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1
Martiniello, Marco. "Bestaat er een stedelijke onderklasse in België ?" Res Publica 37, no. 2 (June 30, 1995): 161–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.21825/rp.v37i2.18679.
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This article makes first a critical review of the different definitions in the scientific literature of the 'underclass' concept. It is argued that the American and British concept of underclass is not necessarily transportable to Europe. The next part adresses the question of a possible emerging urban underclass in Belgium.It is concluded that although Belgium has to fight against social problems associated with underclass formation in the US and Britain, it has until now no clearcut underclass. The main reasons for this are that economic marginality is not permanent and stable, and that economic marginality, deviant values and criminal behaviour are not systematically coinciding.
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Natili, Marcello. "Worlds of last-resort safety nets? A proposed typology of minimum income schemes in Europe." Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy 36, no. 1 (March 2020): 57–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21699763.2019.1641134.
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ABSTRACTOver the past twenty years, minimum income schemes (MIS) have undergone major transformations in their functions and role. From mainly residual instruments that aimed to guarantee minimum income support and to prevent extreme marginality, in most countries they now have an ambiguous function of providing income support and favouring social and labour market inclusion. Against this background, this article provides an analytical grid that allows describing the different features of last-resort safety nets across Europe, building on the definition of key main dimensions of variation of MISs in Europe – generosity, eligibility and conditionality requirements, institutional configuration, active inclusion profiles. Then, it introduces a new typology of MIS in Europe, building on a new dataset with data on expenditures and coverage collected from National Statistical Offices.
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Balampanidis, Ioannis, Ioannis Vlastaris, George Xezonakis, and Magdalini Karagkiozoglou. "‘Bridges Over Troubled Waters’? The Competitive Symbiosis of Social Democracy and Radical Left in Crisis-Ridden Southern Europe." Government and Opposition 56, no. 1 (April 2, 2019): 59–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/gov.2019.8.
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AbstractDuring the economic crisis, the radical left, especially in countries of the European South, continued its course from marginality to mainstream while social democracy found itself trapped in its previous strategic orientations. This article examines the two political families in a relational and comparative perspective, focusing on the interaction of social democratic and radical left parties that evolved in a series of national cases (Greece, Portugal, Spain and France) and in particular within the political and electoral cycle of 2015–17. The ideological, programmatic and strategic responses of these parties to the critical juncture of the crisis, which mark a convergence or deviation in the paths of the two ‘enemy brothers', shed light on their political and ideological mutations, transformations and/or adaptations.
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Cârstocea, Raul. "War against the Poor: Social Violence Against Roma in Eastern Europe During COVID-19 at the Intersection of Class and Race." Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe 21, no. 2 (December 14, 2022): 81–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.53779/qplk4474.
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This article positions the social violence against Roma in Eastern Europe during the COVID-19 pandemic in historical perspective. It is based on primary data derived from the project Marginality on the Margins of Europe – The Impact of COVID-19 on Roma Communities in Non-EU Countries in Eastern Europe, collected in 2020 by researchers in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Ukraine. This data is contextualised with the help of secondary literature on historical epidemics and pandemics, as well as societal responses to them, with a particular focus on the ensuing scapegoating of minorities in certain cases. The article first makes the case for the importance of historicising such responses to pandemics in different contexts as a safeguard against ‘exceptionalising’ either the ongoing pandemic or the Roma minority. Further, it argues against a reductionist perspective that treats the Roma primarily – or even exclusively – along the lines of their representing a ‘national minority’, a concept that is heavily tilted toward a cultural-linguistic definition of the group. In contrast, it posits that hate speech and racist incidents against the Roma in the context of the pandemic (and more generally) are better understood by factoring in the intersection of race and class, where the long-standing racialization of the Roma in Eastern Europe is inflected by the latter as much as the former. Finally, zooming out from the case study under consideration to consider other instances of ‘Othering’ encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic, it draws attention to the different scales at which exclusion operates, and to the advantages provided by an awareness of the multiple spatial and temporal layers constitutive of such a scalar approach.
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Todeschini, Giacomo. "Servitude and Work at the Dawn of the Early Modern Era The Devaluation of Salaried Workers and the “Undeserving Poor”." Annales (English ed.) 70, no. 01 (March 2015): 77–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s2398568200000972.
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Abstract Thomas Piketty’s analysis of the way that neoliberal economists use false meritocracy to justify growing economic inequality invites historians to reconsider the representation of workers in the economic thought and administrative politics of preindustrial Western Europe. This renewed focus on those termed mercenarii in theological, economic, and legal texts, namely salaried workers, shows that since the thirteenth century the literate elites of Christian Europe have interpreted manual labor as the sign of a competence that was useful but also socially and politically devalorizing. The ancient Roman conception of wages as auctoramentum servitutis, or evidence of servitude, reemerges at the end of Middle Ages in the guise of a complex theological, legal, and governmental discourse about the intellectual incompetence and necessary political marginality of salaried workers as manual laborers. At the dawn of the early modern era, the representation of salaried labor as a social condition corresponding to a state of servitude and lack of intellect characterizes both literary works and the economic rationality embodied by the first “scientific” economists.
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Pikov, Gennady. "Formation of a New Person as a Formational Meaning. The Era of Transformation in the History of Europe." Ideas and Ideals 13, no. 4-2 (December 27, 2021): 366–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.17212/2075-0862-2021-13.4.2-366-383.
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The article draws attention to the fact that the phenomenon of marginality is the formation of one's own environment, although not completely dissolving into it. Traditional culture goes into the "basements" of society or manifests itself in the life and mentality of marginals. In a society affected by crisis, several cultural trajectories collide: descending, ascending and, for the marginalized, breaking traditional ties and creating their own, completely different world. In fact, marginality is the third culture, a special socio-cultural state. The article discusses its corresponding components. The prerequisites of global transformation are considered. The situation in Europe begins to change fundamentally at the turn of the I-II millennia. The formation of the era of European Transformation can begin with the XI-XIII centuries, when "Catholic" Europe appears. Phenomenal in its results was the "Renaissance of the XII century", the first truly pan-European Revival at the origins of the era of Transformation. With this, the movement towards a High Renaissance began. The Crusades (XI-XIII centuries) are particularly highlighted. After the Crusades, two variants of capitalism become promising and predominant in Europe and North America, and then their slow convergence continues. The XIII century became a milestone for contemporaries. On the one hand, Europe, it would seem, reached the end of history by creating some kind of optimal model. On the other hand, the reverse side of the idea of the "end of history" became clearly visible. The Mongols, having captured most of Eurasia, reformatted the ethno-political space. In this century, capitalist Europe is born, in fact, as a special development option. Highlighting the era of transformation does not mean that we should abandon the usual division of European history into known periods: antiquity, the Middle Ages, modern times. This periodization successfully emphasizes social and economic aspects and provides a chronological understanding of transitional processes. The era of Transformation is more voluminous, since we are talking about the transition from a centuries-old traditional society to a new stage of human development. Neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation created a new culture, the so-called bourgeois culture will have many faces, both international and national. The main thing is seen in the liberation of man from the former powerful civilizational model, Latin-Christian, i.e. Imperial-ecclesiastical, and ultimately - in the formation of a new type of man.
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Campbell, Luke, Nicola Hay, Marta Kowalewska, Colin Clark, Lynne Tammi, and Brigitta Balogh. "A Hidden Community: Justifying the Inclusion of Roma As an Ethnic Identity in the 2021 Scottish Census." Critical Romani Studies 3, no. 1 (December 11, 2020): 46–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.29098/crs.v3i1.62.
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This article investigates the invisibility of Roma communities within Scottish census ethnic monitoring categories and broader empirical data. Consistent negative stereotyping as well as systematic oppression within social policy, dominant discourses, and data collection processes excludes Roma from participatorycitizenship. This article identifies precise forms of marginality and invisibility within official government data – permeated through social and education policy – that thereby limit the effective targeting of resources to marginalized communities. Specifically, the article argues that omitting Roma as an ethnic category from past data gathering processes limits understanding of the commonalities and differences within and amongScottish communities, rendering entire populations invisible within broader empirical data and therefore restricting both identification of needs and effective resource allocation. Thus, the article presents a timely argument for the inclusion of Roma as an ethnic category in the 2021 Scottish census, while addressingissues within the census approach to data collection – including the impending digitization of the process. Through discussing and advancing the case for the inclusion of Romani communities in the 2021 Scottish Census, the paper also seeks to establish the current social context by chronicling the history of Romanimigration and marginalization within Europe.
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Sheikholharam, Ehsan. "Borders within Borders: Superkilen as the Site of Assimilation." International Journal of Religion 3, no. 2 (December 22, 2022): 121–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.33182/ijor.v3i2.2290.
