Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Education, Higher Economic aspects South Australia“

This study aims to explore how changes in community preferences, shari’ah economic development through the tridharma of higher education and its contribution to the development of shari’ah economics. This study was conducted at the UIN Alauddin Makassar, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. This study applied library research. Data collection techniques in this study using discourse from books, articles, magazines, journals, and web (internet). Furthermore, the data were analyzed using the Miles and Huberman model, among others, data reduction, data display and conclusion. The results show that there is a change in community preferences caused by external factors (changes in the social and economic environment) and internal factors in higher education in responding to community dynamics. Higher education can be used as a vehicle in the development of shari’ah Economy through the application of higher education tridharma. Furthermore, higher education also takes a significant role in developing scientific aspects and human resources in the field of Sharia Economics in Indonesia.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to explore the extent to which the South Australian flexible learning option (FLO) secondary school enrolment strategy supports some of the most vulnerable and disengaged students to simultaneously engage in secondary- and higher-education, skills and work-based learning; second, to explore the degree to which this FLO enrolment strategy addresses the United Nations (UN) principles of responsible management education and 17 sustainable development goals. Design/methodology/approach The approach includes a practice perspective, field-notes and documents analysis. Findings This paper finds the flexibility inherent in the FLO enrolment strategy goes some way to addressing inequity in education outcomes amongst those who traditionally disengage from education and work-based learning. Findings also highlight ways in which the FLO enrolment strategy addresses some of the UN principals and 17 goals. Research limitations/implications This paper supports the work of HESWBL by calling for future research into the long-term benefits of flexible education strategies that support HESWBL, through exploring the benefits to young people, from their perspective, with a view to providing accountability. Social implications The paper offers an example of a way a practice perspective can explore an education strategy that addresses “wicked problems” (Rittel and Webber, 1973). Currently, “wicked problems” that pervade member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development include intergenerational poverty, under-education and unemployment. Originality/value This paper is valuable because it explores from a practice perspective, how a secondary education enrolment strategy supports vulnerable students engage in their secondary schooling, while simultaneously supporting students achieve higher education, skills and work-based learning.

Purpose Higher education institutions are regarded as forerunners and pioneers of sustainability. However, it is to question whether they actually fulfill their role model function. This paper aims to reveal whether selected universities in Australia and Austria meet the reporting expectations about their activities on sustainability in very heterogeneous environments. Design/methodology/approach Annual reports of selected universities in Australia and Austria are screened by the qualitative text analysis suggested by Mayring to identify their information policy on sustainability. Following the standard definitions, sustainability comprises economic, environmental and social aspects as main categories, which are supplemented further by specifically adapted eight subcategories. Findings The results reveal that the universities concentrate on economic information, preferably on accounting, whereas social aspects are of second importance. Environmental activities that essentially shape the image of sustainability for the majority of the stakeholders are mostly unattended. Research limitations/implications For further research, the authors suggest analyzing the reports of additional countries to get a bigger picture on the role of sustainability information in university reporting. Possible limitations are because of language use and time requirements, as each report must be encoded manually. Practical implications The results reveal the gaps that standard setters should fill by enforcing sustainability content in universities’ reports. Originality/value This paper is the first to analyze the annual reports of international universities in respect to sustainability. Hereby, we further fill a gap by applying a qualitative text analysis on the basis of individually derived categories to reveal the sustainability aspects more precisely.

This article has as objective to present historical aspects, as much as a brief conceptualization of the contemporary socio-economic situation of South Africa. The theoretical reflection of this article articulates the participation of both authors in the youth movement “Fees Must Fall”. Based on that, it aims to debate about the contemporary issues on the field of High Education in South Africa. Like in Brazilian reality, since 2015 there has been a rise of a students’ movement demanding free education and a decolonial reform of the higher education curriculum, as much as gender and racial justice. The “Fees Must Fall” movement lead to, but also protested against, the militarization of the campi, imprisonment of students, depredation, arson and violence from the different sides. The so called High Education crisis in South Africa has made propitious a wide debate in society, as much as it has served as model for many student’s struggles in other contexts. This article will speak from the reality of the engagement with these students to debate about the political and economic situation in South Africa and its impact in the field of high education. Methodologically, the article sets up a bibliographical debate concerning the social and economic reasons for the contemporary crisis. The conclusion of it points to a list of some of the reasons for the crisis in high education in South Africa

The article provides a profound analysis of the main trends of international student migration for tertiary education, discusses the key factors influencing the choice of destination for studying abroad, and reveals the regional peculiarities of instruments for student migration regulation. The first part of the paper highlights the official statistics showing that in recent decades the world witnessed the steady increase in the number of international students, concentrating mainly in the USA and the European Union. Almost 48% of all international students in the world study in the European Union. This region also shows the highest internal student mobility. Among others, such countries as Austria, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand demonstrate the biggest shares of foreign students in the total number of university students. As for donor countries, the dynamics proves the major role of the Asia region, with a half of all international students originated from it. The largest number of foreign students come from China, India and South Korea. Nonetheless, the Asia region becomes a popular destination of student mobility nowadays. The second part of the article concerns different coordination policies of tertiary migration in the regional context. Mostly in developed countries, practices of attracting foreign students to study in professional programs and degree programs with a perspective to enter a national labor market after graduation become more and more popular. Postgraduate migration remains a priority. Most countries encourage job-searching for foreign graduate students, as they are considered to have a high-skill level, international views and an opportunity to live and work in a variety of socio-cultural conditions. Further analysis refers to the main factors determining the choice of destination for foreign students, which are: geographical proximity, language skills, cultural proximity, the cost of education, and a country's reputation in the field of higher education. The paper reveals the leading role of the EU in the developed intraregional educational mobility, the regional asymmetry of migration processes in other regions of the world, and Asian countries actively promoting temporary educational and labor migration to developed countries with incentives to return to a home-country in the future. In recent years, due to positive dynamics of the return migrants number, an interest in the creation of the returnees strategy grows as well as desire of developed and developing countries to benefit most from the return migration.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide a contextual analysis of the professional accounting education system of South Africa (SA).Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses the Global Model of Accounting Education (Watty et al., 2012) to describe the accounting education system of SA, which is then compared with similar case studies of Australia, Japan and Sri Lanka. Information about the SA accounting education system is contextualised from multiple sources, using data triangulation.FindingsSeveral similarities between the SA accounting education system and that of Australia are found, such as the role and involvement of the professional bodies in the accreditation processes, with less similarities with that of Japan and Sri Lanka. The comparisons illuminate the economic development of each country and the level of involvement in the education programmes by the profession. Specific challenges in SA include the entrance hurdles to higher education and emphasis on an accounting degree.Practical implicationsThe application of the Global Model of Accounting Education helps to identify the similarities in the global accounting arena and illuminates the uniqueness of the SA accounting education system. This study illustrates the establishment of an accounting education system that aligns with the International Education Standards (IESs).Originality/valueThe study contributes to the discussions around challenges in accounting education, specifically those associated with accreditation and a strong controlling relationship between academe and the profession.

The Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), along with the representative body, the Higher Education South Africa (HESA, now known as Universities South Africa), have indicated that South Africa has reached a critical juncture in the governance of higher education, a belated moment of truth – even if it’s precise nature remains to be clarified. The study examined specific variables which include the nature and scope of corporate governance, the factors which influence effective and sustainable corporate governance as well as the strategies to enhance sustainable corporate governance environment in a Merged University. A mixed method was used and data were collected using questionnaire and interview instruments. The sample was made up of 120 randomly selected staff and students. The study found that even though there were positive aspects of the current governance system, the pendulum swayed towards the majority who felt that the governance system in place was not responsive enough and does not communicate as well as embrace all stakeholders. The study showed that as the demand for higher education continues to grow and as governments acknowledge their role in promoting economic development, it becomes increasingly important to ensure higher education systems are managed in an effective way.

This chapter explores factors that enhance and constrain the adoption and sustainability of Information and Communication Technologies in Universities and higher institutions of learning in South Africa. This study examines pedagogical, socio-economic and epistemological aspects of the paradigm shift in higher education delivery in Africa. Adopting and sustaining ICTs for educational improvement is a multifaceted process. As a dynamic process, all the vital elements of technology adoption need to be present in order to meet the goals of technology-enhanced higher education in Africa. It further argues that policy guidelines and strategic plans are essential for the successful adoption and sustainability of ICTs in higher education (HE) institutions in Africa. The chapter argues that the success of ICT-mediated higher education is not only technical but also political in nature.

This study presents a broad picture of the post school outcomes of 28 young adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder living in South Australia. Findings from the study suggest that the majority of the participants still have a long way to go to reach the goal of meaningful participation in the economic and social life of their local communities. Most of the young adults had limited social networks and were highly dependent on their families for tangible and emotional support. While many of the participants were regularly Involved in structured recreational and leisure activities, the majority were unemployed and still living with their families. Individuals with higher levels of cognitive functioning generally had better outcomes than those identified as functioning at a lower cognitive level. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for practice and further research.

The Cicerone farmlet experiment, conducted on the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia, explored aspects of profitability and sustainability under three different whole-farmlet management regimes. The 5-year period over which the treatments were measured occurred over a period of generally below-average rainfall, hence responses to management treatments were limited. A modelling approach was used to estimate profitability over a longer period representing the variable climate of the region. A stochastic discounted cash flow model was developed to estimate economic returns of two of the Cicerone management system treatments scaled up from the farmlet scale (53 ha) to the size of a typical commercial farm in the region (920 ha) over a 20-year period. Several scenarios were used to estimate the commercial-scale returns under different rates of pasture improvement and stocking rates. Over the long-term, Farm A was found to be more profitable but also more risky (in terms of variation around the mean of cumulative discounted cash flow) than the ‘typical’ Farm B management system. If livestock managers choose to adopt a pasture improvement strategy based on renovating pastures and increasing soil fertility, they are more likely to achieve higher net worth with more moderate rates of pasture improvement than those explored on Farm A where a high rate of pasture improvement had been implemented in order to quickly differentiate treatments.

Purpose – Agriculture is a major generator of wealth and employment in Australia. However, it faces a range of economic and environmental challenges which require substantial community support. The purpose of this paper is to examine Australian adults’ Australian knowledge of, and attitudes towards, Australian agriculture. Design/methodology/approach – Online questionnaire survey of 1,026 adults conducted nationwide during August 2012. Findings – Most respondents had little knowledge of even the basic aspects of the industry but they approved of farmers’ performance of their roles. Latent class analysis showed that there are two groups of consumers with low and lower levels of knowledge. The respondents’ age, rural residence and universalist values were positive predictors of agricultural knowledge. Research limitations/implications – This was a cross-sectional, quota-based survey which examined only some aspects of agriculture. However, the findings suggest that more communication with the general public about the industry is required in order to build on the positive sentiment that exists within the community. Practical implications – More education about agriculture in schools and higher education is indicated. Social implications – The poor state of knowledge of agriculture threatens the social contract upon which agricultural communities depend for survival. Originality/value – The study highlights the poor state of general knowledge about agriculture in Australia. The findings could be used as a baseline against which the efficacy of future education programmes could be assessed.

Since 2009 when Brazil, Russia, India, and China (South Africa since 2011) joined in the international organisation aimed at the economic development of the countries, and gain financial stability, the relations between the countries too boosted via political and cultural cooperation. The new economic, political and social environment has a high demand for competent specialists ready to work in various national agendas and interrelated frameworks of the BRICS. In this context, it is argued that professional training in the countries under discussion should be correlated as it provides grounds for quality assurance in education that contributes to the nations’ sustainable development, safety, and human rights provision. This situation determines the topicality of the issue. The objective of this research is to study the higher educational environment in the BRICS countries and to compare some aspects of professional training. In doing so, the study aims to present the experience of RUDN University as one of the BRICS university network members. The hypothesis states that the harmonisation of higher education systems within regional organisations can contribute to the enhancement of both international standards and individual learning paths, thus fostering youth rights for education in line with quality standards and individual preferences. To accomplish the objectives of the study, it uses the following methods - the review of the current research, formal document and online resources on higher education in the BRICS countries; the survey of the undergraduates, graduates, and postgraduates on their motivation to academic mobility, and collaboration in the frameworks of BRICS higher education. The data has been analysed employing the methods of statistical processing, qualitative and quantitative methods. The findings of the current research include the outcomes and findings on the harmonisation of higher education in the frameworks of BRICS higher education. The study will contribute to further development of BRICS countries education and the harmonisation of higher education.

