The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism edited by Greg Garrard

Camilla Nelson reviews The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrar

Values and Heritage Conservation: Research Report, The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles

Researches values and benefits of cultural heritage conservation undertaken by GCI through its Agora initiative as a means of articulating and furthering ideas that have emerged from the conservation field in recent years

Liberal theory, uneven development and institutional reform: responding to the crisis in weak states

The liberal paradigm responds to the failures of neo-mercantilism by attempting to create reform market-based institutions. This agenda demands such radical changes in institutions, culture, and knowledge systems, that it is hardly surprising that it is faltering in countries where the gap between actually existing and new institutions is so wide. This being so, it is time for a serious reconsideration of a programme that is manifestly failing to achieve its own objectives. This paper looks for explanations for this failure by examining the factors that led to the demise of the post-colonial interventionist programmes, and the problems now associated with their liberal successors. It does this by attempting to validate three propositions: 1) that modern institutions may be failing in crisis states, but still provide the only long-term alternative that offers people freedom, security and prosperity; 2) that reforms must generate antagonistic conflict between new and old institutions and value systems; and 3) that this means that new structures and theoretical paradigms must be adapted to deal with the contradictory realities of the political conflicts that they must inevitably generate during the transition to modernity

The UN local communities and Indigenous peoples' platform: A traditional ecological knowledge-based evaluation

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2019 The Authors. WIREs Climate Change published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.This review evaluates the potential of the proposed local communities and Indigenous peoples’ platform to effectively engage traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) for climate policy. Specifically, we assess the platform's potential to enable greater representation and participation of Indigenous peoples (IPs) within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). An analytical framework based on the extensive TEK and environmental management literature is developed, with a set of criteria identified against which to evaluate the platform. We find that although the process of designing the platform appears to be inclusive of Indigenous views, the structure itself does not recognize the roles that unequal power relations and colonialism play in marginalizing IPs. Limited attention is paid to the institutional barriers within the UNFCCC and the drawbacks of pursuing knowledge “integration” as an end in itself. Based on this, recommendations for improving the platform structure are put forward including using a rights based framing, giving greater decision-making power to IPs, and developing mechanisms to ensure the holistic integrity of TEK and build the overall resilience of climate mitigation and adaptation systems.Ye

The Translocation of Culture: Migration, Community, and the Force of Multiculturalism in History

In his work on a Welsh border village, Ronald Frankenberg showed how cultural performances, from football to carnival, conferred agency on local actors and framed local conflicts. The present article extends these themes. It responds to invocations by politicians and policy makers of ‘community cohesion’ and the failure of communal leadership, following riots by young South Asians in northern British towns. Against the critique of self-segregating isolationism, the article traces the historical process of Pakistani migration and settlement in Britain, to argue that the dislocations and relocations of transnational migration generate two paradoxes of culture. The first is that in order to sink roots in a new country, transnational migrants in the modern world begin by setting themselves culturally and socially apart. They form encapsulated ‘communities’. Second, that within such communities culture can be conceived of as conflictual, open, hybridising and fluid, while nevertheless having a sentimental and morally compelling force. This stems from the fact, I propose, that culture is embodied in ritual and social exchange and performance, conferring agency and empowering different social actors: religious and secular, men, women and youth. Hence, against both defenders and critics of multiculturalism as a political and philosophical theory of social justice, the final part of the article argues for the need to theorise multiculturalism in history. In this view, rather than being fixed by liberal or socialist universal philosophical principles, multicultural citizenship must be grasped as changing and dialogical, inventive and responsive, a negotiated political order. The British Muslim diasporic struggle for recognition in the context of local racism and world international crises exemplifies this process. Classification-

Economic Change and the Redistribution of Power Among Women in Yemen: A Focus on the Treatment of Domestic Workers

A shared female identity does not promise solidarity among women in capitalist society. Exploring the prejudices held by Yemeni women over domestic workers exposes class related inequities among women. Recent economic change in Yemen showcases the crystallization of class while local gender identities morph in accordance to overarching capitalist demands. The presence of marginalized domestic workers in upper-class Yemeni homes demonstrates the mutually informative relationship between class status and gender identity. Paralleling greater Yemeni hierarchical and patriarchal society, Yemeni women assert class privilege over low-income domestic workers. Of extreme relevance to better understanding gender and Islam, I argue that Yemeni women of distinguished class status possess and exercise control over the lives of migrant women, thus challenging perceived Yemeni gender roles that acknowledge men as dominant and women as submissive. Cemented by a preexisting drive to preserve familiar honor and fueled by recent economic change, upper-class Yemeni women problematize the “cultural closeness” of lower-class migrant, domestic workers through the formation of stereotypes

A Platform-independent Programming Environment for Robot Control

The development of robot control programs is a complex task. Many robots are different in their electrical and mechanical structure which is also reflected in the software. Specific robot software environments support the program development, but are mainly text-based and usually applied by experts in the field with profound knowledge of the target robot. This paper presents a graphical programming environment which aims to ease the development of robot control programs. In contrast to existing graphical robot programming environments, our approach focuses on the composition of parallel action sequences. The developed environment allows to schedule independent robot actions on parallel execution lines and provides mechanism to avoid side-effects of parallel actions. The developed environment is platform-independent and based on the model-driven paradigm. The feasibility of our approach is shown by the application of the sequencer to a simulated service robot and a robot for educational purpose

Friedrich List's Adam Smith historiography and the contested origins of development theory

Friedrich List's National System of Political Economy continues to be positively received in IPE, where it is treated as a seminal text in development theory. Only a handful of IPE scholars have questioned the specific history of economic ideas through which List asserted the distinctiveness of his own position. They do so by showing that he deliberately put words into the mouths of his classical political economy predecessors to provide himself with something to argue against. His alleged authority on development issues rests in particular on purposefully caricaturing the arguments of Adam Smith. I use this article to suggest a plausible reconstruction of the route to List's Smith, one which recognises the possible intermediary influence of the early Dugald Stewart, John Ramsay McCulloch, the Earl of Lauderdale and Georg Sartorius. By following this complex trail to List's rather eccentric Smith historiography, it becomes possible to break down one of the most important oppositions in IPE pedagogy: that between List's National System and Smith's Wealth of Nations. Moreover, it also becomes necessary to engage more circumspectly with List's history of economic ideas when searching for the origins of contemporary critically-minded development theory