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Cultural assimilation of “Muslim” immigrants in Europe poses a foundational question to political philosophy: is assimilation a prerequisite for socio-economic integration? What is often interpreted as the symptom of failed integration is the proliferation of ethnic enclaves in European metropolises. Non-white immigrants who experience discrimination and marginalization withdraw into isolated zones, creating internal borders within cities. These spaces are susceptible to a host of social problems and often become a fertile ground for radicalization. The State turns to design techniques to break open these ghettoized zones. This paper analyzes an urban renewal project that was conceived to address marginality in one such neighborhood in Copenhagen. Despite the façade of inclusivity and democratic participation, the design creates a parody of Muslim cultures by remixing culturally-significant symbols. In representing immigrants’ cultures as “Other,” the ideology of design mirrors the exclusionary preferences of the politics of the border.
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Tsoni, Ioanna. "‘They Won't Let us Come, They Won't Let us Stay, They Won't Let us Leave’. Liminality in the Aegean Borderscape: The Case of Irregular Migrants, Volunteers and Locals on Lesvos." Human Geography 9, no. 2 (July 2016): 35–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/194277861600900204.
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This paper draws on ethnographic observations along the south-eastern Mediterranean informal migration route through the Aegean Sea. I focus on the Greek border island of Lesvos as the central stage where the European crisis of asylum has been recently unfolding. In the absence of coherent national and European asylum policies, newly arrived migrants, refugees, and receiving communities (comprised mainly of local residents and volunteers from mainland Greece and Europe) are left to cope with and against each other, leading to multiple personal and collective passages. In this interstitial transit space, subjectivities are made and remade through their participation and resistance to the ongoing production of EU borders. I suggest that liminality provides a useful lens through which to understand the perplexing ‘time-spaces’ and interactions between multiple actors involved in the teetering asylum system on the margins of Europe. I argue that, through various actors’ experiences on Lesvos as a complex social site, liminality emerges as a form of sustained social marginality and exclusion that extends beyond Lesvos itself. The protracted and broadened crisis context in which asylum-seekers and receiving communities of locals and volunteers on Lesvos find themselves provides a salient example of the gradual socio-spatial and temporal ‘stretching’ of liminality from a transitional phase towards a condition of permanent and portable liminality experienced at both the individual and the collective level, and both at and away from borders.
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Von Cossel, Moritz, Iris Lewandowski, Berien Elbersen, Igor Staritsky, Michiel Van Eupen, Yasir Iqbal, Stefan Mantel, et al. "Marginal Agricultural Land Low-Input Systems for Biomass Production." Energies 12, no. 16 (August 14, 2019): 3123. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/en12163123.
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This study deals with approaches for a social-ecological friendly European bioeconomy based on biomass from industrial crops cultivated on marginal agricultural land. The selected crops to be investigated are: Biomass sorghum, camelina, cardoon, castor, crambe, Ethiopian mustard, giant reed, hemp, lupin, miscanthus, pennycress, poplar, reed canary grass, safflower, Siberian elm, switchgrass, tall wheatgrass, wild sugarcane, and willow. The research question focused on the overall crop growth suitability under low-input management. The study assessed: (i) How the growth suitability of industrial crops can be defined under the given natural constraints of European marginal agricultural lands; and (ii) which agricultural practices are required for marginal agricultural land low-input systems (MALLIS). For the growth-suitability analysis, available thresholds and growth requirements of the selected industrial crops were defined. The marginal agricultural land was categorized according to the agro-ecological zone (AEZ) concept in combination with the marginality constraints, so-called ‘marginal agro-ecological zones’ (M-AEZ). It was found that both large marginal agricultural areas and numerous agricultural practices are available for industrial crop cultivation on European marginal agricultural lands. These results help to further describe the suitability of industrial crops for the development of social-ecologically friendly MALLIS in Europe.
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Hosgood, Christopher P. "“Mercantile Monasteries”: Shops, Shop Assistants, and Shop Life in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain." Journal of British Studies 38, no. 3 (July 1999): 322–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/386197.
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It is now over twenty years since Geoffrey Crossick first urged historians to investigate the English lower middle class. On that occasion he suggested that small business interests and white-collar employees be designated the two wings of a residual lower middle class. Historians speculated that the members of this class were bound together by their marginality to the social, cultural, and economic world of the middle class and by their pathetic attempts to ape the gentility of their superiors. Such an analysis confirmed the unheroic nature of the lower-middle-classmentalitéand explains Crossick's conclusion that this group “claimed no vital social role.” Crossick's more recent work, in collaboration with Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, offers a reevaluation of this earlier position and concludes that white-collar and small business interests should not be considered to occupy the same social station. Crossick and Haupt's work is significant because both authors make it clear that they now credit the petite bourgeoisie of small business families in Europe with a greater spirit of independence than they had earlier acknowledged. They argue convincingly that the petite bourgeoisie created their own social and cultural world, centered on the interrelationship between enterprise and family life, which enabled them to react more purposefully to outside social forces and agencies.By hiving off these small business interests from the old lower middle class, we are left with a rump of white-collar workers who collectively formed a lower middle class that shared many common experiences and hence is attractive to historians as a potentially more cohesive social body.
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Vitale Brovarone, Elisabetta, and Giancarlo Cotella. "Improving Rural Accessibility: A Multilayer Approach." Sustainability 12, no. 7 (April 4, 2020): 2876. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su12072876.
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Rural territories are worse equipped than urban ones in terms of accessibility to services and opportunities, due to their scattered development and peripheral character. Increasing cuts to loss-making services in traditional public transport contributed to increased social inequality and marginality, in so doing undermining the livability of rural communities. In this light, improving accessibility is an essential prerequisite for the sustainable development of rural areas. Whereas demand responsive transport solutions are often seen as a panacea in circumstances where traditional services are not viable, their implementation is more challenging than it may seem, due to the potential barriers intrinsically related to the differential socioeconomic, cultural, and institutional features of places. Furthermore, enhancing transport offer is only one side of the multifaceted prism of rural accessibility, and the institution of effective multi-level and multi-sector governance mechanisms is a precondition to approach the mentioned challenges under a more comprehensive perspective. Drawing on the results of the European Territorial Observatory Network (ESPON) Urban-Rural Connectivity in Non-Metropolitan Areas (URRUC) project, the paper sheds light on this issue, exploring the accessibility challenges of rural areas and proposing a multilayer policy approach aimed at supporting decision-makers in improving rural accessibility across Europe.
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Kawamura, Yoshio. "HISTORICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF EMIGRATION FROM RURAL JAPAN IN THE PRE-WORLD WAR II ERA." Journal of Asian Rural Studies 1, no. 2 (July 6, 2017): 109. http://dx.doi.org/10.20956/jars.v1i2.1182.
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Spatial mobility like rural–urban migration is an important social phenomenon to measure the degree of freedom and dynamism of a society that is directly related to industrialization. The same applies to spatial mobility of emigration, which is permanent or long-term transmigration from a nation to another nation. Compared with Europe after the Industrial Revolution where emigration was a major social mobility, Japanese emigration after the Meiji era until World War II, was an exceptional social mobility in its industrialization process. This paper aims to clarify the historical characteristics of Japanese emigration during the prewar period. Three approaches were introduced. The first was to extract periodicity from the trend of migration, finding four medium-term cycles with 15-20 years; shifting the destination from Hawaii, North America, South America and China; and changing their intensions from tentative emigration of contracted labor for remittance to permanent emigration for settlement of agricultural firm in the receiving country. The second is to clarify the Japanese government framework which created institutionalized marginality to the emigrants, causing a discrimination structure within the emigrants society. The third is to identify push and pull factors of Japanese emigrants, finding seven factors: natural environments and natural disasters, increasing population and surplus people, commercialized agricultural products and faded crops, poverty and income differences, accessibility to external society, value of performance orientation, and emigration encouraging agency. Although the situation of emigration is directly affected by the international relations around Japan as well as tense relations between the value and behavior of Japanese emigrants and those of the receiving society, emigration itself results from the personal initiative of an emigrant and thus its mechanism is complicated and diversified, requiring multidimensional framework of ordinary income opportunities in the sending community in which emigration is positioned as one of their income opportunities.
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Nwachukwu, Joel N., and Aaron Ola Ogundiwin. "The Second Scramble for Africa: A Cause for Afro-Pessimism." Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 11, no. 1 (January 10, 2020): 50. http://dx.doi.org/10.36941/mjss-2020-0006.
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This paper argued that although the second scramble for Africa could be located within the broader neo-imperialist global strategy, nevertheless, it is quite different from the classic race for Africa in the 19th century, in terms of its approach, mechanism, timing and new participants. It is also new in some ways. Firstly, it has enlisted the rampageous United States of America, Russia and the ravenous new Asian entrants such as China and India, plus the Oil-rich Sheikdoms, while retaining a number of the European imperial powers in the affray. Secondly, it has created a local bourgeoisie that sees itself as the overseer of foreign interests on the continent. Thirdly, the ideology of the new scramble is based on quick-loot-fast-plunder and is derived from modern globalization imperatives. This study which adopted as its approach, a combination of descriptive, analytical, evaluative as well as historical perspectives insists that unless the second scramble is checked, it would consolidate Africa’s relegation to marginality, cultural irrelevance, and eventual recolonization. Through the test of series of hypotheses, the work exposed the major forces at work as it answered some basic questions of the research. It concludes that Africa needs a super power to provide it with a nuclear umbrella, and draw a marshal plan – the type America did for the war devastated Europe at the end of the Second World War, to assert itself.
