Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Our presentation provides a replicable conceptual model for increasing pre-service teachers’ engagement with cultural, social, and historical differences as they build knowledge, skills, and dispositions to meet cultural diversity standards.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines “place based” community change to analyze the applicability to war-torn countries in the peace settlement phase of conflict resolution. _x000d__x000d_The “place based” concept has emerged from social change literature and captures a particular philosophy of community change where the community itself defines the scope of the community’s needs and programming. The establishment of a non-profit non-governmental organization (NGO) within the community is designed to provide a small territorial impact with a holistic approach to community issues. A central tenant of the place based initiative is that the governance of the NGO must remain at least 51% community members, reflecting the importance of community driven change. The remaining members of the NGO Board of Directors are programmatic experts who live within the community while implement the change. Among the programmes would be private-public ventures and holistic education (empowerment) of mind, body, and spirit that is tailored to age-based categories of the society (eg. Early childhood, primary, secondary, young adult, adult, and elder programming) as well as family-based categories of the society (tribe, western family unit, orphans, etc).

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: (to be uploaded)

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines how young people, ages between 14-18, use commercial places in a planned suburb for different types of hanging out activities. Using ethnographic data, supplemented by interviews and focus groups, I explore the relationship between the physical space and bodies of young people in public space. I categorize the commercial places into three types of social places, namely prime, adaptive, and marginal places. I find that the adolescents hang out in all three types of social place, but who uses each space and how they use it is contingent on different opportunities and constraints each place offers for hanging out. The prime place allows the teens to spend time among adults, engaging in activities I call �doing consumerism,� while the uses of marginal place provide more autonomous and at-risk behaviors, such as �sitting cars� or smoking. In contrast, adaptive place is a social place young people construct through their appropriation of commercial place. I argue that temporary and vulnerable nature of this third type of place embodies the �liminality� of adolescence. The findings also show teenagers adapt to the normative behaviors associated with a given commercial place they use for hanging out, while simultaneously redefining and sometimes challenging the adultist norms of public space.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines local and national newspaper coverage of the 1998 bias-motivated murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, in order to explore the ways in which mass-mediated discourse is utilized to (re)construct place, community and identity in the aftermath of a high-profile violent crime � both by those who live in the place where the crime occurred and by those who live outside the geographic area associated with the crime. While the discursive themes that run through the news coverage surrounding Shepard�s murder in the national media differ in significant ways from those in the local press, the two sources also have much in common. The national media constructed Laramie, Wyoming as a rural place and then situated all bias-motivated crime in rural localities, concealing the realities of urban hate crime. Local (Wyoming) newspapers constructed hate crime as no different than any other crime (which are all constructed as acts of individual deviance) and the discursively placed all crime in urban settings. The result is that neither discourse addresses the cultural homophobia that is pervasive in all of our communities � allowing media consumers to continue believing that there is no need to examine our own prejudices and no need for collective social change in our own communities.