From archive to corpus: transcription and annotation in the creation of signed language corpora

PACLIC / The University of the Philippines Visayas Cebu College Cebu City, Philippines / November 20-22, 200

Authoritarian Bargaining and Economic Sabotage in the Arabian Gulf.

This dissertation explores bargaining dynamics and distributive conflict across the Arabian Gulf. Welfare outcomes vary widely for marginalized groups in the region, motivating a simple but previously unexplored question: why provide benefits to the marginalized? Few autocrats today rely exclusively, or even principally, on repression to survive. Beyond more traditional coercive measures, autocrats use various distributive goods and policy concessions to coopt elites and build mass support. Some autocrats even go so far as to provide targeted benefits to religious minorities, disenfranchised migrants and other marginalized groups. This targeting is inexplicable for existing theory, which suggests that authoritarian rule is predicated on the exclusion of such groups. Having been systematically marginalized, we should not expect these otherwise repressed groups to receive targeted benefits. In explaining this puzzling behavior, my dissertation explores the role of marginalized groups in the Arabian Gulf, offering a formal theory of authoritarian bargaining under the threat of sabotage. All autocrats must solicit the support of various groups in society. Whether purchased or coerced, this support does not come cheap, making autocrats dependent on constant production and growth. When marginalized groups are critical to such production, they have the capacity to threaten costly economic sabotage. This threat provides these groups with a potential bargaining power that is simply nonexistent in traditional theories of authoritarianism. My model generates a series of testable implications, predicting when sabotage occurs and the conditions under which marginalized groups should receive targeted goods and services. To test these hypotheses, I draw on extensive fieldwork, surveys and spatial data from the Gulf. In the first empirical paper, I focus on the regime-level and consider how Qatar has responded to such pressures. I show how the regime has largely prevented sabotage through distributive policies and spatial planning. The second empirical paper then considers the micro-level, exploring bargaining between firms and migrants. All told, contracts and credible exit options appear to provide even the most vulnerable workers a means of protection within authoritarian states.PhDPolitical ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113447/1/tjohnst_1.pd

Issues in the creation of a digital archive of a signed language

PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures), Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories, Ethnographic E-Research Project and Sydney Object Repositories for Research and Teaching

3D UK? 3D History and the Absent British Pioneers

The recent television ‘rediscovery’ of a small cohort of 1950s British 3D films (and the producers who made them) has offered a new route into considering how the historical stories told about 3D film have focused almost exclusively on the American experience, eliding other national contexts. This article challenges both the partiality of existing academic histories of 3D, and the specific popular media narratives that have been constructed around the British 3D pioneers. Offering a rebuttal of those narratives and an expansion of them based around primary archival research, the article considers how the British 3D company Stereo Techniques created a different business and production model based around non-fiction short 3D films that stand in contrast to the accepted view of 3D as an American feature film novelty. Through an exploration of the depiction (and absence) of these 3D pioneers from existing media histories, the article argues for a revision to both 3D studies and British cinema history

Donating Time or Money? The Effects of Religiosity and Social Capital on Civic Engagement in Qatar

Few studies have examined the role of religiosity and social capital on civic engagement in the context of a Muslim country. In this paper, we explore the impact of religiosity and social capital on charitable donations and volunteerism in Qatar. Drawing on a nationally representative survey from Qatar, we consider various attitudinal and behavioral measures for capturing religiosity and social capital. The results indicate that, even after controlling for a wide range of demographic variables, behavioral measures have a stronger effect than attitudes. Individuals who regularly perform daily prayers are more likely to donate than those individuals who simply describe themselves as religious. Similarly, individuals who are more active in their neighborhood engagement are more likely to volunteer than those who merely report high levels of social trust. These results suggest that when it comes to the relationship between religiosity, social capital and civic engagement, individual behavior is much more predictive than attitudes alone. We also find that even in the case of Qatar, where citizen wealth has rapidly increased in the last few decades, there is little evidence of substitution effects: citizens do not appear to trade-off or substitute between time and money. Instead, more religious and active citizens are likely to do both

Ageism is Getting Old!

Ageism is defined as a systemic bias towards older adults because of their are. It is found across the spectrum of health care from a macro policy level down to the individual interactions of healthcare providers towards their patients

Fiscal austerity and monetary largesse : the EU’s constitutional and ideological straitjacket

This chapter argues that the combination of the European economic and monetary constitution with neo-liberal ideology amounts to a straitjacket that is impeding the necessary move towards a more sustainable economy. The chapter explores the limitations on Member State fiscal spending contained in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, and contrasts those limitations with the very broad discretion granted to central banks to conduct monetary policy. Central banks’ ‘quantitative easing’ policies have, as they were intended to, boosted asset prices, skewing wealth distribution in favour of the already wealthy. They have also lowered the borrowing costs facing governments and large corporations, but it is not clear that they have been successful in terms of stimulating economic growth through higher investment and spending. Finally, the chapter looks at the EUs fiscal and monetary response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Does it mark a permanent change that may lead to a more sustainable economy, or, as the pandemic recedes, will the EU return to its constitutional and ideological straitjacket? We fear it will be the latter

The students are our future : growing the next generation of paramedic researchers in Canada

As the paramedic discipline globally moves towards professionalisation through professional registration, higher education, and role diversification within the health service, the importance of the paramedic body of knowledge becomes more apparent. In this article we will outline our experiences with student paramedic research at Fanshawe College, and will expand on our previous reporting of this initiative