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Bottoni, Stefano. "Talking to the System: Imre Mikó, 1911–1977." East Central Europe 44, no. 1 (June 23, 2017): 47–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18763308-04401002.
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Taking a cue from an intelligence file produced by the Romanian political police on Transylvanian Hungarian intellectual Imre Mikó (Cluj, 1911–1977), the article analyzes the various patterns of accomodation with the political system, which represents a key to the understanding of how social legitimacy was built and maintained by the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. The framework in which this story takes place is especially interesting due to the Romanian context. On the one hand, the analysis of an unconventional collaboration established during the 1970s between the security organs of a national communist system and a prominent conservative intellectual stimulates us to rethink the state-society relationship in Ceaușescu’s Romania in more dynamic terms. Among the multiple reasons that led Mikó to accept the role of informer, one finds the communitarian ideology of “serving the people”, but also his belief that cooperation with the state security on relevant issues to the Transylvanian Hungarian community did not represent a betrayal of national ideals but the only way to achieve certain political goals, such as informing the Western public opinion on the worsening condition of the Hungarian minority. The case of Mikó can be compared with other files unveiled in Romania during the last years, and shows that often uncritically accepted definition of “collaboration” require serious conceptual reshaping. During the last decades of the communist regimes, significant parts of the formerly persecuted elite came to work together with the state security organs. They did not “talk to the system” with the purpose of spying on fellow citizens, but seeked to push forward their own cause with the infrastructural support of the state security, in a context where non-party members had been denied any access to the political sphere, and they regarded personal contact with a high-raking state security officer as a counterbalance of their marginality.
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Perocco, Fabio. "Anti-migrant Islamophobia in Europe. Social roots, mechanisms and actors." REMHU: Revista Interdisciplinar da Mobilidade Humana 26, no. 53 (August 2018): 25–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1980-85852503880005303.
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Abstract During the last two decades of rising anti-migrant racism in Europe, Islamophobia has proven to be the highest, most acute, and widely spread form of racism. The article shows how anti-migrant Islamophobia is a structural phenomenon in European societies and how its internal structure has specific social roots and mechanisms of functioning. Such an articulate and interdependent set of key themes, policies, practices, discourses, and social actors it is intended to inferiorise and marginalise Muslim immigrants while legitimising and reproducing social inequalities affecting the majority of them. The article examines the social origins of anti-migrant Islamophobia and the modes and mechanisms through which it naturalises inequalities; it focuses on the main social actors involved in its production, specifically on the role of some collective subjects as anti-Muslim organizations and movements, far-right parties, best-selling authors, and the mass-media.
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Marsden, Terry, Jo Banks, and Gillian Bristow. "The Social Management of Rural Nature: Understanding Agrarian-Based Rural Development." Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 34, no. 5 (May 2002): 809–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a3427.
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There is a growing realisation that agriculture is a central mechanism for delivering sustainable rural development in Europe. However, agro-industrial and postproductivist logics and dynamics have largely tended to marginalise its significance. In this paper we explore some of the conceptual parameters needed to develop the rural development dynamic. This is one which recentralises agriculture and farm-based activities and provides a basis for countering the growing crisis in rural and agricultural policymaking. In order to further embed the rural development dynamic, however, new alliances need to be attached to the struggles that are currently underway in rural areas. This will involve the state and social scientists playing a greater constructive role in developing the social infrastructure around which current exemplars of agrarian-based rural development can become more mainstream.
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Musile Tanzi, Paola, Elena Aruanno, and Mattia Suardi. "A European banking business models analysis: the investment services case." Journal of Financial Regulation and Compliance 26, no. 1 (February 12, 2018): 35–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/jfrc-04-2016-0028.
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Purpose Business Model Analysis is acquiring increasing visibility in the European banking regulatory framework, following the European Banking Authority guidelines on common procedures and methodologies for the supervisory review and evaluation process (SREP), developed to assess business and strategic risks (EBA, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c). Starting from a selected literature review, in the paper, the authors analyse business models set up by financial intermediaries, bank and non-banks, for the distribution of investment services, first by comparing European niche players with European banking global players, and second, comparing European niche players among themselves to understand the evolution of business models for the distribution of investment services at European level. The research is supported by the Baffi–Carefin Research Centre at the Bocconi University (Italy), in collaboration with ANASF, the Italian Association of Financial Advisors (Italy). Design/methodology/approach The authors consider a sample of European financial players from 2009 to 2014. The authors’ focus is on France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain and the UK; overall the authors’ handmade data set is based on 162 annual reports. The authors follow two main questions: Do the niche players, as they are focused on the distribution of investment services, have an upper limit to profitability, compared to the global players, as risk-takers in many financial areas? How is the business model of niche players changing, facing increasing competition and regulatory pressures? Findings Answering the first research question, the highest net profitability is found in the niche players group; the global players, as risk-takers, achieve lower remuneration, in contrast with the risk premium theory. The results were assessed over a limited period, however, deemed in line with the company’s strategic planning horizon. Answering the second research question, the authors focus on the case of niche players, using a cluster analysis. The authors identify three different business models: most dynamic niche players, which combine investment services, insurance and welfare services, achieving the highest margins and stability; players mainly focused on asset management, whose key vulnerability is the degree of open architecture, especially in light of future MiFID 2 implementation; and players mainly focused on the creation of well-structured on-line platforms, which offer also brokerage services, thereby reducing their marginality and potentially increasing their business risk. Research limitations/implications Despite the limited time series, the authors’ research gives some inputs for those interested in deepening the business model analysis focus on the distribution of investment services and the business and strategic risk assessment, both for the global banks and the niche players (banks and non-banks). Practical implications The authors’ results could be of some interest during the strategic assessment of global banks and niche players, both adopting an internal perspective or an external one, as regulator. Social implications By giving some specific insights into the assessment and comparison of business and strategic risks among global and niche players, the authors’ research provides the basis for further research in the field of the distribution of investment services. Originality/value The originality mainly regards the business model risk perspective and the focus of the authors’ analysis: the distribution of investment services. This sector, unlike the asset management, does not have an easily recognisable group of comparables at European level, all the European countries analysed have very different business models. This research avails of an original database, that is unique to Europe.
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van den Broek, Thijs, Marco Tosi, and Emily Grundy. "Offspring and later-life loneliness in Eastern and Western Europe." Families, health, and well-being 31, no. 2-2019 (September 30, 2019): 199–215. http://dx.doi.org/10.3224/zff.v31i2.05.
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Later-life loneliness is increasingly recognized as an important public health issue. In this study, we examine whether having more children and grandchildren is protective against later life loneliness in a group of Eastern and Western European countries. Drawing on data from the Generation and Gender Surveys, we estimated logistic regression models of the likelihood of being lonely among men and women aged 65 and older. The results showed a negative association between number of children and loneliness among men and women in both Eastern-European and Western-European countries. A mediation analysis performed using the KHB decomposition method showed that grandparenthood status partly explained differences in the loneliness risks of childless women, mothers with one child and those with two or more children. Among men, the mediating role of grandparenthood was significant in Eastern Europe and marginally significant in Western countries. Given the relatively strong reliance of older people on the family in Eastern Europe, we expected that the protective effects of offspring on loneliness would be stronger in Eastern-European countries than in Western-European countries. This hypothesis was supported only in part by our results. The protective effect of having four or more children was larger in the East than in the West. Overall, our findings indicate that having close family members, including more children and at least one grandchild, has a protective effect against later-life loneliness in both country clusters considered.
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Jaszczak, Agnieszka, Katarina Kristianova, Ewelina Pochodyła, Jan K. Kazak, and Krzysztof Młynarczyk. "Revitalization of Public Spaces in Cittaslow Towns: Recent Urban Redevelopment in Central Europe." Sustainability 13, no. 5 (February 27, 2021): 2564. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su13052564.
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Revitalization of cities varies depending on the scale of a city, type of challenges, and the socio-environmental context in each case. While revitalization projects carried out in globally known cities are well described, there is still a gap in characterizing revitalization processes that aim to improve quality of life in smaller units like medium-sized towns. This paper fills this gap by the insight from 82 revitalization projects implemented in 14 towns of Warmia and Mazury region (Poland) which are associated in the Cittaslow movement. The study combines a quantitative assessment of statistical data describing these projects with their qualitative evaluation based on interviews with local experts. The results of conducted analyses show that socio-economic development plays a major role as, despite projects which directly refer to the social domain, social elements were found also in projects initially categorized as those targeted to architectural and spatial domains. On the other hand, the authors observed that environmental and ecological as well as cultural issues are treated unevenly or marginally in projects compared to social ones. Interviews with experts show that the least importance was assigned to cultural and historical domain. The obtained results might constitute important knowledge to understand the background of current revitalization processes outside of global metropolises to improve future mechanisms supporting urban renewal.
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Marshall, Benjamin M., and Colin T. Strine. "Exploring snake occurrence records: Spatial biases and marginal gains from accessible social media." PeerJ 7 (December 17, 2019): e8059. http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.8059.
