scholarly journals The extractive infrastructures of contact tracing apps

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 9.1-9.9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriyam Aouragh ◽  
Seda Gürses ◽  
Helen Pritchard ◽  
Femke Snelting

The COVID-19 pandemic will go down in history as a major crisis, with calls for debt moratoriums that are expected to have gruesome effects in the Global South. Another tale of this crisis that would come to dominate COVID-19 news across the world was a new technological application: the contact tracing apps. In this article, we argue that both accounts ‐ economic implications for the Global South and the ideology of techno-solutionism ‐ are closely related. We map the phenomenon of the tracing app onto past and present wealth accumulations. To understand these exploitative realities, we focus on the implications of contact tracing apps and their relation with extractive technologies as we build on the notion racial capitalism. By presenting themselves in isolation of capitalism and extractivism, contact tracing apps hide raw realities, concealing the supply chains that allow the production of these technologies and the exploitative conditions of labour that make their computational magic manifest itself. As a result of this artificial separation, the technological solutionism of contract tracing apps is ultimately presented as a moral choice between life and death. We regard our work as requiring continuous undoing ‐ a necessary but unfinished formal dismantling of colonial structures through decolonial resistance.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neide Célia Ferreira Barros

This book analyzes the criminal processes of homicides or attempted homicides of women in Goiânia during the period of 1970-1984. We observed the gender power relations in the capital of Goiás, a border region, a mixture of country life elements and discourses of modernity. Hence, through case reports of women who suffered attacks on their lives in a period of intense changes, such as the organization of feminist groups in Brazil and the world, political and economic repercussions of the construction of Brasília in Goiás and mass immigration to Goiânia, we have pursued to understand what it meant socially to "be a man" and "to be a woman" in this capital and what consequences were brought into their bodies, concerning life and death, protection and punishment.


Author(s):  
Yilmaz Akyüz

The crisis demolished the myth that EDEs were decoupled from advanced economies and BRICS were becoming new engines of global growth. From 2011 onwards, with the end of the twin booms in commodity prices and capital inflows, growth in EDEs has converged downward towards the depressed levels of advanced economies from the very high levels achieved in the run-up to the global crisis and the immediate aftermath. Loss of momentum is particularly visible in economies that failed to manage the earlier booms prudently. In examining the spillovers from policies in major advanced economies and China to EDEs, the chapter introduces the notion of commodity-finance nexus wherein these markets reinforce each other during both expansions and contractions. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of policies needed to put the world economy into decent shape and to avoid liquidity and debt crises in EDEs.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110164
Author(s):  
Adriana de Souza e Silva ◽  
Ragan Glover-Rijkse ◽  
Anne Njathi ◽  
Daniela de Cunto Bueno

Pokémon Go is the most popular location-based game worldwide. As a location-based game, Pokémon Go’s gameplay is connected to networked urban mobility. However, urban mobility differs significantly around the world. Large metropoles in South America and Africa, for example, experience ingrained social, cultural, and economic inequalities. With this in mind, we interviewed Pokémon Go players in two Global South cities, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Nairobi (Kenya), to understand how players navigate urban spaces not only based on gameplay but with broader concerns for safety. Our findings reveal that players negotiate their urban mobilities based on perceptions of risk and safety, choosing how to move around and avoiding areas known for violence and theft. These findings are relevant for understanding the social and political aspects of networked urban spaces as well as for investigating games as venues through which we can understand ordinary life, racial, gender, and socioeconomic inequalities.


Author(s):  
Ariane Lewis ◽  
Andrew Kumpfbeck ◽  
Jordan Liebman ◽  
Sam D. Shemie ◽  
Gene Sung ◽  
...  

There are varying medical, legal, social, religious and philosophical perspectives about the distinction between life and death. Death can be declared using cardiopulmonary or neurologic criteria throughout much of the world. After solicitation of brain death/death by neurologic criteria (BD/DNC) protocols from contacts around the world, we found that the percentage of countries with BD/DNC protocols is much lower in Africa than other developing regions. We performed an informal review of the literature to identify barriers to declaration of BD/DNC in Africa. We found that there are numerous medical, legal, social and religious barriers to the creation of BD/DNC protocols in Africa including 1) limited number of healthcare facilities, critical care resources and clinicians with relevant expertise; 2) absence of a political and legal framework codifying death; and 3) cultural and religious perspectives that present ideological conflict with the idea of BD/DNC, in particular, and between traditional and Western medicine, in general. Because there are a number of unique barriers to the creation of BD/DNC protocols in Africa, it remains to be seen how the World Brain Death Project, which is intended to create minimum standards for BD/DNC around the world, will impact BD/DNC determination in Africa.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Yang ◽  
Juan Li ◽  
Shengjie Lai ◽  
Corrine W Ruktanonchai ◽  
Weijia Xing ◽  
...  

