The search for linguistic equality

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Humphrey Tonkin

Five papers from the symposium on language and equality, held in New York in 2014 and organized by the Working Group on Language and the United Nations, make up this special issue of Language Problems and Language Planning. The symposium highlighted the difficulty of defining the nature of language equality, the many instances in which it is abandoned in favor of some apparently more practical goal (for example, the expansion of English in higher education, or the assimilation of immigrants into the United States), efforts in the past to achieve such equality (notably the Esperanto experiment), and the apparent sidelining of language as a variable in the planning of United Nations activities and goals.

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 40-61
Author(s):  
Madeline Bourque Kearin

This paper deconstructs the folklore surrounding an early twentieth-century zinc figure of an American Indian that stands in the center of the village of Mount Kisco, New York. The identity that “Chief Kisco” has assumed over the past hundred years elides the nature of the origins of the statue, which was intended not as a statement of communal identity, but rather as the exact opposite. As a ready-made art object, the statue was emblematic of a new network of commodified goods that transformed the cultural geography of the United States; as it was utilized in Mount Kisco, the statue was a piece of temperance propaganda with strong nativist undertones that tapped directly into the class, religious, and ethnic divisions running through the turn-of-the-century village.


Author(s):  
Rob Weighill ◽  
Florence Gaub

NATO’s Libya Operation was a first in several ways: the first time the alliance operated in an Arab and African country, the first time Arab partners participated in kinetic missions, the first time it executed a UN mandate designed to protect civilians and the first time the United States were not in the lead. This book is the first one to tell the operation’s story from all sides concerned: spanning the hallways of the United Nations in New York, NATO Headquarters in Brussels and, crucially, the two operational epicenters: the Libyan battlefield, and Joint Force Command Naples, which was in charge of the mission. Weighill and Gaub offer a comprehensive exploration of both the war's progression and the many challenges NATO faced, from its extremely rapid planning and limited understanding of Libya and its forces, to training shortfalls and the absence of post-conflict planning.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Philip L. Martin

Japan and the United States, the world’s largest economies for most of the past half century, have very different immigration policies. Japan is the G7 economy most closed to immigrants, while the United States is the large economy most open to immigrants. Both Japan and the United States are debating how immigrants are and can con-tribute to the competitiveness of their economies in the 21st centuries. The papers in this special issue review the employment of and impacts of immigrants in some of the key sectors of the Japanese and US economies, including agriculture, health care, science and engineering, and construction and manufacturing. For example, in Japanese agriculture migrant trainees are a fixed cost to farmers during the three years they are in Japan, while US farmers who hire mostly unauthorized migrants hire and lay off workers as needed, making labour a variable cost.


1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-327
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Pierce ◽  
María Amelia Viteri ◽  
Diego Falconí Trávez ◽  
Salvador Vidal-Ortiz ◽  
Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal

Abstract This special issue questions translation and its politics of (in)visibilizing certain bodies and geographies, and sheds light on queer and cuir histories that have confronted the imperial gaze, or that remain untranslatable. Part of a larger scholarly and activist project of the Feminist and Cuir/Queer Américas Working Group, the special issue situates the relationships across linguistic and cultural differences as central to a hemispheric queer/cuir dialogue. We have assembled contributions with activists, scholars, and artists working through queer and cuir studies, gender and sexuality studies, intersectional feminisms, decolonial approaches, migration studies, and hemispheric American studies. Published across three journals, GLQ in the United States, Periódicus in Brazil, and El lugar sin límites in Argentina, this special issue homes in on the production, circulation, and transformation of knowledge, and on how knowledge production relates to cultural, disciplinary, or market-based logics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Giles Scott-Smith

The United Nations Information Office (UNIO), dating from 1942, holds the distinction of being both the first international agency of the embryonic UN network and the first to hold the United Nations label. Run from 1942 to 1945 from two offices in New York and London, these two were merged at the end of World War II to form the UN Information Organisation, and subsequently transformed into the Department of Public Information run from UN headquarters in New York. This article adds to the history of the UN by exploring the origins and development of the UNIO during 1940–41, when it was a British-led propaganda operation to gather US support for the allied war effort. It also examines the UNIO from the viewpoint of the power transition from Britain to the United States that took place during the war, and how this reflected a transition of internationalisms: from the British view of world order through benevolent imperialism to the American view of a progressive campaign for global development and human rights.


1993 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-111
Author(s):  
Marian Nash

On September 8, 1992, President George Bush transmitted to the Senate for advice and consent to ratification the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted at New York on May 9, 1992, by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change and signed on behalf of the United States at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro on June 12, 1992.


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