NAVIGATING THE ILLEGIBLE STATE: EVERYDAY EXPERIENCES OF STATELESSNESS AMONG SHAN YOUTH IN NORTHERN THAILAND

<p>Home to more than half-a-million stateless persons, Thailand provides a unique case study for understanding modern-day statelessness. Since 2005, the country has significantly expanded the rights of non-citizen children to allow access for basic education, civil registration, universal birth registration and healthcare, but still restricts physical mobility of stateless persons to the provincial level and has made the level of education a criterion for citizenship. These new regimes of governing statelessness both marginalise and include stateless people in the formal state systems. This thesis examines the complex dynamics between exclusion and inclusion that stateless Shan youth in northern Thailand experience in their everyday lives. Based on 13-months of ethnographic fieldwork over the course of three years (2015-2018) conducted in the wake of UNHCR’s Global Campaign to End Statelessness, this thesis describes how childhood statelessness in the 21st century is interpreted, determined and governed by the Thai state, and how stateless Shan youth make sense of the label of statelessness, make decisions about their future, challenge the idea of national identity and negotiate their place within the society that simultaneously includes and excludes them. I explore how, despite the Thai state’s public commitment to resolve statelessness in the past few years, the path toward Thai citizenship for many stateless youth is still fraught with various legal obstacles that tie together remnants of the legal and social exclusion from the past with a complex politics of proof in the present. In this thesis, I use the framework of “state illegibility” to capture the Thai state’s past and present opaqueness, inscrutable, contradictory and unpredictable bureaucratic practices, and demonstrate the burdens placed on stateless youth to “read” the state and navigate its opacity in their everyday life. Having learned the roles of documents and aesthetics in mediating membership, I demonstrate how Shan youth negotiate the impact of statelessness through various strategies such as using their bodies to perform “Thainess” and assert belonging, acquiring false documents, emphasising their Shan identity to get scholarships, and secretly obtaining Myanmar citizenship as an alternative option. Through these ethnographic accounts, I not only explore the effects of new regimes of governing statelessness, but also the way such regimes are adopted, manipulated, and enacted by the stateless youth to produce liveable futures for themselves.</p>

NAVIGATING THE ILLEGIBLE STATE: EVERYDAY EXPERIENCES OF STATELESSNESS AMONG SHAN YOUTH IN NORTHERN THAILAND

<p>Home to more than half-a-million stateless persons, Thailand provides a unique case study for understanding modern-day statelessness. Since 2005, the country has significantly expanded the rights of non-citizen children to allow access for basic education, civil registration, universal birth registration and healthcare, but still restricts physical mobility of stateless persons to the provincial level and has made the level of education a criterion for citizenship. These new regimes of governing statelessness both marginalise and include stateless people in the formal state systems. This thesis examines the complex dynamics between exclusion and inclusion that stateless Shan youth in northern Thailand experience in their everyday lives. Based on 13-months of ethnographic fieldwork over the course of three years (2015-2018) conducted in the wake of UNHCR’s Global Campaign to End Statelessness, this thesis describes how childhood statelessness in the 21st century is interpreted, determined and governed by the Thai state, and how stateless Shan youth make sense of the label of statelessness, make decisions about their future, challenge the idea of national identity and negotiate their place within the society that simultaneously includes and excludes them. I explore how, despite the Thai state’s public commitment to resolve statelessness in the past few years, the path toward Thai citizenship for many stateless youth is still fraught with various legal obstacles that tie together remnants of the legal and social exclusion from the past with a complex politics of proof in the present. In this thesis, I use the framework of “state illegibility” to capture the Thai state’s past and present opaqueness, inscrutable, contradictory and unpredictable bureaucratic practices, and demonstrate the burdens placed on stateless youth to “read” the state and navigate its opacity in their everyday life. Having learned the roles of documents and aesthetics in mediating membership, I demonstrate how Shan youth negotiate the impact of statelessness through various strategies such as using their bodies to perform “Thainess” and assert belonging, acquiring false documents, emphasising their Shan identity to get scholarships, and secretly obtaining Myanmar citizenship as an alternative option. Through these ethnographic accounts, I not only explore the effects of new regimes of governing statelessness, but also the way such regimes are adopted, manipulated, and enacted by the stateless youth to produce liveable futures for themselves.</p>

The relationship between headache-attributed disability and lost productivity: 2. Empirical evidence from population-based studies in nine disparate countries

