Suchergebnisse

Modern Irish history is urban history. It is a story of the transferral of a populace from rural settlements to small towns and cities; of the discipline and regulation of society through new urban spaces; of the creation of capital through the construction of buildings and the sale of property. The history of Ireland has been overwhelmingly the history of land, but too often the emphasis has been on the field rather than the street, and on the small farmer instead of the urban shopkeeper. But the same questions of property run throughout Irish urban history from the early modern period to the contemporary, as speculators, businesses and government have attempted to convert land into profit, creating new buildings, streets and spaces, and coming into conflict with each other and other vested interests. Indeed, as recent work on Irish cities has shown, a turn to the urban history of Ireland provides a framework and a methodology for writing a textured and complex history of Ireland's distinctive engagement with modernity.

The article provides an answer to the question: How do students from public high schools located in the city of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, perceive and build their masculinity? The public schools, according to the political profile of the Mexican State, implements mechanisms through which it promotes gender relations and the construction of a hegemonic type of masculinity, that is, patriarchal, linked with the values of neoliberalism. Accordingly, we analyze the school and curricular institutional space, and the practices of the students, which allude to the conformation and perception of masculinity in three processes: a) generational relations; b) bodily practices; c) perceptions of homosexuality. Because it is relevant in the speeches of the students, the relationship that the school maintains with the family space is also examined. Part of the analysis is based on the speeches of the students recovered through group interviews. One answer, as a conclusion, to the question asked, is that the students, from their sphere of reflexivity, resignify and create new practices that question and sometimes subvert, the hegemonic masculinity promoted by the schools.

This article sets out a study about the capacity of the artistic discourse to question the representation of concepts that support traditional hegemonic masculinity in occidental society and its mechanisms of reproduction, from the crisis of the masculinities of the 90s to the present, with the appearance of new emerging hegemonic masculinities. If at the end of the 20th century we witnessed cultural transformations that transgressed the normative ideal of Occidental masculinity, making possible the proliferation of new Masculinities, the sociocultural changes that occurred in the first decades of the 21stcentury have ended up impacting on the values underlying the dominant masculinity, provoking a new resurgence and strengthening of conservative masculinities models. For this purpose, based on the contributions of those of the Studies of Masculinity, we developed a critical analysis of the contemporary artistic strategies that, both at the end of the XX century and at present, have intervened in the construction processes of normative masculinity, altering their representation codes, visibilizing proposals of new peripheral masculinities and favouring alternative models against not hegemonic masculinities and more plural, inclusive and egalitarian.

Due to its geographical situation, the port of Ploče has become a junction of land and sea routes within the Transport Corridor Vc, as a part of the Mediterranean Transport Corridor, passing through Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Hungary. The paper deals with the analysis of the connecting roads leading from the port of Ploče as well as with the evaluation of the respective road traffic volume. Although the congestion on certain road sections is related to the tourist transit traffic, the road traffic volume at the Transport Corridor Vc within Bosnia and Herzegovina indicates the need for the construction of a motorway to stretch out the Corridor. The planned modernisation will fundamentally improve the main road infrastructure on the Transport Corridor Vc that will facilitate the transport of goods and enable shorter travel time from the port of Ploče to the hinterland. Considering that the major portion of the freight transport from the port of Ploče uses road transport services, the envisaged modernisation will significantly increase competitiveness of the port, mostly due to the intermodal transport mode.

Abstract
Ireland's 'Celtic Tiger' economic boom ended with the 2008 global financial crisis. There followed a series of severe 'austerity' budgets and public service pay deals involving cuts in public service provision and employment reform. These were accompanied by approving Irish media narratives of atonement for Celtic Tiger 'excess' and, more recently, of corresponding 'recovery' through collective and individual discipline and entrepreneurial endeavour. This article focuses on the interplay between Irish media narratives of austerity and recovery and constructions of gender, class and national identity in representations of rugby players as celebrities. It explores how elite players have been presented as exemplary of the neo-liberal management of physical and economic risk, and how the repeated focus on successful struggles with diet and injury and post-career educational and business investments highlights their optimizing of the physical and social capital afforded by celebrity status. The emphasis on discipline and 'smart' economic management chimes with the hegemonic political and media discourse of 'no alternative' government austerity, and with economic recovery through individual acceptance of responsibility.

