scholarly journals Elite Formation, Power and Space in Contemporary London

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 179-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowland Atkinson ◽  
Simon Parker ◽  
Roger Burrows

In this article we examine elite formation in relation to money power within the city of London. Our primary aim is to consider the impact of the massive concentration of such power upon the city’s political life, municipal and shared resources and social equity. We argue that objectives of city success have come to be identified and aligned with the presence of wealth elites while wider goals, of access to essential resources for citizens, have withered. A diverse national and global wealth-elite is drawn to a city with an almost unique cultural infrastructure, fiscal regime and ushering butler class of politicians. We consider how London is being made for money and the monied – in physical, political and cultural terms. We conclude that the conceptualization of elites as wealth and social power formations operating within urban spatial arenas is important for capturing the nature of new social divisions and changes.

Author(s):  
Ran Wei

To fully understand the impact of mobile phone technology on politics, this chapter provides a state-of-the-art overview of research and identifies an emerging subfield concerning the relationship between mobile media and politics. The chapter traces the evolution of mobile media from personal communication devices to tools for political participation. The growing literature on the role of various mobile devices in civic and political life is reviewed and critiqued. The specific uses of mobile media as tools in political communication, such as informational use, mobile political news, and mobile public sphere, are explicated and synthesized. The chapter also sheds light on the question of how the attributes of mobile media influence the political process in democratic and non-democratic countries. The chapter outlines key issues concerning mobile media in civic and political communication, highlighting significant predictors and mediators. Unresolved issues and debates are highlighted, and directions for future research are suggested.


Journalism ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146488492095858
Author(s):  
Leena Ripatti-Torniainen

This article provides an alternative contribution to journalism studies on a foundational concept by analysing texts of Jane Addams, a public intellectual contemporary with the seminal scholars Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. The author uses methods of intellectual history to construct the concept of the public from Addams’s books: Democracy and Social Ethics and The Newer Ideals of Peace, showing that all three authors, Lippmann, Dewey and Addams, discuss the same topic of individuals’ changed engagement with public political life. Addams departs from Lippmann and Dewey in setting out from the standpoints of exclusion and cosmopolitanism. Her argument regarding the public, as constructed by the author, consists of two premises. First, public engagement is a method of democratic inclusion as well as social and political inquiry for Addams. She sees the extension of relationality across social divisions as a necessary method to understand society and materialise democracy. Second, Addams emphasises cooperative and reflexive involvement especially in the characteristic developments of a time. She considers industrialisation and cosmopolitanism as characteristic developments of her own era. Addams suggests an in-principle cosmopolitan concept of the public that includes marginalised persons and groups. Compared to Lippmann’s and Dewey’s accounts of the public, Jane Addams’s argument is more radical and far more sensitive to the social inequality and plurality of a drastically morphing society.


2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (13&14) ◽  
pp. 1223-1232
Author(s):  
Chengjun Wu ◽  
Bin Luo ◽  
Hong Guo

When Alice and Bob share two pairs of quantum correlated states, Alice can remotely prepare quantum entanglement and quantum discord in Bob’s side by measuring the parts in her side and telling Bob the measurement results by classical communication. For remote entanglement preparation, entanglement is necessary . We find that for some shared resources having the same amount of entanglement, when Bell measurement is used, the entanglement remotely prepared can be different, and more discord in the resources actually decreases the entanglement prepared. We also find that for some resources with more entanglement, the entanglement remotely prepared may be less. Therefore, we conclude that entanglement is a necessary resource but may not be the only resource responsible for the entanglement remotely prepared, and discord does not likely to assist this process. Also, for the preparation of discord, we find that some states with no entanglement could outperform entangled states.


2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Robert Geoffrey Gutteridge

This study investigated key factors impacting on blended learning delivery with particular focus on socio-cultural and human-computer-interface issues, in the hope that the outcome of this enquiry might contribute positively towards the empowerment of learners and facilitators alike. The study involved a group of first year students enrolled in a Communications Skills Course offered by the (then) Department of English and Communication at the Durban University of Technology. The PRINTS Project, a webquest around which the course activities were based, provided an example of a blended delivery course in practice. While the teaching paradigm used in the course was constructivist, the research orientation employed in this project was critical realist. Critical realism focuses on transformation through praxis and also lends itself to modelling, which provides a way to understand the factors at play within a social system. In the preliminary stages of the research, an exploratory empirical (i.e. applied) model of blended learning delivery was formulated from a theoretical model of course delivery in order to assess which factors in blended learning were systemic and which were variables. The investigation then sought to uncover key factors impacting on the blended delivery system, utilising both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The findings were analysed in terms of the empirical model to gain an understanding of any factors that might be seen to either enhance or inhibit learning in blended delivery mode. The result was that certain core issues in blended learning and teaching could be clarified, including the use, advantages and disadvantages of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in a learning environment. The notion of the digital divide could also be reconceptualised, and the relationship between literacy (be it academic, professional or social), power and culture could be further elucidated, drawing specific attention to the South African educational environment. The notion of iv culture and its relevance in a blended delivery environment was also further clarified, since the findings of this research project suggested how and why certain key socio-cultural factors might impact, as both enhancers and inhibitors, on the blended learning delivery system.


