Letteratura scientifica selezionata sul tema "Young Men's Christian Associations of California"

The author is currently President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) of San Francisco , and also Vice-President of the World Society for Ekistics (WSE). Following his studies and receipt of his Bachelor of Arts with honors from Williams College, his Master of City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his Juris Doctor from the Harvard Law School, and his diploma in Ekistics from the Graduate School of Ekistics of the Athens Technological Organization in Athens, Greece, where he studied with C.A. Doxiadis under a fellowship from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, he practiced law with the firms of Steinhart & Falconer (Piper fìudnick) and Berkeley & Rhodes; as Deputy Secretary of the Business, Transportation and Housing Agency for the State of California, he coordinated the management and policy direction of the Department of Housing Community Development and the Department of Real Estate. He served on the Board of the California Housing Finance Agency, and also secured an extensive city planning background, having worked with Sedway/Cooke and Associates. Among his major responsibilities was directing a comprehensive study for the City and County of San Francisco incorporating economic and fiscal considerations, land use planning, transportation systems, and housing requirements for downtown San Francisco. Following this earlier period of his life, Mr Collins was Chairman and President of WDG Ventures, Inc. and Managing General Partner of WDG Ventures, Ltd which comprise the WDGV family of companies, all of which are engaged in the investment and development of commercial and residential real estate. He has also directed business development, corporate and equity finance and access to capital markets for the companies and affiliated partnerships.

ResumoEste estudo procurou compreender a organização do Curso Comercial e seu propósito no projeto de formação intelectual das Associações Cristãs de Moços Brasileiras, no período de 1893 a 1929. Associação criada em 1844 na Inglaterra, inseriu-se no Brasil em 1893, no Rio de Janeiro, através do missionário norte-americano Myron A. Clark. Essa pesquisa trabalhou com panfletos, cartilhas, revistas, relatórios, atas e estatutos da instituição. Foi possível perceber que a formação intelectual foi parte integrante do projeto acmista. A oferta de ações que proporcionariam tal formação, em especial o Curso Comercial, foi realizada pela ACM como o principal curso que poderia contribuir com a ascensão social dos seus associados, especialmente ancoradas em argumentos relativos à utilização do tempo ocioso com coisas úteis. As ACMs atuaram, dessa forma, como um lugar de preparação, formando o associado para o trabalho, para novos hábitos, comportamentos e sensibilidades de uma formação intelectual acmista.Palavras-Chave: história da educação; curso comercial; associação cristã de moços.The Commercial Course in intellectual formation offered by Young Men’s Christian Associations, in Brazil (1893-1929)AbstractThis study aims to understand the organization of the Commercial Course and its purpose in the project of intellectual formation of the Young Men’s Christian Associations Brazilian, from 1893 to 1929. Association created in 1844 in England, was inserted in Brazil in 1893, in Rio de Janeiro, by north American missionary Myron A. Clark. This research used periodicals, pamphlets, booklets, minutes and statutes of the institution. It was revealed that the intellectual formation was part of acmista project. The offering of shares that would provide such formation, in particular the Commercial Course was held by ACM as the main course that could contribute to the social advancement of its members, especially anchored in arguments relating to the use of idle time with useful things. The YMCAs acted thus as a place of preparation, forming the associate to work, to new habits, behaviors and sensitivities of a acmista intellectual formation. Keywords: history of education; commercial course; young men's christian association

During World War I, the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense served as an intermediary between the federal government and women's voluntary associations. This study of white middle- and upper-middle-class clubwomen in Los Angeles, California reveals ways in which local women pursued twin goals of aiding the war effort while pursuing their own, pre-existing agendas. Women in a wide variety of groups, including organizations associated with the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Young Women's Christian Association, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and the Red Cross, had different goals, but most women activists agreed on the need to promote women's suffrage and citizenship rights and to continue the maternalist reform programs begun in the Progressive Era. At the center of their war voluntarism was the conviction that women citizens must play a crucial role in protecting the family amidst the crisis of war.

“People live here, they die here so they must leave traces.” (Read 140) “Whatever colonialism was and is, it has made this place unsettling and unsettled.” (Gibson, Badland 2) Introduction What does it mean for [a] country to be haunted? In much theoretical work in film and Cultural Studies since the 1990s, the Australian continent, more often than not, bears traces of long suppressed traumas which inevitably resurface to haunt the present (Gelder and Jacobs; Gibson; Read; Collins and Davis). Felicity Collins and Therese Davis illuminate the ways Australian cinema acts as a public sphere, or “vernacular modernity,” for rethinking settler/indigenous relations. Their term “backtracking” serves as a mode of “collective mourning” in numerous films of the last decade which render unspoken colonial violence meaningful in contemporary Australia, and account for the “aftershocks” of the Mabo decision that overturned the founding fiction of terra nullius (7). Ray Lawrence’s 2006 film Jindabyne is another after-Mabo film in this sense; its focus on conflict within settler/indigenous relations in a small local town in the alpine region explores a traumatised ecology and drowned country. More than this, in our paper’s investigation of country and its attendant politics, Jindabyne country is the space of excessive haunting and resurfacing - engaging in the hard work of what Gibson (Transformations) has termed “historical backfill”, imaginative speculations “that make manifest an urge to account for the disconnected fragments” of country. Based on an adaptation by Beatrix Christian of the Raymond Carver story, So Much Water, So Close to Home, Jindabyne centres on the ethical dilemma produced when a group of fishermen find the floating, murdered body of a beautiful indigenous woman on a weekend trip, but decide to stay on and continue fishing. In Jindabyne, “'country' […] is made to do much discursive work” (Gorman-Murray). In this paper, we use the word as a metonym for the nation, where macro-political issues are played out and fought over. But we also use ‘country’ to signal the ‘wilderness’ alpine areas that appear in Jindabyne, where country is “a notion encompassing nature and human obligation that white Australia has learned slowly from indigenous Australia” (Gibson, Badland 178). This meaning enables a slippage between ‘land’ and ‘country’. Our discussion of country draws heavily on concepts from Ross Gibson’s theorisation of badlands. Gibson claims that originally, ‘badland’ was a term used by Europeans in North America when they came across “a tract of country that would not succumb to colonial ambition” (Badland 14). Using Collins and Davis’s “vernacular modernity” as a starting point, a film such as Jindabyne invites us to work through the productive possibilities of postcolonial haunting; to move from backtracking (going over old ground) to imaginative backfill (where holes and gaps in the ground are refilled in unconventional and creative returns to the past). Jindabyne (as place and filmic space) signifies “the special place that the Australian Alps occupy for so many Australians”, and the film engages in the discursive work of promoting “shared understanding” and the possibility of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal being “in country” (Baird, Egloff and Lebehan 35). We argue specifically that Jindabyne is a product of “aftermath culture” (Gibson