Universities have always had international dimensions in their research, teaching, and service to society, but those dimensions were in general more ad hoc, fragmented, and implicit than explicit and comprehensive. In the last decade of the previous century, the increasing globalization and regionalization of economies and societies, combined with the requirements of the knowledge economy and the end of the Cold War, created a context for a more strategic approach to internationalization in higher education. International organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and the World Bank, national governments, the European Union, and higher education organizations such as the International Association of Universities placed internationalization at the top of the reform agenda. Internationalization became a key change agent in higher education, in the developed world but also in emerging and developing societies. Mobility of students, scholars, and programs; reputation and branding (manifested by global and regional rankings); and a shift in paradigm from cooperation to competition (van der Wende, 2001) have been the main manifestations of the agenda of internationalization in higher education over the past 30 years. International education has become an industry, a source of revenue and a means for enhanced reputation. Quantitative data about the number of international degree-seeking students, of international talents and scholars, of students going for credits abroad, of agreements and memoranda of understanding, as well as of co-authored international publications in high impact academic journals, have not only been key manifestations of this perception of internationalization, but also have driven its agenda and actions. This perception has resulted in an increasing dominance of English in research but also teaching, has createdthe emergence of a whole new industry around internationalization, has forced national governments to stimulate institutions of higher education going international, and hasgenerated new buzz words such as “cross-border delivery” and “soft power” in the higher education arena. In the period 2010–2020, we have seen not only the number of international students double to 5 million in the past decade, but also we have noticed an increase in franchise operations, articulation programs, branch campuses, and online delivery of higher education. There is fierce competition for talented international students and scholars, and immigration policies have shifted from low-skill to high-skill immigration. National excellence programs have increased differentiation in higher education with more attention for a small number of international world-class universities and national flagship institutions that compete for these talents, for positions in the global rankings, for access to high impact journals, and for funding, at the cost of other institutions. There is also an increasing concern about the neo-colonial dimension. In the current global-knowledge society, the concept of internationalization of higher education has itself become globalized, demanding further consideration of its impact on policy and practice as more countries and types of institution around the world engage in the process. Internationalization should no longer be considered in terms of a westernized, largely Anglo-Saxon, and predominantly English-speaking paradigm. (Jones & de Wit, 2014, p. 28) Internationalization became defined by the generally accepted definition of Knight (2008): “The process of integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension into the purpose, functions and delivery of post-secondary education,” describing clearly the process in a general and value neutral way. Some of the main trends in internationalization in the past 30 years have been: More focused on internationalization abroad than on internationalization at home More ad hoc, fragmented, and marginal than strategic, comprehensive, and central in policies More in the interest of a small, elite subset of students and faculty than focused on global and intercultural outcomes for all Directed by a constantly shifting range of political, economic, social/cultural, and educational rationales, with increasing focus on economic motivations Increasingly driven by national, regional, and global rankings Little alignment between the international dimensions of the three core functions of higher education: education, research, and service to society Primarily a strategic choice and focus of institutions of higher education, and less a priority of national governments Less important in emerging and developing economies, and more of a particular strategic concern among developed economies In the past decade, however, one can observe a reaction to these trends. While mobility is still the most dominant factor in internationalization policies worldwide, there is increasing attention being paid to internationalization of the curriculum at home. There is also a stronger call for comprehensive internationalization, which addresses all aspects of education in an integrated way. Although economic rationales and rankings still drive the agenda of internationalization, there is more emphasis now being placed on other motivations for internationalization. For example, attention is being paid to integrating international dimensions into tertiary education quality assurance mechanisms, institutional policies related to student learning outcomes, and the work of national and discipline-specific accreditation agencies (de Wit, 2019). Traditional values that have driven international activities in higher education in the past, such as exchange and cooperation, peace and mutual understanding, human capital development, and solidarity, although still present in the vocabulary of international education, have moved to the sideline in a push for competition, revenue, and reputation/branding. Around the change of the century, we observed a first response to these developments. The movement for Internationalization at Home within the European Union started in 1999 in Malmö, Sweden, drawing more attention to the 95% of nonmobile students not participating in the successful flagship program of the EU, ERASMUS. In the United Kingdom and Australia, a similar movement asked for attention to internationalization of the curriculum and teaching and learning in response to the increased focus on recruiting income-generating international students. And in the United States, attention emerged around internationalizing campuses and developing more comprehensive approaches to internationalization as an alternative for the marginal and fragmented focus on undergraduate study abroad on the one hand and international student recruitment on the other. These reactions were and are important manifestations of concern about the competitive, elitist, and market direction of internationalization, and are a call for more attention to the qualitative dimensions of internationalization, such as citizenship development, employability, and improvement of the quality of research, education, and service to society. A wide range of academic scholars and international education practitioners have pushed for change with their publications and presentations. A study for the European Parliament on the state of internationalization in higher education gave this push an extra dimension. Not only did the study provide a comprehensive overview of the literature and the practice of internationalization in higher education around the world, but also—based on a global Delphi Exercise—it promoted a new agenda for internationalization for the future, by extending the definition of Knight (2008), defining internationalization as follows: The intentional process of integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension into the purpose, functions and delivery of post-secondary education, in order to enhance the quality of education and research for all students and staff and to make a meaningful contribution to society. (de Wit et al., 2015) This definition gave a normative direction to the process by emphasizing that such a process does not proceed by itself but needs clear intentions, that internationalization is not a goal in itself but needs to be directed toward quality improvement, that it should not be of interest to a small elite group of mobile students and scholars but directed to all students and scholars, and that it should make a contribution to society. Over the past 5 years this new approach has received positive attention, and at the start of a new decade it is important to see if this shift back to a more ethical and qualitative approach with respect to internationalization is indeed taking place and what new dimensions one can observe in that shift.

This paper reflects on some of the themes emerging from a consideration of recent research at the nexus of technologies, learning and culture. The authors comment on the expansive nature of the concept of learning spaces in papers featuring an investigation of technology enhanced learning (TEL) and communication design studios in the UK and Australia, the use of interdisciplinary research collaborations to develop novel implementations of TEL learning spaces, and the challenges of developing an e-university in Malawi. They also examine a comparative study focused on classroom-based learning spaces augmented by computer-based assessment technologies, and the role of TEL both within and in response to protests at universities in South Africa. Massive open online courses are then considered as distinctive educational designs that may offer diverse student experiences, either formal or informal. The next emerging theme considers the sources of tension and richness arising from the widely divergent values that can be embedded in TEL. This is followed by consideration of infrastructural issues and the technologies–learning–culture nexus, followed by the use of theory in TEL work, leading to interdisciplinary theory-informed TEL projects that may be beneficial in the wider project of reimagining higher education for work and study. Finally, the paper examines the theme of mobile TEL and the hegemonic issues surrounding the building of sustainable and authentic foundations for learning with mobiles in the globalised South. The theme points to the methodologically challenging and problematic aspects of this hegemonic analysis and considers how the arguments may be further developed.

The South African labour market is characterised by sharp segmentation, high unemployment and apparently limited informal sector employment. Recent work has focussed on the importance of the Micro-evidence on day labourers and the thickness of labour markets in South AfricaThe South African labour market is characterised by sharp segmentation, high unemployment and apparently limited informal sector employment. Recent work has focussed on the importance of the quality of education while others have argued that the rigidity of the labour market constrains employment growth. This paper considers the spatial aspects of the day labour market and argues that the size and proximity of economic activity found in agglomerations ensure a thick labour market that allows for better matching between workers and jobs. The results indicate that the day labourers who were hired by the same employer more often received higher earnings. Once workers have a matric qualification they receive earnings above the average, as do workers who have completed vocational training. Skills, as well as factors associated with a thicker labour market are positively associated with wages. The thicker metropolitan labour market allows workers to become more specialised and receive higher earnings. This has important policy implications and calls for the development of people and places.

The aim of this study was to describe the international academic mobility experienced by the Fishing Engineering students in other countries. The data was collected through an electronic semi-structured questionnaire hosted on an electronic platform by Google. A total of nine students answered the questionnaire, in which they chose countries such as France, Spain, Ireland, Canada, the United States and Australia to study abroad in. The student’s satisfaction with the Science without Borders Program (SwB) was extremely positive, where all the interviewees stated that they had learned the language from the hosting country. In relation to the negative aspects, 67% of the interviewees pointed out that they struggled to understand the language in the beginning of the academic mobility, and 78% of the students said that they missed their families during the student mobility period. In conclusion, the academic mobility performed by students from the Fishing Engineering course was rated as excellent, and as a unique and an enriching opportunity, both in professional and personal aspects.ResumoO trabalho teve como objetivo discutir sobre a mobilidade acadêmica vivenciada por estudantes de Engenharia de Pesca em outros países. A coleta de dados foi feita através de um questionário eletrônico semiestruturado, hospedado em uma plataforma eletrônica de formulários da Google. Um total de nove discentes respondeu ao questionário, realizando a mobilidade na França, Espanha, Irlanda, Canadá, Estados Unidos e Austrália. A satisfação dos estudantes com o Programa Ciência sem Fronteiras (CsF) foi positiva, todos os entrevistados afirmaram terem aprendido o idioma do país que escolheram. Em relação aos aspectos negativos, 67% dos entrevistados apontaram que tiveram dificuldades no entendimento do idioma do país no início da mobilidade acadêmica e 78% sentiram saudade da família no período da mobilidade. Concluindo, a mobilidade acadêmica realizada por discentes do Curso de Engenharia de Pesca foi classificada como excelente, sendo uma experiência única e enriquecedora tanto pelo lado profissional, quanto pessoal.Palavras-chave: Educação, Aprendizado, Internacionalização, Programa Ciência sem Fronteiras.Keywords: Education, Learning, Internationalization.ReferencesALTBACH, P. G. Comparative Higher Education: Knowledge, the University, and Development. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong, p. 240, 1998.ANDRADE, B. P. S. O “Ciência sem Fronteiras” pelo olhar da comunidade acadêmica: O caso da Unifal-mg e da Unifei. 2018. 185f. Dissertação (Mestrado em Divulgação Científica e Cultural). 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Disponível em http://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/2017/06/19/experiencia-encerrada . Acesso em: 21 nov. 2017.MARTINS, V.; MONTAGUE, A.; SILVA, P. B. Cooperação internacional para mobilidade estudantil: o caso da Umesp e da Zuyd. Revista de Educação do Cogeime, ano 26, n. 50, jan/jun 2017.MOROSINI, M. C.; AMARAL, G. M. Avaliação da mobilidade acadêmica universitária: A perspectiva dos alunos intercambistas. In: SIMPÓSIO AVALIAÇÃO DA EDUCAÇÃO SUPERIOR, 2015, Porto Alegre. Anais... Porto Alegre, 17 e 18 set. 2015. OLIVEIRA, A. L.; FREITAS, M. E. Motivações para mobilidade acadêmica internacional: a visão de alunos e professores universitários. Educação em Revista, Belo Horizonte, v.32, n.03, p. 217-246, jul/set 2016. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0102-4698148237PEREIRA, V. Relatos de uma viagem: uma análise feita pelos bolsistas sobre o programa Ciência Sem Fronteiras. Revista Perspectivas do Desenvolvimento: um enfoque multidimensional, v. 03, no 4, jul. 2015.PROLO, I.; VIEIRA, R. C. O programa Ciência sem Fronteiras e as Universidades Brasileiras: Uma política pública a celebrar? In: Seminários em Administração (SEMEAD), XX, 2017, LOCAL. Anais..., nov. 2017. ISSN 2177-3866.SÁ, C. M. The Rise and Fall of Brazil’s Science Without Borders. International Higher Education, n.85, p.17-18, 2016. STALLIVIERI, L. As dinâmicas de uma nova linguagem intercultural na mobilidade acadêmica internacional. 2009. 235f. Tese (Doutorado em Línguas Modernas). Universidade Del Salvador, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2009.SANTOS, S. R. et al. Turismo e intercâmbio: contribuições para a formação discente nos cursos de graduação das instituições de ensino superior de São Luís, Maranhão. Cultur, ano 08, n. 2, jul. 2014.SEHNEM, P. R.; LUNA, J. M. F. Os egressos do Programa Ciência sem Fronteiras pela percepção dos seus professores. Revista Eletrônica de Educação, v. 12, n. 1, p. 104-119, jan./abr., 2018. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14244/198271991919UNITED NATIONS ORGANIZATION FOR EDUCATION, SCIENCE AND CULTURE (UNESCO). Recueil des donneés mondiales sur l'éducation: statistiques comparées sur l'éducation dans le monde. Montreal: Unesco, 2009. Dispo­nível em: http://www.uis.unesco.org/Library/Documents/ged09-fr.pdf Acesso em: 01 abri 2019.e3633105

6111 Background: Immigration is increasing world-wide. Cancer survivorship is now recognised as a period of difficult adjustment for all patients, and possibly more so for immigrants. We explored disparities in quality of life outcomes for immigrant (IM) versus Anglo-Australian (AA) cancer survivors. Methods: In a cross-sectional design, cancer survivors were recruited through the New South Wales, Queensland and Victorian Cancer Registries in Australia. IM participants, their parents and grandparents were born in a country where Chinese, Greek, or Arabic is spoken and spoke one of those languages. AAs were born in Australia and spoke English. All were diagnosed with cancer 1-3 years previously. Questionnaires (completed in preferred language) included the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (anxiety/ depression), FACT-G (quality of life) and Supportive Care Needs Survey (unmet needs). Outcomes were compared between AA and IM groups in adjusted regression models that included age, gender, socio-economic status, education, marital status, religion, time since diagnosis and cancer type (prostate, colorectal, breast and other). Results: There were 599 participants (response rate 41%). Consent was unrelated to demographic and disease variables. AA and IM groups were similar except that immigrants had higher proportions in the low and highly educated groups (p < 0.0001), and higher socioeconomic status (p = 0.0003). In adjusted analyses (see table), IMs had clinically significant higher depression (possible range 0-21), greater unmet information and physical needs, and lower quality of life than AAs. The possible range for the latter three is 0-100. Conclusions: Immigrants experience poorer outcomes in cancer survivorship, even after adjusting for socio-economic, demographic and disease differences. Interventions are required to improve their adjustment after cancer. Results highlight areas of unmet need that might be better addressed by the health system (particularly with regard to provision of information and support. [Table: see text]

ObjectiveTo review utilization rates, outcomes, and barriers to peritoneal dialysis (PD) in indigenous peoples from an international perspective.MethodsArticles were obtained from Medline and EMBASE and from author name and reference searches. Data from census bureaus and renal registries in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States were used. Studies were included if they contained information on utilization of, outcomes of, or barriers to PD in indigenous populations.ResultsIn 2007, of all prevalent PD patients, 7.0%, 5.1%, 28.2%, and 1.3% in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States respectively were of indigenous background. The proportions of prevalent renal replacement therapy patients on PD reflected the national rates—New Zealand being the highest at 0.29, and the United States the lowest at 0.05. Mortality was generally higher in indigenous than in non-indigenous PD patients. Variations in mortality study results likely reflect differences in the definitions of explanatory variables such as rurality and in the availability of local specialty care services. Technique failure and peritonitis rates were higher among indigenous than among non-indigenous patients.ConclusionsThe less favorable outcomes in indigenous PD patients across countries may, in part, be a manifestation of reduced access to resources. Understanding the effects of socio-economic, geographic, cultural, and language issues, and of health literacy discrepancies on various aspects of PD education, training, and outcomes can potentially identify ways in which outcomes might be improved among indigenous patients on PD.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the possibilities and potential barriers on the path of internationalization of the educational services market through development of the system of remote education. Design/methodology/approach In order to determine the influence of development of the system of remote education on the process of internationalization of the educational services market, the authors use the method of regression analysis. A regression curve is built, containing the model of paired linear regression and the value of determination coefficient. The research object is the market of higher educational services – as it is subject to internationalization and distribution of remote education. The research is performed based on the 2017 data by the example of countries from various regions of the world that show different rates and levels of socio-economic development but that achieved the largest success in development of the system of remote education – the USA, the UK, Brazil, China, South Korea, Italy, Germany, India, Malaysia, Australia, South Africa and Russia. Due to the absence of the official international statistics on the issue of internationalization of the educational services market, the proprietary method is used for determining its level. Findings It is concluded that remote education has a slight influence on the process of internationalization of the educational services market in the countries of the world, though it has large potential in the sphere of stimulation of internationalization of the educational services market, as it allows providing educational services of equal quality and equal cost for domestic and foreign students. Originality/value The developed and presented model of managing the development of the remote education system of a modern university in the interests of stimulating internationalization of the educational services market allows overcoming these barriers and opening the existing potential of remote education in the sphere of stimulation of internationalization of the educational services market.