Sanitation is a basic human need. Inadequate sanitation and poor hygienic practices lead to huge public health costs and diseases. This study highlights the interregional and interstate disparity in the coverage of sanitation facility in India based on census data. The best sanitation facilities are available in all states of Northeast India while the central region, followed by the eastern region, reports the lowest access to toilet facility. A disparity index has been worked out to measure the level of disparity in access to sanitation facilities over time. The regression analysis confirms that socio-economic variables such as female literacy rate (FLR) and population below poverty line (BPL) rate are significant determinants of improved sanitation facility. The study reveals the unsatisfactory condition of sanitation facility, especially in rural areas. Though the government is conscious about the construction of the toilets in rural areas, it is found not usable in many cases. Thus, there is a need to make constant efforts to improve the performance of the programmes by making them more responsive to the local needs and aspirations. The programmes should concentrate on changing behaviour and promoting latrine use.

AbstractThe condition of the environment is one of the most fundamental concerns of cities worldwide, especially when high levels of pollution and environmental destruction exert immense impact on people's quality of life. This paper focuses on Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, which often tops the charts as the world's most polluted city. Despite associated problems such as congestion, ill health, and premature death, Macedonia's scarce resources are instead spent on controversial projects, such as 'Skopje 2014', involving creating a national identity through massive and extremely costly constructions of neo-classical government buildings, museums and monuments. The aim of this paper is to compare the situation of Skopje to environmentally oriented activities conducted in several Polish cities and to discuss the possibility of their implementation in Skopje. Considering the scale and scope of Skopje's environmental problems, the paper offers some priorities for action, including solutions that emphasize institution building, technical input and self-governance. It also highlights a number of economic, ecological, and socio-cultural contradictions involved in the process of achieving sustainable development.

Prior to its currently subservient position to civilian politics, the Turkish military had always had an autonomous position with a strong ideological commitment to safeguard secularism. From the 1980s to the end of the 2000s, the Turkish military played a key role in the construction of political Islam as a form of risk and in the securitization of religion both in the public sphere and within its own structure. This article examines the Turkish military's security discourse around religion and the Islamic headscarf through the experiences of women in military families, and is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2011. Looking at headscarf regulations and the everyday life on military bases, it explores how the military governed Islamism as a form of risk in culturally and sexually specific ways. Drawing on critical security studies that approach risk as a form of social governance, the article examines secular risk governance through the lived experiences of women in military families, the regulation of their daily conduct, and the representation of their bodies and sexual identities through dress. Concluding remarks examine the significance of secular risk governance in the post-2010 era.

This paper focuses on the reasons that Italian interest groups decide to lobby together with like-minded groups ('friends'), or engage in networking activity with groups that have conflicting interests ('foes'), in order to influence public policy. How often do Italian interest groups recur to these lobbying strategies? What favours the construction of a coalition of more or less different interest groups lobbying on a particular issue? What, on the contrary, influences the decision to lobby individually? In order to answer these questions, original data coming from a national survey conducted on 1277 Italian interest groups are provided. Empirical results are interesting: from a descriptive point of view, business groups are more likely to engage in joint lobbying than other group types, whereas the same holds true for unions with respect to networking with rival organizations. From an explanatory point of view, groups that perceive themselves to be threatened by rivals' influence in policymaking, or by environmental challenges, are more likely to work in coalitions and to engage in networking: resources do not matter in 'absolute' and 'objective' terms, but in 'relative' and 'subjective' ones.

Dans quelle mesure des épreuves morales et affectives accumulées dans des trajectoires de vie individuelles peuvent-elles constituer le support d'une constellation d'activités collectives diverses autorisant la construction d'une forme légitime de participation politique ? C'est ce que donne à penser l'expérience afroféministe telle qu'elle s'exprime et se déploie en France de manière protéiforme depuis quelques années dans des espaces variés et hétérogènes, qu'ils soient privés, semi-publics ou publics. Fondé sur la requalification du vécu intime subjectif en épreuve commune soumise à une réflexivité critique construite collectivement, l'afroféminisme s'apparente à une politique du sensible. Basé sur l'attention fine à la polymorphie des expressions politiques afroféministes, aux discours des militantes, et en particulier à l'étude du récit de vie d'une des fondatrices du principal collectif afroféministe français, Mwasi, le présent article vient aussi nuancer et complexifier les analyses courantes de la dépolitisation ou démobilisation politique des classes populaires. Il montre combien, à l'écart des acceptions partisanes ou conventionnelles, la politique conserve pour les dominées, à bien des égards, sa part d'imagination politique émancipatrice, avec pour enjeu essentiel : l'institution jamais acquise de l'égalité dans les rapports sociaux.