Transformations); a culture living within the ongoing effects of the past, where various levels of filmic haunting make manifest multiple levels of habitation, in turn the product of numerous historical and physical aftermaths. Colonial history, environmental change, expanding wire towers and overflowing dams all lend meaning in the film to personal dilemmas, communal conflict and horrific recent crimes. The discovery of a murdered indigenous woman in water high in the mountains lays bare the fragility of a relocated community founded in the drowning of the town of old Jindabyne which created Lake Jindabyne. Beatrix Christian (in Trbic 61), the film’s writer, explains “everybody in the story is haunted by something. […] There is this group of haunted people, and then you have the serial killer who emerges in his season to create havoc.” “What’s in this compulsion to know the negative space?” asks Gibson (Badland 14). It’s the desire to better know and more deeply understand where we live. And haunting gives us cause to investigate further. Drowned, Murderous Country Jindabyne rewrites “the iconic wilderness of Australia’s High Country” (McHugh online) and replaces it with “a vast, historical crime scene” (Gibson, Badland 2). Along with nearby Adaminaby, the township of Old Jindabyne was drowned and its inhabitants relocated to the new town in the 1960s as part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. When Jindabyne was made in 2006 the scheme no longer represented an uncontested example of Western technological progress ‘taming’ the vast mountainous country. Early on in the film a teacher shows a short documentary about the town’s history in which Old Jindabyne locals lament the houses that will soon be sacrificed to the Snowy River’s torrents. These sentiments sit in opposition to Manning Clark’s grand vision of the scheme as “an inspiration to all who dream dreams about Australia” (McHugh online). With a 100,000-strong workforce, mostly migrated from war-ravaged Europe, the post-war Snowy project took 25 years and was completed in 1974. Such was this engineering feat that 121 workmen “died for the dream, of turning the rivers back through the mountains, to irrigate the dry inland” (McHugh online). Jindabyne re-presents this romantic narrative of progress as nothing less than an environmental crime. The high-tension wires scar the ‘pristine’ high country and the lake haunts every aspect of the characters’ interactions, hinting at the high country’s intractability that will “not succumb to colonial ambition” (Gibson, Badland 14). Describing his critical excavation of places haunted, out-of-balance or simply badlands, Gibson explains: Rummaging in Australia's aftermath cultures, I try to re-dress the disintegration in our story-systems, in our traditional knowledge caches, our landscapes and ecologies […] recuperate scenes and collections […] torn by landgrabbing, let's say, or by accidents, or exploitation that ignores rituals of preservation and restoration (Transformations). Tourism is now the predominant focus of Lake Jindabyne and the surrounding areas but in the film, as in history, the area does not “succumb to the temptations of pictorialism” (McFarlane 10), that is, it cannot be framed solely by the picture postcard qualities that resort towns often engender and promote. Jindabyne’s sense of menace signals the transformation of the landscape that has taken place – from ‘untouched’ to country town, and from drowned old town to the relocated, damned and electrified new one. Soon after the opening of the film, a moment of fishing offers a reminder that a town once existed beneath the waters of the eerily still Lake Jindabyne. Hooking a rusty old alarm clock out of the lake, Stuart explains to Tom, his suitably puzzled young son: underneath the water is the town where all the old men sit in rocking chairs and there’s houses and shops. […] There was a night […] I heard this noise — boing, boing, boing. And it was a bell coming from under the water. ‘Cause the old church is still down there and sometimes when the water’s really low, you can see the tip of the spire. Jindabyne’s lake thus functions as “a revelation of horrors past” (Gibson Badland 2). It’s not the first time this man-made lake is filmically positioned as a place where “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson, Badland 13). Cate Shortland’s Somersault (2004) also uses Lake Jindabyne and its surrounds to create a bleak and menacing ambience that heightens young Heidi’s sense of alienation (Simpson, ‘Reconfiguring rusticity’). In Somersault, the male-dominated Jindabyne is far from welcoming for the emotionally vulnerable out-of-towner, who is threatened by her friend’s father beside the Lake, then menaced again by boys she meets at a local pub. These scenes undermine the alpine region’s touristic image, inundated in the summer with tourists coming to fish and water ski, and likewise, with snow skiers in the winter. Even away from the Lake, there is no fleeing its spectre. “The high-tension wires marching down the hillside from the hydro-station” hum to such an extent that in one scene, “reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)”, a member of the fishing party is spooked (Ryan 52). This violence wrought upon the landscape contextualises the murder of the young indigenous woman, Susan, by Greg, an electrician who after murdering Susan, seems to hover in the background of several scenes of the film. Close to the opening of Jindabyne, through binoculars from his rocky ridge, Greg spots Susan’s lone car coursing along the plain; he chases her in his vehicle, and forces her to stop. Before (we are lead to assume) he drags her from the vehicle and murders her, he rants madly through her window, “It all comes down from the power station, the electricity!” That the murder/murderer is connected with the hydro-electric project is emphasised by the location scout in the film’s pre-production: We had one location in the scene where Greg dumps the body in some water and Ray [Lawrence] had his heart set on filming that next to some huge pipelines on a dam near Talbingo but Snowy Hydro didn’t […] like that negative content […] in association with their facility and […] said ‘no’ they wouldn’t let us do it.” (Jindabyne DVD extras) “Tales of murder and itinerancy in wild country are as old as the story of Cain in the killing fields of Eden” (Badlands 14). In Jindabyne we never really get to meet Greg but he is a familiar figure in Australian film and culture. Like many before him, he is the lone Road Warrior, a ubiquitous white male presence roaming the de-populated country where the road constantly produces acts of (accidental and intentional) violence (Simpson, ‘Antipodean Automobility’). And after a litany of murders in recent films such as Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) and Gone (Ringan Ledwidge, 2007) the “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson Transformations 13) in the isolating landscape. The murderer in Jindabyne, unlike those who have migrated here as adults (the Irish Stuart and his American wife, Claire), is autochthonous in a landscape familiar with a trauma that cannot remain hidden or submerged. Contested High Country The unsinkability of Susan’s body, now an ‘indigenous murdered body’, holds further metaphorical value for resurfacing as a necessary component of aftermath culture. Such movement is not always intelligible within non-indigenous relations to country, though the men’s initial response to the body frames its drifting in terms of ascension: they question whether they have “broken her journey by tying her up”. The film reconfigures terra nullius as the ultimate badland, one that can never truly suppress continuing forms of physical, spiritual, historical and cultural engagement with country, and the alpine areas of Jindabyne and the Snowy River in particular. Lennon (14) points to “the legacy of biased recording and analysis” that “constitutes a threat to the cultural significance of Aboriginal heritage in alpine areas” (15). This significance is central to the film, prompting Lawrence to state that “mountains in any country have a spiritual quality about them […] in Aboriginal culture the highest point in the landscape is the most significant and this is the highest point of our country” (in Cordaiy 40). So whilst the Jindabyne area is contested country, it is the surfacing, upward mobility and unsinkable quality of Aboriginal memory that Brewster argues “is unsettling