Suchergebnisse

AbstractA new term, autonomic imbalance (自律神經失調 or AI), which refers to a wide variety of physical and mental symptoms that are medically unexplained, has recently emerged in Taiwan. Many people compared this condition to neurasthenia, a now obsolete diagnosis. Whether neurasthenia and AI are medically the same or merely similar is a debate that is better left to clinicians; however, this article endeavours to explore the significance of the comparability in terms of socio-cultural theory of health. With Deleuze and Guattari's notion of minor literature as reference, the objectives of this paper are as follows: to address how and why neurasthenia and AI should be treated as 'minor diagnoses' and consequently expose the limitations of current clinical medicine; to provide and discuss reasons why AI can be seen as a reincarnated form of neurasthenia; and to further elaborate how this approach may elevate inquiries on the varieties of medically unexplained symptoms to highlight the bodies that suffer without a legitimate name.

AbstractHeibaika(Mandarin for black-and-white cards) are tools that Taiwanese parents use for infants below 3 months old. These cards are claimed to stimulate vision and enhance the brain. Although the scientific efficacy ofheibaikais questionable, the wide circulation of these cards illustrates the ways some try to urge laypeople to imagine and picture the infant brain. Thus, the use ofheibaikaconstitutes a good example of neuroparenting and neuroculture, where flourishing neuroscience transforms the parenting culture. In the present study, multiple methodologies are applied, and the emergence ofheibaikais identified as a twenty-first century phenomenon popularised by online forums and postpartum care centres, among many other channels.Heibaikaare contextualised in the globalisation of neuroparenting through translation since the 1990s and the rising anxiety of contemporary Taiwanese parents. Through interview analysis, parents are classified into believers, sceptics, and cautious experimenters. Their anticipations and worries are further elaborated. The paper concludes by highlighting its three major contributions: the importance of studying lay neuroscience as a way to rethink and problematise the boundary between science and culture, the enrichment of the concept of neuroparenting, and the emphasis on the dimension of globalisation and knowledge transmission.

Taiwan's government has had the goal of adopting smart living enabled by Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure and applications. Previous Taiwanese government's ICT policies have primarily focused on the development of ICT industries with an emphasis on hardware production. To achieve smart living goals, there was a need to shift the direction of ICT policies to promote the development of an advanced ICT infrastructure and applications to realise these smart living goals. This research analyses policy documents to better understand how Taiwanese ICT policies have supported the development and application of smart living by drawing on concepts from Actor Network Theory to explain the interaction of human and non-human actors in the execution of Taiwan's ICT policies. The results of this research show that the execution of Taiwan's ICT policies has been divided into focusing on different developmental areas in terms of the ICT industry, broadband and wireless infrastructure, the smart living industry and public ICT service. The major finding of this research is that Taiwan's government is the main actor in developing Taiwan's ICT capability and combining existing technologies toward the development of smart living.

Buprenorphine/naloxone (B/N) therapy is a prescription pharmacotherapy for opioid dependence. For certain health service providers, when B/N escapes supervision and diverts into the hands of people for whom it is unintended, it can pose serious risks even if it may still have therapeutic benefits. The line between therapy and diversion is thus a problematic one. By qualitatively analysing archival review and in‐depth interviews, this study uses the concept of a therapeutic assemblage to understand the relationships among government, knowledge, and professionals that surround the regulation of B/N in Taiwan. The therapeutic assemblage is characterised by the partitioning of administration, the loose regulation of prescription, the exclusion of addiction treatment from National Health Insurance (NHI), and the materiality and technicality of therapies. These elements contribute to the therapeutic assemblage's different territorial modes as reflected in the substance schedules that allow for diversion. This is the first grounded work in Asia that empirically examines and theoretically explains the diversion of B/N from an assemblage perspective. It suggests establishing new associations by incorporating addiction treatment into NHI. Lastly, it addresses the analytic purchase of the assemblage approach in unveiling and problematising unintended outcomes of an intervention.

