3,215 research outputs found

    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

    Ecological and confined domain ontology construction scheme using concept clustering for knowledge management

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    Knowledge management in a structured system is a complicated task that requires common, standardized methods that are acceptable to all actors in a system. Ontology, in this regard, is a primary element and plays a central role in knowledge management, interoperability between various departments, and better decision making. The ontology construction for structured systems comprises logical and structural complications. Researchers have already proposed a variety of domain ontology construction schemes. However, these schemes do not involve some important phases of ontology construction that make ontologies more collaborative. Furthermore, these schemes do not provide details of the activities and methods involved in the construction of an ontology, which may cause difficulty in implementing the ontology. The major objectives of this research were to provide a comparison between some existing ontology construction schemes and to propose an enhanced ecological and confined domain ontology construction (EC-DOC) scheme for structured knowledge management. The proposed scheme introduces five important phases to construct an ontology, with a major focus on the conceptualizing and clustering of domain concepts. In the conceptualization phase, a glossary of domain-related concepts and their properties is maintained, and a Fuzzy C-Mean soft clustering mechanism is used to form the clusters of these concepts. In addition, the localization of concepts is instantly performed after the conceptualization phase, and a translation file of localized concepts is created. The EC-DOC scheme can provide accurate concepts regarding the terms for a specific domain, and these concepts can be made available in a preferred local language

    A BIM - GIS Integrated Information Model Using Semantic Web and RDF Graph Databases

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    In recent years, 3D virtual indoor and outdoor urban modelling has become an essential geospatial information framework for civil and engineering applications such as emergency response, evacuation planning, and facility management. Building multi-sourced and multi-scale 3D urban models are in high demand among architects, engineers, and construction professionals to achieve these tasks and provide relevant information to decision support systems. Spatial modelling technologies such as Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are frequently used to meet such high demands. However, sharing data and information between these two domains is still challenging. At the same time, the semantic or syntactic strategies for inter-communication between BIM and GIS do not fully provide rich semantic and geometric information exchange of BIM into GIS or vice-versa. This research study proposes a novel approach for integrating BIM and GIS using semantic web technologies and Resources Description Framework (RDF) graph databases. The suggested solution's originality and novelty come from combining the advantages of integrating BIM and GIS models into a semantically unified data model using a semantic framework and ontology engineering approaches. The new model will be named Integrated Geospatial Information Model (IGIM). It is constructed through three stages. The first stage requires BIMRDF and GISRDF graphs generation from BIM and GIS datasets. Then graph integration from BIM and GIS semantic models creates IGIMRDF. Lastly, the information from IGIMRDF unified graph is filtered using a graph query language and graph data analytics tools. The linkage between BIMRDF and GISRDF is completed through SPARQL endpoints defined by queries using elements and entity classes with similar or complementary information from properties, relationships, and geometries from an ontology-matching process during model construction. The resulting model (or sub-model) can be managed in a graph database system and used in the backend as a data-tier serving web services feeding a front-tier domain-oriented application. A case study was designed, developed, and tested using the semantic integrated information model for validating the newly proposed solution, architecture, and performance

    Towards a General Complex Systems Model of Economic Sanctions with Some Results Outlining Consequences of Sanctions on the Russian Economy and the World

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    The main purpose of this paper is to present a complex nonlinear modelling approach to analyzing mixed capitalist economic systems. An application of a more elaborate version of this model is to explore the consequences of sanctions on the Russian economy and evaluate the model’s predictive successes or failures. Furthermore, the formal expanded nonlinear model presented in the appendix may be seen as an initial step to put the analysis of economic sanctions within a formal complex socio-economic systems framework. The results obtained from this structural complex multisectoral model so far seem fairly accurate in terms of agreement with measured values of observable economic variables. The political consequences are uncertain and are to be explored separately in a companion paper and ultimately in a book length treatment. Methodologically, the paper also presents the case for using Social Accounting Matrix (SAM)-based models for understanding problems of analyzing sanctions in an economywide context. Linear as well as Nonlinear models are presented in the appendix. The nonlinear modelling approach might prove to be especially relevant for studying the properties of multiple equilibria and complex dynamics

