Suchergebnisse

This work examines the war prose of Svetlana Alexievich, an author from Belarus who writes predominantly in the oral history genre about significant political and social events in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states. Alexievich is the 14th woman who has won the Nobel Prize in Literature and is one of just a few nonfiction authors recognized by the Nobel Prize Committee. Although only one of Alexievich's writings from her magnum opus – the grand cycle of books Voices of Utopia – is explicitly devoted to women in wartime, essentially many of her creations analyze war from gender perspectives. Her honest and raw books are based on carefully documented eyewitness accounts of the scariest things that can happen to people in horrific wartime situations. In each of her works, Alexievich emphasizes the discrepancy between the official Soviet discourse of glorious wars and the survivors' true accounts of the horrors they experienced.

Purpose: This study assessed the research productivity of African American faculty in the top 25 ranked schools of social work cited in the 2012 U.S. News and World Report. Method: Four citation metrics ( h-index, g-index, age-weighted citation rate, and per author age-weighted citation rate) were examined. Results: Scholar rankings per h-index changed when ranked by other metrics revealing more uniqueness beyond the impact of their scholarship. Discussion: While the h-index metric is a valuable measure of scholarly impact to assist tenure and promotion decisions, it should be considered with other metrics that reveal the overall character of individual scholarship. As the overall research culture of social work broadens, future research calls for an expanded knowledge based on measuring both impact and uniqueness of scholarship to assist faculty, especially minority scholars, in successfully negotiating and overcoming barriers and challenges.

ABSTRACTThis article explores the interplay between transitional justice and 'everyday' political economies of survival in post‐conflict Acholiland, northern Uganda. It advances two main arguments. First, that transitional justice — as part and parcel of conventional liberal peacebuilding packages — promotes a repertoire of normatively driven policies that have little bearing on lived realities of social accountability in post‐conflict settings. Second, that in transcending the epistemological and ontological boundaries of transitional justice and using concepts developed in the critical peacebuilding literature — the 'everyday' and 'hybridity' — a nuanced understanding of this dissonance emerges. Based on extensive fieldwork in Acholiland in the period 2012–14, using a range of qualitative research methods, the author examines the means through which people negotiate social and moral order in the context of post‐conflict life and analyses the tensions between these forms of 'everyday' activity and current transitional justice policy and programming in the region.

With the signing of the Moscow Treaty in 1970 between the Soviet Union and West Germany, a new period in Soviet-German relations began. This phenomenon was made possible by two factors: the strengthening of Brezhnev's power and the election of Willy Brandt as Chancellor of West Germany. This article identified the importance of the personal relationship between the two politicians in the transition from a policy of harsh confrontation during the Cold War to a policy of détente and economic cooperation in the form of an energy dialogue from 1970 to 1973. Against the background of current events, the author poses the question of why the two politicians were unable to agree to a policy against the backdrop of the perceived ideological antagonism between the capitalist and socialist systems. This article also considers how the relationship between the two men affected the development of economic cooperation between the two countries.

AbstractHerbert Kaufman's The Forest Ranger is considered a landmark study of how organizations can be structured to elicit compliance from field officials, yet there have been few attempts to validate Kaufman's claims. The author argues that the outcomes observed by Kaufman resulted from interplay between organizational structure and political context—a variable that Kaufman ignored. This argument is supported by case studies of two agencies with structures similar to Kaufman's U.S. Forest Service but poorer outcomes: the same agency today and India's forest departments. Both differences in organizational structure and poorer outcomes are found to be the result of political context. Specifically, coalitions assembled around agencies use the implementation process to shape outcomes in ways that could not be accomplished solely through changing laws or formal administrative structure. This points to the importance of building supportive field‐level coalitions to complement administrative reforms.

Abstract
This article looks at the experiences of design students who took part in study tours of Vietnam offered as summer courses by the School of Design at Swinburne University of Technology in 2014, 2015 and 2016. It discusses the role that travel played in their design projects and their design education in general. The author suggests that looking at aspects of Vietnamese everyday life, including its built environment and local crafts, creates greater awareness and a better understanding of the social and cultural aspects of the design process. As outsiders based in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, over the course of the study tour the students achieved what Edward Relph (1976) called 'empathetic insiderness' – i.e. a willingness to be open to the significance of a place and to feel and appreciate this significance – as a result of exploring and engaging with the city's architecture and everyday life.

Abstract
This article deals with the activities of the opposition in Czechoslovakia to the Portuguese New State government during the 1950s to 1970s. It focuses on the most important personalities living in the country and explores their encounters with the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. The article also analyses the approach of the Czechoslovak government towards the Portuguese activists and the assistance is offered to Portuguese emigrants in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR – Československá Socialistická Republika). Special attention is paid to the meeting of representatives of the Portuguese opposition in Prague in January 1964, and to the perception these Portuguese residents had of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. It follows the activities of the remaining emigrants in Czechoslovakia up until the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974. Finally, the author describes the relations between both countries on cultural exchanges and Portuguese students in Czechoslovakia after 1974.