the past in post-invasion Australia” (in Lambert, Balayi 7). As the agent of backfill, the indigenous body (Susan) unsettles Jindabyne country by offering both evidence of immediate violence and reigniting the memory of it, before the film can find even the smallest possibility of its characters being ‘in country’. Claire illustrates her understanding of this in a conversation with her young son, as she attempts to contact the dead girls’ family. “When a bad thing happens,” she says, “we all have to do a good thing, no matter how small, alright? Otherwise the bad things, they just pile up and up and up.” Her persistent yet clumsy enactment of the cross-cultural go-between illuminates the ways “the small town community move through the terms of recent debate: shame and denial, repressed grief and paternalism” (Ryan 53). It is the movement of backfill within the aftermath: The movement of a foreign non-Aboriginal woman into Aboriginal space intertextually re-animates the processes of ‘settlement’, resolution and environmental assimilation for its still ‘unsettled’ white protagonists. […] Claire attempts an apology to the woman’s family and the Aboriginal community – in an Australia before Kevin Rudd where official apologies for the travesties of Australian/colonial history had not been forthcoming […] her movement towards reconciliation here is reflective of the ‘moral failure’ of a disconnection from Aboriginal history. (Lambert, Diasporas) The shift from dead white girl in Carver’s story to young Aboriginal woman speaks of a political focus on the ‘significance’ of the alpine region at a given moment in time. The corpse functions “as the trigger for crisis and panic in an Australia after native title, the stolen generation and the war-on-terror” (Lambert, Diasporas). The process of reconnecting with country and history must confront its ghosts if the community is to move forward. Gibson (Transformations) argues that “if we continue to close our imaginations to the aberrations and insufficiencies in our historical records. […] It’s likely we won’t dwell in the joy till we get real about the darkness.” In the post-colonial, multicultural but still divided geographies and cultures of Jindabyne, “genocidal displacement” comes face to face with the “irreconciled relation” to land “that refuses to remain half-seen […] a measure of non-indigenous failure to move from being on the land to being in country” (Ryan 52), evidenced by water harvesting in the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and the more recent crises in water and land management. Aftermath Country Haunted by historical, cultural and environmental change, Jindabyne constitutes a post-traumatic screen space. In aftermath culture, bodies and landscapes offer the “traces” (Gibson, Transformations) of “the social consequences” of a “heritage of catastrophe” that people “suffer, witness, or even perpetrate” so that “the legacy of trauma is bequeathed” (Walker i). The youth of Jindabyne are charged with traumatic heritage. The young Susan’s body predictably bears the semiotic weight of colonial atrocity and non-indigenous environmental development. Evidence of witnesses, perpetrators and sufferers is still being revealed after the corpse is taken to the town morgue, where Claire (in a culturally improper viewing) is horrified by Susan’s marks from being secured in the water by Stuart and the other men. Other young characters are likewise haunted by a past that is environmental and tragically personal. Claire and Stuart’s young son, Tom (left by his mother for a period in early infancy and the witness of his parents strained marital relations), has an intense fear of drowning. This personal/historical fear is played with by his seven year old friend, Caylin-Calandria, who expresses her own grief from the death of her young mother environmentally - by escaping into the surrounding nature at night, by dabbling in the dark arts and sacrificing small animals. The two characters “have a lot to believe in and a lot of things to express – belief in zombies and ghosts, ritual death, drowning” (Cordaiy 42). As Boris Trbic (64) observes of the film’s characters, “communal and familial harmony is closely related to their intense perceptions of the natural world and their often distorted understanding of the ways their partners, friends and children cope with the grieving process.” Hence the legacy of trauma in Jindabyne is not limited to the young but pervades a community that must deal with unresolved ecologies no longer concealed by watery artifice. Backfilling works through unsettled aspects of country by moving, however unsteadily, toward healing and reconciliation. Within the aftermath of colonialism, 9/11 and the final years of the Howard era, Jindabyne uses race and place to foreground the “fallout” of an indigenous “condemnation to invisibility” and the “long years of neglect by the state” (Ryan 52). Claire’s unrelenting need to apologise to the indigenous family and Stuart’s final admission of impropriety are key gestures in the film’s “microcosm of reconciliation” (53), when “the notion of reconciliation, if it had occupied any substantial space in the public imagination, was largely gone” (Rundell 44). Likewise, the invisibility of Aboriginal significance has specificity in the Jindabyne area – indigeneity is absent from narratives recounting the Snowy Mountains Scheme which “recruited some 60,000 Europeans,” providing “a basis for Australia’s postwar multicultural society” (Lennon 15); both ‘schemes’ evidencing some of the “unrecognised implications” of colonialism for indigenous people (Curthoys 36). The fading of Aboriginal issues from public view and political discourse in the Howard era was serviced by the then governmental focus on “practical reconciliation” (Rundell 44), and post 9/11 by “the broad brushstrokes of western coalition and domestic political compliance” (Lambert, CMC 252), with its renewed focus on border control, and increased suspicion of non-Western, non-Anglo-European difference. Aftermath culture grapples with the country’s complicated multicultural and globalised self-understanding in and beyond Howard’s Australia and Jindabyne is one of a series of texts, along with “refugee plays” and Australian 9/11 novels, “that mobilised themselves against the Howard government” (Rundell 43-44). Although the film may well be seen as a “profoundly embarrassing” display of left-liberal “emotional politics” (44-45), it is precisely these politics that foreground aftermath: local neglect and invisibility, terror without and within, suspect American leadership and shaky Australian-American relations, the return of history through marked bodies and landscapes. Aftermath country is simultaneously local and global – both the disappearance and the ‘problem’ of Aboriginality post-Mabo and post-9/11 are backfilled by the traces and fragments of a hidden country that rises to the surface. Conclusion What can be made of this place now? What can we know about its piecemeal ecology, its choppy geomorphics and scarified townscapes? […] What can we make of the documents that have been generated in response to this country? (Gibson, Transformations). Amidst the apologies and potentialities of settler-indigenous recognition, the murdering electrician Gregory is left to roam the haunted alpine wilderness in Jindabyne. His allegorical presence in the landscape means there is work to be done before this badland can truly become something more. Gibson (Badland 178) suggests country gets “called bad […] partly because the law needs the outlaw for reassuring citizens that the unruly and the unknown can be named and contained even if they cannot be annihilated.” In Jindabyne the movement from backtracking to backfilling (as a speculative and fragmental approach to the bodies and landscapes of aftermath culture) undermines the institutional framing of country that still seeks to conceal shared historical, environmental and global trauma. The haunting of Jindabyne country undoes the ‘official’ production of outlaw/negative space and its discursively good double by realising the complexity of resurfacing – electricity is everywhere and the land is “uncanny” not in the least because “the town of Jindabyne itself is the living double of the drowned original” (Ryan 53). The imaginative backfill of Jindabyne reorients a confused, purgatorial Australia toward the “small light of home” (53) – the hope of one day being “in country,” and as Gibson (Badland 3) suggests, the “remembering,” that is “something good we can do in response to the bad in our lands.” References Baird, Warwick, Brian Egloff and Rachel Lenehan. “Sharing the mountains: joint management of Australia’s alpine region with Aboriginal people.” historic environment 17.2 (2003): 32-36. Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema after Mabo. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Cordaiy, Hunter. “Man, Woman and Death: Ray Lawrence on Jindabyne.” Metro 149 (2006): 38-42. Curthoys, Anne. “An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous.” Race Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. Ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer. Sydney, UNSW P, 2000. 21-36. Gelder, Ken and Jane M. Jacobs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness an Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1998. Gibson, Ross. Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. Gibson, Ross. “Places, Past, Disappearance.” Transformations 13 (2006). Aug. 11 2008 transformations.cqu.edu.au/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Country.” M/C Journal 11.5 (this issue). Kitson, Michael. “Carver Country: Adapting Raymond Carver in Australia.” Metro150 (2006): 54-60. Lambert, Anthony. “Movement within a Filmic terra nullius: Woman, Land and Identity in Australian Cinema.” Balayi, Culture, Law and Colonialism 1.2 (2001): 7-17. Lambert, Anthony. “White Aborigines: Women, Mimicry, Mobility and Space.” Diasporas of Australian Cinema. Eds. Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, and Anthony Lambert. UK: Intellectbooks, 2009. Forthcoming. Lambert, Anthony. “Mediating Crime, Mediating Culture.” Crime, Media, Culture 4.2 (2008): 237-255. Lennon, Jane. “The cultural significance of Australian alpine areas.” Historic environment 17.2 (2003): 14-17. McFarlane, Brian. “Locations and Relocations: Jindabyne & MacBeth.” Metro Magazine 150 (Spring 2006): 10-15. McHugh, Siobhan. The Snowy: The People Behind the Power. William Heinemann Australia, 1999. http://www.mchugh.org/books/snowy.html. Read, Peter. Haunted Earth. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Rundle, Guy. “Goodbye to all that: The end of Australian left-liberalism and the revival of a radical politics.” Arena Magazine 88 (2007): 40-46. Ryan, Matthew. “On the treatment of non-indigenous belonging.” Arena Magazine 84 (2006): 52-53. Simpson, Catherine. “Reconfiguring Rusticity: feminizing Australian Cinema’s country towns’. Studies in Australasian Cinemas 2.1 (2008): forthcoming. Simpson, Catherine. “Antipodean Automobility & Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road.” Australian Humanities Review 39-40 (2006). http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2006/simpson.html. Trbic, Boris. “Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne: So Much Pain, So Close to Home.” Screen Education 44 (2006): 58–64. Walker, Janet. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 2005.

Doing research is always risky, personally, emotionally, ideologically, and politically, just because we never know for sure just what results our work will have. (Becker 253) Howard Becker accurately captures the various problematic dimensions that researchers encounter. Numerous personal, emotional, ideological and political dimensions impact research projects in sometimes unpredictable ways. In this paper, I examine some of the many impacts that researchers can have on their own projects. In much of the literature on qualitative research that examines interviews, focus groups and similar methodologies, scholars identify that a variety of factors influence the interactions between researchers and their projects. The academic debates regarding the insider/outsider positions of research are significant here. I will draw attention to the complexity of the researcher/researched relationship and argue that, in light of complexity, researchers can find themselves in predicaments where they are just as much part of the research data as their participants. Ultimately, I aim to contribute to an existing rich literature that deals with these issues concerning the relationship between the researcher and the researched. In this paper, I discuss my own experiences researching the Camden controversy and conclude with a number of suggestions for researchers to consider in similar predicaments. It is from these experiences that I aim to highlight the impact researchers have on their data and the complex relationships between researchers and "the researched". Further, it is through my experiences and observations that I address the theme of "impact" of research in the wider community. Insider/Outsider Debates Scholars often debate how researchers impact their projects. In the past 30 years, academics have focused on how researchers interact as "insiders" or "outsiders" (Naples 84; Coloma 15; Smith 137). Ultimately, these debates focus on the positionalities of researchers, and how these positions impact projects. A number of thought-provoking questions surface in these debates, regarding the distance/closeness between the researcher and participant/s. Scholars interested in this relationship often ponder if this distance/closeness affects the richness and quality of the data. Commonly, issues regarding the researcher's gender, "race" and class are topical in these discourses. Young points out that an assumption grew from these debates, which concludes that researchers who do not share these categories with their participants work find it more difficult to gain their participant's trust (187). From this perspective, women interviewing men hold outsider positions as women, "non-whites" interviewing "whites" hold outsider positions as "non-whites", and so on. Such a view leads to a rigid dichotomisation of the insider vs. outsider binary, which scholars have recently challenged (190). Academics now argue that researchers experience insider/outsider placements and various signifiers mark insiders/outsiders (Young 191; Sin 479) beyond the "race"/sex/class categories. These include sexuality, "race", education, gender, ethnicity, language and class (Coloma 14) to name the most common. Further, these markers are dependent upon the socio-political context of the time of research (Naples 83); thus researchers hold fluid insider/outsider positions. As the next generation of cultural researchers, I argue that we should acknowledge the increasingly complicated positions, influences, and relationships that manifest themselves in the stories of the researchers and the researched. We are never truly outsiders, yet never wholly insiders either; however, we are always partial in examining our research results (see Clifford 7). Yet the various insider/outsider positions generate a number of challenges for researchers. I unpack some of these positions and challenges in discussing a recent project I researched called the Camden controversy. The Camden Controversy In 2007-2009, a controversy over a proposed Islamic school took place in Camden, an area located on the greater Sydney fringe. In October 2007, an Islamic charity proposed a Muslim school in the area and within weeks, a local rally against the school took place involving thousands of local residents. A second anti-school rally occurred months later, where some local residents sported the Australian flag, publicly vilified Muslims claiming the school threatened the "nation". A local anti-school group was formed and two white supremacist groups supported locals against the school. Several extreme-right politicians also campaigned against the school which included former One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, and leader of the Christian Democrats, Fred Nile. Additionally, two pigs heads with an Australian flag and a wooden crucifix were placed on the proposed site. In the end, the Camden Council rejected the application and the Land and Environment Court rejected the Quranic Society's appeal (for more information, see Al-Natour 573-85). I began researching this controversy in 2008, watching the above events unfold. One of my research methods included interviews with local residents. As a non-local, male researcher of Arab descent (specifically, Palestinian Greek Orthodox Christian and a culturally Islamic background), some interviews were challenging. In some cases, interviewees talked of the controversy as though they responded directly to my "Arabness". In other cases, interviewees positioned me as an outsider to the area. At other times, interviewees sub-typed me from "other Muslims" and I was granted some form of insider status. In various complicated ways, my experiences reflect how researchers become the "researched". To articulate these experiences, I discuss my interactions with only two participants (due to article length restrictions) with very different positions on the school. Case Study 1: Grace Grace is a 38 year old Catholic woman of mixed European heritage who is working in a clothing store in Camden. The interview took place with two of her co-workers in the room. Grace is opposed to the idea of a school in Camden. At the beginning, Grace was understandably suspicious about talking to a stranger about the controversy. Grace: So if there is anything I don't wanna answer, I'll just say 'no comment'.