Portrayals of Hashtag Activism in Southeast Asia: A Case Study of #NOVATONEDUCATION Citizen Movement in Bangladesh

During 2015, the government of Bangladesh imposed a value-added tax (VAT) on private university education in order to expand the purview of revenue collection. Fearing this additional hike in the tuition fees, thousands of mostly middle-class students protested that this would add to the already existing burden on their families in supporting their education. The country’s socioeconomic backdrop of culture and the economic scenario was such where the parents had to bear a lot for their children’s expenses for a long time until the children became independent. On top of such already overpriced expenses, the question of bearing VAT became exorbitant for the families. Therefore, the question of this added cost became a burning issue that the student activists chose to fight. The students vowed to continue peaceful protests and demonstrations until their demands were met. Activism found a new dimension with digital and social media. A literature review was conducted to explore the existing research regarding the issue in question and to identify any research gaps.When looking at the recent developments in the scenario of fundamental freedom, the countries once thought as invulnerable to authoritarian temptations are now imposing restrictions on basic rights and autonomy. Thanks to digital media and advancements in technology, the conversation on the internet, especially via social media, changed the mode of public conversation for good. This research incorporated the Southeast Asian perspective of activism in creating a desirable change in public opinion and the resultant policy reform as the after-effect of widespread dissension. This research revolved around starting with answering research questions like how the #NoVATonEducation campaign developed over time and then presents an overview of the media communication tools that were used in the campaign, followed by a focus on the role of social media

Islamic environmental ethics: a model for shaping Muslim attitudes in helping to promote environmental education, awareness and activism

The environmental themes contained within the Quran and the traditions of the Islamic faith are some of the most understudied and largely ignored concepts within the Islamic educational landscape. Amid the severity of the environmental crisis there has been a growing interest in the subject area of Islamic environmental ethics by scholars who have elucidated the environmental themes contained within the Quran and the traditions of the faith. These scholarly works have helped to raise awareness and revive Islam’s ecological ethic, inspiring many Muslims worldwide to translate some of its principles into practice. Islam’s foundational educational institutions, however,still remains a vital but underutilised learning centre for imparting Islam’s ecological teachings. This thesis provides a review of the historical development of environmental ethics and the growing interest amongst scholars to coalesce religion and science to help tackle the environmental crisis. This work explores and presents an Islamic theological perspective of the environmental crisis. The concepts of tawḥīd, the Covenants, and the Attributes of God are significant themes within the Quran and these are explored, together with Islam’s five pillars of faith, to show their significance in the development of Islamic Environmental Ethics. The study affirms the importance of presenting a holistic view of Islam’s ecological teachings and concepts with a transformative approach which can help to educate, inspire and change the perceptions and behaviours within the British Muslim communities. Using Islamic concepts, based upon tawḥīd and the covenantal obligations, it puts forward a theocentric ecological ethics which can help to change attitudes, lifestyles and reinvigorate a spirituality that will create a metaphysical view of the world based on these Quranic concepts. The work provides an incentive to Muslim communities to introduce Islamic environmental ethics into teaching curriculums and to create alliances and inter-faith dialogue to help better the environment and create future leaders and academics in both the secular and religious environmental disciplines

Reimagining Civil Society Collaborations in Development

At a time when uneven power dynamics are high on development actors’ agenda, this book will be an important contribution to researchers and practitioners working on innovation in development and civil society. While there is much discussion of localization, decolonization and ‘shifting power’ in civil society collaborations in development, the debate thus far centers on the aid system. This book directs attention to CSOs as drivers of development in various contexts that we refer to as the Global South. This book take a transformative stance, reimagining roles, relations and processes. It does so from five complementary angles: (1) Southern CSOs reclaiming the lead, 2) displacement of the North–South dyad, (3) Southern-centred questions, (4) new roles for Northern actors, and (5) new starting points for collaboration. The book relativizes international collaboration, asking INGOs, Northern CSOs, and their donors to follow Southern CSOs’ leads, recognizing their contextually geared perspectives, agendas, resources, capacities, and ways of working. Based in 19 empirically grounded chapters, the book also offers an agenda for further research, design, and experimentation. Emphasizing the need to ‘Start from the South’ this book thus re-imagines and re-centers Civil Society collaborations in development, offering Southern-centred ways of understanding and developing relations, roles, and processes, in theory and practice. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Funded by Wageningen University

