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La política cultural del aborto: Las percepciones y el manejo del aborto en Arica, Chile
No full textChile has a long history of restricting access to legal abortion. Until 2017, when the government passed the law N° 21.030 decriminalizing abortion on three grounds, abortion was completely illegal. However, despite this movement towards decriminalization, legal abortion access is still very limited and highly restricted. In this criminalized, highly stigmatized environment, self-managed abortion has emerged as a way to transform the landscape of abortion. This qualitative, exploratory study seeks to explore perceptions of abortion and practices of abortion management both within and outside of the official healthcare system among women and people with the capacity to become pregnant and primary health care providers in the context of the passage of the law N° 21.030 in 2017 in Arica, Chile. In order to understand this social phenomenon, six qualitative interviews were conducted with participants with personal or professional experience with abortion and then thematically coded. This study suggests the presence of knowledge and stigma barriers limiting access to legal abortions in an already scarce environment. When abortions within the offical healthcare system are accessed, the experience of obstetric violence is common, usually related to providers’ behavior and treatment choices. In an abortion landscape defined by lack of access and violence, self-managed abortion is not a last resort, but rather offers a parallel method of providing safe, effective, and holistic abortion care. The results of this study highlight the need to educate community members and healthcare providers on abortion to improve access to abortion within the healthcare system. There is a clear urgency for the passage of laws to protect people seeking legal abortions from discrimination and violence. Finally, the success of the model of self-managed abortion in providing both safe and person-centered abortions suggests that alternative abortion provision models have the opportunity to expand abortion access and free the abortion discourse from the confines of the medical-legal paradigm. Self-managed abortion should be decriminalized on all grounds to support reproductive justice.
Chile tiene una historia profunda de restringir el acceso al aborto legal. Hasta 2017, cuando el gobierno aprobó la ley N° 21.030 que despenalizó el aborto por las tres causales, el aborto era completamente ilegal. Sin embargo, a pesar de este movimiento hacia la despenalización, el acceso legal al aborto sigue siendo limitado y restringido. En este entorno criminalizado y estigmatizado, el aborto autogestionado ha surgido como una forma de transformar el panorama del aborto. Este estudio cualitativo y exploratorio busca explorar las percepciones del aborto y las prácticas para manejar el aborto tanto dentro como fuera del sistema oficial de salud entre las mujeres y otras personas con capacidad de gestar y los funcionarios la salud en el nivel de la atención primaria en el contexto de la aprobación de la ley N° 21.030 en Arica, Chile. Para entender este fenómeno social, se realizaron seis entrevistas cualitativas con personas con experiencia personal o profesional con el aborto y luego se codificaron temáticamente. Este estudio sugiere la presencia de barreras de conocimiento y estigma que limitan el acceso al aborto legal en un ambiente ya escaso. Cuando se accede a los abortos dentro del sistema médico oficial, la experiencia de la violencia obstétrica es común, generalmente relacionada con el comportamiento de los funcionarios de la salud y sus elecciones de tratamiento. En un entorno del aborto definido por la falta de acceso y la violencia, el aborto autogestionado no es un último recurso, sino que ofrece un método paralelo de proporcionar cuidado del aborto seguro, eficaz, y holístico. Los resultados de este estudio destacan la necesidad de educar a los miembros de la comunidad ariqueña y a los funcionarios de la salud sobre el aborto para mejorar el acceso al aborto dentro del sistema de salud. Existe una urgencia por la aprobación de leyes para proteger a las personas que buscan los abortos legales contra la discriminación y la violencia. Por último, el éxito del modelo del aborto autogestionado en la provisión de los abortos seguros sugiere que modelos alternativos de la provisión del aborto tienen la oportunidad de ampliar el acceso al aborto y liberar el discurso del aborto de los confines del paradigma médico-legal. El aborto autogestionado debe ser despenalizado por todos los motivos para apoyar la justicia reproductiva
Factors Driving Changing Community Acceptance of Gays and Lesbians in Cato Manor, KwaZulu-Natal
Get PDFAcceptance of LGBTQ people is an important and encouraging area of social progress. As attitudes change in South Africa and across the world, it is important to understand the drivers of change and how that change is experienced within communities. Using both semi-structured interviews (n=19) and collection of survey data (n=30), this study interrogated the factors that formed and changed views on gay and lesbian people among respondents from a community in Cato Manor, a peri-urban area near Durban, South Africa. About half of all participants reported an opinion change. Interview participants who experienced opinion change most commonly reported the change to be triggered by having close personal gay or lesbian contacts. A culture of silence, traditional gender norms, and religion were found to form baseline opinions within the community, contributing a variety of ideas promoting both tolerance and intolerance. Knowledge of legal protections for gay and lesbian people and consistent exposure to information about LGBTQ people through television and LGBTQ community presence was found to normalize the existence of gay and lesbian people
Healing from Genocidal Rape: An Exploration of the Trauma Healing Process among SEVOTA Members
Get PDFThrough a case study of SEVOTA, this paper examines trauma-healing practices among genocidal rape victims. Its primary research objectives are to identify the resources available to victims immediately post-genocide through the present, critically examine how these resources have helped victims heal, and observe any existing or impending challenges to healing from rape-related trauma in Rwanda. It concludes that building a community and providing resources to help with certain situations (such as funding for medical treatments or children’s school fees) are effective methods of trauma-healing among genocidal rape victims in Rwanda
The Relationship Between Humans and Nature in The Himalayas: A Collection of Poems
Get PDFThroughout this research period I lived in the Gurung Village of Sikles in the Lower Annapurna Region of the Himalayan Mountain Range. Here, I grew in my understanding and learnings behind the village people’s relationship with nature, what shapes it, how it is changing, and general attitudes towards it. The Gurung community is traditionally of the Bon religion, but with the impacts of our ever-connecting world, many have also incorporated Buddhism and Hinduism into their beliefs and practices as well. Therefore, many of their traditions include pockets of animism and traditional worship of nature, but many villagers have slowly converted to non-animistic religions and beliefs as well. Sikles is situated in the hills just below Annapurna II where conditions are mild enough to interact with the land heavily as a means of life and survival.