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A species’ distribution provides fundamental information on: climatic niche, biogeography, and conservation status. Species distribution models often use occurrence records from biodiversity databases, subject to spatial and taxonomic biases. Deficiencies in occurrence data can lead to incomplete species distribution estimates. We can incorporate other data sources to supplement occurrence datasets. The general public is creating (via GPS-enabled cameras to photograph wildlife) incidental occurrence records that may present an opportunity to improve species distribution models. We investigated (1) occurrence data of a cryptic group of animals: non-marine snakes, in a biodiversity database (Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)) and determined (2) whether incidental occurrence records extracted from geo-tagged social media images (Flickr) could improve distribution models for 18 tropical snake species. We provide R code to search for and extract data from images using Flickr’s API. We show the biodiversity database’s 302,386 records disproportionately originate from North America, Europe and Oceania (250,063, 82.7%), with substantial gaps in tropical areas that host the highest snake diversity. North America, Europe and Oceania averaged several hundred records per species; whereas Asia, Africa and South America averaged less than 35 per species. Occurrence density showed similar patterns; Asia, Africa and South America have roughly ten-fold fewer records per 100 km2than other regions. Social media provided 44,687 potential records. However, including them in distribution models only marginally impacted niche estimations; niche overlap indices were consistently over 0.9. Similarly, we show negligible differences in Maxent model performance between models trained using GBIF-only and Flickr-supplemented datasets. Model performance appeared dependent on species, rather than number of occurrences or training dataset. We suggest that for tropical snakes, accessible social media currently fails to deliver appreciable benefits for estimating species distributions; but due to the variation between species and the rapid growth in social media data, may still be worth considering in future contexts.
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Sirvent Garcia del Valle, Elena. "Acceptability of Sexual Violence Against Women In Spain: Demographic, Behavioral, and Attitudinal Correlates." Violence Against Women 26, no. 10 (June 24, 2019): 1080–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1077801219854536.
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Most research on the social perception of sexual violence is based on samples of university students, while it is rare to find studies with representative samples, despite the vital importance of this information in planning prevention strategies. Furthermore, in Europe, the social perception of sexual violence has been explored very marginally. Our main objective with this study was to explore, by means of a representative sample of the general population ( N = 2,465), the relationship between the acceptability of sexual violence and demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal factors in Spain. The variable with the highest impact on the outcome was sexism, followed by knowledge of the most common type of victim–perpetrator relationship, age, perceived frequency of false complaints, and educational background. Other variables such as sex, country of birth, attitudes toward the consumption of prostitution, or opinions regarding prevention of sexual violence were also significant. A better understanding of the factors influencing public attitudes toward sexual violence would be useful to guide prevention efforts.
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Pesce, Mario, Lavinia Bianchi, and Alberto Pesce. "Dalla dimensione disumana della tratta al riscatto sociale. Percorsi di violenza di genere." WELFARE E ERGONOMIA, no. 2 (January 2021): 76–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.3280/we2020-002007.
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Le vittime di tratta, ostaggio della criminalità organizzata e destinate al mercato del sesso, sono un fenomeno omogeneo, che ha bisogno di buone prassi, particolari e ad hoc, proprio per superare la percezione emergenziale e le generalizzazioni deleterie. In prevalenza le vittime di tratta sono donne che provengono dall'est europeo, oppure di na-zionalità nigeriane o sono transessuali che arrivano principalmente dal Sud America e rap-presentano un business importantissimo per i criminali. Queste donne, invisibili e senza voce, sono il più delle volte ostaggio di chi organizza il viaggio e, di conseguenza, tutto questo ren-de difficile la presa in carico da parte dei servizi sociali. L'intervento prende in esame, come caso di studio, le buone pratiche di accoglienza e presa in carico del servizio Roxanne del Comune di Roma, e delle discipline di scarsità, di sospetto e resistenza (Theodossopoulos, 2014) che le vittime di tratta attivano al fine di gestire il disa-gio della migrazione e della violenza (Appadurai, 2005), ricomponendo i disagi psicofisici della loro condizione. Le narrazioni delle donne nigeriane, delle donne dell'Est Europa e delle transessuali, che hanno contattato il servizio Roxanne o sono state intercettate dall'unità di strada, sono la prima parte del corpus qualitativo della ricerca. La seconda parte è un lavoro di analisi dei contenuti relativamente alle schede conservate dal servizio Roxanne e nelle strutture dove le vittime di tratta vengono inviate. La terza parte del corpus è l'analisi delle narrazioni di alcu-ni uomini detenuti per il reato di sfruttamento della prostituzione nelle carceri di Pavia e di Bollate (MI) per comprendere la totale disumanizzazione e la retorica della cosiddetta "pro-tezione" da parte degli sfruttatori. Le donne vittime di tratta sono permanentemente controllate e abusate dai loro carcerieri, in una costellazione di violenze e di continui atti brutali. A loro volta, i maltrattanti, respingono totalmente ogni responsabilità proiettando ogni colpa verso le maltrattate. Racconta uno di loro "sono libere di fare quello che vogliono, noi siamo qui solo per proteggerle, lei non le aiuterebbe?". Quello che emerge, dall'analisi dei dati, è una forma di normalizzazione della violenza da parte delle vittime di tratta, una forte marginalità (Douglas, 1993) ma, anche, una propen-sione alla resilienza.
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Krahn, Elizabeth. "Transcending the “Black Raven”: An Autoethnographic and Intergenerational Exploration of Stalinist Oppression." Qualitative Sociology Review 9, no. 3 (July 31, 2013): 46–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.9.3.04.
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Many of Canada’s aging immigrants were displaced persons in Europe post-WWII and have internalized psychological effects of their traumatic past within a society that tends to marginalize or pathologize them. While early collective trauma literature focuses on individualized, psychotherapeutic approaches, more recent literature demonstrates the importance of externalizing and contextualizing trauma and fostering validating dialogue within families and community systems to facilitate transformation on many levels. My research is an autoethnographic exploration of lifespan and intergenerational effects of trauma perceived by Russian Mennonite women who fled Stalinist Russia to Germany during WWII and migrated to Winnipeg, Canada, and adult sons or daughters of this generation of women. Sixteen individual life narratives, including my own, generated a collective narrative for each generation. Most participants lost male family members during Stalin’s Great Terror, verschleppt, or disappeared in a vehicle dubbed the Black Raven. Survivors tended to privilege stories of resilience – marginalizing emotions and mental weakness. The signature story of many adult children involved their mother’s resilience, suppressed psychological issues, and emotional unavailability. Results underline the importance of narrative exchange that validates marginalized storylines and promotes individual, intergenerational, and cultural story reconstruction within safe social and/or professional environments, thus supporting healthy attachments.
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Pellegrino, Margot, Carole Wernert, and Angéline Chartier. "Social Housing Net-Zero Energy Renovations With Energy Performance Contract: Incorporating Occupants’ Behaviour." Urban Planning 7, no. 2 (April 28, 2022): 5–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/up.v7i2.5029.
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This article examines how the behaviour of occupants is assessed in a project with ambitious targets for energy use reductions and within the framework of an approach based on an energy performance contract. Its starting point is the observation that there may be significant disparities between the consumption threshold required by the regulations or the labels and the actual building consumption in its post-delivery existence. While behaviour cannot be the only factor explaining this overconsumption, the promoters of high-performance renovation operations often marginalise their importance. The recent surge in requirements for energy consumption reductions in new or renovated buildings in Europe further exacerbates these problems. In light of these challenges, there is a strong demand for compulsory verification of post-delivery performances and for developing energy performance contracts. In this context, the behaviour of a building’s occupants can no longer be considered as a simple adjustment variable. Through the analysis of Energiesprong, a net-zero energy renovation approach for the social housing developed in the Netherlands and in France, built around the principle of an energy performance contract over a long timeframe, the article highlights the injunctions to behavioural changes, the strategies, the negotiations, and the adjustments deployed by the project leaders. It finally shows that there is still a long way to go before the occupant’s behaviour in a high-energy performance renovation project is fully taken into account.
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Ali, Mohsin, Sai Teja Kandukuri, Sumanth Manduru, Parth Patwa, and Amitava Das. "PESTO: Switching Point Based Dynamic and Relative Positional Encoding for Code-Mixed Languages (Student Abstract)." Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 36, no. 11 (June 28, 2022): 12901–2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i11.21587.
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NLP applications for code-mixed (CM) or mix-lingual text have gained a significant momentum recently, the main reason being the prevalence of language mixing in social media communications in multi-lingual societies like India, Mexico, Europe, parts of USA etc. Word embeddings are basic building blocks of any NLP system today, yet, word embedding for CM languages is an unexplored territory. The major bottleneck for CM word embeddings is switching points, where the language switches. These locations lack in contextually and statistical systems fail to model this phenomena due to high variance in the seen examples. In this paper we present our initial observations on applying switching point based positional encoding techniques for CM language, specifically Hinglish (Hindi - English). Results are only marginally better than SOTA, but it is evident that positional encoding could be an effective way to train position sensitive language models for CM text.
