maria T. Grasso. 2016. “.” Politics & Policy 44 (): 447–472. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12157/abstract Lahusen, Christian, Maria Kousis, Johannes Kiess, and Maria Paschou. 2016. “.” Politics & Policy 44 (): 525–552. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12162/abstract Related MediaITV News. 2011. “Conservative Party Conference: Cameron's Debt Promise.” YouTube. https://youtu.be/vJ9RfDr6DVgFinancial Times. 2014. “Miliband Toughens Stance on Deficit.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVY0t_FSN4s

Indigenous peoples with substance use disorders (SUD) and intergenerational trauma (IGT) face complex healthcare needs. Therefore understanding Indigenous patient experiences is crucial for enhancing care delivery, fostering engagement, and achieving optimal outcomes, yet few studies explore the motivations for seeking, staying in, and utilizing treatment from an Indigenous perspective. The goal of this study was to understand the patient experience with an abstinence-based treatment model in a residential treatment setting. A qualitative thematic study was conducted between April 2018 and February 2020 at Benbowpka treatment centre in Blind River, Ontario, Canada. We evaluated the results of the abstinence-based model intervention from the patient's perspective. The Client Quality Assurance Survey tool was employed to gather this data. The data underwent thematic analysis to derive meaningful insights. A total of 157 patients were interviewed. The results were categorized into three parts: (1) Critical events that encouraged participants to seeking treatment; (2) Benefits experienced by participants while they were in the program; (3) Participants take-aways and priorities after completing the program. Core themes emerged in each category and each theme is sub-categorized into quadrants of the Medicine Wheel. Firstly, there was a critical juncture that significantly impacted participants' lives that motivated them to seek treatment at the Benbowpka Treatment Centre. Second, during the study, participants admission to the Benbowopka Treatment Centre, the participants benefitted from a holistic program that addresses spiritual, physical, mental and emotional aspects of healing. Third, participants identified tangible ways in which they implement the skills they gained during the program in their daily lives. Overall, study demonstrates that clients benefitted from both the program activities and the traditional healing practices. This research identified that SUD Indigenous residential treatment programs need to include culture, healing practices, activities and relationships that are part of the treatment process. This study found that the cultural elements and healing practices of the program were highly valued by clients.

The Faroe Islands is receiving increased international attention due to the political changes in the Arctic region. This is causing challenges for the Home Rule model and the Danish Realm. The Faroe Islands have previous experiences with critical junctures that have led to change in self-government settings. Based on historical institutionalism, this article conducts a comparative case study of two previous critical juncture events and time-periods for the Faroe Islands. The first is the Second World War followed by the implementation of the new Home Rule model in 1948, and the second is the severe economic crisis in the 1990s followed by path dependency institutional adaptations to the Home Rule model in 2005. The investigation resembles a different-outcomes comparison and focuses on identifying the contextual political factors of importance and how these factors varied for the two cases. The findings show shifts in the within-case political power balance in opposite directions, changes in the policy space, differences in the Danish state´s position and third-party actor roles as well as differences in terms of international salience of national self-determination norms.

The article refers to the World Congress of Free Ukrainians (WCFU), founded in New York in November 1967. The WCFU united 150 Ukrainian public, political and faith-based organizations. The elected Presidium of the Congress established special committees, which began to work on the coordination of Ukrainian organizations in the West regarding the provision of assistance to Ukrainian refugees and communities in the Americas, Western Europe and Australia, protection of human rights and of political prisoners of Ukrainian descent in the USSR, development of Ukrainian education and culture in the expatriate environment, etc. The WCFU opened its information office at the UN, which brought to the attention of diplomats from different countries the facts about the struggle of the Congress for an independent Ukraine, information about Ukrainian political prisoners, the russification process in Ukraine and Holodomor of 1932–1933. Owing to this effective influence, Canada, with its powerful and numerous Ukrainian community, was the first in the Western world to recognize the independence of Ukraine. In 1991, the WCFU organized a mass demonstration in front of the White House in Washington for the recognition of the young Ukrainian state. In December of the same year, the Congress, together with the Ukrainian World Foundation, announced the creation of the Ukrainian Reconstruction Fund. Since then, this organization has gradually become one of the consistent lobbyists of Ukraine’s national interests in the world. Having changed its name to the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC), it is constantly engaged in the establishment of a positive international image of Ukraine, promotion of its rich historical heritage as well as compelling changes in its society. At the same time, in the circles of this international association there is a certain disappointment with the social and economic situation in Ukraine and lack of real results in the fight against corruption. However, the UWC seeks to contribute to the further development of the historical homeland. Today UWC has an extensive network of constituent organizations and maintains relations with Ukrainian communities in 61 countries. Keywords: WCFU, Ukrainian World Congress, New York, Canada, historical homeland.