[Researcher]: That's ok, that's fine.Grace: So are you a Muslim? Is that why you're doing ya project here?[Researcher]: I'm not Muslim. No.Grace: (puzzled) are you sure?[Researcher]: Umm. I am an Arab though, but not Muslim. If that's what you're asking?Grace: Oh. Well, I can be an Arab too. See! [grabs a pair of men's underwear from a nearby clothing rack and places the underwear on her head] See! Gee wiz, I am one of those Arab ladies! (Interview, 17 July 2009) While her co-workers laughed in the background, Grace began to speak in a gibberish tongue, perhaps imitating "Arabic" (perhaps the men's underwear is supposed to mock a woman's headscarf). This incident may have been a performance for her co-workers, and may not have occurred if the interview did not have an audience. In this situation, Grace's audience and the interviewer influence her "underwear performance". Perhaps there was a look of shock on my face, as Grace then began to explain that she was doing me a favour by participating in the interview and claimed that an Arab would not have agreed because Arabs "are very rude". Again, Grace discusses Arabs perhaps realising her actions were not appropriate at the time. Conceptually, this incident highlights how the interviewee responds to the researcher's ethnicity and her "joke". In the presence of Grace and her co-workers, the performance highlights their "insider" statuses. The vilifying "Arab" clothing and languages were almost like a bonding performance, something that came up as a result of Grace's interaction with an Arab researcher. The interview is a place where Grace negotiates her position on the school and a variety of other issues that she relates to the researcher. She talked about headscarves worn by Muslim women: I don't know why they wear it as they stand out, there's lots of people that wear long skirts, that's fine, but you ["Muslims"] should mingle. I feel comfortable with you [the researcher], because you are not a covering-up-Muslim, but if you're wearing a head thing, I think that I would be uncomfortable, I mean I would think you had a machine gun [laughs]. The fluidity of the researcher's insider/outsider statuses becomes defined as Grace thinks about the school and Muslims. In the case of hijab, Grace uses the "Muslim" researcher to portray Islamic headscarves as outsider items. In the interview, we talked of Catholic nuns and Grace commented that nuns rarely wear headgear anymore. She agrees with modesty, yet defines her position on hijab by expressing her feelings of the researcher. The interview is a place where Grace considers her positions on Muslims, and the researcher in this case influences Grace as she communicates her viewpoints in light of her interviewer. Case Study 2: Andrew Andrew is a 43 year old resident of Anglo-Maltese heritage. He works in the Camden area and supported the proposal for an Islamic school—which would have been only 5 minutes drive from his workplace: [Researcher]: I can see it's [Camden is] different from other areas. It's like a country town.Andrew: I wouldn't say it's a country town anymore. It's not Orange Parks or Bathurst [rural areas]. It's on the outskirts, beginning of the rural area. I have lived here for 8 years. (Interview, 5 Oct. 2009) The differences of opinion on Camden here illustrate broad positions of the insider/outsider researcher (myself). Here, the researcher states their observations of the area as an outsider to Camden. Andrew responds to the researcher and positions himself with a sense of authority as a local. In terms of the contents of the interview, it is obvious that the researcher's dialogue influences the shape of the data. In other parts of the interview, Andrew found common insider ground with the researcher: France has got the highest population of Muslims, I dunno what the statistics are here, but France holds the most Muslim immigrants, they let them in to mix. I mean, look at you, you have mixed in, you even got your ear pierced! Kids mix in, what about the footballer, El-Masri, but look at him, he has mixed in! Everyone loves him! Here, the researcher has insider status when Andrew discusses how Muslims "mix in". Also, the researcher becomes part of the project, as the interview uses the interviewer's items (ear piercing) and a Lebanese-Australian retired footballer (Hazem El-Masri) as evidence of Islamic integration into Australian society. Here, the researcher's appearance specifically impacts the research, unlike the previous instance which focuses on dialogue between the researcher and researched. Given that the literature on qualitative methodologies focuses on the impact of the researcher's "race", ethnicity and so on, it is obvious that these factors relate to the interview itself. As my quote from Becker at the beginning highlights, research results are unpredictable, often to the point where researchers have unforeseen experiences with their participants. Conceptually, we need to think about impact as a complicated process when we reflect upon our projects and make sense of the researcher/researched relationships. Dealing with "Impact" Issues In both insider/outsider positions, the interviews with Grace and Andrew epitomise some instances that show how researchers cannot be separated from their data. Though both participants held different positions on the school, both demonstrated the complicated impact that researchers have on their projects. Further, they challenge the conventional views of qualitative methodology, which see research as a one way process where researchers interview participants and merely (and "objectively") obtain data. In light of the contemporary academic debates regarding the positionality of the researcher, I suggest that the complexities facing researchers destroy the strictly "insider" vs. "outsider" understandings of qualitative research. Though I reach this point by specifically focusing on interviews as research methodologies, I will also point out that even beyond the context of an interview, merely finding research participants and documenting field notes can be challenging. In my case, my Arab identity influenced the ways some residents responded when I asked them whether they would participate in an interview about the school. In some field notes, I documented some of these hostile instances when I approached people in public places and requested their participation in my project: Anonymous Male Resident 1: Look, I don't wanna do the interview, it's not that I am racist, I just can't stand the rag heads, they aren't normal!... in fact if it were up to me, I would probably exterminate them all (laughs). (Field notes, 9 Oct. 2009)Anonymous Male Resident 2: I saw your people on TV last night... the ones that sound like turkeys, Gobble Gobble. (Field notes, 31 July 2009) In these circumstances, prospective-participants frame the researcher as an outsider. Their refusals to participate show us how residents feel towards a researcher, and how these "feelings" impact upon their project. In my case, this meant it was difficult to find some participants, making the researcher's accessibility to interview participants and the obtaining of data a result of their insider/outsider statuses. In researching "race", Duneier suggests that the researcher should hold a "humble commitment" to be open in the field and be aware of their own social position (100). Becker asks how a researcher should react to the challenges of racism. It becomes a practice of balancing two binary opposing ideals: one rejects racist views, and the other which seeks to understand a particular expression/view of racism, which ultimately benefits knowledge. Thus, the researcher is faced with remembering the purpose of the research project—the pursuit of