Abstract Background The COVID-19 pandemic has posed an ongoing global crisis, but how the virus spread across the world remains poorly understood. This is of vital importance for informing current and future pandemic response strategies. Methods We performed two independent analyses, travel network-based epidemiological modelling and Bayesian phylogeographic inference, to investigate the intercontinental spread of COVID-19. Results Both approaches revealed two distinct phases of COVID-19 spread by the end of March 2020. In the first phase, COVID-19 largely circulated in China during mid-to-late January 2020 and was interrupted by containment measures in China. In the second and predominant phase extending from late February to mid-March, unrestricted movements between countries outside of China facilitated intercontinental spread, with Europe as a major source. Phylogenetic analyses also revealed that the dominant strains circulating in the USA were introduced from Europe. However, stringent restrictions on international travel across the world since late March have substantially reduced intercontinental transmission. Conclusions Our analyses highlight that heterogeneities in international travel have shaped the spatiotemporal characteristics of the pandemic. Unrestricted travel caused a large number of COVID-19 exportations from Europe to other continents between late February and mid-March, which facilitated the COVID-19 pandemic. Targeted restrictions on international travel from countries with widespread community transmission, together with improved capacity in testing, genetic sequencing and contact tracing, can inform timely strategies for mitigating and containing ongoing and future waves of COVID-19 pandemic.


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.


Author(s):  
Anda Kuduma

The article is dedicated to the evaluation of creative work by poet and translator Jānis Hvoinskis, and it characterises the content and artistic qualities of Hvoinskis’s poetry process. The main focus is on the representation of the phenomenon of the city as an essential and characteristic poetic chronotope segment in Hvoinskis’s poetry. The study aims to identify and assess the characteristic kinds of city concept formation and their importance in building Hvoinskis’s artistic style. The article highlights and evaluates the techniques for designing the artistic structure of the indivisible chronotope in Hvoinskis’s poetry. This view is based on the fundamental principles of phenomenology, i.e., an individual phenomenon (phainómeno) is crucial in the reflection of consciousness, inner temporality, intentionality, intersubjectivity, and lifeworld. In turn, the highlight of poetry subject’s primary condition and existential motifs is logically linked to the main ideas of existentialism in their attitude towards the reason of an individual’s existence, relationships to life and death, freedom of will and choice, determinism. The study’s theoretical and methodological basis includes the ideas of phenomenology theoreticians (Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others) and the theories of existentialism philosophers (Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre). Hvoinskis’s poetry allows us to speak about a city as a concept, i.e., as a universal and capacious generalising notion (which includes images, notions, symbols) from which its associative components – poetry themes, motifs, images – derive. Thus, it is possible to speak about the depth dimension of the city phenomenon. The city phenomenon in Hvoinskis’s poetry is the landscape that has been adopted as the centre of the world of the lyric subject in both poetry collections that have come out to date: “Lietus pār kanālu e” (Rain over the Channel e, 2009) and “Mūza no pilsētas N” (Muse from City N, 2019). The depth dimension in Hvoinskis’s poetry appears in the natural synthesis of mythical and real chronotope, associatively impressive and plastic imagery, expressive style kindred to surrealism poetics. The city appears as a modernism project created by the logic of industrialisation, simultaneously revealing a metaphysical dimension where symbolic images as constituents of a myth preserve the memory of wholeness of the world. The emotional atmosphere of Hvoinskis’s poetry is defined by the highly existential atmosphere – despite the harsh indifference created by the city, the sadness of existential loneliness, social distance, and aversion towards life, the poet makes the tragic and ugly strangely appealing without losing the feeling of lightness and hope. The poet’s intense intuition and imagination exhibit the congeniality with the 20th-century French modernists. Hvoinskis’s poetry muse is death, which implies life.


Author(s):  
O. I. POPOVA ◽  
◽  
A. S. LESYK ◽  

The article emphasizes that the world around us sets its own requirements for the ability of a junior student to adapt to it, to his tolerant willingness to build constructive relationships with others. In reading lessons, which aim, among other things, to form the values of primary school students, they learn to choose an individual way of self-presentation, behavior and communication. The task of the teacher is to teach to observe life, to notice human kindness, sacrifice, courage, as well as heartlessness, cruelty, indifference. Hence the signs of a tolerant personality, such as patience, indulgence, tolerance for differences, kindness, the ability to listen to others, not to judge others, to take their position, the ability to empathize, humanism. The updated content of literary material, which comprehensively covers the sphere of interests of junior schoolchildren, its emotionality, novelty, decoration, interesting forms and methods of working with texts of works and children's books with preference to problematic, creative tasks should convince students that fiction is a special kind of art, and reading – a special, unique means of satisfying cognitive interests, knowledge of the world and self-knowledge, which can not be replaced by any other means of mass culture. In the process of experimental learning, we tried to design and implement such types of educational activities of students, which contributed to the formation of tolerance in them as the most important value of the individual. After analyzing some aspects of updating the content and methodology of reading lessons in primary school in the context of implementing the ideas of tolerant education, we note that the new textbooks and manuals for extracurricular reading contain many texts with the potential for educating this quality of personality. actions of characters; to feel the state of another person, to make a moral choice. Key words: formation of tolerance in junior schoolchildren, reading lessons, educational potential of reading lessons, formation of personality of junior schoolchildren.


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