scholarly journals Post-Utopia: The Long View

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 65
Author(s):  
David Konstan

The present article is divided into three parts. The first discusses the nature of utopias and their hypothetical anti-type, dystopias, and also disaster scenarios that are sometimes assimilated to dystopias, with reference also to the idea of post-utopia. An argument is made for the continuity of the utopian impulse, even in an age when brutal wars and forms of oppression have caused many to lose faith in any form of collectivity. Representations of social breakdown and its apparent opposite, totalitarian rigidity, tend to privilege the very individualism that the utopian vision aspires to overcome. The second part looks at examples of each of these types drawn from classical Greek and Roman literature, with a view to seeing how utopias were conceived at a time before the emergence of the modern ideology of the pre-social self. Finally, the third part examines several stories from the collection A People’s Future of the United States which imagine life in the near future. While most illustrate the failure of confidence in the social that has encouraged the intuition that a utopian future is passé, one, it is suggested, reconceives the relation between the individual and the social in a way that points to the renewed possibility of the utopian.

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 237802312098032
Author(s):  
Brandon G. Wagner ◽  
Kate H. Choi ◽  
Philip N. Cohen

In the social upheaval arising from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, we do not yet know how union formation, particularly marriage, has been affected. Using administration records—marriage certificates and applications—gathered from settings representing a variety of COVID-19 experiences in the United States, the authors compare counts of recorded marriages in 2020 against those from the same period in 2019. There is a dramatic decrease in year-to-date cumulative marriages in 2020 compared with 2019 in each case. Similar patterns are observed for the Seattle metropolitan area when analyzing the cumulative number of marriage applications, a leading indicator of marriages in the near future. Year-to-date declines in marriage are unlikely to be due solely to closure of government agencies that administer marriage certification or reporting delays. Together, these findings suggest that marriage has declined during the COVID-19 outbreak and may continue to do so, at least in the short term.


Author(s):  
Marharyta Chepeliuk

The pandemic has enhanced the social function of digital technologies and services. It is solely through digital technology that a massive shift to remote work has been possible during the most difficult period of the pandemic. All over the world, the philosophy of office work is changing, and there is a transition to permanent and conditional-permanent remote work. For example, Transport Canada is planning to move to telecommuting as a key employment model for its employees. In the near future, telecommuting will continue for most of the 6,000 employees in the agency. In China, widespread use of WeChat, Tencent, and Ding digital working applications began in late January 2020, when isolation measures were introduced. In Switzerland, COOVID-19 Remote Work and Study Resources provides free resources for remote operation and distance learning. Zoom and Google Meet videoconferencing, remote workplaces, and new social platforms run remote work almost immediately, and this trend is likely to continue after the lifting of the quarantine. Trends in staff employment worldwide are rather mixed. According to LinkedIn, it is possible to track changes in the employment rates of seven key economies – Australia, China, France, Italy, Singapore, Great Britain and United States. In France and Italy, the decline was more pronounced at -70% and -64.5% respectively by mid-April 2020. Since then, employment has been gradually recovering, and most of the seven key economies for which these figures have been analysed tend to change by 0 per cent year on year. By July 1, 2020, China, France, and the United States had seen the largest rebound in relative recruitment – -6% or -7%. At the end of September 2020, the countries with a high recovery in employment were China (22 per cent), Brazil (13 per cent), Singapore (8 per cent) and France (5 per cent). In these economies, hiring so far seems to compensate for months in which no new personnel have been recruited, indicating some stabilization of the labor market.


2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 60-65
Author(s):  
Kirsten Hebert

The Optometric HIstorical Society (OHS) was one of many similar public history organizations created during the third wave of the preservation movement in the United States. This article traces the genealogy of the OHS mission through American heritage resource law and delineates the social and political context that lead to its passage.


2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (suppl 1) ◽  
pp. 225-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie H. Levison

From biblical times to the modern period, leprosy has been a disease associated with stigma. This mark of disgrace, physically present in the sufferers' sores and disfigured limbs, and embodied in the identity of a 'leper', has cast leprosy into the shadows of society. This paper draws on primary sources, written in Spanish, to reconstruct the social history of leprosy in Puerto Rico when the United States annexed this island in 1898. The public health policies that developed over the period of 1898 to the 1930s were unique to Puerto Rico because of the interplay between political events, scientific developments and popular concerns. Puerto Rico was influenced by the United States' priorities for public health, and the leprosy control policies that developed were superimposed on vestiges of the colonial Spanish public health system. During the United States' initial occupation, extreme segregation sacrificed the individual rights and liberties of these patients for the benefit of society. The lives of these leprosy sufferers were irrevocably changed as a result.


