Background: Wars, crises, and climate change are just a few of the worldwide concerns that have resulted in the forced relocation of millions of people. After 12 years of conflict in Syria, millions of Syrians are still displaced in the neighbouring countries, and their conditions have worsened due to the economic and socio-political crisis of the region. This paper reports on a study conducted in Lebanon as part of the EU Horizon-funded project ADMIGOV - Advancing Alternative Migration Governance. It describes the methodological framework used to study Syrian migration in Lebanon and sheds light on the phenomenon's patterns, challenges, and impacts.
Methods: In our study, we opted for a mixed method. It is built on a large corpus of primary data collected over the course of years of intensive, in-depth fieldwork and the author's immersion in the community. Alongside observations, quantitative and qualitative phone interviews were conducted to obtain the perceptions of displaced Syrians living in informal tented settlements in rural Lebanon and an incomplete building in the city of Saida. This interview data is accompanied by primary and secondary data sources, including the findings of other European research projects, statistics from UNHCR and IOM, and academic and press articles.
Results: Our research revealed the difficulties Syrians displaced in Lebanon encounter while navigating the challenging situation they are trapped in. Based on a case study approach, it unveils similarities and differences determined by the government's no encampment policy that led to self-settled practices across the country. This approach helped in understanding the challenging dynamic created by weak public institutions and their failure to guarantee the observance of basic human rights, compromising displaced Syrians safety. The weakness of public institutions and their failure to guarantee the observance of basic human rights has compromised displaced safety. Moreover, even though the development interventions and aid assistance have been necessary for Syrians' survival, they proved insufficient, and unequally distributed by location evidencing the inefficiencies of the majority of development aid projects.
Conclusions: The findings contribute to an enriched understanding of the situation of Syrians in Lebanon and offer insights for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers working in the field of forced migration and humanitarian responses.
Settled societies inhabit environments shaped by building activity. Geographic data in social scientific and geographical research are generally composed of architectural and social categories derived from commonplace lived experience and societal knowledge, thus carrying socio-culturally specific meaning. The mundane pragmatism of such categories conflate spaces and buildings with their use and may obstruct effective comparison. Here I introduce a set of formally redescriptive ontological concepts for built environments that operates on the basis of how differentiation and subdivision constitute distinct occupiable spaces through boundaries. An ontology of the inhabited built environment arises from the application of these socio-spatial and material concepts called 'Boundary Line Types' (BLT). I present and photographically illustrate the definitions of the BLTs, which are conceived on a critical realist basis and rooted in a multidisciplinary body of theory concerning the development and inhabitation of built space. Considering inhabited built environments through BLTs foregrounds the emergent logic by which spaces are divided and connected, creating configurations of boundaries as material frames that afford everyday social life. Since BLTs offer transferrable empirical principles from which these material frames emerge, they also enable diachronic and cross-cultural comparative social research. My proposition to approach social scientific built environment research through constitutive material boundaries offers a comparative complement to commonplace and socio-culturally specific spatial categories that compose most geographic data, enabling formal thick redescriptions and the potential for quantitative spatial analysis.
As we learn more about the multi-scale interstellar medium (ISM) of our Galaxy, we develop a greater understanding for the complex relationships between the large-scale diffuse gas and dust in Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs), how it moves, how it is affected by the nearby massive stars, and which portions of those GMCs eventually collapse into star forming regions. The complex interactions of those gas, dust and stellar populations form what has come to be known as the ecology of our Galaxy. Because we are deeply embedded in the plane of our Galaxy, it takes up a significant fraction of the sky, with complex dust lanes scattered throughout the optically recognizable bands of the Milky Way. These bands become bright at (sub-)millimetre wavelengths, where we can study dust thermal emission and the chemical and kinematic signatures of the gas. To properly study such large-scale environments, requires deep, large area surveys that are not possible with current facilities. Moreover, where stars form, so too do planetary systems, growing from the dust and gas in circumstellar discs, to planets and planetesimal belts. Understanding the evolution of these belts requires deep imaging capable of studying belts around young stellar objects to Kuiper belt analogues around the nearest stars. Here we present a plan for observing the Galactic Plane and circumstellar environments to quantify the physical structure, the magnetic fields, the dynamics, chemistry, star formation, and planetary system evolution of the galaxy in which we live with AtLAST; a concept for a new, 50m single-dish sub-mm telescope with a large field of view which is the only type of facility that will allow us to observe our Galaxy deeply and widely enough to make a leap forward in our understanding of our local ecology.
Background: There is a growing recognition of the key role of the therapeutic relationship in the outcomes of psychotherapy. However, current understanding of its specific components, their interplay and related patient-therapist dynamics is limited.
Objective: (a) To validate two self-report measures to assess subjective affective reactions of patients toward their psychotherapists during specific therapy sessions, and (b) to explore the relationships and dynamics among four elements of the therapeutic relationship: patient reactions toward the therapist, working alliance, alliance ruptures and repairs, and the real relationship.
Methods: This study uses a nonrandomized, two-time point longitudinal design. The target population is adult patients currently engaged in individual psychotherapy for heterogeneous mental conditions. Participants are recruited through two online recruitment platforms: Research for Me and ResearchMatch. Data collection involves administering two surveys through the Qualtrics online survey platform. The baseline survey assesses information about the most recent therapy session and the preceding week, while the follow-up survey collects data on the subsequent therapy session and the days leading up to it.
Discussion: This research offers three main contributions: (a) it furthers evidence-based assessment in psychotherapy by creating and validating two novel, succinct self-report tools; (b) it enhances theoretical understanding within therapeutic relationship research by exploring the significant impact of patients' perceptions of relationship elements on session outcomes variability; and (c) it will identify therapeutic relationship elements that can either enhance or hinder the overall relationship quality and session outcomes.
Ethics and dissemination: The study protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The results will be published in indexed peer-reviewed journals and presented at relevant psychology and psychiatry conferences.