A keen interest in the culture and economic development of the Republic of Korea has resulted in establishing business relations between Korea and various countries all around the world. The Korean War (1950-1953) is said to be the catalyst for Korean Studies, since it has generated a considerable interest in Korean history, language and culture. Yet, when the Korean Language Education (henceforward KLE) is being referred to, usually the years when the boom for "everything that is Korean” started, which could be attributed to the successfully organized Summer Olympics in 1988 and co-organized Asian World Cup in 2002, are being mentioned. This was when the world saw a different side of Korea. However, also thanks to the enormous popularity of Hallyu and the support of the South Korean Government given to initiatives, which among others, popularize the Korean language, the interest in various aspects of Korean culture as well as the language itself, has become higher than ever before. Since the turn of the 21st century, South Korea is perceived as one of the world's leading exporters of culture and tourism, and Hangeul became one of the exported goods.The aim of this research is to analyze the situation of KLE in the era of globalization, which along with the spread of lingua franca, among them English, is endangering the language variety of the world. In order to do so, several significant dates and initiatives showing how Korean scholars and the Government have influenced and shaped the language policy and thus have contributed to the popularization of the language all around the world will also be referred to. Government sponsored institutions providing Korean language classes, as well as books and other teaching materials, will be discussed and classified. The article will also try to answer the question concerning the future of the KLE.

e16507 Background: Immigration is increasing world-wide. We explored disparities in quality of life outcomes for immigrant (IM) versus Anglo-Australian (AA) cancer patients having anti-cancer treatment. Methods: In a cross-sectional design, cancer patients were recruited through outpatient Oncology clinics in New South Wales, Victoria, and the Northern Territory in Australia. IM participants, their parents and grand parents were born in a country where Chinese, Greek, or Arabic is spoken and spoke one of those languages. AAs were born in Australia and spoke English. All were diagnosed with cancer < 1 year previously. Questionnaires (completed in preferred language) included the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (anxiety/depression), FACT-G (quality of life) and the Supportive Care Needs Survey (unmet needs). Adjusted regression models comparing AA and IM groups included age, gender, socio-economic status, education, marital status, religion, time since diagnosis, and cancer type (colorectal, breast, lung, other). Results: There were 910 participants (response rate 57%). IM were similar to AA, except that IM were more likely to be married (76 vs 67 %, p = 0.01) and in the low and the highly educated groups (p < 0.0001). In adjusted analyses, IMs had clinically significant higher anxiety, greater unmet information and physical needs and lower quality of life than AAs (see table). The possible ranges are 0-21 for anxiety and depression, and 0-100 otherwise. Conclusions: In this hospital-based study with a high rate of advanced disease, immigrants with cancer experienced poorer quality of life outcomes, even after adjusting for socio-economic, demographic, and disease variables. Interventions are required to improve their experience of cancer care. Results highlight areas of unmet need that might be better addressed by the health system (particularly with regards to provision of information and meeting support and physical needs). [Table: see text]

Abstract The Republic of Macedonia (RM) has been a part of the Bologna process since 2003. The Ministry of Education, law and policy makers and higher education institutions have actively engaged with its main concepts. In parallel with this, since the adoption of the law on higher education in 2008 and the reform of the Accreditation and Evaluation Board, there have been numerous changes and amendments culminating in the fast-tracked adoption of a new law at the beginning of 2015. Some of its solutions created a huge debate among the academic community, other intellectuals and students themselves, resulting in the postponement of that law and a kind of legal vacuum. In such turbulent circumstances, individual higher education institutions had to consider how and to what extent to adopt and develop relevant standards and guidelines, comply with the legal framework and promote good practice. The aim of this paper is to present how these three aspects, Bologna standards and guidelines for Quality Assurance (QA), a national legal framework and an institutional approach are being reflected, merged and implemented at a relatively young higher education institution. It questions the impact of these three elements on each other and how one institution’s drive for improvement is affected. This is done through a qualitative analysis of the three-fold perspectives. The conclusions and recommendations are expected to be of use to policy makers in the country and region as they evaluate how international trends and good practice fit into the socio-economic and political conditions of RM and similar countries. At the same time, it can demonstrate how far institutional quality assurance and progress can be implemented and recognized in the country itself and by some international stakeholders. It can also prove that the South East European University (SEEU) is a national leader in this field as RM has no functioning QA evaluation system, while SEEU has managed to create a well structured and operating one, based on international and institutional experiences.

Historically, universities and institutions of higher learning have gone through three academic revolutions, namely, teaching, research, and innovation. Universities and Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) in the last two decades have come to occupy an important part in the national innovation systems (NIS), which is a complex of ‘all important economic, social, political, organizational, institutional and other factors that influence the development, diffusion and use of innovations’. From a broader perspective, universities, together with public Research and Development (R&D) labs and science agencies, public policies (on industry, research, innovation and higher education, etc.) and business enterprises are now considered as important actors in the NIS of Asia-Pacific economies. The rise of Asia in the global knowledge-based economy from mid-1990s is closely associated with the rise of knowledge institutions of higher learning and scientific research output. Every Asia-Pacific country embraced and introduced policies relating to innovation in varying forms. Consultancy and collaborative links with industry being traditional forms of engagement, new policy and institutional measures in technology transfer and innovation to engage with society and business enterprises are gaining prominence. Policies for incubation, start-ups, and spin-offs, technology transfer offices (TTOs), and science and technology parks have gained tremendous prominence in leading Asia-Pacific universities. Different national innovation systems in the Asia-Pacific region have given rise to varying roles of universities. Whilst universities in Southeast Asian countries and India continue to play a traditional role of teaching and generating human capital, there are countries such as Singapore, China, Taiwan, and Japan, wherein universities are being transformed as entrepreneurial universities. Science and innovation policies in these countries have orchestrated the goal direction of universities as frontiers of innovation. Universities in Australia and New Zealand have so far been quite successful in marketing higher education to neighboring Asian countries. They have in recent years begun to embark on innovation and commercialization of research. The paper focuses on South East Asia and draws some comparison with more dynamic university ecosystems in East Asia. In doing so, the paper brings into focus the emerging innovation landscapes across the region.

CSR adalah tanggung jawab sosial perusahaan secara etis sudah seharusnya memberikan dampak positif baik dalam ruang lingkup kepedulian yang mencangkup aspek ekonomi, sosial dan lingkungan di sekitar perusahaan. Hal ini penting berkaitan upaya mewujudkan tujuan pembangunan berkelanjutan baik di dalam perusahaan maupun di masyarakat. Perusahaan Samsung Indonesia mencoba melaksanakan programprogram CSR di berbagai bidang khususnya pada bidang pendididikan, hingga memperoleh ‘Best CSR Award 2016’ yang diberikan oleh kedutaan besar Korea Selatan. Dalam bidang pendidikan, Program CSR Samsung di Indonesia salah satu programnya membangun dan mengembangkan "Rumah Belajar Samsung". Tujuan dari program ini adalah membantu remaja yang terkendala melanjutkan pendidikan dan mengakses pendidikan yang lebih tinggi lagi. Salah satu alasan "Program Rumah Belajar" ini didirikan karena Samsung memandang bahwa anak khususnya remaja merupakan masa depan suatu bangsa, sehingga pendidikan mulai sejak dini memegang peran penting bagi perkembangan dan peningkatan kualitas sumber daya manusia. 'Program Rumah Belajar' membidik para siswa Sekolah Menengah Atas yang berasal dari keluarga dengan kondisi sosialekonomi kurang mampu atau pra-sejahtera. CSR is an ethical corporate social responsibility that should have a positive impact both within the scope of concern that covers economic, social and environmental aspects around the company. This is important related to efforts to realize the goals of sustainable development both within t he company and in the community. Samsung Indonesia companies are trying to implement CSR programs in various fields, especially in the field of education, to get the 'Best CSR Award 2016' given by the South Korean embassy. In the field of education, Samsun g's CSR Program in Indonesia is one of the programs to build and develop the "Samsung Learning House" (Rumah Belajar Samsung) . The purpose of this program is to help adolescents who are constrained to continue their education and access higher education. O ne of the reasons for this "Learning House Program" (Rumah Belajar Samsung) was established because Samsung views that children, especially adolescents, are the future of a nation, so that early education plays an important role for the development and imp rovement of the quality of human resources. The 'House of Learning Program' targets high school students who come from families with poor or underprivileged socio - economic conditions.

Background: There is a growing demand of dialysis in Asia for end-stage renal failure patients. Diabetes mellitus is the leading cause of end-stage renal failure in many countries in Asia. Summary: The growth of peritoneal dialysis (PD) in Asia is significant and seeing a good trend. With the enhanced practices of PD, the quality of care in PD in Asia is also improved. Overall, PD and hemodialysis (HD) are comparable in clinical outcome. There is a global trend in the reduction of peritonitis rates and Asian countries also witness such improvement. The socio-economic benefits of PD for end-stage renal failure patients in both urban and rural areas in the developed and developing regions of Asia are an important consideration. This can help to reduce the financial burden of renal failure in addressing the growing demand of patients on dialysis. Initiatives should be considered to further drive down the cost of PD in Asia. Key Messages: Growing demand for dialysis by an increasing number of end-stage renal failure patients requires the use of a cost-effective quality dialysis modality. PD is found to be comparable to HD in outcome and quality. In most countries in Asia, PD should be more cost-effective than HD. A ‘PD-first' or a ‘PD as first considered therapy' policy can be an overall strategy in many countries in Asia in managing renal failure patients, taking the examples of Hong Kong and Thailand. Facts from East and West: (1) PD is cheaper than HD and provides a better quality of life worldwide, but its prevalence is significantly lower than that of HD in all countries, with the exception of Hong Kong. Allowing reimbursement of PD but not HD has permitted to increase the use of PD over HD in many Asian countries like Hong Kong, Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, as well as in New Zealand and Australia over the last years. In the Western world, however, HD is still promoted, and the proportion of patients treated with PD decreases. Japan remains an exception in Asia where PD penetration is very low. Lack of adequate education of practitioners and information of patients might as well be reasons for the low penetration of PD in both the East and West. (2) Patient survival of PD varies between and within countries but is globally similar to HD. (3) Peritonitis remains the main cause of morbidity in PD patients. South Asian countries face specific issues such as high tuberculosis and mycobacterial infections, which are rare in developed Asian and Western countries. The infection rate is affected by climatic and socio-economic factors and is higher in hot, humid and rural areas. (4) Nevertheless, the promotion of a PD-first policy might be beneficial particularly for remote populations in emerging countries where the end-stage renal disease rate is increasing dramatically.

Background: Peritoneal dialysis (PD) for the treatment of end-stage renal failure was introduced in the 1960s. Nowadays it has evolved to an established therapy that is complementary to hemodialysis (HD), representing 11% of all patients treated worldwide with dialysis. Despite good clinical outcomes and similar results in patient survival between PD and HD, the penetration of PD is decreasing in the Western world. Summary: First the major events in the history of the development of PD are described. Then important insights into the physiology of peritoneal transport are discussed and linked to the changes in time observed in biopsies of the peritoneal membrane. Furthermore, the developments in peritoneal access, more biocompatible dialysate solutions, automated PD at home, the establishment of parameters for dialysis adequacy and strategies to prevent infectious complications are mentioned. Finally non-medical issues responsible for the declining penetration in the Western world are analyzed. Key Messages: Only after introduction of the concept of continuous ambulatory PD by Moncrief and Popovich has this treatment evolved in time to a renal replacement therapy. Of all structures present in the peritoneal membrane, the capillary endothelium offers the rate-limiting hindrance for solute and water transport for the diffusive and convective transport of solutes and osmosis. The functional and anatomical changes in the peritoneal membrane in time can be monitored by the peritoneal equilibrium test. Peritonitis incidence decreased by introduction of the Y-set and prophylaxis using mupirocin on the exit site. The decrease in the proportion of patients treated with PD in the Western world can be explained by non-medical issues such as inadequate predialysis patient education, physician experience and training, ease of HD initiation, overcapacity of in-center HD, lack of adequate infrastructure for PD treatment, costs and reimbursement issues of the treatment. Facts from East and West: (1) PD is cheaper than HD and provides a better quality of life worldwide, but its prevalence is significantly lower than that of HD in all countries, with the exception of Hong Kong. Allowing reimbursement of PD but not HD has permitted to increase the use of PD over HD in many Asian countries like Hong Kong, Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, as well as in New Zealand and Australia over the last years. In the Western world, however, HD is still promoted, and the proportion of patients treated with PD decreases. Japan remains an exception in Asia where PD penetration is very low. Lack of adequate education of practitioners and information of patients might as well be reasons for the low penetration of PD in both the East and West. (2) Patient survival of PD varies between and within countries but is globally similar to HD. (3) Peritonitis remains the main cause of morbidity in PD patients. South Asian countries face specific issues such as high tuberculosis and mycobacterial infections, which are rare in developed Asian and Western countries. The infection rate is affected by climatic and socio-economic factors and is higher in hot, humid and rural areas. (4) Nevertheless, the promotion of a PD-first policy might be beneficial particularly for remote populations in emerging countries where the end-stage renal disease rate is increasing dramatically.