knowledge, not the debates with participants (Becker 247-49). Similarly, Ezzy argues the task of qualitative researchers is "not to attempt to solve political and moral issues, nor to avoid them, but to be aware of and engage with the potential political and moral implications of their writings" (157). In dealing with the various challenges of the project, I had to transform into the "researcher". My role was not to accuse participants of being "racists", rather to map out how certain views, which could be categorised as "racist", made up the qualitative research experience and would impact the fieldwork journey. As a researcher, my job was to investigate the Islamic school controversy in Camden. It was as though I needed to temporarily disregard (not compromise) other parts of my identities and focus on extracting information. It was an opportunity to pinpoint how particulars of my identity—gender, ethnicity, religion, skin colour, appearance, age, and so on, impacted upon the data collection process and the content. Conclusion: Way Forward? Throughout this article, I have argued that the complicated researcher/researched relationships result in the researchers becoming part of the research itself. Given how challenging this process is for researchers, I finish this article by suggesting some thought-provoking strategies and ideas for the next generation of cultural researchers. Given that all research projects vary, the researcher's impact processes also vary. It is also worth pointing out that in some circumstances, the "outsider" researcher can work for the project, where participants might feel the need to explain and elaborate on particular topics they feel the researcher does not know much about. Thus, attributing "positive" or "negative" feelings on the "insider" or "outsider" researcher is, at times, flawed and pointless. Whether the researcher is predominantly positioned as the insider, or the outsider, or remarkably changes between the two consistently, I would suggest a number of issues to help handle the impact of such predicaments on the research project in a way that can benefit the generation of knowledge. These issues include debriefing, strengthening, positioning, limiting and self-challenging topics. These suggestions would vary from one project to another, operating as a guide that should not be "set in stone". While it is difficult at times to determine how the researcher may impact the research data, it is important for researchers to be conscious of mapping out these challenges on their fieldwork journeys. Debrief with fellow scholars: Confidential discussions with supervisors, fellow researchers and other academics are processes that can enable researchers to make sense of these challenging predicaments (as long as the researcher is mindful of the ethical details involved). Debriefing can help release any emotional baggage or frustrations attained by these experiences. Sharing opinions on these instances can be helpful, particularly in identifying any overbearing biases of the researcher in making sense of their data. Furthermore, in circumstances where the researcher is working alone on a project, debriefing can remove a sense of isolation that can be accumulated by a lonely fieldwork project (particularly in the case of a doctoral project!). View the project as an exercise in building your research skills: Any research project, no matter how challenging or demanding is an opportunity to make sense of the world around us. Fieldwork also provides a chance to build character and strengthen the researcher's skills. Being in control of certain behaviours as researchers can be seen as a strength. This is not to say that the researcher compromises their values for the sake of research. Rather, the researcher has a particular role which needs to be seen in a professional light. Be wary of your own expectations and biases: This relates to the previous topic on character building and strengthening the researcher. As Becker argues (as quoted at the beginning), we cannot predict our research results. Researchers should not walk into their fields attempting to manipulate or predict their research results. The project itself could be extremely challenging where the researcher might expect to be "insider"/"outsider" in unexpected situations. Research results may not always be as hypothesised or generally expected. Therefore, researchers should be prepared to be challenged in terms of their own understandings of racism, sexism and other issues (again, depending on the project). Also, Rosaldo points out, "social analysts can rarely, if ever, become detached observers" (Rosaldo 169). Given that scholars challenge the idea of an "objective" researcher, it is best to acknowledge any forms of biases and how they influence the process of collecting and analysing data. Identify the complicated positionality of the researcher: The complicated insider/outsider positions of the researcher need to be acknowledged when examining the data. The researcher needs to be mindful of how they are approached by participants. Furthermore, the researcher should keep in mind that such positions are not fixed but are changing constantly, sometimes instantly and other times gradually. These different positions need to be seen as interrelated. Also, the researcher should remember there are different levels of being the insider and outsider, and both these positions can work for and against the process of collecting data. Map out the limitations of the project: The research field (which does not necessarily refer to an actual physical environment), in some circumstances, can be volatile and dangerous for some researchers. In the case of my own project, an Arab female researcher would have different experiences, some of which could include violence (according to the Isma report conducted by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, Arab women are more likely to experience racially-motivated violence than Arab men—see HREOC). I would advise that researchers are mindful of their "fields". Further, I recommend that research is conducted in public places, particularly if they are about contentious issues. Do not give personal details and if a particular topic inflames the participant during the interview to the point where you feel threatened, change the topic to something a lot less "inflammatory". Notes The names of these participants in this article are pseudonyms. Also, their positions on the school do not represent opponents/supporters of the school. Nor do they represent the Camden community. Further, my experiences interviewing these participants are not reflective of all the interviews I conducted in Camden. References Al-Natour, Ryan J. "Folk Devils and the Proposed Islamic School in Camden." Continuum 24.4 (2010): 573-85. Becker, Howard. "Afterword: Racism and the Research Process." Racing Research, Researching Race: Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies. Eds. F.W.Twine and J.W. Warren. New York: New York UP, 2000. 247-54. Clifford, James. "Introduction." Writing Culture. Eds. J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus. California: U of California P, 1986.1-26. Coloma, Roland Sintos. "Border Crossing Subjectivities and Research: Through the Prism of Feminists of Color." Race, Ethnicity and Education 11.1 (2008):11-27. Duneier, Mitchell. "Three Rules I Go By in My Ethnographic Research on Race and Racism." Researching Race and Racism. Eds. M. Bulmer and J. Solomos. London: Routledge, 2004. 92-103. Ezzy, Douglas. Qualitative Analysis: Practice and Innovation. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2002. Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC). Isma – Listen: National Consultations on Eliminating Prejudice against Arab and Muslim Australians. 2004. 9 Nov. 2011 ‹http://www.hreoc.gov.au/racial_discrimination/isma/report/pdf/ISMA_complete.pdf›. Naples, Nancy. "A Feminist Revisiting of the Insider/Outsider Debate: The 'Outsider Phenomenon' in Rural Iowa." Qualitative Sociology 19.1 (1996): 83-106. Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon P. 1993. Sin, Chih Hoong. "Ethnic-Matching in Qualitative Research: Reversing the Gaze on 'White Others' and 'White' as 'Other'." Qualitative Research 7.4 (2007): 477-99. Smith, Linda T. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: U of Otago P, 1999. Young, Alford. "Experiences in Ethnographic Interviewing about Race." Researching Race and Racism. Eds. M. Bulmer and J. Solomos. London: Routledge, 2004. 187-202.