In March 2015, David Cameron announced that social workers may face up to five years' imprisonment if they 'wilfully neglect' child abuse. This announcement was made following the release of an independent inquiry report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. The author of this report was Louise Casey, Director General of the Troubled Families programme. Casey's findings not only raised a number of concerns about the way in which child sexual exploitation was handled by Rotherham, but also led to the potential criminalisation of social workers. In this article, we use a critical discourse analysis approach and Lukes's three-dimensional power framework to examine the inspection report. Our findings suggest that although approaches towards child sexual exploitation do need to improve, Casey's report may in fact prevent us from understanding what actually did happen in Rotherham, why it happened and what is required to minimise the chances of it happening again.

If we want securitization to become one of the main channels to attract funding in leasing activity, as the Bank of Russia predicts, one needs to revise some stereotypes. Relying on foreign and domestic research, the author gives a critical assessment of the postulate of the need for uniformity of securitized assets; proves that real estate, contrary to the traditional approach, rather than equipment and transport, prevails in securitization transactions, and explains why this happens. The article presents a new perspective on the behavior of issu- ers concerning the timing of securities circulation; considers feasibility approach to the calculation of variable character of leverage in leasing; explains pro and contra of evaluating the leasing market based on the volume of the portfolio of contracts; reveals the validity of ratings of bonds issued in the course of secu- ritization of leasing assets.

Mobility, especially labour mobility, is being promoted and highly praised as an economic and political cornerstone of the European Union, essential for its future development and growth. At the same time, people on the move are faced with many impediments to mobility, artists active in transnational art worlds being particularly vulnerable in this respect. Analysing and comparing various written sources (text and hypertext), the author focuses on the international mobility of artists in and to the European Union. The aim of the article is twofold: to outline artists' mobility as a particular type of mobility, and to highlight the divergences between praising of the mobility concept on the decision-making level and the 'naturalization' of mobility in academic discourse on one side and the critical assessment of artists' mobility and impediments to it by art practitioners and experts on the other.

This article examined the African Mission in Burundi (AMIB), assessed its success and drew lessons learned from the experience. The author argued that the mission was successful in restoring peace and stability in Burundi, although the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) component of its mission was not achieved. The willingness of the African Union (AU) to send a peacekeeping mission as a stabilizing force within an ongoing conflict shows that the organization is serious about tackling security issues on the continent. In spite of AU's endeavours, the article establishes that the AU is being challenged by what is called the 'triangular area of tension in African peacekeeping (AU's ambitions versus AU's peacekeeping capacities versus member states' political will and agendas). The article concludes with a reflection on lessons learnt from AMIB as a prelude to addressing this area of tension for better future peacekeeping performances in Africa.

This article argues for the utility of phenomenology in accounting for the manner in which spatial methods yield insights into the everyday lived experiences of young people that are not as easily accessible through more traditional qualitative methods such as interviewing. Spatial methods, defined as methods that focus on the everyday spatial experiences of young people and methods that ask youth to position themselves in space, have been used by the author in a variety of research projects, and also incorporate certain visual methods. Phenomenological concepts such as the spatial perspective, the web of relations and opaque subjectivity are helpful in understanding not only that these methods work well but why they are so effective. The article also addresses Pierre Bourdieu's critique of phenomenology, responding to his concern that phenomenology might be susceptible to ignoring or overlooking the social and political contexts that shape experiences.

This short commentary reflects on policy making for open data. The articles in this special issue all raise interesting challenges and questions for research policy, broadly defined, including how to stimulate researchers to make data open in the first place, how to reuse data sensibly, and how to ensure data are appropriately stored and made accessible for future users. This commentary reflects on the author's own experience of taking part in an international policy forum that was tasked with preparing a report about the importance of making research data open. The author describes how she attempted to ensure insights from science and technology studies—made by contributors to this special issue and many others in the field—were incorporated in the final report. She also describes how technologically determinist arguments were invoked to close down discussions about the political dimensions of open access to research data.

In the article classification of factors of currency formation is carried out in basis of that their dividing is fixed into four basic groups, namely: political, economic, psychological and technical, influence of the factors offered by an author is considered on the dynamics of exchange course of national monetary item, the special attention is spared exactly to the economic factors. Keywords: rate of exchange, inflation rates, level of interest rates, currency speculations, balance payments deficit, level of the labour productivity, state external debt. ; У статті здійснено класифікацію чинників валютного курсоутворення в основу якої покладено їх поділ на чотири основні групи, а саме: політико-правові, економічні, психологічні та технічні, розглянуто вплив запропонованих автором факторів на динаміку обмінного курсу національної грошової одиниці, особливу увагу приділено саме економічним чинникам. Ключові слова: валютний курс, темпи інфляції, рівень процентних ставок, валютні спекуляції, дефіцит платіжного балансу, рівень продуктивності праці, зовнішній борг держави.

The roles of non-governmental or civil society organizations have become more complex, especially in the context of changing relationships with nation states and the international community. In many instances, state-civil society relations have worsened, leading experts to speak of a 'shrinking space' for civil society nationally as well as internationally. The author proposes to initiate a process for the establishment of an independent high-level commission of eminent persons (i) to examine the changing policy environment for civil society organizations in many countries as well as internationally, (ii) to review the reasons behind the shrinking space civil society encounters in some parts of the world and its steady development in others, and (iii) to make concrete proposals for how the state and the international system on the one hand and civil society on the other hand can relate in productive ways in national and multilateral contexts.