scholarly journals “They Sold Us Illusions”: Informality, Redevelopment, and the Politics of Limpieza in the Dominican Republic

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 252-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raksha Vasudevan ◽  
Bjørn Sletto
Keyword(s):  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
Neighborhood Planning ◽  
Community Members ◽  
State Planning ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Face ◽  
River Communities

In the capital city of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, climate change and environmental concerns are used to justify massive redevelopment projects in informal settlements located along the rivers Ozama and Isabela. Residents in such river communities negotiate the uncertainty of state planning under a new socio-environmentalism that prioritizes the environment over social concerns, while continuing to pursue bottom-up neighborhood planning despite the powerful rationality of <em>limpieza</em> (cleanliness), the pervasive techniques of responsibilization, and the celebratory spectacles of megaprojects. The uncertainty resulting from governance under socio-environmentalism produces ambivalence towards environmentcentered projects among residents. Drawing on oral histories and interviews with long-time community members, we suggest that residents engage in three ‘sensemaking strategies’ to process their ambivalence in the face of daily precarity, in particular the ongoing threat of evictions. Residents ‘keep up’ with the state and strategically utilize planning language to advocate for community priorities. They engage in practices of storytelling that reproduce a deep sense of community and provide a longer historical understanding of planning interventions. Finally, through verbal speculation and other ‘unsanctioned speech acts’ they analyze disruptions caused by socio-environmentalism, build solidarity with other communities, and think ahead despite uncertainty.

The Wreck of the USS Memphis in the Dominican Republic

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Paul Roorda
Keyword(s):  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Marine Corps ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
Good Neighbor Policy ◽  
Death Toll ◽  
Us Imperialism ◽  
The Us ◽  
Good Neighbor

On August 29, 1916, the USS Memphis wrecked on the coast of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. A series of enormous waves drove the heavy armored cruiser ashore, killing forty-five sailors. The fact that the death toll was not much higher is owed to the heroic efforts of Dominicans to rescue the survivors of the shipwreck. This was despite the fact that the US Marine Corps had invaded their country three months before, initiating an occupation with unwonted violence. The US Marine occupation of the Dominican Republic would last for eight years, compiling a record of brutality inflicted on the civilian population that Senate hearings documented in excruciating detail. In the aftermath of the traumatic occupation, the shipwreck of the USS Memphis itself, rusting away in plain sight along the seaside boulevard in the Dominican capital city, became symbolic of US imperialism. The dictator Rafael Trujillo, a Marine protégé who seized power in 1930, pointed to the wreck as a relic of the days before US domination, contrasting it with the happy days after national sovereignty had been attained under his own strong rule. In order to implement the Good Neighbor Policy, an effort to expunge the negative legacy of the era of intervention and occupation known as “Gunboat Diplomacy,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the removal of the wreck of the Memphis after taking office in 1933. The wreck’s removal finally took place in 1937.

scholarly journals Malaria outbreak response in urban Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: lessons learned for community engagement

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Dianelba Valdez ◽  
Hunter Keys ◽  
Keyla Ureña ◽  
Domingo Cabral ◽  
Francisco Camilo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Community Engagement ◽  
Active Surveillance ◽  
Health Workers ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
Outbreak Response ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Malaria Outbreak

Community engagement is crucial for public health initiatives, yet it remains an under-studied process within national disease elimination programs. This report shares key lessons learned for community engagement practices during a malaria outbreak response in the Los Tres Brazos neighborhood of urban Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic from 2015-2016. In this two-year period, 233 cases of malaria were reported—more than seven times the number of cases (31) reported in the previous two years. The initial outbreak response by the national malaria program emphasized “top-down” interventions such as active surveillance, vector control, and educative talks within the community. Despite a transient reduction in reported cases in mid-2015, transmission resurged at the end of 2015. The program responded by introducing active roles for trained community members that included door-to-door fever screening, testing with rapid diagnostic tests and treatment. Malaria cases declined significantly throughout 2016 and community-based active surveillance infrastructure helped to detect and limit a small episode of transmission in 2017. Results from qualitative research among community members revealed two key factors that facilitated their cooperation with community-based surveillance activities: motivation to help one’s community; and trust among stakeholders (community health workers, their neighbors and other key figures in the community, and malaria program staff and leadership). This experience suggests that community-led interventions and the program’s willingness to learn and adapt under changing circumstances can help control malaria transmission and pave the way for elimination.

Informal landscapes and the performative placing of insurgent planning

2020 ◽  
pp. 147309522095939
Author(s):  
Bjørn Sletto
Keyword(s):  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Plant Production ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
Planning Practice ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Face ◽  
Emotional Geographies

Non-representational theory illuminates the role of mundane, performative presentations in the production of emotional geographies, while drawing attention to the unexpected (the event, the encounter, the disturbance) which challenge hegemonic representations of landscapes. This focus on situated and performative entanglement of social and material relations has important implications for insurgent planning practice and theory. Such creative productions of emotional geographies, grounded in particular places and socialities, may foster new imaginaries and generate new and innovative spaces of engagement and oppositional planning practices. Drawing on performativity and non-representational theory, this article proposes a reimagining of insurgent planning that takes into account everyday practices and meaning-making but also the materiality of landscape in particular places. The theoretical discussion draws on the example of household plant production and vermicomposting in Los Platanitos, Santo Domingo Norte, Dominican Republic. The article describes the performative relationships between people, plants, and worms in Los Platanitos, examining the ways in which this relationality serves as a locus for insurgent planning practices in the face of a major stormwater project.

