African immigrant women’s transition and integration into Canadian society: expectations,stressors, and tensions

This article contributes to an emergent body of research that explores African immigrant women’s experiences in Western destination countries. Foregrounding these immigrant women’s voices in this research, we aim to better understand the challenges they grapple with as newcomers to Canada. Specifically, our study sought to explore the stressors they faced within and outside the family and how these stressors mediate their transition and integration into Canadian society. We conducted, audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analyzed two focus groups with twenty African immigrant women in Alberta, a Western province among Canada’s ten provinces. Three main themes emerged from our study: (1) Participants felt ill prepared to face the challenges of starting life anew in Canada, which included in particular navigating changes in economic wellbeing and gender roles; (2) Participants experienced a lack of community support, which was reflected in both mental/emotional health and parenting issues; and (3) Participants expressed frustration with the manner in which Canadian socio-legal systems manage immigrants’ family issues. Our findings underscore the need to actively engage African immigrant women and men in the development of policies and practices that mediate their everyday lives in Canada. Such policies and practices should consider the changing gender relations, cultural knowledge, and informal support channels within African immigrant communities.     

On Niello

In a previous volume of this journal, it was proposed that the bishop's palace at Bath was laid out on a modular plan (Chapman, Davenport and Holland 1995). The idea is beguiling, but not supported by the evidence. In fact the case makes an instructive example of the dangers of medieval documentation for the unwary. The problems are briefly discussed here. Full evidence for the location of the bishop's palace at Bath has been published elsewhere and remains valid (Davenport and Lucas 1991; Manco 1994, 80). It is proposed here that the close was laid out between two Saxon streets and so fossilised apart of the Saxon street plan.     

Opium smoking,anti‐Chinese attitudes,and the American medical community, 1850–1890

During the 1870s and early 1880s, members of the American medical community sought to exclude the Chinese from immigrating to the United States because these physicians believed that the Chinese opium smoking habit threatened the moral system of the country. Doctors were especially concerned about the supposed effects of opium smoking on sexual behavior, arguing that it both heightened male and female desire and endangered the nation's reproductive capacity. They also feared that opium smoking and Chinese prostitution would encourage miscegenation, and that use of the drug could ultimately harm America's socio‐economic progress. The conclusions of these physicians fed into the anti‐Chinese campaign that resulted in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.     

The Scope and Definitions of Heritage: From Tangible to Intangible

Since the adoption of the Venice Charter in 1964, there have been many conservation guidelines in the form of charters, recommendations and resolutions that have been introduced and adopted by international organisations such as UNESCO and ICOMOS. This article focuses on the scope and definition of heritage as promulgated by the various charters across the globe. The term ‘historic monument’ used in the Venice Charter 1964 was reinterpreted by ICOMOS in 1965 ICOMOS. 21–22 June 1965. Report on the Constitutive Assembly 21–22 June, Warsaw, , Poland [Google Scholar] as ‘monument’ and ‘site’; and by UNESCO in 1968 UNESCO. 1968. Recommendation Concerning the Preservation of Cultural Property Endangered by Public or Private Works. 15th Session of the General Conference. 1968, Paris.  [Google Scholar] as ‘cultural property’ to include both movable and immovable. The different terminology between the UNESCO and ICOMOS was reconciled at the World Heritage Convention 1972. At national and regional levels the scope of heritage was broadened to include gardens, landscape and environment, and later reinterpreted and defined quite differently in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and China. Although the scope of heritage, in general, is now agreed internationally to include ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ as well as ‘environments’, the finer terminology of ‘heritage’ has not been streamlined or standardised, and thus no uniformity exists between countries.     

Performance of Buried Gas Distribution Pipelines Subjected to Reverse Fault Movement

In the current work, the results of full-scale laboratory testing of 114.3 and 168.3 mm in diameter steel gas distribution pipes buried at different depths and in two different soil types under a reverse fault offset of 0.6 m are presented and discussed in terms of longitudinal strain distribution, pipe deformation, and cross-section distortion. Results show that the pipe deformation and accordingly its failure mode, and soil failure planes change with increasing burial depth. It was also found that severe cross-section distortion occurs at about 2.3 times the strain limit for onset of wrinkling suggested by various guidelines.