Hydrology of the Powerless

This PhD project identifies the complex imbrications of political and environmental violence resulting in patterns of human bodies and remains washing up on the shores of three rivers. It seeks to demonstrate that, contrary to common abstractions and universalisations of water as empty and neutral, the materiality and fluvial processes of rivers are highly engineered and even weaponised. Part I, co-researched with colleague Stefanos Levidis (CRA), considers the Evros / Meriç / Maritsa river between Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria as a Fluvial Frontier weighted with riverine crossings and systematic illegal pushbacks at the border of the EU. Part II explores the condition of Fluvial Terror on the Cauca river in Colombia, where the dispossessions of local communities, through extractive processes, are further compounded by the obfuscation of paramilitary violence within the reservoir of the Hidroituango megadam. Part III reads the mobilisation of the confluence of the Wisła, Soła and Przemsza rivers, Poland, as a technology in the obfuscation of traces from the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and IG Farben chemical factory, as well as contemporary anthropogenic pollutants. In each case power organises, and is organised around, specific fluvial processes and hydrologic properties to disperse the causal agencies ofviolence enacted against subjugated and disempowered communities. Incorporatingvisual culture, testimony, field notes and hydrophonic soundings I employ amethodology that reads rivers across a multi-scalar spectrum from flood to drought,and from entire river catchments to the particulate scale of processes of saltation,accretion and erosion. This thesis, consequently, offers an alternative conceptualisation of rivers as complex and dynamic archives that resist attempts to erase acts of state and non-state violence, and instead continue to narrate andmediate the stories and traces of those who have been lost

The Trade-Off in ‘Relocation’: A Comparative Understanding of Vulnerabilities of Disadvantaged Migrants Moving from Rural Origins to Urban Areas in the Context of Bangladesh

Background: It has been widely recognized by academics and policy makers that people across the world are moving from their habitual residence driven by poverty, war, political insurgency, environmental degradation and the climate change impacts amongst others (Salauddin, 2010; Lilleor & van den Broeck, 2011; IPCC, 2014). Until recently the issue received comparatively little attention within mainstream debates that the majority of this mobility will take place within the geographical boundaries of affected countries than across borders; referred to as internal migration (International Organization for Migration, 2009). By this century, the number of internal migrants may increase from approximately 25 million to over 200 million worldwide (see projections in IOM, 2009; IDMC, 2016; Biermann & Boas, 2010). For many low incomecountries, most of the internal migrants from rural areas are attracted to cities. Cities of many low-income countries like Bangladesh have limited infrastructural and governance capacity to response to the high number of disadvantaged migrants coming every year in search of livelihood (IDMC, 2016; Black, Bennett, Thomas & Beddington, 2011). Hence the increasing influx of rural-urban migrant increases densification of slum population that leads to further deteriorating living condition and widening intra-urban inequalities (Greiner und Sakdapolrak, 2013). Traditionally, policy-making has viewed the vulnerabilities of such disadvantaged groups from a static geospatial point of view i.e. either from geographic origin or from geographic destinations (Zimmerman, Kiss and Hossain, 2011). Yet the vulnerabilities of contemporary mobility are more complex often involving multistage exposure to various risks including environmental, economic and social components (Gray et al, 2014). Such exposures may occur several times considering what the migrants may experience throughout the process of mobility involving various issues in travel and destination phases. This study makes a comparative assessment of general vulnerabilities of disadvantaged migrants at their place of geographic origins and present geographic destinations. The paper tests whether the migrants’ vulnerabilities reduce after migrating from rural areas to slums in larger cities in Bangladesh. Grounded on recent theoretical development in vulnerability and migration scholarship, the study fieldwork involved interviewing household members of migrants both at geographic origins and at destinations. The drivers of vulnerability that are affecting their livelihood in both geographic origins and geographic destinations have been compared. Objectives: This study aims compare the drivers of vulnerability of the disadvantaged rural-urban migrants at two different locations – before migration at geographic origins and after migration at geographic destinations in the context of Bangladesh. Methodology: This study identified two Northern districts of the country as geographic origins which are (natural hazard) hotspots for seasonal drought, crop failure and riverbank erosion. Secondly, four urban locations have been identified which largely recognized as usual geographic destinations of the migrant population are coming from the identified geographic origins. Data was obtained at two stages, firstly at the geographic origins and then at geographic destinations. In total 115 in-depth interviews (75 interviews at geographic origins and 40 at geographic destinations) have been conducted. Additionally, 10 Focus Group Discussions with local participants and 20 Key Informant Interviews involving different government and non-government stakeholders and policy makers across the country have been considered as the primary method for data collection. Results: The drivers of vulnerabilities have been classified into some broader categories involving financial, infrastructural, environmental, governance, political, health and social components. Result compared the drivers of vulnerabilities identified at geographic origins and geographical destinations. While at origins, most of the households stressed financial drivers including poverty and credit burden as top drivers negatively influencing their livelihood stability at destinations, the most frequently appearing drivers of vulnerabilities include infrastructural issues like risk of eviction at slums, followed by social issues. In contrary with geographic origins, higher frequency of social issues like drug abuse, child labour and sexual harassment appeared at geographic destinations as key drivers of vulnerabilities affecting disadvantaged rural-urban migrants. Conclusion: From the perspective of vulnerabilities this study will argue that understanding vulnerabilities at the geographic origins are important policy information for planning any intervention at both geographic origins and destinations, such as knowing about communicable diseases at geographic origins is helpful to design health activities and vaccination for short term migrants roaming over geographic destinations. Again, some of the pre-migration vulnerabilities from geographic origins like stress may escalate new vulnerabilities such as high blood pressure and heart disease at geographic destinations. Policies to protect such disadvantaged migrant in cities and manage vulnerabilities will be most effective if they consider issues involved at both locations, not only at geographic destinations

