Accessible Technology and the Developing World

Most research on information and communications technology (ICT) accessibility and innovation for persons with disabilities, whether in the fields of law, tech, or development, has focused on developed regions (“Global North”) rather than developing parts of the world (“Global South”). The goal of this book is to increase awareness of ICT accessibility in developing areas, under three common themes. First, innovations created in developing states often get little attention, even though they are frequently less resource-intensive, and therefore more sustainable, than corresponding Global North solutions. Second, when Global South countries evolve their technology infrastructures (as many are doing now), it is important to avoid barriers to equal access for people with disabilities. Third, Global North design, development, and implementation techniques often will not transfer well to the Global South, and should not be applied without thought. Three international legal and policy initiatives ensuring accessibility and equal availability of ICT in developing areas are discussed: the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, The Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled, and the Sustainable Development Goals. This book brings together a unique combination of authors with diverse disciplinary backgrounds (technology, law, development, and education), from non-governmental organizations that are part of the public zeitgeist (the World Wide Web Consortium and Benetech), significant United Nations entities (the World Bank and G3ict), universities in the developing world (Pakistan and Uganda) and the developed world (the United States and Norway), and Global North industrial labs innovating in the Global South (Microsoft Research, India), among others.

Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER W. BLAIR ◽  
GUY GROSSMAN ◽  
JEREMY M. WEINSTEIN

Most forced migrants around the world are displaced within the Global South. We study whether and how de jure policies on forced displacement affect where forced migrants flee in the developing world. Recent evidence from the Global North suggests migrants gravitate toward liberal policy environments. However, existing analyses expect de jure policies to have little effect in the developing world, given strong presumptions that policy enforcement is poor and policy knowledge is low. Using original data on de jure displacement policies for 92 developing countries and interviews with 126 refugees and policy makers, we document a robust association between liberal de jure policies and forced migrant flows. Gravitation toward liberal environments is conditional on factors that facilitate the diffusion of policy knowledge, such as transnational ethnic kin. Policies for free movement, services, and livelihoods are especially attractive. Utility-maximizing models of migrant decision making must take de jure policy provisions into account.


Author(s):  
Socorro Herrera

Recent statistics indicate that more than 200 million people worldwide live in a country other than the one in which they were born, with more than a third having moved from an underdeveloped to a developed country and at least another third having moved from one developed nation to another. Although the United States is the world leader as a host country, Europe’s migrant population in 2005 exceeded that of North America by almost 50 percent and Western Asia’s share of the world’s migrants now exceeds 25 million (United Nations, 2011). Most pronounced is an unprecedented migration of persons to the developing world that is both a cause and a consequence of globalization.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaspal Naveel Singh

The Global South is a postcolonial imagined community that bears the potential to imagine powerful south-south solidarity between the struggles for decoloniality of diverse populations across the world. To prepare our field’s pan-global future, this year-in-review overrepresents literature on gender, sexuality and language from/on the Global South. This decolonial move aims to notice and promote southern tactics of resistance, southern epistemologies and southern theories and evaluate what can be learnt if we look southward on our way forward. Some literature from the Global North will be considered too. The review is structured using three overlapping foci: (1) embodied and linguistic resistance, (2) mediatisation and scale and (3) fragile masculinities. I conclude by suggesting that our research should stay locally situated and globally radical.


2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Itumeleng D. Mothoagae

The question of blackness has always featured the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality and class. Blackness as an ontological speciality has been engaged from both the social and epistemic locations of the damnés (in Fanonian terms). It has thus sought to respond to the performance of power within the world order that is structured within the colonial matrix of power, which has ontologically, epistemologically, spatially and existentially rendered blackness accessible to whiteness, while whiteness remains inaccessible to blackness. The article locates the question of blackness from the perspective of the Global South in the context of South Africa. Though there are elements of progress in terms of the conditions of certain Black people, it would be short-sighted to argue that such conditions in themselves indicate that the struggles of blackness are over. The essay seeks to address a critique by Anderson (1995) against Black theology in the context of the United States of America (US). The argument is that the question of blackness cannot and should not be provincialised. To understand how the colonial matrix of power is performed, it should start with the local and be linked with the global to engage critically the colonial matrix of power that is performed within a system of coloniality. Decoloniality is employed in this article as an analytical tool.Contribution: The article contributes to the discourse on blackness within Black theology scholarship. It aims to contribute to the continual debates on the excavating and levelling of the epistemological voices that have been suppressed through colonial epistemological universalisation of knowledge from the perspective of the damnés.


