Building Dignity’s Diaspora through Rapumentary Film: Learning from Ngātahi

Author(s):  
Luis Alvarez

Through an exploration of Ngātahi: Know the Links, a six-part docu/rapumentary film by Maori filmmaker, rapper, musician, and activist Dean Hapeta, I propose that Hapeta, the folks in his films, and the many they identify with are part of a diaspora, one based on interlinked struggles for dignity rather than any particular place or ethnic affiliation. The film uncovers and encourages a diaspora made up of the many local spaces and small politics that seek to make dominant neoliberal, race, or power relations unworkable on the ground, even if only for a moment at a festival, spontaneous musical or poetic performance, or house party. The project both documents and cultivates dignity’s diaspora, showing how people make sense of and strike back against the forces of globalization. They reveal connections between a range of movements for autonomy and freedom. In the larger-than-life murals of pre-Columbian history in Los Angeles and revolutionary struggle in Belfast, the poetic verses thrown on streets in Rapid City and Cape Town or the public marches for the return of indigenous land and against police brutality in San Francisco and the Philippines, Ngātahi illumines dignity’s diaspora. Hapeta and the many new friends he makes along the Ngātahi trail show us that the small politics of cultural work and performance may not be so small after all. More than just imaginary solutions to real problems, the cultural practices evident in Ngātahi enable people to speak back against their own erasure by making a record of events, injustices, and calls for change that might be otherwise ignored or forgotten. Hapeta’s films suggest that “revolution” in the neoliberal, postmodern, postcolonial era may be more plausible with a small “r” and an “s” at the end. The artists and activists in Ngātahi ultimately practice a politics of the possible, demonstrating that utopian hopes for a better future can emerge from the dystopian and almost apocalyptic misery left in the wake of global capitalism and imperialism.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Lisa Grace S. Bersales ◽  
Josefina V. Almeda ◽  
Sabrina O. Romasoc ◽  
Marie Nadeen R. Martinez ◽  
Dannela Jann B. Galias

With the advancement of technology, digitalization, and the internet of things, large amounts of complex data are being produced daily. This vast quantity of various data produced at high speed is referred to as Big Data. The utilization of Big Data is being implemented with success in the private sector, yet the public sector seems to be falling behind despite the many potentials Big Data has already presented. In this regard, this paper explores ways in which the government can recognize the use of Big Data for official statistics. It begins by gathering and presenting Big Data-related initiatives and projects across the globe for various types and sources of Big Data implemented. Further, this paper discusses the opportunities, challenges, and risks associated with using Big Data, particularly in official statistics. This paper also aims to assess the current utilization of Big Data in the country through focus group discussions and key informant interviews. Based on desk review, discussions, and interviews, the paper then concludes with a proposed framework that provides ways in which Big Data may be utilized by the government to augment official statistics.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Zozaya-Montes ◽  
Nicola Schiavottiello

The UNESCO World Heritage city of Évora (Portugal) hosted the second Heritales – International Heritage Film Festival in September 2017. In this edition the festival focused on current and past sustainable communities, selecting works that explored and problematized the relationship and coexistence of modernity and sustainability when applied to human groups and societies. The films presented the everyday life, knowledge, crafts and know-how of ordinary people highlighting the changes and challenges that the expansion of consumer-based economies, globalization and world politics have brought. As organizers, by focusing on sustainability in heritage context, we wanted to go beyond current preservation strategies of the tangible and intangible heritage, to promote a reflection on the “culture of sustainability” itself, looking at how sustainable ways-of-existence have characterized various communities and cultural practices worldwide. Since its first edition, the festival has been a space for the promotion of a critical understanding of cultural heritage, aimed to the broader public. By using emblematic historical places as stage, Heritales has challenged the mainstream cultural heritage scientific communication. Its proposal is to approach heritage’s issues through multiple types of media and artistic work such as films and documentaries but also cultural heritage’s games, exhibitions, theatre and performance, with talks and several communication strategies to facilitate the encounter between the authors and the public. Although the festival has received many positive feedbacks and the support of various entities such as the UNESCO Chair of the University of Évora (Portugal) and the FCT (Science and Technology Foundation, Portugal) it is still at its early stage of action. In this paper we would like to present the results of our experiment and analyse its concept and results, so that more collaborative and sustainable methodologies can also become a part of our plan of actionfor the organization of future events.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
И.А. Шмелева ◽  
С.Э. Шмелев

