Introduction

Author(s):  
Bryan T. McNeil

This introductory chapter sheds light on mountaintop removal coal mining and the ways people have reacted to it, including reimagining profound social and personal ideas like identity, history, and landscape. From a different perspective, it looks at the social processes that help create and continue to justify a monster like mountaintop removal, and about the social resources communities assemble to combat those processes. Conflicts of this sort are often associated with globalization. The chapter reveals how people experience in their daily lives the local effects of global processes. In their opposition to mountaintop removal and other coal industry practices, citizen activists narrate a revised version of local and regional history, in order to situate themselves and their position in relation to the black rock and its industry that had fed them for generations.

Author(s):  
Concepción Maiztegui ◽  
Esther Aretxabala ◽  
Aitor Ibarrola ◽  
Pedro J. Oiarzabal

<p>This article describes and explores an analytical framework based on the concept of belonging, which, in turn, takes into consideration the personal, social, and performative dimensions of the integration process of young migrants. The concept of belonging is becoming one of the central pillars in current research on migration and integration, since it allows us to look into the subjective experiences of individuals and into the social environments that have an impact on the daily lives and give shape to the identity frameworks of young migrants. Approaches based on this concept also take into account the role of participation in social processes.</p><p><strong>Published online</strong>: 11 December 2017</p>


Author(s):  
Salvatore Caserta

This introductory chapter presents the main theoretical and methodological issues of the book. In terms of theory, the chapter explains that the book relies on the concept of de facto authority, according to which international courts become authoritative and powerful when their rulings are endorsed by relevant audiences in their practices. To complement this approach, the chapter explains that the book proposes five original analytical markers, which are central for analysing and explaining the social processes through which international courts, in general, and regional economic courts, in particular, gain or lose de facto authority. These are: (i) the nature of the political environment surrounding them; (ii) the timing of their institutional founding; (iii) the material and/or abstract interests of the agents interacting with them; (iv) the fundamental support of different social groups relating to them; and (v) the societal embeddedness in their operational context.


Author(s):  
Bryan T. McNeil

This chapter discusses how knowledge of the mountains and getting along in them has taken on renewed importance with the advance of mountaintop removal coal mining and restructuring in the coal industry. For generations, living in the mountains and mining the coal beneath them combined to become the distinctive markers of life in the Appalachian coalfields. The relentless expansion of mountaintop removal mining across the landscape since the late 1980s disrupted this symbiotic relationship between life inside and outside the mines. The spread of mountaintop removal brought a dilemma to dinner tables and living rooms across the region: are they coal people or mountain people? For the first time, many people felt compelled to choose because the two sources of identity, intertwined for so long, now seemed to be in stark opposition.


2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 344-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Murray ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Keith Ridgway ◽  
Belinda Winder

Two decades after the year-long miners' strike of 1984/5, this paper presents a contemporary account of the social and economic situation faced by ex-miners in South Yorkshire, uncovering those factors that continue to inhibit new employment and adaptation following the contraction of the coal industry. Forty-one in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with men who had worked in the region's coal mining industry for varying periods of time. The interviews were designed to examine many of the problems that have emerged following deindustrialisation and assess appraisals of retraining provision and prospects for employment. Findings increase understanding of issues endemic to many former pit villages including continuing high levels of localised unemployment and disproportionately high numbers of incapacity benefit claimants. A greater understanding of the reluctance of individuals to adapt, retrain and seek new, alternative employment will lead to more successful methods of dealing with the problems associated with continuing economic inactivity in the region's former coalfield communities and has many important consequences for existing regeneration programmes and employment initiatives.


For millennia, urban centers were pivots of power and trade that ruled and linked rural majorities. After 1950, explosive urbanization led to unprecedented urban majorities around the world. That transformation—inextricably linked to rising globalization—changed almost everything for nearly everybody: production, politics, and daily lives. In this book, seven eminent scholars look at the similar but nevertheless divergent courses taken by Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montreal, Los Angeles, and Houston in the twentieth century, attending to the challenges of rapid growth, the gains and limits of popular politics, and the profound local effects of a swiftly modernizing, globalizing economy. By exploring the rise of these six cities across five nations, New World Cities investigates the complexities of power and prosperity, difficulty and desperation, while reckoning with the social, cultural, and ethnic dynamics that mark all metropolitan areas.


2020 ◽  
Vol 174 ◽  
pp. 04027
Author(s):  
Tatyana Krasnova ◽  
Tatyana Plotnikova ◽  
Alexander Pozdnyakov ◽  
Alexander Vilgelm

It is well-known that the life quality of monoprophilic territories is largely influenced by city-forming enterprises. The article considers the degree of influence of the city-forming enterprises of the coal industry on the development of agriculture of the industry of mono-profile territories in the region. In particular, the direction of the social vector in the activities of coal mining enterprises with regard to support of the corresponding the life quality in single towns has been revealed. Therefore, the material obtained as a result of the study can be used in the development of social development programs of monoprophilic territories with city-forming enterprises of the coal mining industry.


2014 ◽  
pp. 257-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Marley ◽  
Samantha Fox

This article discusses the exhaustion of socio-ecological relations in the coalfields of West Virginia. We use the term socio-ecological to signify "the interwoven character and the indispensable unity of social and natural life" (Araghi 2009: 115). In particular we use classic literatures on labor history in the coalfields of central Appalachia and contemporary studies of mountaintop removal to think about phases of socio-ecological relations of the coal industry. We argue for the interrelationality of the social and the ecological in place of conventional eco-M arxist approaches which treat these as relatively independent units. This enables us to situate nature as an active component of capitalist developmental processes. We argue that the exhaustion of socio-ecological relations in the coalfields of West Virginia is an outcome of material practices within the phase of extraction using mountaintop removal, historical changes in the conditions of production in the coalfields, and of new forms of competition from other regions and energy sources. We find that the relative exhaustion of central Appalachian coal is tempered by favorable international markets and a specialization in metallurgical coal.


2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bayram Unal

This study deals with survival strategies of illegal migrants in Turkey. It aims to provide an explanation for the efforts to keep illegality sustainable for one specific ethnic/national group—that is, the Gagauz of Moldova, who are of Turkish ethnic origin. In order to explicate the advantages of Turkish ethnic origin, I will focus on their preferential treatment at state-law level and in terms of the implementation of the law by police officers. In a remarkable way, the juridical framework has introduced legal ways of dealing with the illegality of ethnically Turkish migrants. From the viewpoint of migration, the presence of strategic tools of illegality forces us to ask not so much law-related questions, but to turn to a sociological inquiry of how and why they overstay their visas. Therefore, this study concludes that it is the social processes behind their illegality, rather than its form, that is more important for our understanding of the migrants’ survival strategies in destination countries.


Author(s):  
Justin Farrell

This introductory chapter briefly presents the conflict in Yellowstone, elaborates on the book's theoretical argument, and specifies its substantive and theoretical contributions to the social scientific study of environment, culture, religion, and morality. The chapter argues that the environmental conflict in Yellowstone is not—as it would appear on the surface—ultimately all about scientific, economic, legal, or other technical evidence and arguments, but an underlying struggle over deeply held “faith” commitments, feelings, and desires that define what people find sacred, good, and meaningful in life at a most basic level. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Hobelsberger

This book discusses the local effects of globalisation, especially in the context of social work, health and practical theology, as well as the challenges of higher education in a troubled world. The more globalised the world becomes, the more important local identities are. The global becomes effective in the local sphere. This phenomenon, called ‘glocalisation’ since the 1990s, poses many challenges to people and to the social structures in which they operate.


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