scholarly journals The Enigma of Commoning in Precarious Times: A Critical Perspective on Social Transformation

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-66
Author(s):  
Carl-Ulrik Schierup ◽  
Aleksandra Alund
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
Civic Agency ◽  
The Common

The article explores movements for social transformation in precarious times of austerity, dispossessed commons, and narrow nationalism. The authors contribute to social theory by linking questions by critics of “post-politics” to precarity studies on changing conditions of citizenship, labour and livelihoods. They discuss an ambiguous constitution of precariat movements in the borderlands between “civil” and “uncivil” society and “invited” and “invented” spaces for civic agency, and posit that contending movements of today are drawing intellectual energy from past movements for democracy, recognition and the common. The paper discusses the issue of an urban justice movement in Sweden emerging from the precariat in this formerly exceptionalist welfare state’s most disadvantaged urban areas. With its vision of reconstructing commons with roots in the working class movement, it has put forward claims for an egalitarian and non-racial democracy while confronting politically grounded frames of institutional conditionality.

Diversity of organisms

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip James
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Native Species ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Green Spaces ◽  
The Common ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
Micro Organisms ◽  
Diversity Of Life

The focus of this chapter is an examination of the diversity of living organisms found within urban environments, both inside and outside buildings. The discussion commences with prions and viruses before moving on to consider micro-organisms, plants, and animals. Prions and viruses cause disease in plants and animals, including humans. Micro-organisms are ubiquitous and are found in great numbers throughout urban environments. New technologies are providing new insights into their diversity. Plants may be found inside buildings as well as in gardens and other green spaces. The final sections of the chapter offer a discussion of the diversity of animals that live in urban areas for part or all of their life cycle. Examples of the diversity of life in urban environments are presented throughout, including native and non-native species, those that are benign and deadly, and the common and the rare.

Marking Religious and Ethnic Boundaries: Cases from the Ancient Golan Heights

2000 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Gregg
Keyword(s):  
Rhode Island ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Small Communities ◽  
Rural Settings ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Roman Period ◽  
Common Era

In the aftermath of the 1967 “Six Days' War,” 254 ancient inscribed stones were found in forty-four towns and villages of the Golan Heights—241 in Greek, 12 in Hebrew or Aramaic, and 1 in Latin. These stones, along with numerous architectural fragments, served as the basis of the 1996 book by myself and Dan Urman, Jews, Pagans, and Christians in the Golan Heights—a study of settlement patterns of people of the three religions in this region in the early centuries of the common era.1 The area of the Golan heights, roughly the size of Rhode Island, was in antiquity a place of agriculture and, for the most part, small communities. Though historians of religions in the late Roman period have long been aware of the “quartering” of cities, and of the locations of particular religious groups in this or that section of urban areas, we have had little information concerning the ways in which Hellenes, Jews, and Christians took up residence in relation to each other in those rural settings featuring numerous towns and hamlets— most presumably too small to have “zones” for ethnic and religious groups. The surviving artifacts of a number of the Golan sites gave the opportunity for a case study. Part 1 of this article centers on evidence for the locations and possible interactions of members of these religious groups in the Golan from the third to the seventh centuries and entails a summary of findings in the earlier work, while part 2 takes up several lingering questions about religious identity and ways of “marking” it within Golan countryside communities. Both sections can be placed under a rubric of “boundary drawing and religion.”

Risk, propriety, and sexual assault

2009 ◽  
pp. 93-111
Author(s):  
Diana Young
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Closed System ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Risk Theory ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Canadian Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
A Site ◽  
Traditional Norms

- Legal theorists often conceive of the law as a closed system of reasoning, and as the central mechanism through which the uses of power are conferred and circumscribed. However, social theory challenges this conception of law by telling us that a great deal of power is non-juridical in nature, operating through discursive practices that define and normalize conduct. This raises doubts as to whether juridical power can be used to achieve social transformation. Risk theory uncovers discursive practices that operate as non-juridical sites of power, by showing how risk analyses normalize contingent values through the use of value-neutral terms of statistical probabilities. For example, feminist criminologists, drawing on risk theory, have shown us how risk discourses can be used to reinforce traditional norms of femininity, particularly by responsibilizing women for minimizing the risk of sexual assault. Using an example from the Canadian law of sexual assault, this paper considers whether the law inevitably reproduces the very discourses of femininity that many law reformers are trying to disrupt, or whether it might act as a site wherein these discourses may be challenged.

scholarly journals 2 + 1 Highways: Overview and Future Directions

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Manuel Romana ◽  
Marilo Martin-Gasulla ◽  
Ana T. Moreno
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
High Performance ◽  
White Paper ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Traffic Volumes ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
The Common ◽  
Rural Access ◽  
Transportation Research

