6,269 research outputs found

    The Globalization of Artificial Intelligence: African Imaginaries of Technoscientific Futures

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    Imaginaries of artificial intelligence (AI) have transcended geographies of the Global North and become increasingly entangled with narratives of economic growth, progress, and modernity in Africa. This raises several issues such as the entanglement of AI with global technoscientific capitalism and its impact on the dissemination of AI in Africa. The lack of African perspectives on the development of AI exacerbates concerns of raciality and inclusion in the scientific research, circulation, and adoption of AI. My argument in this dissertation is that innovation in AI, in both its sociotechnical imaginaries and political economies, excludes marginalized countries, nations and communities in ways that not only bar their participation in the reception of AI, but also as being part and parcel of its creation. Underpinned by decolonial thinking, and perspectives from science and technology studies and African studies, this dissertation looks at how AI is reconfiguring the debate about development and modernization in Africa and the implications for local sociotechnical practices of AI innovation and governance. I examined AI in international development and industry across Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria, by tracing Canada’s AI4D Africa program and following AI start-ups at AfriLabs. I used multi-sited case studies and discourse analysis to examine the data collected from interviews, participant observations, and documents. In the empirical chapters, I first examine how local actors understand the notion of decolonizing AI and show that it has become a sociotechnical imaginary. I then investigate the political economy of AI in Africa and argue that despite Western efforts to integrate the African AI ecosystem globally, the AI epistemic communities in the continent continue to be excluded from dominant AI innovation spaces. Finally, I examine the emergence of a Pan-African AI imaginary and argue that AI governance can be understood as a state-building experiment in post-colonial Africa. The main issue at stake is that the lack of African perspectives in AI leads to negative impacts on innovation and limits the fair distribution of the benefits of AI across nations, countries, and communities, while at the same time excludes globally marginalized epistemic communities from the imagination and creation of AI

    Resilience and food security in a food systems context

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    This open access book compiles a series of chapters written by internationally recognized experts known for their in-depth but critical views on questions of resilience and food security. The book assesses rigorously and critically the contribution of the concept of resilience in advancing our understanding and ability to design and implement development interventions in relation to food security and humanitarian crises. For this, the book departs from the narrow beaten tracks of agriculture and trade, which have influenced the mainstream debate on food security for nearly 60 years, and adopts instead a wider, more holistic perspective, framed around food systems. The foundation for this new approach is the recognition that in the current post-globalization era, the food and nutritional security of the world’s population no longer depends just on the performance of agriculture and policies on trade, but rather on the capacity of the entire (food) system to produce, process, transport and distribute safe, affordable and nutritious food for all, in ways that remain environmentally sustainable. In that context, adopting a food system perspective provides a more appropriate frame as it incites to broaden the conventional thinking and to acknowledge the systemic nature of the different processes and actors involved. This book is written for a large audience, from academics to policymakers, students to practitioners

    Identity, Power, and Prestige in Switzerland's Multilingual Education

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    Switzerland is known for its multilingualism, yet not all languages are represented equally in society. The situation is exacerbated by the influx of heritage languages and English through migration and globalization processes which challenge the traditional education system. This study is the first to investigate how schools in Grisons, Fribourg, and Zurich negotiate neoliberal forces leading to a growing necessity of English, a romanticized view on national languages, and the social justice perspective of institutionalizing heritage languages. It uncovers power and legitimacy issues and showcases students' and teachers' complex identities to advocate equitable multilingual education

    Exploring Realist and Liberal Explanations of Armed Conflict Related to Economic Interdependence