A few days ago, in August 2013, a Cochrane Database Systemic Review reported that the existing limited evidence to date on the effect of Mediterranean diet (MD) on primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD), suggests some favorable effects on risk factors; however, the reduction of CVD event rates was not mentioned [1]. The review included 11 trials (15 papers, 52,044 participants); 7 trials described the intervention as a MD. Clinical events were reported in only one trial [Women's Health Initiative (WHI) 48,835 postmenopausal women with an intervention not described as a MD but increased fruit and vegetable and cereal intake], where no statistically significant effects of the intervention were seen on fatal and non-fatal endpoints during the 8 years of its duration [1]. Since the WHI study was huge and had a great weight in the analysis, it eliminated any other beneficial effect on CVD incidence from other studies. Moreover, in this study the diet used as an intervention was not MD. On April 2013 the results of the Prevención con Dieta Mediterránea (PREDIMED), a multicenter trial from Spain, were published in New England Journal of Medicine [2]. The study included a total of 7,447 persons (aged 55-80 years) with no CVD at baseline. These were randomized to 1 of 3 diets: a MD supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil, a MD supplemented with mixed nuts or a control diet (advice to reduce dietary fat) [2]. An interim analysis terminated the trial prematurely at 4.8 years. The primary endpoint was the rate of major CVD (myocardial infarction, stroke, or CVD death). The multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios were 0.70 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.54 to 0.92) and 0.72 (95% CI, 0.54 to 0.96) for the group assigned to a MD with extravirgin olive oil and the group assigned to a MD with nuts, respectively, vs. the control group [2]. No diet-related adverse effects were reported [2]. Moreover, a post hoc analysis of PREDIMED that will be published in September 2013, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggests that one of the mechanisms by which MD, particularly if supplemented with virgin olive oil, can exert health benefits is through changes in the transcriptomic response of genes related to CVD risk [3]. These results of the PREDIMED trial confirm that changes in diet can have beneficial effects on CVD risk. However, the study was criticized for mainly 3 reasons. One is that in MD the dietary pattern as an entity is rather more important than the inclusion or avoidance of specific nutrients [4]. Second there were low (in absolute terms) primary composite CVD outcome rates (3.8% and 3.4% in the intervention groups vs. 4.4% in the control group) and a minor absolute risk difference (range 0.6 to 1%), thus limiting the importance of the study findings [5]. Furthermore there were statistically significant differences in baseline characteristics between the groups: men (+5.7%), obese persons (+4.7%), diuretic use (+3.5%), and oral hypoglycaemic use (+3.2%) in the control group than in the intervention group [5]. And third there was a complete lack of policy implications [6]. The PREDIMED trial was neither a pure test of a Mediterranean-style diet nor a pure test of extra- virgin olive oil or nuts. All the above make the interpretation of the PREDIMED trial similarly difficult to that of the Lyon Diet Heart Study [7], which tested provision of a margarine rich in alpha-linolenic acid on top of brief advice to consume a MD in high CVD risk patients with astonishing results [7]. Policymakers [8] and Great Scientific Organizations, like Mayo Clinic [9], already recommend consumption of a Mediterranean-style diet on the basis of a body of evidence from observational and interventional studies, in antithesis to the findings of the Cochrane Database Systemic Review [1]. On the other hand, the policy implications of the PREDIMED trial related primarily to the supplemental foods [2] and not MD itself, thus, we probably have to go both back and elsewhere to find evidence base for the benefits of MD and if these are related in any degree to blood pressure (BP) reduction. The Seven Countries Study showed that the risk and rates of heart attack and stroke both at the population and at the individual level were directly and independently related to the level of serum total cholesterol (TC). It demonstrated that the association between TC level and coronary heart disease (CHD) risk from 5 to 40 years follow-up is found consistently across different cultures [10,11]. The Seven Countries Study started in 1958 in former Yugoslavia. In total, 12,763 men, 40–59 years of age, were enrolled as 16 cohorts, in 7 countries, in 4 regions of the world (United States, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, Japan); 1 cohort is in the United States, 2 cohorts in Finland, 1 in the Netherlands, 3 in Italy, 5 in the former Yugoslavia (two in Croatia, and three in Serbia), 2 in Greece (1 in Crete and 1 in Corfu), and 2 in Japan [10]. The Seven Countries Study has continued, with high levels of participation, for more than 50 years.􀀁The initial and objective data on CVD health in relation to the MD originated from the Seven Countries Study [10]. CHD deaths in the United States and Northern Europe greatly exceeded those in Southern Europe, even when controlled for age, TC and BP levels, smoking, physical activity, and weight [12]. After further investigation, the importance of the eating pattern characterized as the MD became clear [12,13]. What exactly is meant by "Mediterranean diet" today, and its benefits, is detailed by other researches during the last 20 years [14,15]. During the 90's, for the first time, the concept of a food pyramid and the need for an adherence to MD score were born [14-16]. As a result of the Seven Countries Study, the MD has been popularized as a "healthy" diet. Nevertheless, it has not replaced the "prudent" diet commonly prescribed to coronary patients [17]. The Crete cohort of the Seven Countries Study had the lowest rates of deaths from CVD [10]; even the 25 year mortality was lower than others (for example vs. the Italian cohort) [18]. This was attributed to the entire lifestyle of Cretans including a variation of MD, the Cretan-type MD. Many investigators during the last 20 years would rather refer to the Cretan-type MD rather than plain MD, which is a rather abstract definition [19-22]. The 40 years’ CVD mortality in the Corfu cohort showed that participants also benefited from the long-term adoption of a nutritional pattern (close to the Cretan-type) of MD, the presence of physical activity, optimism, and a positive psychological profile [23]. During the last 15 years, and before the economic crisis, Greeks adopted a more western way of life. Nevertheless, several aspects of the traditional Greek way of life and diet, suggest that a relatively high consumption of vegetables and fruits or olive oil and bread, remained well-established among large segments of the Greek population, and may explain why a population with a few healthy habits still enjoys one of the longer life expectancies among the 16 cohorts of the Seven Country Study 40 years after its initiation [23]. The Working Group on Epidemiology and Prevention of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) coordinated in 2003 information from 12 European cohort studies, including 205,000 persons, and assessed the 10-year CVD mortality rates. This gave birth to the SCORE (Systematic Coronary Risk Estimation) project [24]. The European Society of Cardiology encouraged the creation of local SCORES for each country, based on the original SCORE and local data. Indeed the HellenicSCORE (equations and charts) present the calibration of the risk by age group and sex, based on mortality data, as reported by the National Statistical Services of Greece and prevalence data regarding smoking, TC and BP levels, as reported by the ATTICA study [25]. This was very successfully tested in the ATTEMPT Study [26]. The predicated rates of CVD were verified in a survival study with a nearly 4-year follow-up in patients with metabolic syndrome and randomization to intensive versus moderate risk factor treatment [27]. In the meantime the MD score (MedDietScore) was developed, according to the adherence to MD [28].􀀁The weekly consumption of the following 9 food groups: non-refined cereals(whole grain bread and pasta, brown rice, etc.), fruits, vegetables, legumes, potatoes, fish, meat and meat products, poultry, full fat dairy products (like cheese, yoghurt, milk), as well asolibe oil and alcohol intake, were included [28]. The inclusion of dietary evaluation (MedDietScore), as well as other sociodemographic and anthropometric characteristics, increases the accuracy and reduces estimating bias of CVD risk prediction models [29]. Thus, we have a country adjusted integrated system that can predict CVD risk. It was clear, during the use of HellenicSCORE and MedDietScore, that a better adherence to MD was related to a lower CVD risk. On the contrary, aging, central fat, hypertension (HTN), diabetes, inflammation, low social status and abstinence from a MD seem to predict CVD events within a 5-year period; actual data from the ATTICA study [30]. All these put the adoption of MD at a high position among CVD risk factors, for good and for bad, according to the degree of adoption (MedDietScore). However, does MD affect the level of BP? Is HTN one of the factors to increase CVD risk if the adherence to MD (MedDietScore) is low? There is some evidence on this issue. It has been suggested by a review on the dietary influences on BP that there is more than enough evidence from observational and clinical studies that diets low in saturated fats and sodium and rich in fruits, vegetables, and fiber, with adequate amounts of potassium, calcium, and magnesium, are effective in the prevention and treatment of HTN alone or as an adjunct to pharmacologic therapy [31]. Such dietary combinations are provided by the MD [31]. The association of adherence to the MD with the incidence of HTN was evaluated among 9,408 men and women enrolled in a dynamic Spanish prospective cohort (SUN) study during 1999- 2005 [32]. The adherence to MD was associated with reduced mean values of systolic BP [moderate adherence, -2.4 mm Hg (95% CI: -4.0, -0.8); high adherence, -3.1 mm Hg (95% CI: -5.4, -0.8)] and diastolic BP [moderate adherence, - 1.3 mm Hg (95% CI: -2.5, -0.1); high adherence, -1.9 mm Hg (95% CI: -3.6, -0.1)] after 6 years of follow-up [32]. These results suggest that adhering to a Mediterranean-type diet could contribute to the prevention of age-related increase in BP [32]. In the ATTICA Study the mean value of the MedDiet Score was 25.5 (±3) for men and 27 (±3) for women (p<0.001). The prevalence of HTN was 36.6% in men and 23.7% in women (p<0.001) [33]. Diet score was 23.5±6.4 in hypertensive and 26.8±6.6 in normotensive individuals (p<0.001). The sensitivity of defining people with HTN was higher than for any other CVD risk factor, suggesting that the adoption of MD reduces the risk for HTN [33]. In an elderly population of Cyprus, another Mediterranean Country, 60% of men and 58% of women have HTN, along with other classical CVD risk factors [34]. A 10-unit increase in the MedDietScore was associated with 21% lower odds of having one additional risk factor, including HTN, in women (p< 0.001) and with 14% lower odds in men (p=0.05) [34]. The results of the CARDIO2000 study [35] point out that the adoption of MD by physically active subjects seems to significantly reduce the coronary heart disease (CHD) events and prevent, just about, the one-third of acute CHD syndromes, in controlled subjects with HTN [35]. This supports the idea that MD combined with physical activity provides substantial protection from acute coronary events in patients with HTN [35]. Other data from the SUN Study also [36] suggest that there is an inverse relationship between fruit and vegetable consumption and the prevalence of nonpreviously diagnosed HTN in a Mediterranean population with a very high intake of both fat (paradoxically) and plantderived foods [36]. There was a 77 % reduction in the prevalence of HTN for those with the higher consumption of both fruit and vegetables compared with those at the lower quintiles of both food groups [36]. This inverse relationship was also evident when considering BP as a continuous variable, with a mean systolic BP and diastolic BP of 2.2 mmHg lower for those with the highest consumption of fruit and vegetables compared with those with the lowest intake [36]. The study concludes that in a Mediterranean population, with an elevated fat consumption, a high fruit and vegetable intake is inversely associated with BP levels [36]. From the same (SUN) study it was reported that there is an inverse association between fiber or fruit/vegetable consumption and weight gain, thus emphasizing the importance of replacing some dietary compounds by such foods and fiber-rich products, which may help to avoid weight gain [37]. This brinks about the issue of MD and obesity, mainly central, which is the key clinical manifestation of metabolic syndrome (MetS); this includes HTN. Data suggest that the prevalence of MetS has dramatically increased during the recent years, especially in Western Countries and South East Asia [38]. More than one third (35 %) of adults in the U.S. could be characterized as having the MetS, which translates to nearly 84 million U.S. adults affected by MetS [38]. Unfortunately the prevalence of MetS in Mediterranean Countries is high (one forth of the adult population), although definitely lower than that in U.S. [39,40]. It has been shown by prospective cohort studies, cross-sectional studies and clinical trials that adherence to the MD was associated with reduced risk of the MetS and its individual components also, in particular waist circumference, triglycerides levels, low density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), BP levels and glucose metabolism [38,41]. These effects of MD increase life expectancy in patients with MetS [42]. On the other hand, Mediterranean countries, such as Greece, have experienced a rapid social-economic change in the last 15 years and recently an economic crisis; both having negative impacts on healthy eating. These community changes affect nutritional habits and there is a tendency to abandon the traditional healthy MD [43]. However, if we continue to try at the elementary school level, things might be better than they look. A study aiming to examine the long-term effects of the "Cretan Health and Nutrition Education Program" on BP, examined several parameters: BP, dietary, anthropometrical and physical activity data nearly 10 years after the original study (at baseline year 1992-1993, and follow-up examination at year 2001-2002) [44]. The findings of the study revealed that the increase over the 10- year period in systolic BP and diastolic BP was higher in the control group than in the MD intervention group (P=0.003 and P<0.001 respectively). These facts are encouraging, indicating favorable changes in BP, micronutrients intake, body mass index (BMI) and physical activity over a 10-year period and 4 years after program's cessation [44]. We just have to keep trying to establish MD at an early age. In brief, MD reduces CVD risk and this action could be at least in part attributed to the reduction of BP and MetS. Given that the complete adoption of MD is practically impossible, a high degree of adherence is desirable. This could substantially reduce adverse CVD events as well as the incidence of acute coronary syndromes, by one third, If combined with a high level of physical activity. A high adherence to MD also reduces the prevalence of MetS, a part of which is HTN, and diminishes its clinical consequences, improving life expectancy. It is more effective if MD is adopted early in life.