Most of the rural transportation system is composed of two-lane highways, and many of them serve as the primary means for rural access to urban areas and freeways. In some highways, traffic volumes can be not high enough to justify a four-lane highway but higher than can be served by isolated passing lanes, or can present high number of head-on collisions. In those conditions, 2 + 1 highways are potentially applicable. This type of highway is used to provide high-performance highways as intermediate solution between the common two-lane highway and the freeway. Successful experiences reported in Germany, Sweden, Finland, Poland, or Texas (US) may suggest that they are potentially applicable in other countries. The objective of this white paper is to provide an overview of the past practice in 2 + 1 highways and discuss the research directions and challenges in this field, specially focusing on, but not limited to, operational research in association with the activities of the Subcommittee on Two-Lane Highways (AHB40 2.2) of the Transportation Research Board. The significance of this paper is twofold: (1) it provides wider coverage of past 2 + 1 highways design and evaluation, and (2) it discusses future directions of this field.

scholarly journals Contemporary moral philosophy in the context of the social transformation

2002 ◽  
pp. 193-202
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Dobrijevic
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Practical Relevance ◽  
Moral Thinking ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Selective Bibliography

The article contains an explanation of the topic to be dealt with by the author within the work on the project 'Applying Modern Philosophical-Political Paradigms on Processes of Social Transformation in Serbia/FRJ'' of the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory. In the first part of the paper the basic conception of the work as well as theoretical and practical relevance of the proposed topic are presented. In the second part, author emphasis the weight of the 'two-level theory' of moral thinking, which was elaborated by Richard Mervyn Hare, utilitarian philosopher. In the third part, the plan and the content of the forthcoming work are outlined. Basic and selective bibliography which author will be rely on in the elaboration of the proposed topic is given at the end of this article.

Representing the Worker in Postsocialist Public Space: Art and Politics under Neoliberalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 98 ◽  
pp. 43-76
Author(s):  
Raino Isto
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Construction Projects ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Labor Conditions ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
New Public ◽  
History Of

AbstractAcross former Eastern Europe, the transition from state socialism toward neoliberal capitalism has been accompanied by a marked reduction in emphasis on working-class identities. Because of the centrality of class to socialist-era identity-construction projects, the recent and relatively sudden ascendancy of various forms of individualist, consumption-oriented subjectivity in postrevolutionary societies has produced conflicts that are often more visible than in societies where capitalism has been the accepted economic paradigm for much longer. This shift can be seen in the realm of art and visual culture: Images of the worker once dominated public spaces under state socialism, competing in number with representations of leaders and communist ideologues, but since 1989 they have often been vandalized, dismantled, or else relocated to decay in relative obscurity. Where new public images of the worker do appear in postsocialist neoliberal conditions, they frequently serve as nexuses of controversy, where generational and ideological conflicts regarding current labor conditions and the legacy of worker solidarity play out. The debates surrounding representations of workers in postsocialism are both part of a global history of postsocialist art and part of the history of labor and its relation to contemporary urban space. This article examines artistic representations of the worker sited in public space in postsocialist Albania, in order to map the political and artistic discourses that animate engagements with working-class identity in conditions of neoliberal social transformation.

scholarly journals Shattered Dreams and Stolen Childhood: A Study of Child Labour and Child Rights in Restaurants and Hotels of Pokhara, Nepal

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 125-135
Author(s):  
Prakash Upadhyay
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
Wicked Problem ◽  
Master Plan ◽  
Vicious Cycle ◽  
National Plan ◽  
Child Rights ◽  
Labour Exploitation ◽  
The Common ◽  
Heavy Workload

Nepal is committed to end child labour expressed by the ratification of ILO convention and its national plan of action for children and Master Plan to end child labour. However, the wicked problem’ of child labour is increasing at an alarming rate in urban areas. New hotels and restaurants have been opened and along with it a new way of child labour exploitation has emerged in urban centres. Most of the workers in restaurants/hotels of Pokhara are children. The employers of such business prefer child labour as they are cheap and can be easily exploited. This study attempts to determine the extent to which child labour constitutes a violation of child rights. Pedestal on theories of exploitation and structural-functionalism the study result reveals that condition of child labourers is disgraceful with a shattered dream and stolen childhood—a result of family dysfunction and child rights violation by employer that has thwarted the opportunities for healthy adulthood under a vicious cycle of deprivation, abuse and exploitation. Amid noxious relationship between child labourer and the employer, child labourers face violence and sexual harassment by employer, senior staff and customers. Heavy workload, trouncing and dragging by hair and ill-treatment are the common violence faced by child labourer. Most of the employers are ignorant of child rights. It is a paradox that child labourer is valuable for employer but the life of child labourer is worthless. Most of the child labourers are willing to rehabilitate.  

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