Campylobacter in broiler meat presents a significant challenge to food safety. Human campylobacteriosis predominantly arises from multiple sources, with poultry serving as the most substantial contributor. The objective of this study was to ascertain the presence of Campylobacter contamination of retail broiler meat at various critical junctures, including slaughter, processing, food preparation, and potential cross-contamination events occurring in both slaughterhouses and restaurants, processed chicken products, table eggs, and stool samples from humans with enteritis. To fulfill this, samples were systemically collected to detect Campylobacter contamination during various stages of slaughter, processing, food preparation, and potential cross-contamination scenarios at slaughterhouses and restaurants. A total of 460 samples were procured, encompassing 120 samples of chicken meat, 100 table eggs, 120 samples of human stool, and 120 environmental food samples, all obtained from Sohag, Egypt. Each sample underwent bacteriological, biochemical analysis and multiplex PCR enabled the detection of the 23S rRNA, hip O, and gly A genes for the precise identification and differentiation of Campylobacter at the species level. The observed prevalence rates of Campylobacter in broiler meat, table eggs, environment, and human stool samples determined by multiplex PCR were 9.17, 2, 7.5, and 6%, respectively, with overall positive samples of 6.3% (28/460). 75% (21/28) of the isolates were Campylobacter jejuni, 25% (7/28) were Campylobacter coli, and 1 isolate had mixed contamination. Poultry fecal matter, broiler meat, and table eggs could be a high risk of C. jejuni and C. coli to humans, highlighting the need for targeted interventions in the poultry, and egg industry to mitigate the risk of Campylobacter infections. Improved food handling practices at restaurant and house kitchens are essential to reduce contamination.

Gaining attention in the mass media is a key goal of many social movement organizations (SMOs). The dominant explanation of media attention to SMOs is that the media act like a filter, selecting some types of SMOs and events for attention, and ignoring others based on characteristics of these SMOs, events, and their political environment. In contrast to this “bias model,” I argue that some media attention to SMOs is characterized by positive feedback, or rich-get-richer processes: past media attention increases the likelihood of future media attention through its effect on the SMO and on other media outlets. Like other positive feedback systems, media attention can be path dependent, is routinely punctuated by large cascades of attention to previously obscure SMOs, and can be contingent on “accidents” of history: at critical junctures, individuals, organizations, and events have the potential to radically impact the extent of media attention to their movements and organizations. Media attention to SMOs can also become decoupled from the types of events that initially sparked their media attention, becoming spokes-organizations for their movements and receiving media attention for events and stories that they themselves are not involved. In support of this theory, I first show that media attention is, similar to other positive feedback processes, power-law distributed across SMOs using two national (US) data sets. I then illustrate the process of positive feedback in media attention through a case study of the Black Panther Party’s rise to prominence in media attention.

ABSTRACTThis special issue seeks to move the scholarly conversation beyond notions of conflict-generated diasporas as simply agents of conflict or peace. The field is ripe to unpack the notion of context for diaspora mobilisation in International Relations, the focus and novelty of this special issue. Theorising in this volume goes beyond current prevalent thinking that contexts are host-states in which diasporas live, and original home-states to which they are transnationally connected. The emphasis here is that diasporas have linkages to different contexts, and that their embeddedness in these contexts – simultaneously or sequentially in time – either shapes their mobilizations or is shaped by them. The volume theorises about spatialities and temporalities of diaspora engagement: it emphasises spatial notions such as multi-sited embeddedness, positionality, and translocalism on the one side, and temporal notions such as critical junctures, transformative events, simultaneity, crises, and durability of conflicts on the other. This collection further adds new thematic areas to current scholarly inquiry, opening the discussion beyond interest in diaspora remittances, economic development, and extraterritorial voting. The authors take little-explored paths to examine diasporas as agents in transitional justice processes, contested sovereignty, and fragile and de facto states, as well as in civic and ethnic-based activism.

This article contributes to the growing literature on how authoritarian regimes deploy disinformation and conspiracy theories to achieve foreign policy goals. While the effectiveness of these measures is disputed, our study—which is based on a rarely occurring natural experiment—makes an empirical contribution in this direction. Based on the analysis of survey materials collected in Mariupol, Ukraine, around the time of the tumultuous events surrounding the Belarusian presidential election of 2020, we show that, given the right conditions, a critical juncture event in one country can rapidly influence existing patterns of relevant conspiracy belief in a neighbouring one. The right conditions, in this case, include a massive disinformation campaign channelled through (pro-)Russian media, against the backdrop of conspiracy theories already in circulation in Ukraine. The implication of this finding is that the disinformation weapon becomes far more effective when it manages to offer a straightforward explanation (a conspiracy theory) of a critical juncture event that is otherwise complex and multilayered, and that adequate psychological defence mechanisms are needed to mitigate and counter this effect.