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    "Over the course of the world's history war between states has existed as a constant possibility. War over land, over the acquisition of resources, over cultural norms and religion, misconceptions, quests for power, etc. There has never seemed to have been a shortage of reasons for war between states, there has however been a shortage of answers to truly explain the trend of why states take the risk of war knowing there is so much to be lost."(p.1) Since the mid-1880 economies have grown and developed to become more diverse and interconnected than ever before. While the economy has changed and interconnected states in new ways, the willingness of states to go into wars and risk economic instability comes into question. Realist theorists in this modern economy point to economic interdependence as a drain for a state and a potential detriment to success while liberal theorists see economic interdependence as a gateway to economic exchange and growth beyond the need for armed conflict. This research paper uses realist and liberal ideas present in the economic era created since the 1880s and analyzes the question of which theory does a better job of explaining the outcome of armed conflict between economically interdependent states. The findings of this paper indicate that both liberalism and realism offer explanations as to why the outcomes of economically interconnected conflicts end the way they do, pointing out the power that individual state policy choices in the direction of one theory over another have a large influence on the outcome of the entire event.No embargoAcademic Major: Philosophy, Politics and Economic

    El régimen retributivo de la electricidad fotovoltaica.

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    El proyecto de tesis doctoral que se presenta está dedicado al régimen jurídico de la energía fotovoltaica, una tecnología especialmente relevante dentro de las energías renovables, tanto por su espectacular crecimiento en los últimos tiempos, como por el potencial que España presenta para su desarrollo futuro. En particular, el objetivo principal de este proyecto de tesis doctoral es realizar un análisis jurídico sobre la regulación del régimen retributivo de la electricidad fotovoltaica y los problemas derivados de un marco normativo que en los últimos años ha estado dotado de inestabilidad y que ha generado grandes perjuicios económicos al sector. Para abordar nuestro objeto de estudio, hemos tenido que adentrarnos en la regulación común a todas las energías renovables, para prestar luego una especial atención a la regulación específica de la fotovoltaica y focalizar después el análisis en las modificaciones de su régimen retributivo, incluyendo el alcance de los cambios producidos, los aspectos más conflictivos, y las carencias que a nuestro juicio presenta. Como apuntábamos, este régimen retributivo ha sido objeto de constantes reformas y está siendo objeto de una importante litigiosidad, por lo que este trabajo presta especial atención a la jurisprudencia en la materia, que ha sido bastante abundante en los últimos años y nos ha obligado a actualizar constantemente el contenido de nuestro trabajo. El nudo gordiano lo constituyen la discutida retroactividad de algunas de las disposiciones que contienen estas modificaciones, la posible colisión con los principios de seguridad jurídica y de confianza legítima, así como la eventual responsabilidad del Estado legislador. También nos cuestionaremos acerca de si la regulación española ha fomentado realmente el uso de esta nueva tecnología, cumpliendo así con los compromisos de España en la lucha contra el cambio climático y liberando al menos en parte la dependencia exterior de los suministros a partir de combustibles fósiles, o por el contrario, como consecuencia de los continuos cambios normativos en el régimen retributivo de las energías renovables se está propiciando el desmantelamiento de este sector industrial

    Small firms and industrial districts

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    Editor's notes. By Margherita Russo. Sebastiano Brusco's collection of essays Piccole imprese e distretti industriali (Tori-no, Rosenberg & Sellier, 1989) was translated in English by Tim Keats in 1990, unless three chapters that were already available in English and chapter 7 that was too long for a publication as a book chapter. Having abandoned the project of publishing a vol-ume in English, Sebastiano Brusco asked me to share a photocopy of the English transla-tion with scholars who requested it, and so several copies arrived in the hands of re-searchers in various countries: South Africa, Norway, Denmark, the United States, France and the United Kingdom. Twenty years after Sebastiano Brusco passed away, and me approaching to retirement, a working paper edition - in the DEMB Working Paper Series - will make the document freely available online. This digital document has been created, in 2012, drawing on a folder of Sebastiano Brusco's digital archive "Backup of EnglishBook" that contained Lotus MS files. These files have been converted by Patrizio Magagni in a txt format and then inserted by me in a single Word file: "Backup of EnglishBook_from files converted by Patrizio_22.01.2012 Some graphs and tables have been added as images, taken from the Italian edition. The text is all flag-formatted, whereas in the Italian edition only the main introduction, chapter introduction and afterword were flag-formatted. The text is not justified be-cause, in the conversion of the original files, a manual line break was automatically inserted at the end of each line. To differentiate those parts of the text written by Brusco specifically for the publi-cation of the 1989 collection of essays, they are reproduced here in two columns, with a smaller font. A complete list of Sebastiano Brusco's publication is available online at:https://www.economia.unimore.it/site/home/dipartimento-di-economia---sebastiano-brusco-web-page.htm

