Integrated Care for Seniors as a Challenge for Slovakia

Older age can be accompanied by a lot of changes in the field of health, which influence the social functioning of seniors.One of the factors influencing the quality of life of seniors is the connection of healthcare and social care, built on the interdepartmental cooperation. This approach is still absent in Slovakia.The aim of the paper is therefore to emphasize the importance and need of integrated care and to describe the barriers that prevent its implementation in Slovakia. In search of answers to the questions: “When and why was the healthcare and social care department of seniors established in Slovakia? What are the reasons persisting in this condition? What are the consequences of this divided care for the seniors in practice? What strategies use facilities for seniors to overcome this situation during the COVID-19 pandemic?” the authors used the method of the case study (Yin, 2003) focused on the Trnava self-governing region. Persistent structural, procedural, legislative and political factors have been identified as the main barriers. Specific for Slovakia is the existence of a barrier of the profession, which is caused by the low interest of social workers in the issue. The authors state that the situation in Slovakia is caused mainly by the reflection of integrated care as a political problem. In the end, the authors make several suggestions for solving the situation.

“Les Hypothèses Trop Hasardées”

This essay argues that the difficulties Émile Zola faced in closing the Rougon-Macquart novel cycle reveal a political imaginary whose notion of a clean line of progress depends on a technical supplement it disavows. At critical points Zola’s method exposes the disavowal of this technical supplement that functions as the prosthetic by which man overcomes a hereditary deficiency, his original psychosis in Zola’s account, and is also the means by which he allegorizes history as progress. But this supplement must also disappear from view, or operate as a vanishing mediator. Because, for Zola, the immediate political problem of engendering the right kind of political subjects for the Third Empire must be integrated into a larger evolutionary history, the rational overcoming of the original psychosis takes the form of a necessary and indeed automatic process. What is at stake here is not the inhumanism of generalizing the “Anthropos,” which has come under recent scrutiny, but the inhumanism integral to any humanism that imagines itself as teleologically or historically oriented—the inhumanism in humanism that subtends any imaginary of evolution or progress, because such a humanism must have recourse to technical prosthesis.

LABELISASI HALAL DAN HARAM

Halal certification within the scope of modern society as it is today raises a bit of concern for some products that do not have a halal certificate. When reviewed in fiqh books, we will find al-tahrîm wal ihlâl haqqullâh wahdah. This is studied descriptively and qualitatively. There are three problems related to the issue of halal labeling which so far the rights are in the hands of the MUI. First, is the political problem caused by labeling itself. Second, is a religious issue. Third, related to economic matters. Abstrak Sertifikasi halal didalam lingkup masyarakat modern seperti sekarang ini menimbulkan sedikit kerisauan terhadap sejumlah produk yang tidak memiliki sertifikat halal. Apabila ditinjau dalam pustaka pustaka kitab fiqih, kita akan menemukan al-tahrîm wal ihlâl haqqullâh wahdah. Ini dikaji secara deskriptif dan bersifat kualitatif. Ada tiga masalah yang berkaitan dengan persoalan labelisasi halal yang dalam ini wilayah haknya ada di tangan MUI. Pertama, adalah masalah politis yang ditimbulkan soal labelisasi itu sendiri. Kedua, adalah masalah keagamaan. Ketiga, menyangkut soal ekonomi

Offsetting Risk in a Neoliberal Environment: The Link between Asset-Based Welfare and NIMBYism

Affordable housing policy in the developed world has been undergoing a systematic commodification for several decades, including a push for homeownership as the normalized tenure and a commodity unto itself. Scholars suggest this push for homeownership is part and parcel of a neoliberal asset-based welfare to supplement, or even outright replace, traditionally defined benefit pension schemes. These policies individualize risk and re-fashion individual citizens as long-term financial planners, navigating the uncertainty inherent in international financial markets and general financial management. Less deeply explored, however, are the perverse incentives this system creates for homeowners to protect their home “investment” by leveraging planning policies, zoning, and land-use restrictions to preserve the community status quo and lock in the value of their home. In a policy environment in which long-term financial risk is individualized and public social welfare and pension systems are relegated to the smallest number of individuals possible, this type of NIMBYism (Not in My Backyard) is rather rational behavior, even as it simultaneously staunches the supply of new housing and drives up prices for non-homeowners. As such, this analysis synthesizes the existing research to make a formal theoretical connection between the neoliberal push for commodified housing, asset-based welfare, and the intractable political problem of NIMBYism.