100 SHOFAR Spring 1994 Vol. 12, No.3 FOCUS ON TEACHING We welcome responses, dialogue, and discussions of experience in this regular column. Jewish Responses to Modern Biblical Criticism: Some Reflections and a Course Proposal Alan Levenson Assistant Professor Cleveland College ofJewish Studies Teaching a survey of the Hebrew Scriptures to undergraduates for the first time at a distinguished Southern college, I was confronted with an interesting dichotomy. Students who had received a traditional religious background felt threatened by a critical approach to the Bible, often reacting in a defensive, fundamentalist vein. Highly secular students, on the other hand, having no commitment to religious community but only to some vague notion of historical facticity, had trouble imagining the function of a sacred text in a living religious community, or the Bible as something more than a repository for "the facts."l The following reflections, and the syllabus appended at their conclusion, emerged out of a quest for a useful heuristic to tackle this problem. Surveying some of the Jewish responses to modern biblical criticism offered a way to demonstrate that an intellectually rigorous confrontation with Scripture does not necessitate a literalist starting point, and that our respective upbringings influence the ways in which we approach biblical texts. ' The two critical terms in my course title are "modern" and "Jewish," and both require explication. I begin by looking at some classic Christian and Judaic interpretations of the expulsion from Eden. Both Christian and Jewish students were surprised that Paul's and Milton's reading ofThe Fall lNorthrop Frye deals with the second ofthese two issues from the perspective ofcultural literacy. Frye, The Great Code (San Diego-New York-London, 1983), pp. xi-xxiii. I would like to thank my colleague Dr. Roger C. Klein for his comments on an early draft of this essay. Focus on Teaching 101 as the critical event in human history did not predominate in rabbinic exegesis. Few realized that Jewish exegetes gave greater prominence to the murder ofAbel by Cain, and thatJewish polemicists dismissed the doctrine of Original Sin as a misreading.2 In addition to announcing my leitmotif that the Christian and Jewish interpretive traditions differed considerably, I introduce and discuss both the existence of pre-modern biblical exegesis and criticism and the problematic of arriving at the plain meaning (p'shat) of the Bible. Having delineated some of the characteristics of pre-modern Bible reading, I turn to Spinoza's Theological-Political Tractate (1670). Without intending to disparage the other pioneers in modern biblical criticism,3 this pedagogic choice allowed me to highlight the differences between. the adumbrations of modern criticism in the midrashim and in medieval commentaries and Spinoza's fundamentally modern willingness . to explicitly challenge the antiquity, authorship, and authority of Scripture .4 The reception accorded Spinoza's Tractate also demonstrates the resistance to the Higher Criticism, a resistance which continued into the nineteenth century and, in some quarters, until today. Within the Jewish community, "traditional" Jewish methods of exegesis currently flourish not only in the yeshiva world, but also in the popular Artscroll Series chumash, in which the p'shat almost always follows Rashi's d'rash. 5 In contradistinction to the scholars discussed below, the Artscroll approach minimizes the possibility of pluriform readings of a given text (after all, even Rashi's grandson frequently disagreed on what the text really said), and negates intergenerational dialogue as a means of discovering meaning. Modern Orthodoxy, to the extent that it ignores the findings of source criticism, form criticism, archaeology, and comparative linguistics, prefers a "traditional" interpre2See Nachmanides' comments in Charles Chavel, ed., The Disputation at Barcelona (New York, 1983), pp. 2-42. 3Any such list of pioneers would have to include Thomas Hobbes, Bishop LOWlh, Richard Simon, Jean Astruc, and Johann Gabler. 'Spinoza was aware of these medieval anticipations and refers quite often to Ibn Ezra's commentary on the Pentateuch. See also Nahum Sarna, "The Modern Study of the Bible in the Framework of Jewish Studies" and the relevant citations, in Proceedings of the Eighth World Congress ofJewish Studies, Vol. 1 Oerusalem, 1983), pp. 19-27. 5It may be argued that a series that attempts to market rabbinic commentary to a...

This article traces the evolution of reeducation-through-labor (laojiao) as a form of administrative punishment in China in an effort to identify the critical junctures, events, and actors that have produced significant changes in the practice over time. Focusing most of its attention on the abolition of the RTL system announced in the Third Plenum Decision of 2013 and the subsequent use of a range of alternative institutions to house former RTL detainees, it outlines a shift toward more diverse and differentiated means of addressing both political opposition and social problems in China. In making this claim, the article suggests the emergence of a new approach of authoritarian control over the legal system, one capable of handling a wider assortment of offender-types and therefore better-able to protect CCP hegemony.

How can we account for the weakening of the US–South Korea alliance after the cold war? After the cold war, the US–South Korea alliance was expected to remain strong due to North Korea's threats of weapons of mass destruction. For the past decade and a half, this realist projection has not fully come to pass: rather, it has changed inversely. How can we account for this puzzle? In explaining this counter-intuitive development, the author employs the critical juncture approach. The author argues that in South Korea, certain domestic critical events readjusted domestic ideologies that affected its alliance policy towards the USA. With the initiation of Nordpolitik after the end of the cold war (the first critical juncture), conservative anti-communism and progressive nationalism became coexistent in South Korea, thus causing frictional policy towards the USA. The 2000 North–South Korean Summit (the second critical juncture) made the progressive nationalistic move more dominant in Korea, and this ideological change made its alliance policy towards the USA less friendly.

An overstretched hypothesis?