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Schulz, Andreas. ""What does it have to do with us?" – Rethinking the Russian Revolution in Germany." Contributions to Contemporary History 58, no. 1 (May 7, 2018): 12–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.51663/pnz.58.1.01.
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The author reviews exhibitions and recent publications in Germany which commemorate the centennial of the October Revolution 1917. After a full century of research there is little left of glory and heroism that had been present at the dawn of the »Great Socialist October Revolution«. A de-mystification has taken place which relocates the proclaimed »World Revolution« into the frame of Russian history. But this nationalization of the revolution tends to marginalize the global effects of the Red October, especially when the Bolshevik seizure of power is simply explained as a successful effort to transform anarchy into an organised regime of terror practised by a determined and self-sacrificing Avantgarde. While the totalitarian approach neglects the social origins of the Revolution, recent cultural studies emphasise contingent factors downrating revolutionary uprisings as an escalation of civil war in contaminated »landscapes of violence«. Leaving behind such entire explanations and grand designs, the second part of this paper wants to draw attention to the enduring structural changes which the Russian Revolution caused in post-war Europe. The author concentrates his arguments on three levels, beginning with the political institutions, secondly, the economic and social order, and thirdly, the demographic change.
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Cafora, Silvia. "Territori e diritti in contrazione. Gestioni possibili per il patrimonio costruito." TERRITORIO, no. 98 (March 2022): 75–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.3280/tr2021-098013.
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Numerosi movimenti community-led stanno emergendo in Europa per rispondere a dinamiche di abbandono e marginalizzazione di territori e popolazioni. Questo articolo si concentra su esperienze nate dal basso in centri urbani e aree marginali, in cui comunità attive e intenzionali hanno prodotto modelli e strumenti di intervento tesi ad ampliare le possibilità di accesso e risignificazione del patrimonio costruito, creando condizioni di rigenerazione territoriale, giustizia sociale, economica e spaziale. Il Mietshäuser Syndikat in Germania e i Community Land Trusts nel Regno Unito sono illustrati quali casi esemplari per il loro radicamento locale e diffusione nazionale, le consolidate pratiche di demercificazione del patrimonio e la potenziale replicabilità nel territorio italiano.
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Shah, Aqil. "Do U.S. Drone Strikes Cause Blowback? Evidence from Pakistan and Beyond." International Security 42, no. 04 (May 2018): 47–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00312.
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Many analysts argue that U.S. drone strikes generate blowback: by killing innocent civilians, such strikes radicalize Muslim populations at the local, national, and even transnational levels. This claim, however, is based primarily on anecdotal evidence, unreliable media reports, and advocacy-driven research by human rights groups. Interview and survey data from Pakistan, where, since 2004, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has launched more than 430 drone strikes, show little or no evidence that drone strikes have a significant impact on militant Islamist recruitment either locally or nationally. Rather, the data reveal the importance of factors such as political and economic grievances, the Pakistani state's selective counterterrorism policies, its indiscriminate repression of the local population, and forced recruitment of youth by militant groups. Similarly, trial testimony and accounts of terrorists convicted in the United States, as well as the social science scholarship on Muslim radicalization in the United States and Europe, provide scant evidence that drone strikes are the main cause of militant Islamism. Instead, factors that matter include a transnational Islamic identity's appeal to young immigrants with conflicted identities, state immigration and integration policies that marginalize Muslim communities, the influence of peers and social networks, and online exposure to violent jihadist ideologies within the overall context of U.S. military interventions in Muslim countries.
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Treu, Tiziano. "Flessibilitŕ e tutele nella riforma del lavoro." GIORNALE DI DIRITTO DEL LAVORO E DI RELAZIONI INDUSTRIALI, no. 137 (February 2013): 1–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.3280/gdl2013-137001.
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Il saggio contiene un'analisi generale della recente riforma del lavoro (l. n. 92/2012). In premessa si ricostruisce l'iter formativo del provvedimento anzitutto nel dibattito fra le parti sociali e il governo, di cui si sottolinea l'andamento contrastato, e poi in sede parlamentare, dove si č verificata una larga convergenza politica sul testo e sulle sue modifiche, che peraltro non ha impedito forti tensioni e diffuse critiche. Il saggio discute l'impostazione generale della legge ispirata al modello europeo della flexicurity, mettendola a confronto con le esperienze di altri paesi e tenendo conto delle particolaritŕ italiane. Sottolinea inoltre l'importanza della delega sulla partecipazione dei lavoratori nell'impresa, che č indicata fra i principi ispiratori del provvedimento. Il commento rileva la non completa corrispondenza dei principali blocchi della legge rispetto agli obiettivi dichiarati dal governo e ai modelli europei: la persistente debolezza degli ammortizzatori sociali, accentuata dalla storica inadeguatezza degli strumenti di politica attiva del lavoro; l'importanza della promozione dell'apprendistato come canale privilegiato di ingresso dei giovani al lavoro; le scelte contrastanti in tema di flessibilitŕ in entrata, consistenti da una parte in una parziale liberalizzazione del contratto a termine, dall'altra in interventi limitativi dei contratti a progetto, partite IVA, associazione in partecipazione, con il ricorso alla tecnica delle presunzioni e, per altro verso, con l'aumento dei costi contributivi (interventi non omogenei che riflettono la mancanza di una rivisitazione complessiva del lavoro autonomo); infine, la modifica dell'art. 18 dello St.lav. che realizza il superamento dell'anomalia italiana della reintegrazione come unica sanzione del licenziamento ingiustificato e riconduce la reintegrazione a ipotesi tassativamente indicate dalla legge, sostanzialmente marginali rispetto alla indennitŕ risarcitoria. Il saggio sottolinea, infine, l'importanza delle vicende applicative della legge, opportunamente soggette a monitoraggio, e il ruolo decisivo non solo della giurisprudenza, ma della contrattazione collettiva che č chiamata a modificare la normativa con interventi ai vari livelli nazionali e decentrati.
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Guveli, Ayse, and Niels Spierings. "Changing roles of religiosity and patriarchy in women's employment in different religions in Europe between 2004 and 2016." Journal of Family Research 33, no. 2 (September 6, 2021): 405–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.20377/jfr-554.
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Objective: This paper seeks to understand the changing roles of religiosity and gender attitudes in the employment of women in Europe between 2004 and 2016.
Background: Religiosity and gender traditionalism are both considered to decrease the likelihood of women’s employment. This study argues that this relationship needs to be decoupled, as religiosity and gender traditionalism have different underlying mechanisms.
Method: We analysed rounds 2 (2004), 4 (2008), 8 (2010), and 10 (2016) of the European Social Survey (ESS), which include, among other data, information on employment, religious affiliation, religiosity, and gender role attitudes in 16 countries (N=39,233).
Results: We show that taking religiosity into account further increases the already increased likelihood of employment for Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish women compared to women with no religion. We also find, however, that religiosity decreases the employment gap between Muslim and Orthodox women on the one hand and secular women on the other. Including gender role attitudes in the model only marginally explains the employment gap.
Conclusion: Our findings support the idea that the mechanisms that underlie the relationships religiosity and traditional gender role attitudes have with women's employment differ. Over time, the likelihood of employment increases for women of all religions, except for Muslim women, among whom it drops.
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Pedroli, Bas. "Towards new commons and sharing interests in the landscape, integrating natural and cultural heritage." Ex Novo: Journal of Archaeology 4 (December 31, 2019): 13–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.32028/exnovo.v4i0.367.
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Heritage values represent a common good, contributing to societal identity. Landscape is a topical issue because it represents character and identity in both a spatial and a temporal dimension, uniting natural and cultural aspects of heritage at the same time. Especially in Europe, practically all natural heritage can be considered cultural heritage as well, since it is through human action that Europe’s biodiversity has evolved. Heritage perspectives on landscape and nature underline time depth, human agency and social value within landscape. Its cultural starting point does not marginalise nature, but places nature within cultural filters, thus highlighting the reciprocity of nature and culture in the creation of sustainable places. Today’s changing society is transitioning towards new forms of governance dominated by collaboration and continuously shifting networks or actors. Reported examples of cultural landscapes explore heritage management approaches that benefit from combining natural and cultural heritage perceptions. In this context, commonly accessible heritage can bring people together in joint efforts to use the inherited landscape as a shared and cherished resource rather than a conserved and regulated landscape.
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González Faraco, Juan Carlos, Antonio Luzón Trujillo, and Mónica Torres Sánchez. "La exclusión social en el discurso educativo: un análisis basado en un programa de investigación." education policy analysis archives 20 (August 20, 2012): 24. http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v20n24.2012.
