Between Islamists and Kemalists

In the political developments in Turkey over the last months all attention has gone to the Islamists and Kemalists. The struggle between those two seems to have overshadowed the concerns of many ordinary Turkish citizens. Nevertheless, people who sympathized with neither of the two sides were instrumental in putting up an opposition movement against the AKP government. It remains a question whether they can bring about further democratization in Turkey

A light-touch routing optimization tool (RoOT) for vaccine and medical supply distribution in Mozambique.

Planning vaccine distribution in rural and urban poor communities is challenging, due in part to inadequate vehicles, limited cold storage, road availability, and weather conditions. The University of Washington and VillageReach jointly developed and tested a user-friendly, Excel spreadsheet based optimization tool for routing and scheduling to efficiently distribute vaccines and other medical commodities to health centers across Mozambique. This paper describes the tool and the process used to define the problem and obtain feedback from users during the development. The distribution and routing tool, named route optimization tool (RoOT), uses an indexing algorithm to optimize the routes under constrained resources. Numerical results are presented using five datasets, three realistic and two artificial datasets. RoOT can be used in routine or emergency situations, and may be easily adapted to include other products, regions, or logistic problems

Migrant living spaces: Religiosity and gender in a disciplinary institution

Contains fulltext : 122158.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)This article looks at the production of gendered pious subjectivities at an Islamic student dorm in the Netherlands, for Turkish–Dutch female students. Following the Foucauldian framework of disciplinary power, we trace how normalising disciplinary techniques are at work in the dorm. We note, however, that members of the dorm voluntarily subject themselves to this power, as they are highly committed to Islamic self-development and living in a pious universe as a mode of being. Members perceive the disciplinary sanctions on themselves as necessary. Therefore, we argue that the constitution of gendered pious subjects is a product of the interplay between agentic subjects and the disciplinary, normalising techniques of the dorm. We want to also stress, however, that gender norms become all the more binding and stringent when people are held accountable by a disciplinary institution rather than personal ethical convictions.19 p