1,100 research outputs found

    Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present

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    This is the final version. Available on open access from MDPI via the DOI in this recordThis is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/Manifestos Ancient Present)This volume brings together the work of practitioners, communities, artists and other researchers from multiple disciplines. Seeking to provoke a discourse around displacement within and beyond the field of Humanities, it positions historical cases and debates, some reaching into the ancient past, within diverse geo-chronological contexts and current world urgencies. In adopting an innovative dialogic structure, between practitioners on the ground - from architects and urban planners to artists - and academics working across subject areas, the volume is a proposition to: remap priorities for current research agendas; open up disciplines, critically analysing their approaches; address the socio-political responsibilities that we have as scholars and practitioners; and provide an alternative site of discourse for contemporary concerns about displacement. Ultimately, this volume aims to provoke future work and collaborations - hence, manifestos - not only in the historical and literary fields, but wider research concerned with human mobility and the challenges confronting people who are out of place of rights, protection and belonging

    Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies

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    Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world. The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial

    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

    Minimum algorithm sizes for self-stabilizing gathering and related problems of autonomous mobile robots

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    We investigate a swarm of autonomous mobile robots in the Euclidean plane. A robot has a function called {\em target function} to determine the destination point from the robots' positions. All robots in the swarm conventionally take the same target function, but there is apparent limitation in problem-solving ability. We allow the robots to take different target functions. The number of different target functions necessary and sufficient to solve a problem Π\Pi is called the {\em minimum algorithm size} (MAS) for Π\Pi. We establish the MASs for solving the gathering and related problems from {\bf any} initial configuration, i.e., in a {\bf self-stabilizing} manner. We show, for example, for 1≀c≀n1 \leq c \leq n, there is a problem Πc\Pi_c such that the MAS for the Πc\Pi_c is cc, where nn is the size of swarm. The MAS for the gathering problem is 2, and the MAS for the fault tolerant gathering problem is 3, when 1≀f(<n)1 \leq f (< n) robots may crash, but the MAS for the problem of gathering all robot (including faulty ones) at a point is not solvable (even if all robots have distinct target functions), as long as a robot may crash

    ‘Inner qualities versus inequalities’: A case study of student change learning about Aboriginal health using sequential, explanatory mixed methods

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    Racism and lack of self-determination in health care perpetuate injury and injustice to Aboriginal people. To instil cultural safety at individual, organisational, community and systems levels, a key site of action has been health professional education that seeks to elicit reflexivity, cultural humility and a working understanding of Aboriginal health concepts. Studies in Aboriginal community settings show Family Well Being (FWB) empowerment education is effective in supporting personal and collective reflexivity and transformation through empowering life skills development. Implementation of FWB within educational settings shows early signs of effectiveness among students. Yet knowledge of the steps and processes of student change is lacking. This mixed methods explanatory case study sought to measure and understand change in postgraduate students of a leading Australian university learning about Aboriginal health and wellbeing through blended delivery, including through face-to-face immersion in FWB in an urban classroom. Three interrelated studies investigated fidelity and acceptability of the program, measured and analysed growth and empowerment in students, and explained processes of change observed, through thematic analysis of asynchronous online discussions using lenses based on transformative learning and empowerment. Researcher reflexivity was promoted by Aboriginal supervision. Over six years, 194 students enrolled in two different Aboriginal public health courses, 85 of them in the FWB course. As well as achieving program fidelity and acceptability, pre/post-course change in students across a range of emotional empowerment, personal growth and life-long learning processes was measured in the FWB group. Thematic analysis revealed students’ fluid and recursive processes of transformative learning in their professional selves and capacities to act in domains important to Aboriginal health. This case study contributes new knowledge critical to strengthening health professional capabilities for ever more complex, uncertain and emotionally demanding sites of practice, and to work in empowering ways—with, not for, Aboriginal people and communities

    Trajectories of Change, from Armed Struggle to Politics: The Transformation of Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) from a Liberation Movement into a Political Party