Oftentimes scholars who focus on the human-environment relationship can write about it in a very academic, inaccessible way that I find to take away from the importance and root of the topic at hand and drive distance between the reader and the subject. I find this approach to be very counterintuitive when sharing teachings of something so vital, natural, and core to our human existence. In an attempt to negate and challenge this outcome, I have chosen to write my findings, experiences, and the knowledge kindly shared with me in the form of poetry
The Evolution of Aid Protection: a future informed by Afghanistan
Get PDFThe need for protection during complex crises is unremitting. Studies spanning the past decade prove humanitarian aid workers are at great risk while working within conflict zones and insecure contexts. This influx is due to the proliferation of politicization of humanitarianism, donor involvement, and lack of communication between involved parties. This exploratory study uses longitudinal data collection by way of semi-structured qualitative interviews. The research examined how humanitarian workers’ need for protection, while providing aid to Afghanistan, will change the future of humanitarian response.
It was concluded that although in the past decade, on-site actors felt they had enough physical protection, especially in regard to rapid-onset incidents, they vocalized the urgent need for psychological protection. The future of humanitarian response must understand that burnout, PTSD, and mental health issues are besetting these workers. Results spoke to the effects of protective protocols set in place mid-way through the crisis in Afghanistan. The impediment of community engagement and restraining aid workers to their offices ultimately created more work. Reflecting on the strategies of humanitarian action employed in this emblematic crisis will have a great impact on many individuals’ futures and should be significant in the tailoring of new operations in humanitarian response
Hummingbird diversity, abundance, and feeding interactions across three floral communities on Mount Totumas, Chiriquí, Panamá
Get PDF(Trochilidae) are a large Neotropical bird family of nectar-feeders that have evolved as pollinators of many Neotropical plants. Interactions between hummingbirds and plants form mutualistic networks that may change in structure over environmental and anthropogenic gradients. While the unique dynamics of hummingbird diversity and floral interactions have been studied throughout the Neotropics, differing drivers between locations emphasizes the need for further local research. This deficit is especially crucial in biodiverse and understudied locations like the Western Highlands of Panamá. In this study, I investigated how hummingbird diversity, abundance, and floral interactions differed between Cloud Forest, Garden, and Oak Forest on Mount Totumas, Chiriquí Highlands, Panamá. I quantified and compared hummingbird richness, Shannon diversity, abundance, floral density, and floral visitation during three days of replicate point counts in each site. Additionally, I constructed quantitative hummingbird-plant networks, computed standard network indices, and compared hummingbird specialization at a species-level. Across study sites, I made 548 observations of 14 hummingbird species, and observed 4533 hummingbird visits to 35 plant species. Hummingbird richness was highest in the Garden, while Shannon diversity was slightly higher in the Cloud Forest. Hummingbird relative abundance, floral density, and visitation rates were significantly higher in the Garden site, and decreased in Cloud Forest and Oak Forest. Linear models suggest that floral density predicts hummingbird abundance and richness, suggesting that high floral density in the Garden likely attracts hummingbirds. While not representative of a complete elevational gradient, hummingbird diversity decreased at the higher elevation Oak Forest site. The study area hummingbird-plant network was speciose, with the Garden contributing more species and interactions than the forest sites. Across sites, nestedness (wNODF) and connectance (C) were lower than expected by null models, while network-level specialization (H2’) and modularity (Q) were higher. Network-level specialization was higher in the forest sites than in the Garden, possibly indicating hummingbird foraging flexibility in human-impacted landscapes. Hummingbird species specialization (d’) varied on a species-specific level between sites, and was not significantly predicted by hummingbird body length, bill length, or bill curvature. While there are clearly structural differences in hummingbird-plant interactions between sites, further study over the entire year is essential to fully describe hummingbird dynamics at Mount Totumas
How elevation affects epiphyte distribution: An analysis in epiphyte distribution changes at different elevations and tree strata in Santa Lucia Cloud Forest Reserve, Ecuador