Introduction I am a transmigrant who has moved back and forth between the West and the Rest. I was born and raised in a Muslim family in a predominantly Muslim country, Bangladesh, but I spent several years of my childhood in Pakistan. After my marriage, I lived in the United States for a year and a half, the Middle East for 5 years, Australia for three years, back to the Middle East for another 5 years, then, finally, in Australia for the last 12 years. I speak Bengali (my mother tongue), Urdu (which I learnt in Pakistan), a bit of Arabic (learnt in the Middle East); but English has always been my medium of instruction. So where is home? Is it my place of origin, the Muslim umma, or my land of settlement? Or is it my ‘root’ or my ‘route’ (Blunt and Dowling)? Blunt and Dowling (199) observe that the lives of transmigrants are often interpreted in terms of their ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, which are two frameworks for thinking about home, homeland and diaspora. Whereas ‘roots’ might imply an original homeland from which people have scattered, and to which they might seek to return, ‘routes’ focuses on mobile, multiple and transcultural geographies of home. However, both ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ are attached to emotion and identity, and both invoke a sense of place, belonging or alienation that is intrinsically tied to a sense of self (Blunt and Dowling 196-219). In this paper, I equate home with my root (place of birth) and route (transnational homing) within the context of the ‘diaspora and belonging’. First I define the diaspora and possible criteria of belonging. Next I describe my transnational homing within the framework of diaspora and belonging. Finally, I consider how Australia can be a ‘home’ for me and other Muslim Australians. The Diaspora and Belonging Blunt and Dowling (199) define diaspora as “scattering of people over space and transnational connections between people and the places”. Cohen emphasised the ethno-cultural aspects of the diaspora setting; that is, how migrants identify and position themselves in other nations in terms of their (different) ethnic and cultural orientation. Hall argues that the diasporic subjects form a cultural identity through transformation and difference. Speaking of the Hindu diaspora in the UK and Caribbean, Vertovec (21-23) contends that the migrants’ contact with their original ‘home’ or diaspora depends on four factors: migration processes and factors of settlement, cultural composition, structural and political power, and community development. With regard to the first factor, migration processes and factors of settlement, Vertovec explains that if the migrants are political or economic refugees, or on a temporary visa, they are likely to live in a ‘myth of return’. In the cultural composition context, Vertovec argues that religion, language, region of origin, caste, and degree of cultural homogenisation are factors in which migrants are bound to their homeland. Concerning the social structure and political power issue, Vertovec suggests that the extent and nature of racial and ethnic pluralism or social stigma, class composition, degree of institutionalised racism, involvement in party politics (or active citizenship) determine migrants’ connection to their new or old home. Finally, community development, including membership in organisations (political, union, religious, cultural, leisure), leadership qualities, and ethnic convergence or conflict (trends towards intra-communal or inter-ethnic/inter-religious co-operation) would also affect the migrants’ sense of belonging. Using these scholarly ideas as triggers, I will examine my home and belonging over the last few decades. My Home In an initial stage of my transmigrant history, my home was my root (place of birth, Dhaka, Bangladesh). Subsequently, my routes (settlement in different countries) reshaped my homes. In all respects, the ethno-cultural factors have played a big part in my definition of ‘home’. But on some occasions my ethnic identification has been overridden by my religious identification and vice versa. By ethnic identity, I mean my language (mother tongue) and my connection to my people (Bangladeshi). By my religious identity, I mean my Muslim religion, and my spiritual connection to the umma, a Muslim nation transcending all boundaries. Umma refers to the Muslim identity and unity within a larger Muslim group across national boundaries. The only thing the members of the umma have in common is their Islamic belief (Spencer and Wollman 169-170). In my childhood my father, a banker, was relocated to Karachi, Pakistan (then West Pakistan). Although I lived in Pakistan for much of my childhood, I have never considered it to be my home, even though it is predominantly a Muslim country. In this case, my home was my root (Bangladesh) where my grandparents and extended family lived. Every year I used to visit my grandparents who resided in a small town in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). Thus my connection with my home was sustained through my extended family, ethnic traditions, language (Bengali/Bangla), and the occasional visits to the landscape of Bangladesh. Smith (9-11) notes that people build their connection or identity to their homeland through their historic land, common historical memories, myths, symbols and traditions. Though Pakistan and Bangladesh had common histories, their traditions of language, dress and ethnic culture were very different. For example, the celebration of the Bengali New Year (Pohela Baishakh), folk dance, folk music and folk tales, drama, poetry, lyrics of poets Rabindranath Tagore (Rabindra Sangeet) and Nazrul Islam (Nazrul Geeti) are distinct in the cultural heritage of Bangladesh. Special musical instruments such as the banshi (a bamboo flute), dhol (drums), ektara (a single-stringed instrument) and dotara (a four-stringed instrument) are unique to Bangladeshi culture. The Bangladeshi cuisine (rice and freshwater fish) is also different from Pakistan where people mainly eat flat round bread (roti) and meat (gosh). However, my bonding factor to Bangladesh was my relatives, particularly my grandparents as they made me feel one of ‘us’. Their affection for me was irreplaceable. The train journey from Dhaka (capital city) to their town, Noakhali, was captivating. The hustle and bustle at the train station and the lush green paddy fields along the train journey reminded me that this was my ‘home’. Though I spoke the official language (Urdu) in Pakistan and had a few Pakistani friends in Karachi, they could never replace my feelings for my friends, extended relatives and cousins who lived in Bangladesh. I could not relate to the landscape or dry weather of Pakistan. More importantly, some Pakistani women (our neighbours) were critical of my mother’s traditional dress (saree), and described it as revealing because it showed a bit of her back. They took pride in their traditional dress (shalwar, kameez, dopatta), which they considered to be more covered and ‘Islamic’. So, because of our traditional dress (saree) and perhaps other differences, we were regarded as the ‘Other’. In 1970 my father was relocated back to Dhaka, Bangladesh, and I was glad to go home. It should be noted that both Pakistan and Bangladesh were separated from India in 1947 – first as one nation; then, in 1971, Bangladesh became independent from Pakistan. The conflict between Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and Pakistan (then West Pakistan) originated for economic and political reasons. At this time I was a high school student and witnessed acts of genocide committed by the Pakistani regime against the Bangladeshis (March-December 1971). My memories of these acts are vivid and still very painful. After my marriage, I moved from Bangladesh to the United States. In this instance, my new route (Austin, Texas, USA), as it happened, did not become my home. Here the ethno-cultural and Islamic cultural factors took precedence. I spoke the English language, made some American friends, and studied history at the University of Texas. I appreciated the warm friendship extended to me in the US, but experienced a degree of culture shock. I did not appreciate the pub life, alcohol consumption, and what I perceived to be the lack of family bonds (children moving out at the age of 18, families only meeting occasionally on birthdays and Christmas). Furthermore, I could not relate to de facto relationships and acceptance of sex before marriage. However, to me ‘home’ meant a family orientation and living in close contact with family. Besides the cultural divide, my husband and I were living in the US on student visas and, as Vertovec (21-23) noted, temporary visa status can deter people from their sense of belonging to the host country. In retrospect I can see that we lived in the ‘myth of return’. However, our next move for a better life was not to our root (Bangladesh), but another route to the Muslim world of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. My husband moved to Dhahran not because it was a Muslim world but because it gave him better economic opportunities. However, I thought this new destination would become my home – the home that was coined by Anderson as the imagined nation, or my Muslim umma. Anderson argues that the imagined communities are “to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6; Wood 61). Hall (122) asserts: identity is actually formed through unconscious processes over time, rather than being innate in consciousness at birth. There is always something ‘imaginary’ or fantasized about its unity. It always remains incomplete, is always ‘in process’, always ‘being formed’. As discussed above, when I had returned home to Bangladesh from Pakistan – both Muslim countries – my primary connection to my home country was my ethnic identity, language and traditions. My ethnic identity overshadowed the religious identity. But when I moved to Saudi Arabia, where my ethnic identity differed from that of the mainstream Arabs and Bedouin/nomadic Arabs, my connection to this new land was through my Islamic cultural and religious identity. Admittedly, this connection to the umma was more psychological than physical, but I was now in close proximity to Mecca, and to my home of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Mecca is an important city in Saudi Arabia for Muslims because it is the holy city of Islam, the home to the Ka’aba (the religious centre of Islam), and the birthplace of Prophet Muhammad [Peace Be Upon Him]. It is also the destination of the Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islamic faith. Therefore, Mecca is home to significant events in Islamic history, as well as being an important present day centre for the Islamic faith. We lived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia for 5 years. Though it was a 2.5 hours flight away, I treasured Mecca’s proximity and regarded Dhahran as my second and spiritual home. Saudi Arabia had a restricted lifestyle for women, but I liked it because it was a Muslim country that gave me the opportunity to perform umrah Hajj (pilgrimage). However, Saudi Arabia did not allow citizenship to expatriates. Saudi Arabia’s government was keen to protect the status quo and did not want to compromise its cultural values or standard of living by allowing foreigners to become a permanent part of society. In exceptional circumstances only, the King granted citizenship to a foreigner for outstanding service to the state over a number of years. Children of foreigners born in Saudi Arabia did not have rights of local citizenship; they automatically assumed the nationality of their parents. If it was available, Saudi citizenship would assure expatriates a secure and permanent living in Saudi Arabia; as it was, there was a fear among the non-Saudis that they would have to leave the country once their job contract expired. Under the circumstances, though my spiritual connection to Mecca was strong, my husband was convinced that Saudi Arabia did not provide any job security. So, in 1987 when Australia offered migration to highly skilled people, my husband decided to migrate to Australia for a better and more secure economic life. I agreed to his decision, but quite reluctantly because we were again moving to a non-Muslim part of the world, which would be culturally different and far away from my original homeland (Bangladesh). In Australia, we lived first in Brisbane, then Adelaide, and after three years we took our Australian citizenship. At that stage I loved the Barossa Valley and Victor Harbour in South Australia, and the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast in Queensland, but did not feel at home in Australia. We bought a house in Adelaide and I was a full time home-maker but was always apprehensive that my children (two boys) would lose their culture in this non-Muslim world. In 1990 we once again moved back to the Muslim world, this time to Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. My connection to this route was again spiritual. I valued the fact that we would live in a Muslim country and our children would be brought up in a Muslim environment. But my husband’s move was purely financial as he got a lucrative job offer in Muscat. We had another son in Oman. We enjoyed the luxurious lifestyle provided by my husband’s workplace and the service provided by the housemaid. I loved the beaches and freedom to drive my car, and I appreciated the friendly Omani people. I also enjoyed our frequent trips (4 hours flight) to my root, Dhaka, Bangladesh. So our children were raised within our ethnic and Islamic culture, remained close to my root (family in Dhaka), though they attended a British school in Muscat. But by the time I started considering Oman to be my second home, we had to leave once again for a place that could provide us with a more secure future. Oman was like Saudi Arabia; it employed expatriates only on a contract basis, and did not give them citizenship (not even fellow Muslims). So after 5 years it was time to move back to Australia. It was with great reluctance that I moved with my husband to Brisbane in 1995 because once again we were to face a different cultural context. As mentioned earlier, we lived in Brisbane in the late 1980s; I liked the weather, the landscape, but did not consider it home for cultural reasons. Our boys started attending expensive private schools and we bought a house in a prestigious Western suburb in Brisbane. Soon after arriving I started my tertiary education at the University of Queensland, and finished an MA in Historical Studies in Indian History in 1998. Still Australia was not my home. I kept thinking that we would return to my previous routes or the ‘imagined’ homeland somewhere in the Middle East, in close proximity to my root (Bangladesh), where we could remain economically secure in a Muslim country. But gradually I began to feel that Australia was becoming my ‘home’. I had gradually become involved in professional and community activities (with university colleagues, the Bangladeshi community and Muslim women’s organisations), and in retrospect I could see that this was an early stage of my ‘self-actualisation’ (Maslow). Through my involvement with diverse people, I felt emotionally connected with the concerns, hopes and dreams of my Muslim-Australian friends. Subsequently, I also felt connected with my mainstream Australian friends whose emotions and fears (9/11 incident, Bali bombing and 7/7 tragedy) were similar to mine. In late 1998 I started my PhD studies on the immigration history of Australia, with a particular focus on the historical settlement of Muslims in Australia. This entailed retrieving archival files and interviewing people, mostly Muslims and some mainstream Australians, and enquiring into relevant migration issues. I also became more active in community issues, and was not constrained by my circumstances. By circumstances, I mean that even though I belonged to a patriarchally structured Muslim family, where my husband was the main breadwinner, main decision-maker, my independence and research activities (entailing frequent interstate trips for data collection, and public speaking) were not frowned upon or forbidden (Khan 14-15); fortunately, my husband appreciated my passion for research and gave me his trust and support. This, along with the Muslim community’s support (interviews), and the wider community’s recognition (for example, the publication of my letters in Australian newspapers, interviews on radio and television) enabled me to develop my self-esteem and built up my bicultural identity as a Muslim in a predominantly Christian country and as a Bangladeshi-Australian. In 2005, for the sake of a better job opportunity, my husband moved to the UK, but this time I asserted that I would not move again. I felt that here in Australia (now in Perth) I had a job, an identity and a home. This time my husband was able to secure a good job back in Australia and was only away for a year. I no longer dream of finding a home in the Middle East. Through my bicultural identity here in Australia I feel connected to the wider community and to the Muslim umma. However, my attachment to the umma has become ambivalent. I feel proud of my Australian-Muslim identity but I am concerned about the jihadi ideology of militant Muslims. By jihadi ideology, I mean the extremist ideology of the al-Qaeda terrorist group (Farrar 2007). The Muslim umma now incorporates both moderate and radical Muslims. The radical Muslims (though only a tiny minority of 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide) pose a threat to their moderate counterparts as well as to non-Muslims. In the UK, some second- and third-generation Muslims identify themselves with the umma rather than their parents’ homelands or their country of birth (Husain). It should not be a matter of concern if these young Muslims adopt a ‘pure’ Muslim identity, providing at the same time they are loyal to their country of residence. But when they resort to terrorism with their ‘pure’ Muslim identity (e.g., the 7/7 London bombers) they defame my religion Islam, and undermine my spiritual connection to the umma. As a 1st generation immigrant, the defining criteria of my ‘homeliness’ in Australia are my ethno-cultural and religious identity (which includes my family), my active citizenship, and my community development/contribution through my research work – all of which allow me a sense of efficacy in my life. My ethnic and religious identities generally co-exist equally, but when I see some Muslims kill my fellow Australians (such as the Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005) my Australian identity takes precedence. I feel for the victims and condemn the perpetrators. On the other hand, when I see politics play a role over the human rights issues (e.g., the Tampa incident), my religious identity begs me to comment on it (see Kabir, Muslims in Australia 295-305). Problematising ‘Home’ for Muslim Australians In the European context, Grillo (863) and Werbner (904), and in the Australian context, Kabir (Muslims in Australia) and Poynting and Mason, have identified the diversity within Islam (national, ethnic, religious etc). Werbner (904) notes that in spite of the “wishful talk of the emergence of a ‘British Islam’, even today there are Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Arab mosques, as well as Turkish and Shia’a mosques”; thus British Muslims retain their separate identities. Similarly, in Australia, the existence of separate mosques for the Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Arab and Shia’a peoples indicates that Australian Muslims have also kept their ethnic identities discrete (Saeed 64-77). However, in times of crisis, such as the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989, and the 1990-1991 Gulf crises, both British and Australian Muslims were quick to unite and express their Islamic identity by way of resistance (Kabir, Muslims in Australia 160-162; Poynting and Mason 68-70). In both British and Australian contexts, I argue that a peaceful rally or resistance is indicative of active citizenship of Muslims as it reveals their sense of belonging (also Werbner 905). So when a transmigrant Muslim wants to make a peaceful demonstration, the Western world should be encouraged, not threatened – as long as the transmigrant’s allegiances lie also with the host country. In the European context, Grillo (868) writes: when I asked Mehmet if he was planning to stay in Germany he answered without hesitation: ‘Yes, of course’. And then, after a little break, he added ‘as long as we can live here as Muslims’. In this context, I support Mehmet’s desire to live as a Muslim in a non-Muslim world as long as this is peaceful. Paradoxically, living a Muslim life through ijtihad can be either socially progressive or destructive. The Canadian Muslim feminist Irshad Manji relies on ijtihad, but so does Osama bin Laden! Manji emphasises that ijtihad can be, on the one hand, the adaptation of Islam using independent reasoning, hybridity and the contesting of ‘traditional’ family values (c.f. Doogue and Kirkwood 275-276, 314); and, on the other, ijtihad can take the form of conservative, patriarchal and militant Islamic values. The al-Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden espouses the jihadi ideology of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian who early in his career might have been described as a Muslim modernist who believed that Islam and Western secular ideals could be reconciled. But he discarded that idea after going to the US in 1948-50; there he was treated as ‘different’ and that treatment turned him against the West. He came back to Egypt and embraced a much more rigid and militaristic form of Islam (Esposito 136). Other scholars, such as Cesari, have identified a third orientation – a ‘secularised Islam’, which stresses general beliefs in the values of Islam and an Islamic identity, without too much concern for practices. Grillo (871) observed Islam in the West emphasised diversity. He stressed that, “some [Muslims were] more quietest, some more secular, some more clamorous, some more negotiatory”, while some were exclusively characterised by Islamic identity, such as wearing the burqa (elaborate veils), hijabs (headscarves), beards by men and total abstinence from drinking alcohol. So Mehmet, cited above, could be living a Muslim life within the spectrum of these possibilities, ranging from an integrating mode to a strict, militant Muslim manner. In the UK context, Zubaida (96) contends that marginalised, culturally-impoverished youth are the people for whom radical, militant Islamism may have an appeal, though it must be noted that the 7/7 bombers belonged to affluent families (O’Sullivan 14; Husain). In Australia, Muslim Australians are facing three challenges. First, the Muslim unemployment rate: it was three times higher than the national total in 1996 and 2001 (Kabir, Muslims in Australia 266-278; Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 63). Second, some spiritual leaders have used extreme rhetoric to appeal to marginalised youth; in January 2007, the Australian-born imam of Lebanese background, Sheikh Feiz Mohammad, was alleged to have employed a DVD format to urge children to kill the enemies of Islam and to have praised martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad (Chulov 2). Third, the proposed citizenship test has the potential to make new migrants’ – particularly Muslims’ – settlement in Australia stressful (Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 62-79); in May 2007, fuelled by perceptions that some migrants – especially Muslims – were not integrating quickly enough, the Howard government introduced a citizenship test bill that proposes to test applicants on their English language skills and knowledge of Australian history and ‘values’. I contend that being able to demonstrate knowledge of history and having English language skills is no guarantee that a migrant will be a good citizen. Through my transmigrant history, I have learnt that developing a bond with a new place takes time, acceptance and a gradual change of identity, which are less likely to happen when facing assimilationist constraints. I spoke English and studied history in the United States, but I did not consider it my home. I did not speak the Arabic language, and did not study Middle Eastern history while I was in the Middle East, but I felt connected to it for cultural and religious reasons. Through my knowledge of history and English language proficiency I did not make Australia my home when I first migrated to Australia. Australia became my home when I started interacting with other Australians, which was made possible by having the time at my disposal and by fortunate circumstances, which included a fairly high level of efficacy and affluence. If I had been rejected because of my lack of knowledge of ‘Australian values’, or had encountered discrimination in the job market, I would have been much less willing to embrace my host country and call it home. I believe a stringent citizenship test is more likely to alienate would-be citizens than to induce their adoption of values and loyalty to their new home. Conclusion Blunt (5) observes that current studies of home often investigate mobile geographies of dwelling and how it shapes one’s identity and belonging. Such geographies of home negotiate from the domestic to the global context, thus mobilising the home beyond a fixed, bounded and confining location. Similarly, in this paper I have discussed how my mobile geography, from the domestic (root) to global (route), has shaped my identity. Though I received a degree of culture shock in the United States, loved the Middle East, and was at first quite resistant to the idea of making Australia my second home, the confidence I acquired in residing in these ‘several homes’ were cumulative and eventually enabled me to regard Australia as my ‘home’. I loved the Middle East, but I did not pursue an active involvement with the Arab community because I was a busy mother. Also I lacked the communication skill (fluency in Arabic) with the local residents who lived outside the expatriates’ campus. I am no longer a cultural freak. I am no longer the same Bangladeshi woman who saw her ethnic and Islamic culture as superior to all other cultures. I have learnt to appreciate Australian values, such as tolerance, ‘a fair go’ and multiculturalism (see Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 62-79). My bicultural identity is my strength. With my ethnic and religious identity, I can relate to the concerns of the Muslim community and other Australian ethnic and religious minorities. And with my Australian identity I have developed ‘a voice’ to pursue active citizenship. Thus my biculturalism has enabled me to retain and merge my former home with my present and permanent home of Australia. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso, 1983. Australian Bureau of Statistics: Census of Housing and Population, 1996 and 2001. Blunt, Alison. Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Cesari, Jocelyne. “Muslim Minorities in Europe: The Silent Revolution.” In John L. Esposito and Burgat, eds., Modernising Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in Europe and the Middle East. London: Hurst, 2003. 251-269. Chulov, Martin. “Treatment Has Sheik Wary of Returning Home.” Weekend Australian 6-7 Jan. 2007: 2. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington, 1997. Doogue, Geraldine, and Peter Kirkwood. Tomorrow’s Islam: Uniting Old-Age Beliefs and a Modern World. Sydney: ABC Books, 2005. Esposito, John. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? 3rd ed. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Farrar, Max. “When the Bombs Go Off: Rethinking and Managing Diversity Strategies in Leeds, UK.” International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations 6.5 (2007): 63-68. Grillo, Ralph. “Islam and Transnationalism.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.5 (Sep. 2004): 861-878. Hall, Stuart. Polity Reader in Cultural Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Huntington, Samuel, P. The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of World Order. London: Touchstone, 1998. Husain, Ed. The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw inside and Why I Left. London: Penguin, 2007. Kabir, Nahid. Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History. London: Kegan Paul, 2005. ———. “What Does It Mean to Be Un-Australian: Views of Australian Muslim Students in 2006.” People and Place 15.1 (2007): 62-79. Khan, Shahnaz. Aversion and Desire: Negotiating Muslim Female Identity in the Diaspora. Toronto: Women’s Press, 2002. Manji, Irshad. The Trouble with Islam Today. Canada:Vintage, 2005. Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper, 1954. O’Sullivan, J. “The Real British Disease.” Quadrant (Jan.-Feb. 2006): 14-20. Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. “The Resistible Rise of Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Racism in the UK and Australia before 11 September 2001.” Journal of Sociology 43.1 (2007): 61-86. Saeed, Abdallah. Islam in Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003. Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Spencer, Philip, and Howard Wollman. Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage, 2002. Vertovec, Stevens. The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns. London: Routledge. 2000. Werbner, Pnina, “Theorising Complex Diasporas: Purity and Hybridity in the South Asian Public Sphere in Britain.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.5 (2004): 895-911. Wood, Dennis. “The Diaspora, Community and the Vagrant Space.” In Cynthia Vanden Driesen and Ralph Crane, eds., Diaspora: The Australasian Experience. New Delhi: Prestige, 2005. 59-64. Zubaida, Sami. “Islam in Europe: Unity or Diversity.” Critical Quarterly 45.1-2 (2003): 88-98. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kabir, Nahid. "Why I Call Australia ‘Home’?: A Transmigrant’s Perspective." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/15-kabir.php>. APA Style Kabir, N. (Aug. 2007) "Why I Call Australia ‘Home’?: A Transmigrant’s Perspective," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/15-kabir.php>.

