Contemporary Vulnerabilities


Book Description

Contemporary Vulnerabilities offers critical reflections about vulnerable moments in research committed to social change. This interdisciplinary collection gathers reflexive narratives and analyses about innovative methodologies that engage with unconventional and unexpected research spaces inhabited and shared by scholars. The authors encourage us to collaborate within, reflect on, and confront the frictions of inquiry around social change. With an aim of contesting the dominance of Eurocentric epistemologies, the collection includes modes of storytelling and examples of knowledge gathering that are often excluded from academic texts in general and methodological texts in particular. All those interested in research methodologies and social justice inquiry will find provocation and recognition in this volume, including scholars, ethics boards, and students. Contributors: Aly Bailey, Kayla Besse, Meredith Bessey, Madeline Burghardt, Claire Carter, Shraddha Chatterjee, Yuriko Cowper-Smith, Eva Cupchik, Cheyanne Desnomie, Bongi Dube, Athanasia Francis, Rebecca Godderis, Moses Gordon, Emily Grafton, Caitlin Janzen, Evadne Kelly, Debra Langan, Rebecca Lennox, Corinne L. Mason, Tara-Leigh McHugh, Preeti Nayak, Anh Ngo, Jess Notwell, Marcia Oliver, Cassandra J. Opikokew Wajuntah, Merrick Pilling, Kendra-Ann Pitt, Salima Punjani, seeley quest, Carla Rice, Jen Rinaldi, Lori Ross, Kate Rossiter, Brenda Rossow-Kimball, Siobhán Saravanamuttu, Melissa Schnarr, Bettina Schneider, Irene Shankar, Skylar Sookpaiboon, Chelsea Temple Jones, Amelia Thorpe, Paul Tshuma, Amber-Lee Varadi, Jijian Voronka, Kristyn White.




Contemporary Economic Geographies


Book Description

The subdiscipline of economic geography has a long and varied history, and recent work has pushed the field to diversify even further. This collection takes this agenda forward by showcasing inspiring, critical and plural perspectives for contemporary economic geographies. Highlighting the contributions of global scholars, the thirty chapters showcase fresh ways of approaching economic geography in research, teaching and praxis. With sections on thought leaders, contemporary critical debates and future research agendas, this collection calls for greater openness and inclusivity.




Vulnerability and Human Rights


Book Description

The mass violence of the twentieth century’s two world wars—followed more recently by decentralized and privatized warfare, manifested in terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and other localized forms of killing—has led to a heightened awareness of human beings’ vulnerability and the precarious nature of the institutions they create to protect themselves from violence and exploitation. This vulnerability, something humans share amid the diversity of cultural beliefs and values that mark their differences, provides solid ground on which to construct a framework of human rights. Bryan Turner undertakes this task here, developing a sociology of rights from a sociology of the human body. His blending of empirical research with normative analysis constitutes an important step forward for the discipline of sociology. Like anthropology, sociology has traditionally eschewed the study of justice as beyond the limits of a discipline that pays homage to cultural relativism and the “value neutrality” of positivistic science. Turner’s expanded approach accordingly involves a truly interdisciplinary dialogue with the literature of economics, law, medicine, philosophy, political science, and religion.




Neo-Victorian Cities


Book Description

This volume explores the complex aesthetic, cultural, and memory politics of urban representation and reconfiguration in neo-Victorian discourse and practice. Through adaptations of traditional city tropes – such as the palimpsest, the labyrinth, the femininised enigma, and the marketplace of desire – writers, filmmakers, and city planners resurrect, preserve, and rework nineteenth-century metropolises and their material traces while simultaneously Gothicising and fabricating ‘past’ urban realities to serve present-day wants, so as to maximise cities’ potential to generate consumption and profits. Within the cultural imaginary of the metropolis, this volume contends, the nineteenth century provides a prominent focalising lens that mediates our apperception of and engagement with postmodern cityscapes. From the site of capitalist romance and traumatic lieux de mémoire to theatre of postcolonial resistance and Gothic sensationalism, the neo-Victorian city proves a veritable Proteus evoking myriad creative responses but also crystallising persistent ethical dilemmas surrounding alienation, precarity, Othering, and social exclusion.