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The aim of this article is to show the theoretical and methodological foundations and stages of a research program that began more than ten years ago. This program emphasizes the complex relationship between social exclusion and education, and specifically between inclusion/exclusion and the governance of education in the framework of general policies and institutional practices. This program combines two analytical approaches: the approach of equity and the approach of knowledge, according to a political and cultural perspective. Both have epistemological and even ideological differentiated roots, but not contradictory. Both, in one way or another, are presented in three successive projects of this program’s research: 1. Education Governance and Social Integration and Exclusion in Europe (EGSIE); 2. Students at Risk of Educational Exclusion in Compulsory Secondary Education; 3. Social and Educational Exclusion in Children and Young People with AIDS. First, this program is based on the idea that certain changes in the governance of education can become mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion, in terms of social and cultural differentiation and stratification. It means that changes in educational policy can severely affect the ability of education to combat social exclusion. We argue about changes that concern the construction of social solidarity and political thinking in order to establish ways of understanding individuals, that is, their politics of knowledge. Using several concepts and categories such as transition and narration, we try to examine how the changes are produced or the principles that order politics, pedagogy, school success or even statistics are modified. In other words, how some systems of reason are introduced to play their role in an unequal field, including some rules of action that reward or punish, qualify or disqualify, integrate or marginalize individuals or groups.
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Manginsela, Elsje Pauline. "STRUKTUR MASYARAKAT DAN KEPEMIMPINAN: KASUS PEDESAAN DI JAWA." AGRI-SOSIOEKONOMI 11, no. 1 (March 3, 2015): 18. http://dx.doi.org/10.35791/agrsosek.11.1.2015.7167.
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This paper aims to examine the influence of the meeting of two cultures, namely the Eastern culture (Javanese) and the West (Europe mainly Dutch), which each have a different social structure. The Ducth culture has affected on rural community of Java. This study is based on the review of secondary data collected from literature. The problem addressed in this paper is, whether socio-political system of a traditional nature is still alive and give benefit to rural communities when the socio-economic development effort conducting at the present time? Based on the framework and Etzioni Tjondronegoro applied to the structure of community and leadership in Java, it can be concluded that: (1) Nepotism loosened in some places/villages in Java. However, in another village, it still preserved. (2) There is a marginalisation occured to the most vulnerable groups. (3) Sodality can still be found at the village level. (4) Congruent type in rural community in Java, which are still alive in certain villages, is a type of Nepotism-Faithful. It can conclude that, the socio-political system of traditional still life in Java and it has a tendency to marginalize the landless communities. For the development community agencies, they needs to consider a vulnerable groups to make sure that benefits of development can distribute equally.
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Nissen, René, Kiril Avramov, and Jason Roberts. "White Rex, White Nationalism, and Combat Sport: The Production of a Far-Right Cultural Scene." Journal of Illiberalism Studies 1, no. 2 (2021): 19–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.53483/vcit3530.
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Most of the scholarship on far-right hooliganism in Europe and Russia mentions only marginally the Russian far-right MMA gear and tournament brand White Rex (WR). A few authors have discussed WR’s right-wing connections and activities. Yet both the structures that enabled WR and, now, other similar brands to exert ideological and political influence and the influence itself bear further examination. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of information from intelligence reports, social media, open media, and interviews to show how WR modeled and cultivated a professionalizing trend in several far-right combat sport tournaments. We argue that WR’s entrance into the Western European far-right combat sport scene was a key development in the emergence of professionally organized, fight-focused events with explicit political messaging targeted at a far-right, primarily trans-European audience and a surrounding infrastructure of far-right organizations shaping the character of this developing scene. The business model that WR developed in Russia proved to be something the emerging European far-right combat sport scene could adopt in order to grow. Finally, we elaborate on how WR’s founder, Denis Kapustin, was able to establish a Western European network that temporarily gave him influence over one of the far right’s most significant cultural scenes.
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Reuter, Marvin, Morten Wahrendorf, Cristina Di Tecco, Tahira M. Probst, Sascha Ruhle, Valerio Ghezzi, Claudio Barbaranelli, Sergio Iavicoli, and Nico Dragano. "Do Temporary Workers More Often Decide to Work While Sick? Evidence for the Link between Employment Contract and Presenteeism in Europe." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16, no. 10 (May 27, 2019): 1868. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16101868.
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European employees are increasingly likely to work in cases of illness (sickness presenteeism, SP). Past studies found inconsistent evidence for the assumption that temporary workers decide to avoid taking sick leave due to job insecurity. A new measure to identify decision-based determinants of SP is presenteeism propensity (PP), which is the number of days worked while ill in relation to the sum of days worked while ill and days taken sickness absence. We investigated the link between employment contract and PP using cross-sectional data from 20,240 employees participating in the 2015 European Working Conditions Survey. Workers were grouped by type and duration of employment contract. The link between contract and PP was estimated using a multilevel Poisson model adjusted for socio-demographical, occupational and health-related covariates. We found that European employees worked 39% of the days they were ill. In contrast to previous studies, temporary workers were significantly more likely to decide for presenteeism than permanent workers were, especially when the contract was limited to less than 1 year. Controlling for perceived job insecurity did just marginally attenuate this association. Presenteeism was also more common among young and middle-aged workers; however, we did not find a significant interaction between contract and age affecting presenteeism. In conclusion, the employment contract is an important determinant of presenteeism. Our results give reason to believe that temporary workers show increased attendance behavior independent of job insecurity, because they are less likely to have access to social protection in case of illness.
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Kinderman, P., P. Pini, and S. Wooley. "Mental Health Europe's “beyond the bio-medical paradigm task force” issues on ICD-10." European Psychiatry 41, S1 (April 2017): S460. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2017.01.506.
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IntroductionRecent developments in psychiatric diagnosis risk downgrading psychological and social aspects of personal recovery and marginalise the individual needs and aspirations of people, considered in their local context. The publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Health Disorders (DSM-5) by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) prompted MHE to establish the Beyond the Biomedical Paradigm Task Force (BBPtf) to investigate, debate and report on these issues.ObjectivesMental Health Europe (MHE) – along with others both within and outside mainstream psychiatry – has noted with concern the increasing dominance of a biological approach to mental health problems. We see a risk of diagnoses being misused when they become part of a complex managerial health system responding mainly to the economic and issues of safety or social control. This kind of misuse could breach the principles of the UN CRPD. MHE welcomes the role of the WHO in coordinating internationally appropriate classification systems. However, we want to ensure that systems based on biomedical, economic and managerial issues are balanced with systems based on knowledge of personal experiences, life stories and direct relationships, which have proven outcomes and which respect human rights and dignity.AimsThis workshop will explore the complex philosophical issues associated with psychiatric diagnosis and, in particular, the ICD-10 revision process.Disclosure of interestI am President of the British Psychological Society and a member of both Mental Health Europe's “Beyond the Bio-Medical Paradigm Task Force” and the Council for Evidence Based Psychiatry. I am currently in receipt of funding from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and I have previously received funding from a variety of sources.The others authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.
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Sing, Manfred. "Towards a Multi-Religious Topology of Islam: The Global Circulation of a Mutable Mobile." Entangled Religions 9 (April 30, 2019): 211–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.46586/er.v9.2019.211-272.
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Narratives of the origins, the history, and the present state of Islam always entail spatial claims. Accordingly, Islam emerged in the Arabian Peninsula, spread over its so-called heartlands, and became a world religion. A common understanding inscribes Islam onto the Orient and opposes it to Europe, the Occident, or the West. Such spatial claims are faced with fundamental challenges and epistemological shortcomings because neither Islam nor space are naturally given, bounded entities. Rather, different historical actors and observers produce spatialized Islam. In this chapter, I challenge the notion that “Muslim space” is a useful analytical concept, and scrutinize the ways in which academic discourses inscribe Islam onto space and history. As an alternative, I propose a topology that understands the production of space as a multi-dimensional social process, including Muslim and non-Muslim perspectives at the same time. Thus, I delineate the topology of Islam as variegated, dynamic, and multi-religious from its inception. My argument is that Islam’s trans-regional spread turned it into a polycentric, mutable mobile characterized by internal and external diversity. I further argue that images of Islam are an integral, yet often concealed part of European and Western knowledge production and self-understanding. Epistemologically, this perspective argues that the “Islamization of Islam” is nowhere better visible than in the spatial ramifications of discourses that marginalize, exclude, or obfuscate both the multi-religious experiences in Islamic contexts and the continuous presence of Islam in European history.
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Roberts, Sean. "World Views: Cartographers, Artisanship and Epistemology in Early Modern Italy." Thematic Issue: The Social Lives of Maps, Volume 1 92-93 (August 10, 2022): 92–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1091246ar.
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Scholars have long since demonstrated that no such occupation as “cartographer” existed in early modern Europe. Instead, the skills needed to produce maps often combined those of manuscript illuminators, scribes, mathematicians, letterpress operators, and engravers - to name only a few. Though it is common to speak of maps as offering insight into “world views,” we often assume these to be those of patrons and viewers rather than of the craftspeople who produced them. These artisans relied upon a host of tools, skills, and materials which varied tremendously from city to city even within discrete geographic regions. Moreover, though many early modern maps were only marginally related to the practical activity of way-Dinding, those who labored to create them were often themselves itinerant artisans moving across the Alps and beyond. In this essay, I chart the training, experiences, and know-how of the engineers, printers, painters, and woodworkers who made maps. I explore the ways in which the trans-national and often multilingual social-lives of these makers informed the material fabric of their maps and, in turn, shed light upon the sometimes unexpected interpenetration of biography, world view, and object that characterizes cartographic cultures between the Difteenth and seventeenth centuries. My approach thus seeks to bridge recent insights on the “artisanal epistemology” of makers with a critical approach to the agency of objects, informed both by anthropological theory and a renewed focus on materiality which has come to characterize studies of visual culture.