“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them [...] life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” (Garcia Marquez 165) Introduction The refugee experience is, at heart, one of rebirth. Just as becoming a new, distinctive being—biological birth—necessarily involves the physical separation of mother and infant, so becoming a refugee entails separation from a "mother country." This mother country may or may not be a recognised nation state; the point is that the refugee transitions from physical connectedness to separation, from insider to outsider, from endemic to alien. Like babies, refugees may have little control over the timing and conditions of their expulsion. Successful resettlement requires not one rebirth but multiple rebirths—resettlement is a lifelong process (Layton)—which in turn require hope, imagination, and energy. In rebirthing themselves over and over again, people who have fled or been forced from their homelands become both mother and child. They do not go through this rebirthing alone. A range of agencies and individuals may be there to assist, including immigration officials, settlement services, schools and teachers, employment agencies and employers, English as a Second Language (ESL) resources and instructors, health-care providers, counsellors, diasporic networks, neighbours, church groups, and other community organisations. The nature, intensity, and duration of these “midwives’” interventions—and when they occur and in what combinations—vary hugely from place to place and from person to person, but there is clear evidence that post-migration experiences have a significant impact on settlement outcomes (Fozdar and Hartley). This paper draws on qualitative research I did in 2012 in a regional town in New South Wales to illuminate some of the ways in which settlement aides ease, or impede, refugees’ rebirth as fully recognised and participating Australians. I begin by considering what it means to be resilient before tracing some of the dimensions of the resettlement process. In doing so, I draw on data from interviews and focus groups with former refugees, service providers, and other residents of the town I shall call Easthaven. First, though, a word about Easthaven. As is the case in many rural and regional parts of Australia, Easthaven’s population is strongly dominated by Anglo Celtic and Saxon ancestries: 2011 Census data show that more than 80 per cent of residents were born in Australia (compared with a national figure of 69.8 per cent) and about 90 per cent speak only English at home (76.8 per cent). Almost twice as many people identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander as the national figure of 2.5 per cent (Australian Bureau of Statistics). For several years Easthaven has been an official “Refugee Welcome Zone”, welcoming hundreds of refugees from diverse countries in Africa and the Middle East as well as from Myanmar. This reflects the Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s drive to settle a fifth of Australia’s 13,750 humanitarian entrants a year directly in regional areas. In Easthaven’s schools—which is where I focused my research—almost all of the ESL students are from refugee backgrounds. Defining Resilience Much of the research on human resilience is grounded in psychology, with a capacity to “bounce back” from adverse experiences cited in many definitions of resilience (e.g. American Psychological Association). Bouncing back implies a relatively quick process, and a return to a state or form similar to that which existed before the encounter with adversity. Yet resilience often requires sustained effort and significant changes in identity. As Jerome Rugaruza, a former UNHCR refugee, says of his journey from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Australia: All the steps begin in the burning village: you run with nothing to eat, no clothes. You just go. Then you get to the refugee camp […] You have a little bread and you thank god you are safe. Then after a few years in the camp, you think about a future for your children. You arrive in Australia and then you learn a new language, you learn to drive. There are so many steps and not everyone can do it. (Milsom) Not everyone can do it, but a large majority do. Research by Graeme Hugo, for example, shows that although humanitarian settlers in Australia face substantial barriers to employment and initially have much higher unemployment rates than other immigrants, for most nationality groups this difference has disappeared by the second generation: “This is consistent with the sacrifice (or investment) of the first generation and the efforts extended to attain higher levels of education and English proficiency, thereby reducing the barriers over time.” (Hugo 35). Ingrid Poulson writes that “resilience is not just about bouncing. Bouncing […] is only a reaction. Resilience is about rising—you rise above it, you rise to the occasion, you rise to the challenge. Rising is an active choice” (47; my emphasis) I see resilience as involving mental and physical grit, coupled with creativity, aspiration and, crucially, agency. Dimensions of Resettlement To return to the story of 41-year-old Jerome Rugaruza, as related in a recent newspaper article: He [Mr Rugaruza] describes the experience of being a newly arrived refugee as being like that of a newborn baby. “You need special care; you have to learn to speak [English], eat the different food, create relationships, connections”. (Milsom) This is a key dimension of resettlement: the adult becomes like an infant again, shifting from someone who knows how things work and how to get by to someone who is likely to be, for a while, dependent on others for even the most basic things—communication, food, shelter, clothing, and social contact. The “special care” that most refugee arrivals need initially (and sometimes for a long time) often results in their being seen as deficient—in knowledge, skills, dispositions, and capacities as well as material goods (Keddie; Uptin, Wright and Harwood). As Fozdar and Hartley note: “The tendency to use a deficit model in refugee resettlement devalues people and reinforces the view of the mainstream population that refugees are a liability” (27). Yet unlike newborns, humanitarian settlers come to their new countries with rich social networks and extensive histories of experience and learning—resources that are in fact vital to their rebirth. Sisay (all names are pseudonyms), a year 11 student of Ethiopian heritage who was born in Kenya, told me with feeling: I had a life back in Africa [her emphasis]. It was good. Well, I would go back there if there’s no problems, which—is a fact. And I came here for a better life—yeah, I have a better life, there’s good health care, free school, and good environment and all that. But what’s that without friends? A fellow student, Celine, who came to Australia five years ago from Burundi via Uganda, told me in a focus group: Some teachers are really good but I think some other teachers could be a little bit more encouraging and understanding of what we’ve gone through, because [they] just look at you like “You’re year 11 now, you should know this” […] It’s really discouraging when [the teachers say] in front of the class, “Oh, you shouldn’t do this subject because you haven’t done this this this this” […] It’s like they’re on purpose to tell you “you don’t have what it takes; just give up and do something else.” As Uptin, Wright and Harwood note, “schools not only have the power to position who is included in schooling (in culture and pedagogy) but also have the power to determine whether there is room and appreciation for diversity” (126). Both Sisay and Celine were disheartened by the fact they felt some of their teachers, and many of their peers, had little interest in or understanding of their lives before they came to Australia. The teachers’ low expectations of refugee-background students (Keddie, Uptin, Wright and Harwood) contrasted with the students’ and their families’ high expectations of themselves (Brown, Miller and Mitchell; Harris and Marlowe). When I asked Sisay about her post-school ambitions, she said: “I have a good idea of my future […] write a documentary. And I’m working on it.” Celine’s response was: “I know I’m gonna do medicine, be a doctor.” A third girl, Lily, who came to Australia from Myanmar three years ago, told me she wanted to be an accountant and had studied accounting at the local TAFE last year. Joseph, a father of three who resettled from South Sudan seven years ago, stressed how important getting a job was to successful settlement: [But] you have to get a certificate first to get a job. Even the job of cleaning—when I came here I was told that somebody has to go to have training in cleaning, to use the different chemicals to clean the ground and all that. But that is just sweeping and cleaning with water—you don’t need the [higher-level] skills. Simple jobs like this, we are not able to get them. In regional Australia, employment opportunities tend to be limited (Fozdar and Hartley); the unemployment rate in Easthaven is twice the national average. Opportunities to study are also more limited than in urban centres, and would-be students are not always eligible for financial assistance to gain or upgrade qualifications. Even when people do have appropriate qualifications, work experience, and language proficiency, the colour of their skin may still mean they miss out on a job. Tilbury and Colic-Peisker have documented the various ways in which employers deflect responsibility for racial discrimination, including the “common” strategy (658) of arguing that while the employer or organisation is not prejudiced, they have to discriminate because of their clients’ needs or expectations. I heard this strategy deployed in an interview with a local businesswoman, Catriona: We were advertising for a new technician. And one of the African refugees came to us and he’d had a lot of IT experience. And this is awful, but we felt we couldn't give him the job, because we send our technicians into people's houses, and we knew that if a black African guy rocked up at someone’s house to try and fix their computer, they would not always be welcomed in all—look, it would not be something that [Easthaven] was ready for yet. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (Refugees and Employment) note that while Australia has strict anti-discrimination legislation, this legislation may be of little use to the people who, because of the way they look and sound (skin colour, dress, accent), are most likely to face prejudice and discrimination. The researchers found that perceived discrimination in the labour market affected humanitarian settlers’ sense of satisfaction with their new lives far more than, for example, racist remarks, which were generally shrugged off; the students I interviewed spoke of racism as “expected,” but “quite rare.” Most of the people Colic-Peisker and Tilbury surveyed reported finding Australians “friendly and accepting” (33). Even if there is no active discrimination on the basis of skin colour in employment, education, or housing, or overt racism in social situations, visible difference can still affect a person’s sense of belonging, as Joseph recounts: I think of myself as Australian, but my colour doesn’t [laughs] […] Unfortunately many, many Australians are expecting that Australia is a country of Europeans … There is no need for somebody to ask “Where do you come from?” and “Do you find Australia here safe?” and “Do you enjoy it?” Those kind of questions doesn’t encourage that we are together. This highlights another dimension of resettlement: the journey from feeling “at home” to feeling “foreign” to, eventually, feeling at home again in the host country (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, Refugees and Employment). In the case of visibly different settlers, however, this last stage may never be completed. Whether the questions asked of Joseph are well intentioned or not, their effect may be the same: they position him as a “forever foreigner” (Park). A further dimension of resettlement—one already touched on—is the degree to which humanitarian settlers actively manage their “rebirth,” and are allowed and encouraged to do so. A key factor will be their mastery of English, and Easthaven’s ESL teachers are thus pivotal in the resettlement process. There is little doubt that many of these teachers have gone to great lengths to help this cohort of students, not only in terms of language acquisition but also social inclusion. However, in some cases what is initially supportive can, with time, begin to undermine refugees’ maturity into independent citizens. Sharon, an ESL teacher at one of the schools, told me how she and her colleagues would give their refugee-background students lifts to social events: But then maybe three years down the track they have a car and their dad can drive, but they still won’t take them […] We arrive to pick them up and they’re not ready, or there’s five fantastic cars in the driveway, and you pick up the student and they say “My dad’s car’s much bigger and better than yours” [laughs]. So there’s an expectation that we’ll do stuff for them, but we’ve created that [my emphasis]. Other support services may have more complex interests in keeping refugee settlers dependent. The more clients an agency has, the more services it provides, and the longer clients stay on its books, the more lucrative the contract for the agency. Thus financial and employment imperatives promote competition rather than collaboration between service providers (Fozdar and Hartley; Sidhu and Taylor) and may encourage assumptions about what sorts of services different individuals and groups want and need. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (“‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”) have developed a typology of resettlement styles—“achievers,” “consumers,” “endurers,” and “victims”—but stress that a person’s style, while influenced by personality and pre-migration factors, is also shaped by the institutions and individuals they come into contact with: “The structure of settlement and welfare services may produce a victim mentality, leaving members of refugee communities inert and unable to see themselves as agents of change” (76). The prevailing narrative of “the traumatised refugee” is a key aspect of this dynamic (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”; Fozdar and Hartley; Keddie). Service providers may make assumptions about what humanitarian settlers have gone through before arriving in Australia, how they have been affected by their experiences, and what must be done to “fix” them. Norah, a long-time caseworker, told me: I think you get some [providers] who go, “How could you have gone through something like that and not suffered? There must be—you must have to talk about this stuff” […] Where some [refugees] just come with the [attitude] “We’re all born into a situation; that was my situation, but I’m here now and now my focus is this.” She cited failure to consider cultural sensitivities around mental illness and to recognise that stress and anxiety during early resettlement are normal (Tilbury) as other problems in the sector: [Newly arrived refugees] go through the “happy to be here” [phase] and now “hang on, I’ve thumped to the bottom and I’m missing my own foods and smells and cultures and experiences”. I think sometimes we’re just too quick to try and slot people into a box. One factor that appears to be vital in fostering and sustaining resilience is social connection. Norah said her clients were “very good on the mobile phone” and had links “everywhere,” including to family and friends in their countries of birth, transition countries, and other parts of Australia. A 2011 report for DIAC, Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals, found that humanitarian entrants to Australia were significantly more likely to be members of cultural and/or religious groups than other categories of immigrants (Australian Survey Research). I found many examples of efforts to build both bonding and bridging capital (Putnam) in Easthaven, and I offer two examples below. Several people told me about a dinner-dance that had been held a few weeks before one of my visits. The event was organised by an African women’s group, which had been formed—with funding assistance—several years before. The dinner-dance was advertised in the local newspaper and attracted strong interest from a broad cross-section of Easthaveners. To Debbie, a counsellor, the response signified a “real turnaround” in community relations and was a big boon to the women’s sense of belonging. Erica, a teacher, told me about a cultural exchange day she had organised between her bush school—where almost all of the children are Anglo Australian—and ESL students from one of the town schools: At the start of the day, my kids were looking at [the refugee-background students] and they were scared, they were saying to me, "I feel scared." And we shoved them all into this tiny little room […] and they had no choice but to sit practically on top of each other. And by the end of the day, they were hugging each other and braiding their hair and jumping and playing together. Like Uptin, Wright and Harwood, I found that the refugee-background students placed great importance on the social aspects of school. Sisay, the girl I introduced earlier in this paper, said: “It’s just all about friendship and someone to be there for you […] We try to be friends with them [the non-refugee students] sometimes but sometimes it just seems they don’t want it.” Conclusion A 2012 report on refugee settlement services in NSW concludes that the state “is not meeting its responsibility to humanitarian entrants as well as it could” (Audit Office of New South Wales 2); moreover, humanitarian settlers in NSW are doing less well on indicators such as housing and health than humanitarian settlers in other states (3). Evaluating the effectiveness of formal refugee-centred programs was not part of my research and is beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, I have sought to reveal some of the ways in which the attitudes, assumptions, and everyday practices of service providers and members of the broader community impact on refugees' settlement experience. What I heard repeatedly in the interviews I conducted was that it was emotional and practical support (Matthews; Tilbury), and being asked as well as told (about their hopes, needs, desires), that helped Easthaven’s refugee settlers bear themselves into fulfilling new lives. References Audit Office of New South Wales. Settling Humanitarian Entrants in New South Wales—Executive Summary. May 2012. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/245/02_Humanitarian_Entrants_2012_Executive_Summary.pdf.aspx?Embed=Y>. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2011 Census QuickStats. Mar. 2013. 11 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/0>. Australian Survey Research. Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals—Report of Findings. Apr. 2011. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/research/_pdf/settlement-outcomes-new-arrivals.pdf>. Brown, Jill, Jenny Miller, and Jane Mitchell. “Interrupted Schooling and the Acquisition of Literacy: Experiences of Sudanese Refugees in Victorian Secondary Schools.” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 29.2 (2006): 150-62. Colic-Peisker, Val, and Farida Tilbury. “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement: The Influence of Supporting Services and Refugees’ Own Resources on Resettlement Style.” International Migration 41.5 (2004): 61-91. ———. Refugees and Employment: The Effect of Visible Difference on Discrimination—Final Report. Perth: Centre for Social and Community Research, Murdoch University, 2007. Fozdar, Farida, and Lisa Hartley. “Refugee Resettlement in Australia: What We Know and Need To Know.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 4 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://rsq.oxfordjournals.org/search?fulltext=fozdar&submit=yes&x=0&y=0>. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera. London: Penguin Books, 1989. Harris, Vandra, and Jay Marlowe. “Hard Yards and High Hopes: The Educational Challenges of African Refugee University Students in Australia.” International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 23.2 (2011): 186-96. Hugo, Graeme. A Significant Contribution: The Economic, Social and Civic Contributions of First and Second Generation Humanitarian Entrants—Summary of Findings. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2011. Keddie, Amanda. “Pursuing Justice for Refugee Students: Addressing Issues of Cultural (Mis)recognition.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 16.12 (2012): 1295-1310. Layton, Robyn. "Building Capacity to Ensure the Inclusion of Vulnerable Groups." Creating Our Future conference, Adelaide, 28 Jul. 2012. Milsom, Rosemarie. “From Hard Luck Life to the Lucky Country.” Sydney Morning Herald 20 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/national/from-hard-luck-life-to-the-lucky-country-20130619-2oixl.html>. Park, Gilbert C. “’Are We Real Americans?’: Cultural Production of Forever Foreigners at a Diversity Event.” Education and Urban Society 43.4 (2011): 451-67. Poulson, Ingrid. Rise. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2008. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Sidhu, Ravinder K., and Sandra Taylor. “The Trials and Tribulations of Partnerships in Refugee Settlement Services in Australia.” Journal of Education Policy 24.6 (2009): 655-72. Tilbury, Farida. “‘I Feel I Am a Bird without Wings’: Discourses of Sadness and Loss among East Africans in Western Australia.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 14.4 (2007): 433-58. ———, and Val Colic-Peisker. “Deflecting Responsibility in Employer Talk about Race Discrimination.” Discourse & Society 17.5 (2006): 651-76. Uptin, Jonnell, Jan Wright, and Valerie Harwood. “It Felt Like I Was a Black Dot on White Paper: Examining Young Former Refugees’ Experience of Entering Australian High Schools.” The Australian Educational Researcher 40.1 (2013): 125-37.