Background Headache disorders are disabling, with major consequences for productivity, yet the literature is silent on the relationship between headache-attributed disability and lost productivity, often erroneously regarding the two as synonymous. We evaluated the relationship empirically, having earlier found that investment in structured headache services would be cost saving, not merely cost-effective, if reductions in headache-attributed disability led to > 20% pro rata recovery of lost productivity. Methods We used individual participant data from Global Campaign population-based studies conducted in China, Ethiopia, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Russia, and from Eurolight in Lithuania, Luxembourg and Spain. We assessed relationships in migraine and probable medication-overuse headache (pMOH), the most disabling common headache disorders. Available symptom data included headache frequency, usual duration and usual intensity. We used frequency and duration to estimate proportion of time in ictal state (pTIS). Disability, in the sense used by the Global Burden of Disease study, was measured as the product of pTIS and disability weight for the ictal state. Impairment was measured as pTIS * intensity. Lost productivity was measured as lost days (absence or < 50% productivity) from paid work and corresponding losses from household work over the preceding 3 months. We used Spearman correlation and linear regression analyses. Results For migraine, in a linear model, we found positive associations with lost paid worktime, significant (p < 0.05) in many countries and highly significant (p < 0.001) in some despite low values of R2 (0–0.16) due to high variance. With lost household worktime and total lost productivity (paid + household), associations were highly significant in almost all countries, although still with low R2 (0.04–0.22). Applying the regression equations for each country to the population mean migraine-attributed disability, we found pro rata recoveries of lost productivity in the range 16–56% (> 20% in all countries but Pakistan). Analysing impairment rather than disability increased variability. For pMOH, with smaller numbers, associations were generally weaker, occasionally negative and mostly not significant. Conclusion Relief of disability through effective treatment of migraine is expected, in most countries, to recover > 20% pro rata of lost productivity, above the threshold for investment in structured headache services to be cost saving.

Information sources, knowledge and compliance to COVID-19 safety protocol in Borno State, Nigeria

Borno State, Nigeria has experienced active COVID-19 with quite a number of cases and mortalities. The extensive global campaign to create awareness about the pandemic and safety measures through various stakeholders appeared to have worked, especially when it became obvious that people in Borno keyed into safety protocols and observed the lockdown. They wore face masks, routinely applied hand sanitizers and handwashing in public places. It was observed, at some points however, there was obvious nonadherence to these protocols. Therefore, this study examines adherence to COVID-19 safety protocol issues in the state. Could the noncompliance be by those not aware or knowledgeable about the pandemic? Are there issues with the sources of information? The objectives of the study are to determine: the sources of information/knowledge on COVID-19; the effectiveness of the sources of information/knowledge on COVID-19; level of compliance to COVID-19 preventive/safety measures, and to identify challenges in complying with COVID-19 safety/preventive measures. The study used knowledge, attitude and practice theory employed survey method as well as convenience and purposive sampling techniques to select 2949 respondents across three LGAs in the state. The study found that people are aware and knowledgeable about the pandemic. The mass media, especially radio are the major sources of information. The noncompliance to COVID-19 safety protocol is largely due lack of fund to purchase and use face mask and hand sanitizer. It concludes that there are diverse sources of knowledge and information with poor compliance to the safety protocols in Borno State.

Antioxidant and Bone; Protect Your Future: A Brief Review

The global campaign of osteoporosis has been organized by the International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) and them introducing World Osteoporosis Day (WOD) in 1997. The day is celebrated on October 20th each year and aimed to improve the awareness of the population about disease prevention. We present some aspects of bone health and the prevention of osteoporosis related to the use of vitamins. The presenting mini-review covers a variety of sources including PubMed, Embase, Scopus, and directory of open access journals (DOAJ) from 10 years ago (Oct 2009 to Oct 2019) for recent developments in the prevention of bone loss. The search was performed by using combinations of the following keywords and or their equivalents; osteoporosis, bones health, bone loss, and vitamin to find related articles about the prevention of osteoporosis by nutritional factors. The factors affecting bone are various and could begin from fetal periods to the end of life. Some of them are not changeable including age, and genetic; however, it is possible to modify some others such as poor nutrition and vitamin deficiency. Beyond vitamin D deficiency, consumption of other vitamins also is beneficial to maintain bone health. By considering the nutritional factors especially vitamins that affect bones, it is possible to have stronger bones to enjoy life in the elderly and protect your future.

