The social, cultural, and economic transitions in rural areas across the globe lead us to critique the traditional "top-down" or "bottom-up" distinction as being outdated for contemporary rural policy. In Europe and the United States in particular, high rates of counterurbanization heighten the need for new ways of thinking…

Nowadays we are experiencing profound economic and social changes, which cause new and different migratory fluxes in the search for better living conditions. In this manner, the human tissue that composes societies is getting diverse. Therefore we can now find new minorities originating from immigration, whose members possess ethnic, religious,…

Within the course of a decade Ireland has emerged from being a country of emigration to a country of immigration. Since the mid-1990s, Ireland has undergone rapid economic expansion with the recent economic growth resulting in approximately 252,000 migrants entering Ireland over the last 6 years, according to the Irish Times (2003). While a large…