Higher Education has a vital role in developing an internationally competitive economy, a more affluent society and a sturdy democracy. The newly released National Plan for Higher Education in South Africa should recognise the current social and economic status in the country to realign its mission, and to reconsider the location and target audience of the various institutions in the country, to optimally serve the educational needs of the communities. The proposals in the National Plan, however, attempts to attain in a few years what other stabilised countries took years. That poses major challenges to education management. The aim of this paper is to evaluate some aspects of the managerial skills in the national education authorities. By analysing the National Plan, and testing the views of a number of teaching staff, the conclusion is that there are serious doubts regarding the management acumen in the educational leadership and that various important aspects are left out in the Plan.

This case study describes current developments in the change processes that are underway at the University of South Australia (UniSA) as it develops from a dual mode institution to one that embraces flexibility in delivery of all of its courses and programs. Forces operating in the context of higher education are causing traditional institutions to become dual mode. Institutions that were already operating as dual mode are developing a proliferation of program delivery arrangements that move beyond hybridisation. A number of Australian institutions claim to provide flexibly delivered courses where student centred learning processes are facilitated through the use of information and communication technologies. Hybridisation and the move to flexible delivery in Australia has partly been driven by changes in the socio-economic context of higher education that have forced universities to compete for income to sustain their operating costs. Offshore teaching and the provision of onshore fee paying courses for international students have required changes to delivery processes for resource-based teaching and online technologies and these changes have washed through institutions. However, for some institutions the development of flexible delivery has been to achieve a wider range of educational purposes for all students. Such purposes are often described in terms of the shift in focus: for example, from teaching to learning; from elite to inclusive; from "producer" to "consumer;" from local perspective to international; from credentialing (four year degree) to life-long learning (40 year degree). This case study looks at the ways in which UniSA course, student, regulatory, logistical and technological systems or subsystems are changing, both in response to extra-institutional influences and in relation to institution-wide development of greater flexibility in teaching, learning and program delivery. This analysis highlights the ways in which these subsystems interact with each other and the critical importance of shared vision to coordinate changes on multiple fronts within the institution and to facilitate internalisation and ownership of such change by its staff. The case study highlights how the logistical assumptions and arrangements of online education are significantly different in kind from those of traditional face-to-face or distance education and argues that moves to online education therefore require pervasive change. At the same time, online education can provide an integrating framework for different forms of delivery, thereby achieving synergies and economies of scale.