Global investment flows in land restoration and nature conservation

Global Challenges (FSW

“We started climate change”. A Multi-level ethnography of Pacific Climate Leadership

Based on fieldwork in multiple locations around the world but with a particular focus on the Pacific Islands region, this dissertation explores ethnographically the global phenomena of anthropogenic climate change and their disparate local implications. For Pacific Islanders, the term ‘climate change’ encompasses a wide array of experiences and understandings, ranging from everyday struggles with floods, to intergovernmental negotiations on a global scale at the United Nations. In this study, I set out to explore how climate change unfolds in the Pacific region not only as environmental impact, but as part of political processes, within documents and as political position-making. The latter refers to the advances made by Pacific countries nationally, regionally, and globally in order to position themselves within global climate change discourse and international climate change decision-making. The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Pacific countries of Palau, Fiji, and Solomon Islands, as well as at the Third International Meeting on Small Island Developing States (UNSIDS) in Samoa, 2014, and international climate negotiations at the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2015 (COP21, Paris), 2016 (COP22, Marrakech) and 2017 (COP23, Bonn). Based on these diverse field sites, I suggest an approach to climate change as a relation; in which capacity it is something that connects us and in the process is created and re-created. As such, this study explores knowledges and linkages between local understandings of climate change and international processes at different levels. The point of departure is an argument that Pacific stories about climate change convey forms of knowledge and insights into aspects of life that international climate change processes frequently separate out or ignore altogether. Notions of storytelling, kinship, place and sociality are important in Pacific knowledge-sharing practices and are therefore at the centre of this analysis. I propose the concept of Pacific climate change stories, which reflects the empirical cases presented and convey experienced local realities of climate change. In terms of theoretical and methodological contributions, the study demonstrates the applicability of an analytical approach that conceptually expands on Pacific notions of stories and storytelling. These forms of narrative and rhetorical genres serve as important tools for creating the relation required in order to get others to understand what climate change means for Pacific Islanders. The sharing of a story may serve as a powerful tool to connect climate change to place and people. The study contributes to contemporary scholarly debates on climate change within anthropology and responds to methodological calls for in-depth empirical research. By taking an approach of ‘studying through’, the focus is on decision makers, institutions and bureaucracies, as well as ‘on the ground’ events, situations, and contexts in Palau, Solomon Islands, and elsewhere, including on the scale of the Pacific as a particular social, cultural and political region of the world. Through this method, entanglements in Pacific island countries between ‘grassroots’ and ‘elites’, as well as politics and kinship, emerge, reflecting a density of global-local connections. Despite the study’s analytical advancement of a multi-level, multi-sited and multi-scalar ethnography, I argue for a renewed notion of locality that postulates exactly such global entanglement and multi-scalarness. Ideas of ‘the local’ can in that sense take on new meanings and purposes, as they ‘travel’ through stories and people. The relationship between people and place becomes increasingly important due to the strong ‘global imaginary’ of climate change, yet with highly unequal local implications. A further elaboration of these arguments reveals that through the development of a distinctive Pacific climate diplomacy, a conversion of Pacific climate change stories takes place and gains influence in the realm of global climate governance. Stories of climate change as expressed in different forms by Pacific delegates at the global stages, carry the authority of lived experiences of climate change in multifaceted ways and represent a distinctive authenticity in COP settings. Hence I argue that Pacific delegations have developed a strategy to create spaces at COPs to voice concerns and incorporate formal mechanisms that make place relevant and value Pacific-based approaches of knowledge-sharing. This strategy stands in contrast to the often systemheavy and bureaucratic processes characterising the UN systems. In a desire to move away from existing system-oriented practices, Pacific countries have developed a greater Pacific regional voice, and a distinct regional approach of Pacific climate leadership. This involves the building of global positioning of the Pacific in climate change politics, and requires a specific repertoire of a Pacific climate diplomacy

2014, UMaine News Press Releases

This is a catalog of press releases put out by the University of Maine Division of Marketing and Communications between January 6, 2014 and December 31, 2014

BRIDGE: The Heritage of Connecting Places and Cultures, Conference Proceedings

Official Conference Proceedings for the international conference BRIDGE: The Heritage of Connecting Places and Cultures (6-10 July 2017, Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site, UK) Organised by the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage, University of Birmingham, and the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust

SBE16 Brazil & Portugal - Sustainable Urban Communities towards a Nearly Zero Impact Built Environment

Vol. IThe organizers of SBE 16 Brazil & Portugal were challenged to promote discussions and the development of solutions for an important and, at the same time, very ambitious topic ? Sustainable Urban Communities towards a Nearly Zero Impact Built Environment. This is the main focus of the international conference SBE16 Brazil & Portugal; the only event of the SBE16/17 conference series being held in Latin America, more precisely, in Vitória (Espírito Santo), Brazil, from the 7th until the 9th of September 2016. The conference offered a unique opportunity to bring together researchers from all over the world to share evidence-based knowledge in the field and succeeded to achieve its goals since many contributions from various parts of the planet were received, addressing a tiny part of the problem or trying to perform the difficult task of making the sum of the parts a coherent whole.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio