scholarly journals What can GIS do?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Lally
Keyword(s):  
Special Issue ◽  
Critical Gis ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Simple Question

This special issue is organized around the deceptively simple question: "what should the doing of critical GIS look like?" Instead of declaring what path critical GIS should take, I instead argue that we do not know what GIS can do. I suggest that we hold a place for doubt and unknowing, acknowledging that the potentials and possibilities of GIS do not preexist practice, but rather, critical GIS emerges in the doing and practice of GIS. Following this argument, I make three main claims in the article. First, I argue that understanding the possibilities for GIS requires being attentive to how particular instantiations of GIS connect with social and material relations. Second, I argue that the doing of critical GIS might use these existing limitations as a starting point for theremaking of GIS. Third, I argue that the doing of critical GIS has an important role to play in understanding how GIS is used within infrastructures of governance. I conclude by suggesting that the doing of critical GIS takes meaningful form through experimentation, openness to the encounter, and linking with existing situated practices and theories.

scholarly journals The Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Religious Exercise: Preliminary Remarks

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Adelaide Madera
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Regulatory Frameworks ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Legal Contexts

Since 2020, the spread of COVID-19 has had an overwhelming impact not only on our personal lives, but also on domestic regulatory frameworks. Influential academics have strongly underlined that, in times of deep crisis, such as the current global health crisis, the long-term workability of legal systems is put to a severe test. In this period, in fact, the protection of health has been given priority, as a precondition that is orientating many current legal choices. Such an unprecedented health emergency has also raised a serious challenge in terms of fundamental rights and liberties. Several basic rights that normally enjoy robust protection under constitutional, supranational, and international guarantees, have experienced a devastating “suspension” for the sake of public health and safety, thus giving rise to a vigorous debate concerning whether and to what extent the pandemic emergency justifies limitations on fundamental rights. The present paper introduces the Special Issue on “The crisis of the religious freedom during the age of COVID-19 pandemic”. Taking as a starting point the valuable contributions of the participants in the Special Issue, it explores analogous and distinctive implications of the COVID-19 pandemic in different legal contexts and underlines the relevance of cooperation between religious and public actors to face a global health crisis.

Editorial: Refashioning stories for celebrity counterpublics

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina Moro ◽  
Samita Nandy ◽  
Kiera Obbard ◽  
Andrew Zolides
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Ted Talks

Using celebrity narratives as a starting point, this Special Issue explores the social significance of storytelling for social change. It builds on the 8th Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies conference, which brought together scholars and media practitioners to explore how narratives inspired by the lives of celebrities, public intellectuals, critics and activists offer useful rhetorical tools to better understand dominant ideologies. This editorial further problematizes what it means to be a popular ‘storyteller’ using the critical lens of celebrity activism and life-writing. Throughout the issue, contributors analyse the politics of representation at play within a wide range of glamourous narratives, including documentaries, memoirs, TED talks, stand-up performances and award acceptance speeches in Hollywood and beyond. The studies show how we can strategically use aesthetic communication to shape identity politics in public personas and bring urgent social change in an image-driven celebrity culture.

scholarly journals GRAPE, Solar Terrestrial Physics in an operational environment

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgiana De Franceschi ◽  
Maurizio Candidi
Keyword(s):  
Space Environment ◽  
Ionospheric Scintillation ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Operational Environment ◽  
Data Infrastructure ◽  
Earth Space ◽  
Near Earth Space ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Space Data

<p>[…] The collection of papers that forms this special issue represents the whole amplitude of research that is being conducted in the framework of GRAPE, while also connecting to other initiatives that address the same objectives in regions outside the polar regions, and worldwide, such as the Training Research and Applications Network to Support the Mitigation of Ionospheric Threats (TRANSMIT; www.transmitionosphere.net), a Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) Marie Curie Initial Training Network that is focused on the study of ionospheric phenomena and their effects on systems embedded in our daily life, Near-Earth Space Data Infrastructure for e-Science (ESPAS), an FP7-funded project that aims to provide the e-Infrastructure necessary to support the access to observations, for the modeling and prediction of the near-Earth Space environment, Concept for Ionospheric Scintillation Mitigation for Professional GNSS in Latin America (CIGALA) and its follow-up and extension Countering GNSS High-Accuracy Applications Limitations due to Ionospheric Disturbances in Brazil (CALIBRA), both of which are funded by the European Commission in the frame of FP7, for facing the equatorial ionosphere and its impact on GNSS. The main objective of the present Special Issue of Annals of Geophysics is to collect recent reports on work performed in the polar regions and on the datasets collected in time by the instrumentation deployed across various countries. This collection will set the starting point for further research in the field, especially in the perspective of the new and very advanced space system that will be available in the next few years. […]</p>

scholarly journals Special Issue “Risk, Ruin and Survival: Decision Making in Insurance and Finance”

Risks ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiandong Ren ◽  
Kristina Sendova ◽  
Ričardas Zitikis
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Starting Point

It has been six years since Editor-in-Chief Steffensen (2013) wrote in his editorial that “to Risks inclusiveness, inter-disciplinarity, and open-mindedness is the very starting point [...]

scholarly journals Social Theory after Strathern: An Introduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 7-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Street ◽  
Jacob Copeman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Subject And Object

Taking its cue from the articles in this special issue, this introduction explores what value a critical engagement with Strathern’s work might have for the social sciences by setting such an engagement in motion. It argues that Strathern’s writings are a particularly fruitful starting point for reflecting on our assumptions about what exactly theory might be and how and where it may be made to travel. Through the juxtaposition of articles published in this special issue and Strathern’s writings on Melanesia it explores the theorization of power in the social sciences as one arena in which Strathernian strategies might be harnessed in order to reflect on and extend Euro-American concepts. It also takes Strathern’s own interest in gardening as a metaphoric base for generating novel topologies of subject and object, the particular and the general, and the concrete and the abstract. This introduction does not provide a primer for ‘Strathernian theory’. Instead it reviews some of the original strategies and techniques – differentiation, staging of analogy, surprise, bifurcation, the echo, and an unremitting focus on how we make our familiar categories of analysis known to ourselves – that Strathern has used to ‘garden’ her theory: it can be used, if you like, as a conceptual toolkit.

scholarly journals Protest communication ecologies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Mercea
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Information Communication ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Media Communication ◽  
Growth Area ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Communication Practices ◽  
Media And Communication

The flurry of protests since the turn of the decade has sustained a growth area in the social sciences. The diversity of approaches to the various facets and concerns raised by the collective action of aggrieved groups the world over impresses through multidisciplinarity and the wealth of insights it has generated. This introduction to a special issue of the international journal Information, Communication and Society is an invitation to recover conceptual instruments—such as the ecological trope—that have fallen out of fashion in media and communication studies. We account for their fall from grace and explicate the rationale for seeking to reinsert them into the empirical terrain of interlocking media, communication practices and protest which we aim to both capture with theory and adopt as a starting point for further analytical innovation.

scholarly journals Biotechnology, nanotechnology and medicine

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 551-554
Author(s):  
Sonia Contera ◽  
Jorge Bernardino de la Serna ◽  
Teresa D. Tetley
Keyword(s):  
Antibiotic Resistance ◽  
Controlled Release ◽  
Immune Responses ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Clinical Use ◽  
Safety Regulation ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Medical Problems ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Over Time