This dissertation documents the processes and outcomes of Chinese government efforts to address national environmental problems through master planned "green development" projects. These large-scale spatial planning projects include eco-city and eco-industrial parks, and integrate goals for industrial, urban and rural development. Such efforts explicitly attempt to simultaneously "green" the economy, society and space; that is, to reduce the negative environmental impact of economic growth, to produce the social norms to support optimized use of resources, and to construct the human-ecological places where an "ecological civilization" can flourish. I find that the ideology of green development, taken from international and national sources, is projected onto local processes of place making. This process works to construct environmental resources at trans-local scales, and to justify rural dispossession as environmentally rational. I then document how national environmental governance agendas target rural society and space as backward and as the necessary site for intervention. I argue that green development in China extends practices of rural dispossession and deepens patterns of urban-rural inequality. Furthermore, I demonstrate that these patterns present significant negative environmental externalities as local governments transform rural landscapes to provide cheap land and financing for projects of China's "Green Leap Forward." To explore the policies, institutions and practices that make up these processes, this dissertation focuses on Yixing, a third-tier city in Jiangsu province, where the construction of eco-city, solar and other `green' industry projects have been yoked as the engines for rural transformation. To begin, I describe the national and regional contexts of environmental industry construction and eco-city planning. I document the growth of solar manufacturing, eco-city construction and linked projects for agricultural modernization and ecological conservation that have required the enclosure of over 330 square-kilometers of rural land and the displacement of over 55,000 residents since 2006. The local government expects to displace another 50,000 residents in master planned rural-urban transformation by 2020. I further document how these primarily state-led processes of dispossession and development planning refigure rural state-society and social-environmental relationships in the rapid construction of "new" ecologically rational city-regions. I argue that these processes are fundamentally linked to a revaluation of rural environmental resources and forms of agrarian transition that entail dispossession and the elimination of the land ownership system, which is bifurcated between state-urban and collective-rural structures. I analyze three processes through which this strategy unfolds. First, I examine the construction of a model of green development based on master-planned eco-urbanization and rural environmental governance at regional and national scales. I document and analyze the institutionalization of green development in the national policies of the Chinese government, the practices of municipal agencies, and in the approaches of transnational experts and businesses operating in China. I demonstrate that this model envisions a reallocation of rural land resources for master planned urban expansion. As its primary rationale, the model seeks to address the historical environmental failures of China's present model of industrial modernization and is predicated on restructuring municipal authority over rural land use.Second, I document how these changes shape agrarian transition by revaluing rural land as an environmental resource. I examine the environmental justification of rural dispossession and the dissolution of collective land tenure rights as economically and environmentally untenable. I argue that as rural livelihoods come to be designated as environmentally irrational and rural land is made into an object of planning, environmental value is paradoxically abstracted and divided from actual landscapes. I demonstrate that rural cash assets as well as land are enclosed into green development and contribute to circuits of accumulation based on "exporting sustainability." I show how the processes of eviction and resettlement re-inscribe historical urban-rural inequalities into a new geography of peri-urban segregation and class differentiation.Third, I argue that environmentalization in China is fundamentally tied to structural changes in territorial-administrative authority. Through an examination of local governmental practices in planning and land management, I document the construction of spatial uniformity and land resources at the national scale. I argue that in deploying a national land-use quota system, local governments fundamentally reshape the land management regime so that instead of managing the land itself, abstracted quanta of land are the objects that are being governed. This leads to negative social-environmental consequences that manifest in specific localities, and that undermine goals of sustainability at all scales. As a case study, I examine the rapid state-facilitated construction of the solar photovoltaics industry in Yixing through subsidies in land, infrastructure and finance capital. Such practices link rural dispossession in China to the global green economy. Additionally, large-scale and rapid construction on greenfield sites produces direct and indirect land-use change impacts on the carbon efficiency of solar photovoltaics manufactured in Yixing and elsewhere.

As urbanization and industrialization continue to spread through China's countryside, the central government has officially declared the construction of master planned eco-industrial zones and eco-cities as primary strategies for accelerating the transformation of industrial structure and the prevailing model of economic development, as well as for "constructing a socialist economic, politically, culturally… and ecologically civilized… harmonious society" (NPC 2011: chapter 1, np). Based on recent fieldwork, this paper demonstrates how these strategies extend beyond the "green washing" of rural land enclosure and transformation, arguing that processes of rural dispossession are linked to the commodification and circulation of natural capital. This paper analyzes processes of environmentalization and enclosure as linked state-led strategies for governing economic growth, rural transformation and interventions into global market-based solutions to climate change as integral problems of Chinese national development and modernization. As a basis for theorizing the relationships between Chinese models of "green development," forms of environmental governance and new circuits of accumulation, the paper utilizes a case study of Yixing city, where eco-city, renewable energy and ecological conservation projects are being planned in tandem, enclosing over 300 square-kilometers of rural land and displacing over 50,000 residents since 2006. The technical and discursive "dividing practices" (Foucault 1972, 1977) of local government planners are examined in conjunction with the scalar construction of rural land as a fungible national "resource" under central government policies for renewable energy development, food security, "ecological withdrawal of agriculture" and arable land reclamation quotas (e.g. State Council 2007). Following Marxian scholarship on the enclosure of access to land and the establishment of property regimes as ongoing moments of "primitive" accumulation and state-territorial projects (Thompson 1975; Harvey 2003; Hsing 2010; Peluso and Lund 2011; Corson and MacDonald 2012), this paper argues that rural land enclosure in China functions in different circuits of accumulation corresponding to varied constructed scales of environmentalization. The paper analyzes such environmentalized transformations, including ecological set-asides, non-fossil fuel energy generation, and high-intensity non-village agriculture and the requisite conversion of collectively owned rural land into state controlled urban land, as a process of territorialization. Drawing upon the work of Poulantzas and recent scholarship on environmental enclosures (e.g. the volume by Peluso and Lund 2011), I argue that the construction of discrete environmental functions for—and apart from—rural land is fundamental to the constitution of "homogenizing enclosure" and territoriality as the "institutional materiality of the state" (Poulantzas 1978: 93–107). Following Lefebvrian analysis of the production of space (Lefebvre 1991[1974]; e.g. Roth 2008), I find that such abstraction refigures the local in a process of territorialization, highlighting the importance of state power to the establishment of market-based forms of environmental governance and the circulation of "natural capital."