The basis for the thesis research was the examination of the extent to which YMCAs in the United States incorporate public relations skills and corporate mission statements into the training of their employees.A mail survey was sent to the total population of 913 corporate YMCAs which represent all 2,170 locations in the United States. The first of two mailings was sent on July 5, 1984. A total of 530 responses were received from forty-nine states representing 58 percent of the total population. Of the returned surveys, 514 were usable in all aspects of the study, or 56.2 percent of the total population.The findings show the typical YMCA is served by a male director with eighteen years of YMCA work experience who has been in his current position just less than ten years. He oversees the management of a YMCA serving an average of 6,700 individual members.Public relations duties are performed by an average of 2.5 persons in the responding YMCAs including the executive director himself. The training and preparation for handling these responsibilities most often comes in "learn-by-doing" situations. Workshops enhance on-the-job training in most cases. Fewer than 20 percent of the professional directors performing public relations functions have had university or college coursework in public relations.Approximately 70 percent of the responding YMCAs have made a specific attempt to determine how their organization is perceived by the community. Two-thirds of the associations which have attempted to measure community perception stated they used formal research methods to do so. Only 32 percent of the YMCAs responding have prepared a written statement of their mission with 28 percent having a formal action plan for achieving their goals and objectives.Just less than 60 percent of the 514 respondents budget public relations items as a planned expense at an average of 3 percent of the total operating budget.Three of the conclusions drawn from this research are:1. The lack of formal training of employees performing public relations functions, in the YMCAs responding, suggests some disparity between job preparation and the generally accepted guidelines for training public relations practitioners.2. The marked increase in the number of YMCAs which have formulated written mission statements and action plans since 1980 is one indication of an increased awareness of the need to operate these nonprofit organizations under traditional management principles.3. Not only must more YMCAs develop and implement formal action plans, but more employees at all job levels must be informed of these plans if their YMCA is to experience the degree of membership growth and the improved community image possible through a total organizational effort.

This research provides insights into three aspects of social capital: the factors that influence its variability; its two-dimensional nature; and the relationship between social capital and membership in a YMCA. These insights have implications for social capital theory, for public policy, for organizational management and for individual well-being. Most social capital research treats the construct as a causal variable and analyzes the implications of different levels of social capital for certain aspects of individual and community well-being. This treatment implies that levels of social capital vary. Little research has been done to analyze the factors that cause social capital variability and therefore the understanding of social capital variability lacks insight. Before social capital variability can be explored, an intermediate issue must be addressed. Social capital is usually conceived of as a single-dimension construct. In fact social capital has two dimensions: the attitudes of social capital and the behaviors of social capital. Unidimensionality is sufficient when social capital is used exogenously but it is insufficiently nuanced when used for the purpose of recommending policies to increase it. This research analyzes the two-dimensional nature of social capital. Finally, a number of social capital behaviors have been studied but membership in the YMCA is not one of them. This research examines the relationship, ceteris paribus, between membership in the Central Florida YMCA and individual social capital. A survey questionnaire was mailed to 10,000 YMCA members in Central Florida and 21,000 residents who were demographically similar. There were 1,881 completed responses. The results were analyzed using structural equation modeling and were guided by social capital theory and the theory of reasoned action. iv The results of the study indicate that the two most influential factors of social capital variability are personal educational attainment and the average educational attainment of the community. The study also confirms that social capital is a two-dimensional construct and the two dimensions are iterative. The study results also revealed that members of the Central Florida YMCA had higher levels of social capital ceteris paribus. This study is significant in four areas: social capital theory, public policy, management of social capital-generating organizations and for individuals. At the theoretical level, insight has been gained into both the causes of social capital variability and the two-dimensional nature of social capital. Regarding public policy, this research provides clear evidence that education provides a greater role in building a community than simply creating human capital; it also creates social capital. Both educational institutions and those organizations that create social capital should be supported. Furthermore, social capital promulgation through public policy should target both dimensions of social capital to be most effective. For managers of social capital-generating organizations social capital can be used as a metric for measuring organizational effectiveness and community impact. For individuals, there is now an evidence-based approach for developing a life plan for creating personal social capital. This research is unique because it simultaneously brings insights into four distinct spheres of social capital.
ID: 030646214; System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader.; Mode of access: World Wide Web.; Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2011.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-125).
Ph.D.
Doctorate
Health and Public Affairs
Public Affairs

During the 1890s in the United States, Midwestern YMCA missionaries challenged the nexus of power between Northeastern Protestant denominations, industrialists, politicians, and the Association's International Committee. Under Kansas YMCA secretary George Fisher, this movement shook the Northeastern alliance's underpinnings, eventually establishing the Gospel Missionary Union. The YMCA and the GMU mutually defined foreign and domestic missionary work discursively. Whereas Fisher's pre-millennial movement promoted world conversion generally, the YMCA primarily reached out to college students in the United States and abroad. Moreover, the GMU challenged social and gender roles among Moroccan Berbers. Fisher's movements have not been historically analyzed since 1975. Missionary Millennium is a reanalysis and critical reading of religious fictions about GMU missionaries, following the organization to its current incarnation as Avant Ministries.