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Kyrchanoff, M. W. "POLITICS OF MEMORY IN THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN AS A NON-WESTERN FORM OF HISTORICAL POLITICS (BETWEEN THE VALUES OF THE UMMAH AND THE PRINCIPLES OF NATIONALISM)." Вестник Пермского университета. История, no. 4(55) (2021): 46–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.17072/2219-3111-2021-4-46-55.
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The author analyzes the main features and directions of the policy of historical memory in the Islamic Republic of Iran, proclaimed in the 1979. Analyzing the politics of memory in Iran, the author transplants those models of explanation and interpretation to Iranian contexts, which were originally proposed for the study of ideologically mo-tivated manipulations of history in Europe. It is assumed that the politics of memory depends on the dynamics of political and socio-economic modernization in its Islamic version. Elites actively use history and the past as symbolic resources in their attempts to legitimize regime, and the politics of memory has become one of the dimensions of Iranian political imagination, integrated into the Shia political discourse. The main forms of politically and ideologi-cally motivated manipulations with history in the Islamization contexts are presented. The author states that the Irani-an elites are active in their attempts to marginalize the Zoroastrian and pre-Islamic heritage, imagined as alien cultur-ally and anti-Islamic traditions. Therefore, the early policy of memory in Iran was radical and repressive in its nature. The author analyzes the radical forms of the politics of memory, including the destruction of historical and cultural monuments. It is assumed that political Islam and the values of the Ummah in the historical imagination of Iran be-came more important factors than Iranian ethnic nationalism. In general, the article shows the interdependence of the memorial politics of the non-secular Shia regime and Iranian nationalism, despite its marginalization. The author presumes that the politics of memory belongs to the few spheres of social and cultural life of Islamic Republic of Iran, where Iranian secular intellectuals can visualize their identity and nationalist preferences. The historical politics in Iran actualizes the peculiarities of ideological struggle of the Shia regime against the Iranian political emigration, which criticizes Islamization. The results of the politics of memory also demonstrate the significant potential of the historical experience (Iranian-Iraqi war) as a stimulus for consolidation and promotion of loyalty. Therefore, the au-thor analyzes the politics of memory as a constantly revising project, declaring the need for its further interdiscipli-nary analysis.
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Yeo, Sow Nam, and Kwang Hui Tay. "Pain Prevalence in Singapore." Annals of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore 38, no. 11 (November 15, 2009): 937–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.47102/annals-acadmedsg.v38n11p937.
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Abstract: The prevalence of chronic pain is well described in various parts of the world; primarily in Western societies such as Europe, America and Australia. Little is known of the prevalence of chronic pain within Asia or Southeast Asia. In view of the cultural and genetic variation in pain causation, manifestation and reporting, the findings of previous studies can- not be translated to Asian countries. Prevalence studies needed to be carried out to quantify the magnitude and impact of chronic pain within Asian countries to properly allocate precious health funds to deal with this important healthcare issue. We report the findings of the preva- lence study within one Asian country: Singapore. Objective: To determine the prevalence and impact of chronic pain in adult Singaporeans. Materials and Methods: Two sets of question- naires were designed. The first, a screening questionnaire, to identify the prevalence of chronic pain, and should there be chronic pain; the second, a detailed questionnaire was administered, to characterise the features and the impact of pain. A cross-sectional sampling of Singapore adults were achieved using a computer-based multi-step random sampling of listed telephones numbers. The questionnaires were administered via telephone by a trained interviewer with the aid of a computer-assisted telephone interview system. Results: A total of 4141 screening and 400 detailed questionnaires were completed. The prevalence of chronic pain, defined as pain of at least 3 months’ duration over the last 6 months was 8.7% (n = 359). There was a higher prevalence in females (10.9%) and with increasing age. In particular, pain prevalence increased steeply beyond the age of 65 years old. There was a significant impact on work and daily function of those with chronic pain. Conclusion: Though the prevalence of chronic pain was marginally lower compared other studies, the impact of pain was just as significant. In a rapidly ageing population such as Singapore, chronic pain is an important emerging healthcare problem which will likely exert increasing toll on the existing social infrastructure within the next 5 to 10 years. Key words: Asia, Chronic pain, Epidemiology
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Minkovich-Slobodianik, Olena. "Negative factors affecting the development of legal and political cultures: before the problem." Law Review of Kyiv University of Law, no. 1 (April 15, 2020): 58–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.36695/2219-5521.1.2020.09.
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In this article we have tried to analyze the negative factors that affect the development of legal and political cultures and are common to them. Any negative factors that exist in civil society are also reflected in the legal and political cultures. One of these factors, in our view, is corruption. In general, corruption is in he rent in any state and any society because it is connected with the human nature, greed and in ability to deny it self and stop in time, therefore, in our view, corruption as well as crime in general can not be over come – they can be substantially reduced. Level but not eradicate. Ukraine today declares its political and legal path to wards Europe, its values and humanistic ideas. The persistent corruption crisis, which has been going on for quite sometime in our country, requires deep social reforms that must first and fore most affect people's consciousness and their social standard of living.
It is no better in the political sphere, because today we do not even have a legal definition of the concept of "political corruption"; Today's society is characterized by some ambivalence, we have the same problem in the political sphere as in the legal sphere, namely, on the one hand citizens "cry" about the need to fight corruption, on the other – by all means "help" its prosperity by finding all the time for it self justification, fearing "reprisals", simply be having marginally. Thus, we lose one of the main elements of political consciousness - motivation.
Another serious negative factor affecting the development of legal and political cultures is nihilism. Since nihilism is itself a rejection of values, in our case legal, it is quite understandable that languages, not only about the high, but at least satisfactory, state of legal culture cannot be. The spread of legal nihilism in our society has become possible not only because of an unsatisfactory level of lawmaking and enforcement, but also through appropriate political decisions that precede it. In this context, we can say that legal nihilism is characteristic not only of ordinary citizens, but in most of our politicians, top officials who constantly broadcast to the general public their disrespect for the Law. As a result, in the political sphere, this leads to a total distrust of the people in the political establishment of Ukraine, marginal behavior, the pursuit of screen leaders, and as a result of deformation of political consciousness and a decrease in the level of political culture as a whole.
As a result of this study, it becomes clear that legal and political culture have common factors that depend on both the speed of their development and the qualitative component.
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Roth, Steffen. "Les Deux Angleterres et le Continent. Anglophone sociology as the guardian of Old European semantics." Journal of Sociocybernetics 9, no. 1/2 (May 7, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.26754/ojs_jos/jos.20111/2616.
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Despite its influence in Central European sociology, N. Luhmann’s Social Systems theory remains a marginal branch of international sociology. In this paper, the theory questions the reasons for its own marginality in general and for its marginality in the Anglophone centers of sociology in particular, with the latter still being a surprise against the background of the theory’s cybernetic roots in the US. The theory arrives at the conclusion that, while Europe, or ‘the continent’, is still perceived as old compared with the Anglophone new world(s), it still is Anglophone sociology that preserves ‘Old European’ semantics. Sociology in continental ‘Old Europe’, however, seems to have a chance of slowly being acquainted with a new, post-enlightenment mindset focused on semantics and communication rather than on humans and action.
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Sendroiu, Ioana, Ron Levi, and John Hagan. "Legal Cynicism and System Avoidance: Roma Marginality in Central and Eastern Europe." Social Forces, November 11, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab125.
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Abstract The Roma are Europe’s largest minority group and face extensive discrimination across the continent. Drawing on a survey of Roma and non-Roma households in twelve Central and Eastern European countries, we analyze the extent to which legal cynicism, as a cognitive frame, is connected to the avoidance of helpful social institutions. We thus expand existing research on legal cynicism to focus on individuals’ contacts with potentially helpful institutions that can buffer inequality. We conclude that the interplay of legal cynicism and system avoidance, which have provided deep insights into the reproduction of structural disadvantage in American cities, also provide us with international insights into the causes of inequality and minority disadvantage across hundreds of towns in Central and Eastern Europe. In this way, legal cynicism and system avoidance work to reproduce durable inequality.
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Becker, Elisabeth. "Incivility and danger: theorizing a Muslim undercaste in Europe." American Journal of Cultural Sociology, June 16, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/s41290-021-00136-z.
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AbstractPositing Muslim positionality in Europe as an undercaste helps to make sense of how cultural stratification, rooted in associations with incivility, has resulted in deep and unrelenting inequalities experienced by diverse Muslims. Based on two years of ethnographic research with a Muslim community in Berlin as well as a survey of secondary research, this paper both theorizes and empirically showcases the process by which Muslims have become synonymous with incivility, and how this affects opportunities and inclusion across the educational, economic, residential, and private spheres. By drawing parallels with other instances of caste-based status differentiation in the West, specifically the Jewish experience in Europe and Black experience in the USA, it further illuminates how cultural stratification through associations with incivility (as a modern secular coding of impurity) that endures for generations functions in the contemporary world. Employing the concept of caste deepens the cultural turn that has replaced economic or legal explanations of Muslim marginality in Europe. And it awakens a dormant sociological vocabulary that allows for a more precise theoretical understanding of this empirical social phenomenon and thereby the possibilities—and limits—of pluralism in modernity.