    Insights from an OTTR-centric Ontology Engineering Methodology

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    OTTR is a language for representing ontology modeling patterns, which enables to build ontologies or knowledge bases by instantiating templates. Thereby, particularities of the ontological representation language are hidden from the domain experts, and it enables ontology engineers to, to some extent, separate the processes of deciding about what information to model from deciding about how to model the information, e.g., which design patterns to use. Certain decisions can thus be postponed for the benefit of focusing on one of these processes. To date, only few works on ontology engineering where ontology templates are applied are described in the literature. In this paper, we outline our methodology and report findings from our ontology engineering activities in the domain of Material Science. In these activities, OTTR templates play a key role. Our ontology engineering process is bottom-up, as we begin modeling activities from existing data that is then, via templates, fed into a knowledge graph, and it is top-down, as we first focus on which data to model and postpone the decision of how to model the data. We find, among other things, that OTTR templates are especially useful as a means of communication with domain experts. Furthermore, we find that because OTTR templates encapsulate modeling decisions, the engineering process becomes flexible, meaning that design decisions can be changed at little cost.Comment: Paper accepted at the 14th Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns (WOP 2023

    Objects Of Display: Presenting Intimate Queer Histories Through Sculptural Practice

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    This research project employs a sculptural practice to generate intimate and minor queer histories that challenge the normative modes involved in the production and display of material histories. It examines how archaeological artefacts are bound within a western construction of linear time and how their display in traditional museums uphold heteronormative and colonial narratives about the past. I aim to challenge these linear narratives by re-imaging the lives and purposes of real artefacts through the production of queer artefacts, ones that actively embody my own lived experiences as a queer person. Drawing from David Getsy and Gordon Hall’s work on queer abstraction, I produce and display artefacts in ways that embrace non-disclosure and avoid systems of classification that museums rely on. This research emerges from recent cultural shifts which challenge notions of museums as official sites of history and culture, and generates counter histories through a focus on the lived experiences of queer people

    Designs of Blackness

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    Across more than two centuries Afro-America has created a huge and dazzling variety of literary self-expression. Designs of Blackness provides less a narrative literary history than, precisely, a series of mappings—each literary-critical and comparative while at the same time offering cultural and historical context. This carefully re-edited version of the 1998 publication opens with an estimation of earliest African American voice in the names of Phillis Wheatley and her contemporaries. It then takes up the huge span of autobiography from Frederick Douglass through to Maya Angelou. "Harlem on My Mind," which follows, sets out the literary contours of America’s premier black city. Womanism, Alice Walker’s presiding term, is given full due in an analysis of fiction from Harriet E. Wilson to Toni Morrison. Richard Wright is approached not as some regulation "realist" but as a more inward, at times near-surreal, author. Decadology has its risks but the 1940s has rarely been approached as a unique era of war and peace and especially in African American texts. Beat Generation work usually adheres to Ginsberg and Kerouac, but black Beat writing invites its own chapter in the names of Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman. The 1960s has long become a mythic change-decade, and in few greater respects than as a black theatre both of the stage and politics. In Leon Forrest African America had a figure of the postmodern turn: his work is explored in its own right and for how it takes its place in the context of other reflexive black fiction. "African American Fictions of Passing" unpacks the whole deceptive trope of "race" in writing from Williams Wells Brown through to Charles Johnson. The two newly added chapters pursue African American literary achievement into the Obama-Trump century, fiction from Octavia Butler to Darryl Pinkney, poetry from Rita Dove to Kevin Young

    Sensing Collectives: Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined

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    Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders, in governance and innovation. This ranges from populist rallies and artistic activism over alternative lifestyles and consumer culture to corporate PR and governmental policies. Authors are academics and artists. The result is a new mapping of the intermingling and co-constitution of aesthetics and politics in engagements with collective orders
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