The King Never Dies: Royal Renunciation and the Fiction of Jain Sovereignty

To theorize Jain sovereignty, this essay takes up Ernst Kantorowicz’s underlying query of what happens when a king dies. In turning to medieval Jain authors such as Jinasena, we see how sovereignty and renunciation were mutually constituted such that the king’s renunciation completely subverts the problem of the king’s death. If the fiction of Jain kingship properly practiced culminates in renunciation, then such a movement yields up a new figure of the ascetic self-sovereign. Renunciation does not sever sovereignty but extends it into a higher spiritual domain. Worldly and spiritual sovereignty share a metaphorical language and set of techniques that render them as adjacent but hierarchical spheres of authority. In so doing, Jain authors provide a religious answer to a political problem and make the political inbuilt into the religious, thereby revealing their interpenetrating and bounded nature.

School Grade Repetition in Brazil: History of the Configuration of a Political and Educational Problem

This article intends to argue that the movement of students through the Brazilian mandatory school only acquires signs of an educational political problem from the 1930’s on. It indicates that the current sense of the notion of student failure came to be defined only in the twentieth century, although it was possible to fail students since before. It intends to show further that, in articulation with political and cultural changes in education – such as the emergence of compulsory school, the definition of grade-based model of school, and the primacy of homogeneity of classes – the emergence of better and systematic statistics after 1931 contributed decisively in defining the conditions for the possibility of inclusion of student failure as a problem on the political agenda.

Demographic processes in Russia as a political problem

The purpose of this work is to identify and analyze the political consequences of demographic processes in Russia. The methodological basis of the study is indicative analysis, with the help of which it was possible to identify the main demographic factors that have the greatest impact on the political system of the Russian Federation. This influence was considered through the prism of the demographic security of the state. To assess it, 24 indicators were used, divided into three groups: indicators of the size and location of the population (1), indicators of population structure (2), indicators of population health (3). The author has formed a system of threshold values for each indicator, and based on the data of state and international statistics, which cover the period 1990–2020, the dynamics of indicators of demographic security in Russia is analyzed. The multifaceted nature of demographic security has become the reason for the use of an integral assessment (internment of particular indicators into a single index), which represents a numerical assessment of a certain part of the demographic situation in the country. As a result, integral assessments of Russia's demographic security over the past 30 years were calculated and their impact on the political sphere was analyzed. The practical significance of the work lies in the developed system of indicators of demographic security, which makes it possible to carry out a full analysis of the state of the demographic situation of the country and / or regions and to identify the most priority areas for demographic policy in Russia.

Higher Education's Contributions to the U.S. Democratic Society

College experiences can contribute to teaching, learning, and instruction within higher education. The framework for this essay treats the college community as prototypic of the U.S. political society. Several aspects of the national political culture have been approximated within a collegiate culture. For example, every political problem within our society can be represented in a miniature fashion within a program of studies in a university. Much of students’ political information can come from the interaction between teachers and students. However, a sizable portion of this learned information can extend through interaction among students. At that point, teachers would point students to information that expands their reservoir of collegiate information. Ultimately, students would refine their political information by exchanging valuable information with one another, as well as with their teachers. We have chosen to target higher education rather than pre-collegiate levels in emphasizing how higher education and our democratic system of government can be intertwined. We highlight the possibilities of college students’ understanding and appreciating others’ political views in working with one another rather than against one another in educational and political planning. Specifically, we include in this report the following issues: (a) political information resources routinely available in higher education, (b) college students’ learning to participate in broader political conversation, (c) college students’ examination of high profile U.S. constitutional declarations, (d) college students’ deepened comprehension of their own political perspectives, and (e) college students’ understanding that the knowledge derived from higher education can strengthen our democratic system of government.