This paper investigates elections as the construction of a two-faceted field in a semi-urban area in Herat, western Afghanistan. Looking at Afghanistan's 2014 presidential and provincial council elections, the paper first surveys the elections as a discursive field. It tries to understand what the local people, given their historical and social contexts, said about the elections. The second facet examines the elections as a performative field, attempting to unpack how local actors enacted the elections. The paper shows that an election's discursive and performative framing needs to be situated in the wider historical and social contexts of a place. It also shows that in a place where there is greater freedom immediately following an oppressive era (for instance, that of the Taliban) and where there is egalitarianism among elites, the election is turned into a lively and unpredictable process where the discourse is marked by polyphony and instability, and the performance is characterized by mobilization of ties on various fronts and by shifting differentiation of local actors on political, generational, gender, and other grounds.

AbstractThe purpose of this study is to assess the comprehensiveness of voluntary occupational health and safety (OHS) disclosures of large business entities. We devise a composite disclosure index, relying on well‐established performance indicators, and focus on the information found in the sustainability reports of corporations pertaining to the oil and gas, chemical, airline, and construction industries, in an attempt to shed light on the current status and emerging trends in OHS reporting from a diverse group of business entities. The findings indicate that companies tend to place emphasis on their overall management approach to OHS, but fall short in reporting quantitative and qualitative information beyond the 'conventional' metrics of occupational injury rates. OHS issues within the supply chain and relevant monitoring systems/mechanisms in place are topics that are underreported, while OHS training programmes are an aspect that is inadequately analyzed in quantitative terms, being the least reported indicator in the sample reports. In contrast, companies from all four industries seek assurance for the OHS information that they report and place emphasis on the externally developed management standards/initiatives that they subscribe to, support, or have adopted.

AbstractIn 2002, Care Not Cash/Proposition N was introduced to respond to public concern over San Francisco's chronic homeless epidemic. The controversial initiative, which significantly reduced General Assistance (cash aid) to unhoused people, diverted funds to direct services such as shelter, food, medical assistance, and substance abuse programs. To investigate the underlying attitudes and beliefs that framed homelessness and the Care Not Cash policy in the months leading up to the citywide vote articles from theSan Francisco Chroniclewere analyzed. Of particular interest was assessing the prevalence of individualistic framing, constructions of dependency, and the problems Care Not Cash was presented as solving. Our analysis found that homelessness was framed as a threat to businesses, tourism, and residents of San Francisco and welfare as enabling deviant behavior (e.g., substance abuse) among people experiencing homelessness. Similar to federal welfare reform, Care Not Cash was portrayed as a compassionate solution that would both solve the problem of homelessness and address problematic behaviors associated with people who are unhoused (Stryker & Wald, 2009). Implications for economic justice are discussed.

Peer breastmilk sharing—the unregulated gifting of human milk for the purpose of feeding a child—is a growing practice in Western societies despite official warnings against it. Milk sharing occurs in a context of breastfeeding promotion, and cultural expectations that mothers take individual responsibility for their children's health, weigh expert recommendations on childrearing, and engage in responsible consumerism to minimize children's toxic exposure. This study analyzes the perspectives of parents who milk‐share within this broader context. Data consist of a survey asking 392 parents who milk‐share to evaluate the healthiness of mothers' own milk, peer‐shared milk, and formula, and explain their evaluations. Participants rated mothers' breastmilk as healthiest, followed closely by peer‐shared milk, and infant formula as least healthy. They drew on scientific discourses regarding the health benefits of breastmilk, and natural versus artificial dichotomies to construct formula as unhealthy based on its synthetic makeup. Engaging with scientific and neoliberal motherhood in their constructions, peer‐shared breastmilk emerged as a healthier option than formula when mothers' own milk was unavailable.

This qualitative study explores the experience of treatment in a mixed-gender therapeutic community (TC) by Israeli women coping with drug addiction. The vast majority of studies reveal that the techniques used in TCs are designed based on men's needs. This study focuses on the meanings assigned by women to their experiences within the TC in light of the intersectionality theory and the social construction of gender. The study is based on an interpretative phenomenological approach. Seventeen middle-aged women answered open-ended questionnaires or participated in in-depth interviews. Textual analysis yielded three themes: (1) there's no place like home—searching for family in the TC; (2) fulfillment and difficulty in intimate relationships in the TC; (3) overall evaluation: mixed-gender TCs are a mixed bag. The discussion focuses on the sociocultural context of women's treatment in the TC, the male power paradigm, and the individualistic focus that serves as the foundation of the TC approach. The question of how TCs can create safe space for rehabilitating relationships for women is addressed. Finally, implications for policy practice are presented based on the gender-responsive approach.