Internet and Distributed Computing Systems


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Internet and Distributed Computing Systems, IDCS 2015, held in Windsor, UK, in September 2015. The 19 revised full and 6 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. The selected contributions covered cutting-edge aspects of Cloud Computing and Internet of Things, sensor networks, parallel and distributed computing, advanced networking, smart cities and smart buildings, Big Data and social networks.




Global Health Governance


Book Description

Globalization has immersed all of humanity in a single germ pool. There are no health sanctuaries in a globalizing world. In Global Health Governance, Obijiofor Aginam explores the relevance of international law in contemporary public health diplomacy. He focuses on the concept of mutual vulnerability to explore the globalization of disease, in what is paradoxically a global village and a divided world. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, Global Health Governance offers a holistic approach to global health governance involving a multiplicity of actors: nation-states, international organizations, civil society organizations, and private actors. Aginam articulates modest proposals under the rubric of communitarian globalism, a paradigm that strives to meet the ideals of 'law of humanity.' These proposals project a humane global health order where all of humanity is inexorably tied into a global compact and where the health of one nation-state rises and falls with the health of others. International law—with its bold claims to universal protection of human rights and human dignity—is an indispensable governance tool for the reconstruction of damaged public health trust in the relations of nations and peoples.




Sensing Disaster


Book Description

"In 2007, a tsunami slammed a small island in the western Solomon Islands, wreaking havoc on its coastal communities and ecosystems. Drawing on over ten years of ethnographic and environmental science research, Matthew Lauer provides an intimate account of this catastrophic event that explores how a century of colonization, Christianity, and increasing entanglement with capitalism prefigured the local response and the tumultuous recovery process. Despite near total destruction of several villages, few people lost their lives, as nearly everyone fled to high ground before the tsunami struck. To understand their astonishing, lifesaving response, Lauer argues that we need to rethink the popular portrayals of indigenous ecological knowledge that inform environmental research and contemporary disaster mitigation strategies so as to avoid displacing those aspects of indigenous knowing and being that tend to be overlooked. In an increasingly disaster-prone era of ecological crises, this important study challenges readers to expand their thinking about the causes and consequences of calamities, the effects of disaster relief and recovery efforts, and the nature of local knowledge"--




Social Justice and the City


Book Description

This special collection aims to offer insight into the state of geography on questions of social justice and urban life. While using social justice and the city as our starting point may signal inspiration from Harvey’s (1973) book of the same name, the task of examining the emergence of this concept has revealed the deep influence of grassroots urban uprisings of the late 1960s, earlier and contemporary meditations on our urban worlds (Jacobs, 1961, 1969; Lefebvre, 1974; Massey and Catalano, 1978) as well as its enduring significance built upon by many others for years to come. Laws (1994) noted how geographers came to locate social justice struggles in the city through research that examined the ways in which material conditions contributed to poverty and racial and gender inequity, as well as how emergent social movements organized to reshape urban spaces across diverse engagements including the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, anti-war protests, feminist and LGBTQ activism, the American Indian Movement, and disability access. This book originally published as a special issue of Annals of the American Association of Geographers.




Strategic Intelligence and Civil Affairs to Understand Legitimacy and Insurgency


Book Description

This book describes the common pitfalls of U.S. military interventions in efforts at stabilization, which supports post-conflict societies by establishing stable governance, rule of law, a safe and secure environment, economic development and social well-being for all members of the population. These efforts are often unsuccessful and can even cause harm when mission teams do not understand both the populations with whom they are engaging and policymakers. The book recommends prioritizing a relational approach to stabilization with a professional and well-resourced Civil Affairs and strategic intelligence approach to engagements over the current preference for transactional, often lethal operations.




The Emerald Handbook of Digital Media in Greece


Book Description

The Emerald Handbook of Digital Media in Greece: Journalism and Political Communication in Times of Crisis presents the empirical applications of digital media in political communication and in a number of social settings including the environment, homelessness, migration and social movements.