The Vulnerable State and Technical Fixes: An Analysis of Official Climate Change Discourses in Nepal

I conduct discourse analysis of seven selected official climate change policies and documents of Nepal. In the first part of my analysis, I draw from international climate justice discourses to analyze how policy makers construct Nepal’s position in the global arena, in relation to the issue of climate change. In the second part, I draw from political ecology and anthropological understandings of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘adaptation’ to analyze how policy makers construct those terms in the context of Nepal. The result shows that Nepal has adhered to the ‘vulnerability’ and ‘transition’ discourses, which serve as important tools to advocate for financial support from the international climate change regime. Driven primarily by international processes and guidelines, the climate change policies and documents in Nepal project a heavily technocratic approach with little socio-cultural considerations. Vulnerability is understood as a static property and assessed based on sectors and geographic areas, while adaptation is understood as series of actions to be implemented. Overall, the policies are at risk of perpetuating the existing systemic ills, as well as impeding imaginaries to pursue more radical socio-political and cultural change as effective adaptation measures

Ellalou Dimmock Honors Voice Recital, November 10, 2009

This is the concert program of the Ellalou Dimmock Honors Voice Recital performance on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 7:30 p.m., at the Boston University Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were Petit Cours de morale by Arthur Honegger, Cinq Mélodies populaires grecques by Maurice Ravel, Three Russian Songs by Sergei Rachmaninoff, From Mörike-Lieder by Hugo Wolf, From Childhood Fables for Grownups by Irving Fine, Four Italian Liriche by Ottorino Respighi and Pietro Cimara, Duet: Viens! Une flûte invisile by Camille Saint-Saëns, Four Lieder by Gustav Mahler, and La regata veneziana by Gioachino Rossini. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 13 (02) 1959

published or submitted for publicatio

オスカー・ワイルドの初・中期詩における音楽の表象

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), an Anglo-Irish author of the nineteenth century, is known to have embraced music both as culture and as an idea. In examining his appreciation of music, musical representations in his earlier poetry should not be overlooked. As observed in this paper, Wilde’s appreciation of music as the supreme art form was almost synonymous with writing poetry. The paper explores how the idea and figure of music played a role throughout Wilde’s early career, and it unveils the process in which his references to Classical images were replaced by contemporary discourse over the course of time

Mechanics, cosmology and Mach's principle

It is pointed out that recent cosmological findings seem to support the view that the mass/energy distribution of the universe defines the Newtonian inertial frames as originally suggested by Mach. The background concepts of inertial frame, Newton's second law, and fictitious forces are clarified. A precise definition of Mach's principle is suggested. Then an approximation to general relativity discovered by Einstein, Infeld, and Hoffmann is used and it is found that this precise formulation of Mach's principle is realized provided the mass/energy density of the universe has a specific value. This value turns out to be twice the critical density. The implications of this approximate result is put into context.Comment: 9 pages, 34 references, 0 figure

Flickr: A case study of Web2.0

The “photosharing” site Flickr is one of the most commonly cited examples used to define Web2.0. This paper explores where Flickr’s real novelty lies, examining its functionality and its place in the world of amateur photography. The paper draws on a wide range of sources including published interviews with its developers, user opinions expressed in forums, telephone interviews and content analysis of user profiles and activity. Flickr’s development path passes from an innovative social game to a relatively familiar model of a website, itself developed through intense user participation but later stabilising with the reassertion of a commercial relationship to the membership. The broader context of the impact of Flickr is examined by looking at the institutions of amateur photography and particularly the code of pictorialism promoted by the clubs and industry during the C20th. The nature of Flickr as a benign space is premised on the way the democratic potential of photography is controlled by such institutions. Several optimistic views of the impact of Flickr such as its facilitation of citizen journalism, “vernacular creativity” and in learning as an “affinity space” are evaluated. The limits of these claims are identified in the way that the system is designed to satisfy commercial purposes, continuing digital divides in access and the low interactivity and criticality on Flickr. Flickr is an interesting source of change, but can only to be understood in the perspective of long term development of the hobby and wider social processes