    Perspectives on Public Policy in Societal-Environmental Crises

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    This is an open access book. Histories we tell never emerge in a vacuum, and history as an academic discipline that studies the past is highly sensitive to the concerns of the present and the heated debates that can divide entire societies. But does the study of the past also have something to teach us about the future? Can history help us in coping with the planetary crisis we are now facing? By analyzing historical societies as complex adaptive systems, we contribute to contemporary thinking about societal-environmental interactions in policy and planning and consider how environmental and climatic changes, whether sudden high impact events or more subtle gradual changes, impacted human responses in the past. We ask how societal perceptions of such changes affect behavioral patterns and explanatory rationalities in premodernity, and whether a better historical understanding of these relationships can inform our response to contemporary problems of similar nature and magnitude, such as adapting to climate change

    Democracy, Decolonization and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada

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    Using Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (IRS TRC) as an occasion and a lens, this dissertation aims to critically assess the capacity of the Canadian state to make good on the promise of transformation that the politics of reconciliation harbours. Canada’s IRS TRC is an opportunity to renew reflection on the sort of transformations that might bring about post-settler-colonial forms of commonality that do not presuppose the impossibility of decolonization and Indigenous self-determination. Using the topic of collective memory and methods drawn from emergent anti-imperialist sub-traditions in Western political thought, this dissertation forwards the claim that the realization of political reconciliation’s transformative potential entails both democratic and decolonial elements. This, in turn, grounds an attempt to bring radical democratic thought (with a focus on Sheldon S. Wolin) and Indigenous resurgence theory (with an emphasis on Glen S. Coulthard) into a conversation based on the assumption that not only are these two traditions of political thought not mutually exclusive but can be brought together in ways that can contribute towards the realization of political reconciliation’s transformative potential. This, however, entails a systematic decolonization of those elements of the foundations of Western democratic thought that render it amenable to imperial projects as a condition for freeing it up as a resource in the struggle for decolonization. This approach resulted in a twofold conclusion. First, the politics of reconciliation in liberal-democratic, settler-colonial contexts can be broadly divided into two contrasting and diametrically opposed models of political reconciliation: reconciliation ‘from above’ and reconciliation ‘from below.’ The second conclusion is that the form that the politics of reconciliation assumed in Canada is a form of reconciliation ‘from above,’ which, amongst other things, might be characterized by its selective social amnesia, its non-participatory and elitist decision-making processes and an incapacity to make good on the promise of change that the politics of reconciliation harbours. The liberal-democratic settler state’s inability to facilitate political reconciliation’s transformative potential is due to an enduring structural predisposition to promote the opposite of a decolonizing transformation in Indigenous-state relations in settler-colonial contexts such as Canada

    Hijacked Christianity: How An Aberrant Eschatology Enables A Grievance Culture That Supplants Christian Grace For An Extremist Meritocracy

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    The Evangelical participation attack on Capitol Hill that happened on January 6th, 2021, that almost toppled American Democracy, was an eye-opening experience to the dangers of radicalization. For this paper, the central question is, do recent evolutions to Christian Eschatology (Premillennialism/Postmillennialism) give exigence to the radicalization of mainstream American Evangelicalism via a Dominionist ideology? This study is a rhetorical criticism that will examine sermons of four prominent Neo Charismatic around the time of the 2020 National COVID Lockdown Announcement and the Capitol Hill Insurrection. This study uses a Constant Comparative Method (CCM) to inductively identify the possible themes, and a Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA) to provide a more detailed examination of their rhetoric. Findings illustrate that increases in Millennialism rhetoric correlate with radicalization tendencies to create grievances that dehumanize outsiders while stoking existential crises in their own members to propel them into action via quests of significance
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