1983 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.A. Keenleyside

Prior to 1947, India, despite its dependence upon Great Britain, was represented in most of the bonafide international conferences and organizations that evolved especially during the inter-war years. For example, India participated in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the Washington Conference on Naval Armaments of 1921, the London Naval Conference of 1930, the Disarmament Conference of 1932 and the annual inter-war conferences of the International Labour Organization. In addition, India was represented in two important international organizations of the inter-war period—the British Commonwealth, in whose deliberations it was included from 1917 onwards and the League of Nations, of which it was a founding member. For a variety of reasons; Indians involved in the independence movement disassociated themselves from and were critical of official Indian diplomacy conducted through the major international conferences and institutions of the world community and tended to attach greater importance to those non-governmental organizations in which the voice of nationalist India could be fully heard—that is to the deliberations of such bodies as the League Against Imperialism, 1927–1930, the Anti-War Congress of 1932, the World Peace Congress of 1936 and the International Peace Campaign Conference of 1938. Nevertheless, despite the nationalist antipathy for official Indian diplomacy, an examination of such governmental institutions as the League of Nations from the perspective of nationalist India is still important in order to understand some aspects of independent India's foreign policy and more specifically its approach to international organization. Further, even though Indian delegations to the League were unrepresentative, there were subtle ways in which they reflected national Indian opinions and exhibited specifically Indian traits, so that a study of the official Indian role is useful in drawing attention to what were to prove to be some of the earliest and most persisting elements of independent Indian diplomacy via such bodies as the United Nations. It is thus the purpose of this article first to explore nationalist Indian attitudes towards the League (especially the reasons for opposition to the organization), second to analyze the extent to which the official Indian role in the League reflected nationalist Indian concerns, and third to comment upon the impact of the League of Nations on independent India's foreign policy, especially its role in the United Nations.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 60 (6) ◽  
pp. 797-804
Author(s):  
Myron E. Wegman

Data for this article, as in previous reports,1 are drawn principally from the Monthly Vital Statistics Report,2-5 published by the National Center for Health Statistics. The international data come from the Demographic Yearbook6 and the quarterly Population and Vital Statistics Report,7 both published by the Statistical Office of the United Nations, and the World Health Statistics Report,8 published by the World Health Organization. All the United States data for 1976 are estimates by place of occurrence based upon a 10% sample of material received in state offices between two dates, one month apart, regardless of when the event occurred. Experience has shown that for the country as a whole the estimate is very close to the subsequent final figures.


Author(s):  
Franz Neumann

This chapter considers a variety of methods of treating Germany. The main objective of the United Nations in the treatment of Germany is to prevent it from ever again becoming a threat to the security of the world. The problem of securing this objective could be approached through destruction of Germany's industrial potential, destruction of Germany as a political entity, and removal from German society of the causes of aggression. The chapter shows that the first two solutions should be deferred until it is clear that the third alternative proves unworkable. In order to eliminate the causes of aggressiveness in German society, temporary and long-term disabilities should be imposed upon Germany. The chapter also examines the causes of German aggression, the United States' policy toward Germany, short-term measures during the period of military government, conditional measures during the probationary period, and permanent impositions upon Germany.


Author(s):  
Jacqueline Strenio ◽  
Joyita Roy Chowdhury

Workplace sexual harassment is a serious occupational hazard, adversely affecting workers' employment trajectories, economic well-being, and mental and physical health. Prior to COVID-19, it was widespread and primarily perpetrated by men against women, both in the physical workplace and physical and virtual public spaces associated with work. This chapter examines how the transition to remote work has effected changes in the prevalence and types of sexual harassment, paying attention to its gendered nature. Remote work holds both promise and peril. While exposure to physical harassment has fallen, information and communications technology has increased the risk of sexual harassment in virtual spaces. The cases of the United States and India are explored in more detail to compare worker experiences across the Global North and Global South, in countries with vastly different socioeconomic structures. This chapter contributes to the understanding of the benefits and challenges of remote work in combatting sexual harassment.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Wertheim

Why did the United States want to create the United Nations Organization, or any international political organization with universal membership? This question has received superficial historiographical attention, despite ample scrutiny of the conferences that directly established the UN in 1944 and 1945. The answer lies earlier in the war, from 1940 to 1942, when, under the pressure of fast-moving events, American officials and intellectuals decided their country must not only enter the war but also lead the world long afterwards. International political organization gained popularity – first among unofficial postwar planners in 1941 and then among State Department planners in 1942 – because it appeared to be an indispensable tool for implementing postwar US world leadership, for projecting and in no way constraining American power. US officials believed the new organization would legitimate world leadership in the eyes of the American public by symbolizing the culmination of prior internationalist efforts to end power politics, even as they based the design of the UN on a thoroughgoing critique of the League, precisely for assuming that power politics could be transcended.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-295
Author(s):  
Keith Allan Clark II

In 1955, Jiang Tingfu, representing the Republic of China (roc), vetoed Mongolia’s entry into the United Nations. In the 26 years the roc represented China in the United Nations, it only cast this one veto. The roc’s veto was a contentious move because Taipei had recognized Mongolia as a sovereign state in 1946. A majority of the world body, including the United States, favored Mongolia’s admission as part of a deal to end the international organization’s deadlocked-admissions problem. The roc’s veto placed it not only in opposition to the United Nations but also its primary benefactor. This article describes the public and private discourse surrounding this event to analyze how roc representatives portrayed the veto and what they thought Mongolian admission to the United Nations represented. It also examines international reactions to Taipei’s claims and veto. It argues that in 1955 Mongolia became a synecdoche for all of China that Taipei claimed to represent, and therefore roc representatives could not acknowledge it as a sovereign state.


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