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    The end of the Cold War catalysed a range of civil wars and separatist conflicts that battled for government control around the globe. Most of them were resolved through peace agreements which led rebels to lay down their arms and adopt political strategies to pursue their goals. A primary challenge for any resistance or liberation movement is how to win legitimacy and support from the population. This thesis is a case study on the transformation of the Sudan People Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) from a liberation movement to a political party and, later, government. It provides a context-specific understanding and analysis of how the liberation movement garnered legitimacy by tapping into local and international support in the liberation war. The analysis uses legitimacy as the optic for exploring the historical narrative and process-tracing to unearth multifaceted and interactive mechanisms, and strategies facilitating the liberation movement’s quest to consolidate domestic and international legitimacy during the period of struggle. The study employs a theoretical framework focusing on the concept of legitimacy as developed by Max Weber and other scholars. The theoretical approach expands the application of the term ‘legitimacy’ by including concepts such as revolutionary ideology, and performance, or eudaemonic legitimacy. Revolutionary ideology plays a vital role in helping a liberation movement to garner support and political legitimacy from the population during a conflict. It also arises through the invocation of universal values such as freedom, equality, and social justice democracy. Equally important is performance or eudaemonic legitimacy, which is measured by the ability of a former liberation movement to fulfil its revolutionary promises in the aftermath of (violent) conflict. Such a process entails the fulfilment and deliverance of ideals of liberation earlier promised during a struggle period. The promises may include the provision of security, public goods, and welfare to the citizens. However, in comparison to motives, objectives and aspirations of the SPLM/A during the liberation war against the central government in Khartoum, key findings on SPLM/A’s trajectory from a rebel movement to a government in the post-conflict period are not encouraging. The optimism, the hard-won jubilation, and the revolutionary legitimacy that catapulted the SPLM/A to power and the subsequent secession and independence in July 2011 quickly began to wane. The study found that SPLM/A’s legitimacy in the post-CPA and independence period continues to decline, and the South Sudanese do not enjoy the fruits of the liberation struggle. The findings also indicate that the SPLM/A is stuck in a political limbo: it retains many traits of a liberation movement, while its free ride during the CPA-mandated interim period en route to forming South Sudan’s first government has in effect worked against its aspiration to transform into a legitimate political party

    Repeated Game Dynamics in Population Protocols

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    We initiate the study of repeated game dynamics in the population model, in which we are given a population of nn nodes, each with its local strategy, which interact uniformly at random by playing multi-round, two-player games. After each game, the two participants receive rewards according to a given payoff matrix, and may update their local strategies depending on this outcome. In this setting, we ask how the distribution of player strategies evolves with respect to the number of node interactions (time complexity), as well as the number of possible player states (space complexity), determining the stationary properties of such game dynamics. Our main technical results analyze the behavior of a family of Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma dynamics in this model, for which we provide an exact characterization of the stationary distribution, and give bounds on convergence time and on the optimality gap of its expected rewards. Our results follow from a new connection between Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma dynamics in a population, and a class of high-dimensional, weighted Ehrenfest random walks, which we analyze for the first time. The results highlight non-trivial trade-offs between the state complexity of each node's strategy, the convergence of the process, and the expected average reward of nodes in the population. Our approach opens the door towards the characterization of other natural evolutionary game dynamics in the population model

    Connecting to make a difference : social learning and radical collective change in prefigurative online communities

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    In view of the current global social and ecological predicament, what might constitute relevant forms of radical collective change? What role can processes of social learning play in facilitating such change? And to what extent are online networks able to support the unfolding of such processes? This thesis addresses these questions. I first present the results of two participatory action research projects, taking place in two different prefigurative online communities attempting to bring about very different forms of collective change. The first focuses on building a transnational, decentralised grassroots economic system as an alternative to global capitalism, but struggles to shake free from the toxic influence of global financial markets, and from unhelpful ways of relating and organising. The second aims to foster self-organisation and new forms of relationality between humans and with the rest of the living world, but struggles to address the heritage of historical violence and injustice, or to bring about visible political change. With the help of the Wenger-Trayner social learning theory and evaluation framework, I consider what processes of social learning have been taking place (or not) in these networks, and their outcomes; and what other social change efforts may learn from these experiments and their limitations. Finally, I present a reflexive account of my own process of learning and unlearning through my involvement with these projects and others, with regards to the question of what may constitute radical collective change. This critical assessment of my own thinking and aspirations leads me to argue in favour of decolonial approaches to social change as potentially relevant responses to the global predicament. This thesis contributes to the understanding of social learning processes within prefigurative online communities, and to the practice of social change efforts in such contexts
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