2021 ◽  
pp. 67-72
Author(s):  
Myroslava Marushchenko

In the article, the current state of cooperation between Canadian Ukrainians and Ukrainian doctors analyzes. The urgency of modern challenges for cooperation is determined, in particular: pandemic restrictions due to the rapid spread of Covid-19 virus and a sharp restriction of direct professional contacts; the politicization of professional international cooperation in the conditions of Russian aggression; bureaucracy on the part of the management of medical institutions of Ukraine, unfinished state regulation of charitable organizations and international cooperation; insufficient development of charity in Ukraine. The activity of the main Cooperation programs between doctors Canadian Ukrainians and Ukrainian doctors is analyzed. The main focus of the article is on the analysis of the effectiveness of the Canadian-Ukrainian Pediatric Fellowship Program. The Medical Director of the Program is Professor James Rutka, and the Program Coordinator is Professor Myroslava Romach. The stages of organizing training meetings within the Program are indicated: planning and preparation for the meeting (goal setting and detailed planning); choice of locations, according to pre-thought-out criteria; the meeting itself (lectures and practical training, joint operations in 7 cities of Ukraine); further observation, assessment of the impact and results of the meeting, as well as planning of long-term cooperation. Analysis of the concrete results of cooperation is one of the most important stages of international cooperation, as it not only increases its efficiency but also ensures the targeted use of funds. It is determined that important factors that increase the effectiveness of interstate programs in the field of medicine are awareness of cooperation at the diplomatic level, coordinated cooperation at the local level, selection of reliable partners for cooperation, systematic contacts, activities, targeted, premeditated assistance, careful selection of applicants, changes in the means of communication in today's challenges. The work of the above-mentioned medical Ukraine Paediatric Fellowship Program can serve as an example of the organization of international cooperation in various directions of social and political life of modern Ukraine, and a guarantee of its high efficiency in clear strategic planning.


Author(s):  
Joe W. Trotter

This essay explores several overlapping waves of black population movement from the African background through the early twenty-first century. It shows how enslaved people dominated the first two great migrations—from Africa to the tobacco-producing colonies of British North America and later from the Upper South to the cotton-producing lands of the Deep South. In the wake of the Civil War and the emancipation of some 4 million enslaved people, the great farm-to-city migration gradually transformed African Americans from a predominantly rural southern people into the most urbanized sector of the nation’s population. While massive black population movements resulted in substantial disruption of established patterns of cultural, institutional, and political life, African Americans built and rebuilt forms of community under the impact of new conditions, including the rise of a new wave of voluntary black migration from Africa and elsewhere by the close of the 20th century.


Huju ◽  
2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan P. J. Stock

This chapter examines how music becomes inscribed with social power. Topics considered include the reorganization of huju troupes in the new People's Republic of China, post-1949; the impact of the specialist composer since the 1950s; the changing role of the performer; and the expression of political content in dramatic situations, words, actions, and music. Regional opera styles, such as Shanghai opera, it turns out, led the way in the reform of traditional opera in mainland China, with adaptations applied in these styles later transplanted to more established historical forms such as Beijing opera. It is argued that music in huju makes a special contribution to the ‘envoicing’ of the weak, a tendency that becomes problematic at times when the ordinary folk who people these operas must be portrayed as dauntless revolutionaries. Ironically, perhaps, the operas produced at the most publicly politicized periods of China's recent history are those that now appear the least eloquent in terms of their political argument.


Author(s):  
Marcin Wodzinski

This chapter explores The Jewish Population of Breslau, 1812–1914. This book is a fragment of a doctoral dissertation by Leszek Ziątkowski. Only the part discussing two key issues in the life of the Breslau Jewish community: its demographic development and its socio-topography was published. Despite the book's many strengths, the chapter mostly addresses its many weaknesses. It remarks that the book's title promises much more than we get. In vain one looks for information on important events in the history of Breslau Jews: on the emancipation edict and the impact of the Prussian ‘Jewish’ legislation on the everyday work of the Breslau kehilah; on religious life (including the famous Tiktin–Geiger controversy); on social, economic, and political life; on the role played by the Jewish Theological Seminar, and other key issues. This thus leaves the reader with a sense of dissatisfaction — more so for the fact that there is currently no monograph describing this period in the history of Breslau's Jews.


2019 ◽  
pp. 41-70
Author(s):  
George Pattison

The modern world has been marked by a recurring sense of the degradation of language. According to Hannah Arendt, for whom the possibility of politics is interdependent with the possibility of authentic speech, this generates a political crisis, connected to the role of science in contemporary society. The impact of science on the language of public discourse is further explored through Habermas and Uwe Poerksen. Their analyses receive added force through the development of new communications technologies that are proving fateful both for individuals and their personal relationship as well as for political life. Though acknowledging the optimism still associated with these technologies in some quarters, the chapter asks how we can protect against their negative effects. The thought of Byung-Chul Han is used to identify the need for attentive listening and a sense of the uniqueness of the human countenance and name to counter the digital shitstorm.


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