A new strategic direction for greening our cities and making them smart to reduce the environmental impact of their performance, increase employment and economic viability and to enhance the quality of life requires a thorough assessment of sustainability and smart urban performance. The research presented in this paper is based on data on 143 global cities including London, New York, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Moscow, Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, Shanghai, Sydney and Tokyo. Exploring linkages between different sustainability and smart city dimensions, this study applied a multi-criteria approach using a panel of 20 indicators to assess urban sustainability performance of global cities. The assessment focused on the drivers of CO2 emissions in cities, including important aspects of energy transitions, the share of coal in the energy mix and renewable energy, public transport, cycling patterns and pedestrianization, waste recycling as well as carbon tax. The results show that San Francisco leads in economic and environmental priorities, and Stockholm leads insocial and smart city priorities. Seoul consistently performs very successfully across the whole spectrum of indicators. We devote considerable attention to the strategies, policies and performance of the leading cities, namely, San Francisco, Stockholm and Seoul. This assessment could be a valuable tool for policy-makers and investors, and could help identify linkages between different sustainability dimensions, as well as sustainable development potential and investment opportunities in cities.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Nurul Athirah Abd Manaf

<p>Performance audit, compared to the traditional financial and compliance audits, is a relatively new innovation that emerged amidst accountability concerns in the public sector. Economic crises, ministerial scandal and inefficiencies were among the impetus that led the public to demand better performance and greater accountability in the public sector, and performance audit was among the many responses to such demand. In New Zealand, performance audit is carried out by the Controller and Auditor General (the AG) under the mandate granted by the Public Audit Act 2001. Adapting the methodology from grounded theory, this study looks at the impact of performance audit on seven entities audited in 2006 by the AG. This study found that the entities were impacted through the manifestation of implemented audit recommendations and the attainment of performance audit goals. In particular, there is a high acceptance and implementation rate to the audit recommendations made in the seven audits. The implementation of accepted recommendations consequently led to the changes within the entities in terms of managerial practices, as well as internal systems and processes. In some entities, these changes were translated into performance improvement, where the entities experienced changes in the way that they carried out their operations. However, based on interviewees' accounts being the auditees of the audits, most interviewees viewed performance audit as having a greater role for performance accountability compared to performance improvement. Whilst the auditees found the audit recommendations useful, the impact on performance in their view has not been significant. Rather, the auditees viewed performance audit as having a more important role as an assurance tool in terms of their accountability to the public.</p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-25
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Shanken

The unbuilt proposals for the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair offer a cross section of designs put before the public in a formative moment just before modernism came to dominate architectural discourse and production. Projects by luminaries Bernard Maybeck and Richard Neutra joined projects by Joseph Strauss and Henry Killam Murphy. Here were architectural hopefuls at the nadir of the Great Depression attempting to draw their way into the commission of a lifetime. Thus, a Beaux-Arts bohemian competed with a sincere modernist, a self-promoting engineer, and America's leading practitioner in China. At the same time, the proposals were part of the larger economic and political landscape of San Francisco, as neighborhood associations and politicians used them to attract the fair to their part of the city. More than pie in the sky, these designs show in amplified form the way architecture is embedded in public discourse as a form of persuasion, a kind of politics by other means through which elites and other stakeholders argued for their preferred reality. As tools of intra-urban boosterism, these plans reveal the competing interests within San Francisco at a pivotal moment in its development, when its future lay in the formation of a regional metropolis that could compete with Los Angeles for commerce on the West Coast and beyond.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Nurul Athirah Abd Manaf

<p>Performance audit, compared to the traditional financial and compliance audits, is a relatively new innovation that emerged amidst accountability concerns in the public sector. Economic crises, ministerial scandal and inefficiencies were among the impetus that led the public to demand better performance and greater accountability in the public sector, and performance audit was among the many responses to such demand. In New Zealand, performance audit is carried out by the Controller and Auditor General (the AG) under the mandate granted by the Public Audit Act 2001. Adapting the methodology from grounded theory, this study looks at the impact of performance audit on seven entities audited in 2006 by the AG. This study found that the entities were impacted through the manifestation of implemented audit recommendations and the attainment of performance audit goals. In particular, there is a high acceptance and implementation rate to the audit recommendations made in the seven audits. The implementation of accepted recommendations consequently led to the changes within the entities in terms of managerial practices, as well as internal systems and processes. In some entities, these changes were translated into performance improvement, where the entities experienced changes in the way that they carried out their operations. However, based on interviewees' accounts being the auditees of the audits, most interviewees viewed performance audit as having a greater role for performance accountability compared to performance improvement. Whilst the auditees found the audit recommendations useful, the impact on performance in their view has not been significant. Rather, the auditees viewed performance audit as having a more important role as an assurance tool in terms of their accountability to the public.</p>