The 1980s mark the starting point of nanotechnology: the capacity to synthesise, manipulate and visualise matter at the nanometre scale. New powers to reach the nanoscale brought us the unprecedented possibility to directly target at the scale of biomolecular interactions, and the motivation to create smart nanostructures that could circumvent the hurdles hindering the success of traditional pharmacological approaches. Forty years on, the progressive integration of bio- and nanotechnologies is starting to produce a transformation of the way we detect, treat and monitor diseases and unresolved medical problems [ 1]. While much of the work remains in research laboratories, the first nano-based treatments, vaccines, drugs, and diagnostic devices, are now receiving approval for commercialisation and clinical use. In this special issue we review recent advances of nanomedical approaches to combat antibiotic resistance, treatment and detection of cancers, targeting neurodegerative diseases, and applications as diverse as dentistry and the treatment of tuberculosis. We also examine the use of advanced smart nanostructured materials in areas such as regenerative medicine, and the controlled release of drugs and treatments. The latter is currently poised to bring ground-breaking changes in immunotherapy: the advent of ‘vaccine implants’ that continuously control and improve immune responses over time. With the increasingly likely prospect of ending the COVID 19 pandemic with the aid of a nanomedicine-based vaccine (both Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer vaccines are based on lipid nanoparticle formulations), we are witnessing the coming of age of nanomedicine. This makes it more important than ever to concentrate on safety: in parallel to pursuing the benefits of nanomedine, we must strengthen the continuous focus on nanotoxicology and safety regulation of nanomedicines that can deliver the medical revolution that is within our grasp.

scholarly journals President and Assemblies—25 Years After Shugart and Carey’s Book: Introduction to Special Issue

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-11
Author(s):  
Anna Fruhstorfer ◽  
Gianluca Passarelli
Keyword(s):  
Regime Change ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Recent Debate ◽  
Balancing Efficiency

Why are some institutions capable of enhancing democracy, while others struggle under pressure? Shugart and Carey wrote their seminal book Presidents and Assemblies at a crucial time in modern history in an effort to answer these fundamental questions. Because of bold claims and huge theoretical and conceptual contributions, their timely publication became the starting point for a new way to think about institutional specifications and types of political systems. And although their examples are by now dated, the idea of “trade-off” or “balancing efficiency and representativeness” still speaks to the fundamental questions of regime change and democratic sustainability. While their study made clear that there are distinctions between system types, they also argued that not a specific type is more conducive or damaging to democracy; rather specific institutional configurations lead to a vulnerability of a political regime. Twenty-five years after the first publication of Presidents and Assemblies, this special issue uses this argument and reconnects Shugart and Carey’s book with the recent debate on individual attributes of legislative–executive relations and their effect on democracy. This article serves as an introduction and highlights the rationale and the major themes that run through the contributions to the special issue.

The danger of virtuosity

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 558-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Special Issue ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Relationship

This Afterword to the special issue on Virtuosity takes the main contributions to the issue as a starting-point for a discussion of the normality of virtuosity, the anxieties it creates for performers, and the politics of virtuosity. Conclusions from Izabela Wagner’s (2015) study of the training of violin virtuosi are outlined. The relationship between virtuosity and conformity is considered. And suggestions are offered for increased virtuosity of creativity in the performance of western classical scores.

Introduction: Framing the Asia Pacific War with an Even Hand

2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 5-23
Author(s):  
Philip West
Keyword(s):  
Human Dimensions ◽  
Bad News ◽  
Good News ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
General Will ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Cultural Markets ◽  
Book Publishers

AbstractThe powerful hold the glory of war has on the human imagination is good news for book publishers, filmmakers, and creators of video games—not to mention those invested in military enterprises whose vastness lies almost beyond comprehension. They enjoy economic, political, and cultural markets that seem only to expand with the passing of time. For the purposes of this special issue, that steady and expanding market is bad news because our hope is that governments and people in general will learn from the lessons of war and spend less time on the glory of its violence. We aspire to work with an even hand and begin with an awareness just how blinded we can be by human nature to the realities and memories of war of .the other side.. We also believe that including more attention to the human dimensions of war in our teaching and writing—while placed within the familiar military and historical contexts—will soften the powerful hold that war has on the way we see ourselves and others. The selected letters and diaries introduced in this special issue are offered as a starting point and framework to do just that.

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