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Mierau, Konstantin. "Transient marginal identities and networks in early modern Madrid: the 1614 case of the ‘Armenian’, ‘Greek’ and ‘Turkish’ counterfeiters." Urban History, December 7, 2020, 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0963926820000802.
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Abstract This article centres on a trial held in Madrid in 1614 involving a group identified as ‘vagrants’ of ‘Armenian’ and ‘Greek’ background. In order to tease out the ways in which the presence of foreigners challenged the institutions and citizens, this article approaches these defendants as relationally defined actors in the urban dynamic. It reveals the tactics marginal groups employed vis-à-vis strategic attempts by the municipal government to control foreigners by assigning them identities based on ethnicity. This case-study thus calls into question notions of vagrancy and identification based on ethnicity (‘Armenian’ and ‘Greek’, in particular) in Madrid under Phillip III and IV. In doing so, it shows marginality to be a key yet elusive site for cultural encounters and collaboration in early modern Europe, in which multilingual and culturally fluid social actors related to the Armenian diaspora played a central role.
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Lippard, Cameron D., and Catherine B. McNamee. "Are refugees really welcome? Understanding Northern Ireland attitudes towards Syrian refugees." Journal of Refugee Studies, February 28, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feab030.
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Abstract In 2018, Northern Ireland (NI) government officials, journalists, and preliminary research declared that NI citizens had provided a ‘welcoming society’ to Syrian refugees settling in local communities across the country. However, this claim starkly contrasted with other reports of growing violence towards foreign-born groups, particularly Muslims, which lead to NI being identified as the ‘Race Hate Capital of Europe.’ Using the 2015 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey (NILT), we problematize and empirically-test these initial conclusions about NI attitudes towards Syrian refugees by testing four prominent social theories. We first examine whether economic self-interest and social exposure (i.e., contact hypothesis) predict NI attitudes towards Syrian refugees. We also recognize NI's unique conflictual ethnic history by testing whether cultural marginality and ethnic competition theories further explain attitudes. The findings suggest that multiple theories explain NI citizen views towards Syrians. Results provide partial support for economic self-interests and direct and preferential social exposure as predictors. However, when considering racism and sectarianism measures, the results require a nuanced understanding of the context of NI people’s attitudes. We found that identity politics related to NI's citizens' religious and nationalist identity encouraged racist and sectarian disapproval of Syrian refugee resettlement. These findings provide a promising avenue of study in understanding how ethno-identities shape attitudes towards Syrian refugees and other foreign-born groups living in NI. However, we contend more granular research will be needed to highlight these nuances.
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Chiruta, Ionut. "The Representation of Roma in the Romanian Media During COVID-19: Performing Control Through Discursive-Performative Repertoires." Frontiers in Political Science 3 (June 7, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2021.663874.
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This article investigates the narratives employed by the Romanian media in covering the development of COVID-19 in Roma communities in Romania. This paper aims to contribute to academic literature on Romani studies, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, by adopting as its case study the town of Ţăndărei, a small town in the south of Romania, which in early 2020 was widely reported by Romanian media during both the pre- and post-quarantine period. The contributions rest on anchoring the study in post-foundational theory and media studies to understand the performativity of Roma identity and the discursive-performative practices of control employed by the Romania media in the first half of 2020. Aroused by the influx of ethnic Romani returning from Western Europe, the Romanian mainstream media expanded its coverage through sensationalist narratives and depictions of lawlessness and criminality. These branded the ethnic minority as a scapegoat for the spreading of the virus. Relying on critical social theory, this study attempts to understand how Roma have been portrayed during the Coronavirus crisis. Simultaneously, this paper resonates with current Roma theories about media discourses maintaining and reinforcing a sense of marginality for Roma communities. To understand the dynamics of Romanian media discourses, this study employs NVivo software tools and language-in-use discourse analysis to examine the headlines and sub headlines of approximately 300 articles that have covered COVID-19 developments in Roma communities between February and July 2020. The findings from the study indicate that the media first focused on exploiting the sensationalism of the episodes involving Roma. Second, the media employed a logic of polarization to assist the authorities in retaking control of the pandemic and health crisis from Romania. The impact of the current study underlines the need to pay close attention to the dynamics of crises when activating historical patterns of stigma vis-à-vis Roma communities in Eastern Europe.
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Grama, Adrian. "People's History in the Age of Populism." Contemporary European History, February 21, 2022, 1–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0960777322000091.
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Why write people's histories in our age of populism? Much of the original appeal of the genre derived from the marginality its subject once occupied in public life. Ordinary lives were hardly mentioned in school textbooks; popular culture was assigned to the bottom of the nation's hierarchy of values; and popular politics was either criminalised or disciplined to fit national voting patterns in states ruled by bullet and ballot alike. Defining the people naturally set the fault lines between liberal, conservative and socialist practitioners of the genre. J.R. Green's late nineteenth-century prototype – A Short History of the English People – presented a liberal story of social change, from the landing of Hengist to the battle of Waterloo. It incorporated the entirety of social life mushrooming beneath the deeds of kings, in all its evolutionary splendor. On the continent, notably in Central and Eastern Europe, the people would often feature in ethnic garb, in histories of national liberation or imperial projection. Yet it was Marxism, broadly conceived, that provided the most enduring template for people's histories, at least in the Anglosphere, from A.L. Morton's pioneering A People's History of England onwards. Extended beyond strictly national boundaries to topics such as modern Europe or even the world, two recent people's histories written in this vein, both taking their motto from Brecht's Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters, filter their subject through class struggle and offer a narrative of freedom from want in which a vast labouring multitude toils, suffers and rebels across ages. However, political outlook and epistemological commitments aside, for the past century people's history has claimed to restore to the people its own past, often one of misery at the hands of elites yet one all the more dignified for that reason. Do any of these coordinates still obtain today? Is not the current glorification of ordinary lives, popular culture and politics the bread and butter of populism?
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Paetau, Michael. "Notes from the Editor." Journal of Sociocybernetics 9, no. 1/2 (May 14, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.26754/ojs_jos/jos.20111/2706.
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The current issue of the Journal of Sociocybernetics is the first edition after its transformation into an open-access online journal. The reorganisation we have made during the last year enables electronic support of online-submission of articles and online management of the review and publishing process. We thank very much the University of Zaragoza for the possibility of hosting our Journal at the university's server and its generous technical and organisational assistance. As of now potential authors will be guided through the whole process of submitting an article, information of current peer-to-peer review status, copysediting, galley proofing and publication. For submitting articles authors need to register with the journal prior to submitting. People who want to register have the option to register as a reader or as an author. Every reader or author can register by themselves using the journal's website. After clicking the register item they will be guided through the registration process. After registration they will be able to login by username and password and then authors may submit their papers. The system will immediately confirm the submission and will automatically trigger the review process. Authors will get an email with a URL that will enable them to track its progress through the editorial process once they are logged in. We recommend that you review the "About the Journal” page for the journal's policies, as well as the "Author Guidelines". The reorganisation needed a longer time than was first thought. I would like to beg your pardon for the tardiness of publication and thank both authors and readers for your patience. With a regrettable delay we are now publishing in close secsession the volumes for 2011, 2012 and 2013. 2011 and 2012 will be published as a double issue. The current edition comprises articels with theoretical and epistemological aspects of sociocybernetics. In his article “The Spectral Sign: A Cybernetic Perspective on Digital Conversations” Marco Tolodo Bastos discusses the idea of a spectral sign, which is defined as the outcome of an operation that corrupts the semiotic structure of a sign, replacing instead of adding units of meaning. From a linguistic point of view, the spectral sign relies on the effects of communication technologies that challenge the dyadic representation of a sign. Instead of relating to another sign to perform a paired circle, spectral sign connects a diversity of circles that are not immediately accessible in a semiotic context. In his article “Les Deux Angleterres et le Continent Anglophone Sociology as the Guardian of Old European Semantics” Steffen Roth questions the reasons for the marginality of Luhmann's Theory of Social Systems in Anglophone sociology. He comes to the conclusion that, while Europe, or ‘the continent’, is still perceived as old compared with the Anglophone new world(s), it is still Anglophone sociology that preserves ‘Old European’ semantics. Sociology in continental ‘Old Europe’, however, seems to have a chance of slowly being acquainted with a new, post-enlightenment mindset focused on semantics and communication rather than on humans and action. In this edition we start with a series of three articles by Roberto Gustavo Mancilla which gives a general introduction to Sociocybernetics. Part 1 (in this issue) discusses the differentiation between first and second order cybernetics, the concept of observer and the concept of society as a complex adaptive system. The following parts will adress the aspects of power, law and justice, and epistemological questions on constructivism. These parts will be published in the next issues of the Journal of Sociocybernetics. Michael Paetau (Editor)