Get PDFCloud forests are unique ecosystems due to their tropical nature, high elevations, and extremely high presence of epiphytes that serve many important roles for the ecosystem’s biotic and abiotic components. As epiphytes can make up anywhere from one-quarter (Foster 2001) to a half (Gómez González et al. 2017) of all local plant species in cloud forests, it is essential to understand how their habitat distributions change with elevation and whether climate change will have a significant effect on that. This study used observational survey methods to record the amount of monocots (separately counted bromeliads and orchids), dicots, ferns, and percent moss cover of thin, medium, and thick mosses on multiple trees at every 50 meters (m) of elevation increase along trails in Santa Lucia Cloud Forest Reserve in Pichincha, Ecuador. These data allowed for results to analyze the microclimatic distributions and overall ecosystem distributions of these epiphytic plants to test whether the changes in their prevalence across an elevation gradient were significant and could be used to predict how they will shift as the climate continues to change due to increased atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This study concluded that there were increasing trends in the average numbers of ferns, bromeliads, and medium moss per tree as elevation increased. It also used differences between counts from 0-5 m on tree trunks and 5-10 m on tree trunks to analyze how distributions changed only on tree trunks across the studied elevation range (1,600-2,200 m). The number of ferns on the 0-5 m sections significantly increased (R = 0.7405) and the same for bromeliads, although not significantly. On both sections of the trees, medium moss coverage significantly increased along with elevation which allows for conclusions on water storage potential and the optimization of mosses in more humid environments to be made. The results of this study could be used in conjunction with other studies that research how plant distributions change with climate change in order to predict how certain epiphyte distributions may change as climate change progresses
The Geopolitical Impact of Conflict on Food Security in Nigeria
Get PDFNigeria is a country on the rise, and considered the leader of Africa. By 2050, the population is estimated to reach 400 million people, which would make it the third most populous country in the world. However, conflicts and food insecurity threaten the prosperity of the country. Many have heard about these threats to human security, such as Boko Haram, flooding, and the Russian-Ukrainian war. The root causes and contributors to these crises must be investigated, to better understand the direction they are headed. It is important to understand what the main drivers of food insecurity in Nigeria are, as well as the main conflicts in and impacting the country. This paper seeks to analyze the intersectionality of the two subjects, analyzing the geopolitical impact conflict has on food security, but also acknowledging the impact food security has on conflict. Further, this paper analyzes solutions and approaches presented by various experts in an attempt to hypothesize how these crises are best approached and addressed
Evolving Swiss Neutrality: Foreign Policy, Identity, and a Changing World
Get PDFIn the minds of many, both within Switzerland and abroad, when one thinks of Switzerland one thinks neutrality, and often when one thinks neutrality one thinks Switzerland. It is perhaps for this reason that when Switzerland chose to sanction Russia much of the world was caught by surprise. Sensationalist newspapers were quick to jump to the conclusion that the age of Swiss neutrality is over. The government insists that there isn’t a kernel of truth in the matter. However, as is always the case, the truth is much more nuanced than either extreme. Using previous publications, current and historical data on the economy of Switzerland, four interviews with historians and professionals in the field, as well as analysis of the official statements released by the Swiss government, this paper will attempt to answer and understand exactly to what extent Switzerland deviated from its traditional understanding of neutrality.
The paper will look at three distinct factors. Economic changes, political changes, and societal factors. Using each of these prisms one will see to what extent they can be blamed for Switzerland\u27s decision to sanction Russia and what their impacts on Switzerland’s neutrality may be. Be it abandoning or evolving neutrality this paper will attempt to understand in what direction the winds of Switzerland’s understanding of its own neutrality are blowing
The Contradictions of Sought Safe Havens: The Difficulty of Immigration and Integration for Muslim Maghrébins in France
Get PDFThe purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of laïcité and government trends to the right in France affect immigration and integration policy in France as it pertains to Muslim Maghrébin migrants. To do so, I conducted interviews with five experts with experience in some facet of Muslim North African migration, followed by using secondary sources to identify current trends, policies, and practices pertaining to migrants in France. The paper is broken into five sections that build on each other to contextualize and explore how the lives of Muslim Maghrébins are affected, including historical migrant trends, laïcité as a French principle, the current French political trend to the right, immigration policy, and integration policy. The evolution of laïcité and its role in affecting right-wing anti-immigration rhetoric is explored, in addition to the examination of discriminatory immigration policy against Maghrébins. The paper concludes with the determination that both laïcité and French right-wing policy has substantially affected the trajectory of immigration and integration policy in recent years and has contributed to the targeted discrimination of Muslim Maghrébins in both France and French immigration practices