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

During the late 17th-early 18th century, Spanish forces colonized the middle reaches of the Neches River and its tributaries when several missions were established for the Tejas and other Hasinai tribes in this locale: Mission San Francisco de los Tejas, 1690-1693, Mission El Santisimo de Nombre Maria (1690-1692), and Mission Nuestra Padre de San Francisco de Tejas (1716-1719, 1721-1730), otherwise known as Mission San Francisco de los Nechas. These missions were established along the Hasinai Trace, later known as El Camino Real de los Tejas . None of these missions have been located and identified in the many archaeological investigations that have been conducted in East Texas since the 1930s. It has been known, however, since 1940 that early 18th century artifacts have been found at the George C. Davis site (41CE19) on the Neches River at the crossing of the Camino Real. H. Perry Newell, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) excavator of the site, had noted in the published report on the 1939-1941 excavations at the George C. Davis site, that: some pieces of Spanish pottery found near a spring in one of the ravines cutting the slope a few hundred yards southeast from the mound [Mound A]…The Spanish ware were examined by Arthur Woodward, Los Angeles County Museum…The Spanish ware was analyzed as follows: “The fragment of blue and white glazed ware is Mexican majolica, made at Puebla, Mexico, sometime between 1700-76 but more than likely it dates from 1720-1750." This majolica from the George C. Davis site, about 20 sherds in total, has been recently relocated in the collections of the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin. The sherds are from early 18th century (ca. 1720) Puebla Blue on White plates, a bowl, and a cup. Given the rarity of majolica on archaeological sites in East Texas outside of Spanish Colonial archaeological deposits, its presence at the George C. Davis site is especially intriguing given the fact that Mission San Francisco de Tejas/de los Nechas or Neches was built in this part of the Neches River valley in 1716, then rebuilt in 1721, and finally abandoned in 1730.


Author(s):  
Sharon Levy

On a May morning in 1957, ten thousand fish floated on the eastern edge of San Francisco Bay, their pale, upturned bellies bobbing on the surface of the dark water. The crowd of carcasses described an arc that stretched along the shore from Richmond’s harbor south to Point Isabel. Many striped bass, a prized game fish, were among the dead. Seth Gordon, director of California Department of Fish and Game (DFG), fielded complaints from anglers outraged by the fish kill. The Public Health Committee of the State Assembly passed a resolution admonishing DFG for its failure to enforce pollution control laws. Gordon told the committee members off. “We want to stop pollution,” he said, “but the law as it stands puts our Department in the position of a boxer going into the ring with one hand tied behind his back.” The ability to set and enforce pollution standards rested with California’s nine regional water pollution control boards. To effect any change, Gordon’s department had to prove to the boards’ satisfaction that pollution allowed by existing standards was harmful to fish, a challenge that had so far proved impossible. Responding to questions about the East Bay fish kill, he said, “We still don’t know what caused the die-off, or where it came from.” David Joseph was then starting out as a DFG biologist, armed with a doctorate in marine biology from the University of California at Los Angeles. Born in Connecticut, on a cooperative farm where his parents raised dairy cows and shade-grown tobacco with other immigrant Russian Jews, he’d grown up in Inglewood, in southern California, when the place was still a bucolic town and he could ride his horse to the beach. He’d met his wife, Marion, when they were both students at UCLA. “He was an outdoor guy,” she remembers. “He wasn’t a fisherman, he just loved the sea, loved the land. His work was always going to have something to do with protecting the environment.”


Author(s):  
Paula T. Morelli ◽  
Alma Trinidad ◽  
Richard Alboroto

Filipinos are the second largest group of Asians in the United States; more than 3.4 million Filipino Americans live primarily within the largest U.S. continental cities (including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York) and Hawaii. Annexation of the Philippines, following the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), granted Filipinos unrestricted immigration to the United States as “American nationals” without right to U.S. citizenship. Throughout this more than one-hundred-year relationship, Filipinos in the United States endured discrimination, race-based violence, and a series of restrictive federal legislation impacting civil rights and immigration. Filipinos may present with a distinctly Western orientation in areas such as values and contemporary ideas; however, their traditional social and cultural characteristics contrast considerably with mainstream American culture. This entry provides a brief historic, geopolitical and cultural context to facilitate the work of social work practitioners.


2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-212
Author(s):  
Gregory L Thompson ◽  
Danika Bellamy-Sankar

During the interwar period, illegal shared ride sedans (known as ‘wildcat sedans’) appealed to a significant fraction of travellers between Los Angeles and San Francisco, defying California’s ethos of regulated rail and bus monopolies. Several historians documented the urban jitney phenomenon, but none examined California’s wildcat sedans. This paper attempts to fill that void. It examines how private automobiles posed a challenge to corporate interests in the intercity public transportation, investigating the structure and economics of the wildcatters, how wildcatters exploited the legal ambiguities of private motor vehicles to challenge those corporations, and the public welfare consequences of this defiance of the regulatory state.


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