A Review on Methods of Face Masks Sterilization for Reuse Owing To Crisis During COVID-19

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (SPL1) ◽  
pp. 1240-1243
Author(s):  
Pradyuman Singh Rajput ◽  
Asish Kumar Saha ◽  
Insiya Gangardiwala ◽  
Anand Vijayakumar Palur Ramakrishnan
Keyword(s):  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Health Hazard ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Limited Resources ◽  
Protective Equipment ◽  
First Line ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Enormous Amount ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common

The COVID-19 pandemic initially started from the Wuhan capital city of Hubei Province in the People's Republic of China had now led to a severe public health hazard across the globe, the recorded death is approximately 958 thousand globally and counting. With the enormous amount of spread of the disease, a severe crisis for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is being noticed across the globe. Face masks being the first line of defence for all the healthcare workers as well for the common public. It became mandatory to wear face masks before entering the patient care area. The countries who are not manufacturing it locally had to depend on other countries for the procurement. As there is a severe supply chain disruption due to the lockdown measures taken by all the countries to contain the disease, so it had become difficult to procure the face masks from the manufacturing countries. The price for these PPEs is also rising at an alarming rate with the increase in the COVID-19 cases and the huge rate of consumption by the healthcare and other sectors. Therefore, with limited resources, the hospital has to run its services. The CDC, WHO and ICMR have released several guidelines from time to time for sterilization and reuse of face masks. This article will discuss the various methods that can be utilized to sterilize the face masks and reuse of it.

The Many Faces of Socioeconomic Change

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Toye
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Development ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Face ◽  
Scientific Expertise ◽  
The Many ◽  
Century Development

This book provides a survey of different ways in which economic sociocultural and political aspects of human progress have been studied since the time of Adam Smith. Inevitably, over such a long time span, it has been necessary to concentrate on highlighting the most significant contributions, rather than attempting an exhaustive treatment. The aim has been to bring into focus an outline of the main long-term changes in the way that socioeconomic development has been envisaged. The argument presented is that the idea of socioeconomic development emerged with the creation of grand evolutionary sequences of social progress that were the products of Enlightenment and mid-Victorian thinkers. By the middle of the twentieth century, when interest in the accelerating development gave the topic a new impetus, its scope narrowed to a set of economically based strategies. After 1960, however, faith in such strategies began to wane, in the face of indifferent results and general faltering of confidence in economists’ boasts of scientific expertise. In the twenty-first century, development research is being pursued using a research method that generates disconnected results. As a result, it seems unlikely that any grand narrative will be created in the future and that neo-liberalism will be the last of this particular kind of socioeconomic theory.

Redeeming Santo Domingo: North Atlantic Missionaries and the Racial Conversion of a Nation

2020 ◽  
Vol 89 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-100
Author(s):  
Christina Cecelia Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Dominican Republic ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Alternative Future ◽  
Protestant Missions ◽  
Racially Ambiguous ◽  
Race And Religion ◽  
Key Interventions

AbstractThis article examines North Atlantic views of Protestant missions and race in the Dominican Republic between 1905 and 1911, a brief period of political stability in the years leading up to the U.S. Occupation (1916–1924). Although Protestant missions during this period remained small in scale on the Catholic island, the views of British and American missionaries evidence how international perceptions of Dominicans transformed in the early twentieth century. Thus, this article makes two key interventions within the literature on Caribbean race and religion. First, it shows how outsiders’ ideas about the Dominican Republic's racial composition aimed to change the Dominican Republic from a “black” country into a racially ambiguous “Latin” one on the international stage. Second, in using North Atlantic missionaries’ perspectives to track this shift, it argues that black-led Protestant congregations represented a possible alternative future that both elite Dominicans and white North Atlantic missionaries rejected.

Misoprostol and declining abortion-related morbidity in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: a temporal association

2005 ◽  
Vol 112 (9) ◽  
pp. 1291-1296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suellen Miller ◽  
Tara Lehman ◽  
Martha Campbell ◽  
Anke Hemmerling ◽  
Sonia Brito Anderson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Temporal Association ◽  
Santo Domingo

In vitro Antimicrobial Activity of Tropical Medicinal Plants used in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Part 2

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-60
Author(s):  
Cesar Manuel Lozano ◽  
Manuel Antonio Vasquez Tineo ◽  
Maritza Ramirez ◽  
Maria Isabel Infante
Keyword(s):  
Antimicrobial Activity ◽  
Medicinal Plants ◽  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
In Vitro Antimicrobial Activity

scholarly journals Utjecaj podizanja trajnih naselja i uzgoja žitarica na razvoj putnih komunikacija / The impact of permanent settlements and grain cultivation on the development of road communications

2017 ◽  
pp. 32-42
Author(s):  
Dženan Brigić
Keyword(s):  
Communication Network ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Direct Impact ◽  
Neolithic Period ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Communication Development ◽  
The Road ◽  
Long Time ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The Impact

The transformation of hunter-gatherer society, who lived as nomads for a  very long time, largely influenced the development of road communication. These communities now established permanent settlements, especially in arable lands, and had a somewhat lifestyle than before. The cultivation of grains  and domestication of animals meant that people had no more need for migration and the search for better locations, instead they started setting up their  homes in the proximity to other community members, thereby forming the  first Neolithic settlements. By forming the settlements appeared the need to  establish a communication with other communities in the territory of present-day Balkans and wider, usually for the purpose of trade of certain goods,  which had a direct impact on the road communication development that laid  foundations for the development of the roads in the Roman period. Several  such settlements are known in the territory of present-day Bosnia that maintained continuity and tradition as well as road communications from the  Neolithic period up to the Roman period, i.e. Roman governor Publius Cornelius Dolabella, under whose governorship the widest road communication  network was built in the territory of the province of Dalmatia.     

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