Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between flood exposure and levels of social trust among a cohort of adult men from refugee backgrounds who were affected by the 2011 floods in Queensland, Australia.

A quantitative questionnaire was administered to 141 men from refugee backgrounds almost two years after the 2011 Queensland floods. The survey was administered in-person by trained peer interviewers, and included a number of standardized instruments assessing respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics, levels of social trust toward and from neighbors, the police, the wider Australian community and the media and exposure to and impact of the floods. Multiple logistic regression analyses were used to assess the relationship between flood exposure and social trust adjusting for pre-disaster levels of trust and other potentially confounding variables.

Participants with higher levels of flood exposure were significantly more likely to report greater levels of trust both toward and from their neighbors, the wider Australian community and the media, and they were also more likely to believe that most people can be trusted.

Although the study reports on data collected two years after the floods, the analysis has adjusted for pre-disaster measures of social trust and other socio-demographic variables.

This paper has highlighted the important place of social trust and social capital for refugee communities in a post-disaster setting. Disaster responses that support social capital among marginalized populations are critical to increasing community resilience and supporting recovery.

This chapter explores how neoliberal higher education reforms in the United Republic of Tanzania (URT) during the 1990s and 2000s were shaped by the history of governance, schooling, and foreign donor involvement in the country following its independence in 1961. Against this backdrop, I examine how concepts of private versus public leadership, individualism, competition, and education’s place in the overall development scheme shifted over time, and the influence these changing conceptualizations had on the role of universities in Tanzania by the end of the first decade of the 21st century. In an international environment in which powerful funding agencies see neoliberal higher education policies and “knowledge societies” as the key to increased national competitiveness and poverty eradication in sub-Saharan Africa, this chapter shows how changes embedded in recent market-centered university reforms – in which the state is said to “steer” rather than “row” – have influenced the quest for equitable development.