85 research outputs found

    Impact of culture towards disaster risk reduction

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    Number of natural disasters has risen sharply worldwide making the risk of disasters a global concern. These disasters have created significant losses and damages to humans, economy and society. Despite the losses and damages created by disasters, some individuals and communities do not attached much significance to natural disasters. Risk perception towards a disaster not only depends on the danger it could create but also the behaviour of the communities and individuals that is governed by their culture. Within this context, this study examines the relationship between culture and disaster risk reduction (DRR). A comprehensive literature review is used for the study to evaluate culture, its components and to analyse a series of case studies related to disaster risk. It was evident from the study that in some situations, culture has become a factor for the survival of the communities from disasters where as in some situations culture has acted as a barrier for effective DRR activities. The study suggests community based DRR activities as a mechanism to integrate with culture to effectively manage disaster risk

    When Policy and Infrastructure Provisions are Exemplary but still Insufficient: Paradoxes Affecting Education for Sustainability (EfS) in a Custom-designed Sustainability School

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    Schools willing to implement education for sustainability (EfS) commonly find themselves confronted with curricula, school grounds and buildings and teaching practices that do not lend themselves easily to best practice EfS. In this article, we present what we learned about some of the challenges confronted daily by the staff of a purpose-built sustainability primary school situated in a ‘green’ suburb in Western Australia. Over the period of a year, we regularly engaged with the staff of the school through semi-structured, in-depth interviews and classroom observations as part of an interpretive ethnographic study. We identified three key themes—policy infrastructure, physical infrastructure and pedagogical infrastructure—that serve as both affordances and counter-affordances to best practice EfS. Given the paradoxical interplay of the affordances and counter-affordances shaping the school’s implementation of EfS, we suggest that overcoming these paradoxes requires no less than a transformation of school culture

    Can deliberate efforts to realise aspirations increase capabilities? A South African case study

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    This paper takes up Appadurai's suggestion that aspirations could be used as a key to unlock development for people who are economically marginalised, and that their capabilities could be increased by this approach. The notion of “aspirations” is theoretically and conceptually framed, and then Amartya Sen's use of the term capabilities as the space within which development should be assessed is explored. I subsequently describe a five-year programme in which economically marginalised women in Khayelitsha near Cape Town were assisted in voicing and attempting to realise their aspirations, while being assisted with access to some resources. Capability outcomes and constraints are described and analysed, and the question of adaptive preferences is addressed. I conclude that deliberate efforts to realise aspirations, accompanied by some facilitation, can increase capabilities, but that there are also structural constraints to capability expansion for these women that frustrate their aspiration of class mobility.International Bibliography of Social Science

    Creativity as development : discourse, ideology and practice

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    What the new global policy imaginary of "creativity" has amounted to is, on the one hand, a profoundly disintegrated research landscape with a heavy interest in creative “industries” (Cho, Liu, & Ho, 2018) and, on the other hand, an approach to development framed by a somewhat more general and hegemonic global ideology on culture, the arts, and development (Garner, 2016; Stupples, 2014). This “ideology” is mediated by global or UN-level policy and indeed specific to an age in which the neoliberal global economy has established an unprecedented degree of certitude and political consensus across the world on how we develop a prosperous society. Creativity has become a powerful signifier around which a rhetoric of dynamic trade, growth, and opportunity has evolved, and is subject to a broad assessment in this chapter

    Wnt signaling in triple-negative breast cancer

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    Wnt signaling regulates a variety of cellular processes, including cell fate, differentiation, proliferation and stem cell pluripotency. Aberrant Wnt signaling is a hallmark of many cancers. An aggressive subtype of breast cancer, known as triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), demonstrates dysregulation in canonical and non-canonical Wnt signaling. In this review, we summarize regulators of canonical and non-canonical Wnt signaling, as well as Wnt signaling dysfunction that mediates the progression of TNBC. We review the complex molecular nature of TNBC and the emerging therapies that are currently under investigation for the treatment of this disease

    The Politics of Gender Mainstreaming Poverty Reduction: An Indonesian Case Study

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