Societal Age Stereotypes in the U.S. and U.K. from a Media Database of 1.1 Billion Words

Recently, 194 World Health Organization member states called on the international organization to develop a global campaign to combat ageism, citing its alarming ubiquity, insidious threat to health, and prevalence in the media. Existing media studies of age stereotypes have mostly been single-sourced. This study harnesses a 1.1-billion-word media database comprising the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English—with genres including spoken/television, fiction, magazines, newspapers—to provide a comprehensive view of ageism in the United Kingdom and United States. The US and UK were chosen as they are home to the largest media conglomerates with tremendous power to shape public opinion. The most commonly used synonym of older adults was identified, and its most frequently used descriptors were analyzed for valence. Such computational linguistics techniques represent a new advance in studying aging narratives. The key finding is consistent, though no less alarming: Negative descriptions of older adults outnumber positive ones by six times. Negative descriptions tend to be physical, while positive ones tend to be behavioral. Magazines contain the highest levels of ageism, followed by the spoken genre, newspapers, and fiction. Findings underscore the need to increase public awareness of ageism and lay the groundwork to design targeted societal campaigns to tackle ageism—one of our generation’s most pernicious threats.

Structured Q1 headache services as the solution to the ill-health burden of headache: 1. Rationale and description

In countries where headache services exist at all, their focus is usually on specialist (tertiary) care. This is clinically and economically inappropriate: most headache disorders can effectively and more efficiently (and at lower cost) be treated in educationally supported primary care. At the same time, compartmentalizing divisions between primary, secondary and tertiary care in many health-care systems create multiple inefficiencies, confronting patients attempting to navigate these levels (the “patient journey”) with perplexing obstacles.High demand for headache care, estimated here in a needs-assessment exercise, is the biggest of the challenges to reform. It is also the principal reason why reform is necessary.The structured headache services model presented here by experts from all world regions on behalf of the Global Campaign against Headache is the suggested health-care solution to headache. It develops and refines previous proposals, responding to the challenge of high demand by basing headache services in primary care, with two supporting arguments. First, only primary care can deliver headache services equitably to the large numbers of people needing it. Second, with educational supports, they can do so effectively to most of these people. The model calls for vertical integration between care levels (primary, secondary and tertiary), and protection of the more advanced levels for the minority of patients who need them. At the same time, it is amenable to horizontal integration with other care services. It is adaptable according to the broader national or regional health services in which headache services should be embedded.It is, according to evidence and argument presented, an efficient and cost-effective model, but these are claims to be tested in formal economic analyses.

Is the Grass Greener in a Post-Pandemic World? (Re)Connecting Humanity with Nature for a Just Recovery

This article assesses the potential for reconnecting human and non- human nature in global post-COVID-19 recovery plans. The article utilises a critical perspective on the neoliberalisation of nature as a framing, as well as the case of sustainability and deforestation in forest risk commodity supply chains, to assess whether sustainable development initiatives and neoliberal environmental governance adequately protect the interests of vulnerable human and non- human nature. It finds that existing approaches to sustainable development in international governance prioritise liberalised global markets and the neoliberalisation of nature through commodification, privatisation and marketisation, thus furthering an unjust human-nature dichotomy by placing humans separate from nature and removing the intrinsic value of non-human materiality. It identifies a synergy between the global campaign to ‘build back better’ after COVID-19, environmental regulation and principles of Wild Law. The article concludes by recommending that a just post- pandemic economic recovery must realign the human experience as a part of the wider whole of the non-human natural world.

Farmers-Herders Conflicts and Development in Nigeria

The conflict between farmers and herders have constituted serious concerns and impediments to development in Nigeria. Development entails food security, of which dairy needs are integral. The global campaign for good agricultural practices (GAP) essentially focuses on the preservation of humans, animals and the general ecosystem, as the world continues to confront the depletion of the ozone layers. In Nigeria, the development concerns of farmers-herders’ conflicts are not only pertinent but also daunting as the protracted conflicts increase the burden of food insecurity, human insecurity, ethic/tribal tensions and underdevelopment outcomes. While the challenges posed by the farmers-herders’ conflicts are serious, existentially threatening and hydra-headed, their impacts on development of the country are massive and require urgent attention research and policy terms. This is because development can only be sustainable in an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity. But in situations where conflicts and insecurity are near intractable, development may be mere desideratum. It is against this background that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was used to examine the context, burden and tractability of farmers-herders’ conflicts in Nigeria with a view to unpacking the interface of (in)security and development relative to food security in Nigeria.