Dans cette thèse nous étudions, d’abord, le développement du Mouvement « universel » de la « jeunesse chrétienne » en tant que réseau transnational dans l’espace occidental au cours de la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle. Nous y analysons ensuite l’interaction entre les agents de la branche américaine du Mouvement, la YMCA, et les représentants des élites politiques, économiques, religieuses et intellectuelles russes en Russie depuis la fin des années 1890, en Europe avec les émigrés russes dans l’entre-deux-guerres, ainsi que les tentatives faites par les agents de l’Association américaine pour se fixer en URSS dans les années 1920.Le Mouvement chrétien des jeunes était conçu comme un espace mondial dépassant les frontières nationales. Cette forme d’internationalisme avait pour ambition de surmonter les nombreuses barrières qui divisaient l’humanité en factions nationales, politiques, économiques, sociales, religieuses ou raciales. Il s’agissait d’un projet utopique construit sur la base du protestantisme évangélique. L’universalisme du Mouvement reposait sur l’idée de la « catholicité » de la « communauté chrétienne » et sur la logique des grandes religions de conversion. Les leaders du Mouvement propageaient le « christianisme vivant ». Réfutant une conception du religieux comme besoin mystique et du christianisme comme ensemble de croyances défini une fois pour toutes, centré sur un dogme rigide et sur un rite religieux, ils prônaient un activisme social des chrétiens et leur participation à la résolution de problèmes sociaux concrets. Initialement axé sur la mission d’évangélisation, ce projet universaliste était lui-même un résultat de la sécularisation à laquelle il devait faire face. Affirmant son « respect » vis-à-vis des structures ecclésiastiques « traditionnelles », le Mouvement était guidé par des laïcs. Manifestant une préoccupation relative aux moyens à utiliser pour soigner les malaises de la société industrielle moderne et pour assurer le progrès de l’humanité, ses leaders prétendaient élaborer un « modèle » de l’action chrétienne « moderne », « organisée », capable d’assurer le développement « intégral » (moral, intellectuel, physique et social) des individus, mettant un accent particulier sur la formation des élites. Dans une perspective de long terme, leur ambition était d’assurer une transformation sociale, politique et économique des sociétés humaines. Plusieurs problématiques sont explorées : 1. Le rapport entre, d’une part, les engagements « universalistes » et « nationaux » et, d’autre part, les facteurs qui influençaient les rapports de force entre des cultures nationales différentes et, donc, déterminaient les vecteurs de la circulation d’idées, d’expériences et de pratiques dans ce type de mouvance internationaliste ; 2. Le mécanisme de la pénétration de la YMCA américaine dans un autre pays, en l’occurrence en Russie, et les motifs invoqués pour le justifier ; 3. Le rapport entre la religion et la politique ; 4. Les relations entre les protestants et les chrétiens orthodoxes. L’étude de ces problématiques se décline en plusieurs dimensions structurées par quatre dichotomies principales : « universel » versus « national », « laïque » versus « religieux », « modernité » versus « tradition », « politique » versus « apolitique »
In this thesis we first investigate the creation of a transnational network by the advocates of the Young People’ Global Christian Movement in the West in the latter half of the 19th century. Secondly, we analyze the interaction between the agents of the American branch of the Movement, the American YMCA, and the representatives of the Russian political, economic, religious and intellectual elites in Russia from the end of the 1890s and in Europe with the Russian émigrés in the period between the two world wars. Attempts to implant the American Association in the USSR in the 1920s are also considered.The Young People’ Christian Movement was conceived as a global space transcending national boundaries. The ambition of the advocates of this form of internationalism was to break the barriers of nationalities, politics, economic and social inequalities, religion or race. This utopian project was founded on the values, beliefs and principles of Evangelical Protestantism. The Movement’s universalism was founded on the concept of Christian communities’ “catholicity” and was following the logic of religious conversion. Its leaders were propagating the Vital Christianity. Refuting the conception of religion as a mystic quest and that of Christianity as a set of beliefs defined once and for all and focused on the rigid dogma and on the performance of a religious belief, the leaders of the Global Christian Movement were calling for a social activism of Christians and propagating their capacity to engage in practical problem solving in their own communities. With an initial focus on the mission of evangelization, the Young Christians’ Movement should be a bulwark against the growing secularism of society. However this Universalist project was itself the result of the secularization. Affirming “respect” for the “traditional” ecclesiastical structures, the Movement was guided by laypersons. Demonstrating an active concern for the means to treat the ailments of the modern industrial societies and to assure the progress of humanity, the leaders of the Young Christians’ Movement had an ambition to elaborate a “model” of a “modern” and “organized” Christian action, capable of ensuring the “integral” (moral, intellectual, physical and social) development of the individuals, with a particular emphasis on the training of the elites. Set in a long-term perspective, the ambition of the leaders of the Movement was to assure a complete social, political and economic transformation of human societies. Several problematic issues were explored: 1. The relationship between the “globalist” and “national” commitments, and the factors affecting the power relations between the different national cultures and determining the direction of circulation of ideas, experiences and practices within this internationalist movement; 2. The mechanism of and the motives invoked to justify the penetration of the American YMCA in the other countries, i.e. in Russia; 3. The relationship between religion and politics; 4. The relationship between Protestants and Orthodox Christians. This study addresses four key dichotomies: “universal” versus “national”, “laic” versus “religious”, “modernity” versus “tradition”, “political” versus “apolitical”

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
The narrative of the Fall Creek Parkway YMCA is central to the record of the historically black community northwest of downtown Indianapolis, which was established in the early 1900s, as well as reflective of the urban revitalization projects and demographic fluxes that changed this community beginning in the 1960s. This is because the conflict between administrators of the Fall Creek YMCA branch and Greater Indianapolis YMCA or Metropolitan YMCA over the viability of the branch at 10th Street and Indiana Avenue was a microcosm of the conflict between community and city leaders over the necessity of large-scale forces. This thesis specifically examines the large-scale forces of urban revitalization, defined in the study as the city’s implementation of construction projects in Indianapolis’ downtown area, and school desegregation, which was the focus of a federal court case that affected Indianapolis Public Schools. Delineating the contested visions held by Fall Creek and Metropolitan YMCA administrators about how the Fall Creek YMCA should have functioned within an environment changed by urban revitalization and school desegregation is crucial to understanding the controversies that surrounded major construction projects and desegregation measures that took place in the downtown area of Indianapolis during the late twentieth century. The study therefore understands the conflict between the Metropolitan and Fall Creek YMCAs over targeted membership groups and autonomy as a reflection of changes in the branch’s surrounding area. Moreover, the study utilizes such conflict as a lens to the larger conflict that took place in Indianapolis between the agents of citywide urban revitalization plans and community leaders who opposed the implementation of these plans, as well as school desegregation measures, at the expense of the historically black community located in the near-downtown area of the city. This thesis is informed and humanized, respectively, by archival research and oral history interviews with individuals who were involved in either the administration or advocacy of the Fall Creek YMCA between 1971 and 2003.