Introduction The genealogy of Feminist Standpoint Theory in the 1970s prioritised “locationality”, particularly the recognition of social and historical locations as valuable contribution to knowledge production. Pioneering figures such as Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar, and Donna Haraway have argued that the oppressed must have some means (such as language, cultural practices) to enter the world of the oppressor in order to access some understanding of how the world works from the privileged perspective. In the essay “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale”, the Australian social scientist Raewyn Connell explains that the production of feminist theory almost always comes from the global North. Connell critiques the hegemony of mainstream Northern feminism in her pyramidal model (59), showing how theory/knowledge is produced at the apex (global North) of a pyramid structure and “trickles down” (59) to the global South. Connell refers to a second model called mosaic epistemology which shows that multiple feminist ideologies across global North/South are juxtaposed against each other like tiles, with each specific culture making its own claims to validity.However, Nigerian feminist Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s reflection on the fluidity of culture in her essay “Fabricating Identities” (5) suggests that fixing knowledge as Northern and Southern—disparate, discrete, and rigidly structured tiles—is also problematic. Connell proposes a third model called solidarity-based epistemology which involves mutual learning and critiquing with a focus on solidarity across differences. However, this is impractical in implementation especially given that feminist nomenclature relies on problematic terms such as “international”, “global North/South”, “transnational”, and “planetary” to categorise difference, spatiality, and temporality, often creating more distance than reciprocal exchange. Geographical specificity can be too limiting, but we also need to acknowledge that it is geographical locationality which becomes disadvantageous to overcome racial, cultural, and gender biases — and here are few examples.Nomenclatures: Global-North and Global South ParadigmThe global North/South terminology differentiating the two regions according to means of trade and relative wealth emerged from the Brandt Report’s delineation of the North as wealthy and South as impoverished in 1980s. Initially, these terms were a welcome repudiation of the hierarchical nomenclature of “developed” and “developing” nations. Nevertheless, the categories of North and South are problematic because of increased socio-economic heterogeneity causing erasure of local specificities without reflecting microscopic conflicts among feminists within the global North and the global South. Some feminist terms such as “Third World feminism” (Narayan), “global feminism” (Morgan), or “local feminisms” (Basu) aim to centre women's movements originating outside the West or in the postcolonial context, other labels attempt to making feminism more inclusive or reflective of cross-border linkages. These include “transnational feminism” (Grewal and Kaplan) and “feminism without borders” (Mohanty). In the 1980s, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality garnered attention in the US along with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which raised feminists’ awareness of educational, healthcare, and financial disparities among women and the experiences of marginalised people across the globe, leading to an interrogation of the aims and purposes of mainstream feminism. In general, global North feminism refers to white middle class feminist movements further expanded by concerns about civil rights and contemporary queer theory while global South feminism focusses on decolonisation, economic justice, and disarmament. However, the history of colonialism demonstrates that this paradigm is inadequate because the oppression and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and Queer activists have been avoided purposely in the homogenous models of women’s oppression depicted by white radical and liberal feminists. A poignant example is from Audre Lorde’s personal account:I wheeled my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, ‘oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!’ And your mother shushes you, but does not correct you, and so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. (Lorde)This exemplifies how the terminology global North/South is a problem because there are inequities within the North that are parallel to the division of power and resources between North and South. Additionally, Susan Friedman in Planetary Modernisms observes that although the terms “Global North” and “Global South” are “rhetorically spatial” they are “as geographically imprecise and ideologically weighted as East/West” because “Global North” signifies “modern global hegemony” and “Global South” signifies the “subaltern, … —a binary construction that continues to place the West at the controlling centre of the plot” (Friedman, 123).Focussing on research-activism debate among US feminists, Sondra Hale takes another tack, emphasising that feminism in the global South is more pragmatic than the theory-oriented feminist discourse of the North (Hale). Just as the research-scholarship binary implies myopic assumption that scholarship is a privileged activity, Hale’s observations reveal a reductive assumption in the global North and global South nomenclature that feminism at the margins is theoretically inadequate. In other words, recognising the “North” as the site of theoretical processing is a euphemism for Northern feminists’ intellectual supremacy and the inferiority of Southern feminist praxis. To wit, theories emanating from the South are often overlooked or rejected outright for not aligning with Eurocentric framings of knowledge production, thereby limiting the scope of feminist theories to those that originate in the North. For example, while discussing Indigenous women’s craft-autobiography, the standard feminist approach is to apply Susan Sontag’s theory of gender and photography to these artefacts even though it may not be applicable given the different cultural, social, and class contexts in which they are produced. Consequently, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi’s Islamic methodology (Mernissi), the discourse of land rights, gender equality, kinship, and rituals found in Bina Agarwal’s A Field of One’s Own, Marcia Langton’s “Grandmothers’ Law”, and the reflection on military intervention are missing from Northern feminist theoretical discussions. Moreover, “outsiders within” feminist scholars fit into Western feminist canonical requirements by publishing their works in leading Western journals or seeking higher degrees from Western institutions. In the process, Northern feminists’ intellectual hegemony is normalised and regularised. An example of the wealth of the materials outside of mainstream Western feminist theories may be found in the work of Girindrasekhar Bose, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society and author of the book Concept of Repression (1921). Bose developed the “vagina envy theory” long before the neo-Freudian psychiatrist Karen Horney proposed it, but it is largely unknown in the West. Bose’s article “The Genesis and Adjustment of the Oedipus Wish” discarded Freud’s theory of castration and explained how in the Indian cultural context, men can cherish an unconscious desire to bear a child and to be castrated, implicitly overturning Freud’s correlative theory of “penis envy.” Indeed, the case of India shows that the birth of theory can be traced back to as early as eighth century when study of verbal ornamentation and literary semantics based on the notion of dbvani or suggestion, and the aesthetic theory of rasa or "sentiment" is developed. If theory means systematic reasoning and conceptualising the structure of thought, methods, and epistemology, it exists in all cultures but unfortunately non-Western theory is largely invisible in classroom courses.In the recent book Queer Activism in India, Naisargi Dev shows that the theory is rooted in activism. Similarly, in her essay “Seed and Earth”, Leela Dube reveals how Eastern theories are distorted as they are Westernised. For instance, the “Purusha-Prakriti” concept in Hinduism where Purusha stands for pure consciousness and Prakriti stands for the entire phenomenal world is almost universally misinterpreted in terms of Western binary oppositions as masculine consciousness and feminine creative principle which has led to disastrous consequences including the legitimisation of male control over female sexuality. Dube argues how heteropatriarchy has twisted the Purusha-Prakriti philosophy to frame the reproductive metaphor of the male seed germinating in the female field for the advantage of patrilineal agrarian economies and to influence a homology between reproductive metaphors and cultural and institutional sexism (Dube 22-24). Attempting to reverse such distortions, ecofeminist Vandana Shiva rejects dualistic and exploitative “contemporary Western views of nature” (37) and employs the original Prakriti-Purusha cosmology to construct feminist vision and environmental ethics. Shiva argues that unlike Cartesian binaries where nature or Prakriti is inert and passive, in Hindu Philosophy, Purusha and Prakriti are inseparable and inviolable (Shiva 37-39). She refers to Kalika Purana where it is explained how rivers and mountains have a dual nature. “A river is a form of water, yet is has a distinct body … . We cannot know, when looking at a lifeless shell, that it contains a living being. Similarly, within the apparently inanimate rivers and mountains there dwells a hidden consciousness. Rivers and mountains take the forms they wish” (38).Scholars on the periphery who never migrated to the North find it difficult to achieve international audiences unless they colonise themselves, steeping their work in concepts and methods recognised by Western institutions and mimicking the style and format that western feminist journals follow. The best remedy for this would be to interpret border relations and economic flow between countries and across time through the prism of gender and race, an idea similar to what Sarah Radcliffe, Nina Laurie and Robert Andolina have called the “transnationalization of gender” (160).Migration between Global North and Global SouthReformulation of feminist epistemology might reasonably begin with a focus on migration and gender politics because international and interregional migration have played a crucial role in the production of feminist theories. While some white mainstream feminists acknowledge the long history of feminist imperialism, they need to be more assertive in centralising non-Western theories, scholarship, and institutions in order to resist economic inequalities and racist, patriarchal global hierarchies of military and organisational power. But these possibilities are stymied by migrants’ “de-skilling”, which maintains unequal power dynamics: when migrants move from the global South to global North, many end up in jobs for which they are overqualified because of their cultural, educational, racial, or religious alterity.In the face of a global trend of movement from South to North in search of a “better life”, visual artist Naiza Khan chose to return to Pakistan after spending her childhood in Lebanon before being trained at the University of Oxford. Living in Karachi over twenty years, Khan travels globally, researching, delivering lectures, and holding exhibitions on her art work. Auj Khan’s essay “Peripheries of Thought and Practise in Naiza Khan’s Work” argues: “Khan seems to be going through a perpetual diaspora within an ownership of her hybridity, without having really left any of her abodes. This agitated space of modern hybrid existence is a rich and ripe ground for resolution and understanding. This multiple consciousness is an edge for anyone in that space, which could be effectively made use of to establish new ground”. Naiza Khan’s works embrace loss or nostalgia and a sense of choice and autonomy within the context of unrestricted liminal geographical boundaries.Early work such as “Chastity Belt,” “Heavenly Ornaments”, “Dream”, and “The Skin She Wears” deal with the female body though Khan resists the “feminist artist” category, essentially because of limited Western associations and on account of her paradoxical, diasporic subjectivity: of “the self and the non-self, the doable and the undoable and the anxiety of possibility and choice” (Khan Webpage). Instead, Khan theorises “gender” as “personal sexuality”. The symbolic elements in her work such as corsets, skirts, and slips, though apparently Western, are purposely destabilised as she engages in re-constructing the cartography of the body in search of personal space. In “The Wardrobe”, Khan establishes a path for expressing women’s power that Western feminism barely acknowledges. Responding to the 2007 Islamabad Lal Masjid siege by militants, Khan reveals the power of the burqa to protect Muslim men by disguising their gender and sexuality; women escape the Orientalist gaze. For Khan, home is where her art is—beyond the global North and South dichotomy.In another example of de-centring Western feminist theory, the Indian-British sitar player Anoushka Shankar, who identifies as a radical pro-feminist, in her recent musical album “Land of Gold” produces what Chilla Bulbeck calls “braiding at the borderlands”. As a humanitarian response to the trauma of displacement and the plight of refugees, Shankar focusses on women giving birth during migration and the trauma of being unable to provide stability and security to their children. Grounded in maternal humility, Shankar’s album, composed by artists of diverse background as Akram Khan, singer Alev Lenz, and poet Pavana Reddy, attempts to dissolve boundaries in the midst of chaos—the dislocation, vulnerability and uncertainty experienced by migrants. The album is “a bit of this, and a bit of that” (borrowing Salman Rushdie’s definition of migration in Satanic Verses), both in terms of musical genre and cultural identities, which evokes emotion and subjective fluidity. An encouraging example of truly transnational feminist ethics, Shankar’s album reveals the chasm between global North and global South represented in the tension of a nascent friendship between a white, Western little girl and a migrant refugee child. Unlike mainstream feminism, where migration is often sympathetically feminised and exotified—or, to paraphrase bell hooks, difference is commodified (hooks 373) — Shankar’s album simultaneously exhibits regional, national, and transnational elements. The album inhabits multiple borderlands through musical genres, literature and politics, orality and text, and ethnographic and intercultural encounters. The message is: “the body is a continent / But may your heart always remain the sea" (Shankar). The human rights advocate and lawyer Randa Abdel-Fattah, in her autobiographical novel Does My Head Look Big in This?, depicts herself as “colourful adjectives” (such as “darkies”, “towel-heads”, or the “salami eaters”), painful identities imposed on her for being a Muslim woman of colour. These ultimately empower her to embrace her identity as a Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian Muslim writer (Abdel-Fattah 359). In the process, Abdel-Fattah reveals how mainstream feminism participates in her marginalisation: “You’re constantly made to feel as you’re commenting as a Muslim, and somehow your views are a little bit inferior or you’re somehow a little bit more brainwashed” (Abdel-Fattah, interviewed in 2015).With her parental roots in the global South (Egyptian mother and Palestinian father), Abdel-Fattah was born and brought up in the global North, Australia (although geographically located in global South, Australia is categorised as global North for being above the world average GDP per capita) where she embraced her faith and religious identity apparently because of Islamophobia:I refuse to be an apologist, to minimise this appalling state of affairs… While I'm sick to death, as a Muslim woman, of the hypocrisy and nonsensical fatwas, I confess that I'm also tired of white women who think the answer is flashing a bit of breast so that those "poor," "infantilised" Muslim women can be "rescued" by the "enlightened" West - as if freedom was the sole preserve of secular feminists. (Abdel-Fattah, "Ending Oppression")Abdel-Fattah’s residency in the global North while advocating for justice and equality for Muslim women in both the global North and South is a classic example of the mutual dependency between the feminists in global North and global South, and the need to recognise and resist neoliberal policies applied in by the North to the South. In her novel, sixteen-year-old Amal Mohamed chooses to become a “full-time” hijab wearer in an elite school in Melbourne just after the 9/11 tragedy, the Bali bombings which killed 88 Australians, and the threat by Algerian-born Abdel Nacer Benbrika, who planned to attack popular places in Sydney and Melbourne. In such turmoil, Amal’s decision to wear the hijab amounts to more than resistance to Islamophobia: it is a passionate search for the true meaning of Islam, an attempt to embrace her hybridity as an Australian Muslim girl and above all a step towards seeking spiritual self-fulfilment. As the novel depicts Amal’s challenging journey amidst discouraging and painful, humiliating experiences, the socially constructed “bloody confusing identity hyphens” collapse (5). What remains is the beautiful veil that stands for Amal’s multi-valence subjectivity. The different shades of her hijab reflect different moods and multiple “selves” which are variously tentative, rebellious, romantic, argumentative, spiritual, and ambitious: “I am experiencing a new identity, a new expression of who I am on the inside” (25).In Griffith Review, Randa-Abdel Fattah strongly criticises the book Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks, a Wall-Street Journal reporter who travelled from global North to the South to cover Muslim women in the Middle East. Recognising the liberal feminist’s desire to explore the Orient, Randa-Abdel calls the book an example of feminist Orientalism because of the author’s inability to understand the nuanced diversity in the Muslim world, Muslim women’s purposeful downplay of agency, and, most importantly, Brooks’s inevitable veil fetishism in her trip to Gaza and lack of interest in human rights violations of Palestinian women or their lack of access to education and health services. Though Brooks travelled from Australia to the Middle East, she failed to develop partnerships with the women she met and distanced herself from them. This underscores the veracity of Amal’s observation in Abdel Fattah’s novel: “It’s mainly the migrants in my life who have inspired me to understand what it means to be an Aussie” (340). It also suggests that the transnational feminist ethic lies not in the global North and global South paradigm but in the fluidity of migration between and among cultures rather than geographical boundaries and military borders. All this argues that across the imperial cartography of discrimination and oppression, women’s solidarity is only possible through intercultural and syncretistic negotiation that respects the individual and the community.ReferencesAbdel-Fattah, Randa. Does My Head Look Big in This? Sydney: Pan MacMillan Australia, 2005.———. “Ending Oppression in the Middle East: A Muslim Feminist Call to Arms.” ABC Religion and Ethics, 29 April 2013. <http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/04/29/3747543.htm>.———. “On ‘Nine Parts Of Desire’, by Geraldine Brooks.” Griffith Review. <https://griffithreview.com/on-nine-parts-of-desire-by-geraldine-brooks/>.Agarwal, Bina. A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1994.Amissah, Edith Kohrs. Aspects of Feminism and Gender in the Novels of Three West African Women Writers. Nairobi: Africa Resource Center, 1999.Andolina, Robert, Nina Laurie, and Sarah A. Radcliffe. Indigenous Development in the Andes: Culture, Power, and Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi. “Fabricating Identities: Survival and the Imagination in Jamaican Dancehall Culture.” Fashion Theory 10.3 (2006): 1–24.Basu, Amrita (ed.). Women's Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms. Philadelphia: Westview Press, 2010.Bulbeck, Chilla. Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women's Diversity in a Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Connell, Raewyn. “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale.” Feminist Theory 16.1 (2015): 49–66.———. “Rethinking Gender from the South.” Feminist Studies 40.3 (2014): 518-539.Daniel, Eniola. “I Work toward the Liberation of Women, But I’m Not Feminist, Says Buchi Emecheta.” The Guardian, 29 Jan. 2017. <https://guardian.ng/art/i-work-toward-the-liberation-of-women-but-im-not-feminist-says-buchi-emecheta/>.Devi, Mahasveta. "Draupadi." Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 381-402.Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.Hale, Sondra. “Transnational Gender Studies and the Migrating Concept of Gender in the Middle East and North Africa.” Cultural Dynamics 21.2 (2009): 133-52.hooks, bell. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.Langton, Marcia. “‘Grandmother’s Law’, Company Business and Succession in Changing Aboriginal Land Tenure System.” Traditional Aboriginal Society: A Reader. Ed. W.H. Edward. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Macmillan, 2003.Lazreg, Marnia. “Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria.” Feminist Studies 14.1 (Spring 1988): 81-107.Liew, Stephanie. “Subtle Racism Is More Problematic in Australia.” Interview. music.com.au 2015. <http://themusic.com.au/interviews/all/2015/03/06/randa-abdel-fattah/>.Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” Keynoted presented at National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Conn., 1981.Mernissi, Fatima. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland. New York: Basic Books, 1991.Moghadam, Valentine. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003.Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism. St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 2000.Morgan, Robin (ed.). Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology. New York: The Feminist Press, 1984.Narayan, Uma. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism, 1997.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Background: Historically, challenges faced by students with disabilities (SWDs) in accessing higher education institutions (HEIs) were attributed to limited public funding. The introduction of progressive funding models such as disability scholarships served to widen access to, and participation in, higher education for SWDs. However, recent years have seen these advances threatened by funding cuts and privatisation in higher education.Objectives: In this article, the funding mechanisms of selected developed and developing democratic countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India are described in order to gain an insight into how such mechanisms enhance access, equal participation, retention, success and equality of outcome for SWDs. The countries selected are often spoken about as exemplars of best practices in relation to widening access and opportunities for SWDs through government mandated funding mechanisms. Method: A critical literature review of the sample countries’ funding mechanisms governing SWDs in higher education and other relevant government documents; secondary academic literature on disability funding; online sources including University World News, University Affairs, newspaper articles, newsletters, literature from bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Disabled World and Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Data were analysed using a theoretically derived directed qualitative content analysis.Results: Barriers which place SWDs at a substantial educational disadvantage compared to their non-disabled peers include bureaucratisation of application processes, cuts in disability funding, means-test requirements, minimal scholarships for supporting part-time and distance learning for SWDs and inadequate financial support to meet the day-to-day costs that arise as a result of disability.Conclusion: Although the steady increase of SWDs accessing HEIs of the sampled countries have been attributed to supportive disability funding policies, notable is the fact that these students are still confronted by insurmountable disability funding-oriented barriers. Thus, we recommend the need for these HEIs to address these challenges as a matter of urgency if they are to respect the rights of SWDs as well as provide them with an enabling environment to succeed academically.

Teacher migration is a problem for developing countries as it impacts on delivery of quality education. The potential to earn higher incomes remains the most common factor driving teacher migration. This study seeks to investigate how the South African teacher salary structure compares with the equivalent salary structure in six prominent migrating countries whilst highlighting the economic appeal of South Africa from a Zimbabwean teacher perspective. Using a representative basket of commonly bought goods (including food, entertainment, fuel and utilities), a purchasing power parity (PPP) ratio is used to equalise the international price of buying that basket. Our study makes comparisons, using a PPP index, and allows the identification of real differences in salaries for our selected countries (South Africa, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Zimbabwe) for selected teaching categories. Even when controlling for differences in the cost of living, the incentive for a South African teacher to seek work overseas remains strong and increases with career experience. A worrying conclusion for South Africa concerned with keeping its experienced teachers is that as more human capital is gained by experience, the greater the incentive to emigrate.

Considering the weak role of public health insurance in South Korea, this study identified the impact of older consumers’ coping resources such as income and education, well-being (e. g., successful aging and quality of life), and psychological and economic aspects affecting potential stressors on their purchasing of private health insurance (PHI) based on proactive coping theory. From the sixth wave of the 2016 Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (KLoSA), a sample of 1,224 Korean older adults aged above 65 years was used; binary logistic regression was conducted to identify the association of PHI and purchase decision factors, first separately for two groups (lower/higher use of health care services), and then for the total group. The results showed that older adults with higher levels of well-being, especially with a higher successful aging index and coping resources such as income are more likely to purchase PHI in all three groups.