Percurso ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (29) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Everton Das Neves GONÇALVES ◽  
Bruna Pamplona de QUEIROZ

RESUMO O presente artigo, por meio de método de abordagem dedutivo e, como auxiliar, o comparativo, bem como procedimento de análise bibliográfica e jurisprudencial, pretende demonstrar que a teoria norte-americana da Failing Firm Defense encontra aplicação no atual cenário de crise brasileira, ao possibilitar a aprovação de certos atos de concentração, normalmente, reprováveis ou sujeitos às restrições, pelo Órgão de proteção à concorrência, em razão da função social da empresa. Para isso, são estabelecidos determinados critérios encontrados nos precedentes e no Horizontal Merger Guidelines dos Estados Unidos que servem de base ao CADE à utilização da teoria em seus julgados, ainda que necessária a adaptação à realidade econômica do País. PALAVRAS-CHAVES: Direito Econômico; Antitruste; Concorrência; Legislação Falimentar; Crise; Failing Firm Defense. ABSTRACTThe present article, through the method of deductive approach and, as auxiliary, comparative, as well as the process of bibliographical and jurisprudential analysis, the proposals that demonstrate the American theory of the Defense of Low Companies, are in Increasing probability of competitions, normally reprehensible or subject to restrictions, by competition law, because of the social function of the company. The horizontal merger guidelines of the United States of America are not based on the United States Horizontal Fusion Guidelines. KEYWORDS: Economic Law; Antitrust; Competition; Bankruptcy Legislation; Crisis; Failing Firm Defense.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Peter Jensen

Homelessness presents a massive organizational problem in the United States, with over 400,000 men, women, and children making use of shelter services each night. In this study, I take a comparative ethnographic approach to study how the use of the organizing Discourses of feminism, paternalism, neoliberalism, and anarchism result in more normative or alternative organizing practices. My project examines the organizing practices at two shelters for homeless women. One shelter is affiliated with an international religious nonprofit organization and self-identified anarchists run the other. Using the communicative constitution of organization (CCO) and institutional logics theories, I propose a theoretical framework for understanding how organizing Discourses are enacted or resisted at the organizational and individual level. My findings highlight how the institutional logics of responsibility, social welfare, and market manifest in different and sometimes paradoxical organizing practices based on the Discourse that is being translated. In this project, I highlight and critique how Discursive translations of institutional logics structure relations of power that impact agency at the individual and organizational level. My project has implications for understanding why the United States organizes around the social problem of homelessness the way it does, and explores alternatives to normative nonprofit organizing practices.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pearson Ripley

Shut Away is a window into a less-discussed immigration story in the United States. At present there are around fifty undocumented immigrants living in houses of worship after receiving deportation orders. It is the strategy of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to avoid raiding these “sensitive locations,” allowing them to provide their occupants with insulation from the possibility of deportation. This act of taking sanctuary comes at a significant cost as the individual does not leave the property upon entering. Comprised of still photographs, video portraits and oral histories, Shut Away seeks a more nuanced account of life in sanctuary beyond the common depiction of victimhood. This paper will analyze the foundation, creation and context of the project. It begins with the historical and political background of the topic and the participants, then analyzes the methodology of the social and creative approach to the work The paper ends with a contextualization of the project within the documentary field and a reflection on the traditions of photography in which the work falls.


2015 ◽  
Vol 51 (7) ◽  
pp. 949-961 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peipei Setoh ◽  
Lili Qin ◽  
Xin Zhang ◽  
Eva M. Pomerantz

Author(s):  
Helle Porsdam

Legal discourse is language that people use in a globalizing and multicultural society to negotiate acceptable behaviors and values. We see this played out in popular cultural forums such as judicial television dramas. In the American context, television judge shows are virtually synonymous with reality courtroom television. There have been a few judge shows, but these have been completely overshadowed by the success of reality courtroom television. The first reality courtroom show was The People’s Court, and its history and early success are discussed in the opening section of this article. The next section looks at the television judge show landscape after the first incarnation of The People’s Court up to the present day in the United States. The third section is dedicated to a discussion of television judge shows outside the United States, chiefly in Europe. The focus is on German and Dutch versions and on the ways in which they differ from the original U.S. versions. This section also briefly looks at the effects of modern digital technology on the judicial genre and asks whether enhanced viewer engagement and crowdsourced justice in the near future will force judges to bow to the popular will, on and off the small screen.


1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie McElhinny

Traditional dialect boundaries in the United States have received renewed attention (Labov, 1991, 1994). Labov outlined three dialects of English (the Northern Cities Chain Shift, the Southern Chain Shift, and the Third Dialect), the boundaries of which are defined by chain shifts in the vowel system and roughly correspond to traditional dialectal boundaries defined through the bundling of lexical items (Kurath, 1949) and phonological isoglosses (Kurath & McDavid, 1961). Other research has suggested that the Third Dialect may be the most heterogeneous of these dialects, with speakers in different areas displaying widely disparate behaviors (see, e.g., Clarke, Elms, & Youssef, 1995; Di Paolo, 1988; Di Paolo & Faber, 1990; Labov, 1996; Moonwomon, 1987). The present article contributes towards a richer picture of the Third Dialect by offering the first systematic variationist analysis of speech in Pittsburgh, with a particular focus on three phonological processes: vocalization of /l/, laxing of /i/ before /l/, and laxing of /u/ before /l/. I argue that Veatch's (1991) model of English syllable structure provides a unified account of these seemingly unrelated phonological changes in Pittsburgh; the implications of this argument for further research on Pittsburgh speech are also noted.


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